Hey Guys,

I am currently living in New York and read News24 every day to keep up with what's going on in SA, but I realize that it would be pointless to just reply on the Media's view of events, so I am hoping some real South Africans could enlighten me about the real situation.
I recently started reading all the coverage about a song by a musician called "Bok van Blerk" (fortunately not his real name, I am told...) - "De la Rey," and the media as far away as England talking about a new "Afrikaner nationalism brewing in SA." I've downloaded the song, even watched the video and other footage about it on YouTube, but I cannot quite make up my mind what to believe, because, obviously I am not IN SA to see and experience for myself. My family in the Vaal (okay, Mpumalanga, not the Vaal, Laeveld, I guess? I'm from CT, so I am not so au fait with regions inland! apologies!) are quite Afrikaans, so have embraced the song and music, I am not a fan of Afrikaans music, only people like Koos Kombuis, Johannes Kerkorrel, etc. so I am also not an expert in this field.

I listened to the song, found it quite catchy, the video certainly stirs some emotions, but, since we did not learn all that much about the Anglo-Boer War in my school in the Western Cape, I can only rely on recent books I have read about that part of SA history and have never really felt and affinity for the Voortrekkers, Boers, etc. Ek is mos 'n hans-kakie!

So anyway, to make a long story short, is this true, a new nationalism stirring amongst young South Africans (and older, but I don't really think its new for the old guard...).

I'd love to hear what people have to say...

Which song? Man I live here and I have no idea what you are talking about, so I think it is safe to say that there is no new nationalism going on. Then again, if I don't know about the song, I may not know about that.

I don't think there is any such thing on the cards.

Welcome to the forum HannaHanna.

I see you are female. Beware the other guys, they may make some comments and have some smileys, but they really harmless.

It is just a song. Afrikaner youth hanging on to it due their absence of leadership. Some called for it to be banned and so the media hype - but it is just a song and Afrikaners have the right to express their freedom of speech in a non-violent manner just as much as anyone else.

But then again, I am not Afrikaans, so maybe there is a hidden message for them to rise up and overthrow the government, who knows?

Here are some links in YouTube to enlighten you...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAhHWpqPz9A...ated&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DAfaqSCdME...ated&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuiyM2dGiv4...ated&search=

Thanks for the welcome, I am sure I will be able to handle all kinds of jeers and catcalls, maybe I will even encourage them,

Oh yeah, I also just wanted to add my two sents about the 100% Boer debate, I found this excellent blog about it the other day, really funny!

http://gormendizer.wordpress.com/2007/04/1...g-op-sy-t-hemp/

lol. money on fishfly or valheru being the first to ask for pics.

thanks for the links. will check them out now.

Pics please?

Being Afrikaans and from the Freestate until 1998, and then studying in Potch (North-West province) until 2004, I cant really say that I know anything about any new nationalism. I think its just something that the Afrikaans youth latch on to, just to say that we also have a history and something to be proud of in this country. I was 14 in 1994, and from then (even before then) the media and everyone and everything focuses on how whites and Afrikaans people in general are the bad guys in our history.
The song just gives us something that says "you have a history here as well". But apart from something to listen to, I dont think the Afrikaans boys and girls from today are anything different from what they were this time last year.

Personally, I do not own the CD and not even the mp3. I have seen the video though, and it certainly stirs up a little emotion, but I dont think its something to write home about.

I vote 85% media hype, 15% substance.

Dela rey was just a way for "bok van blerk" aka Johan Pepler to make money ( he even pissed off his fans later on)

I say 100% media hype 0% Substance although i think some people got the shivers thinking about a revalution of some sort.

Yes, I had read that in an article as well, Amanda Strydom who knows him said he told her that he wrote this song purely because he knew he would make a massive profit (tapping into Afrikaner sentimentality...).

This debate even made it into the New York Times over here (front page), I will paste in the link and the full article for your reading pleasure...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/world/af...xprod=permalink


Song Wakens Injured Pride of Afrikaners
Henner Frankenfeld/PictureNet AfricaA statue of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, overlooks the private Afrikaner village of Orania.

By MICHAEL WINESPublished: February 27, 2007
Correction Appended

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 26 — "Proudly South African" is this nation's E Pluribus Unum, a slogan stamped on products, echoed in radio commercials and inculcated into the new South African DNA. Much as America's motto celebrates melding many into one, South Africa's says that it doesn't matter what you look like — we can all be proud of our young country.

[color="#0000ff"][/color] Jeffrey Barbee for The New York TimesLouis Pepler, who co-wrote the song “De la Rey,” performing in Orania.

Enter Louis Pepler, who, perhaps inadvertently, has cast the notion of South African pride in a whole new light. He and two friends penned an unlikely rock ballad about an Afrikaner general named De la Rey who battled British forces a century ago, and it instantly became an Afrikaner anthem.

Mr. Pepler calls the song, "De la Rey," a testament to Afrikaner pride. "I'm part of this rainbow country of ours," he said. "But I'm one of the colors, and I'm sticking up for who I am. I'm proud of who I am."

Which would be fine, except that nobody, not even Afrikaners themselves, agrees on what an Afrikaner is these days.

A dozen years after the end of an Afrikaner government that invented apartheid, the mere concept of Afrikaner pride remains an exquisitely sensitive issue among whites and blacks alike. Are Afrikaners the feared Dutch descendants who built an empire based on a belief in their God-ordained racial superiority? Are they just another ethnic group, like the Zulu and Sotho and Xhosa, with a distinct place in the new democracy? Or are they South Africans first and foremost— 2.5 million whites in a stewpot of 4.5 million whites among 47.5 million people — and Afrikaners second, or third?

"De la Rey" has become a vessel for those aspirations and fears and, for the last month, the object of a caustic, often racially tinged national debate.

The seeds of the debate were planted late last year, when "De la Rey" first saturated Afrikaner radio airwaves and catapulted Mr. Pepler from middling success on the bar and restaurant circuit into an ethnic rock icon. Suddenly, at some of his concerts, a small knot of fans began to wave the old orange-and-blue flag of apartheid South Africa as "De la Rey" was sung.

Mr. Pepler repudiated them. But the Ministry of Arts and Culture was unpersuaded. Two weeks ago it issued a brusque warning that "De la Rey" was "in danger of being hijacked by a minority of right wingers," and that "those who incite treason, whatever methods they might employ, might well find themselves in difficulty with the law."

That drew a barbed retort from the Democratic Alliance, the second largest and mostly white political party. If the government was looking for subversion in a song, the party said, it might well examine "Bring Me My Machine Gun," the personal anthem of Jacob Zuma, the deputy president of the governing <A title="More articles about African National Congress" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/african_national_congress/index.html?inline=nyt-org">African National Congress and an aspirant to succeed President Thabo Mbeki.

Mr. Zuma and a business adviser faced bribery and corruption charges last year. Throngs of his supporters chanted the song outside their courtrooms, an act some critics called an attempt to intimidate the judiciary.

Since the dispute over "De la Rey" began, a ban on singing it has been issued and revoked at Loftus Versfeld Stadium in Pretoria, the nation's most hallowed rugby pitch; the culture minister affirmed his support in Parliament for Mr. Pepler's freedom of expression; and Nelson R. Mandela's personal assistant has defended the song as a youthful cry for direction. Newspapers and blogs have resounded with competing takes on the meaning of its lyrics and its larger significance.

Taken literally, the lyrics are clear: "De la Rey" is a song about Afrikaner history. In the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, a much larger British force overwhelmed the Boers, or Afrikaners, in a scramble for gold and land — but only after Gen. Koos de la Rey inflicted punishing defeats on the British. Nearly 28,000 Afrikaners and perhaps 20,000 black Africans died in British concentration camps during the war, many of them women and children. Their suffering is a central theme in Afrikaner lore.

Mr. Pepler's song is set in the trenches of that war. In the music video, a blooded and beleaguered Afrikaner soldier sings of "a handful of us against a whole big force" and "a nation that will rise again" — as the Afrikaners later did, winning control of South Africa in an election in 1948.

"De la Rey, de la Rey," the refrain pleads, "will you come and lead the Boers?"

But while the lyrics as a whole refer to the Boer War, some see in those phrases, and in the soldier's hopeless plight, a metaphor for Afrikaners' reduced place in post-apartheid society. His plea for a leader is viewed as a call for resistance to South Africa's government, which is based on universal suffrage.

Not only blacks have raised those interpretations. "I understand Afrikaans, and I've listened to the song," said Steven Friedman, an independent white political analyst. "It says that 'we need to follow some sort of general like you,' which could be interpreted by literal-minded people to be a call to arms."

Mr. Pepler, 28, a construction engineer from Pretoria, calls that interpretation "totally ridiculous."





"I'm not clever enough to read coded language in a song," he said after a concert in Orania, a village of 600 on the fringes of the Great Karoo desert. "It's such a sensitive subject. You say 'Boer,' and everyone is 'What is this now?' It's directly connected to people getting ideas and pictures in their heads — that a Boer is a right-wing person with khaki clothes who wants to murder black people."

Such people undoubtedly exist; a few far-right Afrikaners were recently tried on charges of antigovernment terrorism. But many more seem to be searching for a comfortable place in a black-majority society and still have not found it.

The Sunday Independent, perhaps South Africa's most renowned newspaper, says the song "answers a deep sadness" in Afrikaners' souls, a feeling that they have not merely fallen from power but have been marginalized in South African society — tossed into history's dustbin, as Ronald Reagan once said of the Soviets.

In its comment on "De la Rey," the government raised those fears, then dismissed them as nonsense. In fact, better than one in seven South Africans speaks or understands Afrikaans, including many blacks.

But many Afrikaners are not convinced. Students at Stellenbosch University, once the Harvard of Afrikaner enlightenment, have formed a society to preserve Afrikaans-language teaching there. Eastward, in the province of Mpumalanga, government officials this month decertified an Afrikaans school that refused to teach courses in English.

Afrikaners complain that the government has excised their history, including General de la Rey's exploits, from official textbooks.

"It's a continual process of assimilating Afrikaners into the larger population," said Carel Boshoff, who represents Orania in the Parliament of Northern Cape Province. Mr. Boshoff says his great-grandfather was born in a British concentration camp. Yet Afrikaner history, including the Boer War, has been sidelined to a few sentences in South African history texts, he says. He argues that the language and culture of Afrikaners may be next.

Mr. Boshoff is hardly the exemplar of his cause. He is a relative of Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African leader who institutionalized apartheid as national policy in the 1950s.

Orania itself, a privately owned compound, was founded in 1990 as an all-Afrikaner enclave, a place where Boer culture could flourish free of black, mixed-race or even white English influence. A bust of Mr. Verwoerd dominates its entrance. The town's 600 residents even have their own currency. Most people would call Orania's very premise racist.

Moreover, hardly all Afrikaners share Mr. Boshoff's views. Among intellectuals a school of thought argues that Afrikaners should sublimate their ethnic identities in favor of the larger purpose of forging an integrated South African society, a model for the world.

Yet it is still possible to recognize that it is not easy to be a proud Afrikaner these days. "Not everything we did in our history was wrong and bad and despicable," Mr. Boshoff said as Mr. Pepler's band clamored in the background. "There's also a history of a hundred years ago, which is represented by this song."






Correction: February 28, 2007



[/font]A front-page article yesterday about an identity crisis among Afrikaners, who invented the apartheid system that ended about a dozen years ago, misstated the colors of South Africa’s old apartheid flag. It is orange, blue and white, not orange and green. The article also referred incompletely to the name of a soccer stadium where an Afrikaner pride song was temporarily banned, and misstated the stadium’s location. It is Loftus Versfeld Stadium, not Loftus Stadium, and it is in Pretoria, not Johannesburg.

The article also misstated the location of Mpumalanga, a province that recently decertified an Afrikaans-language school that had refused to teach courses in English. While it is indeed in the eastern side of the country, it does not border the Indian Ocean. And the article misspelled the given name of an Afrikaner legislator who expressed concern that the government is excising Afrikaner history from official textbooks. He is Carel Boshoff, not Corel.

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I did upload a personal pic when I first registered on Vault9 Forums and it does appear on my blog profile, but I am not sure why it does not appear here, is there a special procedure for uploading a pic to appear next to your name when you post here? I am also working on my photo album, no rude pics, though, I am an upstanding South African girl, you know!

To me it is just a song. On Carte Blanche (a local current affairs show), the writer of the song (I think it was him) said that he needed a name in order to make the song catchy, and thus De la Rey was chosen.

The more this is debated though, the more Bok laughs all the way to the bank. Damn, I should also write crappy songs, throw in a lil' bit of a racial undertone to it, and then I can also become rich. Anyone remember Arthur's "Don't call me Kaffir?" (or something along those lines, that song was release waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the day).

Thanks for the link

Sorry I cant help, I am not from S.A, but I have always wanted to go...