BIG READ: The origin story of an anthem born in choir, coal and community

The past few weeks have been a time for anthems. Part of the iconography building up around Springbok captain Siya Kolisi is his lusty singing with closed eyes of all sections of our awkward national hymn, the close-up camera shots interspersed with those of spectators from all races belting it out with him. Social cohesion is the nationalistic concept it is meant to serve, and the threat of cohesion was probably why our disrupter-in-chief Julius Malema had to get in there some time ago to call for the abandonment of the anthem, or at least its purification into Nkosi Sikelele’ iAfrika only.

Personally, I would not mind in the least if Malema got his way. Even before my rebellious days as a youngster refusing to sing Die Stem, I hated the idea of a national anthem being forced on captive school kids and the cheap patriotism extorted from them. Just look at the expressions of consternation followed by faked conviction when Argentinians have to commit musical sin by singing their convoluted anthem at the start of international sporting ties. I couldn’t care less what happens to ours.

But there is another reason for my tug of the beret to Malema: the beauty of Nkosi Sikelele’. I don’t recall where I heard it the first time, at some UDF (United Democratic Front) gathering or from Soweto youths hiding in my neighbour’s house, but I do remember the tears it brought to my eyes. In it Enoch Sontonga somehow managed to capture the suffering of generations of Africans and the hope that slowly things will become better, a dirge and a psalm of hope at the same time.

Here’s the thing, though: while nobody believes Sontonga may have cribbed it, many musical experts contend that its source is a Welsh hymn. It will always remain an African hymn, not for nothing the anthem of several countries, but is it a repurposed song or, dare one mention that word, a case of cultural appropriation?

Earlier in 2023 I stayed for a month in Sully just outside Cardiff. Close by was Penarth and when I heard that the composer of the averred Welsh source material was buried there, I had to investigate. Penarth itself is an upmarket town with a photogenic yacht club, Herbert Baker-like sandstone double storeys, charity shops to die for and a pretty park sloping down to the sea where you can have the best fish and chips for miles around on the pier.

Joseph Parry is buried at St Augustine’s on top of Penarth’s highest hill, in a graveyard just sufficiently overgrown with thistle and wildflowers to enable an engrossing hour spent peering at tombstones colonised by lichens probably centuries old. There is a monument at his grave, which is well tended, attesting to the reverence with which the Welsh still regard the composer of the first opera in Cymraeg, their language.

As it happened, various concerts with Welsh fare were on offer in the area and we spent some more reverential time at the great Cardiff Cathedral. All was relaxed and there was some great jazz among the prayer books. The magnificence of its organ was offset by the colourful socks of the organist, which the audiovisual technicians every now and then zoomed into for broadcast on giant television screens. But I found something that would be reinforced later: I could not understand the great regard in which Parry was held.

On every programme at least one or two Parry compositions were included, one of them invariably Myfanwy (a woman’s name meaning “beloved”), composed in 1875. Said to be based on a 14th-century story of unrequited love and longing, I failed to develop a misty eye or even warm to it; in fact, I found it rather dull. But around me the soft sighs of satisfaction went up as soon as the first notes were struck, notes one could easily guess every Welsh child grew up with.

Sontonga’s purported reworking of it into Nkosi Sikelele’ seemed to me to be far superior, as if the South African had the perspicacity to see through its vague lilts to an essence that would become far more compelling than Parry’s hymn.

Aberystwyth, the hymn tune used for Jesus, Lover of my Soul written by John Wesley, the great spirit of the Methodist church, fared a little better. After hearing it a few times, it began to grow on me, albeit like one of those graveyard lichens needing a century for some colour to show. But still, while one could recognise some phrases and a homologous structure, Sontonga’s purported reworking of it into Nkosi Sikelele’ seemed to me to be far superior, as if the South African had the perspicacity to see through its vague lilts to an essence that would become far more compelling than Parry’s hymn — which was, after all, only one of the 5,000 produced by Wesley.

The other explanation for this lack of appreciation of mine could be historical or cultural. My roots on one part of my family tree in English settlerdom would always make me feel at home in Britain, but my Afrikaans trunk could not avoid the jolt, mild as it may have been, on seeing the wages of empire displayed in a side chapel at Cardiff Cathedral. One tall wall was covered in plaques commemorating battles all over the world in which the famed Welsh Regiment had taken part, and also trumpeted were a few sites from the Anglo-Boer War, in a concentration camp of which my grandmother was born.

Was this the reason I was beginning to shuffle towards the side of those who reject similarities between the two hymn tunes as taking pattern pursuit a step too far? But as I listened to people among the pillars and pews of empire around me speaking of Parry, or looking in the right internet places on their phones to answer my proddings, another, far richer seam for mining began to emerge.

Travelling from Penarth to the Cardiff inner city one passes one after another rectangle of seawater with concrete banks invaded and cracked up by weeds and empty canals dotted up by grey, rotting pylons of wood and rusty bolsters of steel connecting them. All fairly neat and the relentless entropy is being held in check but these vacant areas have been resolutely abandoned and are ignored by the yachts of the global rich passing by.

Apart from male choirs and rugby, Wales is coal country. Dozens of coal docks are what Cardiff’s — and surrounding towns like Penarth’s — wealth is based on. It was the first city in Britain where a £1m cheque was written. The toil and suffering of hundreds of thousands of Welsh coal workers are the stuff of legend and literature across the land and the great horror of Aberfan in 1966, when 116 primary schoolchildren were killed by a coal slag heap that had collapsed is part of the Welsh psych and identity. How even the Queen of England was persuaded to come over and commiserate made it into an episode of the TV series The Crown.

Parry’s early life was typical of thousands of others. School was barely able to be called that, it must have been far worse than the quality of primary education in certain areas of SA in our times — when he left at age nine he had not yet learnt to read and write. One of eight children crammed into a stone-cold row house in Merthyr Tydfil just north of Cardiff, he had to go and work in the mines to help the family survive.

Child labour was notoriously cruel and callous, but at least Parry was not small enough to become a chimney sweep, a boy who had to crawl up narrow flues and who not uncommonly perished when stuck, either from suffocation or the heat of the chimney bricks. He worked for 56 hours a week and took home a halfpenny more than 12p. At 12 years old his father rescued him by arranging a job beside him at the furnaces of an ironworks.

What kept them going was music, the whole family sang in the chapel choir and his mother did solos at church gatherings. Music in Wales had a social function and practices of its famous male choirs and brass bands were occasions for doling out charity to the most deserving, for general education and training, and were breeding grounds for activism and the labour unions of the future. Today choral structures are still broadly aligned with the Welsh Labour Party.

But the Parrys took the other route of escape from the almost unbearable exploitation by mine owners growing rich and transforming Cardiff into one of the most genteel, if parvenu, cities in Europe. Originally a town grown around a Roman fort, and later designated as the seat from where the occupying Normans and English aristocracy held colonial sway over Wales, in 1801 its population was only 1,870. By 1901 it was 164,000, most of its people toiling on the dockyards that were being carved out in the bayside. By 1913 Cardiff had been anointed the world’s largest coal-exporting port.

Long before that, around 1853, a steady stream of workers were exporting themselves, to the land of the free, home of the brave, America, where class was said not to stand in the way of entrepreneurship. The Parrys joined and found themselves in Danville, Pennsylvania, where a large Welsh community had been established. There, the social functions of Welsh choral singing drew them in too, and some members of the Parry family found their American feet as singers.

Joseph was by far the most talented and during a spell of unemployment tagged along with a singing band formed by three fellow workers. One taught sight-reading classes and when he realised he had a prodigy on his hands, began teaching Joseph harmony as well. At 17 Parry was still unable to read and write, and so his teacher wove in some ABCs into his musical teachings too. Soon Parry outperformed his mentor in both.

It was not long before he began composing. What followed was a comedy of errors. Feeling his Welsh roots tugging, he sent the score of a march by post to the National Eisteddfod of Wales in Llandudno. Unlike today, when the name is associated with school kids egged on by fiercely competitive mums, the National Eisteddfod was an almost cultic adult competition with tremendous local prestige and cachet for the winners. Believing he was a famous musician in the US, the adjudicators awarded the absent Joseph Parry first prize in 1863.

For his next entry, he travelled from Pennsylvania to Aberystwyth. However, the score, sent earlier for advance adjudication, had got lost in the post. To compensate, he was declared pencerdd America (chief musician of America).

For his next entry, he travelled from Pennsylvania to Aberystwyth, probably the most Welsh of all cities and towns. However, the score, sent earlier for advance adjudication, had got lost in the post. To compensate, he was declared pencerdd America (chief musician of America) and given membership of the Orsedd, an elite society for creative Welshmen.

His fame grew hand over fist from then on, in Wales and the US, with Queen Victoria as one of his greatest fans commissioning several private performances of his work. But only in 1874 was he able to leave the musical school he was running in Danville to take up a post at the new Aberystwyth University, where lectures were given in Cymraeg. The fact that his most famous song is known as Aberystwyth and not by its Methodist moniker Jesus, Lover of my Soul speaks to its nationalist functions — the town had always been the centre of what little public resistance there was to the repression of Cymraeg in the years before Wales gained its own parliament.

Was that the reason for my failure to warm to it, being as a non-Welshman unattuned to the nationalistic undertones? And is it possible that such a vaguely dissident context might have been what attracted Sontonga?

It is known that Sontonga wrote Nkosi Sikelele’ iAfrika in 1897 while he was the choirmaster at the Nancefield Methodist mission. By that time the industrialisation of SA had changed the subcontinent completely. In the rural areas of the British colonies and Boer republics the subjugation and break-up of local tribes were in full swing, creating the stream of tens of thousands of traumatised refugees to the new mining cities. There they barely survived on what were virtually slave wages. 

Like the Parrys, to alleviate their suffering, some sang in choirs. The Welsh missionaries, coming from their own tradition of dissidence and social service, might have seen a way of mutual identification by passing on the Welsh composer’s hymns and songs to the likes of Sontonga, whose musical prowess would have been evident.  

Sontonga’s song was taken up in 1925 as a means to help foster another kind of nationalism than that of the Welsh when it was made the official anthem of the first truly multiracial SA nationalistic movement, the ANC. By that time Sontonga had died at age 33, in 1903, followed shortly after by Parry, in 1905. Parry’s funeral in Penarth was attended by 7,000 people, Sontonga’s grave was unknown until it was discovered in the Braamfontein cemetery, where he now, like Parry in Penarth, has a monument dedicated to him.

It remains undecided, and probably will always be, whether Nkosi Sikelele’ was indeed based on Aberystwyth. Those who reject the idea may be motivated by discomfort over such a rousing anticolonial and anti-apartheid anthem having its roots in the music of Christianity, that foundation of the British Empire. Yet it remains an anthem to dissidence in the first place, as when the Swazi government tried to forbid its singing during antiroyalist demonstrations or when it is sung in Zimbabwe, where it was replaced in 1994 by a “more Zimbabwean” national anthem.

Whatever the case, it differs sufficiently from Parry’s Aberystwyth for one to declare that, at the least, it has been Africanised. Malema can relax, he won’t have to perform one of his characteristic flip-flops and suddenly reject this part of the anthem too for being too Eurocentric. But there is the opportunity to place it in a wider ambit than just the narrowly nationalistic. Both songs emerged from worker culture, from the worlds of the suppressed and exploited.

Of course, another way to approach the issue would be to see its being yoked together with the completely different music of Die Stem, in the original Afrikaans and the laboured English translation, as an expression of a new nationalism that like all other nationalisms will end up being violent and repressive. That was the fate of Parry’s work too: at one brass concert of the world-famous Cory Band in Cardiff compositions of his were performed side by side with French marches used during the Algerian war of independence in which a million people died. Our neighbouring countries have long talked of the SA subimperialism that lies behind the xenophobia so prevalent in our townships.

If such an analysis is true, it would only reinforce the need to rescue Nkosi Sikelele’ from political exploitation, and that can only be done by going back to its roots. Choir, coal, community ... rather than the current knee-jerk anti-European rhetoric and ideological posturing driving the post-apartheid politics of the formerly dispossessed, the EFF and its ANC acolytes would do better to cultivate such commonalities in the historical beds of colonial exploitation, shallow as they may be.

Lethal exploitation has not been confined to Africans. The anticolonial flipsides are there too, all over Europe, to be utilised, even if only for purposes of solidarity as Africans seek a better future.