TRUST our old part-time Pennington pal Steve Hofmeyr to stir up a hornet’s nest once again by reverting back to our old national anthem, ‘Die Stem’, at some of his most recent gigs.
He belted out the old version at the Innibos-fees in Nelspruit and then again in Adelaide, Australia.
Whether this was in retaliation to the EFF’s quest in Parliament to have ‘Die Stem’ bit ‘exorcised’ from our current mish-mash anthem is not clear.
With Mandela’s grand plan of uniting all in a ‘Rainbow Nation’, both Steve and the EFF are obviously out of line.
However, perhaps their rather radical thinking should not be tossed out entirely.
Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika was composed with a view to uniting the country. Maybe it did for a while.
However, the anthem now seems to be having the opposite effect.
Twenty years on, one only has to attend a Springbok rugby match to get the picture. The crowd still mumbles through the first part of the anthem and then belts out ‘Die Stem’ bit at the end with noticeable gusto.
Likewise, the first bit of the anthem is sung with passion at rallies and events which attract predominantly black crowds and then tapers off at the tale.
One can argue that it’s a language thing, but we would just be kidding ourselves.
So, maybe it’s time to compose an entirely new national anthem that unites us all as proud South Africans. The tune and beat should be distinctly South African and the words in English, not to alienate any other indigenous tongue (including Afrikaans), but because it is the language most of the world can understand.
After all, we do want the world to sit up and take note.
Heck, we can even call the anthem… “The Rainbow Nation”.
