Nkosi nkosi sikelela le Afrika: the profoundness of our national anthem

         Written by Noluvuyo Mjoli

I started leaning our national anthem when I was just seven years old. We sang it every Friday of school in Primary. I still sing it with proudly when Bafana bafana plays. I struggle with ‘Uit die blou van onse hemel’ because I do not speak Afrikaans, hence the hum when this versie comes. Die Stem van Suid Afrika is the Afrikaners’ prayer. Cornelis Langhoven wrote the Afrikaans version as the 1918 poem. I still do not know what the original Die Stem poem was referring to, but I know it speaks about heavens somewhere in it there.

Today, I have sat and listened to the powerful message behind our South African National Anthem, I was tempted to say our Azanian national anthem but ke i-Azania akukabiyona eyethu. Looking back where we come from and where we still are today, and at where we hopefully wish to go; I let out a bit of tears to shed sentiments of how far this song has come. It was written under sad, painful and unexplainable conditions. I cry out of gratitude and out of pain that comes from deep within the left side of my lower breast where the doctors say lie my heart.

It is painful singing along to it if you understand what it is saying. If you have ever listened to Mirriam Makeba's Bahlei bonke etilongweni you may have grasped this kind of sadness I am talking about.

Nkosi Sikelela is a very desperate plea to the gods of Africa. This is a very meaningful prayer. Loosely translating to god bless Africa. Our elders were really in need. They were crying. They were asking their creator to watch over them. They were pleading on a bended knee with him, asking him to please release them from their misery.

I do not know what kind of pain father Enoch Sontonga was in when he composed the first few Xhosa notes of the song. This was in 1897, and I am guessing, Vasco da Gama, Somerset, Cecil Rhodes and his friends were already digging deeper in the mines, or were they now? He may have been in tears as he was composing this verse. Oh! This was when the land was already taken and owned by the white men, and after the Sandlwana Anglo wars. This is where noble men with families were now landeless beggars in their own land. He may have been writing this with a lump on his throat telling the one who created him to spare him and his people this pain, oh Nkozi uqamatha sisikelele thina bantu bakho!

Samuel Mqhayi must have had been nursing the same heartbreak again in 1927 when he also added few verses in Xhosa to the Bantu national anthem. Rhodes and the Oppenheimers had already established the land as their own. Mqhayi must have been feeling the pain of being called a boy that worked endlessly on forced labour. Surely he was asking the god of the blacks to bless the miners shot down in Transvaal and all that exploitation that was going on at the time.

Seeing that his Sotho men and women cannot cry in the Xhosa verses already produced, Moses Mphahlele thought he would add few Sotho words there and there. Calling the gods of the Bantu, Mphahlele said, morena boloka sejthaba sa heso, ofedise dintwa le matshwenyeho, god watch over us, come end all these fighting and refuge us from our worries. God protect us, oh lord protect us!

Then father Langa libalele Dube also appealed for his Zulu people, and this was when Jan Smuts and his friends were already making a huge mockery of the blacks to the outside world.  He was saying, let your throne shine Africa, lord hear our prayers. I am unsure which lord he was referring to because they had already lied to him and told him that his god was a whiteman with a long beard. This is so because the missionaries did manage to convert him to a devoted Christian that saw this faith as the only answer to the African problems. Nevertheless, tata Dube was still pleading with the one above or underground or the one that sits in the sun or in the rocks to spare him and his people from this treatment.

I do not know and it is of my great curiosity as to why is there no Tshivenda, Xi-Tsonga, nor Khoisan included in the languages of the national anthem. Is this to say, these respective people of South Africa did not have their own kind of prayer to their own black god? S this to say they are quite fine with relying on others to carry their prayers to their respective gods in their behalf, I do not know.

With the kind of ‘us versus them’ history we have in this country, the national anthem in South Africa was segregated. Africans had theirs, so did the Zuid Afrikan regime under the Boer rule. Steve Hofmeyer still embraces Die Stem van Suid Afrika. This was their anthem while the Bantu had their Nkos’ sikelel’ iAfrika which had Woza moya oyingcwele as part of the song. So in the new democracy, our Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and Die Stem were joined together as the sound to call all races to come together. Calling them to unite because the English verse of the anthem says that and that united we should stand. 

The English verse encourages us to come to terms with one another’s difference so that we can live together and strive for freedom in South Africa, even though freedom is the greatest chain, but nonetheless, let us unite and find ways to live with one another in harmony!

Nkosi sikelela iAfrika! These words, oh these words! This is about the blood that has spilled of black children. Nkosi, oh Nkosi sikelela thina bantwana be Afrika, refuge us oh god from this misery! Even though we are still far away in gaining this freedom but this song gives one hope, hope not to despair. 

I feel the urge to add few verses to this anthem to add my own prayer.

Zulu. Nkosi, Nkosi uphi na nxa sifayo phambi kwakho?

(God og god, God of the Africa child where are you when we are dying like this)

Swahili. Hakika wewe ni pale si kama haya yote kutokea chini ya kuangalia wako

(Surely you are not there if all these happen under your watch)

Lizobuya leli lizwe bantwana be Afrika.

The children of this country will come to recognise that Azania is not yet ours.

This country will come back when we have land.

When we have education to fight our oppressors with!  

The liberation must be carried on always,

not with guns, but with education,

The education that they will never teach you,

the education which you must discover for ourselves!.