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Abstract:

When writing an ethnography on how young Afrikaners re-imagine their cultural and religious identities in South Africa, one is hard pressed not to include the importance given to the production and reception of music by those youth. Places where they can meet in Cape Town to ‘jol’ (to party, to have a good time) are aplenty. Small and larger hot spots lie dispersed in the old city centre, some just outside of it, some in the suburbs. Some have been around for years, others are fairly new. Specific venues often stage similar kinds of music bands, drawing a loyal crowd. As places where a whole generation of city-dwelling Afrikaner youth flock together, they become sites where fraught identities are being stitched together. Engaging the past and the present, the bands and their audience play upon cultural stereotypes, alternative expectations and the city life. Add to this the relatively recent use of the virtual networks through which they build both an international and a national following and one could easily conclude that the young Afrikaner music scene seems to have rediscovered its mettle. Little has been written on this expressing and staging of urban Afrikaner identities. In our paper we will try to open up the debate by comparing the contemporary musical city scene with what some would regard as its now twenty-year-old predecessor: the Voëlvry movement.