Mainstream bands playing live churned out covers singing in fake American accents. Commercial record companies were not in the business of producing music that challenged the status quo and radio stations were strictly ruled by the pro-government South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). In those days, when radio play was key and there was no internet, alternative bands songs struggled to get their music heard in the public realm. Some did, while others left the country, or tried to evade it by continuing their university studies. Young white men who refused to be conscripted into the army faced serving six years in jail. Even student parties (at which many of the bands recorded by Shifty played) were frequently raided by police armed with teargas and batons and partygoers jailed for the night, because the events were seen as subversive, communist gatherings. From the first State of Emergency in 1985 university campuses were invaded by police beating people and firing rubber bullets whenever a demonstration was held. Universities were targeted by the government as hotbeds of radical anti-government activity. Anti-apartheid activists of all colours were harassed, jailed and murdered. South Africa’s National Party took the West’s Cold War paranoia to an extreme degree. This was a country where apart from the obviously political songs such as Brenda Fassie’s My Black President, Beware Verwoerd ( Ndodemnyama) from an album by Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte, and Free Nelson Mandela by The Specials, films as harmless as the Rocky Horror Picture Show and books Black Beauty and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were all banned at some point in time. No one in the country even knew what Nelson Mandela looked like, as his image was banned from being published and he was last pictured when he was jailed. In addition to this, South Africa, viewed as a pariah state, was completely isolated from the rest of the world, which had imposed cultural and economic sanctions. While brutal apartheid laws to continue to hold the country in its grip, depriving the majority of its people of their basic humanity, there was also cultural oppression – where creativity was viewed as politically dangerous to the ruling National Party. To understand the music scene of that time, one has to recall an entirely different country to the one we live in now. Alternative local bands began making themselves heard, singing about what it meant to be South African. It was the 1980s in South Africa that saw the birth of a new local music scene, as artists sought to voice their protests against apartheid and the stifling conservatism of the time through music that spoke of the real South African experience. Celebrating ubuntu at New York’s Carnegie Hall. ![]()
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