Steve Hofmeyr with Arno Jordaan at The Scala in London with Afrikhaki

By Susan Miller

Steve Hofmeyr  is never far from South Africa’s headlines. And now one of South Africa’s biggest-selling singer/songwriters – and an increasingly vocal social commentator – is heading to The Scala.

Organiser Etienne of Afrikhaki says he’s expecting Steve to perform all his greatest hits at the show, ‘Pampoen’, ‘Agter Elke Man’, ‘Loose When You Lie’, ‘Prove me Wrong’, ‘Die Bloubul’ and is sure the singer will treat the crowd to a few Neil Diamond songs as well.  

Hofmeyr's new album Duisend En Een, inspired by his trip to Vienna, Budapest and Prague has 17 new tracks, eleven of which were written by Steve after what he calls a two-year “creative slumber.” Expect love ballads like Se Vir Almal Jy is Myne and listen out for Ewigheid, an Afrikaans version of Puccini’s Nessum Dorma.

Tickets cost £30 and the organiser promises three non-stop hours of entertainment, with Arno Jordaan opening the show. Etienne says that Arno was so popular at Afrikhaki last time that they decided to ask him back.

Steve should be onstage for almost two hours and Etienne says the two performers may well team up to treat the crowd to some South African classics.

Currently busy acting with Bok van Blerk, Liani May and Izak Davel in Platteland, a music-movie directed by Sean Else, written by Deon Opperman and Sean Else, Steve Hofmeyr is increasingly – and some would say controversially - vocal about issues like race and crime.

In fact his comments on his Facebook page blaming black South Africans’ ‘propaganda of entitlement’ for a brutal farm murder were slammed by a number of high-profile South Africans. The DA Arts and Culture spokeswoman Annelie Lotriet said his views were “profoundly repugnant and demonstrates deep-seated prejudiced views that are completely inconsistent with the values that inform our constitutional state.”

“Every South African who is commited to building a compassionate society should reject Hofmeyr’s comments,” she said.

In his News24 column, writer Max Du Preez suggested Steve Hofmeyr was playing the populist card to generate album sales. “I suspect Hofmeyr sat back with a big smile when he saw the Sowetan’s front page headline on Monday, Top Muso’s Racist Rant – and started imagining how many CDs he was going to sell as a result of the publicity.”

However, Times columnist Lin Sampson marked the singer as underrated in her recent Over & Under column on what South Africans should pay attention to and what should be forgotten.

‘Steve Hofmeyr for knowing the difference between racism and going against fashionable hypocrisy. Real racists stay in the closet’, she said.

Then again comedian John Vlismas told The Witness he would like an end to Hofmeyr for his Xmas wish list. “I just want world peace and an end to HIV, cancer and Steve Hofmeyr. I’m asking Santa to go to {Hofmeyr’s} house and fill his chimney with cement,” he said.

I asked the singer about the allegations of racism and got this reply, which I have left unabridged.

Susan

The furore is mostly from liberal media. Off course, no one attacks skin colour. That is ridiculous. But I do attack an attitude of entitlement, a government model based on race (BEE, AA, EE, representation and quotas), which I find deeply disturbing. One that encourages brutality when it is presented as an indefinite “I owe you”.

South Africans are being wiped off the face of the earth in unprecedented statistics that make war-torn zones seem like fun parks. Why am I the only one interested in WHO these murderers are?  

Yes, all South Africans are suffering at the hands of these (mostly young criminals) but in my community there is a subculture of hard working but dangerously exposed folk. The white farmers. Their death rate clocked on the World Genocide Watch. The farm murder rate is eight times higher than the national average murder rate and 7 times higher than any other country in world.

Afrikaners, having lost more folk in one year than Africans in the entire century of their Struggle, don’t go to these extremes of neurotic entitlement. And when this genocide becomes a white or Afrikaner transgression of these epidemic proportions, I will own up and do some serious in-house screaming and self-scrutiny.

I blame Black folk for embracing the climate that instigates and encourages the justification of these brutal acts. Their super-inflated sense of Afrocentric entitlement. It’s so 70’s and somewhat hypocritical.

I helped blacks unmask Apartheid. It had a white face. Now help me solve brutality. It does not have a Japanese face.

South Africa today has a lower life expectancy than Uganda!

I place nation-building secondary to mortality-rates.

The latter defines a civilization.

You can’t build a nation if the nation is dead.

Steve Hofmeyr