ABSTRACT
In the mid-1970s punk rock burst onto the scene in a flurry of black leather, wild hairstyles and anti-authoritarian attitude. Despite censorship laws, punk and other underground musical forms reached South Africa largely thanks to individuals bringing records from places like New York and London that were subsequently reproduced and – often illicitly – distributed. Punk as a subculture in the Global North has been the focus of extensive scholarship, including gender dynamics and race within punk scenes, examined by scholars such as Leblanc (1999), Duncombe and Tremblay (2011), and Rapport (2020). Conversely, punk rock in the Global South has been hugely undervalued in scholarship, eclipsed for decades by punk scenes in the West. Despite the dearth of book-length studies of punk in the Global South, punk music, styles and attitudes did exist outside the West, often fuelled by systematic oppression and colonialism. This chapter looks at the punk scene in South Africa during the latter decades of the apartheid era. It argues that punk was thriving in South Africa at the time and was a subculture that transcended race, class and gender in a country that was deeply and systematically divided. By drawing from a diverse range of sources, including interviews, newspaper articles, documentaries, memoirs, photographs, flyers, music videos and audio recordings, this work attempts to demonstrate the ways that South African punks carved out their own spaces and renegotiated their identities in a country that had deeply segregated its people and set strict rules on who and what different types of people could and could not be.
