‘Race’ in post-apartheid popular culture: tensions between persistence and transformation
An issue of enduring interest to social scientists has been the tension between the constraining structures of culture and society that shape the behaviour of individuals in powerful ways, and the capacity of social actors to resist such structural constraints as they choose alternative paths of action and ways of being, and in so doing exercise a degree of agency, defined here as action that has the ‘transformative capacity’ to ‘make a difference’ (Giddens in Apter Reference Apter2007, p. 3). This issue is particularly pertinent to scholars interested in the continuity and transformation of the structural category of ‘race’ in post-apartheid South Africa. Recent scholarship on popular culture and ‘race’ in this context has noted the tension between the persistence of the apartheid-era racial classifications as categories of social difference on the one hand and, on the other, the ways in which individuals may exercise a considerable degree of agency in reimagining the significance of ‘race’, and negotiating new identifications that transcend racial boundaries. For example, Nadine Dolby (Reference Dolby1999, Reference Dolby2001a, Reference Dolby2001b) has shown how, in the context of a Durban high school, global popular culture, especially music, provides the arena for individuals to engage in acts of what Paul Willis has termed ‘symbolic creativity’ (Dolby Reference Dolby1999, p. 292), which may either express conflict between racial groups that entrench apartheid-era classifications, or index interracial affinities that forge new alliances. Sarah Nuttall (Reference Nuttall2004a) critiques studies of post-apartheid South Africa that focus only on the endurance of the category of ‘race’ as structuring difference, and argues that, although in many ways the racial ‘habitus’ of apartheid remains entrenched, various transformations have taken place. She discusses the ‘self-styling’ of ‘Y Culture’, an emergent youth cultural form in Johannesburg, as an example of such a transformation, where young black South Africans approach identity as something malleable and fluid, which may actively be created through various cultural resources, including clothing and music (Nuttall Reference Nuttall2004b, Reference Nuttall, Dolby and Rizvi2008). In the context of Y Culture, ‘[s]elfhood and subjectivity are presented less as inscriptions of broader institutional and political forces than as an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable and artful process’ (Nuttall Reference Nuttall, Dolby and Rizvi2008, p. 151).
In my own research among young South Africans in Durban, I discovered a similar attitude among some to the role of individual choice in racial identity, and the importance of music as a resource for these processes of self-construction. However, not all research participants displayed this consciousness of the malleability of identity, or a sense of their own agency in utilising music to reimagine the meanings of race. In this paper I aim to explore the specific circumstances in which individuals come to an awareness of the potential fluidity of racial identities, and the role of music in this process. I will also examine the ways in which such an awareness may be utilised, not only to reimagine or critique apartheid-era racial classifications, but also to reinforce them, while attempting to trace the factors constraining individuals in their efforts to reconfigure racial identities. In this way, I hope to contribute to illuminating the dynamics through which hegemonic social structures may be reproduced and/or transformed as individuals engage with music in various ways.
Challenging the illusion of ordinariness: ‘race being’ as an equipmental whole
In this discussion, I will draw on the insights of practice theory and, in particular, the work of Heidegger. Practice theory suggests that the structures of society and culture are internalised, embodied and perpetuated in the daily practice of individuals, but that practice also provides the medium through which actors may challenge and transform the structural scaffolding of social worlds (Ortner Reference Ortner2006). Exponents of practice theory have differed in their conceptualisations of the psychological depth at which these internalised structures lie. For example, whereas Giddens (Reference Giddens1979) claims that subjects are always at least partially aware of the contours of structural constraints, Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1977) posits a habitus located below the level of consciousness. In order to move beyond these conflicting interpretations, I will draw on a Heideggerian approach that attributes a degree of fluidity to the level of consciousness exhibited by actors regarding internalised social and cultural structures.Footnote 1 In particular, following Daniel (Reference Daniel1996), I will utilise the Heideggerian concept of the ‘equipmental whole’ in exploring the role of music in reaffirming or reconfiguring existing categories of racial difference in South Africa.
Daniel's work examines engagements with the concept of ‘nationalism’ among Tamils in Sri Lanka and later as immigrants in Britain. For Daniel, ‘nationalism’ may be understood as constituting an ‘equipmental whole’: an integrated configuration of related practices, objects and concepts, which in the case of nationalism includes the national past, citizens, official languages and national costumes (Daniel Reference Daniel1996, p. 158). He emphasises that these related entities ‘are defined by their use in the whole’ (Daniel Reference Daniel1996, p. 158, original emphasis), and that this integrated configuration is characterised by its ‘availableness’.Footnote 2 Something has become available when it is no longer utilised consciously as an instrument to achieve a particular end. Rather, through habitual use over time, its instrumental purpose sinks below the level of consciousness and becomes unobtrusive, transparent, invisible.
The category of ‘race’ in post-apartheid South Africa may be conceptualised in a similar way: as a system of integrated practices and concepts that comprise an equipmental whole, and which have become internalised to such a degree that they elude detection by the conscious mind in the course of daily life. The legacies of colonialism and apartheid have carved ‘race’ indelibly into the South African social landscape as a category of difference. This structural system of division has imbued every aspect of life, and has become unremarkable through its ubiquity. Maré (Reference Maré2001, p. 75) references the taken-for-granted quality of ‘race’ in South Africa in his discussion of ‘race thinking’ as an ‘illusion of ordinariness’. Altering Maré's term slightly to emphasise their embodied nature, one could describe the inconspicuous, habitualised aspects of ‘race’ in contemporary South Africa as practices of ‘race being’.
Although these practices as techniques of reinscribing and reproducing the category of ‘race’ remain below the level of consciousness most of the time, in certain circumstances they may be brought into focus, and become the object of conscious reflection. Daniel (Reference Daniel1996) discusses this possibility when he examines the ways in which aspects of the equipmental whole of nationalism lost their transparency for Tamils, penetrated individual consciousness and became unavailable, or ‘occurrent’. Following Heidegger, he defines occurrentness as referring to ‘the presencing of an entity as an isolate, disarticulated from the background practices to which it belongs’ (Daniel Reference Daniel1996, p. 158). This occurrentness is caused by a ‘malfunction’Footnote 3 in the available’ (Daniel Reference Daniel1996, p. 159). When an aspect of an equipmental whole does not function as one expects, it loses its transparency and becomes conspicuous. As the previously taken-for-granted concept or practice is brought into the clearing of consciousness, its instrumental nature as a means to establish or reaffirm an identity is foregrounded and scrutinised. For many research participants in my own study, elements of the equipmental whole of ‘race’ in South Africa had lost their illusion of ordinariness and become conspicuous. Two elements in particular figured prominently: understandings of ‘race’ implicit in dominant political discourse, and racialised music genres and music-listening practices.Footnote 4 In the discussion that follows, I will trace the processes through which music as a practice of ‘race being’ had become occurrent for research participants – or, for some, had never become entirely inconspicuous and available – and how this allowed individuals to reflect on other elements of the equipmental whole, and particularly, how it enabled a critique of interpretations of ‘race’ underpinning political discourse. I will also explore what followed from these processes of reflection. I will argue that once they had become occurrent, articulations of music and ‘race’ were either utilised instrumentally to affirm a reconfigured understanding of a racial identity, or deconstructed in order to reject the validity of ‘race’ as a category of identity altogether. First, however, I will discuss the two elements of the equipmental whole of ‘race’ mentioned above: dominant interpretations of ‘race’ in post-apartheid South African political discourse, and racialised music genres and music-listening practices.
Constructions of ‘race’ in South African political discourse
In post-apartheid political rhetoricFootnote 5 there has been a tendency to depict ‘races’ as homogeneous, seamless social groups; to obscure affinities cross-cutting racial boundaries; and to portray ‘race’ as the primary determinant of difference in South Africa. Three varieties of this interpretation of ‘race’ – in which these tendencies are present to varying degrees – may be identified. The first of these is the symbol of post-apartheid South Africa as ‘the rainbow nation’.Footnote 6 The metaphor became prominent after the swearing in of the National Assembly after the first democratic election in 1994, when Bishop Desmond Tutu proclaimed that ‘We of many cultures, languages and races have become one nation. We are the rainbow people of God’ (in Alexander Reference Alexander2002, p. 81). The image of the ‘rainbow nation’ captured the South African imagination, and became a dominant symbol for affirming a newfound national identity based on the celebration of difference. However, the rainbow as a metaphor for South African society drew criticism from scholars, opposition politicians, as well as members of the public, for its representation of South Africa as comprised of undifferentiated racial categories, its elision of interracial commonalities, its privileging of ‘race’ as the primary determinant of difference, and its masking of economic disparities through its superficial celebration of cultural diversity (Gqola Reference Gqola2001; Alexander Reference Alexander2002).
The second variety of racially reductive political discourse was introduced by President Thabo Mbeki in his State of the Nation address in 1998, in which he described South Africa as consisting of two nations: one of poor blacks and another of rich whites (Pillay et al. Reference Pillay, Roberts and Rule2006). In this interpretation, difference is defined explicitly in terms of economic inequality, an inequality rooted in a particular historical and political context, and that, by implication, may be transformed. However, in this representation of South Africa, racial groups continue to be portrayed as homogenous, and commonalities cross-cutting racial boundaries remain hidden.
A third variety of this approach to ‘race’ – that of ‘culturalism’ – is described by MacDonald (Reference MacDonald2006). He outlines the culturalist view as one in which racial groups are understood as being united by a shared culture which is prior to political activity. As the categories of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ are collapsed into each other, the ‘pseudoscientific’ connotations of ‘race’, as MacDonald puts it, imbue the concept of culture, rendering the latter fixed, static and racially determined (MacDonald Reference MacDonald2006, p. 165). Such an essentialist interpretation of ‘race’ obscures the integral role played by political forces in constructing racial categories. MacDonald goes on to argue that, as economic divisions among black South Africans increase, and various political and historical factorsFootnote 7 exacerbate the obstacles faced by the government in countering these divisions, an instrumental appropriation of the culturalist conception of ‘race’ as a means to retain power becomes more tempting. MacDonald warns that culturalism in the context of post-apartheid South Africa ‘has the effect of deferring poor [black] Africans’ (MacDonald Reference MacDonald2006, p. 173). As differentials of class and power within racial groups are obscured, and black politicians – the political and economic elite – are constructed as representing the interests of all blacks simply by virtue of a common racial classification, policies that further elite interests go unchallenged, and the needs of the poor majority are ignored. In light of the potential political and material consequences of the reification of ‘race’ as an homogenous category in political discourse, elucidating processes that allow for the critique of such constructions becomes all the more pressing. In order to do this, it is necessary to examine the second aspect of the equipmental whole of ‘race’ in post-apartheid South Africa relevant to the present discussion, namely that of racialised music genres and music-listening practices.
‘KwaitoFootnote 8 is for blacks, rock is for whites’: the racialisation of South African music genres
It was the original goal of my research to explore possible connections between music and ‘race’ in the experience of young South Africans, and to examine the ways in which they engaged with such articulations. From September 2004 to March 2005, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 31 young South AfricansFootnote 9 from across the racial spectrum. In conducting this research project, it was not my intention to obtain information from which I could draw generalisations concerning the population of South African youth, or any other social group. Rather, I wished to explore some of the dynamics at play in the imaginative engagement with others enabled by music, and the implications of these for racial identity. With these considerations in mind, I felt that it was more important to select research participants who were willing to talk at length about their experiences and opinions with regard to South African music than to attempt to obtain a representative sample. For this reason, I went to some of the bigger classes at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, and asked for interested participants. My sample snowballed through the contacts given to me by some of these individuals. Friends also put me in touch with suitable participants with whom they were familiar. In addition, I visited a number of retail music shops to ask for willing interviewees.
In conducting the interviews, I wanted to avoid reifying categories of ‘race’. For this reason, I asked interviewees whether they would classify themselves racially, and if so, how. This question elicited some puzzled expressions, demonstrating the extent to which the racialisation of subjects in South Africa has come to be regarded as natural and self-evident. In the interviews, I also attempted to make transparent variables of class, gender, religion, ethnic group, educational level and home language in order to maintain an awareness of the possible impact of such identifications on music-listening practices. In general, I did not find any significant impact of these variables on the responses of research participants.
During the course of the research, it became clear that, for many research participants, a division in music tastes along racial lines was one of the taken-for-granted aspects of the equipmental whole of ‘race being’ in post-apartheid South Africa. One interpretation that was particularly prevalent was the division between the genre of kwaito as ‘black music’ and the genre of rock as ‘white music’. Comments made by Themba, a 21-year-old jazz student who classified himself as ‘black’, illustrate the taken-for-granted, ‘just the way things are’ interpretation of the racialisation of music taste in South Africa. Here, he explains his opinion that kwaito fans are mostly black and rock fans are mostly white:
I mean, that's what I see almost every day, you know … I hear Hola! [imitates kwaito groove] you know that there's a taxi full of black people, and you hear this [imitates guitar line, mimes playing the guitar] … you know that it's white people. I mean, it is like that. And it's never disappointed me.
For many, division in music taste according to ‘race’ was interpreted as evidence of the racially determined nature of experience in post-apartheid South Africa. This is illustrated by a comment made by Jamiel, a 20-year-old student who classified himself as ‘Indian’. He explained why, in his opinion, the fans of kwaito music are primarily black:
… [kwaito] is directly related to them in the sense that they see what's occurring in the song every day, it's like common knowledge to them, so obviously they would sway more towards that music, more than they would towards rock.
In this interpretation, kwaito music reflects an undifferentiated shared experience of being black, and thus black people are more inclined to listen to it. Whether or not those ‘shared experiences’ are determined by an apolitical, racial ‘culture’ or are influenced by political and historical context is left unspecified. However, the parallels between Jamiel's view and the portrayal of ‘races’ in political discourse as homogenous categories of difference are clear. At this point, the mutually constitutive nature of elements belonging to the equipmental whole of ‘race being’ – Heidegger's insistence that equipment is defined by its use within the whole – becomes clearer. The political depictions of ‘race’ and explanations for racial divisions in music listening provide mutual verification and support for one another. This reciprocally reinforcing relationship maintains the ‘ordinariness’ of ‘race’ as a category of difference. For individuals such as Themba and Jamiel, racialised music-listening practices as elements of ‘race being’ in South Africa are available. They function as expected, and have become inconspicuous – as Themba remarks, his predictions have never disappointed him – and thus remain a part of the taken-for-granted, habitualised practice of ‘race’, residing below the level of conscious reflection during the course of everyday life.
However, this was not the case for all research participants. Many spoke of a disjuncture between their lived experience and dominant ideas about racially determined music tastes. This had the effect of fracturing the unity of the equipmental whole of racial identity, and led to the element in question – racialised taste in music – rupturing into the realm of consciousness. As this aspect of the equipmental whole was brought into focus and scrutinised, individuals could critique other elements of ‘race being’. Since individual elements of the whole make sense in relation to each other, it follows that problematising one aspect would lead to problematising the entire configuration. For some of those interviewed, this interrogation of racialised music genres and the construction of ‘race’ which underpinned it – and which it in turn reinforced – led to a search for different understandings of racial identity. According to Heidegger, the initial response to the unavailableness of equipment is a search for alternative familiar coping practices (Daniel Reference Daniel1996). However, if these practices too do not function as required, the equipmental whole may be rejected in its entirety. For some research participants this was the case, as it was apparent that they had come to reject the validity of ‘race’ as a referent of identity.
Rejecting ‘race’: the case of Khaya
KhayaFootnote 10 constitutes an example of a research participant who had rejected his racial classification as a force shaping his identity, although he made it clear that his struggle to resist internalising the equipmental whole of ‘race’ was ongoing. At the time of our interview, Khaya was a 21-year-old black Communication Studies student who was a passionate fan of metal music. Khaya discussed his experience of the incongruity between the expectations of others regarding his taste in music, and his enjoyment of metal, a genre labelled – in his perception and that of every other person I interviewed – ‘white’. He explained that he enjoyed listening to the music because of the personal connection he felt with it. However, listening to metal music as a way of expressing an individual identity had become conspicuous to him due to the comments made by his peers regarding the strangeness of a black person listening to ‘white music’. Their judgements had thrust his music-listening practices into the clearing of consciousness and had led him to reflect on his preference for a genre labelled ‘white’ rather than ‘black’, and on articulations between music and ‘race’ in contemporary South Africa more generally. Khaya expressed the opinion that labels such as ‘white music’ and ‘black music’ stem from the associations that certain genres of music acquire with aspects of experience shared primarily within but not between racial groups. However, he emphasised that such associations tend to flatten out the diversity of experience among South Africans sharing a single racial classification. He discussed the example of the township's association with ‘black music’. During apartheid, the townships were the areas, usually peri-urban, that were designated by the government as the legal residential location for a particular ‘non-white’ racial group – either black, coloured or Indian – and to which many ‘non-white’ South Africans were forcibly relocated (Beinart Reference Beinart2001). Khaya described how in the township of KwaMashu (designated as ‘black’ during apartheid), near Durban, ‘you walk past a house … and they're all playing [house music and kwaito] … You see it everywhere, and you become so used to it that it becomes a part of you.’ In this way, certain styles of music, heard within the context of the shared daily experience of black township dwellers, become part of the equipmental whole of ‘being black’, sinking below the level of conscious reflection. His final remark, ‘it becomes a part of you’, is a particularly apt description of the embodied nature of habitual practice, the naturalisation of a social construction.
He went on to discuss how the racialisation of music genres is entrenched through what people say about music. He expressed the opinion that many of his black friends ‘could relate to heavy rock if they listened, and they just gave it time, but you become stuck in the idea of ‘it's all just noise’, and you never take time to look beyond what people are telling you.’ Describing his experience of playing in a rock band, he commented:
It's just weird to be inside something and know that lots of people from a certain race are just excluded because it's not their sound … it's become stereotyped to be ‘white music’ or ‘black music’.
However, Khaya had never come to regard such racial labelling of music as a description of ‘just the way things are’. ‘Black music’ as a part of the equipmental whole of being black had never become available to him because of his particular experiences as an individual. Khaya described his childhood and adolescence, during which his parents had continuously moved from place to place around the country. These places had included suburbs in various cities and towns – some primarily white, others racially mixed – as well as black townships such as KwaMashu. Because of this, he had been exposed to a wide variety of music, listened to by various individuals occupying diverse positions along the racial spectrum. The music that appealed to him from this variety of sounds was not labelled by society as ‘black’, and so he came to regard as spurious dominant discourses positing a necessary link between having black skin and enjoying a particular kind of music.
By reflecting on and deconstructing the articulation of certain genres of music to ‘race’, Khaya could critique other aspects of the equipmental whole of ‘race being’ in South Africa, including representations of ‘race’ in political discourse as a seamless unit of social difference and, in particular, the determinist relationship between ‘race’ and identity posited by the culturalist view. To the extent that division in music taste coincides with racial categories, Khaya explained this situation as being caused by the spatial division between racial groups – a result of the social and political history of South Africa – and as being entrenched by socially circulating discourse. Thus he interpreted any overlap between taste in music and racial identity as contingent on historical context, not as arising from some essentialist, homogeneous, racially determined culture. In the following comment, he communicated his own sense of struggle against the habit of ‘race being’, a habit perpetuated by his ‘superiors’ – individuals who are unnamed in this statement, but who could conceivably include figures of authority such as politicians who continue to reify ‘race’ as an homogeneous category of difference:
… being South African, we're so racially inclined … we've bound our identities to race, without even trying, and our superiors have bound our identities to race as well, never mind what we do. So it's definitely influenced a lot about what I think I am. But I've had to change that and form myself, and remember what I know I am.
Khaya's remark illustrates the point that taken-for-granted dispositions of ‘race being’ may be brought out into the light of consciousness, reflected on, problematised and possibly rejected. It also demonstrates that this rejection is not a one-off, decisive act, but must be continuously struggled for in daily practice.
‘Many ways of being black’: the case of Tina
Not all research participants who experienced a disjuncture between their own lived experienced and dominant notions of ‘race’ and racialised music genres dismissed the validity of ‘race’ as a factor shaping identity. For some, critiquing the equipmental whole of ‘race’ led to a reconfiguration of its constitutive practices and concepts, and allowed for an instrumental utilisation of some of these to affirm a transformed understanding of a racial identity. Tina – a black, 23-year-old postgraduate Humanities student – and her engagement with kwaito music provides an example of this process. The genre of kwaito was unanimously described by research participants as being labelled ‘black’. It was clear in our interview that listening to kwaito music served to affirm Tina's identity as a black person. However, it was also apparent that, rather than listening to the music as a taken-for-granted element of being black, Tina had reflected on the specific elements in kwaito that connect it to a black identity. For example, at one point Tina explained that she enjoys the way kwaito music evokes a sense of the history of black South Africans:
Most of [the kwaito artists] make reference to the ‘Loxion Kulcha’,Footnote 11 the location [township] culture … and that, by its very nature, sort of links it back to the past … because the culture is in some ways continuous. It's sort of a sophisticated version of mapantsula.Footnote 12 [‘Waar Was Jy?’ by Skeem] takes little snippets of old-South African, pre-1994 popular music, that bubblegum stuff, and all these snippets are sort of pastiched together in this one song, but it's still merged into this one continuous kwaito groove, which is distinctively post-1994.
Thus an important aspect of her enjoyment of kwaito is the sense of continuity it constructs in black experience centred around the space of the township, and in black musical production as it integrates sonic indexes of the past in the music of the present.
At one point, Tina explicitly spoke of kwaito as providing her with a link to the township. However, her feelings about the township were clearly ambiguous:
Tina: [When I listen to kwaito] there is an awareness that I don't go to the townships anymore, because there's nothing that takes me there. So in that sense kwaito is my last link with the whole township vibe.
Mr: And do you want to be linked to the whole ‘township vibe’?
Tina: No, not necessarily, I don't like the township. It's dangerous nowadays. I mean, I sound very white middle-class now, but it is dangerous, I mean my mom gets mugged all the time.
At a practical level, Tina feels no inclination to go to the township, and considers it to be an alien and hostile environment. However, there is a tension between this dismissive response and her description of kwaito as ‘her last link’ to the township, which reveals a desire to forge a connection with a place inextricably woven into the narrative of black South African history. Listening to kwaito allowed her – strategically and consciously – to forge this connection.
This instrumental use of kwaito to affirm a black identity was dependent on it being occurrent for Tina. It was unclear to what extent kwaito as ‘black music’ had ever been part of the taken-for-granted, inconspicuous practices of being black. However, at some point kwaito had become entirely dislodged from the unconscious embodied practice of ‘race being’, and had become the object of conscious reflection. A crucial factor contributing to Tina's consciousness of kwaito as an instrument allowing her to construct a black identity, rather than as an internalised practice of being black, was her status as a black South African who left the township at an early age, and transferred to a previously all-white school, one of the so-called ‘Model C’Footnote 13 schools, which in 1990 began to admit a minority of black, coloured and Indian students.
Attending a previously all-white school had prompted Tina to reflect on the practices and concepts of being black that she had taken for granted, including listening to ‘black music’ such as kwaito. She described her feelings at first attending a Model C school:
… it was actually quite a shock … sometimes you felt like there was a little bit of shame in being black when you first went there, well I felt that. Because you were so different.Footnote 14 Simple things, like you couldn't swim.
No longer could the practices and concepts constituting her racial identity function as embodied dispositions, but became objects of scrutiny, both her own and those of her white peers.
Tina also expressed the opinion that the genre of kwaito springs from the experiences of black South Africans living in the township. Thus, listeners who are familiar with these experiences would have the greatest understanding of the music. As someone who no longer lives in the township, and who has no reason to visit, she felt that she could only partially identify with kwaito, and that it could express an aspect of her identity, but not her experience of life as a whole. Her status as partial insider and partial outsider to kwaito had been reinforced during her school days by the behaviour of some of her peers who still lived in the township, and, unlike Tina, did not attend previously all-white schools. These peers mocked her at times for not understanding all the slang or the references to township life in kwaito lyrics. In her words, ‘If you're at a party full of bitches, and they're like, “why don't you know [what the slang in the lyrics means]? Oh, you're so Model C”, then obviously you're going to feel crap.’
Reflecting on her ambiguous relationship with kwaito allowed Tina to explore the diversity of experience present among black South Africans:
By seeing myself as black, I see myself as a particular kind of black. I don't now say that there's one type of blackness in South Africa. I mean you can see that when I said, OK fine, I dig this kwaito thing, but I'm not necessarily part of it because of certain things … I just think there are as many different experiences of being black … as there are many different black people.
In this way, critiquing homogenising interpretations of kwaito expressing a monolithic ‘black identity’ allowed Tina to highlight the multiplex nature of being black in South Africa, and to contest politically dominant notions of ‘races’ as undifferentiated categories of difference. Tina was able to affirm a hybrid identity, and could legitimate her own enjoyment of ‘black music’ as well as genres labelled ‘white’, such as classical music. In her words, ‘there's nothing wrong with me liking Baroque music, I can like it, and I can still dance to kwaito’. Further, by rooting the experiences expressed in kwaito in the township, and thus contextualising them within a political and historical context, Tina conferred fluidity onto black identity, debunking the notion of a static, apolitical black culture posited by the culturalist discourse of ‘race’.
Imagining ‘race’, imagining beyond ‘race’: the case of Nosipho
Similarly, Nosipho, a black 20-year-old Bachelor of Commerce student, did not reject the category of ‘race’ entirely, but rather utilised music strategically to align herself with a more nuanced understanding of racial identity, while imagining commonalities with other South Africans across the boundaries of racial classifications. Various elements of Nosipho's story resonate with Tina's narrative; once again, the experiences of leaving the township and of enrolling in a majority-white school figure prominently. Nosipho moved from the township to the suburbs at the age of about five or six, and started attending a Model C school. Similarly to Tina, being thrust into an environment in which internalised dispositions of being black were thrown into relief by virtue of their difference could only result in these practices becoming conspicuous. One of these practices was speaking Zulu, her mother tongue. She was instructed by her teachers to speak only English – a language she had never spoken before – at school and even at home to her parents. She explained that, later in her life, speaking Zulu became a conscious way in which she could affirm her racial and ethnic identity. However, she was no longer as fluent in the language as she was in English, and she expressed frustration at not being able to employ speaking Zulu to express an unselfconsciously black identity. As she put it, ‘not to be able to express yourself fully in [isiZulu] is a bit demotivating, demoralising’.
In this way, speaking Zulu was transformed from an embodied practice of identity to a self-conscious strategy of constructing blackness. As she only spoke English with her parents and at school, one of the few times Nosipho spoke Zulu during her early school-going years was with black friends and relatives who visited the family, most of them still living in the townships. It was through these friends that she was first introduced to kwaito music. In this way, speaking Zulu became associated with listening to kwaito music, and shaped the connotations of kwaito as a marker of blackness. Through this experience, kwaito also became an indexical referent of the township for Nosipho. These associations are clear in the following comment, where Nosipho expressed her feelings regarding kwaito being labelled by many South Africans as ‘music from the township’:
Well, I did grow up in the township, I grew up in Umlazi [near Durban], only later did I move on. So I do identify with that … I do still have a lot of connections to the township via friends and family … even if I don't spend a lot of time there myself. It's the whole history of [kwaito] music as well, so I do identify with that … [But] even if I hadn't grown up there [in the township], I would identify with kwaito in terms of the culture, with the whole identity of being black.
Thus the conspicuous nature of listening to kwaito music as a practice of ‘race being’, as well as its associations with speaking Zulu and with the township, allowed Nosipho to utilise the music in strategically affirming her identity as a black South African. However, the obtrusiveness of articulations between race and music also allowed Nosipho to critique the vision of homogenous racial difference underpinning such constructions, and to imagine a more inclusive South African identity transcending racial categories. For example, she criticised the racial targeting of South African radio stations, explaining that ‘[i]t's a mistake to do that because then you exclude such a large proportion of the population that could enjoy that kind of music’. She insisted that commonalities cross-cutting racial classifications do exist in South Africa, for instance those shaped more by class position than racial classification:
Ten years down the line [after the end of apartheid] … there's just more of an integration … between black and white people, there isn't that division anymore. I mean we're living in the same areas, we're studying in the same universities, we're going to the same schools, we're beginning to understand each other more … that understanding has led me to be able to appreciate more aspects of other cultures and other people.
Although this comment ignores the fact that the poor black majority still do not attend the same schools and universities, or live in the same areas as the economically privileged blacks and whites who do, it emphasises that ‘race’ does not mechanistically determine experience, and that place of residence or education may constitute commonalities cross-cutting racial categories.
Nosipho's discussion of vocalist and song writer Thandiswa Mazwai further illustrates her dual utilisation of the occurentness of racialised music tastes both to affirm a racial identity and to imagine commonalities beyond racial boundaries. She began by detailing the origins of her enjoyment of Mazwai's music:
The Thandiswa Mazwai CD [Zabalaza (struggle)] I first heard in my parents’ car, and … I didn't enjoy it that much. And then I went to her concert and I heard it live and saw her. Her concert was at the BAT Centre [a live music venue in Durban] and there were like mostly young … black people. And … it just invoked this whole pride of being black and whatever, and it was young, it was vibey, everyone was dancing and whatever, and just seeing her live and her passion for it, that changed my perspective on her music completely.
She explained that Mazwai's music and lyrics reflect her own experience of trying to find an identity as a young black South African that reconciles her cultural heritage with the context of a modern, cosmopolitan South Africa:
[Mazwai's music has] … got a traditional sound … but then she re-mixes it to have like a young, vibey feel … the whole CD is about her trying to find her identity as a young South African … and trying to find out where she's from, her roots and that sort of thing. And I think it's so cool, because it's exactly where a lot of South Africans are. Especially our generation, we were caught in the after-apartheid era type of thing … we're not in that ‘you're black, you're African’ [imitates an impassioned speech-making tone, shaking her fist in the air] … even the whole concept of being African is like completely changing, it includes so many people now, and then there's the western influence, so it's like a battle to keep your identity, you know. So in [Mazwai's] music there's that whole African feel, but at the same time moving forward and embracing the whole western and pop and whatever influences as well.
However, although Mazwai's music allowed Nosipho to explore what being black means in post-apartheid South Africa, she went on to describe her experiences at a Mazwai concert, expressing disappointment that the labelling of the concert as ‘black’ prevented South Africans from other racial groups participating:
When I was at the Thandiswa Mazwai concert … there were one or two white people there, but I kept feeling like, if there were more white people here, they would enjoy it just as much … And … I noticed there was also this Indian guy there and he was really enjoying it, and whatever, and I just felt like if people didn't look at it as, OK, this is a ‘black concert’, [they would also enjoy it].
From the above discussion, it is clear that the occurrentness of ‘black music’ allowed Nosipho to employ the act of listening to the music as a means to construct, affirm and explore her blackness. At the same, time, however, her consciousness of the constructed nature of links between being black and listening to ‘black music’ allowed her to criticise exclusionary definitions of racial categories and racialised music genres that ignore affinities and shared experiences cross-cutting racial boundaries. In this way, she was able to interrogate and problematise the depiction in post-apartheid political discourse of ‘races’ as the primary categories of difference within South African society.
Conclusion: reimagining the structures of ‘race’
In this paper, I have argued that individuals may exhibit varying degrees of awareness towards habitualised, embodied practices constituting an equipmental whole of ‘race’, and that through certain experiences, elements of this whole may be brought into the realm of consciousness. Reflecting on music as a practice of ‘race being’ allowed research participants to critique other constitutive elements of the equipmental whole – particularly depictions of ‘race’ underpinning dominant political discourse – and in so doing, to reimagine what it means to be classified as black, white, Indian or coloured in post-apartheid South Africa. This reconfigured view of ‘race’ on the level of the imagination was entrenched through daily practice in which engaging with music, among other things, allowed social actors to experience and embody the reconstituted category of ‘race’. It remains to assess the significance of such transformations in individual experience for the broader structural categories of the South African social landscape. Some may object that a claim such as Khaya's that ‘race’ no longer influences his identity does not amount to a transformation in the contours of structural constraint. I would respond by suggesting that, although altered individual experience does not amount to a reconstitution of the structural topography of the social landscape, transformed individual engagement with structural categories may prefigure changed identities on a broader scale. As individuals such as Khaya, Tina and Nosipho engage with their peers and express alternative interpretations of identity – one in which the facticity of ‘race’ may be challenged – they participate in disseminating alternative ways of being. These alternatives may come to serve as ‘heuristic means to guide, authorise, legitimate, and encourage’ (Holland et al. Reference Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain1998, p. 18) transformations in the behaviour of other South Africans and, ultimately, as potential seed-beds from which new structural categories of identity may be generated.
A final comment needs to be made about Khaya's struggle to define himself without reference to ‘race’. In doing so, rather than fashioning his identity in a manner entirely unfettered by the constraints of culture and society, he drew on an alternative culturally familiar script of identity – that of ‘the free-thinking individual’. In supporting his claim that being black no longer shaped his choices or behaviour, he would constantly emphasise the difference between his motivations in choosing a particular course of action – listening to rock music or attending a rock concert, for example – and the motivations of others, whom he considered to be bowing to social pressure in conforming to the expectations of those around them that they listen to music ‘appropriate’ to their racial classification. I refer to this as a culturally familiar script of identity because it was invoked by many other research participants who contrasted their own personal reasons for enjoying music with what they imagined the motivation of most other South Africans to be: to fit into a social group, especially one defined in terms of ‘race’. This illustrates a further point crucial to understanding the transformation of social and cultural structures through individual practice: at any point in time, hegemonic structures are never all-encompassing, and co-exist with previous as well as emergent hegemonies (Ortner Reference Ortner2006). The presence of these multiple, overlapping, sometimes contradictory discourses provides a resource for individuals to imagine and to embody alternate ways of being in the world. At the same time, in challenging one element of the structural scaffolding of society, individuals may uphold and embrace another. Once again, the constant tension between the pressures exerted by structural forces on individuals, and subjects’ capacity for creative agency, is evident.
In this paper, I hope to have shed light on some of the dynamics of this tension, on the complexities of the ways in which dominant structures may be reproduced and transformed through the practices of individuals, and on the role of music in these processes. I have attempted to illuminate some of the ways in which reflections on previously taken-for-granted ways of being in the world may lead to dominant structural categories of identity being reproduced, reinterpreted or rejected. By focusing on the micro-details of these processes, I hope to have demonstrated some of the nuanced ways in which individuals may come to engage with structural constraints – both through the faculties of the mind and imagination, and through embodied practice in which understandings are enacted and entrenched. The individuals discussed here illustrate the interplay between embodied practices and imaginative engagements in perpetuating and challenging structural constraints: Khaya playing guitar in a rock band while reflecting on the hue of the crowd; Tina dancing to kwaito one day and listening to Bach the next; Nosipho enjoying the collective, affective experience of a young, black identity at the Mazwai concert, while imagining a more racially inclusive collectivity. In these scenes, music allows subjects to mediate the tension between structural forces directing dispositions, and the potential for individual creativity and agency to reconstitute social and cultural worlds.
