Hello everybody on HIVE, and especially the AFRITUNES Community. My name is Jasper, and I'm writing (and singing) to you from Cape Town, South Africa! Welcome to Week 107 of AFRITUNES.
This is my first week contributing to AFRITUNES. Now, a lot of people on Hive seem surprised when I say that I am from South Africa, probably because I am white and my home language is English? The truth is that I was born in South Africa, and so were my parents, and so were 3 out of 4 of their parents! We can trace some of my family back to some of the original wine farms in Cape Town, and we even still have some of the diary of an ancestor who came via ship to escape the Scottish and Irish potato famine in about the 1850s…
So, South Africa is definitely my home! In fact, about 7-8% of all South African people are white. About half speak English and the other half speak Afrikaans.
I love South Africa and some of the special flavours of music we get here, and I look forward to doing a few posts on AFRITUNES to bring you music from South Africa, or to show you my original songs that have South African inspiration…
Today, let me tackle the song "Shosholoza" quickly. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shosholoza
Basically, this is a traditional song. First it was sung by Ndebele miners from just over the Zimbabwe border on their way to work in the mines in South Africa. Because Ndebele is a very similar language to isiZulu and isiXhosa, a lot of South African miners also began singing this song.
It is similar to an American chain gang song, where it was sung to make repetitive manual labour like digging with spades or pick-axes less onerous and to create unity in a team. It has a call-and-answer structure as well, where a soloist will sing the main line first, and the rest of the singers will repeat it! This is quite common in traditional music here.
The song was also sung in prisons to make their manual labour times pass by more easily, and the great Nelson Mandela has recalled singing this song during his time as a Political prisoner on Robben Island, before eventually being released and becoming our first democratically elected President after Apartheid ended.
Because of the energy and unity the song creates, as well as it’s theme of pushing forward like a train, the song is also a very rousing one to sing at sporting events and is often sung by South African crowds to motivate our soccer and rugby teams. It has become our unofficial second National Anthem as a result.
Here are two example videos of where it is used to this effect. The Soundtrack to the movie Invictus, that told the story of Nelson Mandela and the unifying effect South Africa’s first rugby World Cup victory had on the Nation, shortly after Apartheid ended:
More recently, here’s the young Ndlovu Youth Chior singing the song to motivate a more recent Springbok rugby team!
Here are the lyrics and their translation, as sourced from the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shosholoza):
Lyrics for “Shosholoza” (Traditional Song)
Shosholoza (call)
Shosholoza (response)
Kulezo ntaba
Stimela siphume South Africa
Go forward (call)
Go forward (response)
From those mountains
On this train from South Africa
Wen' uyabaleka (call)
Wen' uyabaleka (response)
Kulezo ntaba
Stimela siphume South Africa
You are running away (call)
You are running away (response)
From those mountains
On this train from South Africa
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