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

1. Introduction: The Challenges of Inscribing Coloured Voices

1 Introduction The Challenges of Inscribing Coloured Voices O ne of my earliest memories of coloured farmworkers is the sound of their hymn singing at Sunday morning church services. In my mind, these sounds became intimately connected with my visits to the Karoo, the name for the semidesert region in which the farming town of Graaff-Reinet is located.1 These childhood associations resurfaced when, early one Sunday morning in August 2004, I traveled into Kroonvale (the residential area for coloured people on the edge of Graaff-Reinet) to attend the morning service of the Uniting Reformed Church. Brown-red dust, typical of the Karoo, hung in the air as I drove. As I stepped over the church threshold, I collided with a powerful wall of sound. While the congregation sang “Juig aarde, juig” (Rejoice Earth, Rejoice) at full volume, I reflected on the anomaly of the utter silence about this music in the Reinet House Museum archive, where I had spent the past month searching for historical evidence. As the service began, I looked around at the congregation from my position at the back of the church and realized that these distinct sounds, so thoroughly a part of this Karoo coloured community, survived only through their creation and possession by the many people sitting in front of me. The South African apartheid regime held a deeply ambivalent position toward those it categorized as “coloured,” the racial category it defined as “not a white person or a native” (Statutes 1950, 277).2 Nurtured and sustained by a policy of racial purity, a common stereotype of those classified 2 Introduction as “coloured” in apartheid South Africa was that they had no authentic ethnic identity because of their mixed racial heritage. Oral and written sources typically convey coloured people’s cultural history and musical heritage as similarly lacking. Coloured people also experienced ambivalence about their position, which led to their subscription to both ideals of white Western culture and black power at different periods. However, music has been (and continues to be) an integral part of the religious practices of these communities, although its performance has survived practically unnoticed by those outside. This book therefore counters the lingering stereotype of coloured people’s ethnicity by examining how sacred musical performance enabled coloured community members around the town of Graaff-Reinet to claim a place for themselves collectively under apartheid and in post-apartheid South Africa. This project provides a narrative of the social history of coloured people in the Graaff-Reinet region that is drawn from regional archives and empirical research in the form of fieldwork, specifically participant observation. I concentrate on religious musical practice, namely, hymns, koortjies (choruses ), choir performance, and the singing at women’s society meetings. Studying song performance examines the complex nexus of music, race, religion, politics, class, and gender identities within this community and constitutes a vital way of retrieving history and oral repertories. This music thereby provides one vehicle for groups and individuals in this community to articulate a more “legitimate” place for themselves in the contemporary landscape of South African history and culture. By placing the voices of coloured people at the center of this study, I move beyond the myopic apartheid view that saw coloured people purely in terms of their ethnic origins and capacity for labor. Instead, I approach coloured people’s music and history in terms of the sounds and spaces of its religious performance culture. The reference to “sonic spaces” in this book’s title has a threefold connotation. First, it refers to my emphasis on listening to the sound of this religious community as the primary vehicle for interpretation and the awareness of how the unique geographic location of the Kroonvale community shaped this repertoire. Second, it recognizes the presence of sacred song in this community as a testament to the survival of this musical tradition despite the marginality, violence, and oppression coloured people experienced in the actual localities where they lived. Finally, the reference to “sonic spaces” wishes to acknowledge the sound of coloured people’s voices raised in song as an integral part of that very diverse and varied entity known collectively as “South African music.” This work thus claims a (scholarly) space for the research of music within rural Karoo coloured communities.3 Introduction 3 Frontier History In the precolonial era, the oldest indigenous peoples of South Africa, the San hunter-gatherers and the Khoekhoe...