Va. Lyrics of Protest - On Events

It is described that “words are Nortje’s ammunition, and they motivate and invigorate him.” Nortje and Brutus use words to convey their stance against apartheid. Poets’ use of words inspired Masekela’s goal of his own music to function in a corresponding way. In his autobiography, Masekela writes that “poetry was the language of an internal revolution that had spread all over the world, the liberation of voice…and [poetry] reminded me of the underlying urge of my own art–the impulse to change the world, right the wrongs, and tell the truth, through the power of my own voice” (Masekela 243).

So, as poetry does, Makeba and Masekela’s song lyrics function to raise resistance to apartheid’s racism. One method is to highlight specific apartheid events that clearly show the magnitude of the regime’s evil. Brutus describes this as “[seizing] on certain high points - things that represent the essence of the society, the nature of the society” ("Dennis Brutus reads from his work"). Poetry and music call attention to these occurrences, preventing them from being remembered as “just a little atrocity” (Masekela, “Soweto Blues”).

For example, Brutus issues a plea not to forget the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. In
"Sharpeville," he recreates the scene and writes that the event was the epitome of racial prejudice - “Remember Sharpeville / bullet-in-the-back day… / Nowhere is racial dominance / more clearly defined / nowhere the will to oppress / more clearly demonstrated” (Brutus 88). With similar purpose of exposure, Makeba sings a song "Hauteng" to remember South African mineworkers who had been “massacred at Western Deep Level mines in Carletonville in South Africa in 1973” (Makeba 136).

In addition, both Brutus and Masekela write pieces about the Soweto massacre – the government’s putdown of students’ protest to the Bantu Education Act of 1953. In “Remembering June 16, 1976,” Brutus writes that the murdered students “return to join a new generation” in protest. Through this, Brutus urges for the students’ courage of resistance to be continued in the ongoing protest. In his "Soweto Blues," which Makeba sang, Masekela not only recounts the events of the tragedy but, as Brutus did, issues a call to action. As Makeba sings, “Where were you men when the children were facing guns and throwing stones,?” Masekela implies that people need to stand up and support the activism that the students displayed. These songs about apartheid’s events serve to keep fresh the realities of the mass persecutions suffered at those times and to flame the resiliency displayed by those martyred.