Contextualizing South Africa’s Freedom Songs

Abstract

This article offers an examination of Lee Hirsch’s Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony. Beginning with the liberation songs that gained salience during the National Party’s implementation of apartheid policy in 1948 and ending with the struggle songs of a post-1994 democratic South Africa, the documentary’s aim is to retrieve and recount the role of freedom songs in antiapartheid struggle. Using the writings of Ernesto Laclau, John Mbiti, Paul Ricoeur, and Alfred Schutz, this essay will argue that liberation songs are ancestral text that were partly used by antiapartheid activists to create their collective identities. This essay will further argue that Amandla! set itself the task of retrieving South Africa’s liberation songs and liberation’s praise singers from the ancestral region John Mbiti calls Zamani to a region he calls Sasa. However, this essay will assert that the ancestral retrieval task of this documentary is compromised by the documentary’s privileging of the hegemonic groups within the African National Congress (ANC), the documentary’s presentation of the ANC as a monolithic and univocal organization, and the producer’s snowball sampling method. Arguing that this documentary relegates some of the South African struggle experiences into Zamani, this essay will attempt to correct these omissions and broaden the context of liberation songs.