If you wanted to show someone the emotional power that music can have, showing them a national anthem being sung at sports events might be a good example. National anthems are funny that way: most people certainly don't listen to their own national anthem on their own leisure time, and I suspect most people wouldn't say it's reflective of their taste in music either. Yet there's an appreciation and joy out of singing it with lots of people, or when we hear it being played at sports events. Now imagine being responsible for writing a national anthem! The pressure would be incredible - what do you say in it? what kind of music would it be? what language?
Now imagine that you're responsible for writing the national anthem for a deeply divided country with a history of oppression and violence between different groups....and you have South Africa in 1994.
As most of you know, South Africa emerged from apartheid in 94, with just such a history. It's totally fascinating what they did with the national anthem. At the time, Die Stem van Suid Afrika (written in Afrikaans, a language that is derived from Dutch) was the national anthem, with an official english version of it, The Call of South Africa. As you can imagine, the anthem represented oppression for most of the black population in South Africa. Instead, unofficially the song Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika was adopted as an anthem by anti-apartheid groups (which is, or has been, the national anthem for other nations in that region). If you've ever seen the film "cry freedom", one of the scenes involves a huge anti-apartheid meeting where the song is sung as an act of defiance, and it shows how significant the song became. It was a symbol of freedom and human rights. At the same time, the song represented terrorism and communism for the most of the whites, since that's what they were told by the government and media. So one divided country, with two national anthems, both hating the other.
*This is a crude summary of the complexities that existed in South Africa at the time, and in no way am I doing justice to the views that existed. I'm just trying to quickly show how divided the country was. If you want to know more about it, I suggest doing more research. This is not a forum for political discussion.*
In 94 - when Nelson Mandela became president - he ordered that both national anthems be adopted. So for awhile, South Africa had two official anthems. Then, in 96, both national anthems were combined into one, which is the current one that still remains. It's incredible - it starts off with Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika in Xhosa, then Zulu, then Sesotho, then switches keys and goes into Die Stem van Suid Afrika in Afrikaans, then in English. Since it doesn't go back to the original key, it is also the only national anthem to be Neo-Modal. In total, the music is written by 2 writers and the lyrics are written by 5. How amazing is that? Hear's what it sounds like:
Here's a video of it being sung by the national rugby team during the 2007 world cup, which they won!
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