David Kramer speaks to Anneliese Burgess about the Freedom of the City, his creative partnership with Taliep Petersen, the enduring heartbeat of District Six, handing the baton to a younger generation, and why humour, music and Cape Town itself keep him going.
The man, in his trademark black hat and red vellies, stands at the podium, visibly moved. Against the ornate Victorian architecture of Cape Town City Hall, the Freedom of the City, Cape Town’s highest civic honour, is conferred on two of South Africa’s most beloved musicians.
David Kramer clears his throat. Then, in typical fashion, he cracks a joke. Would this scroll grant him free parking? The right to graze cattle on the Grand Parade? Ostriches in the Company Gardens? The audience laughs. But when he speaks again, his voice catches on something deeper. Taliep Petersen, his creative partner for two decades, is not alive to witness the honour bestowed on them. “For many years, I’ve been thinking that there should be a statue of a man beating the ghoema drum in the city,” he says. “And in that way, even when the wind isn’t blowing, you can still feel the heartbeat of the city.”
The image lingers. It is what Kramer and Petersen did together over two decades – giving voice to Cape Town’s soul through rhythm, song, and story.
“Taliep would have loved this day,” Kramer says.
Together, they created seven musicals. Their first, District Six: The Musical, premiered in 1987 and ran for more than 550 performances. Their last, Ghoema, explored the Cape’s musical roots and opened in London nearly 20 years later. Between those shows: a partnership that gave South Africa some of its most enduring songs and took the Cape to Broadway and the West End.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of District Six being declared a white group area, and Kramer is handing the creative baton to a younger generation. “I knew this anniversary was coming, so I started thinking about what we’re going to do about it,” Kramer says of From Hannover Street, a new show to commemorate District Six.
“It’s a set of concerts, and the four youngsters who grew up with me and played the role of Broertjie in the District Six musical are co-producers. They’ve come on board and are taking over, which is very nice because we are keeping an eye on it all, but the hard work is now being done by a younger generation. At my age now, I don’t have the energy I had 30 years ago, but I am loving it.
“Almost all the songs were written by Taliep and me, and we have such a fabulous eight-piece band. It’s absolutely fantastic. The four of them – Emma Adams, Luqmaan Adams, Alistair Izobell, and Jody Abrahams – all started in theatre at age 12, and now they’re 50 years old and established performers in their own right. Alistair is the musical director, and he’s very much like Taliep. He hears things the same way Taliep used to. So, he does all the harmonies, and then we’ve got all these fabulous singers and dancers. I just love being there, in the theatre.”
His debut album, Bakgat!, released in 1980, was banned by the SABC for being too political and vulgar. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – this censorship, Kramer became a household name. His follow-up album, Die Verhaal van Blokkies Joubert, a portrait of a washed-up ex-Springbok rugby player, rocketed up the charts. Singles such as “Blokkies Joubert,” “Die Royal Hotel,” and later “Stoksielalleen” became part of South Africa’s cultural DNA.
“There was a very negative reaction from the authorities,” Kramer remembers of his first album.
It really upset Pretoria. But that’s how it was – a bunch of idiots in charge. People with no sense of humanity. I mean, destroying District Six … horrible, stupid people, just like the Trump people now. Same thing. The same stupid psychopaths.
— David Kramer
Cultural iconography
Despite many of his great hits being in Afrikaans and much of the iconography being tied to the Karoo platteland, Kramer says it’s not related to a specific love for the language. “I don’t know if I would say it’s a love of Afrikaans. I mean, do I love English? I don’t think so. I’m not in love with the language or the culture, but it seems what I have done has contributed to them.
“I grew up in Worcester on the border of the Karoo, and as an artist, you find a voice, a sound, a texture. You interpret the world around you and give an audience something to identify with, so it was part of my artistic mission to express myself as a person born into that environment. Had I been born into another environment, maybe it would have been very different.”
That creolisation, that fluid mixing of languages and cultures, is central to Cape Town’s identity, according to Kramer, and he’s not particularly fond of the term “Kaaps” to describe it. “I don’t like this reference to ‘Kaaps’ – it feels like accommodation,” he says. “Maybe Afrikaans should be accommodated? Kaaps is a creolisation that continues to adapt, evolve, and change. That’s how Afrikaans came about, to start with – the slaves were trying to adapt to the Dutch. They invented the language. The Dutch certainly didn’t want to speak Afrikaans, and they had nothing to do with its invention.”
And the suggestion to replace the statue of Jan Smuts with one of a ghoema drum?
“Well, I’ve had that idea for a long time. The colonial past has always been acknowledged through statues. And you have this ugly statue of Smuts sitting outside the slave lodge – as he should be,” Kramer adds with a laugh. “My suggestion is to take down that statue and put up something that reflects what Cape Town is. Cape Town is a Creole city that emerged from the mix of people bumping into each other, and the importance of slavery in our music cannot be overstated.”
It was a 1983 advertising campaign that cemented David Kramer’s iconic status beyond the music world. Volkswagen South Africa hired Kramer to embody their Microbus brand – and for the next 13 years, his image became synonymous with the “Volksie bus”. With his trademark red vellies, bicycle, and guitar, he portrayed himself as a rural everyman travelling dusty roads. It was probably the longest-running celebrity endorsement South Africa has ever seen.
“Becoming famous is not something that you’re prepared for unless you’re born into the royal family or something,” he says.
“And if it happens very quickly, as it happened to me, it changes your life, and it’s very difficult to adapt. It was very difficult for my family, especially my children, to adapt to that kind of attention.
“And despite the rewards you get from being famous, you can reach a point where you ask yourself, so now what? That happened to me after the success of District Six. I was a functioning depressive, so I could still write, but I was depressed for 10 years. I eventually got out of it with a lot of therapy.”
Creative partnership
Kramer says he was deeply moved by the ceremony at City Hall. “I didn’t know if it would be as big and as special as that, and it made me feel very emotional and overwhelmed. It’s the first time an artist or artists have been acknowledged with the Freedom of the City.
Taliep would have been so appreciative of this recognition. During the apartheid years, he didn’t receive the recognition he felt he deserved.
— David Kramer
“He was blocked by the apartheid government on the radio and even in the record companies, and so on. You know, they weren’t interested in any kind of original work. They just wanted a singer like Taliep to copy something from overseas. And he was very frustrated with that.”
The two first met in the mid-1970s at a folk concert at the University of Cape Town. Nearly a decade later, in 1986, they began collaborating on what would become District Six: The Musical – a production that dared to tell a story of forced removals and community resilience at the height of apartheid.
District Six: The Musical became a cultural milestone, with 550 performances and international tours. Together, Kramer and Petersen created six or seven musicals, but it was Kat and the Kings in 1995 that established them internationally. The production won an Olivier Award for Best New Musical – and played on both Broadway and the West End.
Former president Nelson Mandela himself attended a West End performance. For Petersen, who had been denied recognition for so long, it was vindication. For Kramer, it was joy at seeing his creative partner finally receive his due.
“It was great. He loved that. He loved receiving international recognition. But I think now, getting it in our hometown … it’s such a pity that he’s not here to see that.”
The last musical Kramer and Petersen wrote together was Ghoema. They opened it in London in 2006. Petersen went home. Two or three days later, he was dead, murdered in his own home in a crime that would shock South Africa.
For Kramer, the loss was devastating, but he refused to surrender to the darkness.
“The loss of someone as close as that affected me,” he says, “as it would anyone else. There was a strong connection between us through music and creativity, and suddenly, this person is gone, and this creative partnership is gone. We worked together for 20 years.”
“We wrote our first musical because that’s what we wanted to do. And then District Six became a huge hit and set us up financially, so that Taliep and I could continue working on more shows. We did six or seven musicals, and it took us all over the world.”
To honour Petersen’s memory, Kramer created the Kramer Petersen Songbook, which played to sold-out houses at the Baxter Theatre. Since then, he has continued to create musicals such as Orpheus McAdoo and concerts such as Karoo Kitaar Blues (which documented the nearly lost musical heritage of marginalised communities in South Africa’s semi-desert regions), as well as countless other projects.
At the Freedom of the City ceremony, Petersen’s posthumous award was accepted by his daughter, Jawaahier, whom Kramer has known since she was a baby. “She was born with District Six: The Musical,” he says. During his speech, Jawaahier kept nodding – moments when something he said reminded her of her father.
When Mayor Hill-Lewis said that Kramer and Petersen had left an indelible mark on the soul of the city, Kramer was flattered but also aware of the weight of those words.
“It’s flattering. I understand what he means, and it’s nice to be recognised for that. Both Taliep and I have written some evergreen classic songs that people still sing today and have become part of the cultural life.”
And that is precisely why he hopes it will continue – through artists like Alistair and the others, and through new generations who keep the stories of District Six alive. As Hill-Lewis said during the ceremony: “Thanks to you, David Kramer and Taliep Petersen, future generations will hear our accents, laugh at our jokes, feel our spirit, dance with the ghoema, and then rise with the hope of a city that is richer and more whole because of you.”
Beautiful Cape Town
Kramer lives in Camps Bay with a beautiful view of the ocean and says his life is “a weekend that is 365 days long”. Like most South African men, he loves a braai. He and his wife, Renaye, regularly go to movies at the Labia Cinema. They eat out frequently at restaurants in Cape Town. And he reads – mostly nonfiction about musical theatre – about writing. His bedside table is stacked with books: one on Sondheim’s lyrics, Patrick Mellet’s The Lie of 1652, books about slavery and the history of the Cape Minstrel Carnival. But it is Cape Town itself that steals his heart. The city he remembers as “so miserable” in the ’70s and ’80s has transformed.
“I just love what Cape Town has become and is becoming. It’s just got increasingly wonderful and more like an attractive international city. And I can understand why people want to come here and spend time here because it’s got so many special aspects to it, the mountain, the sea, and the streets are full of wonderful people and wonderful things to do. There’s nowhere else I’d want to be these days.”
Towards the end of our interview, Kramer had had enough of my questions. “No, this is going on too long now,” he said, half-seriously. I acknowledged that he must be “gatvol” of me.
Kramer laughs. “Gatvol. That could be a new album.”
It feels apt. Because if there is one thing clear from this conversation, it is that David Kramer – despite loss, despite grief, despite the weight of legacy – is full of humour and heart. His final words to me are simple: “Live a creative life.”
It is exactly what he does, every day, in a city he loves, with music that will never stop beating.
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