Sonic Spaces of the Karoo: The Sacred Music of a South African Coloured Community

Preface

Preface As a child, the Karoo always symbolized an escape for me. It was a refuge from the routine of school attendance and extramural activities, and from the restlessly windy, unpredictable weather of the coastal city of Port Elizabeth . The family farm lay only three and a half hours’ drive away from the city, where huge breakfasts of porridge, toast, and tea fortified me for seemingly endless sunny and windless days spent walking in the surrounding veld, participating in (and most likely, hindering) the usual farming activities and playing in the water furrows. A typical Karoo child displays an endless fascination with the precious commodity of water, and diverting the small rivulets in the furrow to flow smoothly over the muddy gravel guaranteed countless hours of captivation. When I was a child, my grandmother used to tell me to look for San tools such as grinding stones or arrowheads when walking in the Karoo veld. A collection of these artifacts was displayed in the farmhouse. It never occurred to me then that the San people, the forebears of many present-day coloured people, suffered merciless persecution on the part of my ancestors, the colonial settlers. When I returned to the Karoo for fieldwork on the music of coloured people, this memory of looking for San “treasure” and proof of their existence in this area contrasted very strangely with the historical accounts I read about the violent treatment of the San people by the settlers. Immersed in my research, I seldom visited the veld and instead explored my childhood memories in new contexts of colonial history and apartheid. As much as this project was originally driven by a deep appreciation of and interest in this music and then an ongoing desire that it not be ignored, my own background xvi Preface as the granddaughter of a Karoo farmer had to be revisited and recontextualized as the project continued. I remember sitting in June Bosch’s home one day when for once my childhood memories did not clash with the historical and contemporary stories of coloured people’s oppression and marginalization. June Bosch and her cousin, Loretta Fortune, told me a story from their childhood days on Caroline Street, Graaff-Reinet. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, water from the Van Ryneveld’s Pass Dam outside the town would be led into the cement furrows lining the streets for the townspeople to use. As the neighborhood children saw the water, they would shout up the street to announce its presence and run for any and every available container. June was under strict instructions from her grandmother to water the garden roses first and then to spray the unpaved street in order to settle the dust. After fulfilling these duties, the children would play in the furrows until the water flow ceased. Recognizing the similarity in our childhood games and activities with their focus on water made it poignantly apparent to me that we were all once children of the Karoo. This research project thus stems from my own connection to GraaffReinet and its surrounding area. Combined with a strong scholarly fascination with this music, my reasons for undertaking the project also included the opportunity to revisit and perhaps, in some small way, to recapture the past. While the Karoo is no longer a childhood escape for me, the spaces and sounds of this community have offered me a new perspective on my relationship to this place and its people. ...