Meadowlands

The story

"Meadowlands" is an anti-apartheid song composed in 1956 by Strike Vilakazi in reaction to the forced relocation of black South Africans from Sophiatown to the new township of Meadowlands. The Afrikaner National Party had come to power in 1948 and governed for the next 46 years; under apartheid, a brutal system of racial segregation whose name meant "separateness" in Afrikaans, the white minority held all political power and black South Africans were forced to live in poverty-stricken townships and denied basic human rights. The Group Areas Act of 1950 and the Bantu Resettlement Act of 1954 forcibly moved millions of people into racially segregated areas, part of a plan to divide the black population into small, impoverished bantustans. Sophiatown, a cultural centre above all for African jazz, was destroyed under this plan in 1955, and its 60,000 inhabitants were moved by force, many of them to Meadowlands.

The song was first sung by Nancy Jacobs and Her Sisters, set to an "infectious jive beat", with the music writer Todd Matshikiza at the piano. Its words were in three languages: isiZulu, Sesotho and tsotsitaal, the street slang of the townships. On the surface the song was sunny and upbeat, and the government, reading it through a literal translation, took it for support of the removals: a bureaucrat praised Vilakazi for it, and his application for housing was reportedly approved. The words were meant ironically. The people of Sophiatown understood them so, and sang the song as government trucks carried away their belongings. It has since been cited as a notable example of ambiguous meaning used to carry anti-government feeling in a covert way; the scholar Gwen Ansell called it "as rich in nuance as a traditional fable".

Miriam Makeba, who carried many protest songs of the period inside and outside South Africa, made "Meadowlands" widely known, and it became an anthem of the movement against apartheid. Dorothy Masuka also popularised it, and the Tulips and Dolly Rathebe were among those who covered it. Other songs, among them Makeba's "Sophiatown is Gone" and the Sun Valley Sisters' "Bye Bye Sophiatown", also told of the removal. Performed abroad by several artists during the apartheid years, the song helped "expose the injustices suffered by oppressed racial groups", in the words of the commentator Michaela Vershbow. South African musicians, especially in Cape Town, have quoted it in their own compositions, and in 2007 it was included in the collection Essential South African Jazz.

What it says

A song about the forced removal of a community from its homes, sung in a bright jive style whose cheerfulness is ironic; under the light mood lies the grief and anger of the people moved.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.