One afternoon, during a jam session in a wealthy but crumbling residential district in Johannesburg, in the long, tense months after the Soweto Uprising of 1976, a certain sound came together. It was the result of the simple combination of distorted electric guitar with African hand drumming. The sound was rooted in marabi, the distinctive South African groove that provided the basis for Abdullah’s Ibrahim’s “Mannenberg,” the township anthem of the era. But this was edgier, more dissonant, a sound that echoed the sirens and rumbling of military vehicles off in the distance, evidence of the growing police presence in the streets. Within the sound, the heavy downbeat and liberation cadences of reggae were coming to the surface. And underneath it all, the sound of the raw anger of the rebel rock music emerging from London and New York—the sound of punk. “The Sixties” never really happened in South Africa. Massive social upheaval and seismic change would come only in the 1970s, the beginning of the country’s coming period of political and cultural clash. The confrontational sound of punk—from three-chord anthems to militant hardcore, dissonant post-punk, and upbeat ska—provided one of the ways for its youth to first find a public voice for a submerged frustration with the social conformity of a state whose racist policies had kept its own citizens stifled, repressed, and segregated for decades. As a result, it was easy to stand out amidst the political insanity, social confusion and suburban tedium that characterized South African life in the late 1970s, simply by being different. But in terms of presenting overt political engagement within popular culture, nothing was ever going to present such a contrast to the established system as a politically engaged, multi-racial punk-reggae band who were equally at home in the rock underground and the township nightclub circuit. Miraculous as it may sound, such a band actually existed: National Wake, the result of a creative confrontation not just between the worlds of punk and new wave with those of reggae and African music but between the unique personalities of its founding members, Ivan Kadey and brothers Gary and Punka Khoza. The band came together at the end of the 1970s, finding common ground at a musical and political crossroads defined by a mixture of optimism and anger. Central to this was the search for an authentic South African identity unburdened by the strict confines and
artificial boundaries imposed by the inhuman laws of the apartheid system. The band survived by existing almost totally outside of the system, eventually releasing a single record in 1981. This sold an estimated 700 copies before being withdrawn under government pressure, or “gazetted” in the euphemism of the time. The band subsequently disintegrated under enormous political and legal pressure, but their traces could still be found in the fanzine and cassette trading underground then emerging in South Africa. Matt Temple of the reissue label and influential blog Matsuli Music recalled encountering the album for the first time on a cassette copy, calling it “uncompromising, frenetic and loud…it struck an immediate chord with many people like me searching for any way out.” This clandestine medium eventually reached young conscript soldiers fighting South Africa’s illegal border wars. Among them was writer and journalist Deon Maas, who first heard National Wake while in the army and later described the effect of the band as “like a vicious orgasm… it’s only history that has recognized the incredible groundwork they did, not just for punk but for the whole music scene that followed.” Despite the groundbreaking nature of the band, during the subsequent chaos of the state of emergency of the late 1980s and the euphoria of the post-1994 democratic era, National Wake were almost totally forgotten. Memory of the band faded over time, to the extent that they were left out of most histories and accounts of South African rock music. It was only the emergence of specialized music blogs and a new evaluation of the role of the early South African punk scene in particular that eventually led to the band being rediscovered. Craig Duncan, a specialist in global alternative music at Czech State Radio, places this unsung legacy of the band today in an even more radical perspective, as “perhaps the most dissident music scene of the 20th century: a multi-racial punk-reggae band operating in a fascist police state.” Guitarist Ivan Kadey grew up as a disaffected Jewish orphan in the suburbs of Johannesburg feeling radically estranged from the daily reality of the country from a young age. As a teenager he had developed a deep interest in protest-oriented folk music, performing in small folk clubs and eventually beginning to compose his
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