This article first appeared in THE WEEKDENDER

5th July 2008

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The Graham Protea Hotel in Grahamstown’s High Street is a nice enough place to stay, I’ve been told; but when you’re going there to watch a show at the National Arts Festival, you don’t consider that – you simply pass through the bustle of the foyer into the perpetual twilight of the function room. It’s a potentially gloomy spot, with a makeshift stage and rows of temporary chairs on the dull carpet. When the lights go down, however, and some of South Africa’s finest musical talents (from veterans such as Tony Cox to relative unknowns like Fly Paper Jet) take the stage, it is transformed into a magical space.

This metamorphosis was more pronounced than usual when Amanda Strydom brought her “Soul Songs” to the 2008 Festival.

Strydom clearly didn’t have to win her audience over: instead, as she walked out, she basked in the applause of an audience that seemed comprised mostly of already-loyal fans. Yet, diva though she may be, Strydom is altogether lacking in pretension. Evidently ambivalent about her performance environment, she welcomed those gathered to the “middag diens” (midday service) in which they would light – in the words of her latest album title – “kerse teen die donker” (candles against the dark).

The church jokes notwithstanding, Strydom is a self-consciously ‘spiritual’ performer. Between songs she exhorted her audience to prioritise “faith, hope and love” in their lives, but although this occasionally verged on a kind of Afrikaans Oprah-speak, it was redeemed by the poetry of her lyrics and the sheer beauty of her voice. Whether telling a melancholy narrative about lonely female figures (“Boord van Woorde”, “Sara Stoepsit”, “Slippers van Satyn”) or sharing nominally personal stories of nostalgia or loss (“Foto 1974”, “Die Eerste Seerkry”, “My Nostalgie”), Strydom performs with an emotional generosity that evokes an authentic sympathy from her audience.

Her ‘cabaret’ encompasses not just the sultry lounge music typically associated with that word, but also rock’n’roll, jazz and even pop ballades. The subtle shift between these musical registers is due in large measure to the flawless and multi-instrumental accompaniment of her “hoof skriba” (which is NG Kerk nomenclature for a church secretary), Janine Neethling, a remarkable musician in her own right who also put in a star turn as chief accompanist to the cast assembled by Janice Honeyman for her “African Celebration”, one of the high-profile events at this year’s Festival.

The playful interaction between Strydom and Neethling prevents the show from slipping into sentimentality; indeed, in a number like “Die Briels”, they lampoon the kind of pained songmaking in vogue amongst Afrikaans musicians in the early part of the twentieth century. “Thank goodness for progress!” noted Strydom, laughing away all the “snot en trane”. She is determinedly sanguine in the face of life’s challenges: her “Mooiweer en Warm” begins, “Almal het iets om te dra – ’n kruis, ’n frons, ’n Wonderbra” (“Everyone has something to bear – a cross, a frown, a Wonderbra”) but insists that ultimately, our relationships with others save us from minor and major mishaps alike.

This is not to say that she underplays suffering. A tri-lingual rendering of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas / Laat My Niet Alleen / If You Go Away” explored every desperate and despairing corner of that famously heart-rending song. Along with this French-Flemish-English synthesis, Strydom demonstrated her linguistic virtuosity with a heavily accented “La Vie en Rose”, English numbers like Jose Feliciano’s “Listen to the Rain” and Bette Midler’s “Some People’s Lives” and – wait for it – a combined Zulu and Dutch version of George Gershwin’s “Summertime”.

This latter piece is significant for two reasons. Firstly, although Strydom is a cosmopolitan artist, she remains a quintessentially Afrikaans cultural icon; singing Concord Nkabinde’s Zulu translation of the lyrics is an understated but valuable political gesture. Secondly, the Dutch is a nod to her large following in Holland (she tours there regularly and even has a website specifically for her Dutch fans).

As she explores new audiences and new modes of expression, this grand dame of Afrikaans music – despite a thematic preoccupation, in her recent work, with the passage of time – shows no sign of ageing or slowing down. And yet there remains a tone of humility, perhaps even existential uncertainty, in many of her songs. There is a refreshing honesty in the song she offered, without irony this time, as a closing prayer for the midday service, “Pelgrimsgebed”: “Alle pilgrims keer weer huis toe; / elke swerver kom weer tuis; / ek verdwaal steeds op die grootpad, / soekend na U boardinghuis” (“All pilgrims return to their house; / every vagabond comes home again; / I am still lost on the great road, / looking for your boarding-house”).