Remembering Kerkorrel

JUST ANOTHER DAY IN AFRICA
In no-man's land I got lost
by Robyn Sassen

Johannes Kerkorrel

In niemandsland het ek verdwaal — "In no-man's land I got lost."
— Johannes Kerkorrel

"Don't use fugitive inks."
— Robert Genn

What happens when an enfant terrible who spent much of his creative professional life holding a mirror to the ugliness of a culture, dies? On Tuesday, 12 November 2002, Johannes Kerkorrel, the apartheid era's bad boy in contemporary music, committed suicide. The apartheid era is a matter of history according to most politicos here, but pussyfooting around sensitive issues like the cultural avant-garde is still, it seems, scarily sensitive.

The human thing about South African culture which was criss-crossed with legislation and bureaucracy for well nigh fifty years, was the subcultures that proliferated behind the scenes, and in many respects, punctuated what could easily have been an intolerable existence. And, don't get me wrong: intolerable it was for many on both sides of the colour bar. But here, I speak of the broadly unpigmented ones who spoke in tongues of Dutch-extraction. Or, more directly, Afrikanerdom.

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