Disavowal and the Perverted Mind of Apartheid

Abstract

Riffing on J.M. Coetzee’s 1991 essay The Mind of Apartheid, the public persona of boeremusiek celebrity Nico Carstens, and his much-publicized disavowal of boeremusiek, is the focus of this chapter. I consider the boeremusiek of the 1950s as part of apartheid’s aesthetics of perversity by analyzing the presence of the racialized other in Carstens’s music, and how the label “boeremusiek” and Carstens’s public persona functioned as fetishes for containing racialized values that were disavowed from within dominant definitions of Afrikaner whiteness. By theorizing Carstens’s boeremusiek (and the astounding amount of money he earned and subsequently squandered) around Georges Bataille’s notion of “expenditure,” I speculate on how boeremusiek functioned as excess within the “general economy” of apartheid. As fetishes tend to do, the disavowed heterogeneity of boeremusiek invigorated rather than undermined racial thinking in the early apartheid period.

The Nico Carstens Conundrum

For a brief time during the 1950s and 1960s, boeremusiek was cool. This was mainly down to the only real celebrity ever to be associated with the genre: accordionist Nico Carstens.

Dubbed the “King of Boeremusiek,” Carstens had an indelible influence on the South African entertainment industry. As bandleader, accordionist, and prolific composer of boeremusiek tunes, tangos, and popular Afrikaans songs, he achieved unparalleled commercial success. In 1956, Eddie Calvert’s cover version of his hit “Zambesi” reached number 13 on the UK hit parade, and in 1958, only eight years after forming his own orchestra, his record sales topped one million records.¹ This put him, as Schalk van der Merwe has noted, in the same league of local popularity as Elvis and Jim Reeves.² “Deviating radically from the archaic ‘concertina-and-guitar’ Boeremusiek,” wrote the Rand Daily Mail in 1957, branding him as a rebel, “Nico introduced a solid, swinging rhythm section, brilliant accordion improvisations and vocalists who were more at home in a ballroom than at a braaivleis (barbecue).”³

His influence, however, extended further than the sheer number of his compositions and recordings and the money it earned him at the height of his fame. In collaboration with accountant, lyricist, and business partner, Anton de Waal, Carstens was instrumental in creating the conditions for making a living as a professional musician in South Africa. The duo played a pioneering role in systematically exploiting the possibilities of earning musical royalties, and their publishing house “De Waal-Carstens” would set the bar for popular music as commercial undertaking for years to come.

But facts and figures do not approximate the extent to which Carstens’s music—and his musical persona (see Fig. 5.1)—was taken up in the white South African imagination. For this, one needs to turn to journalistic legend. “His fans were as besotted as any rock’n’roll groupies,” writes Chris Barron in an obituary in 2016: “Cars and bakkies would line up for miles, awaiting their appearance over the horizon or around the bend with mounting excitement.” And then, as Lin Sampson imagines, “[t]he Carstens Caravan with its backing band and often two or three vocalists, would tool into a small Karoo town in a cortege of swanky Cadillacs. They would set the place on fire.”⁴

Fig. 5.1

Carstens and his third wife, Vera Gibson. They married in 1957

Carstens’s rise as a commercial artist coincides with important coordinates in South Africa’s economic and political history. He became a professional musician in 1945—three years before the National Party won the election that set the country on the road to racial separate development. His career reached its pinnacle in the 1950s and early 1960s—corresponding to the postwar boom of the South African economy and the legal institution of grand apartheid. On the face of it, Carstens’s staggering road to success in the 1950s suggests an uncomplicated link between boeremusiek, commerce, and apartheid politics.

Given the meta-narrative of South African history, it is not surprising that Afrikaans mainstream popular music—like that of Nico Carstens—has historically been seen as an uncomplicated extension of Afrikaner nationalist ideology. This idea, however, has been more a matter of common sense than sustained academic scrutiny. The perceived co-optation of the popular by the political is evident in journalist Lin Sampson’s appraisal of the Afrikaans music scene of the 1950s and 1960s:

The history of ligte musiek [light music] in South Africa is intimately connected to the rise of nationalist politics in the country. The Afrikaans nationalist establishment, exemplified culturally by the SABC, but politically by the Stellenbosch intellectuals, who wanting something that would fit in with the rising sense of identity of the Afrikaner, discovered Carstens who played a type of boere jazz.⁵

Although it is indisputable that the Afrikaans music industry indirectly benefitted from Afrikaner nationalist political ideology in various ways, there is little evidence to suggest that the apartheid government or any of the Afrikaner establishment cultural agencies took any active interest whatsoever in co-opting Carstens’s music. In fact, as noted in the previous chapter, the only real musical ideologue of the time, Anton Hartman, while supporting “traditional” boeremusiek, sharply criticized modern versions of boeremusiek (also known at the time as “light Afrikaans music”) as a “cheap” commercialization of volksmusiek.⁶ The relationship between boeremusiek and apartheid thinking lies outside the direct involvement of official apartheid structures and their cultural apparatchiks.⁷

The perceived link between popular music and political hegemony in South Africa may be attributed to the fact that popular music have been theorized primarily in terms of the oppression/resistance binary that haunts the public sphere on so many levels.⁸ The tradition of South African popular music studies, mostly examining black vernacular genres, situate popular music within a context of confrontational political action—in a space of resistance, opposition, and struggle against a political and economic status quo.⁹ Where white popular music is concerned, however, academia has been disproportionately interested in musical instances that support the confrontational political action paradigm—those instances either of white anti-apartheid musical protest or white musical protest against the current political regime.¹⁰

In this chapter, I seek a more nuanced understanding of Afrikaans white popular culture under apartheid. Continuing the tradition of South African popular music studies, I retain a fundamental commitment to the idea of music as an inherently political act, but discard the notion that the apartheid establishment was an overarching ideological machine that regulated every aspect of life.

If one understands apartheid as a homogeneous, top-down ideological system situated in a specific period of historical time, Carstens makes for a particularly unsuitable poster boy.¹¹ Although he clearly functioned very productively within mainstream Afrikaner society, Carstens’s life in music is characterized by deep disjunctures between his perceived socio-political positioning and the details of his colorful and risqué personal life. Typified by extreme fiscal recklessness and unusual spiritual (and even Spiritist) sentiments, his lifestyle was, by any standard, fundamentally opposed to the dominant values of white-Afrikaner society. Moreover, although some of his music was carefully calculated to cash in on public sentiments and symbols of nationalism, displaying a commercially-oriented political pragmatism, his musical output on the whole does not fit such limiting brackets. Carstens’s immense popularity therefore presents something of a conundrum—a conundrum even Carstens himself struggled to understand. In a 2012 interview, he mused in a perplexed tone: “Why did it sell so well? Why did it last so long?”

If, on the other hand, one understands apartheid as the collective and systematic psychological mismanagement of racial difference, then a figure like Carstens can arguably tell us a whole lot about the everyday workings of apartheid. Carstens’s world of white entertainment—one inhabited by fire eaters, acrobats, dancing dwarfs, and ventriloquists—thereby offers a point of entry into a carnivalesque underbelly of apartheid that is yet to be documented and assimilated into broader social epistemologies of South African history. In this chapter, I contend that it is essentially meaningful that a public figure like Carstens rose to fame during the early decades of apartheid and that he was, against his wishes, labeled a proponent of boeremusiek.

In following this reasoning, I depart from the paradigm that assigns popular music to either side of the political acquiescence/political resistance binary. Instead, I start with the premise that, as Lara Allen has convincingly argued for the intersections of commerce, politics, and popular culture in black urban jive, Carstens’s music was neither “panacea nor cultural weapon, neither … pure resistance nor complete acquiescence.”¹² But, clearly, there is more at stake here than merely pointing out such ambivalences and uncertainties. As Homi Bhabha has noted, “the function of ambivalence as one of the most significant discursive and psychical strategies of discriminatory power—whether racist or sexist, peripheral or metropolitan—remains to be charted.”¹³ My goal here is to understand the contradictions and ambivalences that Nico Carstens embodied and his music propagated—especially toward racial hybridity—as part of the perversions of apartheid. Because apartheid was indeed that, an affective disorder and a malady of the mind.

Hence, my theory of affective enregisterment takes a darker turn here. As the previous chapters have shown, white aesthetic pleasure is provisional, hinging on cultivating forms of aesthetic doublespeak and affective mechanisms of displacement, negation, and erasure. My concern here is, once more, with the social pragmatics of white pleasure, and the rhetorical means by which political acquiescence and resistance have been bound as differential valences into a particular affective modality. In the context of Carstens and apartheid, the aesthetic doublespeak of boeremusiek’s metalanguage of affect was set off against the brutal subjugation of the majority of the South African population. What did “white pleasure” amount to in the politically charged context of apartheid, what purpose did it serve, and how was it to be attained? These are the questions I believe Carstens and his music allow us to address.

This chapter consists of two parts. In the first, I posit “disavowal” as the central affective modality of Carstens’s music and its reception by means of a psychoanalytic reading of Carstens’s life and music of the 1950s. In the second, I place the both/and logic of racial disavowal in the broader context of the economics of apartheid by considering the heterogeneity of boeremusiek in terms of Georges Bataille’s theories of excess and expenditure. Carstens’s music, his thoughts on boeremusiek, and his public persona shed light on the perverse populistic mind of apartheid, and perhaps even on the workings of right-wing populism more broadly.

Boeremusiek Ain’t Boeremusiek

“Disavowal,” writes Stuart Hall, “is the strategy by means of which a powerful fascination or desire is both indulged and at the same time denied.”¹⁴ Such disavowal is at work when Carstens declares: “I never really played boeremusiek. I played tangos, setiese, bossanovas and waltzes, music with a nice beat. Surely my compositions, ‘Die Klokkie-wals,’ ‘Helena Tango,’ ‘Zambezi,’ ‘Skokiaan,’ and ‘Hasie’ cannot be classified as boeremusiek…. I don’t even like boeremusiek.”¹⁵

Carstens has rehearsed his disavowal of boeremusiek several times over the years. “I get angry when people call us a ‘boere-orkes,’” he noted in a 1981, looking according to the interviewer, “like he would explode.” “I am not a boeremusiek musician. I can’t play a note on the concertina and don’t want to be associated with boeremusiek or boere-orkeste at all.” “And so he goes on and on,” the interviewer observes: “It looks like an obsession… That terrible complex about boeremusiek just won’t let go of him!”¹⁶

I say that Carstens’s disavowal of boeremusiek points to both an indulgence and a denial of boeremusiek, because to many of Carstens’s fellow musicians—and to the countless fans for who he was the “King of Boeremusiek”—his disavowal made little sense. According to pianist Taffy Kikillus, who played with him in Hendrik Susan’s orchestra, Carstens “made name for himself” as a boeremusiek musician. They often played boeremusiek together, and it was evident that Carstens had enjoyed it. His opinions of boeremusiek also remained a mystery to his first wife, Elise, since boeremusiek was their “bread and butter” at the time.¹⁷ “Nico plays boeremusiek, whether he likes it or not,” said guitarist Hennie Nieman in 1973, “and now, after he has made a fortune from it, he’s suddenly ashamed of it.”¹⁸ Asked why he made so many records that could be described as boeremusiek, yet came out so strongly against the genre, his response to me was simple: at the time “it was an easy way to make money.”¹⁹

It is indeed possible to understand Carstens’s disavowal of boeremusiek in relation to the commercial pragmatism of his early work. Were it not for the efforts of the entrepreneur Anton de Waal, Carstens might never have cashed in on the Afrikaans market. De Waal and Carstens met around 1951, just as Carstens formed his first professional band under his own name (see Fig. 5.2). De Waal was, according to Ralph Trewhela, “quiet and conservatively dressed” and “looked exactly what he had been trained to be – a conscientious accountant,” yet he had a “shrewd assessment of the world around him.”²⁰ In what resonates with the curious admixture of heterogeneity and homogeneity in Carstens’s music, De Waal described his recipe for success in South Africa “to be born a Jew, have an Afrikaans name, and go to an English-language private school.”²¹

Fig. 5.2

The original Nico Carstens orchestra, 1951, Duffy Ravenscroft Collection, SAMRO archive, Braamfontein, Johannesburg

Although he made a career as an Afrikaans lyricist and music publisher, De Waal’s real name was George Gunn. In the early 1930s, he worked with Danie Bosman, and together they composed more than one hundred songs with English lyrics.²² This partnership ended in failure when De Waal returned empty-handed from a trip to England. Music publishers there showed no interest in the songs and his attempts to approach band leaders Billy Mayerl, Jack Hylton, and Henry Hall were unsuccessful. Hylton reportedly pre-empted Gunn’s sales pitch with the words “Don’t even bother if it is music you want to show me. I have more than enough.”²³ Only when Gunn decided to focus his efforts on the untapped, but exploding Afrikaans market did he change his name.²⁴

Carstens has given several slightly different versions of how the two men met. De Waal was a director at the publishing house Trutone when he phoned Carstens one day. Carstens, who had just returned from a gig and a night of partying, was dead tired, but De Waal convinced him to go down to the Trutone offices, for he had written lyrics he wanted Carstens to set to music. According to De Waal, the lyrics were rather stupid and it would either be extremely successful or a complete flop. “I tended to agree with him – they were just stupid,” remembered Carstens.²⁵ Although the lyrics weren’t Carstens’s cup of tea, a tune came into his head, which he jotted down quickly while De Waal took a phone call. That was how the hit “Hasie” (Bunny) was created. Al Debbo’s version eventually sold more than 100,000 copies.²⁶

The publishing house De Waal-Carstens was born out of this initial collaboration. After the success of “Hasie” came other hits like “Ek ry met die trein” (I’m on the train) and “Rickshaw Boy.” De Waal provided the lyrics and titles for most of these songs, after which Carstens composed the music.²⁷ “I would never have composed so many tunes if De Waal hadn’t forced me,” said Carstens. “He would literally stand behind me and say ‘Write!’ and I would write.”²⁸

It is partly in the context of his partnership with De Waal—a man with clear commercial savvy—that Carstens’s acclaim as “King of Boeremusiek” and the contradictions inherent in his musical output are to be understood. Regardless of the fact that he never called his band a boere-orkes, the titles and cover art on many of the 1950s and 1960s record sleeves show a clear predilection for boeremusiek iconography and nationalist symbolism, even though the musical content sometimes differed quite substantially from the expectations created by the sleeves. It is hard not to view this as a ploy to leverage nationalist sentiment for commercial profit.

His album Wisseldans depicted dancers in Voortrekker dress in the background, when, at the time, the costume was only donned on days of special significance and functioned largely as political emblem.²⁹ Titles like Koffiehuiskonsert and Ons hou braaivleisaand (We’re having a barbecue evening) recalled the traditions constructed by Pieter de Waal and Hendrik Susan during the 1930s. The sleeve of Lief en leed (Love and sorrow) with singer Jurie Ferreira is replete with oxwagon, Cape-Dutch homestead and young Afrikaner lovers. Boere Wisseldans featured sketches of a concertina, accordion, banjo, guitar, piano, and drum set—a clear allusion to a boere-orkes.

A fascinating example is Authentic South African Boeremusiek by Nico Carstens and his Orchestra, an album recorded in 1957 in the “most modern studios on the African continent” and released by Capitol in the USA. The front cover shows dancers in Voortrekker dress, set against a Cape-Dutch building and described in the sleeve notes as an “attractive … photograph, actually taken in South Africa and superbly authentic in showing the costuming of the good folk who regularly dance to boeremusiek.” The back cover depicted a series of monuments to Afrikaner economic and cultural achievement: the monolithic building of the dominant electricity provider, Escom, a Witwatersrand gold mine, the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, the Voortrekker Church in Pietermaritzburg, and the National Anglo-Boer War Memorial in Pretoria.

With Springbokland (Springbok Country), De Waal and Carstens prefigured what would later become the money-spinning genre of the rugby album. The springbok on the cover was supplemented with tracks that referenced images associated with rugby: “Springboklied” (Springbok song), “Boerewors en koffie” (Boer sausage and coffee), and “Pale-toe” (a term referencing the act of scoring a try).

The multiple commercial recordings Carstens made with well-known concertinists like Rassie Erasmus, Neels Steyn, and Nic Potgieter (despite insisting in later years that the concertina is his least favorite instrument and that he never allowed a concertina in his bands) are further testament to the De Waal-Carstens enterprise’s cornering of the boeremusiek market.

The ambiguities of Carstens’s music and his repeated and insistent disavowal of the genre dispel any notion that the link between boeremusiek and apartheid politics was uncomplicated. Carstens was certainly no ideologue, but nor did he operate in some time-out away from political pressures. Instead, one can think of Carstens—the apartheid-era celebrity—as embodying a structural position within the apartheid entertainment economy that sheds light on how the average white citizen of the early apartheid era rationalized and internalized the madness of apartheid thinking. In this operation, as I will show, the notion of disavowal is central. My argument here is that Afrikaans audiences did not respond to Carstens’s music despite the obvious ambiguities and contradictions of his musical endeavors, but because of them. This is evident in some of the reasons Carstens has proffered for disavowing boeremusiek, which I turn to next.

Boeremusiek, Jazz, and the SABC

Part of the explanation for Carstens’s resistance to boeremusiek, despite his evident dabbling in the genre, must be sought in his rather extraordinary musical sensibilities that evidently exceeded that of his conservative white-Afrikaans audience. From a very young age, while his parents were listening to Afrikaans crooner Chris Blignaut, he was fascinated by Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, and the big band sound.³⁰ When Carstens started playing for Hendrik Susan in 1945, he described himself as being “jazz crazy.” He and Taffy Kikillus frequented the jazz nightclubs of Johannesburg. In comparison with these clubs—the Bal Tabarin, His Majesty’s and Ciro’s—Hendrik Susan’s Werda club didn’t even qualify as a nightclub in Carstens’s eyes.³¹ Rather than being merely a rented premises where Afrikaners would dance on a Saturday evening, the nightclubs featured the “big guns of the jazz scene,” playing every night from 10 pm until the last customer left. “The ‘nightclub boys’ looked down on us Afrikaans musicians,” Carstens remembered.³² Be that as it may, in a 2012 interview Carstens mentioned that he often used jazz session musicians on his recordings, because they were generally free during the day.

The rift between the English and Afrikaans music market in the 1950s and 1960s—a rift no doubt fueled by the decades-long strife between English and Afrikaans at the SABC—is evident in the frequency with which people in the music industry changed their names. While De Waal adopted an Afrikaans name, many Afrikaans musicians anglicized their names in order to make it in the predominantly English-speaking jazz world. Jannie Fourie who started out with Susan and Carstens, for example, later played in London and became the renowned jazz guitarist Johnny Fourie. Carstens’s entrenchment in the Afrikaans market, and the fact that he loved the limelight and hardly ever collaborated with famous musicians, made a shift to the jazz world unlikely.

But there was also a political element to the fact that Carstens’s music was labeled “boeremusiek” and not “jazz.” Despite his music being largely instrumental, it was only ever played on the Afrikaans “B” service, and never on the English “A” service of the “SABC.”³³ According to Carstens, this was due to the fact that “[i]n the old days the broadcaster decreed that musicians with Afrikaans names could not play jazz, and could only serve the Afrikaans public. In my case that meant Boeremusiek.”³⁴ As in the case of Jo Fourie’s Uit die jaar vroeg, musical categorization occurred on the basis of ideological concerns rather than actual musical features, resulting in the different possible sound worlds theory I posited at the end of the previous chapter. In practice, this meant that the same tune performed in a largely similar style could be packaged by the SABC under different categories. If this sounds confusing, it is: any attempt to create homogeneity out of the clearly heterogeneous nature of South African popular music of the 1950s was bound to end up as a bundle of internal contradictions. Carstens’s 1959 release of “Skokiaan” is a case in point. Composed by Rhodesian August Machon Musururgwa of the Buluwayo Sweet Rhythms Band in 1947, it became an international hit and was covered in 1954 by Louis Armstrong as “Happy Africa.” “Skokiaan” is generally considered to be a fine example of the international cosmopolitanism of jazz and the interfaces between African music and US jazz, but Carstens’s version nevertheless passed as boeremusiek.³⁵ The term “boeremusiek,” in this case, served to disavow the influence of African jazz on white musical practice of the time.

This is not to say that Carstens did not—especially during the 1950s and 1960s—also play into the expectations of the SABC or that of his Afrikaans audience. Carstens’s most well-known boeremusiek numbers, including “Jampot polka,” (Jam Pot Polka), “Warmpatat” (Hot Sweet Potato), and the less locally infused “Klokkiewals” (Little Bell Waltz), reveal little of his affinity for progressive jazz. Despite being improvisatory and atmospheric and speaking of seemingly infinite articulative and ornamental resources, the overall formal and harmonic structures of these numbers are contained and formulaic. In Carstens’s composition of boeremusiek numbers, including several vastrappe, walse, setiese, and polkas, he employed the basic boeremusiek structure of two complementary themes with minors (see Chap. 6).

The up-beat “Jampot polka” and “Warmpatat” follow the boeremusiek recipe almost to the letter—“Warmpatat” usually inclusive of the “minors” section—yet Carstens infuses it with rhythmic sophistication and vitality. In many of Carstens’s renditions, he contrasts instrumental techniques prevalent in boeremusiek concertina playing—octave unison playing, downward-sliding major sixth tremolos, and the octave tremolo skommel movement—with his most distinctive, and much copied, musical gesture: a rapid and loud movement of the hand down the keyboard utilized as rhythmic-textural excursion.

Even when the accordion steps back and plays a supportive role, Carstens is a master at filling in harmonic gaps and adding syncopative rhythmic interest with bursts of rapid staccato chords. Hearing him weave his magic, one comprehends how he got away with choosing women vocalists based on their looks and little else and often went touring with second-rate musicians: “as long as they knew how to hold their instruments, it was fine.”³⁶

Although Carstens’s jazz virtuosity shines through despite the imposed boundaries of the boeremusiek standard, the commercial demands on his compositional efforts were clearly a source of frustration:

I have been branded the King of Boeremusiek and been limited in my compositions for far too long. I do play and compose that type of music, which is wonderful for dancing. But it is not all I can or want to do.³⁷

Boeremusiek’s Syncretism

Another reason for Carstens’s disavowal has to do with his views on boeremusiek’s syncretism. On the one hand, and despite his many disavowals, Carstens competed in boeremusiek competitions as late as 1992. When asked why he did so, his response was that he competed tongue in cheek only to “make a statement.”³⁸ This “statement” may have been about pushing the boundaries of boeremusiek’s genre definition.

In an interview that caused much controversy in the 1980s, Carstens referred to the genre as “so-called boeremusiek”:

I say so-called boeremusiek because it is only a type of music that has become known as boeremusiek. It isn’t really boeremusiek. The word vastrap derives from foxtrot; setees from Scottishe; a boer waltz is simply a mazurka, and this is a Polish term for a quick waltz. Furthermore, the polka is a typical Eastern European rhythm.

But what really got the critics going was when Carstens questioned the white origins of the genre. Despite the fact that boeremusiek’s hybrid origins were widely recognized and that the terms “boeremusiek” and “hotnotsmusiek” were used interchangeably up to the 1950s, this knowledge amounted to cultural sacrilege by the 1980s. In a critical article on his participation in a boeremusiek competition, the Traditional Boeremusiek Club strongly rejected Carstens’s statements:

For a while now, since 1984 to be precise, the renowned accordionist Nico Carstens has been running away from the boeremusiek ghost that haunts him. In that year he stated in Huisgenoot that the hoarse screaming of the concertina sounds just like someone suffering from laryngitis! … In 1989 he took the project of denigration further and reportedly said that “if you have heard one concertina, you have heard them all … Boeremusiek ain’t boeremusiek. Boeremusiek comes from blacks!” According to Nico boeremusiek only employs two chords and he is adamant that he has never played boeremusiek. What nonsense such statements are!³⁹

“Boeremusiek ain’t boeremusiek. Boeremusiek comes from blacks.” This statement contains the key to understanding why white audiences felt so attracted to the music Carstens was making in the 1950s and early 1960s. For what was being disavowed by listeners—the powerful fascination that were both indulged and denied—was the racial syncretism of boeremusiek and, by extension, the “bastardized” ears of its white listeners. Carstens’s own disavowal of boeremusiek, then, can be understood as what Peggy Kamuf has called “the disavowal of disavowal.” Citing Derrida citing Freud, she notes that “[r]epressions that have failed have more claim on our interest than those that may have been successful; for the latter will for the most part escape our examination.”⁴⁰ Carstens’s disavowal of boeremusiek, read as an unsuccessful repression of the disavowal of boeremusiek’s racial hybridity, thus allows disavowal as a broader affective modality of whiteness to become legible. As I have demonstrated throughout this book, racial disavowal haunts the history of boeremusiek. But Carstens is interesting because both his music and his disavowal of the disavowal of boeremusiek’s syncretism constitute “a repetition that does not merely repeat the same, but also dismantles or assists at the dismantling of what remains nevertheless visible,”⁴¹ thereby allowing us to examine disavowal in the context of apartheid South Africa and the development of its racial ideology.

Carstens’s Music As Race Music

Carstens’s musical output is deeply concerned with race. Given the context of its production, this shouldn’t be too surprising. But what is surprising is the manner in which his music deals with race: unlike Afrikaans literature or art music of the period, which either erased or repressed racial anxiety, Carstens’s music disavowed it. Because if it is true that the term “boeremusiek” became a paradoxical shop-front—a fetish, in other words—for the denial of the music’s racial syncretism, then boeremusiek didn’t articulate a hegemonic position by propagating white exclusivity, but, on the contrary, by placing whiteness and its racial Other into a perverse relationship to one another. This relationship can be explained by unpacking the psychoanalytic and postcolonial meanings of the term “disavowal.”

The first step in such an analysis is to illustrate the difference between repressing racial desire and disavowing it. Perhaps the most powerful account of the former is found in The Mind of Apartheid—J.M. Coetzee’s brilliant analysis of the writings of apartheid theorist Geoffrey Cronjé on which I draw extensively in this chapter and this book.⁴² Coetzee identifies in Cronjé’s writings of the late 1940s signs of an “obsessional neurosis” with black bodies and miscegenation. For Coetzee, the cardinal point of Cronjé’s key text (ominously titled A Home for Posterity: The Lasting Solution to South Africa’s Race Question [“’n Tuiste vir die nageslag: die blywende oplossing vir Suid-Afrika se rassevraagstuk”]) is that Cronjé’s apartheid, which was later partly realized in real apartheid legislation, developed as “a counterattack upon desire.” Coetzee describes Cronjé’s texts as a “continual hide-and-seek with desire: an inability to face the desire of black for white or white for black [which] manifests itself in motions of evasion … or of revulsion and denial.”⁴³ This “denial, displacement and reprojection of desire,” Coetzee suggests, were re-enacted in apartheid’s ambitious projects of human displacement: “the redrawing of the maps of cities, the redivision of the countryside, the removal and resettling of populations.”⁴⁴

It so happens that the same Geoff Cronjé had things to say about music too, which can help us clarify the distinction between repression and disavowal in the context of musical representation.

For Cronjé, as Carina Venter has noted, musicality functioned as a marker of the “spiritual apparatus” of different races:

The spiritual apparatus of a race also entails its temperamental, emotional and other spiritual properties. We know from experience that white and black races differ with respect to these spiritual properties. Thus we know, for example, that the Bantu has fine musical talent. However, we also know that his music is very different from that of the white man. Among other things, it is strongly characterized by the repetitive rhythms that we, unlike the Bantu, find tedious. It is very probable that the native has a different musicality to the white man. In all probability, this is similar to the way in which he has a different spiritual apparatus to the white man.⁴⁵

It is through the notions of “rhythm” and “innate musicality” that the so-called Bantu becomes subhuman. According to this “logic,” the Bantu relates to the world in a visceral way, as opposed to the rational engagement of the white; the Bantu answers to nature, while the white answers to culture; the Bantu is primitive, while the white is progressive.

For Cronjé the biological determinism of musical aptitude extended to labor preferences too, for which there existed a similar system of classification. The report of the Carnegie Commission on the “Poor white problem” in South Africa noted, for example, that the level of unemployment among whites during the 1930s could to a certain extent be ascribed to their reluctance to engage in “k*ff*r work”—demeaning forms of labor that had been routinely outsourced to “non-whites.”⁴⁶ Cronjé found in musical taste and aptitude a biological basis for this “natural” division of labor. “The native’s suitability,” he wrote, “is apparently particularly focused in the area of the concretely empirical, in particular in the performance of the repetitive work through which he experiences, as it were, a kind of ‘monotonous’ rhythm that would have a tedious and even pacifying effect on the white man.”⁴⁷

That is what Cronjé wanted to believe anyway. As the realities of the South African music industry of the 1950s attested, “black” music-making had anything but a tedious and pacifying effect on white audiences. What is more, the distinction between “black” and “white” music was never as clear-cut as Cronjé supposed. How they managed this tension between reality and ideology is what set an ideologue like Cronjé and a populist like Carstens apart: Cronjé denied and repressed the racial intersections of musical taste; Carstens indulged the desire for mixing—with some strings attached. If in its relationship to the racial Other Cronjé’s writings show signs of neurosis, Carstens’s music shows signs of perversion.

Boeremusiek with a Gammat Beat

While Cronjé propagated a taboo on touching and bodily contact between races, Carstens’s music gave unparalleled presence to the idea of racial mixing. This is particularly evident in his musical style of the 1950s, which, as suggested earlier, incorporated elements from a wide range of musical sources. Carstens framed his birthplace as an important site in the development of this distinctive style. “I like the boeremusiek as I knew it in the Cape … with a gammat beat,” Carstens said on occasion.⁴⁸ When asked to describe his style, his response was:

I didn’t follow anybody’s style … but I grew up in Bellville South, a very poor area of the Cape, where I came in contact with many Cape Coloureds. I got the movement and everything from them.⁴⁹

This musical contact across racial divides would have occurred before the formal implementation of grand apartheid in the 1950s. The Bellville South of Carstens’s childhood was one of two racially “mixed” residential and industrial zones in the greater Bellville area and occupied the area south of the railway track that runs across this northern suburb of Cape Town. Carstens explained the significance of the railway track in a discussion about his relationship with his first wife, Elise Lategan. Elise and her sister Sylvia lived on the upper side, adjacent to the other “mixed” area, Oakdale, and Carstens frequently visited them in the afternoons after school:

From [Elise and Sylvia’s house in] Bellville North to our house in Bellville South you had to ride through bushes and sand. We were on the lower side. We lived “below the tracks,” so to speak. Their dad was … gone … you know … not there … and their mom didn’t like me at all. I’m below the tracks and my father works on the railways, I mean … you know … She thought she was better than us. … I wasn’t socially acceptable by her standards. End of story.⁵⁰

The history of urban redevelopment in Bellville sheds some light on Carstens’s childhood memories and the theme of racial mixing in his music. Like many of the other white residents of the area, Carstens’s father was employed by the South African Railways where he worked as a copper smith. “Coloured” residents, however, outnumbered the relatively small white working-class population of Bellville South.⁵¹ The demographics of Bellville South and Oakdale prior to the forced removals indicate that apartheid was not always South Africans’ “natural state,” as government propaganda had people believe.

Although scholarly attention has focused mostly on District Six, Bellville was actually one of the earliest municipalities to implement the apartheid government’s Group Areas Act of 1950.⁵² According to the act, urban areas would be divided into zones each assigned to a racial group in order to effect urban apartheid. In practice, this meant that people were forcibly moved from one site to another, without regard for social structures and property rights. Soon after Carstens left Bellville South to work as a professional musician, the messy project of social engineering based on the principle of apartheid commenced.⁵³

In September 1950 the Bellville Municipal Council decided in principle to implement the Group Areas Act within its municipal borders. Because of its reputation as a “poor” area, its less desirable low-lying position, and its proximity to an industrial zone, the area south of the railway track—where Carstens’s family lived—was earmarked as a “coloured” area, while the slopes of the Tygerberg and the entire area north of the railway track were to be reserved for white residents only. This included the neighborhood of Oakdale, where many “Africans” and “Coloureds” had settled, sometimes in temporary shelters and in squalid conditions. After their expulsion, Oakdale would henceforth be redeveloped into the white “pride of Bellville.”

This decision sparked much protest from Belville’s coloured and white residents alike.

The white residents called for the area south of the track to be zoned for white low-income housing. This had little effect, however, and the white residents of Bellville South were instructed to swop places with their coloured neighbors in Oakdale. In practice, this meant that about 3000 coloured residents were moved from Oakdale to Bellville South and that the 180 white families then residing in Bellville South were relocated elsewhere. The forced removals also affected 800 coloured families in the other areas of Bellville.⁵⁴ Coloured families were not only legally forced out of Oakdale, and their property sometimes expropriated, but forced to carry the infrastructural costs of relocating themselves. This inevitably led to the impoverishment of the coloured community of Bellville, who lived in slum-like condition after the move.⁵⁵ The suburb where Carstens was born was formally proclaimed a “Coloured” area under the Group Areas Act in 1958—just as his record sales hit the one million mark.

This historical background puts a different spin on Carstens’s statements on his syncretic style. It makes it clear that when Carstens’s boeremusiek hit the airwaves, it would have been in a political climate inimical to the notion of racial mixing. And yet, his music, his upbringing, and his public person and musical mythos embodied for his white audience that very idea. Although it was never said out loud, media reports of the 1950s and 1960s frequently hinted crudely at Carstens’s own racial ambivalence, most often by focusing on the texture of his hair and his blended parlance. So, for example, a 1969 report described him as a fellow with “piercing steel-gray eyes, and woolly, frizzy hair [“kroeskrulhare” in Afrikaans]” who when he spoke “braided together English and Afrikaans” to such an extent that it was unclear what his home language was.⁵⁶ The way his childhood experiences of “mixing” seeped into his attitudes and his music of the 1950s cannot be divorced from the fact that this very seepage was both violently and pettily suppressed by the apartheid government.⁵⁷ That he spoke so freely about the interfaces between white and coloured culture in his early childhood points toward the complicated identity politics and the central anomaly of his musical output: that his music of the 1950s was at once open toward shared notions of indigenous South African music, and closed around the genre definition of boeremusiek and its predominantly white audiences.

Boeremusiek Ain’t Kwela

Carstens’s involvement in “coloured” music making extended beyond his childhood experiences and into his professional working life. His so-called kwela compositions of the 1950s and 1960s and his collaborations with Stan Murray are most notable in this regard.

Born in Cape Town, Stan Murray was, according to Rob Allingham, “the hottest South African jazz guitarist (basically in the Charlie Christian mold) of the late 40s/early 50s.”⁵⁸ Murray recorded extensively with Carstens and was a regular member of his band throughout most of the 1950s, but also did session work with various Gallo African artists including the Manhattan Brothers. In the mid-1950s, he took up alto sax, adopting what Allingham describes as “the typical fruity-toned Coloured style.”⁵⁹ In the late 1950s, he left Johannesburg (and Carstens) and returned to Cape Town where he began recording “coloured-style” records for Gallo as Stan Lee & His Boys.⁶⁰ It is important to note, however, that Stan Murray was white.

Carstens’s collaboration with Murray was born of their shared interest in the rhythms of the Cape, which Carstens referred to as “that particular Cape Coloured beat”:

I spent a lot of my youth on farms, and on every farm you’ll find labourers who take out their guitars after work or on weekends. They taught me the basic chords and the strumming of that particular Cape Coloured beat, which I could never find in the Transvaal. The only people who could do it were people like Stan Murray who also grew up in Cape Town. That’s why Stan and I fitted in so well in those old recordings like “Outa in die Langpad”. Eddie Wyngaardt, also from the Cape, is another.⁶¹

Between 1954 and the early 1960s, unbeknownst to their white fans, Carstens and Murray released several 78s on Columbia’s TSA “Carnival series” under the pseudonym “Penny Serenaders.” The name of the band suggests that these recordings would have fallen under the rubric of “kwela.” These recordings were specifically aimed at the coloured market, as indicated by the affix “C” on some of the catalogue numbers.⁶² When comparing Carstens’s release of “Zambesi,” starring Murray as sax soloist, with his accordion versions for the white market, it is reasonable to contend that Carstens used the coloured market as an outlet—or perhaps even as a cover—for his affinity for jazz.

However, Carstens also released kwela for white-Afrikaans audiences, but then it was called “boeremusiek” and sounded like it too. “Konsertina Kwela,” released with concertinist Neels Steyn in 1962, is an example of a straightforward boeremusiek standard. In records aimed at the Afrikaans market, the terms “kwela” and “boeremusiek” were thus sometimes used interchangeably. To complicate matters of nomenclature and genre definition even further, Duffy Ravenscroft (Carstens’s biggest contender on the white South African dance music circuit) released Kwela with Duffy in 1955. All of the so-called kwela tracks on the LP were cover versions of Carstens compositions or hits that were previously marketed to the Afrikaans audience as “boeremusiek.” The lyrics and some of the titles were translated into English and the LP was thus specifically targeted at the English-speaking white market. Tracks included “Rickshaw Boy,” “Fanagalo,” “Outa in die langpad” (here translated as the racial slur “Picannin”), “Africa,” and “Skokiaan.” Apart from the extent of white proclivities for blackness and black bodies, this LP indicates that “boeremusiek” and “kwela” were sometimes used to describe the same songs, but to delineate different audiences. Most importantly, it suggests that the terms did not always evoke a specific set of stylistic characteristics but rather, depending on the audience, various relationships toward African indigeneity.

For the English-speaking white audience, indigeneity functioned largely as curiosity to be visited, experienced, and left behind. As much can be deduced from the sleeve notes on The Petersen Brothers’s extremely successful On Safari (1958), which included a rerelease of two of the Carstens tracks on Kwela with Duffy: “Africa” and “Fanagalo” in addition to several other Carstens hits. The sleeve notes, written by Anton de Waal (Carstens’s early collaborator and lyricist), bind the track titles (in capitals) into a safari travelogue:

This is an invitation for you to go on a musical Safari through Africa in the charming company of three good-looking young men who are ready to entertain you with witty ditties and romantic songs, with tunes to dance to, and tunes to make you dream. Here are Mervy, Basil and Andy waiting to guide you on your journey o pleasant make-believe. The whole panorama of AFRICA is spread out before you like a magic carpet, while in the distance you hear the strange language of your baggage boys as they converse in FANAGALO. Through the hills and valleys of Zululand you pick up a trail as you hear the chant of HAMBA KAHLE. You tarry for a brief moment in the confines of a city to dance to the JOH’BURG SAMBA, before packing your bags again and journeying on to a lovely valley in PONDOLAND, where you pitch your tent beside a tumbling waterfall.

If musical exoticism appealed to the English-speaking white market, the white-Afrikaans market sought something else: that sense of belonging to Africa that accompanied the moniker “boeremusiek.” But herein lay also the problem of white Afrikaans identity and musicality: how to belong to Africa without being “reduced” to it, as it were. And here the faltering distinction between “kwela” and “boeremusiek” provided a convenient workaround. One answer to the affective management of racial difference is found in the sleeve notes of Albie Louw’s In Tune with South Africa: Volume 5: Kwela.⁶³ The text suggests a white orientation toward coloured music—one of being “in tune with” or in resonance with Africa—that powerfully contradicts Cronjé’s apartheid logic of the distinct musical apparatus of different races. The sleeve notes read like the premises to an argument that does not add up:

The inborn sense of rhythm, which is a heritage of the peoples of our land, has given us the irresistible lilt of the KWELA. No other pianist in South Africa is probably more qualified to interpret the fascinating charm of KWELA than Albie Louw. Albie was born in the Cape, and all his life he has been in contact with music of this type, listening to it, and absorbing it with appreciative interest. Albie’s playing gives us the very essence and spirit of KWELA, which was spontaneously created by the Coons during Carnival time.⁶⁴

Rather than denouncing racial mixture or using metaphors of contagion that recoil at touching the racial Other, here the white musician is portrayed in intimate contact with the Other through music, aurally “absorbing” its “irresistible lilt.” At the same time, the music remains something external, something to be “interpreted” and listened to with an “appreciative interest”: Albie Louw was born in the Africa, the sleeve note says, but he is, like St. Paul, most certainly not of it. Two contradictory ideas thereby exist alongside each other: (1) “The inborn sense of rhythm, which is a heritage of the peoples [read: the black peoples] of our land, has given us the irresistible lilt of the KWELA”; and (2) “No other pianist in South Africa is probably more qualified to interpret the fascinating charm of KWELA than Albie Louw [a white man].” Defying all logic, it is as if the white musician playing kwela enacts a form of double blackface that cancel each other out. In this warped reasoning two “blacks” (kwela’s irresistible lilt; the ability to interpret its fascinating charm), plus a fetish (KWELA writ large), make a white. But because (a) boeremusiek and kwela were so often used as interchangeable terms referring to similar sound worlds and (b) because Carstens’s relationship to the music of the Cape is described in nearly identical terms of direct contact and “resonance,” a similar warped reasoning holds when one substitutes “kwela” for “boeremusiek” and “Albie Louw” for “Nico Carstens.” With one crucial difference—the term boeremusiek disavows the hybrid origins of the music and its sensuous relationship to blackness in a way the term kwela does not. The relationship between whiteness and black indigeneity implied by the term “kwela” is illogical. The relationship between whiteness and black indigeneity implied by the term “boeremusiek” is perverse.

Verleugnung, Psychoanalysis, and the Colonial World

Representations of race in boeremusiek are so riddled with contradictions, because rather than repressing racial anxieties and pushing them out of conscious thought, they disavow racial desires thereby simultaneously acknowledging and denying their existence. Freud first introduced the notion of disavowal, or Verleugnung, in his discussion of castration anxiety. In the paradigmatic case of Little Hans, the boy sees and registers the absence of his sister’s penis, but refuses to accept it, even though he knows it to be true. As Jane Gallop notes, for Freud the denial of castration is “the prototype – and perhaps even the origin – of other kinds of denials of reality.”⁶⁵

Disavowal involves a Spaltung or split of the ego so that two pieces of contradictory knowledge are maintained side by side. “[It] operates according to a kind of both/and logic,” writes Stephanie Swales: “the thought related to the perception of something is put out of mind, while the person develops symptoms that indicate the perception was actually registered and stored in memory.”⁶⁶

Lacan extended Freud’s ideas on disavowal by working the term into a rigorous theory of the three primary psychoanalytic diagnostic categories: perversion, neurosis, and psychosis.⁶⁷ Each of these, in turn, hinge on one of the three primary defense mechanisms: perversion on disavowal, neurosis on repression, and psychosis on foreclosure.⁶⁸ For Lacan, these “diagnoses” are ontological. In other words, rather than describing a set of clinical symptoms, they describe three possible structural positions that the self can take in relation to the symbolic Other. It is in this sense that Carstens’s music might be described as “perverse”: disavowal articulates a particular way of relating to Others in the symbolic worlds of music, language and representation.

The nature of this relationship becomes clearer in Charles Shepherdson’s discussion of the difference between “disavowal” and “repression:”

[I]n the case of “disavowal,” the mode of rejection is stronger than in repression. What is disavowed is not “repressed” (and thus able to return), but is rather more profoundly refused; and in order to clarify this difference, Freud relies on the perceptual dimension. The “idea” (or signifier) of castration is indeed “retained” and “given up,” but unlike repression, where the idea is normally retained only in the unconscious, in disavowal the affect is repressed, while the idea of maternal castration is not repressed, but remains present alongside its negation. This is why the fetishist requires another mechanism by which the negation of this idea can be maintained – not a mechanism of repression, by which the symbolic representation (the idea or signifier) would be lodged in the unconscious, but a mechanism of disavowal, by which the imaginary representation (the visual image) remains present in the field of perception, by means of the fetish.⁶⁹

This sounds complicated, but transposing this paragraph to the disavowal of racial hybridity in boeremusiek makes some unnerving observations possible. If what is disavowed by the name “boeremusiek” is the idea of racial hybridity or racial mixing, racial hybridity is both “retained” and “given up” in boeremusiek performance. It works like this: Unlike repression (where racial hybridity would be retained only in the unconscious), in disavowal the affect of encountering racial hybridity (i.e., desire or anxiety about racial mixing) is repressed, while the idea of racial hybridity is not repressed but remains present alongside its negation. As such, boeremusiek functions as a fetish—a mechanism that allows the negation of the idea of racial hybridity to remain present alongside its musical signifier in the aural field of perception. Put in different terms: if by a fetish is meant a libido-invested object that serves as substitute for the thing that is being denied, then boeremusiek serves as such a fetish, because it allows whites to entertain the idea of racial hybridity while repressing its associated anxieties, and therefore alongside its opposite: the idea of racial purity.

Disavowal and the Spectacle of the Other

In classical psychoanalysis Verleugnung involves, as noted above, the man’s perception of the absence of the woman’s (the mother’s) phallus. The fetish, writes Freud in his 1927 essay on the subject, is a compromise between the refusal and the acceptance of that fact: “In his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but the penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute.”

When a black man—in the figure of Frantz Fanon—disrupts this “primal scene” of the white male Imaginary, when he shows psychoanalysis to be a colonial drama about sexual and racial difference, things get more complicated.⁷⁰ Then “disavowal” describes in broader strokes the West’s perverted relationship to the colonial world.⁷¹

As Fanon has shown, the colonial encounter is a deeply traumatic phantasy for all parties involved, engendering all sorts of contradicting desires:

The black man wants to be white.⁷²

The white man slaves to reach a human level.⁷³

A white woman who has had a Negro lover finds it difficult to return to white men.⁷⁴

(The black woman—largely absent for Fanon—is the object of the white man’s unregulated voyeurism.)⁷⁵

In addition to the white woman’s supposed “lack,” the white man registers the black man’s phallus as potentially fulfilling that lack. This threatens the white man with castration, because the black man potentially replaces him as the object-cause of the white woman’s jouissance—that thing on which she “gets off.” But, simultaneously, the black man assumes the role of the white man’s fetish: that object intended to “complete” the woman in order to make her desirable. This is why the black man is so often depicted in colonial literature as an overdetermined penis. It is also the cause of the white man’s ambivalence toward the black man, his horror and fascination, attraction and repulsion for the racial Other: from the perspective of the white male, the presence of the black man renders his relationship to the white woman perverse.⁷⁶

In his discussion of how these fantasies enter the realm of visual representation, Stuart Hall discusses disavowal and fetishism as specific strategies for representing racial difference. Hall refers to fetishism and disavowal as “the level where what is shown or seen … can only be understood in relation to what cannot be seen, what cannot be shown” and “where what has been tabooed nevertheless manages to find a displaced form of representation.”⁷⁷

Such disavowal is evident in one of the biggest hits of the 1950s, “Fanagalo.” Carstens released the most successful version of the song with the Petersen Brothers on their On Safari LP in 1958, discussed earlier. He subsequently recorded several instrumental cover versions of the song: it is included, for instance, on the compendium of his greatest hits Nico Carstens—Goue plaat, released by Columbia records in 1959.

Fanagalo refers to the pidgin language that was taught to black mine workers and their white superiors to aid communication in the mining sector. The title of the song and its chorus—“Fanagalo Fanagalo / A Zulu boy will understand / Fanagalo Fanagalo / The magic word from Zululand”—conjure up apartheid geography and economic policy: the mines of the Witwatersrand, the creation of black homelands, apartheid restrictions on black mobility, and the apartheid policies on migrant labor that were meant to prevent black “overcrowding” in the cities while providing the black labor required for economic growth. But this broader industrial context is not the setting for the song: instead, it is the intimacy of a white suburban household in which “Jim”—that generic name for a black male worker—lives and works as “houseboy.” He is issued with a series of instructions: “Jim digga lo garden / Jim digga lo garden / Pasop my flower, pasop my flower / Cultivate! / Fanagalo.”⁷⁸ Jim speaks only once: “Missis hamba shaya golf / Me babysit.”

What we have here is an enactment of the Oedipal psychodrama of apartheid, in which the black male body is stripped of its unique features and infantilized as a “boy” within the white family. None of Geoff Gronjé’s repression of racial desire in this account. What is disavowed here is the fact that Jim is not a boy but a man. As Stuart Hall notes, the “conscious attitude amongst whites – that ‘Blacks are not proper men, they are just children’ – may be a cover, or a cover-up for a deeper, more troubling fantasy – that ‘Blacks are really super-men, better endowed than whites, sexually insatiable.’”⁷⁹ It is hardly necessary to link up the corners of the Freudian triangle between Jim and his white “Baas” and “Missis.”

Intriguingly, however, the song was first performed by the all black quartet the Woody Woodpeckers in 1952 as part of the hugely popular African Jazz and Variety Show organized by the South African Institute for Race Relations—a liberal attempt to showcase black talent.⁸⁰ As Mark Sanders notes, this shows that the lyrics “will thus first have been a [black] mimicry of a white master addressing his houseboy,” rendering the later Petersen Brothers version with Nico Carstens and his Orchestra “a white parody of a black parody of a white attempt to mimic black speech.”⁸¹ This does not make the song any less racist, of course, but points rather to Fanon’s line of thinking about the black man’s internalization of the white man’s image of him.

A similar mode of presentation is seen in another of Carstens’s big hits, “Rickshaw Boy,” first recorded with Al Debbo in 1950. Here, however, what is disavowed in the black “boy”—his virility—is powerfully conferred onto his behavior and appearance; his headdress in particular, as Fig. 5.3 shows.

Fig. 5.3

Rickshaw puller, South Beach, Durban, 1948. Photograph courtesy of Gerald Buttigieg via http://www.fad.co.za

The image of the Rickshaw puller is synonymous with the white leisure landscape of Durban’s Marine Parade of the 1950s—a tourist destination with a long colonial history. Undoubtedly, as Vivian Bickford-Smith notes, in a port city like Durban such “images of exotic difference... helped preserve an imaginative racial boundary between ‘our’ modernity and ‘their’ local colour or ‘un-progressive’ tradition,” but, once again, the attraction of the racial Other here operates through the disavowal rather than the denial of racial desire. The Rickshaw “Boy” quite literally provides a vehicle in which to ride out the spectacle of the Other.

The lyrics of the original 1950 song extends this idea through a series of racist sonic and kinetic similes: The rikshaw boy moves like a monkey on a stick, he stomps and bleats like a goat, he groans and wheezes like a wild hare, he jumps like a kangaroo, he cock-a-doodle-doos like rooster, he caws like an old, black crow. On a sonic level, these similes have clear aural corollaries, and these are supplemented by nonsense scat-like syllables common in popular music of the time. Fricatives like “Zakazu zaka zi zakazazu za” have specific meanings in this context, however: they are sonic images of how the Zulu language might sound to a white ear, rendered here in the register of imitating language in a mock-foreign way. In the 1950 recording with Al Debbo performing, the lyrics are disrupted several times by the exclamation: “Hau! Missis!,” which suggests, once again, that the black man and his white woman passenger are locked into a racist fantasy of libidinal ecstasy into which the white male can enter only as onlooker, or through impersonation.

In Carstens’s instrumental versions of “Fanagalo” and “Rickshaw Boy”—now masquerading as “boeremusiek” despite their stylistic incongruence—all of these meanings are retained. When Carstens covered these songs, their lyrics were well-known enough to remain present, but unspoken, alongside their sonic signifiers. This is a first level of disavowal, but there is also a second.

With his accordion strapped onto his body, Carstens plays the role of racial ventriloquist. The white parodies of a black parody of white representations of blackness—the “Zulu” exclamations, whistling, mocking speech inflections, and scat-like sounds in the originals—are conferred onto Carstens’s accordion technique. This results in a “reciprocal ‘voicing’” between vocal and instrumental practice, but also in non-reciprocal splitting between Carstens’s persona and the sounds that emerge from his instrument.⁸² Carstens’s instrumental boeremusiek versions of racist songs thus serve “as a strategy for having-it-both ways: for both representing and not-representing the tabooed, dangerous or forbidden object of pleasure and desire,” as Stuart Hall has explained disavowal as representational practice.⁸³ This musical mode of racial representation through disavowal clearly has its roots in blackface minstrelsy, but is encountered here in a metaphorical and much abstracted sense.

Under the cover of boeremusiek, Nico Carstens—the racially marked Afrikaans apartheid-era celebrity—performed the disavowal of racial hybridity to the adoration of his white South African fans.

Apartheid Eroticism; Apartheid Economics

Understanding boeremusiek as fetish goes some way in explaining the unsettling paradoxes of Carstens’s life in music: that he was the most recognizable exponent of boeremusiek, even though he repeatedly disavowed the genre; that his music systematically exploited white nationalist sentiment, even though he and his music were racially marked as Other; that he divested his largely conservative white audience from astounding amounts of money, even though he transgressed every white bourgeois apartheid-era value.

That the first real white apartheid celebrity engaged in what was effectively a sophisticated form of blackface performance is a particular kind of irony. If the mechanism of disavowal explains some of the racial ambiguities in Carstens’s version of boeremusiek, the question remains what—if anything—this can tell us about apartheid. In the next section, therefore, I cast the net wider, considering Carstens, boeremusiek, and the disavowal of racial hybridity within a broader economic sphere of the 1950s and early 1960s.

One way of approaching the matter is to think of the racial hybridity of Carstens’s music as a brief but passing phase in the development of cultural hegemony in South Africa. An example of such an approach is found in Lara Allen’s consideration of kwela’s white audiences. According to Allen, “the 1950s constituted a brief phase during which it was apparent that identities could be chosen before separate, exclusive racial categorization became hegemonic.” Allen suggests that kwela existed in an oppositional frame to apartheid, and that musical appreciation across the barrier of race was capable of “decomposing apartheid even at its genesis.”⁸⁴ Schalk van der Merwe elaborates this point by arguing that the release of kwela for a specifically white audience “not only signifies a deliberate commodification of black urban popular culture for consumption by a white market but also the establishment of white patronage over it at a time when apartheid politics focused squarely on intensifying racial segregation.”⁸⁵ For Van der Merwe “the implication that racial identities were still flexible and not hegemonic at this time… begs the question whether or not it did become as hegemonic as is believed in the years that followed. In the Afrikaans music industry, several music releases seem to indicate that cultural hegemony was never fully achieved.”⁸⁶

But, as we have seen, the appropriation of black popular urban culture under the banner of “boeremusiek” did not occur on neutral political ground—far from it. The syncretic nature of Afrikaans music listening did not correspond to liberal political views on racial segregation nor did listening to “boere-kwela” allow white listeners to “choose” an identity. It certainly did not serve to “decompose” apartheid, as Allen has argued. On the contrary, musical syncretism served the establishment of perverse relationship toward blackness, one that corresponded with the institution of white baasskap (domination).

Another way of approaching the issue is to think of the syncretic nature of boeremusiek of the 1950s as a kind of musical delirium, in which, as Coetzee writes in the context of Cronjé, “we catch glimpses of apartheid nakedly occupied in thinking itself out.” Seen in this way, boeremusiek of the 1950s and 1960s provides a window on how apartheid (mis)managed its heterogeneous elements and incorporated it into an ideology of homogeneity. One might even take the argument one step further by positing that the disavowal of racial heterogeneity, as symbolized by and enacted in Carstens’s boeremusiek, fueled the development of racial thinking in South Africa. Carstens’s music, therefore, might help explain how “madness spreads itself or is made to spread through the social body,”⁸⁷ to borrow more of Coetzee’s words—not top-down via apartheid’s intelligentsia, but bottom-up via the perverted populistic mind of apartheid.

The Paradox of “Racial Capitalism”

As I argued at the outset of this chapter, the relationship between Carstens’s music and the apartheid system lies in the commercial domain, outside the explicit influence of official apartheid structures. Although he was restricted in his musical expression by the SABC, he was never forcibly coerced or otherwise officially entrained to apartheid ideology—quite the opposite. Carstens did not capitalize on apartheid by representing racial segregation musically, but by thematizing racial intersections in everyday white lives and by performing and embodying the perverted white desires for black bodies that were explicitly prohibited by apartheid laws. The views on race that sold records and provided white aesthetic rapture did not necessarily conform to the dogma that won white votes. And yet, it is impossible, I argue in the remainder of this chapter, to divorce Carstens’s commercial success from apartheid ideology. Any discussion of Carstens’s music and musical persona takes us back into the sociological domains of the sacred and the profane, and to the relationship between the law, exchange, transgression, and the taboo.

The desire/derision for black bodies that found its disavowed place in Carstens’s music took shape against the broader economic impasse of apartheid’s racial capitalism. Carstens’s appropriation of kwela, the syncretic nature of his music, and the subject matter of a song like “Fanagalo” show how Carstens’s music was influenced by the presence of black migrant workers in South Africa’s cities. And yet, his music passed as “boeremusiek.” Carstens’s music thus enacted and exploited in the aesthetic sphere the essential contradiction of apartheid economics: that black urbanization and black labor market competition threatened the white working class but that the white working class could not fulfill the labor demands of an industrial market.

In his excellent An Economic History of South Africa, Charles H. Feinstein formulated this paradox as a clash between the “logic of domination” and the “logic of industrialization:”

The logic of domination dictated that the majority of the black population should remain isolated and dispersed in rural areas and mine compounds; the logic of industrialization dictated that they should concentrate in urban areas to provide the labour necessary for economic expansion.⁸⁸

“Apartheid inevitably created a paradoxical situation,” writes economist Anton D. Lowenberg along the same lines: “the achievement of maximum income for the white group as a whole required increased integration of blacks into the modern economy while the policies of separate development and apartheid were aimed at just the opposite.”⁸⁹

Explaining this paradox has been a central concern for economists and economic historians of South Africa. There have been two distinct schools of thought on this issue, one “liberal,” the other “revisionist” or “Marxist”; the one more focused on apartheid as an ideology of white supremacy, the other on apartheid as an economic policy. Feinstein explains:

[P]roponents of the “liberal” view contended that because apartheid was driven primarily by ideological considerations, it was economically irrational and incompatible with a dynamic economy, and would ultimately prove damaging to the country’s growth and prosperity. In particular, they argued, migrant workers, high labour turnover, inferior education, job reservation, and other apartheid policies all had powerful adverse affects [sic] on the productive efficiency of black workers and thus severely retarded economic growth.

In diametric opposition to this, radicals and Marxists maintained that there was no conflict between the state’s political and economic objectives. On the contrary, they argued, apartheid was designed to serve the interests of the dominant class and was the means by which capitalism could thrive under the conditions prevailing in post-war South Africa. Their analysis—though not of course their political objective—was thus similar to that of the government and its supporters in industry and mining who saw the battery of apartheid policies as supportive of economic growth.⁹⁰

I am not an economist and therefore not interested in (nor capable of) tallying the “nett worth” of apartheid, nor in determining whether or not the apartheid state’s racial ideology was, ultimately, detrimental to the economy. I am not primarily concerned with determining whether or not apartheid was “an essentially atavistic, irrational body of doctrine whose motivations were explicitly noneconomic, and indeed contradictory to economic efficiency,”⁹¹ although it is a sentiment that resonates with my own. What interests me is this tension between racial affect and capitalist reason. In my reading of the literature on the economy of apartheid, it seems that it may not be possible to determine conclusively whether apartheid’s ideological or economic concerns ultimately outweighed the other. This may be because the apartheid government recognized its own project as a balancing act between ideology and economics. So, for example, the Minister of Labour declared in 1957:

The European worker in this country must be protected or else European civilization will go under. Even though it might intrude upon certain economic laws, I would still rather see European civilization in South Africa being maintained and not being swallowed up than to comply scrupulously and to the letter with the economic laws.⁹²

Assuming that this tension cannot conclusively be resolved, the apartheid system—just like the commentary on it—contained both affective (ideological) and rational (economic) elements which existed, at least in the heyday of apartheid, in some kind of precarious balance. Seen in this way, neither the liberal nor the radical school of thought can “explain” apartheid. What is needed to understand the economics of apartheid, and the role of a figure like Carstens within that system, is an economic theory that can account for the crisis of affect under racial capitalism; one that can accommodate the impasse of “racial capitalism” as an impasse, without attempting to resolve it; one that views contradictions and paradoxes as part of any economic system, rather than viewing them as aberrations of economic thought. What is needed is an economic theory that might show how the vacillation between horror and fascination, attraction and repulsion for the racial Other played out on a macro-economic scale.

Unproductive Expenditure: Bataille, Boeremusiek, and Apartheid’s “Accursed Share”

Such a theory is found in the writings of Georges Bataille. Bataille argues that the desire in human societies to conserve, to acquire, and to consume rationally is opposed by another force: the desire to destroy or to lose.⁹³ As holocaust historian Dan Stone notes, central to Bataille’s work is “a denial that the energy within human society is adequately accounted for by the notions of production and conservation contained within classical economic theories.” Bataille refers to the latter as models of a “limited economy.” Instead, Bataille proposes a model of a “General economy,” which includes both the “limited economy” of Marxists and liberals and its “excess.”⁹⁴ Bataille notes in this regard:

The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.

Bataille reserves the term “expenditure” for that part of the economy which is destined to be dissipated uselessly and to be “sent up in smoke.”⁹⁵ In this category, Bataille includes “luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected from genital finality) … activities which have no end beyond themselves.”⁹⁶ “Sovereignty” is this experience of life beyond utility, and it finds its highest expression in eroticism and death: eroticism, because “pleasure is so close to ruinous waste”; death, because it is the ultimate useless sacrifice.⁹⁷ “Sovereignty” is thus the negation of prohibition, a state reached through transgression of bourgeois values of investment and rational consumption.⁹⁸

Bataille argues that bourgeois society defines itself around the value of investment and the hatred of expenditure. For this reason, “nonproductive expenditure” is the preserve of those who are excluded from bourgeois society: mobs, warriors, the aristocratic and impoverished classes, poets, madmen. To this list one might add “celebrities.” At the same time, as Bataille notes, “expenditure is also the principle of the bourgeoisie’s horrifying hypocrisy.”⁹⁹ Stone explains:

[W]hilst disavowing unproductive expenditure, bourgeois society nevertheless has to find, even if unconsciously, an outlet for its excess energy. Denying this need is the root of catastrophe, which must be covered over with bourgeois respectability.¹⁰⁰

Returning now to the paradoxes of Carstens’s life in music, it is immediately apparent how Bataille’s theory of expenditure may be brought the bear on this matter at hand: asking what Carstens’s life can tell us about apartheid society. I have already shown how the term “boeremusiek” was employed to disavow with a thin veneer of bourgeois respectability the transgressive aspects of the music. The fetish is, after all, the displacement of excess energy on the “wrong” object. But Bataille’s theory provides more than fodder for a musical analysis; it provides the means of understanding the contradictions of Carstens’s life and music as part of the “accursed share” of apartheid’s general economy.

This is the case not only because the white Afrikaner middle class expended its capital on Carstens and his music on an unprecedented scale, but because Hedonism—glorious, unproductive spending—was one of the key elements of Carstens’s public persona. (The other components were the persistent gossip about his ethnicity and his reputation as Casanova, forms of “expenditure” in their own way.)

While Carstens’s business partner De Waal managed the financial side of the De Waal-Carstens publishing house (managed it well, by all accounts), Carstens squandered away his share on cars, parties, and attracting the attention of women. Stories abound about his recklessness with money. He described his marriage to his second wife Helena (a former model who went by the name of “Tosca”) as a “four-year-long lost weekend.” He would ask her: “What will we do today? Watch a movie or buy a new car?”¹⁰¹ He only drove a car “until its ash-tray was full.”¹⁰² Once he bought an expensive hunting rifle for a one-day Bushveld shoot, only to abandon it in his hotel room the next day.¹⁰³ When asked why he never pursued an international career, his answer was “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps I wanted to take a blonde in a Cadillac down to Durban.” “He is a terrible businessman,” said his former wife Anne.¹⁰⁴

Anecdotes aside, what emerges from Carstens’s interviews, personal documents, and financial history is a plain disregard for any bourgeois notion of ownership or accumulation. Carstens valued expenditure over investment. He had, in Bataille’s words, no “acquisitive sense.” For Carstens, money meant nothing more “than the comfort and luxury it could buy.” “Quality, too, played a big role in my life,” he said. “My ideal was to have loads of cash so that I could surround myself with quality high-end things.”¹⁰⁵ “I lived the good life,” he continued elsewhere:

Wasted money like it was water. Flirted and partied about. Te lekker. Even today I’m clueless about money. I have it and I don’t have it. I am rich and I am poor. I just pour it down the drain.¹⁰⁶

“The money I earned from my hits bought articles that made people turn their head,” Carstens noted, “shiny cars, dozens of suits, more shoes than I could ever wear, top-of-the-range instruments. I lived in the most expensive apartments.”¹⁰⁷ And although he furnished these apartments and entertained his friends on a lavish scale, racking up sky-high bills with florists, caterers, and liquor stores, he owned neither the apartments nor their accoutrements. Instead of direct ownership of luxury goods, he preferred hire-purchase agreements with set monthly installments—agreements he regularly got behind on.¹⁰⁸ He traded in his cars for different models without regard for the resulting financial losses:

What happened to the money? I blew it on expensive cars. I drove everything except a Rolls Royce … All left-hand drives [imported from the US]. Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles. Never Chevs and Fords, though. They were too cheap!¹⁰⁹

Eventually, Carstens’s fiscal recklessness landed him in real financial and legal trouble. In 1954, already drowning in debt, he purchased a nightclub in Johannesburg called “Club 400” for the grand sum of £5000—and promptly turned it over to his wife Helena as wedding gift.

The “400” was at the center of two court cases in the 1950s. In December 1954, David Magidson, one of Carstens’s creditors, filed an urgent application for Carstens’s estate to be placed under sequestration and the club to be placed in the hands of a provisional trustee.¹¹⁰ Carstens’s creditors included his first wife, whom he owed £305 in arrear maintenance. This application followed a prior judgment against Carstens and resulted in a writ of execution for the amount of £85.9.5 to be seized from the premises of the “400.” The writ was returned nulla bona the next day: “All goods claimed by wife, married by antenuptial contract,” it said.

In Magidson’s petition, it was noted that Helena had informed his attorney that all Carstens’s assets were in her name and that if he proceeded with the matter he would only be “throwing good money after bad.” Carstens’s accountant also notified Magidson’s attorney that if he “persisted in his attitude he would get nothing” as Carstens was “not possessed of any assets.”

In turn, Magidson submitted that Carstens possessed “considerable and substantial assets” which he attempted to hide from his creditors by putting it in the name of his wife: the “400,” chief among these, as well as a “1947 model Cadillac Motor car worth approximately £1000.0.0.” In addition, it was noted that Carstens was “one of the leading Jazz musicians in the Union” and “in receipt of substantial income from diverse sources.” The court ordered that Carstens’s estate be placed under provisional sequestration, but the order was placed aside when Anton de Waal bailed Carstens out and paid the outstanding amounts owed to both Magidson and Carstens’s ex-wife, Elise.

The most reliable sources for his actual financial liquidity at the time are the proceedings of his divorce from his second wife, Helena Carstens, which make for some fascinating reading on his views on money, accumulation, and debt.¹¹¹

In an affidavit signed on October 7, 1957, Carstens’s accountant, Maurice Levine, painted a gloomy picture of Carstens’s financial affairs. Levine noted that, apart from owing him £423 and being liable for £1000 in income tax, Carstens owed Moweni Investments a total of £3749 pounds in capital and interest that was lent to him to purchase “Club 400.” Furthermore, his royalties from musical and mechanical rights were ceded to Moweni investments in respect of the loan. He noted that Carstens had sold his shares in the Club for a mere £250 pounds to a Mr. Dyer, since he was unable to pay the Club’s monthly rental of £100 pounds.¹¹² This amounts to a massive 95% loss on his original investment. In her affidavit, Helena Carstens noted:

He effected the sale not because he was not able to pay the rent of £100.0.0 per month, but because he wished to act in a spiteful manner towards me. Respondent was in one of his capricious and irresponsible moods and instructed the said Levine to dispose of the Shares at any price, because he thought that I might derive a benefit whilst he held the said Shares.¹¹³

In terms of the divorce settlement, the furniture at the center of the dispute was awarded to Helena Carstens, and Carstens was ordered to pay the balance owing on the hire-purchase agreements.¹¹⁴ He defaulted on these payments, and the furniture was repossessed. On December 28, 1959, Helena Carstens obtained an Order of Execution against Carstens, upon which he told the deputy sheriff that he “possessed no money.”¹¹⁵ In the end they settled on an amount of £400—less than half of what the furniture was worth. Whether Helena Carstens ever received the payment, or whether she simply gave up, we’ll never know.

How it exploited black labor tells one part of the story of apartheid; how it squandered the fruits of that labor tells another. If one assumes, as Bataille does, that the form and role “luxury” assumes in a society are characteristic of that society, then Carstens moves from being a peripheral figure to a more central one. Carstens’s public persona encapsulated the collected perverted desires of apartheid by offering a figure onto which his audience could confer a sense of ritual expenditure. “Ownership” meant nothing to Carstens. On the contrary, given his capricious taste in women and “financial embarrassment,” as he repeatedly referred to it, possessions were a liability. Because he possessed no fear of losing money he operated above the law, and above the rules of bourgeois society. What Carstens stood for, therefore, was not only capital expenditure, but “sovereignty” in the broader sense of the word. As an apartheid celebrity—a job divorced from instrumental action—he provided a fetishistic outlet for the transgression of apartheid’s bourgeois values.

Homogeneity and Heterogeneity: Understanding Boeremusiek’s Syncretism in Apartheid’s “General Economy”

If Carstens’s music and his public persona embodied for his listeners the idea of expenditure and sovereignty, the question remains what this can tell us about the relationship between racial affect and capitalist reason in apartheid times. To understand Carstens’s role in the “General economy” of apartheid, I have to return to the paradox of apartheid’s racial capitalism with which I opened Part II.

Consider, this time, Coetzee’s formulation of the impasse between the “logic of domination” and the “logic of industrialization”:

[Apartheid] did indeed flower out of self-interest and greed, but it also flowered out of desire and out of the hatred of desire. In its greed it demanded black bodies in all their physicality in order to burn up their energy as labour. In its anxiety about black bodies it made iron laws to banish them from sight. Its essence was therefore from the beginning confusion, a confusion which it displaced wildly all around itself.

In “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in effect a study of the economics of racial capitalism, Bataille takes the distinction between rational consumption and fruitless expenditure further by explaining these two opposing societal forces in terms of homogeneity and heterogeneity. It is possible to read this distinction into the paradox of racial capitalism, as formulated by Coetzee above.

Bataille defines social homogeneity as productive, useful society—that part of society that thrives on fixed rules and entertains a belief in the commensurability between different elements. In homogeneous bourgeois society, Bataille notes, “each man is worth what he produces … he is no more than a function, arranged within measurable limits, of collective production.”¹¹⁶ In a Bataillian reading, apartheid’s “self-interest and greed,” its rational capitalist consumption, its “logic of industrialization” corresponds to the domain of the homogeneous.

Apartheid’s “desire … and hatred of desire” or its “logic of domination,” on the other hand, corresponds to the heterogeneous elements in society. The heterogeneous “concerns elements that are impossible to assimilate” and “includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure”:

This consists of everything rejected by homogenous society as waste or as superior transcendent value. Included are the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body; persons, words, or acts having a suggestive erotic value; the various unconscious processes such as dreams and neuroses; the numerous elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate: mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule (madmen, leaders, poets, etc.).¹¹⁷

The question for Bataille, as it is for me, is the relationship between these elements—the rational and the affective—in the economics of racial capitalism.

As Dan Stone notes, a key point to understanding Bataille’s theory is that he locates the meaning of racial capitalism (of which fascism is an extreme form) in its “actual psychological structure” rather than its material economic conditions.¹¹⁸ This means that racial capitalism is based on a particular psychological relationship between the heterogeneous and homogenous elements of society. Scattered throughout Bataille’s text on fascism, there are indications that this psychological structure is, in fact, one of perversion or Verleugnung. In a racial capitalist context, Bataille suggests, homogenous society deals with its heterogeneous elements through fetishization and disavowal.

For example, Bataille explains the heterogeneous in what might very well be taken as a definition of the fetish:

There is sometimes attraction, sometimes repulsion, and in certain circumstances, any object of repulsion can become an object of attraction and vice versa.¹¹⁹

And elsewhere:

Heterogeneous reality… presents itself as a charge, as a value, passing from one object to another in a more or less abstract fashion. The preceding aspect nevertheless does not signify that the observed facts are to be considered as subjective: thus, the action of the objects of erotic activity is manifestly rooted in their objective nature. Nonetheless, in a disconcerting way, the subject does have the capacity to displace the exciting value of one element onto an analogous or neighboring one.¹²⁰

Most importantly, Bataille argues that racial capitalism functions by disavowing its own affective sources.¹²¹ While it taps the “affective effervescence” of the masses (in the case of apartheid, the white masses’ “desire … and the hatred of desire” for the racial Other), it reinjects these same energies back into the capitalist scheme of homogeneity by means of the law or the military order.¹²² The heterogeneous is thus disavowed and channeled back into the bureaucratic apparatus of the state, backed up by the military power of the police, as was the case during apartheid:

Once in power, developed heterogeneous forces have at their disposal the means of coercion necessary to resolve the differences that had arisen between previously irreconcilable elements. But it goes without saying that, at the end of a movement that excludes all subversion, the thrust of these resolutions will have been consistent with the general direction of the existing homogeneity, namely, with the interests of the capitalists.¹²³

This “methodical diversion of violence to the outside” results in a perversion of the sovereign act.¹²⁴ When heterogeneity is installed in authoritarian structures by the force of the state, it can only be in the form of a perverted heterogeneity—“one that cannot accept its own heterogeneity at all,” as Stone observes.¹²⁵

It is in this sense that the boeremusiek of the 1950s provides a template for understanding apartheid thinking. The disavowal of the heterogeneous elements of apartheid society under the name of “boeremusiek” points to how heterogeneous elements were incorporated into homogenous rule-making of apartheid more broadly.

From my discussion in Part II, it is clear that Carstens’s public persona belongs to the domain of the heterogeneous, embodying for his listeners the ideas of sovereignty and unproductive expenditure. But so too, following my discussion in Part I, does his music. If boeremusiek is the racially charged libido-invested object that I have shown it to be, then bourgeois white society could partake in Carstens’s sovereignty by means of a hypocritical listening that heard “boeremusiek” whenever it was confronted with the sonic pleasures of intermingling white selfhood with black Otherness. In the apartheid context, “white pleasure” subsisted in listening to heterogeneity and absorbing its affects, but ultimately disavowing these heterogeneous elements of apartheid society in the name of “boeremusiek,” thus reinjecting them into an ideology of white racial capitalism.

That age-old idea that music serves as an “outlet” is hereby given new meaning.

In Bataille’s terms, it is precisely because music is an affective outlet that it becomes part of the “General economy” and its associated politics. Musical outlets do not “release”; they fuel. Indeed, the more extraneous to political thought, the more ridiculous, abject, and “useless” the music seems, the more it functions as an “outlet” for unproductive expenditure in Bataille’s sense: as a space of heterogeneous sovereignty on which a political ideology of racial homogeneity could feed. In such a view, boeremusiek moves from being extraneous to apartheid ideology, to being a heterogeneous affective well for the institutionalization of its racial hypocrisy.

Understanding boeremusiek and Nico Carstens as integral components of apartheid’s “General economy” shows that apartheid was a misnomer: it was never an ideology of apartness, and thus of white homogeneity. Instead, it replicated itself in the systematic mismanagement of the relationship between the homogenous and the heterogenous; in cultivating in white ears an affective anatomy for the disavowal of difference. Herein lies the real perversion of apartheid.