Wow Vaughn i am delighted at the threadjack. Now i know a real rock star.
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Tom I love the music and the words. But .....you need to teleport yourself to something like the bad days of the black civil liberties days of the USA. We were a little worse than that back in SA and only about 30 years late to the party.
Gotta remember i grew up with none of your freedoms. You dont have freedom of expression and speech in a dictatorship.
BTW if you think i was/am a rebel think of what a black kid in apartheid South Africa was like. I was simply anti gov because of them trying to dictate what i could and could not do or should or should not say etc.
Well thing that caused a whole lot of grief was our idiots in gov. The country had at the time and still does today two official languages. Bit like Canada except in SA case it was English and Afrikaans. Trouble is Afrikaans aint like French. No one else in the world knows how to speak it or uses it. Its as good as one of the indigenous black languages perhaps even worse.
But around the time of this song forgive me i cannot recall exact dates but in and around 1976/77 the minister of education at the time had what he thought was a brainwave to get the blacks to speak more Afrikaans and mandated that their lessons would be taught in their schools in Afrikaans. I know pure genius ..NOT.
Not bad enough that they had an entirely different education system for them which was lesser education on top of that they want to make people learn both languages to get an education. Dont even look for logic it aint there.
Well this led to the Soweto Riots. Helicopters in the air and all the images of almost Syria today. Words to describe the mess fail me.
Anyhow the song came hit our airways a few years later and each year in June there was always a commemorative period for those that lost their lives in the uprising in Soweto.
It was a huge mess because the "liberation movement" used the kids politically to cause mayhem and had them burn all the schools to the ground. This set the whole education of generation back and they became known as the lost generation. Today they are a serious part of the crime come back to haunt the masters who had them loose out for their political gain. Nothing was done for them that totally lost out on even a substandard education or their lives.
Well the words to the song if you listen to them in this context fuel the anti gov attitude and each year back then in June caused more turmoil.
So the govs solution to anything like this was to ban it from the airways. That did not quiet work by then because they had created independent states by then (yeah fully independent countries out of what you guys would know as a "reservation" except in the SA context they were known as homelands. Well private radio stations in "Independent States were not subject to censor board rules. It used to infuriate the gov ministers that had always had their way.
We even had a period where we chanted the song at school given the bias in the school sylabus when it came to subjects like History which end up involving politics etc. Teachers were directed as to what was allowed and not allowed to be discussed in the class room. Suffice to say my history teacher was a rebel.
Thank goodness for me. I thank her every day. She took huge personal risk to give us a more broader balanced outlook. Not at all popular back in those days.
Who would have thought a song like this could have had such an impact.