A South African’s discovery of Bruce Springsteen

by | Jan 24, 2014 | News | 0 comments

As Bruce Springsteen makes his way to SA, Desmond Tutu’s former press secretary John Allen recalls how the Boss’s lyrics expose the US’s ubuntu.

Somehow I managed to miss Bruce Springsteen when others in my generation were listening to him.

I knew who he was, vaguely. But I guess journalism in the wake of first the Soweto uprising and then the states of emergency after the Vaal uprising of 1984 gave us all the excitement we needed. So I wasn’t among the South Africans who poured across the border into Zimbabwe in 1988 to hear him compare “the systematic apartheid of South Africa” to “the economic apartheid of my own country, where we segregate our underclass in ghettos in all the major cities”.

It wasn’t until, more than a decade later when I went to live in New York, or more accurately, worked in New York and lived across the Hudson River in downtown Jersey City – New York’s “third world” – that I understood that Springsteen reflects the America that you won’t learn about from the sitcoms, the soaps or many of the graduate students who come to study us.

No, he represents the America in which, if you don’t have a college degree, or even two, you might be working two jobs to make ends meet; the America in which, until Obamacare, 40-million people had no health insurance, some relying on church fundraisers to pay for heart surgery; the America of those Jersey City streets where the Dominican immigrants working for the minimum wage congregate on the steps of their walk-up apartments (no lifts) to socialise on a hot summer evening as you walk by.

I learned in New York for the first time that Born in the USA, far from celebrating fist-pumping American patriotism is about the disillusionment of the sons, and now daughters, of blue-collar workers deployed by America’s elites to fight their wars for them – such as the Vietnam vet of the song who:

Got in a little hometown jam,
So they put a rifle in my hand,
Sent me off to a foreign land,
To go and kill the yellow man.

And Springsteen’s message came closer to home when I read how, in a fit of pique, the New York Police Department withdrew the escort helping the rock star get through the traffic to an appearance at the old Shea Stadium in Queens.

So when Springsteen performs in Cape Town on January 28, I’ll be with the crowds at the Velodrome in Bellville. And for vocalising my curiously mixed emotions as a stranger living through the worst attack in the 225-year history of the country, I’ll be silently saying, “Thanks, Boss, for showing us the face of ubuntu in America.”

For full story: Mail & Guardian

John Allen is a former religion reporter of the Star who served as Desmond Tutu’s press secretary and the director of communications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and of Trinity Church Wall Street. He is now editor of allAfrica.com.

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