David Kramer
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About the author:
David Kramer, songwriter and performer, has since released 20 albums, achieving gold status for many of them. Today he works mainly as a writer and theatre director with his interest for almost 30 years being to explore a South African identity. The thrust of the six musicals that he has written with Taliep Petersen and one on his own, is in the retelling of a suppressed history.Three of these musical collaborations, District Six, Poison and Kat and the Kings have toured internationally. Kat and the Kings has gone on to be performed in the West End and on Broadway, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Musical in London in 1999. It is the only South African musical to have been performed both on the West End and Broadway. In 2001 Kramer embarked on a musical journey, which he called Karoo Kitaar Blues. In this project he showcased eccentric musicians on stages all over South Africa. A live CD was recorded and the show was awarded 2 FNB Vita Awards. It was also the subject of a documentary film directed by Liza Key that recently won the Golden Reel Award for Best Musical Documentary at the 2006 Tiburon International Film Festival in California. Kramer received a GMT Lifelong Achievement Award in 2005 for his contribution to Afrikaans music. He has also been honoured by SARRAL (South African Recording Artists Assoc. Ltd) and entered in their Composers Hall of Fame. Spice Drum Beat – Ghoema, his most recent work, is playing at London’s Tricycle.
I was born in 1951, three years after the National Party swept to power in South Africa. Some of their leaders such as B.J. Vorster had been incarcerated during the war because of their sympathy toward the Nazi cause, while my father was fighting with the Allies in Egypt. The new regime promoted their racial politics under the banner of Afrikanerdom and although my father's side of the family spoke Afrikaans, they were not Nationalists.
I grew up in the apartheid system. Propaganda and indoctrination played a large part in its success. In government schools it was called Christian National Education and those of us that attended our racially segregated institutions were all taught a history that distorted the white man's role in Africa to say the least. The actions of the early European settlers and later the Afrikaners were always described in heroic and mythic fashion. It was Orwell that said that “history is a battlefield. That it is constantly fought over, because whoever controls the past, controls the present. History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product: myth.” The Nationalist government must have understood this well because that is what we, brown, black and white, were taught: myth. Myths and legends taught to us as history.
As a child I heard Afrikaans folk songs being sung by family friends around the barbecue fire. I heard them echoed by farm labourers strumming their guitars outside the furniture shop where my father worked. On New Year’s Day I recognized some of those songs. They were sung at the carnival to a vibrant rhythm, as satin-clad troupes danced their way down Durban Street in the town where we lived. At that time I thought of these songs as Afrikaans folk songs, and because I was taught that Afrikaans was a white man's language, I assumed that anyone else singing these songs, was just imitating the white Afrikaans culture.
A scene from Spice Drum Beat - Ghoema
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It was one of these folk songs, Bobbejaan Klim Die Berg (“Baboon Climbs The Mountain”) that started me thinking about the roots of Afrikaans folk music. In the lyric the baboon is depicted as a hero for raiding the boer's orchard. It occurred to me that a boer (white farmer) would not have written this. The farmer would not be rooting for the destroyer of his crops. The more I investigated these old folk songs, the clearer it became that the creators of this body of work were not white, but the slaves and the Khoisan who laboured on the farms.
My investigation into the origins of the volksliedjie was an eye-opener. My reading and research gave me a new insight into the origins of this syncretic culture that emerged at the Cape shortly after the arrival of the Dutch East India Company and the slaves that they imported from countries around the Indian Ocean. I began to understand how we in South Africa and the rest of the world have been indoctrinated about the origins and ownership of this language. A subject which is being debated and contested to this day.
As a writer I rely on my imagination. I create characters, stories and worlds in which they live, from fact and fiction. Charles Raus said that imagination is a form of knowledge. It’s probably naïve to think that there is always a clear distinction between fact and fiction. We all compose the world we live in every moment of our lives.
I wrote Spice Drum Beat – Ghoema, as an attempt to re-imagine the fact and the fiction; to re-investigate the history of early Afrikaans music. I hope to remind audiences that Afrikaans is a Creole culture and to acknowledge the nameless people who created and contributed to it. It is a sad fact that the majority of Capetonians have almost no knowledge of their background and involvement, because their history was suppressed and distorted by the Dutch, the British and the apartheid government. So it has been hugely gratifying for me to experience the enormously positive reaction of the audiences across South Africa. I look forward to staging it at the Tricycle Theatre in London and the opportunity of introducing ghoema, the music of the Cape, to a new audience.
Hopefully Spice Drum Beat - Ghoema will inform, inspire and free us from some of the misconceptions of this language and this music.