South Africa’s president rarely misses an opportunity to entertain supporters with a rousing, hip-swinging rendition of the
anti-apartheid song Bring Me My Machine Gun.
Not to be outdone, Jacob Zuma’s rivals have come up with catchy tune of their own. They’ve taken to singing that their party “has no machine guns.” It also doesn’t have any “showers,” they chant, dangling their fingers over their heads to suggest running water.
They’re ridiculing Zuma, who in 2006 said he showered after having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman because he believed it would reduce the risk of being infected with the AIDS virus.
South Africa’s political scene has long been a raucous, musical affair but the tempo’s been stepped up a beat with this month’s elections.
Old freedom songs that evoke the struggle against apartheid have been revived and newer ones have been composed to reflect the political battles of the day. The anti-Zuma song sprung up among members of a party that broke away from Zuma’s African National Congress last year.
“People are so creative,” said Sipho Jantjie, who was among those voicing their support for the new breakaway Congress of the People (COPE) party at a recent rally in Soweto. “They are composing songs all the time.”
Songs long have been a powerful weapon of resistance in South Africa. During apartheid when leaders were jailed and their voices silenced, songs became a rallying cry.
They were sung at trials and on the way to the gallows. At mass funerals, thousands hummed mournful hymns as coffins were lowered into the ground. From across the borders came songs of exile and armed struggle.
But as South Africa’s past grows more distant, there was a fear that the songs were fading into the background.
Zuma put the song and dance back into local politics with Umshini Wami, or Bring Me My Machine Gun — his call for that worldwide symbol of revolution — the AK47.
The stirring Zulu song with its strong, soulful rhythm has become a national hit. It is heard in taxis, taverns and is sung by church choirs. It is even available as a cellphone ringtone.
Villagers in the Zulu heartland sang it outside the school where Zuma voted on April 22 and the song rang out at an ANC victory party in downtown Johannesburg a few days later.
Still, critics say in a country with South Africa’s violent past and where at least 50 people a day are murdered, the song is divisive and inciting.
Strains of the song could be heard during the bloody anti-immigrant riots that swept South Africa last year.
“The song recalls an earlier and more dangerous way of being,” says Liz Gunner, research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.
In a paper published last year, Gunner traces the “life” of the song and its role in Zuma’s rise to prominence.
The song has its roots among the ANC military training camps where frustrated guerrillas wished for weapons so they could return to fight apartheid. It was also sung by the students in the famous Soweto 1976 uprising, which drew world attention to the apartheid regime’s violence and injected new life into the struggle to topple it.
The brutality of the police response to the unarmed students sparked nationwide rioting in which more than 500 youths are estimated to have been killed. Thousands of others were maimed, disappeared into detention or fled the country to join the guerrilla fight.
Like many “freedom songs,” the authorship of Bring Me My Machine Gun is not clear and it has been adapted over the years.
Today it has become the anthem of the poor who favor Zuma over his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki — who preferred quoting Yeats to singing and dancing.
Zuma began singing the song about five years ago amid claims by him and his supporters that criminal charges against him were part of a conspiracy by Mbeki to thwart his ambitions.
The claims and a bitter power struggle between Zuma and Mbeki for leadership of the party left many South Africans nervous about the future of their new democracy. Mbeki was eventually ousted by the ANC as president last year and Zuma was inaugurated on Saturday.
Coming at a time of “national confusion and anxiety,’” Zuma’s choice of song was “superbly timed,” Gunner writes.
“The icon of the heroic guerrilla fighter was melded with that of the beleaguered senior politician,’’ she says in her paper.
But Zuma rivals are determined not to have their voices drowned out by his deep baritone.
Sung in Sotho, one of the most widely spoken languages in the country, the “shower song” first captured attention at the breakaway party’s launch in December last year. And it has caught on fast.
At COPE’s Soweto rally in February, a crowd of a few thousand sang the easy melody, repeatedly, each time with more gusto.
“Today we are reviving the spirit you used to get in 1976,” said Lloyd Phillips. “We are reviving the spirit of the songs.’’
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