1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 W. Froneman, The Groovology of White Affect, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40143-5_1 CHAPTER 1 Boeremusiek’s “Heart-Speech” THE RURAL DREAMTIME OF THE CONCERTINA “You may be surprised to learn that I enjoyed the couple of sessions of Boeremusiek; most probably because it takes me far back to my childhood days on the platteland,” writes Nelson Mandela’s condant Ahmed Kathrada from their Pollsmoor prison cell in 1986. 1 He is writing to fellow anti-apart- heid activist Helen Joseph, excited by the latest concession the prisoners have won—access to a television set. “For all our Gujerat origins and the emphasis on Arabic and the Koran,” Kathrada explains his afnity for boeremusiek elsewhere, “we grew up speaking more Afrikaans than anything else … The women in my family still speak Afrikaans, and boeremusiek, traditional folk music played on a concertina, still makes me nostalgic.” 2 Kathrada’s descriptions of boeremusiek resonate strongly with the primary discursive context of the genre as a domestic music outside the political public eye. The platteland (the rural landscapes of South Africa), childhood innocence, and intimate scenes of home and family are familiar territory in boeremusiek reception. Kathrada appeals to a shared imaginary of a deep rural South African dreamtime to which the “boer” in boere- musiek—which translates directly from Afrikaans as “farmer”—belongs at least in part. The whimsical materialism of boeremusiek titles such as “Dirt 1 Kathrada (2000), p. 222. 2 Ahmed (2004), p. 22.