Historian Thomas Pakenham famously referred to the South African War (1899–1902)Footnote 1 as, on the one hand, the ‘last great (or infamous) imperial war’ and, on the other hand, as the first conflict in which ‘a nineteenth-century army had to fight a twentieth-century war’.Footnote 2 The events of the South African War thus occurred within a fluctuating turn-of-the-century environment that prefigured many of the forms of racism that would later be used as justifications for mid-twentieth-century warfare. The rise of mass disciplinary procedures that were employed by the British Army against the rival Dutch settlers (Afrikaners, or ‘Boers’ as they were known at the time),Footnote 3 not to mention the Black South Africans who became cruelly caught up in the struggle,Footnote 4 included the first widespread use of concentration camps.Footnote 5 Explanations for and anxieties about colonial warfare were further reinforced by late-Victorian ideas of imperial sovereignty, Protestant morality and racial degeneracy. For the defeated Afrikaners, cultural trauma,Footnote 6 and by extension, ‘perennial mourning’,Footnote 7 ran deep. While the manifestations of trauma in the musical memory of colonial warfare are challenging to navigate, particularly given the Eurocentrism of much existing trauma literature,Footnote 8 the enduring associations of the concertina as an instrument of degenerate suffering during the South African War provide an opportunity to explore how sensory memory can reinforce and reconfigure legacies of collective mourning about a context that predates the historical timeframe of most academic studies of trauma.Footnote 9
In this article I examine how the concertina emerged as a ‘degenerate’ instrument in British narratives about the South African War, exploring how the ‘mournful’ and ‘diseased’ associations of the instrument that surfaced in colonial wartime reporting have continued to function as a metaphor for Afrikaner cultural trauma. Due to the growing associations of the concertina during the nineteenth century with working-class musicians (despite its origins in the middle-class Victorian parlour), and its ineffectiveness in ‘blending’ with standard classical concert ensembles, the instrument has also been marginalized in many written histories of western music.Footnote 10 Furthermore, most musicological examinations of the connections between suffering and music in spaces of wartime incarceration (such as in concentration camps) have been overwhelmingly focused on European geographical locations.Footnote 11 When examining historical literature on the South African War, however, as well as studies of Afrikaner nationalism, the concertina emerges as a powerful metaphor for racial and cultural degeneration in musical constructions of both the imperial enemy and the colonial Other.Footnote 12
In placing the colonial concertina into dialogue with trauma studies, both from a psychological standpoint and through acknowledging scholarly work on music as a tool for torture and weaponization,Footnote 13 I will provide a contextualized reading of the concertina as a ‘traumatic’ instrument of the South African War. Drawing on newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts from the time, as well as on scholarship about the enduring legacy of the concertina in Afrikaner culture, I consider the frameworks of ‘cultural trauma’ as set out by sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, and ‘perennial mourning’ as defined by psychiatrist Vamik Volkan. While Alexander does not engage with Volkan's psychoanalytic models of trauma, a case study of the concertina as inhabiting and representing a ‘traumatic sonic space’ during the South African War is a useful opportunity for bringing these theories together, to consider how sonic legacies may become trapped in a perennial, traumatic ‘holding place’. Furthermore, since much published trauma literature is considerably Eurocentric, the significance of examining the post/colonial implications of a musical instrument for multiple generations of settler communities becomes all the more potent.
This case study thus considers how the ‘soundscapes of suffering’ associated with the Victorian concertina were shaped by imperial systems of control, which in turn reinforced Afrikaner nationalist ideologies of the ‘collective memory’ of traumatic suffering. Fassin and Rechtman have defined ‘collective memory’ as a ‘traumatic relationship with the past in which the group identifies itself as a victim through its recognition of a shared experience of violence’; notwithstanding different contexts, ‘the moral framework that emerges is the same: suffering establishes grounds for a cause; the event demands a reinterpretation of history’.Footnote 14 Another helpful starting point here is Ron Eyerman's work on cultural trauma, slavery and African American identity, where he claims that ‘there is a difference between trauma as it affects individuals and as a cultural process. As cultural process, trauma is mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective memory’.Footnote 15 In the context of South Africa, moreover, Uriel Abulof proposes that collective transgenerational trauma has been endemic to Afrikaner identity, reaching a crisis in the late twentieth century when as a community they were caught up in an ‘ontological insecurity, running into an identity void’.Footnote 16 Similarly, Abulof reminds us that ‘Afrikaner ontological insecurity is multifaceted, exerting a different effect on different groups’.Footnote 17 Jacob R. Boersma, further, has argued that Afrikaner identity was never homogenous nor straightforward, particularly in the context of late twentieth-century South Africa, when post-Apartheid neoliberalism alienated ongoing strains of Afrikaner nationalism and exacerbated economic class disparities.Footnote 18 Boersma's method is to address the gaps left by a blanket concept of ‘collective’ trauma through the use of case studies.Footnote 19
Focusing on what I consider to be the sonic – and inherently subjective – presence of the concertina during the South African War, I draw upon Boersma's ‘case study’ approach to focus on how collective mourning can be present within the body and sound of a particular musical instrument. My case study is thus an exploration of how sonic trauma can be ‘sounded’ within a context of colonial war and reframed over time in postcolonial musical contexts. In looking historically at the biopolitical soundscapes of imperial incarceration, my understanding of the word ‘soundscape’ is based on R. Murray Schafer's notion that a soundscape can refer to ‘any portion of the sonic environment regarded as a field for study’,Footnote 20 which, in my case, includes references to and metaphors about the concertina in the incarceration of Afrikaner communities. More relevant to the nineteenth century, I also embrace John Picker's notion that the Victorian soundscape ‘was so varied and vast as to be too much for one pair of ears to apprehend’, and that ‘the subjective nature of sensation was of central interest to the Victorians’.Footnote 21 I therefore understand the colonial concertina to be: 1) a signifier of a particular kind of sonic environment that, aesthetically, came to embody traumatic connotations of degeneration and death for Afrikaner victims of the South African War, and 2) emblematic of a soundscape in which there was room for subjective agency to emerge through and beyond traumatic and degenerative connotations.Footnote 22
On an aesthetic level, I also hold that the concertina's geographic porousness (as an instrument of travel) and grainy timbre in part make room for sonic legacies of trauma that are ubiquitous across Afrikaner folk musical practices today, as well as aurally reminiscent of generational suffering. If the idea of the concertina as a means of luring Boer soldiers to their incarceration and/or death was a way of manipulating the power of a discordant ‘voice’, then its exclusion as a viable instrument from British classical music culture during and since the late nineteenth century can also be understood as an example of the censoring of a soundscape that is acutely susceptible to connotations of degeneration. By extension, that the ‘wailing; wheezing’ sound of the concertina is both uncomfortable yet ubiquitous in Afrikaner folk music today points not only to the instrument's distance from ‘established’ imperial forms of music-making, but also to a traumatic tension between alienation and belonging that has followed the concertina in South Africa since the late nineteenth century.
The Concertina in the Trenches: A Victorian Construction
Towards the final months of the notorious Siege of Mafeking, which lasted from October 1899 – May 1900,Footnote 23 several British newspapers published short articles that used the concertina as a way to belittle the musical faculties of the Boer soldiers. The press reports implied that, because the Boers as a race did not possess the ability to resist the concertina's sound, it was possible for the British to lure them out of their hiding places and into captivity and/or death simply by playing a few notes of music on the instrument.
On 28 March 1900 an article appeared in the Daily Mail entitled ‘Mafeking – March 16: Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches: Music as an Adjunct to Sharp-Shooting’.Footnote 24 Here is the way a ‘war correspondent’ described the scenario:
Like wary trappers decoying a wild animal from its lair, a month of close quarters has taught our colonial contingent what are the habits peculiar to the enemy.
Except Sunday, when we do not fire, our boys discovered that he possesses abnormal curiosity, and the effect of music is very similar to that upon other underground creatures. So arranging among themselves, one played a concertina, and three or four conversed.
This continued for half an hour. At the other end of the trench one of our best shots awaited developments. The music proved too much for the Boers. First one and then another head peeped through the porthole or round the corner.
This was our man's opportunity. whiz! and the owner of one head fell backwards.Footnote 25
A week later London's musical journalists had taken notice, and the Musical News published a similar summary, this time drawing out the metaphor of a Pied Piper's ‘seductive strains’:
The instrument had a particular attraction for the Boers, over whom it appeared to exercise as much charm as … the strains of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Whenever the performer began his seductive strains, the Boers could not resist the temptation to pop their heads out of their cleverly-constructed defences in order to gratify closer their very natural curiosity.Footnote 26
These provocative narrations, which, like much wartime propaganda, may well be apocryphal, offer a formidable example of how British constructions of the Afrikaners as a degenerate white race was a powerful way to undermine the threat of the enemy in the press.Footnote 27 In the Daily Mail article, for example, the Boers are likened to wild animals that a ‘trapper’ watches in order to incarcerate. A day later, the St James's Gazette commented that the Daily Mail article had ‘amusingly’ described how the Boers ‘seem to be as easily charmed by [music] as snakes’, concluding that when the British soldier ‘breathed forth an alluring strain as deadly as that of … the Pied Piper of Hamelin’, the ‘Boers, like the rats, soon popped their heads out of their holes under the impulse of irresistible curiosity, and a British rifleman, specially placed for the purpose, quickly exacted the penalty’.Footnote 28 In such accounts the Boer soldiers are unfailingly framed as being musically and evolutionarily backwards – and consequently, their ‘natural curiosity’ about the concertina is given as an evolutionary flaw that renders them fragile – in the face of an army that prided itself as being immune to sensory manipulation.Footnote 29
There are a number of implications in these accounts about race, degeneration and musical susceptibility, not to mention the narratives of myth-making that regularly occurred as part of war reporting.Footnote 30 In this framework not only does the concertina operate as a technology of wartime entrapment, but its power over the Boers also degrades them to a lower stage of racial evolution than the British: they have no more musical agency than the unguarded animals who are compelled to follow a Pied Piper.Footnote 31 Such depictions of Boer soldiers contrast with an idealized notion of the British military hero, who, according to historian Linda Colley, was associated even from the beginning of the nineteenth century with ‘masculine’ definitions of commerce, industry, war, and the successful spread of empire.Footnote 32 By extension, several late nineteenth-century public (male) figures in Britain even specifically prided themselves on being ‘unmusical’: as Phyllis Weliver notes, ‘prominent men like Gladstone, Tennyson, Charles Lamb and the Archbishop of Canterbury all declared with pride during this period that they knew nothing of music’.Footnote 33 Thus, a Boer soldier's susceptibility to music was presented in opposition to British military resilience. Moreover, the fluid, skeleton-like physical frame of the concertina itself, combined with the distinctive timbre of its wailing and wheezing tones, could be understood as a metaphor for a weak, if not diseased, human body that was intrinsically ‘other’ to a notion of national strength, whether this otherness had resulted from categories of class, race or militaristic opposition.
Conspicuously, such otherness was represented in numerous accounts as a diseased and inherently degenerate musical instrument precisely at the moment when unprecedented atrocities of imperial surveillance saw the containment of tens of thousands of Afrikaners, including women and children, being placed in British concentration camps.Footnote 34 Indeed, the word ‘concentration’ as applied to acts of incarceration was first used by the British during the South African War.Footnote 35 The destruction wrought by this first major conflict of the twentieth century, which historian Aidan Forth has described as ‘an early example of “total war” in the dawning age of mechanized violence’,Footnote 36 had lasting consequences on Afrikaner communities in South Africa. The losses for Afrikaner, Black South African and British troops were substantial. According to Steve Attridge, the British lost 7,792 men in action and 13,250 from disease; the Boers lost 6,000 men, and 26,370 women and children died in concentration camps.Footnote 37 Over 20,000 Black South Africans died in separate Black concentration camps, most of them incarcerated because, as Attridge argues, ‘the British feared they might help the Boers and because a cheap labour force would be needed once the gold miners in Witwatersrand were reopened’.Footnote 38 Several scholars have also noted that ‘the trauma of black people after the South African War was “ignored”’,Footnote 39 and that there remains a gap in the historiography of the Black experience of the war.Footnote 40 While my focus here is on how the concertina has been constructed as a metaphor for Afrikaner cultural trauma, it is also worth noting that the instrument has a long association with Black South African music-making; even before the South African War it was referred to derogatively as a ‘k****r instrument’ in Victorian travel writing.Footnote 41
In terms of perceiving how these negative connotations were manifest at the time, it is worth noting that while the term ‘trauma’ was not in wide use during the nineteenth century, the concept was of growing interest in medical circles. Indeed, the Victorians themselves invented the term ‘traumatic neurosis’.Footnote 42 The widespread idea of individual trauma as a medical condition was not systematically recognized, however, until the twentieth century.Footnote 43 That said, the experiences of trauma that can be found in Afrikaner memories of the South African War point to distinctive symptoms of collective trauma that emerged in post-war communities. Relevant here is Kirby Farrell's concept of trauma as ‘an interpretation of the past’, in which trauma becomes ‘a kind of history’ for grieving communities.Footnote 44
In the British media coverage of the Siege of Mafeking, then, the susceptibility of the Boer and Black soldiers to the strains of the concertina was given as evidence of their racial and social degeneracy. This coverage was part of a larger movement to reassure British readers that the enemy was physically and even evolutionarily weak despite the slow pace of the war. As Krebs notes, ‘the predominant image of the Boers as ignorant, backward peasants was often reinforced by stories about the siege’.Footnote 45 Even in private reports, such as personal diaries, parallel accounts of the concertina emerged. As an Irish soldier recounted:
The Cape Boys shot a Boer today … The former were playing a concertina, jigging and singing and shouting to the Boers to send over some of their [women], as they wanted dancing partners. One of the Boers looked over the fort wall and was immediately shot dead by our riflemen. Ruse of War.Footnote 46
The Boer soldier's inability to ‘escape’ the sound of the concertina here stems from the pervasive idea that the instrument was effectively an extension of a Boer soldier's identity. Indeed, British wartime accounts of the concertina are consistent in characterizing the instrument as endemic to a Boer's innate ‘idleness’. As noted in the Musical Herald in July 1900:
The Boer's one musical instrument is the concertina. He plays this everywhere – while trekking in a wagon, in laager, or while tending cattle. On a quiet moonlight [sic] night, as you sit on the stoep, and the weird charm of the South African night holds you captive, the concertina is said to please. Boer women never play the concertina. This would not be considered correct. When the Boers are disarmed, their concertinas will be left to them.Footnote 47
The concertina is thus ubiquitous and inextricable from the (male) Boer's life; by extension, Boer women live within the concertina's aural remit, although, unlike mid-Victorian ladies, they appear powerless to play it.Footnote 48 This linking of the instrument so closely to the physical body of the Boer farmer/soldier was further complicated, moreover, by the fact that the concertina player in the Musical Herald anecdote was himself a British soldier, and so the instrument does, uncomfortably, ‘belong’ in a sense to the British Army, even though it is intrinsically associated with the enemy.
The broader framework for these constructions reveals deeply pervasive attitudes in Britain about the concertina as an allegory for inertia and social decay. Furthermore, if the concertina as a degenerate instrument became tied to a brand of Afrikaner identity that was intensified during the South African War, then it can also be placed within a framework of cultural trauma. Marc Howard Ross has claimed that for many Afrikaners the South African War ‘constitutes their “chosen trauma”, a significant loss that a group cannot fully mourn and integrate into the present’.Footnote 49 This kind of ‘chosen trauma’ can be linked to the mass deaths that occurred for innocent civilians, particularly children, in the concentration camps, and, consequently, can be found embedded within the rise of Afrikaner nationalist movements.Footnote 50 The experience of a ‘chosen trauma’, moreover, also unites the Afrikaners against the British. The terminology that Afrikaner communities have used to refer to the camps is revealing in this regard: as André Wessels has noted, the camps have been ‘referred to by many British sources as “refugee camps”, while in some Afrikaner circles, they are still referred to as “murder camps”’.Footnote 51
Victorian constructions of the Boer as musically degenerate are thus in dialogue with a larger process of sonically memorializing the experience of the South African War as traumatic for Afrikaner communities. This process was reinforced by British war reporting, which, in the words of Hermann Gillomee, culminated in a ‘propaganda contest in which a large amount of British resources went into denigrating the Boer population’,Footnote 52 something which Attridge has also noted with regard to the rise of poetry about the war that was published in British periodicals.Footnote 53 It was particularly important for the British press to perpetuate denigrating narratives about the enemy when the war was not going particularly well.Footnote 54
The anecdote about the ‘musical ruse’ at Mafeking eventually made it into official histories of the war written in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. As seen in Figure 1, the concertina's ‘deadly work in the trenches’ was visually depicted in the 1902 volume of Cassell's History of the Boer War, where the concertina player is placed centrally in the image: the music appears to distract at least two of the other British soldiers, and only one figure on the far right crouches vigilantly, at the ready to strike.Footnote 55
Fig. 1 ‘Musical Ruse’ at Mafeking. Image from Cassell's History of the Boer War, 1899–1902 (London: Cassell, 1902), p. 989. © British Library Board, General Reference Collection 09061.cc.21.
While the concertina's ‘deadly work’ is presented in many of these accounts as simply an entertaining anecdote (as Paula Krebs notes, when the Daily Mail and the Westminster Gazette presented the story, it was listed as an ‘example of the humorous side of the siege’),Footnote 56 these stories also contributed to a wider degenerative narrative that strategically constructed the Boer soldier as an inferior colonial rival. And while the Musical News, generally less conservative than the Daily Mail and Westminster Gazette, did admit that ‘one is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to lure persons to destruction’, the article then concluded that ‘on the other hand we must remember that the enemy is wantonly attacking a city in our own territory’, and ‘all's fair in war’.Footnote 57
In the following sections I consider the role of the concertina in the broader imperial cultures that constructed such degenerative narratives, considering how a framework of trauma studies can inform the sonic legacies of transgenerational suffering that are still associated with the concertina for Afrikaner communities.
Sounding Degenerative Narratives
As a material export of empire, the concertina became increasingly abundant in South Africa during the nineteenth century.Footnote 58 A small, highly portable instrument not dissimilar to the accordion, the concertina could be played very simply by stretching and contracting central bellows between the hands, with pitches rendered by the pressing of a button. It was a cheaply produced, compact and robust instrument that could more easily withstand international transportation and changes in climate and humidity than many other traveling instruments. By the late-Victorian era there were reports of concertina music being played on the streets in colonial cities such as Cape Town,Footnote 59 after which the instrument gradually moved out of the metropolis to rural areas, particularly Boer farms.Footnote 60
By the end of the nineteenth century, the potential of music as a force for not only aesthetic transformation but also social regulation had already been operative within Britain as a means of disciplining the lower classes.Footnote 61 The seeds of what Tia DeNora has called the operation of music as a ‘technology of control’Footnote 62 thus became embedded within a Victorian mindset by this time. By extension, music as a form of imperial control was not only linked to large-scale acts of military violence, but also to the growth of philanthropic work and civilizing missions.Footnote 63 In all cases, music used in British colonial contexts provided opportunities for social power, as long as it was regulated according to certain social codes. Thus, whether sounding on a mission station or in the trenches, the British use of music as a means of negotiating and governing a volatile colonial setting was linked to competing ideologies of order, as well as to emerging conceptions about the connections between music, degeneration and disease.Footnote 64
These colonial destinations and degenerative connotations might seem surprising for an instrument that had originally been invented as a popular Victorian scientific curiosity. In the early nineteenth century the concertina was initially seen more as a scientific experiment, having been invented in 1834 by the English physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone, who developed the complex button system that enabled a wide range and flexible intonation.Footnote 65 Wheatstone had originally intended the concertina to be a test in vocal communication: an instrument that could both ‘speak’ and play chromatic repertoires.Footnote 66 By mid-century the concertina was, briefly, a popular Victorian parlour instrument. In its easily mass-produced forms, however, the instrument gradually became more widely used by street musicians, gathering a received narrative of mobility, diaspora and degeneracy.Footnote 67 As part of an upsurge in different mass-produced instruments, analogies between the ‘breathing’ sound of the concertina and the ‘nasal’ and ‘naturally embodied’ diverse human voice abounded. The notion that each individual concertina could effectively represent a separate – if unrefined – human voice was further complicated by the fact that, instead of being standardized, the variations on the size and range of the instrument continued to increase over the course of the nineteenth century; for example, London publisher J. J. Ewer alone listed c450 versions of the concertina available for sale by 1860.Footnote 68 Even Charles Dickens noted in his periodical Household Words in 1853 that the pervasive street instrument ‘could speak in any vocal register: treble concertina, baritone concertina, tenor concertina’.Footnote 69 Here, the concertina encompassed the social diversity of a Dickensian human voice: in its various accents it spoke across gendered and classed boundaries, and therefore communicated on an all-too-human (and potentially all-too-physical) level.
Dickens was not alone in making an analogy between the concertina and the ‘accented’ human voice. James Q. Davies has noted that ‘in the early days, Wheatstone experimented with ways to make his concertina speak in vowels, using resonators, though these efforts apparently failed’.Footnote 70 Anna Gawboy has also noted that Wheatstone initially conceived of the concertina as an instrument that was in line with contemporary developments in telegraphs and typewriters,Footnote 71 placing it more in the category of a scientific tool for global communication than as an instrument that would have been classified as appropriate for sophisticated art music. As Davies claims, the concertina was more of a communicative, mobile, ‘voice in a box’.Footnote 72
The concertina was, likewise, easily transportable and exportable as an object of colonial travel, further separating those who played it from the middle-class Victorian parlour. By the 1870s reports of concertinas spanned coastal towns across South Africa, Nigeria, Benin, Angola and the Cape Verde Islands.Footnote 73 As Dan Worrall notes, ‘many of the very earliest observations of concertina use in Africa involve both British explorers and Dutch settlers in South Africa, but Indigenous Africans [also] began to play the instrument at the same time’.Footnote 74 Therefore, the instrument gathered further associations not only with Dutch imperial competitors to Britain, but also with Black colonial subjects. In colonial contexts, moreover, the fact that the simple pressing of buttons produced tones in ‘just intonation’ rather than ‘equal intonation’Footnote 75 further renders the concertina a particularly apt instrument of empire because it had the potential to be inherently communicative. In the context of communicating with – or, in the context of the trenches, ‘luring’ – the enemy, the concertina thus became a veritable ‘speaking machine’ that could sound the ‘othered’ tones of working-class and/or colonial scales.Footnote 76
Over the course of the nineteenth century the traveling concertina thus transformed from a British travel accessory to an instrument that became ubiquitous in many colonial communities. Over time, as Davies has argued, the concertina was increasingly subject to colonial transformations that took the instrument far from its origins as a Victorian curiosity. He claims that ‘in South Africa at least … concertinas were misused, fiddled with, indigenized, altered, and mutilated in ways that messed with the utopian fantasies of such globalist liberals as Wheatstone’.Footnote 77 As Davies continues, ‘later versions of Wheatstone's multi-“tongued” reed instrument would be advertized as the sound of “British dominions and Colonies”’, would be ‘taken to the Antarctic by Shackleton, Central Asia by Livingstone’, and would be ‘instruments of choice for colonial missionaries’.Footnote 78 In this way, the concertina inhabited a shifting space where it was simultaneously a marker of British imperialism, while at the same time it was an appropriate instrument to bestow upon colonial subjects who were not given access to more elite British musical practices. The concertina could therefore function successfully as an instrument of colonial diplomacy: an article in the Times from April 1881, for example, noted that William Noble of the Blue Band and Army Gospel Temperance Society had travelled to South Africa in order to ‘present a “handsome concertina” to the King of the Zulus, Cetshwayo kaMpande, who was being held as a prisoner of war near Cape Town’.Footnote 79
The increasingly derogatory associations of the concertina with the voices and bodies of rival settler communities and colonial subjects can therefore help to explain the rhetoric that emerged around the instrument during the South African War. The professional classes in Britain – those who would have published and read journals such as the Musical News – may well have strongly associated the concertina with contemporaneous ideas about racial degeneracy. Equally, none of the ‘deadly work in the trenches’ reports questioned the racial evolutionary framework of why the Boer soldiers would be specifically receptive to the danger of this particular type of musical seduction. Such neglect can be tied to persistent, and widely accepted, British propaganda supporting the idea that the Boers were a devolved white race, implying that they as a people would thus have little or no control over their own bodies once they heard the wheezing strains of the instrument. For example, in 1900 the Musical News gave the following account of the state of music in white South Africa:
Except at Johannesburg, where the people are almost all English, music, as we recognise it, seems to be hardly known. The Boers apparently confine themselves mainly to the droning of hymns, accompanied by a harmonium … It may be that, besides the blessings of equal justice and good government which must result from war, music will bear her fair share through the softening influence the divine art will exercise on the people of this portion of our South African empire.Footnote 80
In this construction, the Boers knew nothing of musical development, and so the concertina became attached to a form of degeneracy that could only be ‘helped’ by the civilizing influence of British military success. The Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle reflected a similar depiction of Boer society (and the predominance of the concertina within it) in an article that came out in the same year:
Every Boer believes himself to be a born musician … and every Boer homestead possesses some musical instrument, as a rule a concertina … The concertina is in use every day, and at all hours of the day. When the Boer goes away on a transport journey he takes his concertina with him. From every waggon trekking slowly along the dusty road you will hear strains of this instrument breaking out in the quiet air, and if you give a backward glance, you will see the boss stretched out on his mattress in the tent of the waggon, pipe in mouth, grinding out some world-forgotten tune … On the farm, too, the concertina is never idle, for the boys take it with them, as they go out in the early morning to watch the cattle feed, and again in the evening, when they count the stock as they are driven in.Footnote 81
Here, the Afrikaner subject ‘believes’ him or herself to be a musician by virtue of the constant prevalence of the concertina. In this framework, then, the Boer soldier cannot help but surrender to its vocalic sounds, because the concertina has become a central figure in the soundscape of Boer life. Notably, the British newspaper reports based this soundscape on a notion of backwards laziness: the ‘boss stretched out on his mattress … pipe in mouth, grinding out some world-forgotten tune’. His musical act is thus out of place and time with the imputed progress of empire, and, by extension, the ability to be physically fit for battle. Rather, it is the concertina itself, not the Boer, who is never idle; its body is more frequently exercised.
The idea of the racially ‘other’, unhygienic concertina player who struggles to rise out of poverty was of course not new in nineteenth-century Britain. As far back as Henry Mayhew's influential publication London Labour and the London Poor, published serially in the 1840s, the unwashed subject on the city street had been effectively constructed as Black, not just because of physical dirtiness but also due to a perceived evolutionary degeneracy – ideas that were blatantly extended to the Irish at the time. As Kavita Philip has noted, ‘it is remarkable … how similar the rhetoric of racialization of the Irish, a white population, was to the language used to characterize non-white colonial subjects in Africa and Asia’.Footnote 82 For example, the category ‘Africanoid’ described each of these groups, its validity being quantifiable by the ‘index of nigresence’.Footnote 83
Likewise, when the concertina is referenced in war reporting, it is often placed in the hands of someone who is Black, Afrikaner or Irish.Footnote 84 Given this context, the British soldier holding the concertina at the ‘Ruse at Mafeking’ is unusual, except to say that there is still an impression of only really using it to lure a ‘degenerate’ enemy.Footnote 85 Moreover, the Irish played an important anti-British role in the war. As Donald P. McCracken has explored, the Irish involvement in the South African War reveals the strength of pro-Boer sentiment in Ireland at the time.Footnote 86 Furthermore, the Irish support for the Boer cause incentivized the British to redouble their efforts in South Africa; as McCracken claims, ‘the Irish pro-Boer movement was the most influential of the European pro-Boer movements, not only because of its influence on Ireland's relations with Britain, but also because it tempered British attitudes towards South Africa’.Footnote 87 Indeed, ‘The prospect of “another Ireland”’, writes McCracken, ‘was a spectre that might only be exorcized by a magnanimous peace in South Africa’.Footnote 88
The use of the concertina by both the Irish and Afrikaners at the time also provides another link to British ideas of cultural (and musical) degeneration that were applied to colonial subjects and imperial rivals alike. At the same time, as James Kennaway has noted, discourse had long since emerged in western medical writings about how overstimulation of the nerves through music could also lead to physical degeneration.Footnote 89 For the British wartime media, Irish soldiers then fell, like the concertina, into a degenerative framework of musical disturbance, suffering, and inherent racial otherness that rendered them, like the British working classes, as a less-white race. Effectively this amounted to large-scale ethnic othering of Afrikaners and Irish people alike, and extended to British political ideas about race that linked degeneracy to laziness, lack of physical control, and social decay.Footnote 90 Forth has applied this racial othering to parallels in the racialization of Ireland and India as British colonies:
In the language of social-scientific racism, the famished of both colonies were suspect ethnic ‘others’. Lazy, improvident, and adherents of a ‘superstitious’ religion, the Irish, like their Indian counterparts, [a Times article of 1847 had maintained] were ‘born and bred … from time immemorial in inveterate indolence … disorder and consequent destitution’.Footnote 91
Such constructions of racial degeneracy can be extended to discourses about ill health and poor sanitation for communities who used the concertina by the end of the nineteenth century. While first-hand accounts of concertina music in the concentration camps are scarce, published inspections by those who visited them – particularly medical staff – present chilling analogies between the physical body of the concertina and degenerative starvation. For example, one eyewitness likened the visual appearance of poor-quality meat served to prisoners to the instrument:
Very scarce and dear, and awfully nasty; either ‘trek Ox’ which is so near the verge of starvation before it is killed that the carcase looks like a concertina drawn out fully with all the wind knocked out, just rib-bones with their flabby skin drawn over them, and no flesh at all.Footnote 92
Compared here to a starving, rotting carcass that would render few nutrients to keep the emaciated body of a dying camp inmate alive, the concertina appears as a body effectively ‘drawn out’, or zoomorphized into a skeletal frame that has been described even more recently with regard to the soundscapes of Afrikaner folk music as ‘gasping, wheezing, asthmatic’.Footnote 93 In other words, the presence of the concertina heralded ill health.
As John Boke argues, an emphasis on physical decay within the concentration camps was at the heart of much of the wartime reporting, where health problems were related to a lack of ‘water, meat, clothing, being overworked, and the lack of freedom’.Footnote 94 Moreover, since the Afrikaner inmates had largely come to the camps from isolated rural areas, they often lacked immunities to the more urban diseases spread by the war.Footnote 95 Boke argues, moreover, that ‘the trauma of experiences such as seeing their homes destroyed and their animals slaughtered added to their debilitation’.Footnote 96
It is worth remembering that the early British justifications for the concentration camps were that they were a form of humanitarian liberal reform: thus, any ill health and death in the camps was presented as the fault of the (‘lazy’) inmates, not the ‘benevolent’ camp administrators. As Forth notes, ‘[a]t first glance, camps fit awkwardly within concurrent developments in British liberalism’.Footnote 97 However, at the time, the camps were justified as ‘products of a putatively, even quintessentially, “liberal” power – one dedicated, in theory if not in practice, to free movement, laissez-faire politics, and the rule of law’.Footnote 98 Therefore,
while free movement emerged as a fundamental right for model citizens in metropolitan Britain – respectable, industrious, and white – mobility augured danger and criminality for racial or social ‘inferiors’. Camps … remind us that securing liberal freedom in Britain depended on creating and ruling through self-acting individuals – a status categorically denied to the suspect collectivities of empire.Footnote 99
If the birth of the concentration camp evolved out of a mindset of ‘humanitarian’ imperialism, then wartime accounts of the concertina, as a metaphor for all that was ‘wrong’ with Afrikaner culture, can be understood within the same Victorian biopolitics of ‘health reform’ that conceived of the concentration camp as a location of so-called humanitarianism in the first place. As such, the concertina was an instrument inherently associated with the idleness and physical decay of the inmates (conditions that the British were, ostensibly, there to address) rather than with a musical opportunity for recovery (Victorian hymns would take on this role). By extension, it followed that the ‘diseased’ instrument could be used to lure men to death or imprisonment if they themselves could be framed by the British as being part of a degenerate white race. In reality, however, the camps created an environment where thriving physically was effectively impossible. And so, the reality of disease and death was echoed by the sound and image of an instrument that came to resemble – in both sound and image – physical deterioration itself.
As a metaphor for the trauma of disease and starvation, then, the presence of the concertina in the South African War came to be indelibly linked to the biopolitical history of decaying, incarcerated bodies. Like the scant food served to the concentration camp inmates, the concertina's gasping and wailing strains provided an audible metaphor for the failure of the camps to carry through their humanitarian claims in practice.Footnote 100 Indeed, the ostensible humanitarian goals of the camps had been to ‘preserve health and well-being, while addressing imperial security concerns raised by destitute and displaced populations considered socially, racially, or politically suspect’.Footnote 101 Thus, British discourses about the treatment of inmates during the war emerged from a late-Victorian liberal concept of the kinds of ‘administrative machinery oriented around welfare and social control’ that had originated in nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote 102 Likewise, according to Forth,
The same forces that generated prisons, factories, and the work-houses in nineteenth-century Britain created colonial camps (along with mining compounds, convict settlements, and other imperial enclosures). Like their metropolitan correlatives, famine, plague and wartime concentration camps were disciplinary institutions that operated according to putatively humane principles of ‘poor relief’ and ‘protective custody’. Britain encamped populations ‘for their own good’ and in the name of relief and humanity. Yet camps also responded to metaphors of social danger and contagion, which dehumanized those detained.Footnote 103
Late-Victorian appropriations of humanitarianism also reinforced the idea that liberal rule at this time was, as Forth concludes, ‘premised on the construction of a certain type of subject: trustworthy, self-governing and hygienic’.Footnote 104 A subject that had degenerated from this construction was by implication left outside of the humanitarian paradigm by virtue of their racial deterioration from a British self-governing standard.
Since the achievement of liberal agency in nineteenth-century Britain depended on the success of self-governing individuals,Footnote 105 the inmates in the concentration camps who did not thrive could therefore be blamed for not embracing the ‘protection’ that they were offered, despite the reality of lack of food, overcrowding and contagious disease. Many accounts of Afrikaner music-making within the camps reflected this ideology: if, as noted in the diary of one of the concentration camp teachers, the child inmates were indeed openly resistant to learning how to sing ‘God Save the King’,Footnote 106 then the broader allegiance to what was perceived to be the degenerate musical forms of ‘dreary’ Dutch psalm tunes and the wailing of concertina music could be seen as a symptom of their inability to adequately self-regulate, rendering the Boer prisoners stuck within patterns that replicated illiberal musical acts.Footnote 107 The concertina in this context had effectively become the sonic symbol of traumatic sickness and death; the instrument of those who had devolved into an ethnic status of starvation and suffering.
By the same token, British imperialist discourse also linked physical health to their own national character. Those who had the capacity for moral judgment, above and beyond their race or class, were able to achieve physical strength and good health. As Elizabeth van Heyningen argues, however, the Boers were not regarded as a race that had the ability to self-regulate, physically or morally: neither the blue book medical reports that came out of the camps nor the British newspapers attempted to ‘hide the scale of the deaths but they sought to justify British administration by [instead] pointing a finger at the insanitary behaviour of the Boers, their superstitious practice[s] of medicine and the failings of the mothers in caring for their children’.Footnote 108 This attitude offered a way to exonerate the camp administrators for the extraordinary levels of infectious disease in the camps, where typhoid, pneumonia and measles (which counted for around 43 per cent of all concentration camp deaths) proliferated, as did death by malnutrition.Footnote 109 Yet camp authorities resisted taking responsibility for these atrocities and were quick to point to the culturally determined sanitation practices of the inmates as the problem. As Boke notes, ‘the camp authorities made something of a fetish of ventilation and were vociferous in their complaints about the inmates’ poor hygiene’.Footnote 110 Of course, the notion that only Black and Afrikaner South Africans suffered from poor hygiene is erroneous, when considering that, in reality, ‘more British soldiers died of disease than as a result of enemy action’.Footnote 111
That said, the idea of Boer despondency and laziness as an explanation for the concentration camp deaths was necessary for British propaganda. The racially charged idea of an innate despondency is perhaps outwardly in tension with the idea of the Boers’ ‘natural curiosity’ for music as reported in the Daily Mail article, but, on the other hand, both a despondent approach to health and a susceptibility to ‘natural’ strains of music point to an inability to control one's body in the face of armed conflict, which rendered the British as having ultimate biopolitical control. The January 1902 medical report by the British doctor Thomas Hime, for example, noted that:
All the Medical Officers of the Camps have noticed the want of resisting power, the despondency and a tendency to take a gloomy view of the most trifling ailment, which prevails among the Refugees. On feeling in the least unwell it is no uncommon thing to see a Boer take to bed, and declare that he feels his end has come … I have been informed by Medical men who have been practicing many years in the country, this morbid condition was no less wide-spread among the Boers when resident on their own farms.Footnote 112
By extension, British Army propaganda routinely emphasized the health of the British soldiers, even though medical reports indicated that good physical health was far from common among the troops. However, a narrative of robust British militaristic health was vital to cultivating an imperial counterpart to Boer degeneracy. It is no coincidence that the war hero of the Siege of Mafeking, General Baden-Powell, was also the founder of the Boy Scouts,Footnote 113 itself an initiative to increase the physical health of the next generation of British soldiers, and an organization that was born largely as a reaction to the many working-class men in Britain (around one-third of those who should have been eligible) who could not qualify for the army due to physical conditions such as rickets.Footnote 114
This growing focus on ‘British health’, which, by implication, could distinguish ‘healthy’ British soldiers from ‘unhealthy’ imperial rivals and subjects, was also the start of Britain's welfare state.Footnote 115 Undoubtedly, the British press emphasized a liberal ‘humanitarian’ focus in order to quell concerns about the war's progress, despite growing criticisms within Britain about camp living conditions.Footnote 116 Yet an overarching narrative of British ethnic paternalism in relation to a ‘degenerate’ enemy enabled the cultural justification for the camps on so-called humanitarian grounds. The sonic legacies accompanying such degenerative frameworks, ultimately, are therefore a way to ‘sound’ the modes of cultural trauma that accompany this conflict.
Reframing ‘Deadly Work’: Cultural Trauma and the South African Concertina
As demonstrated above, the presence of the concertina in the South African War was constructed by the British as musically degenerative, an attitude that was perhaps only reinforced in racial attitudes to the significant role the instrument has since played in the development of Black and Afrikaner folk music in South Africa.Footnote 117 I argue, however, that in Afrikaner cultural memory the instrument also came to act as what Alexander has referred to as a ‘script’ of trauma that was ‘performed in the theatres of everyday collective life’.Footnote 118 Notably, the associations of the instrument in these stories with the Boer soldiers being physically ‘weak’ and therefore ‘susceptible’ to being lured out of their hiding places are particularly at odds with the threads of Afrikaner nationalism that takes as a point of pride the idea that Afrikaners never surrender. In fact, ‘Die Stem’, the anthem of Apartheid South Africa, ended with the lines: ‘Ons sal lewe, ons sal sterwe, ons vir jou Suid Afrika’, which in the English version translates as ‘We will live, we will die, we for thee, South Africa’.Footnote 119 For a culture in which surrendering was a last resort, then, the strains of the concertina have the potential to reinforce an unwavering allegiance to continually re-sounding the pain of the past.
Entrenched connotations of musical degeneracy have, indeed, continued to permeate constructions of the concertina in Afrikaner culture. As Willemien Froneman has explored, concertinas for twenty-first century Afrikaner communities still hold associations of wilderness and displacement, as well as being interwoven into histories of blackface minstrelsy not only in South Africa but also in Britain and across North America.Footnote 120 This comes from the instrument's associations with creating volatile wheezing, rasping sounds around the rural campfire; of the prevalence of the instrument in Black South African ensembles; and of the ‘savage’ possibilities of racial mixture within the varieties of hybrid ensembles that have permeated the concertina's history in South Africa, from its nineteenth-century colonial origins until today. The concertina, in Froneman's construction, also carries associations with ‘loss of composure and wild abandon’.Footnote 121 Moreover, because the concertina's colonial connotations verged on ideas of the ‘savage’, the ‘“screeching” and “wailing”’ tones of the concertina therefore ‘held the potential of activating a white musicality that was associated with, described, desired and derided as Black experience’.Footnote 122 The parallels here with Victorian ideas of musical degeneracy – that playing the concertina renders one racially ‘less-white’ – are stark.
Such legacies suggest that from the late nineteenth century the concertina gained strong associations of suffering and oppression for Afrikaner communities. Froneman has affectingly described the Afrikaner concertina as an instrument that struggled to transcend these associations:
The concertina carries with it all the pain of a personal cultural heritage fundamentally tainted by political transgression. It points to the initial success and inevitable demise of whiteness in Africa. It speaks of vulnerability, of frustration at unrealised potential, of work that has been in vain. It carries the burden of history, the attempts of people trying to live authentically despite this burden, the becoming unwanted on a continent one has called one's home. The concertina echoes the melancholy of the loss of power, of a way of life, of innocence, of freedom – a nostalgia that cannot hide one's own cultural complicity in this sorry state of affairs. Boeremusiek cannot exist in contemporary South Africa: it can only exist in the subjunctive.Footnote 123
This multifaceted network of memory aroused by the Afrikaner concertina raises questions about where further studies might go in exploring the soundscapes of degeneration, suffering and trauma associated with the instrument. Indeed, as noted by several historians of the South African War, the memory of the concentration camps at large, like the mass migration of the Voortrek, has become an enduring ‘emblem of Afrikaner suffering’,Footnote 124 with strong parallels drawn as early as the nineteenth century between the plight of the Afrikaner peoples and the Israelites being predestined to wander, dispossessed, in the desert.Footnote 125
An ideology of oppression and predestined suffering that is directly related to the trauma of the concentration camps has, furthermore, helped to reinforce Afrikaner nationalist ideology since the war. According to van Heyningen, Afrikaner nationalists who draw upon a ‘repetition of unending suffering’ to ‘justif[y] their demands for an independent political nation’, take direct inspiration from the pacifist writers who campaigned for better conditions in the concentration camps, such as Emily Hobhouse.Footnote 126 Legacies of societal mourning have thus been deeply embedded into historiographies of Afrikaner suffering and nationalist identity. Liz Stanley's extensive study of mourning, memory and the South African War has likewise claimed that the construction of the concentration camps in Afrikaner memory has enabled Afrikaner nationalists to avoid taking ‘responsibility for institutionalized racism and apartheid’, with the result that ‘what many people not think of as “the facts” and “the history” of the South African War concentration camps were constructed within nationalist political mythology, and are not supported by the historical record’.Footnote 127 In this way, if the ideas of a degenerate musical instrument were inflicted, consciously or unconsciously, on an oppressed community within a framework of communal suffering, then the traces of sonic trauma that were perpetuated in the decades to come can be linked back to a British imperial ideology of degeneracy, whether or not the ‘historical record’ of the Mafeking ruse was entirely accurate.
In modern-day South Africa, the concertina has often been seen to represent the perpetual nostalgia and grief about the ongoing soundscapes of Afrikaner music.Footnote 128 Froneman, for example, points to a pervasive rhetoric of ‘embarrassment’ over prevailing presumptions about Afrikaner nationalist music as unevolved, cringeworthy and unappreciated by mainstream South African musical discourses.Footnote 129 Further, studies of the cultures surrounding Afrikaner popular music more recently have suggested that boeremusiek has struggled to grasp a confident sense of its own identity throughout the twentieth century and continuing to the present day.Footnote 130
Drawing upon and expanding this previous work for a trauma studies framework, I contend that Volkan's psychological framework of ‘societal mourning’, an extension of Freud's concept of melancholia,Footnote 131 can be read as a way to understand how entire communities have been able to articulate and express themselves in relation to wartime trauma, not least through music. As Volkan maintains:
A massive trauma at the hands of the enemy can never remain a regional trauma. The feeling of humiliation and helplessness of the people of the affected sector is automatically felt by almost all those who belong to the same large-group identity, such as one defined by ethnicity or nationality. The society then starts behaving like an individual who suffers from perennial mourning.Footnote 132
As a culture of people who have often aligned themselves with a rhetoric of unending and predestined suffering,Footnote 133 Afrikaner communities from the time of the South African War to the present have also fixated, in musically defining themselves, on the mournful Dutch psalm tunes sung in the camps and the wheezing timbre of the concertina (however ‘embarrassing’ this may be),Footnote 134 rather than moving past these associations towards more positive presentations of their cultural musicality. Helpful here is Stanley's articulation of the complexity of Afrikaner mourning about the South African War, which, she claims, ‘raises fundamental ontological and epistemological questions about the nature of life and its boundaries with death, about memory, about emotions and their power in people's lives’.Footnote 135 Afrikaner mourning can thus have a myriad of results: ‘[t]urn the kaleidoscope one way’, claims Stanley, ‘and behold the suffering mourning Boer mother. Turn it another, and behold the vengeful Afrikaner nationalist. Both have to be seen and at one and the same time, for the Boer mother did indeed suffer and more than 22,000 of her children certainly died’.Footnote 136 Linking this context of a ‘double vision’ of Afrikaner identity to Derrida's notion that ‘mourning is interminable … right up until death’,Footnote 137 Stanley thus describes a ‘dynamis’, or ‘economy of exchanges’ through which the relationship of mourning and remembrance occurs. Through the process of ‘“tracing the name”, the past continues to reverberate in the present, with the borders between memory and forgetting shifting unpredictably as a consequence’.Footnote 138
Another recent perspective on trauma in the South African context is Chris N. van der Merwe and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's Narrating Our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma.Footnote 139 With reference to Apartheid, they trace the ‘unacknowledged trauma’ between ‘silence and disclosure’, in which ‘traumatic events that produce traumatic effects’ can sometimes ‘create a void’.Footnote 140 In trying to fill this void, they claim, ‘[t]he struggle with trauma is a struggle with memory’; ‘Trauma is not remembered in the same way as normal events … The repetitive intrusion of traumatic memory into the lives of survivors renders victims and survivors powerless, without any internal resources to control the intrusive traumatic memories’.Footnote 141
Returning to the idea of the sonic legacies of colonial degeneration, Van der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela's concept of a traumatic ‘void’ in South Africa provides a potentially productive space for strains of sonic trauma to be sounded. In this formulation, the idea of a traumatic Afrikaner concertina not only reinforces nineteenth-century British imperial acts of musical othering, but it also renders Afrikaner communities ‘stuck’ in the imagined, mournful musical soundscapes of a shared traumatic past. This is the kind of process that Volkan has described as ‘perennial mourning’.Footnote 142 A ‘perennial mourner’, for Volkan,
cannot identify with the enriching aspects of the mental representation of the lost object and the adaptive ego functions associated with this mental representation. This kind of mourner cannot find ‘suitable reservoirs’ for externalizing the representation of the lost person of thing. On the other hand, the mourner does not end up identifying totally with the lost object representation and does not, in other words go through a ‘normal’ mourning process or develop depression. Instead, these mourners keep the object representation of the lost person or thing within their self-representation as a specific and unassimilated ‘foreign body’. In the psychoanalytic literature such an unassimilated object representation or object image is known as an ‘introject’.Footnote 143
Volkan's description of perennial mourning may aptly apply to the metaphor of the concertina as an ‘introject’ in wartime discourses about traumatic soundscapes. Because Afrikaner communities suffered extensive losses, particularly through lack of food, ill health and death in the concentration camps, they were not, as a community, able to go through ‘normal’ processes of mourning.Footnote 144 As a result, at least in musical terms, the concertina may also be framed as an ‘object representation’ of trauma – what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas describes as a ‘mnemic object’.Footnote 145 In applying this notion to the lexicon of objects, Bollas writes that:
Objects can be said to have a lexical function when we employ them to ‘speak’ our idiom through the ‘syntax of self experience’. The mnemic object is a particular form of subject object that contains a projectively identified self experience, and when we use it, something of that self state stored in it will arise.Footnote 146
Bollas's idea of an object such as a musical instrument gaining a ‘syntax of self experience’ can be further applied to Wessels's notion that ‘[t]oo many South Africans suffer from historical amnesia; for this reason, they do not know who they are, where they come from, why their current situation obtains, or where they are heading’.Footnote 147 One way out of this, as Van der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela maintain, is to recognize that since we ‘inherit a communal past from our families, cities, countries; it is never possible to make a completely “new beginning”’ without a lot of individual reworking of one's positionality in relation to the narratives constructed by history.Footnote 148 Hence, as Froneman has noted, the concertina in the twenty-first century is ‘the lead instrument in boeremusiek and occup[ies an] iconic status in white Afrikaans culture’.Footnote 149 However, the instrument still retains seemingly permanent and inexorable connotations of groundlessness and displacement in Afrikaner communities, themes which have only been exacerbated by the rise of Afrikaner national music under and since Apartheid. As noted by Giliomee,
During the 1950s the Afrikaners in growing numbers saw themselves as part of a volksbeweging, a people on the move, putting their imprint on the state, defining its symbols, making bilingualism a reality, adapting to an urban environment and giving their schools and universities a pronounced Afrikaans character. Teachers made conscious efforts to increase the sense of distinctiveness through encouraging the singing of folk songs at schools and organizing volkspele or folk dances as extra-curricular activity. The Afrikaans radio service played seven hours of boeremusiek or Afrikaans folk music every week.Footnote 150
Afrikaner folk music, then, became a central component of constructing communal identity at a time when Afrikaner communities were recovering from the political conflicts of the twentieth century. And yet, as Froneman suggests, the role of the concertina within boeremusiek did not represent progress – rather, it symbolized being even more stuck in the past, despite – or perhaps because of – its ongoing presence as a nostalgic genre. As Van der Waal and Robins have explored, twentieth-century nationalist nostalgia for the war permeated Afrikaner music even through the post-Apartheid era, when the popular song ‘De la Rey’ ‘helped to reassert the imagined boundaries of white Afrikanerdom’, while also reinscribing ‘nostalgic feelings among a middle-class Afrikaans-speaking white population that experienced itself as besieged’.Footnote 151
Volkan's notion that ‘[m]any perennial mourners spontaneously use the term “frozen” when they speak of their dreams’,Footnote 152 could be a useful framework for approaching musical associations of Afrikaner ethnic suffering that can permeate a society's musical identity for generations despite other societal and musical changes. This becomes additionally problematic when a community does not feel that they have musical agency in relation to an oppressor. As DeNora has argued in Music in Everyday Life, ‘[a]t the level of daily life, music has power … To be in control, then, of the soundtrack of social action is to provide a framework for the organization of social agency, a framework for how people perceive (consciously or subconsciously) potential avenues of conduct’.Footnote 153 When applied to communal identification, in Volkan's framework, the discordant soundscapes of the concertina become a ‘shared linking object’, functioning in the same way as a physical memorial.Footnote 154 The prospects for overcoming generational trauma for Afrikaner communities were therefore extraordinarily difficult in light of the traumatic discourses of ethnic degeneration that were applied to them by the British. Accordingly, narratives of suffering were deeply engrained within Afrikaner historiographies of the South African War.
The Boer concertina, then, ‘sounded’ a legacy of suffering that was both imposed by the imperial enemy and reinforced by nostalgic narratives of generational suffering. The journalistic narratives of the concertina's ‘deadly work in the trenches’ thus are historically significant not so much for their historical accuracy but for what they implied about an instrument's visceral – and potentially deadly – effect on the bodies of its Boer listeners. Walter Benjamin memorably wrote that ‘[t]o articulate the past historically’ does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” … It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’.Footnote 155 Benjamin's historical comment can be usefully applied to Volkan's process of perennial mourning, where, for an individual or a community, traumatic associations might be repeatedly triggered by the sound of an instrument or the flash of a visual symbol. Notably, the concertina has remained conspicuously separate from British South African musical practices.Footnote 156 Moreover, the potentially traumatic connotations of the instrument have been reinforced by the fact that the rise of Afrikaner folk culture was bolstered by the perpetuation of cyclic suffering going back to the Voortrekkers, which only reinforces a sense of perennial mourning. As Farrell has argued, ‘[p]eople not only suffer trauma; they use it, and the idea of it, for all sorts of ends, good and ill. The trope can be ideologically manipulated, reinforced, and exploited’.Footnote 157 Thus – and Farrell's notion may be usefully applied to an aesthetics of Afrikaner folk music – ‘[m]any cultures have systematically induced trauma or near-trauma in an effort to reinforce the conviction of a ground of experience and to strengthen group bonding’.Footnote 158
With its wailing sonorities, the concertina as a ‘suffering’ instrument is thus a particularly apt sonic symbol of repeated physical suffering in Afrikaner culture. Froneman, likewise, locates the Afrikaner folk concertina today within a soundscape that is redolent of congenital respiratory pain:
In Afrikaans the concertina is sometimes called a donkielong – a donkey's lung. The term points to the braying sound of the instrument and to its mechanisms of respiration. The concertina ‘screeches’ and ‘wails’ when air is forced out of its lungs, or ‘sighs’ in a slow exhalation of breath. The commonplace metaphor of the concertina as a living, breathing thing holds no subtle poetry. Like a human voice it ‘quivers’ … with emotion when shaked on held notes, effecting a vibrato of sorts. ‘Gasping’ for air, phrases end off belabouredly before the next ‘wheezy’ inhalation. For many commentators since the late nineteenth-century, beauty and gainliness were not what the concertina was about. Its charm lay precisely in its existential, yet mesmerizing unpleasantness.Footnote 159
That the timbre of the concertina may ‘sound’ a form of nationalistic identification that is simultaneously discomforting, connoting a wheezing rasp of a nineteenth-century invalid, colonial inmate, or even farm animal, reinforces a received, inherited association with cultural trauma and physical decay; it renders its listeners captive only in its ‘mesmerizing unpleasantness’.
Conclusion: Hearing Sonic Trauma
Did the concertina really lack any ‘subtle poetry’Footnote 160 when it was allegedly used in the South African trenches to lure Afrikaner soldiers to their death? Perhaps the aesthetic situation was indeed more complex, as there should be room for the Boer soldiers to have sounded their own musical subjectivities against the British Pied Piper. In closing I would like to draw upon Suzanne Cusick's comments on the musical subjectivities of prisoners who were tortured during the USA's War on Terror. As Cusick claims,
The destruction of prisoners’ subjectivities partly depends on the acoustically and philosophically salient fact that manipulations of acoustical environment always produce the somatic effect of sympathetic vibration. Always compelled by the physical properties of sound to vibrate in their very bones with those sounds, the prisoners subjected to the music programme have no choice but to become, themselves, the characteristic sounds of their captors. This is, I argue, an ultimate violence that batters prisoners’ bodies, shatters (however temporarily) the capacity to control the acoustical relationality that is the foundation of subjectivity and blasts away all sense of privacy, leaving in its place a feeling of paradoxically unprivate isolation.Footnote 161
Music is an effective means of torture in Cusick's study because the prisoners (and guards) have no means of unhearing what is played to them. The same can be said of the British construction of the Boer soldiers in the trenches – being arrested by the strains of an instrument so closely associated with Boer farm life, the Boer soldiers are compelled to frame the music as welcoming rather than deadly. Only once the concertina had been established as a trope of Afrikaner cultural trauma did the sound of the instrument simultaneously bolster British constructions of racial degeneracy and establish the instrument as a symbol of recurrent Afrikaner suffering. If the structures of discipline in the context of the South African War were indeed what Forth has referred to as ‘transformative technologies’,Footnote 162 then the negative transformation of the concertina from a degenerate folk instrument into an audible signifier of cultural trauma demonstrates how the concertina in the context of the South African War can itself reflect the power structures placed on those in captivity, and also embody an anthropomorphized emblem of physical decay.Footnote 163
Afrikaner trauma, ‘transmitted across a number of generations’,Footnote 164 has thus deeply influenced the collective psyches of ostracized societies long after the cultural atrocities have taken place.Footnote 165 As Boersma notes, this is further complicated for Afrikaner communities today because the legacy of victimhood from the South African War is confronted by the trauma of being a perpetrator during Apartheid, which has left the state of ‘being Afrikaans’ in a ‘troubled condition’ that is difficult to resolve: ‘Afrikaners must manage the emotions of loss, guilt, and shame. They have to confront their lost social status, and the burden of stigma on their ethnic identity’.Footnote 166 And as Abulof has claimed, ‘[j]ust as Zionists looked to history, not least the Holocaust, in envisioning existential threats, so Afrikaner collective memory was scarred by the Anglo-Boer War’.Footnote 167 Abulof concludes, moreover, that the ‘British threat, however, went beyond the war, impairing the Afrikaners’ quest for ontological security (forging a sound Afrikaner identity) and epistemic security (consolidating Afrikanerdom)’.Footnote 168 Jumping forward several decades, Abulof claims that Apartheid constituted a ‘re-deepening of the “Abyss Within”’, where post-Apartheid Afrikaners confronted the double danger of struggling to secure a political future while also tending to the ‘scars of the past’.Footnote 169 If such ‘scars’ might be reframed to also have sonic elements, then it is worth putting pressure on the question of whether the concertina, as a legacy of the South African War, can ‘sound’ a new ontological security, shaped by both oppression and resistance.
In today's international political climate, where spaces of racial incarceration are increasing globally – only for many reports of their atrocities to be undercut in some sectors as ‘fake news’ – it seems all the more incumbent upon our discipline to engage with the stark implications of possible transgenerational traumas upon marginalized communities, and to grapple with how these traumas might influence musical cultures in the future. Forth has recently made this connection in reference to the link between the ‘humanitarianism’ that justified the British imperial concentration camps, and the accusations of ‘fake news’ against Americans who have recently use the term ‘concentration camp’ as a means of describing the state of migrant detention centres under the Trump administration.Footnote 170 In other words, forms of wrongful incarceration that are justified by ‘humanitarian’ principles have not disappeared, and risk continual perpetuation without direct intervention.
As DeNora has proposed, the ‘history of music in the West is punctuated with attempts to enlist and censure music's powers’.Footnote 171 The concertina has certainly been enlisted, censured, and reimagined. Its potentially (dis)comforting voice in the soundscapes of Afrikaner music even today speaks to the legacies of trauma latent in its wheezing registers. If these timbral registers have been inscribed into Afrikaner identity as a mode of communal suffering, then the enduring presence of the concertina in the postcolonial world raises only more questions about the extent to which the aesthetics of an instrument once framed as a technology of war might eventually be raised out of a cycle of perennial mourning, and into a space of potential reconciliation.
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