“We lived in a society where every mean was used to prevent apartheid from coming to an end…this album somehow had lyrics in it that almost set us free as oppressed people.” – South African record store owner, Stephen (“Sugar”) Segerman, and journalist Craig Bartholomew Strydon. 

In 1998, a little known American named Sixto Rodriguez landed in Johannesburg, South Africa to play a sold-out arena concert. Outside of having put out a few unsuccessful albums in the 1970s, Rodriguez was an average construction worker. While he was laying bricks, his music spread like wildfire through South Africa.

For the two decades before the concert, South Africans had been shut out from the world. Due to apartheid, where a white minority held power over a black majority, many countries had isolated South Africa, whose government in turn shut out most of the world. Bootlegs of Rodriguez’s album, “Cold Fact,” had been brought in to the country, then reprinted and circulated through the 1970s and 1980s. Many South Africans, isolated from the world, assumed the Rodriguez was as big as Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones. As energy slowly picked up against apartheid, especially among young whites, the American, anti-establishment ideas from the record created a new possibility that protest was acceptable. “This system’s gonna fall soon, to an angry young tune, and that’s a concrete cold fact,” Rodriguez sang.

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, much of Rodriguez’s music followed the typical Dylanesque American protest tradition. Songs like “Rich Folks Hoax” and “Hate Street Dialogue” focus on the disillusionment with inner city life, where the poor buy into a false idea that the rich have worked hard to gain success, while their day to day life is filled with drugs, prostitution and poverty. In “A Most Disgusting Song,” he speak/sings, “while the Mafia provides your drugs, the government will provide the shrugs, and your national guard will supply the slugs, so they sit all satisfied.” Listened to by young white South Africans, who had grown up in a highly censored and conservative society, they didn’t have to understand inner city life to relate. Instead, the general theme that the establishment could be questioned was considered eyeopening. 

The anti-apartheid movement had been led by black South African leaders, who were united by their own anthems. Strangely, when it came to winning over a young white majority, it was the songs of a Mexican-American construction worker that rallied anti-apartheid allies. After the end of apartheid and after Rodriguez found out that he had become a protest hero, he flew over to play a set of sold out shows. To a minutes-long standing ovation, he opened his first show with “I Wonder,” with his typical anti-establishment sentiment: “I wonder about the tears in children’s eyes, I wonder about the soldier that dies, I wonder will this hatred ever end, I wonder and worry my friend.”

Sources:

1.https://mondoweiss.net/2013/06/revolution-original-apartheid/

2.https://www.okayafrica.com/rodriguez-searching-for-sugar-man-south-africa-cold-fact/

3.https://louderthanwar.com/remembering-rodriguez-resistance-music-in-context/

4.https://www.npr.org/2012/07/28/157478577/rodriguez-forgotten-in-america-exalted-in-africa