Disavowal and the Perverted Mind of Apartheid

Riffing on J.M. Coetzee’s 1991 essay The Mind of Apartheid, the public persona of boeremusiek celebrity Nico Carstens, and his much-publicized disavowal of boeremusiek, is the focus of this chapter. I consider the boeremusiek of the 1950s as part of apartheid’s aesthetics of perversity by analyzing the presence of the racialized other in Carstens’s music, and how the label “boeremusiek” and Carstens’s public persona functioned as fetishes for containing racialized values that were disavowed from within dominant definitions of Afrikaner whiteness. By theorizing Carstens’s boeremusiek (and the astounding amount of money he earned and subsequently squandered) around Georges Bataille’s notion of “expenditure,” I speculate on how boeremusiek functioned as excess within the “general economy” of apartheid. As fetishes tend to do, the disavowed heterogeneity of boeremusiek invigorated rather than undermined racial thinking in the early apartheid period.