Klipwerf Orkes

The most famous band you never heard of!

 

THE MOST FAMOUS BAND YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF 

On the loneliest road in the country, a distinct vastrap groove plays through a car’s soundsystem, giving the driver fuel for the unbearable distance. Klipwerf are the multi-platinum-album band keeping the Boers happy in bakkies and dancehalls in the Afrikaans heartland. 

By Riaan Malan
O here we are, roaring down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere in search of the most famous band you’ve never heard of.  Klipwerf?  Ring any bells?  Probably not, but don’t worry, we’re all on a learning curve here.  Klipwerf is the band playing on the stereo in Guy’s bakkie. Specifically, we’re listening to “Wie se Kind Is Jy?, a catchyditty that seems to have originated in Garies, a dusty town about 300 clicks behind us.  It was originally a “coloured” song, but Klipwerf have pulled it slightly this side of the racial border and infused it with their patented vastrap groove.Someone pumps a simple bassline on the bottom end of an organ.  The drummer mars the offbeat with both hands, simultaneously whcking the snare and hi-hat.  There’s a fat sakkie-sakkierhythm guitar in there somewhere and, atop it all a Yamaha synth picking out the melody.  Not to everyone’s taste, perhaps, but I tell you one thing:  Klipwerf sound great on a sinkplaat road in an arid and empty wasteland. 

We’re crossing what appears to be an ancient seabed, a level plain of blackened rocks and grey grass. Every half hour or so, we pass a wind pump and a flock of dejected sheep, but otherwise, there’s nothing, no trees, no houses, no respite from the glare.  Our water ran out hours ago. Now we’re dopping wine, to fight dehydration.  We know where we’re going, but when we’ll get there…. God knows. Somewhere along the line, someone went mad on this road and defaced all the distance signs, causing them all to read “Kliprand 0km”.  At first you wonder why anyone would do such a thing, but after an hour or two, you gt it:  the vandal could not bear to face the awful truth about the unbearable distance he had yet to travel. 

“Wie se Kind” segues into “Lientjie se Vastrap” and then Wals vir Hessie”.  All the songs sound similar.  We put on another Klipwerf CD, and it sounds similar too – relentlessly cheerful, simple to the point of idiocy and devoid of all traces of art or introspection.  There are no solos in a Klipwerf song, no fancy wind gathery(claptrap, no vocals.  This music exists only to drive a certain kind of dancing, and if you aren’t dancing, it can be a bit much.  When I move to put in a third Klipwerf CD, I see Guy’s eyes rolling, so I say, OK, your choice. 

Guy plays some acid jazz by Jestofunk.  This cool Italian shit is aeons removed from the dust and stones of Bushmanland, but it’s dance music, and the approach is identical to Klipwerf’s:  start with a simple bass pulse, wed it to a suitable beat, add some simple earworms and repeat ad infinitum.  “The main difference between Klipwerf and these guys is style and attitude, “I say, Guy concedes the point. “Besides,”  he says, “they sound completely wrong out here.” 

Some we axe the acid jazz and play more Klipwerf.  This time, it’s Kom Kuier in die Hantam, their very first CD, the one with the (subsequently fired) singer who semi-yodeliling demolition of a cheesy American country song called “Forever and Ever” has us in stitches.  After that, it’s back to hard vastrap, I am thinking about my Afrikaans father and the vastrap hoedowns he used to stage in our garage in the Sixties, after he and his friends had braaied and downed a few brandies.  The old man loved his vastrap. I didn’t.  In fact, I was always worried that my English friends would show up and witness these embarrasing Dutchman rituals.  What can I say?  I was a stupid little twat, but now I’m on a learning curve, crawling interminably towards Kliprand.

We pass a few more wind pumps and a squashed dassie.  The last motorist who got stuck out here sat for seven days before another car passed.  This could be the loneliest road in the whole country.  It is the road from Pofadder to Kliprand.  It is also the road that leads into the strange domain of the reigning kings of vastrap. 

FLASHBACK:  THE YEAR IS 1988, AND MURRY ANDERSON IS ONE OF THE coolest dudes in Cape Town.  His politics are leftish and his hair is waist-length.  He owns a small recording studio just off Long Street where he works mostly with jazz cats from the Cape Flats or alternative rockers like the Kalahari Surfers, who combine machine beats with mocking excerpts from the speeches of apartheid politicians. 

One day, a bunch of hefty Afrikaners pitch up on Murray’s doorstep.  These okes are mostly middle-aged, with leathery skin and hands scarred from years of wrestling  with pumps and bared wire.  They are sheep farmers, but they want to make a record. 

Murray’s not about to argue.  These Boers are big.  So big that when they walk into a dancehall, people sometimes say, “Are you here to play, or have you come to donder us?”  So Murray invites them to set up their instruments and lay down some tracks. Being an Englishman, he’s in no position to understand that he’s hearing something special – boeremusiek from a place so lonely and isolated that it is almost completely uncontaminated by the sterile conventions that have ruined its Pretoria equivalent. To Murray’s ear, everything sounds wrong. The guitar is out of tune, the drummer is rolling in all the wrong places, and the arrangements strike him as pedestrian.  Murray tenatively suggests some improvements. The Boers slap him on the back and say, nooit, this is exactly how we like it.

 

That first album does fairly well, so the Boers return a year later to make another. As far as Murray’s concerned, the sound is still wrong, but he’s an Englishman, so he has not the slightest inkling that this second collection of vastrap and waltz will explode like a supernova, selling around 80 000 copies and turning these amiable sheep farmers into superstars of the Afrikaans dance-music underground.  It will also (eventually) turn Murray himself into the most successful recording engineering you’ve never heard of. 

A few years back, Murray took me on a guided tour of Milestone, his splended Cape Town recording studio.  In an alcove just off the reception area, we came across a floor-to-ceiling display of gold and platinum records.  Hugely impressed, I moved in for a closer look, only to discover that all these shimmering awards were generated by one band, an unlikely agglomeration of Afrikaners with boeps, snors and (sometimes) matching blazers. “Who the hell are they?”  I asked. 

They are Klipwerf. Since 1988, they’ve issued 27 Cds and three DVDs, which might be a record in itself.  They’ve also won 22 gold and six platinum awards and travelled around 1,7 million kilometers in their bus to perform at some 4 000 dinner-dances in the Afrikaans heartland.  If you add it all up, they’re one of the biggest bands in South African history. 

I was going through some sort of midlife crisis when I discovered them, trying to come to terms with the fact that, as I grew older, I was turning into a Dutchman, just like my father, thanks mostly to Dawie de Lange, the hard-drinking, womanising shit-kicker who dominated boeremusiek in the Thirties.  I loved Dawie de Lange. I would sit in my bedroom like a teenager, working out his songs and wishing I could be a vastrap artist too. 

In such a state of mind, Murray’s story about Klipwerf was revelatory.  This was exactly the life I yearned for – Zen-like isolation of a lonely farm, interspersed with road trips to barn dances where fans would offer me brandy and  Coke and sexual favours.  Murray didn’t say any of this, but that’s how I pictured it, and it sounded magical. I wanted to meet these guys. The truth…. I wanted to be them.  That’s why we were here, Guy and I, driving down a lonely road to meet the kings of vastrap.  

KLIPWERF ARE A BAND THAT HAS EXISTED IN VARIOUS FORMS FOR nearly half a century.  They take their name from a settlement too small to feature on any map but, if you must know, go to Google Earth and check out the empty quarter between Calvinia and the Orange River.  Klipwerf are in there somewhere.  In the hands present incarnation, it’s a four-piece – Willie Burger on guitar, Johnny Dreyer on drums, the glamorous Gené van Niekerk on keyboards, and Kobus Visagie on keyboards too. 

Kobus is the guy who calls the tunes.  He’s a tall, rangy Boer with hooded eyes, a shy smile and hands cursed with what he calls “banana fingers”, meaning they’ve so often been caught under rocks or hit with hammers that they’re all swollen and mishappen, and so broad that he’s inclined to hit two keyboard keys when he’s aiming at just one. 

That’s a drawback in his music career, but no hardship in his real life, which plays out on a farm called Middelwater, on the border between Bushmanland and the Hantam ecosystem.  The distinction is vital to sheep farmers, but to the layman is quite simple:  there are some mountains in the Hantam, some dry watercourses with thorn trees.  In Bushmanland, there’s nothing. Nothing. 

The Visagie clan settled in this moonscape in 1801.  They dug wells in hard rock with their bare hands, lived in crude huts made of straw brick.  As recently as World War II, they were still living a semi-nomadic existence, following rainstorms across the arid plains with their herds of sheep. Kobus’ father, Hertie, was pulled out of school at the age of 14 and sent into the veld to protect his father’s sheep from jackals and the dreaded rooikat. 

“It was a primitive life,” says Oupa Hentie, now 90.  “It was also boring. So long as the wind pumps kept working and the rams did their job, there was nothing much to do.  At night, after the sheep were in the kraal, I used to sit around the fire with the Hottentots, playing my one-pound-ten guitar.

Henties parents disapproved of such things, because Hottentot rhythms led to dancing, and dancing led to unspeakable sins.  Hentie took an easier line with his own sons, Johan and Kobus, born in 1945 and 1953 respectively. When they showed an interest, he bought some instruments, and when the sun sank down over the barren plains, the Visagies would play vastrap on their stoep.  Kobus was on the accordion. Dad played guitar.  Johan stretched a piece of rubber inner-tube across the month of an oil container and fastened it in place with wire.  This was his drum.  He hit it with a plastic container filled with stones.

After a few years, the Visagies started sounding quite lekker, so they recruited a few friends and organised a dance at the Klipwerf Farmer’s Union hall. “It’s hard to explain what life was like in those days,”  says Kobus.  “How isolated we were. How desperate for entertainment. In those days, all you had to do was beat a drum and people would start dancing.  “That first dance created demand for another, and then another.  Soon Boers on the far side of Bushmanland were phoning to book the band.  To reach the Visagie farm, you had to call an old manual exchange and ask for “Klipwerf 1121”.  So the band became the Hantam Klipwerf Boereorkes, and later, just Klipwerf. 

Over the years, their gear improved. Johan got a real set of drums. Their dad acquired an amplifier.  Kobus bought a Lowrey organ, a big clunky thing with speakers at the player’s knees, facing backwards, which meant Kobus had to sit with his back to the audience.  This would never do, so he added a rear-view mirror that enabled him to watch what was happening on the dance floor.  Kobus had little or no interest in expressing himself artistically, and he certainly didn’t want to say anything. He just wanted to make Afrikaners dance, and somewhere along the line he discovered the secret.  It was in the left hand.  If he pulled fancy moves, people just sat and stared.  But if he moved one bass note, really loudly, and the drummer responded by whacking the off beat with both hands, the band started generating a killer vastrap groove that had the dance floor heaving in seconds. 

Decades later, when Klipwerf became famous, that groove was subjected to much analysis.  Murray Anderson was inundated by bands who said, “Just make us sound like Klipwerf so we can also make millions.” But he couldn’t.  There was something about the Klipwerf groove that defied emulation.  Kobus says, “I think the secret was isolation, but that doesn’t help unless you understand the history of boeremusiek. 

Born of a dalliance between European folk tunes and Gamat rhythms from Cape Town, boeremusiek was an embarrassment to high-minded Afrikaners from the outset. Mac Jackson, the first boeremusiek artist captured on wax, turned out to be a black man.  That was in 1929. Four years later, Dawie de Lange emerged from a Jo’burg gold mine to become the first great vastrap star.  De Lange was barely literate, and his music was a raucous celebration of the poor-white lifestyle – dropping mampoer, dancing all night to the tjank of concertinas and threatening to shoot anyone who stole your girlfriend.  The cultural commissars of the National Party were horrified.  “Boeremusiek is inferior,” sniffed Dr Anton Hartman, who became head of music at the SABC in the early Fifties, just after the National Party came to power.  Given their druthers, Hartman and company would have replaced boeremusiek with Germanic lieder, but they could never eradicate that vastrap gees, so they tamed it instead, using their control of radio to eliminate undesirables like De Lange and raise everyone else to a more “civilised” level.  By 1970, boeremusiek had become a sterile form, performed by bland okes who wore suits and ties, and defiled the music with all manner of passing chords and alien jazz inflections. 

So when Kobus says, “I think the secret was isolation,” what he means (I think) is that he somehow escaped these deadening interventions and maintained a connection with the spirit of the old music.  That’s why ordinary Afrikaners responded so strongly to Klipwerf’s primordial vastrap.  It’s also why posh Afrikaners sneered, and continue to sneer.  Klipwerf Cds are seldom reviewed in the Afrikaans press.  There is no mention of Klipwerf on Litnet.co.za, where Afrikaans intellectuals debate cultural affairs.  The band doesn’t even draw support from the Traditional Boeremusiek Club, which disapproves of Klipwerf’s deployment of snythesisers. 

These were added in the 1980’s, when Kobus decided that he couldn’t stand listening to the concertina for hours at a stretch.  Enter the Yamaha ESP, the JVC and the Roland, keyboards that can be tuned to sound like almost anything.  On one setting, they sound like a guitar.  Hit a button and they turn into a sax or a banjo or anything you please.  These days, Kobus appears on stage with a stacked array of these instruments, playing instrumentals that range from traditional waltzes to “boerified” versions of “Sloop John B” and “Bad Moon rising”.  Kobus plays the tune in one voice.  His sidekick Gené plays it in another.  Then they play the tune together.  There’s nothing to it, and yet there is. 

If you want deeper insight, find Hantam Carnival, a DVD film of Klipwerfs 40th birthday party.  I watched it with my fiancée Shmerah, who is entirely English and urban. Her taste inclines to Bon Iver and electronica.  Her style is short skirts, high heels and champagne.  She has no love for boeremusiek, no point of connection.  In fact, she only watched that DVD to humour me. 

On screen, an ordentlike young Afrikaner in smart casuals is introducing Klipwerf to the audience.  This is Kobus, that’s his guitarist and drummer and, here at centre stage, we have Gené van Niekerk, a slim and attractive 52-year-old with a light dusting of glitter in her hair and on her cleavage.  Gené is the Dolly Parton of boeremusiek.  Her make-up is always perfect, her hair and fingernails just so.  Gené and the boys are wearing matching green shirts and black slacks.  They’re listening politely while the MC describes their long history and many achievements. 

Shmerah yawns. “Christ, this is zef”, she says. “I’m going to bed.”  But when the band starts up, she doesn’t.  It’s not the music that holds her, it’s what happens on the dance floor.  People start pouring out of the darkness on the edge of the screen. Hundreds of them. These are decent working people, got up in their Sunday best, and they dance in the formal style, gentlemen with their arms around the ladies’ waist, hands clasped and stretched out sideways, in the pose known as langarm, or long arm. 

At first, it’s chaos out there, all the couples miling aimlessly and treading on each others toes, but then they get their bearings and start moving through the darkness in anti-clockwise circles. There’s a camera high above them, and from up there, it’s like watching a vast human whirlpool, or maybe, a wildebeest migration.  Another camera, on the fringe of the maelstrom, picks out couples who dance particularly gracefully, gliding around the dance floor as if skating on ice.  That first song last nearly six minutes.  It’s followed by another just like it, and then 12 more.  Shmerah watched until the very end, enchanted. 

Then she says something interesting:  “these people are like Jews. They’re clinging to this because they’re afraid of annihilation.” 

“I’ve been praying for this since Christmas,”says Kobus. It’s early evening at Middelwater and a cool breeze is blowing.  “This is the wind that brings rain, and if it rains, my lambs won’t die.”  I assume he means the animals won’t die of thirst, but there’s another threat here newborn lambs that fall on the ground in high summer are likely to be baked to death by heat radiating off the stones beneath them.   I say, jeez, Kobus, this is a cruel and unforgiving place.  He looks hurt. 

We’re standing outside his farmhouse, looking out across the lonesome desert.  In the distance, there’s a clump of blue gum trees, and beneath it, an old whitewashed structure where his ancestors made their home.  His own house is more modern, but it’s nothing much to look at.  Kobus must have made millions of CD sales, but there are no  gold rings on his fingers, no fancy cars in his garage.  He drives a 16-year old bakkie, buys his clothes at chain stores.  If he has any vices, they aren’t apparent;  he barely drinks these days, and he’s been married to one women for 37 years.  Rita’s in the kitchen right now, kneading dough for roosterkoek and marinating the meat for tonights braai.  Kobus and I are discussing Shmerah’s theory of boeremusiek. 

Speaking for myself, I think she’s onto something. I never wanted to be an Afrikaner while Afrikaners were in power. But once the Boers abandoned apartheid and set forth to the African unknown, I started thinking, jeez, it’s time to join the tribe.  Did a similar sense of deepening unease perhaps play a role in the rise of Klipwerf, who came out of nowhere at the very moment of the National Partys demise?  Clearly, this is an idea that hasn’t occurred to Kobus, and he doesn’t find it convincing.  He thinks Klipwerfs success has more to do with the Afrikaners nostalgia for his lost rural past.  “You know,” he says, “a lot of city people have grandparents who grew up like we did, dancing in farm sheds and smoking cigarettes on the sly behind the old stone kraal.  If you have that in your blood, the Klipwerf sound makes you break out in goosebumps.” 

This, too, is true;  vastrap engages me on the level of blood and instinct.  I feel much the same about Kobus himself.  He isn’t a philosopher.  He just wants to entertain his people and maybe cheer them up a bit in hard times.  Right now he wants Guy and I to taste his lamb, which is apparently a very special delicacy, infused with rich flavours that come from grazing on gannabos and boesmansgras.  I wouldn’t know, because smoking has ruined my palate. But I can tell you that they’re amazingly hospitable, these sheep farmers. The men are constantly offering to top up your dop.  Their wives constantly in the kitchen, cooking up sumptuous meals of yellow rice, curried beans, quince chutney and mutton. Everyone says grace before meals, and prays before going to sleep at night. 

Next morning, Kobus puts us in his bakkie and takes us out to see his sheep. While it’s still cool, Kobus keeps casting his eyes skywards and begging for rain.  When it gets hot again, he says, “On a day like this, there’s nothing between you and hell but a jackal-proof fence.”  In-between, he talks about the band. 

In the 43 years of Klipwerf’s existence, about a dozen okes have joined and left again, and two have died – one was Kobus’ elder brother Johan, the drummer; the other was Pieter van Loggerenberg.  Klipwerfs ace accordion player.  These deaths created problems beyond your imaginings.  Klipwerf are based in a place where humans are scarce and scattered across enormous distances.  The talent pool is tiny.  Pieter, for instance, was the last competent trekklavier player in the whole of Bushmanland, and Kobus wasn’t about to recruit an outsider.  So he turned to Gené van Niekerk, who’d played the organ in her distant childhood.  Gené lived in the back of beyond, so Kobus persuaded her to drive to Brandvlei, home of his buddy Willie, Klipwerfs guitar palyer.  Willie and Gené jammed some vastraps in his lounge while Kobus sat in distant Calvinia, listening over the telephone. Gené’s chops were rusty, but her gees was right, so she was in.

Johan’s death precipitated a similar crisis.  Kobus and Gené used a professional drummer for a while, but he had to take a steady job for his family’s sake.  After that, they were stumped until their sidekick Willie paid a visit to Kliprand, a settlement so tiny that if you blink you miss it – just a scattering of houses, two shops, a bottle store and a petrol station with 1950’s pumps outside.  Johnny Dreyer was Kliprands postmaster, general dealer and purveyor of papsak.  Willie noticed an old drum set in a corner of Johnny’s home and asked, what’s this?  Johnny said, well, when I was a panelbeater in Garies, I had a band called 4U2Dance that played Creedence and Elvis  covers.  This wasn’t exactly the pedigree Kobus and Willie were looking for, but Johnny knew his way around sheep, bakkies and boreholes, and that counted. So Johnny got the gig. 

Kobus insists that we meet all his musicians.  This is not quite what we had in mind, given the distances involved, but what can you do?  We’re like the black dude in the Klipdrift TV commercial, the one who falls in with a friendly Boer who won’t let him go until he’s had yet another brandy “met eish”.  So we rev up Guy’s bakkie and head off into the emptiness.  We drive past Willies’ place, but he’s not there, so we press on towards Genés’ farm, heading into a landscape that grows more naked and God-forsaken with each passing kilometre.  The heat is suffocating, the glare unbearable. 

Five hours later, we spy a patch of greenery in the distance. Up close, it turns into a barn-like structure surrounded by wind pumps, solar panels and, God help us, real trees.   We slide into a patch of deep cool shade and cut the engine.  In the silence, we hear water tinkling into the cool green depths of a stock dam.  It’s like arriving in paradise.  Genés’ home is an oasis, surrounded 

by orchards, stables and neat vegetable gardens. Inside, everything is perfect, like Gené herself – hair and make-up touched up, even when she’s slaving over her old cast-iron stove, making fig jam, sultana chutney and what-not.  Her manners are courtly and her taste immaculate, with furnishing of the sort you see in upmarket B&B’s, and little sprigs of boesmangras and lavender on your pillow. 

Towards sunset, we find ourselves sitting in Genés’ garden, drinking wine and watching the sun go down. As shadows lengthen, the landscape softens, and I begin to see that one might grow to love this place. Gené tells us that her great musical influence was her ouma Ellie, a tough old lady who played the fiddle with such vigous that she was known to wear a hole in the armpit of her dress in the course of a single evening.  When we express interest, Gené produces a rough recording made around 1970, when Ouma Ellie was nearly 90.  The music sends shivers down my spine.  I glance at Guy and see he’s on the same plek.  Gené says, “Well, if you like it, why don’t you make a copy? 

We eat mutton again for dinner, with salads and roosterkoek on the side.  Next morning, there is cold mutton on the breakfast table, along with bacon and egg and all manner of home-made jams.  When we’ve eaten our fill, Gené and her husband Stolly insist on escorting us to the “main road”, actually just another corrugated abomination running straight as a die over the southern horizon.  Gené offers hugs and blessings. Stolly extends a manly hand, and we set off for drummer Johnny Dreyers’ place. 

As soon as we’re out of sight, we dig the Ouma Ellie recording out if our baggage and put it on full blast.  This is amazing music, even rawer and wilder than the Dawie de Lange tunes that first converted me to boeremusiek. Some songs are familiar, but there’s something else going on here, a wild and eerie noise that clearly dates back to the golden era when Boers and Basters had a culture in common.  We’re thinking, jeez, if we were in Klipwerf, this is the music we’d be playing, preferably unplugged.  We’d rebuild Johan’s home-made drum, restring Oupa Hentie’s box guitar and recreate those early barn dances where they played vastrap on farm implements for lonely Boers who’d driven hundreds of kilometres to be there.  “They could make a film about it,” I say, “intercutting music with stories about jackals and Bushmen and days so hot that lambs who lie on the ground too long get baked to death by solar radiation.  They’d be famous, man. They’d be like those old bossa nova cats in Buena Vista Social Club….” 

I still scheme it’s a bright idea, but it’s not much use to anyone.  I mean, we can’t exactly tell Kobus, listen, we’d prefer it if you drop the uniforms and can’t exactly tell Kobus, listen, we’d prefer it if you drop the uniforms and synthesisers and play primitive folk music.  We’re soutie journalists. Kobus is the king of vastrap. 

Shortly afterwards, we turn onto the road to Kliprand, where all the road signs have been defaced by a vandal who couldn’t face how far he had yet to travel.  Five hours later, we see a dust cloud in the distance.  Another car!  The first we’ve seen all day!  As we draw near, it turns into a bakkie with three big Boers in the cab.  It’s Johnny and his gabbas, driving out into the desert to find us.  They turn around and guide us back into Kliprand, where the entire white population is waiting to meet us.  That’s Johnny, his wife, his brother, two relatives from Strand and his mother and her dog. Johnny serves brandy and Coke in tall frosted glasses.  He says, I think we’ll braai tonight, hey. 

I don’t bother asking more questions about boeremusiek.  We sit on the stoep, watching the sun go down.  Dogs bark in the distance.  A donkey brays. The light fades to golden, and then pitch dark, with stars.  The nearest bar is in Vanrhynsdorp, 180km away.  The nearest movie house is in Cape Town.  There is nothing to do, but that’s OK.  We reach for guitars and play vastrap. 

It’s Friday, February 17th, and Klipwerf are trekking off to play a dinner-dance in Alberton.  Their bus lives in Kobus’ backyard.  He drives it to Brandvlei, where the rest of the band is waiting.  By now, they’ve all been driving for hours already, and the journey hasn’t even begun.  Kobus takes the wheel, with Gené as his co-pilot.  Johnny and Willie sleep on the seats behind.  They drive through the night, stopping every four hours to change drivers.   It’s a murderous trip, and Kobus has been doing it every second weekend for decades.  He smokes, drinks coffee and downs a concoction called Herbalife to keep going.

When the sun comes up, they’re near Johannesburg.  Kobus starts noticing things only a farmer would see. For a start, all the roadside fences are gone, looting by thieves and carted off for scrap.  You can’t farm without fences, so Boers are disappearing too, their abandoned homesteads turning into ruins as squatters strip the roofs, window and, in the end, even bricks.  Albertons downtown is faring a little better, but here too, there are signs of hard times and decay.  The streets have been taken over by Congolese traders. 

Every third shop is empty. 

Inside the Civic Centre, hefty Afrikaans ladies are laying the groundwork for the evening’s festivities.  A R170 ticket buys you dinner – lamb stew and malva pudding – followed by four hours of dancing. Klipwerfs bus pulls up at the loading dock at 10am and the boys start unloaded gear – another grueling ordeal, given the size of their Pa.  By the time it’s set up, it’s midday and the band goes off to sleep for a few hours.

The punters start arriving around six.  Some come in family groups – toddlers, grannies, teenagers and dads lugging cooler boxes full of booze.  Most are middle-class and middle-aged, but there’s a fair smattering of beautiful people in evening dresses, plus a contingent of poor folks whose shabby clothes suggest they’ve made a huge sacrifice to be here.  Everyone is polite and helpful.  Shmerah and I have brought a bottle of wine, but we can’t open it, so we ask around for a corkscrew.  In the next few minutes, four strangers come over to our table, offering help and friendly handshakes.  I am reminded of something President Zuma once said about “the warm feeling of being together” found in African tribal society.  This gathering is tribal too, I feel like we’ve being welcomed into some sort of family. 

At 7.30pm, the band appears on stage, wearing matching red shirts and black slacks.  Kobus steps up to a mike and clears his throat.  “Hello,” he says. “My name is Kobus Visagie and I farm near Calvinia.”  Then he introduces the rest of the band, offering details that fix them in the Afrikaner firmament – Johnny’s also a farmer, Gené is a farmers wife, and Willie over there is a Telkom technician.  The message is we’re ordinary people, just like you, and we’re all in this together.  “Folks,” he concludes.  “It was a helluva job to get here, because we had trouble with the bus on the way… but we’re here, and we’re ready for you!  Now let us pray.”  With that, the entire gathering join hands and thank God for the meal they’re about to eat and the fun they’re about to have.  

I want to cry. It’s all so courtly, so old-fashioned, so… Afrikaans, down to the matric-dance decorations draped across the back of the stage and the disco ball at the bands feet.  There’s even a corny old smoke machine that starts belching erratically as the band opens up and the great human whirlpool starts churning.  The tribal rite has begun, and it’s time to join in.  I bow to a likely lady and ask her to dance.  The spirit is willing but my feet are ignorant, so I mostly just tread on her toes and get in the way of the real dancers, the ones who look like they’re gliding on ice.  If my father was watching he’d have a good laugh at my expense, but what the heck:  I’m on the learning curve. 

From time to time, the human current carries us past the stage.  Kobus is fixated on his keyboards, seldom looking up.  Willie and Johnny exchange an occasional grin, but they too are mostly deadpan, concentrating on that vastrap groove.  Only Gené is jiving and sending it, playing her keyboard with one hand and every now and then raising the other to point skywards. My dance partner thinks she’s experiencing a rock’n’roll epiphany, but I don’t buy it. When the band takes a break, I ask Gené about that sky-pointing gesture. I say, “but to me it looks like you’re warning the band that you’re coming up to a key change.” 

“You’re both wrong,” she says.  “When I do that, I am thanking God for the pleasure music gives me.”