682. South Africa: Mandela and the Death of Apartheid (Part 6)

21:39Tom Holland:Yeah, because South Africa would never have been given the Rugby World Cup had Mandela and the ANC not essentially given it the green light even before they become the government. And as you say, Mandela has picked up on the significance that rugby plays in the kind of Africana soul.

21:56Dominic Sandbrook:And by the way, you can't emphasize enough how unusual this is because black South Africans did not, by and large, support the Springbok rugby team. Their sport was not rugby. It was football. Rugby was the game of the oppressor. So for Mandela to have any interest in it at all is groundbreaking, stunning.

22:17Tom Holland:Well, it's part of a kind of broader program of self-education that Mandela puts himself through in prison to try basically to try and understand the enemy. So he is learning Afrikaans, he's learning about the history of the Afrikaners, their heroes, their mythology, you know, how they understand their role in Africa. Because of course, by this point, they have been in Africa for centuries and centuries. So they are essentially an African people. And Mandela absolutely kind of recognizes that, that they have to be part of the settlement that Mandela is hoping will come. and so as well as studying africana history he also tries to befriend his jailers he treats them with respect in the expectation which increasingly the longer he's in prison comes to be met that the jailers will treat him with respect in return and he ends up great friends in particular with one guard christo brand and it's brand who in the late 1980s starts to educate mandela in rugby as you said, it's not just about the rules.

23:16Tom Holland:It's not just about the players. It's about the role that it plays in Africana culture. And so Mandela comes out of prison entirely understanding how potentially significant rugby might be. And he sees, I think, the World Cup as a way of securing two separate goals. So the first is that it might help win the support of Afrikaners who are the most inveterant opponents of accommodation with black majority rule, it might help them kind of accept this new multiracial settlement. As you said, for most black Africans, rugby is the archetypal sport of the white oppressor, the Afrikaner oppressor. And so radicals in the ANC, they want to see, for instance, the distinctive green jersey of the Springboks band.

24:07Tom Holland:They want to see the name Springboks band as well. And they push this demand and Mandela flatly refuses. Mandela has also made a point of reaching out to the captain of the Springboks, who is a guy called Francois Pienaar, getting Pienaar on board with the exciting progressive new slogan for the South African rugby team, one team, one country. And Pienaar is essentially what AI would come up with if you typed in africana rugby player you know he he doesn't really look like matt damon who plays him in um invictus and who just looks so unbelievably american it's not true penar looks

24:46Dominic Sandbrook:very very south african he looks incredibly hard doesn't he he's from a working class transvaal family so he's from the car one of the kind of great africana heartlands and he looks like he's hewn out of wood or something very blonde incredibly tall gigantic an absolute alpha male

25:03Tom Holland:but he's very smart he's educated and he's a deeply christian man and he is invited to the presidential palace for tea meets mandela is completely charmed by mandela and mandela in turn is very impressed with pinar said about him he did not seem to me at all to be the typical product of an apartheid society. It was a pleasure to sit down with him. And Pinar buys into Mandela's kind of goal. And between them, they managed to get the rest of the spring box on board, so that by the time the World Cup comes around, all the South African team are aware of their mission, which essentially is not just to win the tournament, although that would be a massive bonus, but essentially to serve as symbols of the new Africa, you know, one team, one nation.

25:49Tom Holland:But it's not just about winning the support of white South Africans for the new constitution for Mandela. He also has another goal, and this is much more difficult, which is to get black South Africans to back the spring box as their team, as their boys. I mean, obviously, they hate the spring box because they were seen as a symbol of apartheid. But as you said, it's also because football is the mass game for for black south africans they don't people most black south africans don't understand rugby and those who did understand it if they watched a rugby match an international rugby match would always as a point of principle support the spring box opponents and it is an issue that going into the 1995 tournament the south african team only has one non-white player in the entire squad and this is chester williams chester williams who is known as the black pearl yeah so it is i think for mandela a massive gamble he's got to get the white rugby supporters backing the new multi-racial settlement and he's got to get the black south africans supporting the spring box as an emblem of this new south africa so how does he do it i mean

26:58Dominic Sandbrook:the key thing obviously is they win the world cup yeah that's a huge help isn't it so there is a conspiracy theory isn't there i know we have some listeners in new zealand and they will be absolutely pulling their hair out at this point and throwing their phones across the room because they will tell you tom that their team were poisoned before the game they had food poisoning so like gordon banks yeah well much more than gordon banks so a lot of the team they say had food poisoning they were poisoned by the south africans and um yeah that's what the south africans want now at this point our south african listeners will be going mad well their manager

27:29Tom Holland:said that it was dodgy milk yeah i mean what is definitely a factor i think is the presence of mandela himself huge yeah at the match and mandela who's an incredibly cunning cunning operator at every level i mean he plays a blinder so before the the tournament begins he does everything he can to get you know the anc the the kind of larger black constituency beyond them in south africa backing the the spring box he's absolutely insisting this is not a time for school settling this is a time for generosity he goes to the spring box training camp before the tournament begins he shakes all the hands of the various players he's made sure he knows what their names are he addresses them by name and then he goes out and he publicly urges everyone in south africa to back them he says we have adopted these young men as our boys as our own children as our own stars and it helps as you say that the spring box keep winning and winning and winning and they end up in the final.

28:29Tom Holland:Mandela's most iconic performance of all comes on the day of the final because he turns up very famously wearing a spring box shirt, the green shirt that had been an emblem of apartheid for so many decades. And on it, he has the number six, which is Pinar's number on the back. And wearing this green shirt he goes down into the bowels of this immense stadium and first of all he visits the the all blacks in their dressing room and then he goes to see the spring box and this has a huge psychological impact on both teams because the all blacks to have the man who's probably the most admired person in the world at this point turn up in a spring box journey i mean And their synapses are absolutely fizzing with this.

29:22Tom Holland:They can't kind of synthesize it. And it's reported that Lomu was daunted to meet Mandela. And perhaps this had a kind of dispiriting impact on him. Whereas for the Springbacks, of course, they are massively inspired by meeting Mandela. But the greatest moment is yet to come. Because Mandela, after he's been to the dressing rooms, then steps out onto the rugby pitch itself. onto the field of what Carlin in his book describes as Afrikanerdom's holy of holies, the national rugby stadium. And it could so easily have gone wrong. He could have been booed. I mean, worst of all, he could have been shot.

30:00Tom Holland:You know, there might have been a kind of, you know, a racist sniper up there in the stands, but it's a triumph. And the overwhelmingly Afrikaner crowd start chanting Nelson Nelson so it's like us when we're talking about the Battle of Trafalgar and you can hear it on the on on YouTube it's a kind of amazing kind of rapturous greeting of a man who by most of the people in that stadium had been seen as a terrorist only a few years before and Mandela takes off his cap he waves it in the air you see it on the on YouTube he's smiling he's looking as as happy as it's possible for a man to look and mornay de plessy who was the spring box manager great former south african rugby player captain yeah he said it of this moment it was a moment of magic a moment of wonder it was the moment i realized that there really was a chance this country could work this man was showing that he could forgive totally and now they white side africa rugby white side africa they showed in their response to him that they

31:05Dominic Sandbrook:too wanted to give back oh that's a very good version of the accent that we people around the world have come to love thank you maybe he's a rugby player i should have made it sound slightly more formidable but so yeah i it sounded familiar i was focusing on the vowels yeah it sounded formidable in a slightly camp way anyway the clock shakes out towards the start of the match and of course you know it's a final of a world cup yeah and they're going to begin by seeing their national anthems so a tense moment well not just tense i mean it is the most symbolically

31:38Tom Holland:freighted moment of the entire match the entire tournament perhaps the entire spell of time since mandela had been released from prison so the two teams new zealand and south africa they have to sing their respective national anthems and of course the tension you could cut with a knife Dominic to coin a phrase. So we have the Imolongi Cantu Choral Society who are going to be taking the lead in singing the anthems and they are a black choir from Soweto which is the sprawling township outside Johannesburg where the Rugby World Cup final is being held and it had long served as the effective capital of the anti-apartheid movement.

32:18Tom Holland:On top of that this choir is going to be singing a song that had only been South Africa's national anthem for a year since the election of the ANC government. And this is Nkosi Sikoleli Africa. And it's a song that to Afrikaners had long symbolized subversion, revolution, terrorism, black power, everything that the apartheid regime had been committed to suppressing very brutally. And to reiterate, we are now in the great cathedral of Afrikanedom. So obviously the Springboks had sung it before. It preceded previous matches, but never in a place, a time, a fixture with the amount of symbolic weight that this match had.

33:10Tom Holland:So what's it going to mean for them to sing this anthem? But even more pressingly, perhaps, how is the crowd in this great stadium, overwhelmingly Africana, how are they going to react with the eyes of the world upon them?

33:26Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. And what about the anthem itself? Nkosi Sikileli Africa, where's it come from and how has it ended up becoming this great anthem of black liberation? Well, we'll be answering all these questions after the break.

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36:28Dominic Sandbrook:Hello and welcome back to The Rest is History. So this is the sixth in our great series, tying in with the World Cup, looking at the stories behind the national anthems of some of the competing nations. And today we are looking at the story of Nkosi Sikalele Africa, perhaps the most beautiful of all the African national anthems that people will be hearing at the FIFA World Cup, and certainly the most celebrated and the most historically fascinating. The interesting thing, though, is that we've done some anthems in this series, the origins of which are kind of shrouded in obscurity. So, you know, it's sometimes hard to tell exactly where they've come from.

37:10Dominic Sandbrook:For example, God Save the King. Exactly who wrote it, we can't be sure. Same story with the Wilhelmus, the national anthem of the Netherlands. But we do know who wrote this anthem, and it's a man called Enoch Sontonga, isn't it, Tom? Yes.

37:25Tom Holland:So he is the writer and he was born in the early 1870s in the Eastern Cape Colony. And like Mandela, he was a native speaker. And again, I hope I've got the click right there. He moves northwards to Johannesburg and he becomes a teacher in a Methodist school in what will ultimately become the great township of Soweto outside Johannesburg. So you would think a teacher in a Methodist school in the 1880s and 1890s, unlikely to be a dandy. But in St. Tonga's case, you'd be wrong because there is a photograph showing him looking unbelievably natty. He's got a hat, he's got a three-piece suit, must have been very hot in the South African sun, very natty pocket square, and he's holding the chain of a fob watch.

38:15Tom Holland:I mean, he looks very, very stylish indeed. We know incredibly little about him. We don't even know what he taught, but we do know that he runs the school choir and he's always writing songs for it. So he's clearly very musical. and one of these songs which he scribbles down on a scrap of paper in 1897 is the song that becomes Mkosi Sikoleli Africa the song that will make him famous but this fame is entirely posthumous because in 1905 Sontonga he's 32 he starts to get afflicted by stomach cramps and they are so hideous that actually it gets into the local newspaper he's suffering so badly and the the newspaper wrote he suffered at times from stomach ache to the extent that he would predict that these were his last days on this earth and he's right yeah because he dies shortly afterwards of gastroenteritis and he's buried in the section of the bramfontein graveyard in johannesburg which is reserved for black christians so the racism is evident um even in cemeteries and in due course the very location of his grave comes to be forgotten and that is pretty much the sum total of what we know about him so we do know you know we know who wrote this song but you know the life

39:36Dominic Sandbrook:of the composer is pretty much veiled in obscurity and if we go to the uh the song itself written in and it's it means lord bless africa one verse and a chorus right that's all there is yes and this

39:51Tom Holland:these words are as well as the music santonga has written the words as you say a single verse lord bless africa may her glory be lifted high here are petitions lord bless us your children and then this chorus descend oh spirit descend oh holy spirit so i mean very evidently a hymn an anthem if you like and expressive of um a kind of a broader trend in south african christianity at the time Santonga writes it. So white missionaries have been spreading Christianity in South Africa among black South Africans over the course of the centuries. And by the end of the 19th century, black Christians in South Africa are, I think, coming to resent the kind of the mood, the spirit, the vibe of paternalism with which they are being treated by white missionaries, by the predominantly white-led churches.

40:49Tom Holland:And in reaction to this, they start to emphasize the antiquity of African Christianity and to argue that Christianity has been a presence in Africa for much longer than it had been, for instance, in either Britain or the Netherlands.

41:02Dominic Sandbrook:But they're not wrong.

41:03Tom Holland:They're not wrong because they can focus specifically on Ethiopia. The kings of Ethiopia, people who listened to the episode we did on the Ark of the Covenant may remember that the Ethiopian kings claimed to be descended from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. And in the Psalms, it had been prophesied that Ethiopia would quickly stretch out her hands to God. And in South Africa, Ethiopia comes to be a kind of synonym for the whole of Africa. And in the Acts of the Apostles, South Africans can read that one of the very first Gentile converts is an Ethiopian eunuch. And as they say, you know, there's no Dutch, there's no British converts in the Acts of the Apostles.

41:47Tom Holland:But an African convert, yes, there absolutely is. And so in 1892, five years before Santanga writes in Kozi Sikilele, Africa, a breakaway Christian movement has been founded by a Zulu Methodist minister. And this is called the Ethiopian Church. And so this is very much the spiritual climate in which Santanga is living. And it's a climate in which it's taken for granted by black Africans that God holds Africa especially in his care, that he has plotted out a particular path for Christianity in black Africa. The hymn that St. Ongo writes is Pentecostal, meaning that it describes the Holy Spirit descending like fire.

42:32Tom Holland:And this is entirely appropriate because the popularity of the hymn itself spreads like wildfire. And in 1912, it's sung at the inaugural meeting of a crucial convention. This is a meeting of the South African Native National Congress. And this was held in Bloemfontein and it is attended by chiefs and other leading black figures from across the country. And the aim of this Congress is to oppose attempts by white legislators to introduce what in retrospect will very clearly come to seem one of the kind of, you know, the building blocks of what will be the apartheid regime. And specifically, it's essentially about enabling the whites to take the best bits of land in South Africa.

43:19Tom Holland:So it's a Native Land Act, that's what it's called. And it allocates the ownership of 90 % of South African land exclusively to whites. You know, the blacks can have the remaining 10%, which is all scrubby and rubbish and, you know, not fertile. So you can understand why Black leaders are meeting up to oppose this. Inevitably, it fails. This Natives Land Act is passed the following year, so in 1913. But the members of the Congress don't give up, and they're determined to continue the fight. and in 1923 they changed the name of their organization to a much more inclusive one and indeed much snappier and so what had been the South African Native National Congress becomes the African National Congress so you know you don't have to be a South African native you anyone can join it it's open to everyone and it's two years after that that Nkosi is adopted as the ANC's official anthem.

44:24Tom Holland:And it's quite, it's not maybe an obvious anthem because we said in the previous episode that we did on the Brazilian national anthem that a lot of national anthems are really quite violent. They need an enemy. And you'd think that the ANC might be tempted to go for an anthem in which the white rulers of South Africa are being damned, but not a bit of it because there's actually very, you know, there's nothing martial, there's nothing aggressive There's nothing militant about the lyrics of Nkozi, Sekaleli, Africa at all. And even when in 1927 a Xhosa poet adds seven extra verses to it because one verse is decided it's not enough.

45:06Tom Holland:I mean, it still remains a hymn. The tone of the song remains kind of pacific in the way that it had previously been.

45:13Dominic Sandbrook:But that kind of works, doesn't it, given the nature of their struggle? I mean, the struggle is punctuated with moments of martyrdom, with massacres, with funerals and trials and suffering. The story of the ANC is a story about victory through suffering. And that's why this, as a hymn, it works really well.

45:33Tom Holland:Yeah. So people who are being executed, ANC members who are being executed, as they are standing on the trap door that will drop and they'll kind of fall through the trap door, they are singing it. And in a sense, the fact that it's not aggressive, it's not violent, that it's a kind of hymn to God, I agree, it makes it kind of all the more powerful. But equally, you can see why to the agents of the apartheid regime, the hymn of the ANC comes to seem something very menacing, something very aggressive. Well, not least because they can't understand it. can't really understand it. And so they assume that it's a song that's kind of suffused with hate.

46:14Tom Holland:And, you know, it comes to seem emblematic of everything that they're fighting. They really, really mistrust and dislike it. The idea that it might end up as the anthem of South Africa, just kind of monstrous possibility, not least because the apartheid state has its own national anthem, Distem van Südafrika, the call of South Africa. And just as white South Africans hate the ANC anthem, so black South Africans come to hate the apartheid anthem. I mean, entirely understandably. Now, in fact, like the lyrics of Cozy, those of Dijstam are actually pretty mellow in tone. So there is one mention in it of the groan of the ox wagon.

46:56Tom Holland:And this is an allusion to the Voortrekkers, the Boers who had sought to escape British rule in the 19th century. you know so migrating from the cape colony to the interior of south africa and when they get there they kind of displace various native peoples have repeated punch up with the zulus all this kind of thing so the allusion to the voodrekkers is a kind of red flag i guess to to black south africans but otherwise there's nothing in the lyrics that would be obviously offensive because essentially it's a hymn of love to the beauties of South Africa and also thanks to God who had fashioned these beauties.

47:34Tom Holland:So it's opening lines from the blues of our heavens, from the depths of our sea, over our everlasting mountains, where the cliffs echo back our calls. I mean, these are sentiments that everyone in South Africa could agree with. Absolutely, you know, absolutely ecumenical in

47:52Dominic Sandbrook:tone. So the apartheid regime falls in the early 1990s. And the obvious question is, what is the new South African to adopt as this anthem? The majority is obviously black. You would assume they are simply going to throw out Die Stem and to replace it with Nkosi, which is, of course, a song that the majority, I guess, of black South Africans would get behind. But that's not quite what happens, is it?

48:17Tom Holland:Yeah, so early in 1994, just before Mandela's inauguration as South Africa's first black president, the ANC kind of supreme decision making caucus hold a meeting to decide what the anthem is going to be and it's pressing because people from around the world are going to be coming for Mandela's inauguration and so they do need an anthem as you say it's absolutely inconceivable that they will have to stem and the kind of the overwhelming consensus is that it should be cozy and they wait for Mandela to pop out for a phone call and while he's gone to take the call They say, yeah, we'll have Incosy Ciclele Africa.

48:58Tom Holland:Mandela comes back. They tell him, this is our decision. He blows a gasket. He is furious. He tells them, this song, Distem, that you treat so easily, holds the emotions of many people who you don't represent yet. With the stroke of a pen, you would take a decision to destroy the very, the only basis that we are building upon, reconciliation. So Mandela's solution, very centrist, keep both anthems. and also just for good measure include a translation and cozy uh into a second um south african language sesothu so basically everyone will be happy i think you know kind of ticking all the boxes there but there is a problem with this because if you play all three songs together it lasts for more than five minutes i mean it just goes on and on and at mandela's inauguration one of the guests is prince philip prince philip is a man yeah he calls it as he sees it yeah he calls in as it is um and he jokes that he'd had to keep his hat off for so long you know as a mark of respect for the anthem that he got sunstroke and even mandela himself um acknowledges that it was all a bit boring by the end so there's obviously an issue here and so he comes up with the classic politician's wheeze when faced with an imponderable problem he hands it over to um a committee i

50:14Dominic Sandbrook:suppose you could say he kicks it into touch would that be a rugby kind of metaphor and then there's some line-out metaphor to follow no so this committee meets um early in 1995 the year of

50:26Tom Holland:the rugby world cup and to begin with the committee are really struggling because the challenge is actually quite a serious one because mandela's mandated them to um to meet two seemingly contradictory objectives so the first one is to ensure the anthem isn't too long you know he doesn't want dignitaries dying of heat stroke in the future simultaneously it has to incorporate both the A and C anthem and the apartheid regime anthem and Mandela's precise instructions are don't scrap anything be inclusive so that's a real problem it's kind of yeah make it a bit longer but cut it also yeah do all that in two minutes or whatever yeah and of course you've got the Rugby World Cup coming along it's going to be held the final is going to be held on the 25th of May it's obvious that the the anthem is not going to be ready in time for that and that means that these two anthems, Nkosi, Sikoleli Africa and Dishdem, are both going to have to be sung at the World Cup final, which in turn means that it's going to be a massive test for the Springboks, as we've said.

51:29Tom Holland:They've got to sing it in full view of the cameras of the world's media and for the crowd in Ellis Park Stadium. How is the crowd going to respond to what for 70 years has been the ANC anthem and the answer is they respond amazingly well so the spring box they excelled themselves and the reason for this is that a month before the final they'd all been given lessons in how to sing the ANC anthem fortunately two of them who were farm boys raised in the eastern cape they already spoke lousa so that was good the others you know they had no idea but they throw themselves very gainly into learning it and at the final you know they're lined up on the pitch before the start of the match and all of them you know at the very least are kind of pretending to mouth the words it doesn't look like they've got no idea it does look like they know what the words of the song are and actually the only one who doesn't sing if you look at the footage of it the only one who doesn't is the captain francois pinard and the reason for this he said afterwards I couldn't sing the anthem I dared not because I knew that if I did I'd fall apart oh he's a softy heart yeah and in playing the enemy John Carlin cites what Sean Fitzpatrick who was the all-black captain later told Pienaar so he told me that he looked over and saw a tear roll down my cheek so an incredibly emotional moment and it is respected as such by the crowd you know they they really behave very well and in the mythology of this occasion it's kind of cast as something that inspires the entire you know notion of a rainbow country a rainbow nation and i think it's it's kind of easy to be skeptical about that to be cynical but the converse i think is clearly true that the spectacle of the springboks failing to sing the anc anthem what is now the south african anthem i think that would have dealt a really devastating blow to kind of any notion of one

53:35Dominic Sandbrook:team one country any prospect of well imagine if the crowd had booed it i mean that crowd is very white imagine if the white crowd booed the uh the anthem i mean that would have that was

53:44Tom Holland:nothing more corrosive could be imagined yeah i and so i think it really really mattered that they they didn't do that and that they they behaved themselves and at the end of the match Piena who is um you know he's played a blinder throughout the tournament he serves up the absolutely perfect soundbite so a sports reporter asks him how did it feel to have 62 ,000 fans supporting you here in the stadium and Piena's answer does Mandela proud we didn't have 62 ,000 fans behind us we had 43 million South Africans so not a dry eye in the house but they've sung

54:21Dominic Sandbrook:both anthems they actually don't have one anthem at this point so the committee doesn't um come up with its report until two years after the world cup after the rugby world cup and their solution i mean is it a fudge just i guess it is a fudge really isn't it well it's a fudge if you think

54:38Tom Holland:that uh a day in the life the beatles great song which fuses two separate songs by john lennon and paul mccartney into what is often seen as the masterpiece on sergeant pepper whether that's a fudge i don't think it's a fudge i think they do exactly the same they fuse in cozy sikileli africa and dish them into a single song and it works musically but it also works ideologically as well because actually when you pair the lyrics from the two songs you realize that both of them have emerged from a common christian african culture because both songs are expressing an identical conviction namely that god has bestowed particular blessings on south africa and that people who live in south africa therefore should be grateful for those blessings so actually they kind of they blend perfectly however the the the committee have really got the beat between their teeth because they feel that it's actually not enough just to have these two songs put together we better chuck in a whole load of other stuff as well you know because there are loads and loads of languages of different kind of peoples in South Africa.

55:47Tom Holland:So they render the new anthem into no less than five of South Africa's 11 official languages. So one of them is obviously Osa, first two lines of Nkosi, Tsikileli, Africa, as Sontonga had written them. Then you have Zulu, so the third and fourth lines of the original are translated into that. Then you have Sosotu, which is a verse asking God to protect South Africa. Then you have Dishtem, so that's Afrikaans, and then the last verse is in English composed specially for the new anthem and this is very bland sounds the call to come together and united we shall stand let us live and strive for freedom in South Africa our land

56:26Dominic Sandbrook:I mean when they're singing before a rugby match their kind of voices are rising at that point it is a very powerful climax I think

56:33Tom Holland:yeah I mean the lyrics are not as powerful perhaps as the early ones but they do what they've got to do so you have these five five different languages it is in the south african national anthem and that makes it very very exceptional and in fact there is only one other country that has a multilingual anthem and this is surinam so country on the uh the north coast of south america it had originally been an english colony so back in the 17th century then in 1667 it gets swapped by the dutch for new amsterdam which becomes New York so the English get what will become New York and the Dutch get Suriname and I think basically the English have the better of that deal however having said that I mean the English end up losing New York of course but the Dutch keep Suriname for almost 350 years and Suriname only obtained its kind of ultimate independence in 1975 but even before that it had adopted an anthem that had two verses so one in Dutch and one in a language called I hope I'm pronouncing this right saranen tong which is an anglo-dutch creole means sort of suriname tongue yes yes so i think it's a kind of it's it's the language that was spoken by the uh the slaves there yeah and it may be there's something about kind of anglo-dutch colonial fusion that fosters multilingual national anthems because there is clearly a kind of correspondence between the

58:02Dominic Sandbrook:history of suriname and south africa and um i know senior notes you say that as fine as the the Suriname National Anthem is it can't really compose with Nkosi, Sikolalia, Africa. Talk me through, the Suriname National Anthem, how fine is it? It's not very fine. It's not very fine? Well, it's all right, but I don't think it's a banger. Have you actually ever heard it?

58:20Tom Holland:Yes, I have. I listened to it. Oh, well done. Because I was wondering if it was, you know, if it was going to be any good. Yeah. And actually, I mean, it's all right, but it's literally nothing else. Well, I mean, it's one of two multilingual national anthems. I think that makes it stand out from the crowd. I mean, we've only talked about the anthems of two South American countries in this series, Brazil, and now Suriname.

58:40Dominic Sandbrook:So, yeah, this is a terrible result for Argentina. They'll be fuming. Right. So let's get back to the South African anthem. You say it's the most haunting and historically resonant of 20th century national anthems. And I guess that's true, isn't it? because we've done a lot of anthems with a lot of history, but none whose past is so kind of freighted with suffering and martyrdom and stuff.

59:07Tom Holland:And it's a haunting melody. The words are obviously haunting, even though I have to have them translated. and it lacks the kind of rolling brass based strut that tends to be a characteristic of most national anthems that have originated in the 19th century I think has a very very different quality

59:30Dominic Sandbrook:it's almost like a lament isn't it I always think the sound of it yeah it's it's really powerful

59:35Tom Holland:um and so on that note the lament uh let's let's end this episode and the series by going back to Eric Satonga, the man who wrote it. And we said that after his burial in the Bramfontein graveyard in Johannesburg, all the traces of his grave were lost. He's a famous figure in ANC mythology, the guy who wrote their anthem. And so there had been lots of attempts to try and identify it, nobody could find it. But then finally in the early 1990s, and you could see why this, you know mandela's release has stimulated a kind of renewed attempt to try and track it down a researcher has the kind of brainwave why not look up in the cemetery records not for a sontonga but for an enoch his first name and they're sure enough they find him grave number 4885 his surname had been completely erased and replaced by the insulting afrikaans word for a black person and they were able as a result of this to work out where the grave was and in 1996 so one year after his hymn had been sung at ellis park stadium heard by people around the world ellis park stadium was only about three miles away from the cemetery in which he'd been buried nelson mandela arrived to unveil a memorial to sontonga that had been raised on the site of his grave and mandela said this by the pride with which we bellowed your melody and its lyrics in good times and bad we were saying to you enoch mania we were saying to you enoch mankey sontonga that with your inspiration we could move mountains and i guess in a sense they had

1:01:26Dominic Sandbrook:oh that's a nice ending it's nice to have another happy ending on the rest of this We don't have enough. So that's an amazing story. Fascinating story. Brilliantly told. Thank you, Tom. So that's the end of our World Cup series. I think a better series than the actual World Cup. They've got too many teams in the World Cup, whereas we limited ourselves.

1:01:48Tom Holland:Yeah.

1:01:48Dominic Sandbrook:I think a World Cup with only six teams would be very punchy, wouldn't it? It would be punchy, but it'd be elite. And we're all about elite content. Well, it'd be like the rugby, actually. It'd be like the Six Nations. Exactly. Yeah, it would be like the Six Nations. They'd all play each other. So talking of elite content, we are returning next week with an absolutely elite series. Because not only is this summer the summer of the Football World Cup, it is the summer in which the tax revolt of 1776 will be 250 years old. God, so many back taxes to be paid. And the rebel state formed as a result of that event is marking its 250th anniversary.

1:02:32Dominic Sandbrook:I think the world is looking at the United States of America and saying, how have things worked out for them? How are their politics looking now? Are they perhaps regretting? Are they in danger of crawling back and asking to be readmitted? I mean, the problem with that diagnosis, Dominic. To the family of civilized nations. Well, yeah, I mean, that implies that Britain's been doing better. I'm not entirely sure that that's... On the other hand, of course, they could look north and say Canada's the country they could have been. Anyway, to mark this event, because we do like our American listeners, to reach out to them and to give them a little favour, we are going to be doing a series about the founding fathers.

1:03:13Dominic Sandbrook:Four of them. Yes. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. and we should of course be treating them tom with the reverence and respect they deserve with exactly the amount of respect and reverence they deserve so for our american listeners it should be an eye-opening experience now if if our american listeners i imagine even now they're like they're scrabbling desperately their keyboards trying to work out how they can get access to this series early to hear this patriotic fest because it'll really broaden their minds Tom is there any way is there any mechanism or process by which somebody could listen to all of that series on Monday if they wanted to.

1:03:54Dominic Sandbrook:They absolutely could they could sign up to the rest is history club.

1:03:59Tom Holland:You know that as we said there's a lot of back tax to be paid. It's actually unbelievably good value just yeah every tiny minute number of your tax dollars could go on it. Yeah. I mean just insane value because you get a whole load of additional benefits as well. I don't think we've ever mentioned that before. so very very exciting and of course you don't have to be american to do that either do you because the founding fathers are remarkable characters um their stories are remarkable so of interest to one and all so we hope you enjoy that series coming up starting next monday

1:04:37Dominic Sandbrook:brilliant so we'll see you on next monday for the founding fathers but until then tom thank you very much that was a brilliant episode uh bye-bye everybody bye-bye

1:04:59Dominic Sandbrook:Oh

1:05:04Oh Oh

1:05:06Dominic Sandbrook:See Yes

1:05:18The Lord is the Son of God, and the Lord is the Son of God, and the Lord is the Son of

1:05:45Dominic Sandbrook:God.

1:06:14Sous-titrage MFP.

1:06:37Dominic Sandbrook:Hi everybody, it's Dominic Sandbrook here. There are two weeks to go until the Rest is History's inaugural festival at Hampton Court Palace. and frankly I could not be more excited there's going to be medieval combat there are going to be all sorts of big name historians you can go to the palace you can feast like Henry VIII on the very lawns where he walked in the sunshine I'll be talking to Tracy Borman about the Tudors I'll be talking to Katja Hoyer about Weimar Germany I'll be talking to Ian Hislop about the history of satire so it's on two days it's on Saturday the 4th of July and Sunday the 5th of July the bad news is we have actually sold out the allocations that we were given by Hampton Court for both days.

1:07:17Dominic Sandbrook:The good news, however, we have persuaded Hampton Court to let us have more people. So there will be a handful of extra tickets available for both the Saturday and the Sunday. Now, we do expect all of those extra tickets to sell out really quickly. So please do not wait to get your hands on them. The tickets are exclusive for club members. It's one of the benefits of being a member of the rest is history club frankly if you're not a member and you would like to go to the festival the only way to do that is by joining the club so you have to head to the rest is history.com to sign up and then you go to the members area once you've signed up and you select festival to get your tickets we are really hoping to see as many of you there as possible in the sunshine at hampton court bye bye hi everybody it's dominic sandbrook here there There are two weeks to go until the rest is history's inaugural festival at Hampton Court Palace.

1:08:14Dominic Sandbrook:And frankly, I could not be more excited. There's going to be medieval combat. There are going to be all sorts of big name historians. You can go to the palace. You can feast like Henry VIII on the very lawns where he walked. In the sunshine, I'll be talking to Tracy Borman about the Tudors. I'll be talking to Katja Hoyer about Weimar Germany. I'll be talking to Ian Hislop about the history of satire. So it's on two days. It's on Saturday the 4th of July and Sunday the 5th of July. The bad news is we have actually sold out the allocations that we were given by Hampton Court for both days. The good news, however, we have persuaded Hampton Court to let us have more people.

1:08:50Dominic Sandbrook:So there will be a handful of extra tickets available for both the Saturday and the Sunday. Now, we do expect all of those extra tickets to sell out really quickly. So please do not wait to get your hands on them. The tickets are exclusive for club members. It's one of the benefits of being a member of the Rest is History Club. Frankly, if you're not a member and you would like to go to the festival, the only way to do that is by joining the club. So you have to head to therestishistory.com to sign up, and then you go to the members area once you've signed up, and you select Festival to get your tickets.

1:09:26Dominic Sandbrook:We are really hoping to see as many of you there as possible in the sunshine at Hampton Court. Bye-bye. Hi, everybody. Dominic here from The Rest is History. You knew who it was. So we have just recorded a brilliant episode of our new mini-series about the World Cup and dictatorships with Paul Rouse of University College Dublin. We were just talking about Pelé and Brazil and the dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. We had a lot of fun and we thought you might like to hear a little clip from it to whet your appetite if you're not a member of The Rest is History Club. So here it is.

1:10:04Dominic Sandbrook:Enjoy. So I guess the question with Brazil in particular is, we think that Brazil is defined more than anything else by football. That football is absolutely central to Brazilian national identity. The classic thing that people think when we were talking about this before we started recording, that football is an expression of the Brazilian national soul in some way that it isn't in other countries. How and when does this idea become popular? so in a global sense it really took hold from the 1950s onwards brazil's successes in the 58 and 62 world cup and then of course they did three in a row in 1970 unfortunately it wasn't possible to play a world cup in 1966 so so they that's poor from you paul why do you hate why I mean, as we always say, why do you hate Britain?

1:10:59Dominic Sandbrook:So that was important. That was important in the winning of a World Cup at the very moment when television pictures begin to flow around the world of sporting. So the late 50s, sport on television was beginning to be broadcast by 1962. You had an international broadcast through Telstar, through the satellite. but by 1970 you have the projection around the world in colour in colour but most people still have black and white telly so we have to be careful not to over not to overstate that but it is the projection of this Brazilian greatness at the very moment that you get an explosion of interest in television Thank you for listening hope you enjoyed it if you want to hear more of course you could go to therestishistory.com you can subscribe you'll hear the rest of that series and you'll get a wonderful range of supplementary benefits.