Afrikaners is Plesierig! Voëlvry Music, Anti-apartheid Identities and Rockey Street Nightclubs in Yeoville (Johannesburg), 1980s-90s

Abstract

In the 1980s, Afrikaans-speaking young South Africans increasingly disassociated themselves from the dominant institutions, i.e., the Calvinist church, the state and the parental generation. Their oppositional ideas could be partly conveyed through Voëlvry, rock-punkish music at the time labelled 'Boerepunk' and 'Alternative Afrikaans Music Movement', which lasted for a short span of time, between the 1980s and the early 1990s. Voëlvry contributed to some extent to changing the widespread images of Afrikaners as inherently conformist. Drawing on novel oral sources, newspapers and secondary literature, this article argues that Yeoville (Johannesburg) - Rockey Street in particular - as a space of cross-cultural interaction facilitated the expression and popularisation of anti-apartheid identities through music. Two popular nightclubs on Rockey Street were Rumours, a jazz club started in 1979, and the Black Sun. Rumours became the central meeting place for the Anglophone Yeoville...