We need protest anthems for the modern era

THE wind blows grey cement dust through the silent, staring gaps in the walls. Glassless windows of lifeless buildings in Gaza. The city bleeds into colourlessness. Somewhere, a radio plays the raw sounds of a 16-year-old girl singing a song, The Urgent Call of Palestine.

Can’t you hear the urgent call of Palestine?
Tormented, tortured, bruised and battered,
And all her sons and daughters scattered.

In a mass march in Tel Aviv, a thousand voices chant in protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's attempt to subvert the judiciary, Ein Li Eretz Acheret (I Have No Other Country), written by Ehud Manor and sung here by Gali Atari.

I have no other country
Even if my land is aflame
Just a word in Hebrew
Pierces my veins and my soul
With a painful body, with a hungry heart
Here is my home.

Both songs were written during the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The raid was in response to the assassination attempt on Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to Britain, by the Abu Nidal Organisation, a splinter group of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The Israeli army occupied the national archive in Beirut, looted loads of archival material and took it away to Jerusalem. It included a black-and-white 8mm film by Ismail Shammout in which teenager Zeinab Shaath sings the heartbreaking The Urgent Call of Palestine.

Shaab's inspirations were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez with their intense, shrill protest music against America's war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Dylan with The Times They Are A-Changin' and Baez with the equally iconic We Shall Overcome.

In 2017, the Israel State Archives' curator, Rona Sela, contacted Shaath and said she had located the 8mm film. After Israel's invasion of Gaza last October, The Urgent Call of Palestine appeared on TV again on March 26.

Two peoples in brutal conflict. Two protest songs with the same lament. Where are our protest singers and musical social commentary today?

We have had songs with social comment in the past. During the apartheid years, struggle songs were mostly unknown to white people. Senzeni Na (What Have We Done); Vuyisile Mini's inciting Izakunyathel iAfrica, his call to schoolchildren to venture into the streets. Singer Miriam Makeba and musician Hugh Masekela. Umshini Wami, one of those struggle songs by uMkhonto weSizwe, was appropriated as his personal battle cry by Jacob Zuma with his stomping on ANC stages. Although those words mean “bring me my machine", they are short for “bring me my machinegun".

In the 1980s, the Voëlvry tour allowed us to experience a short-lived, heroic era of freshness and PW Botha's phallic finger. An era that coincided with the stormy Vrye Weekblad and its fearless journalists who often put their lives on the line. Vrye Weekblad even sponsored the Voëlvry tour. The lyrics of Johannes Kerkorrel, Bernoldus Niemand, Dagga-Dirk Uys and Koos Kombuis challenged the apartheid regime of PW and its Broederbonders blatantly with Sit Dit Af and BMW. Satire and protest that challenged those staunch Afrikaner politicians over their oppressive Calvinist mentality.

Then came 1994 and we reckoned we'd arrived. Our problems were a thing of the past. Bles Bridges taught us all to yodel and handed out pretty red roses.

It's 1995 and Laurika Rauch metronomically forces us back to the wounds on the world map. Cities, towns and places where people live, have lived, or try to live. To which healing has not yet come.

London Paris Rome Berlin
Barcelona Washington
Moscow Beijing Tokyo
Jerusalem Jericho

Waco Waco Bethlehem
Srebrenica Sebokeng
Sarajevo O Saigon
Hiroshima Rubicon

I can see a fiery, fiery glow
Even as the sun is sinking low
I can see a horseman on the run
Oh my daughter, oh my son.

Today, she could include Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. It's time for change. Time again for Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin'.

Protest and social commentary. The songwriter's weapons against injustice and oppression. Not to be limited to war and conflict. We also need social commentary on the outrages and events now occurring in our country. As in David Kramer's Skipskop, named after a village of fishermen and subsistence farmers west of Waenhuiskrans. In 1984, Armscor expropriated Skipskop to set up a missile test range. Kramer's song is a glaring comment on the brutality when people are simply cast away like rubbish by a government that doesn't care.

'n Stukkie lê hier (a piece lies here)
'n stukkie lê daar (a piece lies there)
stukkies van my lewe (pieces of my life)
hulle lê nou deurmekaar (now lie all over)

Echoes of the 1948 song Deportee, written by protest singer Woody Guthrie about 32 Mexican seasonal workers who died in a plane crash in Los Gatos, California. With cold indifference, the media and authorities reported, “They were just deportees."

The skyplane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon
A fireball of lightning it shook all our hills.
Who are these dear friends who are scattered like dry leaves?
The radio said they were just deportees.

Who is going to write about the construction disaster at George and the people who will never come back? Or the bus disaster at the Mmamatlakala Bridge in Limpopo? Forty-two pilgrims on their way back from Moria.

Where are our social songs and comments about a government, officials, municipalities and protection services that simply don't care?

During the Depression between the two world wars,  Guthrie was the champion of the poor against the rise of fascism. 

All you fascists
People of every color
Marching side to side
Marching 'cross these fields
Where a million fascists dies
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose!

But then he also gives hope to the poor and unemployed who have been pushed aside without identity by powerful companies and politicians in This Land is Your Land.

This land is your land                                                                                                         This land is my land …

As I went walking 
I saw a sign there,
And on the sign
it said “No Trespassing."
But on the other side
it didn't say nothing.
That side was made
for you and me.

Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and so many more used their music to point out injustice, issued warnings, but also gave hope.

Writers and critics. Poets and musicians. Journalists and thinkers. These are times of change. We still have time to turn this country around 180 degrees. Our Woordfeeste, KKNK, Inniebos. Can we recreate, rewrite, resing, redefine De la Rey and “Hoor jy die magtige dreuning"?

The poet and the singer. In his Nobel Prize speech, Alexander Solzhenitsyn called on the writers and artists of the world to use the truth as a norm when he said, “One word of truth outweighs the world."

♦ VWB ♦

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