‘The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’: Soundscapes of Suffering in the South African War

Under the recurring headline ‘the Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’, several British newspapers reported in early 1900 that, during the ongoing siege of Mafeking, British army concertina players were capturing enemy soldiers by simply playing strains of the concertina to distract them out of their hiding places. ‘One is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to lure persons to destruction’, a commentator in the Musical News noted, but then, it was rationalized, ‘all's fair in war’. This hybrid use of the concertina during the South African War was further employed as a metaphor for the decay of the physical body itself: as has been noted by Elizabeth van Heyningen, food in Boer concentration camps was so meagre that the meat served to prisoners was once described as coming from a ‘carcase [who] looks like a concertina drawn out fully with all the wind knocked out’. Likewise, Krebs (1999) has discussed the presence of the concertina in the trenches as an example of contemporaneous stereotypes about the susceptibility of Boer soldiers to music in relation to perceived notions that they were backwards and easily manipulated. Drawing upon references to music – particularly the ubiquitous, anthropomorphised, instrument of the concertina – in concentration camps during the South African War, this paper will situate the use of British military music at the dawn of the twentieth century within the framework of trauma studies, proposing that the soundscapes of imperial war were implicitly tinged with traces of physical suffering.

In this article I examine how the concertina emerged as a 'degenerate' instrument in British narratives about the South African War, exploring how the 'mournful' and 'diseased' associations of the instrument that surfaced in colonial wartime reporting have continued to function as a metaphor for Afrikaner cultural trauma. Due to the growing associations of the concertina during the nineteenth century with working-class musicians (despite its origins in the middle-class Victorian parlour), and its ineffectiveness in 'blending' with standard classical concert ensembles, the instrument has also been marginalized in many written histories of western music. 10 Furthermore, most musicological examinations of the connections between suffering and music in spaces of wartime incarceration (such as in concentration camps) have been overwhelmingly focused on European geographical locations. 11 When examining historical literature on the South African War, however, as well as studies of Afrikaner nationalism, the concertina emerges as a powerful metaphor for racial and cultural degeneration in musical constructions of both the imperial enemy and the colonial Other. 12 In placing the colonial concertina into dialogue with trauma studies, both from a psychological standpoint and through acknowledging scholarly work on music as a tool for torture and weaponization, 13 I will provide a contextualized reading of the concertina as a 'traumatic' instrument of the South African War. Drawing on newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts from the time, as well as on scholarship about the enduring legacy of the concertina in Afrikaner culture, I consider the frameworks of 'cultural trauma' as set out by sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, and 'perennial mourning' as defined by psychiatrist Vamik Volkan. While Alexander does not engage with Volkan's psychoanalytic models of trauma, a case study of the concertina as inhabiting and representing a 'traumatic sonic space' during the South African War is a useful opportunity for bringing these theories together, to consider how sonic legacies may become trapped in a perennial, traumatic 'holding place'. Furthermore, since much published trauma literature is considerably Eurocentric, the significance of examining the post/colonial implications of a musical instrument for multiple generations of settler communities becomes all the more potent.
This case study thus considers how the 'soundscapes of suffering' associated with the Victorian concertina were shaped by imperial systems of control, which in turn reinforced Afrikaner nationalist ideologies of the 'collective memory' of traumatic suffering. Fassin and Rechtman have defined 'collective memory' as a 'traumatic relationship with the past in which the group identifies itself as a victim through its recognition of a shared experience of violence'; notwithstanding different contexts, 'the moral framework that emerges is the same: suffering establishes grounds for a cause; the event demands a reinterpretation of history'. 14 Another helpful starting point here is Ron Eyerman's work on cultural trauma, slavery and African American identity, where he claims that 'there is a difference between trauma as it affects individuals and as a cultural process. As cultural process, trauma is mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective memory'. 15 In the context of South Africa, moreover, Uriel Abulof proposes that collective transgenerational trauma has been endemic to Afrikaner identity, reaching a crisis in the late twentieth century when as a community they were caught up in an 'ontological insecurity, running into an identity void'. 16 Similarly, Abulof reminds us that 'Afrikaner ontological insecurity is multifaceted, exerting a different effect on different groups'. 17 Jacob R. Boersma, further, has argued that Afrikaner identity was never homogenous nor straightforward, particularly in the context of late twentieth-century South Africa, when post-Apartheid neoliberalism alienated ongoing strains of Afrikaner nationalism and exacerbated economic class disparities. 18 Boersma's method is to address the gaps left by a blanket concept of 'collective' trauma through the use of case studies. 19 Focusing on what I consider to be the sonicand inherently subjectivepresence of the concertina during the South African War, I draw upon Boersma's 'case study' approach to focus on how collective mourning can be present within the body and sound of a particular musical instrument. My case study is thus an exploration of how sonic trauma can be 'sounded' within a context of colonial war and reframed over time in postcolonial musical contexts. In looking historically at the biopolitical soundscapes of imperial incarceration, my understanding of the word 'soundscape' is based on R. Murray Schafer's notion that a soundscape can refer to 'any portion of the sonic environment regarded as a field for study ', 20 which, in my case, includes references to and metaphors about the concertina in the incarceration of Afrikaner communities. More relevant to the nineteenth century, I also embrace John Picker's notion that the Victorian soundscape 'was so varied and vast as to be too much for one pair of ears to apprehend', and that 'the subjective nature of sensation was of central interest to the Victorians'. 21 I therefore understand the colonial concertina to be: 1) a signifier of a particular kind of sonic environment that, aesthetically, came to embody traumatic connotations of degeneration and death for Afrikaner victims of the South African War, and 2) emblematic of a soundscape in which there was room for subjective agency to emerge through and beyond traumatic and degenerative connotations. 22 On an aesthetic level, I also hold that the concertina's geographic porousness (as an instrument of travel) and grainy timbre in part make room for sonic legacies of trauma that are ubiquitous across Afrikaner folk musical practices today, as well as aurally reminiscent of generational suffering. If the idea of the concertina as a means of luring Boer soldiers to their incarceration and/or death was a way of manipulating the power of a discordant 'voice', then its exclusion as a viable instrument from British classical music culture during and since the late nineteenth century can also be understood as an example of the censoring of a soundscape that is acutely susceptible to connotations of degeneration. By extension, that the 'wailing; wheezing' sound of the concertina is both uncomfortable yet ubiquitous in Afrikaner folk music today points not only to the instrument's distance from 'established' imperial forms of music-making, but also to a traumatic tension between alienation and belonging that has followed the concertina in South Africa since the late nineteenth century.

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Nineteenth-Century Music Review that used the concertina as a way to belittle the musical faculties of the Boer soldiers. The press reports implied that, because the Boers as a race did not possess the ability to resist the concertina's sound, it was possible for the British to lure them out of their hiding places and into captivity and/or death simply by playing a few notes of music on the instrument. On 28 March 1900 an article appeared in the Daily Mail entitled 'Mafeking -March 16: Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches: Music as an Adjunct to Sharp-Shooting'. 24 Here is the way a 'war correspondent' described the scenario: Like wary trappers decoying a wild animal from its lair, a month of close quarters has taught our colonial contingent what are the habits peculiar to the enemy.
Except Sunday, when we do not fire, our boys discovered that he possesses abnormal curiosity, and the effect of music is very similar to that upon other underground creatures. So arranging among themselves, one played a concertina, and three or four conversed.
This continued for half an hour. At the other end of the trench one of our best shots awaited developments. The music proved too much for the Boers. First one and then another head peeped through the porthole or round the corner.
This was our man's opportunity. whiz! and the owner of one head fell backwards. 25 A week later London's musical journalists had taken notice, and the Musical News published a similar summary, this time drawing out the metaphor of a Pied Piper's 'seductive strains': The instrument had a particular attraction for the Boers, over whom it appeared to exercise as much charm as … the strains of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Whenever the performer began his seductive strains, the Boers could not resist the temptation to pop their heads out of their cleverly-constructed defences in order to gratify closer their very natural curiosity. 26 These provocative narrations, which, like much wartime propaganda, may well be apocryphal, offer a formidable example of how British constructions of the Afrikaners as a degenerate white race was a powerful way to undermine the threat of the enemy in the press. 27 In the Daily Mail article, for example, the Boers are likened to wild animals that a 'trapper' watches in order to incarcerate. A day later, the St James's Gazette commented that the Daily Mail article had 'amusingly' described how the Boers 'seem to be as easily charmed by [music] as snakes', concluding that when the British soldier 'breathed forth an alluring strain as deadly as that of … the Pied Piper of Hamelin', the 'Boers, like the rats, soon popped their heads out of their holes under the impulse of irresistible curiosity, and a British rifleman, specially placed for the purpose, quickly exacted the 24 'Mafeking -  27 The veracity of these stories is, certainly, unreliable, but that the stories existed at all demonstrates the significance of using 'degenerate' music to denigrate the imperial enemy particularly during a time when the outcome of the war was unclear.

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'The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches' penalty'. 28 In such accounts the Boer soldiers are unfailingly framed as being musically and evolutionarily backwardsand consequently, their 'natural curiosity' about the concertina is given as an evolutionary flaw that renders them fragilein the face of an army that prided itself as being immune to sensory manipulation. 29 There are a number of implications in these accounts about race, degeneration and musical susceptibility, not to mention the narratives of myth-making that regularly occurred as part of war reporting. 30 In this framework not only does the concertina operate as a technology of wartime entrapment, but its power over the Boers also degrades them to a lower stage of racial evolution than the British: they have no more musical agency than the unguarded animals who are compelled to follow a Pied Piper. 31 Such depictions of Boer soldiers contrast with an idealized notion of the British military hero, who, according to historian Linda Colley, was associated even from the beginning of the nineteenth century with 'masculine' definitions of commerce, industry, war, and the successful spread of empire. 32 By extension, several late nineteenth-century public (male) figures in Britain even specifically prided themselves on being 'unmusical': as Phyllis Weliver notes, 'prominent men like Gladstone, Tennyson, Charles Lamb and the Archbishop of Canterbury all declared with pride during this period that they knew nothing of music'. 33 Thus, a Boer soldier's susceptibility to music was presented in opposition to British military resilience. Moreover, the fluid, skeleton-like physical frame of the concertina itself, combined with the distinctive timbre of its wailing and 28 'Notes', St James's Gazette, 29 March 1900, 3. 29 The musical subjectivities of the British army around this time have been discussed by Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity, in particular chapter 1, 'The Music Hall', 16-43. Consider also Attridge's conclusion: 'In the range of songs, acts, films, sketches and plays which constituted music-hall repertoire during the South African War it is not possible to identify representations of the soldier which coalesce into a generally accepted endorsement of the war. Neither can the variety of performances be easily reconciled to a clear sense of nationhood. The soldier figure is both accommodated and distanced, supported and derided, an expression of unity and class antagonism.' Ibid., 43. 30 As Krebs notes, British newspapers were so desperate to sell good news of the war that at times apocryphal stories were invented to keep readers happy. Krebs, Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire, 11. 31 On the relationship between Victorian science, music, and evolution, see Bennett Zon, Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 32 Colley articulates a 'masculine' vs 'feminine' dichotomy growing in the early nineteenth century between Britain and France. While her construction predates the more bombastic displays of military masculinity seen later in the nineteenth century, the seeds of British 'masculine' culture as existing in a separate sphere from artistic and musical activities is certainly relevant as a backdrop to this article. As Colley claims, '[t]here was a sense … in which the British conceived of themselves as an essentially "masculine" culturebluff, forthright, rational, down-to-earth to the extent of being philistinecaught up in an eternal rivalry with an essentially "effeminate" Francesubtle, intellectually, devious, preoccupied with high fashion, fine cuisine and etiquette, and so obsessed with sex that boudoir politics were bound to direct it'; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation  Nineteenth-Century Music Review wheezing tones, could be understood as a metaphor for a weak, if not diseased, human body that was intrinsically 'other' to a notion of national strength, whether this otherness had resulted from categories of class, race or militaristic opposition. Conspicuously, such otherness was represented in numerous accounts as a diseased and inherently degenerate musical instrument precisely at the moment when unprecedented atrocities of imperial surveillance saw the containment of tens of thousands of Afrikaners, including women and children, being placed in British concentration camps. 34 Indeed, the word 'concentration' as applied to acts of incarceration was first used by the British during the South African War. 35 The destruction wrought by this first major conflict of the twentieth century, which historian Aidan Forth has described as 'an early example of "total war" in the dawning age of mechanized violence', 36 had lasting consequences on Afrikaner communities in South Africa. The losses for Afrikaner, Black South African and British troops were substantial. According to Steve Attridge, the British lost 7,792 men in action and 13,250 from disease; the Boers lost 6,000 men, and 26,370 women and children died in concentration camps. 37 Over 20,000 Black South Africans died in separate Black concentration camps, most of them incarcerated because, as Attridge argues, 'the British feared they might help the Boers and because a cheap labour force would be needed once the gold miners in Witwatersrand were reopened'. 38 Several scholars have also noted that 'the trauma of black people after the South African War was "ignored"', 39 and that there remains a gap in the historiography of the Black experience of the war. 40 While my focus here is on how the concertina has been constructed as a metaphor for Afrikaner cultural trauma, it is also worth noting that the instrument has a long association with Black South African music-making; even before the South African War it was referred to derogatively as a 'k****r instrument' in Victorian travel writing. 41 34 The most comprehensive recent critical history of the British camps of the South African War can be found in Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 35 As Forth notes, particularly with regard to disease by overcrowding, '[t]he description "concentration camps" is appropriate because it was the concentration of people that killed them', Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism, 121. 36    In terms of perceiving how these negative connotations were manifest at the time, it is worth noting that while the term 'trauma' was not in wide use during the nineteenth century, the concept was of growing interest in medical circles. Indeed, the Victorians themselves invented the term 'traumatic neurosis'. 42 The widespread idea of individual trauma as a medical condition was not systematically recognized, however, until the twentieth century. 43 That said, the experiences of trauma that can be found in Afrikaner memories of the South African War point to distinctive symptoms of collective trauma that emerged in post-war communities. Relevant here is Kirby Farrell's concept of trauma as 'an interpretation of the past', in which trauma becomes 'a kind of history' for grieving communities. 44 In the British media coverage of the Siege of Mafeking, then, the susceptibility of the Boer and Black soldiers to the strains of the concertina was given as evidence of their racial and social degeneracy. This coverage was part of a larger movement to reassure British readers that the enemy was physically and even evolutionarily weak despite the slow pace of the war. As Krebs notes, 'the predominant image of the Boers as ignorant, backward peasants was often reinforced by stories about the siege'. 45 Even in private reports, such as personal diaries, parallel accounts of the concertina emerged. As an Irish soldier recounted: The Cape Boys shot a Boer today … The former were playing a concertina, jigging and singing and shouting to the Boers to send over some of their [women], as they wanted dancing partners. One of the Boers looked over the fort wall and was immediately shot dead by our riflemen. Ruse of War. 46 The Boer soldier's inability to 'escape' the sound of the concertina here stems from the pervasive idea that the instrument was effectively an extension of a Boer soldier's identity. Indeed, British wartime accounts of the concertina are consistent in characterizing the instrument as endemic to a Boer's innate 'idleness'. As 15-21. Note, however, that 'traumatic neurosis' as a diagnostic category was largely overtaken after World War I by the more unstable category of 'traumatic hysteria', which, as Peter Leese notes, 'yielded no compensation' upon diagnosis, versus the pension rights afforded in Britain to those who were found to have 'traumatic neurosis'. Leese, Shell Shock, 19.
43 See Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 44 'As an interpretation of the past, trauma is a kind of history. Like other histories, it attempts to square the present with its origins … Because not everybody in a given culture is likely to be neurologically afflicted, or affected the same way, trauma is always to some extent a trope … People may use [trauma] to account for a world in which power and authority seem staggeringly out of balance'; Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture, 14.  Nineteenth-Century Music Review The Boer's one musical instrument is the concertina. He plays this everywherewhile trekking in a wagon, in laager, or while tending cattle. On a quiet moonlight [sic] night, as you sit on the stoep, and the weird charm of the South African night holds you captive, the concertina is said to please. Boer women never play the concertina. This would not be considered correct. When the Boers are disarmed, their concertinas will be left to them. 47 The concertina is thus ubiquitous and inextricable from the (male) Boer's life; by extension, Boer women live within the concertina's aural remit, although, unlike mid-Victorian ladies, they appear powerless to play it. 48 This linking of the instrument so closely to the physical body of the Boer farmer/soldier was further complicated, moreover, by the fact that the concertina player in the Musical Herald anecdote was himself a British soldier, and so the instrument does, uncomfortably, 'belong' in a sense to the British Army, even though it is intrinsically associated with the enemy. The broader framework for these constructions reveals deeply pervasive attitudes in Britain about the concertina as an allegory for inertia and social decay. Furthermore, if the concertina as a degenerate instrument became tied to a brand of Afrikaner identity that was intensified during the South African War, then it can also be placed within a framework of cultural trauma. Marc Howard Ross has claimed that for many Afrikaners the South African War 'constitutes their "chosen trauma", a significant loss that a group cannot fully mourn and integrate into the present'. 49 This kind of 'chosen trauma' can be linked to the mass deaths that occurred for innocent civilians, particularly children, in the concentration camps, and, consequently, can be found embedded within the rise of Afrikaner nationalist movements. 50 The experience of a 'chosen trauma', moreover, also unites the Afrikaners against the British. The terminology that Afrikaner communities have used to refer to the camps is revealing in this regard: as André Wessels has noted, the camps have been 'referred to by many British sources as "refugee camps", while in some Afrikaner circles, they are still referred to as "murder camps"'. 51 Victorian constructions of the Boer as musically degenerate are thus in dialogue with a larger process of sonically memorializing the experience of the South African War as traumatic for Afrikaner communities. This process was reinforced by British war reporting, which, in the words of Hermann Gillomee, culminated in a 'propaganda contest in which a large amount of British resources went into denigrating the Boer population', 52 something which Attridge has also noted with 47  The Boer War marks a significant moment for the political impact of music hall in that it drew upon and coexisted with an interest in military spectacle and the technological impact of film; representations of the soldier then assume a new hybrid dimension at once intensely theatrical and quasi-documentary'; Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity, 18. 54 Indeed, the continual setbacks that the British encountered during the war gave rise to a large number of insecurities about the strength of the army and the empire; this added even 130 Nineteenth-Century Music Review The anecdote about the 'musical ruse' at Mafeking eventually made it into official histories of the war written in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. As seen in Figure 1, the concertina's 'deadly work in the trenches' was visually depicted in the 1902 volume of Cassell's History of the Boer War, where the concertina player is placed centrally in the image: the music appears to distract at least two of the other British soldiers, and only one figure on the far right crouches vigilantly, at the ready to strike. 55 While the concertina's 'deadly work' is presented in many of these accounts as simply an entertaining anecdote (as Paula Krebs notes, when the Daily Mail and the Westminster Gazette presented the story, it was listed as an 'example of the humorous side of the siege'), 56 these stories also contributed to a wider degenerative narrative that strategically constructed the Boer soldier as an inferior colonial rival. And while the Musical News, generally less conservative than the Daily Mail and Westminster Gazette, did admit that 'one is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to lure persons to destruction', the article then concluded that 'on the other hand we must remember that the enemy is wantonly attacking a city in our own territory', and 'all's fair in war'. 57 In the following sections I consider the role of the concertina in the broader imperial cultures that constructed such degenerative narratives, considering how a framework of trauma studies can inform the sonic legacies of transgenerational suffering that are still associated with the concertina for Afrikaner communities.

Sounding Degenerative Narratives
As a material export of empire, the concertina became increasingly abundant in South Africa during the nineteenth century. 58 A small, highly portable instrument not dissimilar to the accordion, the concertina could be played very simply by stretching and contracting central bellows between the hands, with pitches rendered by the pressing of a button. It was a cheaply produced, compact and robust instrument that could more easily withstand international transportation and changes in climate and humidity than many other traveling instruments. By the late-Victorian era there were reports of concertina music being played on the streets in colonial cities such as Cape Town, 59 after which the instrument gradually moved out of the metropolis to rural areas, particularly Boer farms. 60 more pressure to wartime reporters to reassure British readers of national unity. As Attridge notes at the outset of his book, '[f]or England, the Boer War (1899-1902) was a pendulum that swung not only between centuries, but between national assurance and introspection, between Victorian certainties and the doubts and vicissitudes of modernity, between a national character that knew exactly who it was and one which was confused'. Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity, 1. 55  By the end of the nineteenth century, the potential of music as a force for not only aesthetic transformation but also social regulation had already been operative within Britain as a means of disciplining the lower classes. 61 The seeds of what Tia DeNora has called the operation of music as a 'technology of control' 62 thus became embedded within a Victorian mindset by this time. By extension, music as a form of imperial control was not only linked to large-scale acts of military violence, but also to the growth of philanthropic work and civilizing missions. 63 In all cases, music used in British colonial contexts provided opportunities for social power, as long as it was regulated according to certain social codes. Thus, whether sounding on a mission station or in the trenches, the British use of music as a means of negotiating and governing a volatile colonial setting was linked to competing ideologies of order, as well as to emerging conceptions about the connections between music, degeneration and disease. 64 These colonial destinations and degenerative connotations might seem surprising for an instrument that had originally been invented as a popular Victorian scientific curiosity. In the early nineteenth century the concertina was initially seen more as a scientific experiment, having been invented in 1834 by the English physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone, who developed the complex button system that enabled a wide range and flexible intonation. 65 63 It is important to note that the large-scale philanthropic mission movements that took many Britons to nineteenth-century South Africa were related to a much less militaristic or governmental notion of imperialism, and instead reflected Victorian liberal ideas about civilization through conversion, through which colonial converts were seen to potentially transcend racial degeneracy. Music, within this framework, was therefore appropriate so long as it was presented in 'respectable' frameworks, such as mission station hymn singing or brass band playing (as long as the band director was white). See  Nineteenth-Century Music Review was, briefly, a popular Victorian parlour instrument. In its easily mass-produced forms, however, the instrument gradually became more widely used by street musicians, gathering a received narrative of mobility, diaspora and degeneracy. 67 As part of an upsurge in different mass-produced instruments, analogies between the 'breathing' sound of the concertina and the 'nasal' and 'naturally embodied' diverse human voice abounded. The notion that each individual concertina could effectively represent a separateif unrefinedhuman voice was further complicated by the fact that, instead of being standardized, the variations on the size and range of the instrument continued to increase over the course of the nineteenth century; for example, London publisher J. J. Ewer alone listed c450 versions of the concertina available for sale by 1860. 68 Even Charles Dickens noted in his periodical Household Words in 1853 that the pervasive street instrument 'could speak in any vocal register: treble concertina, baritone concertina, tenor concertina'. 69 Here, the concertina encompassed the social diversity of a Dickensian human voice: in its various accents it spoke across gendered and classed boundaries, and therefore communicated on an all-too-human (and potentially all-too-physical) level. Dickens was not alone in making an analogy between the concertina and the 'accented' human voice. James Q. Davies has noted that 'in the early days, Wheatstone experimented with ways to make his concertina speak in vowels, using resonators, though these efforts apparently failed'. 70 Anna Gawboy has also noted that Wheatstone initially conceived of the concertina as an instrument that was in line with contemporary developments in telegraphs and typewriters, 71 placing it more in the category of a scientific tool for global communication than as an instrument that would have been classified as appropriate for sophisticated art music. As Davies claims, the concertina was more of a communicative, mobile, 'voice in a box'. 72 The concertina was, likewise, easily transportable and exportable as an object of colonial travel, further separating those who played it from the middle-class Victorian parlour. By the 1870s reports of concertinas spanned coastal towns across South Africa, Nigeria, Benin, Angola and the Cape Verde Islands. 73  It is also worth noting that both the banjo and the concertina became used in Irish traditional music around the same time that they were othered from English parlour culture. Thank you to Jillian C. Rogers for drawing this connection. 68

'The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches'
Africans [also] began to play the instrument at the same time'. 74 Therefore, the instrument gathered further associations not only with Dutch imperial competitors to Britain, but also with Black colonial subjects. In colonial contexts, moreover, the fact that the simple pressing of buttons produced tones in 'just intonation' rather than 'equal intonation' 75 further renders the concertina a particularly apt instrument of empire because it had the potential to be inherently communicative. In the context of communicating withor, in the context of the trenches, 'luring'the enemy, the concertina thus became a veritable 'speaking machine' that could sound the 'othered' tones of working-class and/or colonial scales. 76 Over the course of the nineteenth century the traveling concertina thus transformed from a British travel accessory to an instrument that became ubiquitous in many colonial communities. Over time, as Davies has argued, the concertina was increasingly subject to colonial transformations that took the instrument far from its origins as a Victorian curiosity. He claims that 'in South Africa at least … concertinas were misused, fiddled with, indigenized, altered, and mutilated in ways that messed with the utopian fantasies of such globalist liberals as Wheatstone'. 77 As Davies continues, 'later versions of Wheatstone's multi-" tongued" reed instrument would be advertized as the sound of "British dominions and Colonies"', would be 'taken to the Antarctic by Shackleton, Central Asia by Livingstone', and would be 'instruments of choice for colonial missionaries'. 78 In this way, the concertina inhabited a shifting space where it was simultaneously a marker of British imperialism, while at the same time it was an appropriate instrument to bestow upon colonial subjects who were not given access to more elite British musical practices. The concertina could therefore function successfully as an instrument of colonial diplomacy: an article in the Times from April 1881, for example, noted that William Noble of the Blue Band and Army Gospel Temperance Society had travelled to South Africa in order to 'present a "handsome concertina" to the King of the Zulus, Cetshwayo kaMpande, who was being held as a prisoner of war near Cape Town'. 79 The increasingly derogatory associations of the concertina with the voices and bodies of rival settler communities and colonial subjects can therefore help to explain the rhetoric that emerged around the instrument during the South African War. The professional classes in Britainthose who would have published and read journals such as the Musical Newsmay well have strongly associated the concertina with contemporaneous ideas about racial degeneracy. Equally, none of the 'deadly work in the trenches' reports questioned the racial evolutionary framework of why the Boer soldiers would be specifically receptive to the danger of this particular type of musical seduction. Such neglect can be tied to persistent, and widely accepted, British propaganda supporting the idea that the Boers were a devolved white race, implying that they as a people would thus have little or no control over their own bodies once they heard the wheezing strains of the 74

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Nineteenth-Century Music Review instrument. For example, in 1900 the Musical News gave the following account of the state of music in white South Africa: Except at Johannesburg, where the people are almost all English, music, as we recognise it, seems to be hardly known. The Boers apparently confine themselves mainly to the droning of hymns, accompanied by a harmonium … It may be that, besides the blessings of equal justice and good government which must result from war, music will bear her fair share through the softening influence the divine art will exercise on the people of this portion of our South African empire. 80 In this construction, the Boers knew nothing of musical development, and so the concertina became attached to a form of degeneracy that could only be 'helped' by the civilizing influence of British military success. The Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle reflected a similar depiction of Boer society (and the predominance of the concertina within it) in an article that came out in the same year: Every Boer believes himself to be a born musician … and every Boer homestead possesses some musical instrument, as a rule a concertina … The concertina is in use every day, and at all hours of the day. When the Boer goes away on a transport journey he takes his concertina with him. From every waggon trekking slowly along the dusty road you will hear strains of this instrument breaking out in the quiet air, and if you give a backward glance, you will see the boss stretched out on his mattress in the tent of the waggon, pipe in mouth, grinding out some world-forgotten tune … On the farm, too, the concertina is never idle, for the boys take it with them, as they go out in the early morning to watch the cattle feed, and again in the evening, when they count the stock as they are driven in. 81 Here, the Afrikaner subject 'believes' him or herself to be a musician by virtue of the constant prevalence of the concertina. In this framework, then, the Boer soldier cannot help but surrender to its vocalic sounds, because the concertina has become a central figure in the soundscape of Boer life. Notably, the British newspaper reports based this soundscape on a notion of backwards laziness: the 'boss stretched out on his mattress … pipe in mouth, grinding out some world-forgotten tune'. His musical act is thus out of place and time with the imputed progress of empire, and, by extension, the ability to be physically fit for battle. Rather, it is the concertina itself, not the Boer, who is never idle; its body is more frequently exercised. The idea of the racially 'other', unhygienic concertina player who struggles to rise out of poverty was of course not new in nineteenth-century Britain. As far back as Henry Mayhew's influential publication London Labour and the London Poor, published serially in the 1840s, the unwashed subject on the city street had been effectively constructed as Black, not just because of physical dirtiness but also due to a perceived evolutionary degeneracyideas that were blatantly extended to the Irish at the time. As Kavita Philip has noted, 'it is remarkable … how similar the rhetoric of racialization of the Irish, a white population, was to the language used to characterize non-white colonial subjects in Africa and Asia'. 82 For example, the category 'Africanoid' described each of these groups, its validity being quantifiable by the 'index of nigresence'. 83 Likewise, when the concertina is referenced in war reporting, it is often placed in the hands of someone who is Black, Afrikaner or Irish. 84 Given this context, the British soldier holding the concertina at the 'Ruse at Mafeking' is unusual, except to say that there is still an impression of only really using it to lure a 'degenerate' enemy. 85 Moreover, the Irish played an important anti-British role in the war. As Donald P. McCracken has explored, the Irish involvement in the South African War reveals the strength of pro-Boer sentiment in Ireland at the time. 86 Furthermore, the Irish support for the Boer cause incentivized the British to redouble their efforts in South Africa; as McCracken claims, 'the Irish pro-Boer movement was the most influential of the European pro-Boer movements, not only because of its influence on Ireland's relations with Britain, but also because it tempered British attitudes towards South Africa'. 87 Indeed, 'The prospect of "another Ireland"', writes McCracken, 'was a spectre that might only be exorcized by a magnanimous peace in South Africa'. 88 The use of the concertina by both the Irish and Afrikaners at the time also provides another link to British ideas of cultural (and musical) degeneration that were applied to colonial subjects and imperial rivals alike. At the same time, as James Kennaway has noted, discourse had long since emerged in western medical writings about how overstimulation of the nerves through music could also lead to physical degeneration. 89 For the British wartime media, Irish soldiers then fell, like the concertina, into a degenerative framework of musical disturbance, suffering, and inherent racial otherness that rendered them, like the British working classes, as a less-white race. Effectively this amounted to large-scale ethnic othering of 136

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Afrikaners and Irish people alike, and extended to British political ideas about race that linked degeneracy to laziness, lack of physical control, and social decay. 90 Forth has applied this racial othering to parallels in the racialization of Ireland and India as British colonies: In the language of social-scientific racism, the famished of both colonies were suspect ethnic 'others'. Lazy, improvident, and adherents of a 'superstitious' religion, the Irish, like their Indian counterparts, [a Times article of 1847 had maintained] were 'born and bred … from time immemorial in inveterate indolence … disorder and consequent destitution'. 91 Such constructions of racial degeneracy can be extended to discourses about ill health and poor sanitation for communities who used the concertina by the end of the nineteenth century. While first-hand accounts of concertina music in the concentration camps are scarce, published inspections by those who visited themparticularly medical staffpresent chilling analogies between the physical body of the concertina and degenerative starvation. For example, one eyewitness likened the visual appearance of poor-quality meat served to prisoners to the instrument: Very scarce and dear, and awfully nasty; either 'trek Ox' which is so near the verge of starvation before it is killed that the carcase looks like a concertina drawn out fully with all the wind knocked out, just rib-bones with their flabby skin drawn over them, and no flesh at all. 92 Compared here to a starving, rotting carcass that would render few nutrients to keep the emaciated body of a dying camp inmate alive, the concertina appears as a body effectively 'drawn out', or zoomorphized into a skeletal frame that has been described even more recently with regard to the soundscapes of Afrikaner folk music as 'gasping, wheezing, asthmatic'. 93 In other words, the presence of the concertina heralded ill health. 90 With regard to political ideas about social decay in Britain, Robert F. Haggard has noted that 'As Victorian poverty was largely associated with the least respectable class of laborersmanual, unorganized, unskilled, casual, and, often, female workers … it was commonly believed to be the result of their own improvidence, laziness or intemperance'; Robert

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'The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches' As John Boke argues, an emphasis on physical decay within the concentration camps was at the heart of much of the wartime reporting, where health problems were related to a lack of 'water, meat, clothing, being overworked, and the lack of freedom'. 94 Moreover, since the Afrikaner inmates had largely come to the camps from isolated rural areas, they often lacked immunities to the more urban diseases spread by the war. 95 Boke argues, moreover, that 'the trauma of experiences such as seeing their homes destroyed and their animals slaughtered added to their debilitation'. 96 It is worth remembering that the early British justifications for the concentration camps were that they were a form of humanitarian liberal reform: thus, any ill health and death in the camps was presented as the fault of the ('lazy') inmates, not the 'benevolent' camp administrators. As Forth notes, '[a]t first glance, camps fit awkwardly within concurrent developments in British liberalism'. 97 However, at the time, the camps were justified as 'products of a putatively, even quintessentially, "liberal" powerone dedicated, in theory if not in practice, to free movement, laissez-faire politics, and the rule of law'. 98 Therefore, while free movement emerged as a fundamental right for model citizens in metropolitan Britainrespectable, industrious, and whitemobility augured danger and criminality for racial or social 'inferiors'. Camps … remind us that securing liberal freedom in Britain depended on creating and ruling through self-acting individuals a status categorically denied to the suspect collectivities of empire. 99 If the birth of the concentration camp evolved out of a mindset of 'humanitarian' imperialism, then wartime accounts of the concertina, as a metaphor for all that was 'wrong' with Afrikaner culture, can be understood within the same Victorian biopolitics of 'health reform' that conceived of the concentration camp as a location of so-called humanitarianism in the first place. As such, the concertina was an instrument inherently associated with the idleness and physical decay of the inmates (conditions that the British were, ostensibly, there to address) rather than with a musical opportunity for recovery (Victorian hymns would take on this role). By extension, it followed that the 'diseased' instrument could be used to lure men to death or imprisonment if they themselves could be framed by the British as being part of a degenerate white race. In reality, however, the camps created an environment where thriving physically was effectively impossible. And so, the reality of disease and death was echoed by the sound and image of an instrument that came to resemblein both sound and imagephysical deterioration itself.
As a metaphor for the trauma of disease and starvation, then, the presence of the concertina in the South African War came to be indelibly linked to the biopolitical 94 John Boke, An Imperfect Occupation: Enduring the South African War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015): 111. 95 Boke, An Imperfect Occupation. 96 Boke, An Imperfect Occupation. Boke also argues that in the camps men were better fed than women, a reality that further exacerbated the large numbers of starving women and children. Ibid., 123. 97 Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism, 10. 98 Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism, 10. 99   Nineteenth-Century Music Review history of decaying, incarcerated bodies. Like the scant food served to the concentration camp inmates, the concertina's gasping and wailing strains provided an audible metaphor for the failure of the camps to carry through their humanitarian claims in practice. 100 Indeed, the ostensible humanitarian goals of the camps had been to 'preserve health and well-being, while addressing imperial security concerns raised by destitute and displaced populations considered socially, racially, or politically suspect'. 101 Thus, British discourses about the treatment of inmates during the war emerged from a late-Victorian liberal concept of the kinds of 'administrative machinery oriented around welfare and social control' that had originated in nineteenth-century Britain. 102 Likewise, according to Forth, The same forces that generated prisons, factories, and the work-houses in nineteenth-century Britain created colonial camps (along with mining compounds, convict settlements, and other imperial enclosures). Like their metropolitan correlatives, famine, plague and wartime concentration camps were disciplinary institutions that operated according to putatively humane principles of 'poor relief' and 'protective custody'. Britain encamped populations 'for their own good' and in the name of relief and humanity. Yet camps also responded to metaphors of social danger and contagion, which dehumanized those detained. 103 Late-Victorian appropriations of humanitarianism also reinforced the idea that liberal rule at this time was, as Forth concludes, 'premised on the construction of a certain type of subject: trustworthy, self-governing and hygienic'. 104 A subject that had degenerated from this construction was by implication left outside of the humanitarian paradigm by virtue of their racial deterioration from a British self-governing standard.
Since the achievement of liberal agency in nineteenth-century Britain depended on the success of self-governing individuals, 105 the inmates in the concentration camps who did not thrive could therefore be blamed for not embracing the 'protection' that they were offered, despite the reality of lack of food, overcrowding and contagious disease. Many accounts of Afrikaner music-making within the camps reflected this ideology: if, as noted in the diary of one of the concentration camp teachers, the child inmates were indeed openly resistant to learning how to sing 'God Save the King', 106 then the broader allegiance to what was perceived to be the degenerate musical forms of 'dreary' Dutch psalm tunes and the wailing of 'The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches' concertina music could be seen as a symptom of their inability to adequately selfregulate, rendering the Boer prisoners stuck within patterns that replicated illiberal musical acts. 107 The concertina in this context had effectively become the sonic symbol of traumatic sickness and death; the instrument of those who had devolved into an ethnic status of starvation and suffering.
By the same token, British imperialist discourse also linked physical health to their own national character. Those who had the capacity for moral judgment, above and beyond their race or class, were able to achieve physical strength and good health. As Elizabeth van Heyningen argues, however, the Boers were not regarded as a race that had the ability to self-regulate, physically or morally: neither the blue book medical reports that came out of the camps nor the British newspapers attempted to 'hide the scale of the deaths but they sought to justify British administration by [instead] pointing a finger at the insanitary behaviour of the Boers, their superstitious practice[s] of medicine and the failings of the mothers in caring for their children'. 108 This attitude offered a way to exonerate the camp administrators for the extraordinary levels of infectious disease in the camps, where typhoid, pneumonia and measles (which counted for around 43 per cent of all concentration camp deaths) proliferated, as did death by malnutrition. 109 Yet camp authorities resisted taking responsibility for these atrocities and were quick to point to the culturally determined sanitation practices of the inmates as the problem. As Boke notes, 'the camp authorities made something of a fetish of ventilation and were vociferous in their complaints about the inmates' poor hygiene'. 110 Of course, the notion that only Black and Afrikaner South Africans suffered from poor hygiene is erroneous, when considering that, in reality, 'more British soldiers died of disease than as a result of enemy action'. 111 107 The associations of racial degeneracy discussed above also extended to British missionary identifications of hymn singing in the camps. For example, the Boer tradition of singing Dutch reformed psalm tunes as a collective force at irregular camp intervals that often intimidated and challenged camp guards. As recalled in the joint eyewitness accounts writ- 140

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That said, the idea of Boer despondency and laziness as an explanation for the concentration camp deaths was necessary for British propaganda. The racially charged idea of an innate despondency is perhaps outwardly in tension with the idea of the Boers' 'natural curiosity' for music as reported in the Daily Mail article, but, on the other hand, both a despondent approach to health and a susceptibility to 'natural' strains of music point to an inability to control one's body in the face of armed conflict, which rendered the British as having ultimate biopolitical control. The January 1902 medical report by the British doctor Thomas Hime, for example, noted that: All the Medical Officers of the Camps have noticed the want of resisting power, the despondency and a tendency to take a gloomy view of the most trifling ailment, which prevails among the Refugees. On feeling in the least unwell it is no uncommon thing to see a Boer take to bed, and declare that he feels his end has come … I have been informed by Medical men who have been practicing many years in the country, this morbid condition was no less wide-spread among the Boers when resident on their own farms. 112 By extension, British Army propaganda routinely emphasized the health of the British soldiers, even though medical reports indicated that good physical health was far from common among the troops. However, a narrative of robust British militaristic health was vital to cultivating an imperial counterpart to Boer degeneracy. It is no coincidence that the war hero of the Siege of Mafeking, General Baden-Powell, was also the founder of the Boy Scouts, 113 itself an initiative to increase the physical health of the next generation of British soldiers, and an organization that was born largely as a reaction to the many working-class men in Britain (around one-third of those who should have been eligible) who could not qualify for the army due to physical conditions such as rickets. 114 This growing focus on 'British health', which, by implication, could distinguish 'healthy' British soldiers from 'unhealthy' imperial rivals and subjects, was also the start of Britain's welfare state. 115 Undoubtedly, the British press emphasized a liberal 'humanitarian' focus in order to quell concerns about the war's progress, 112 116 Yet an overarching narrative of British ethnic paternalism in relation to a 'degenerate' enemy enabled the cultural justification for the camps on so-called humanitarian grounds. The sonic legacies accompanying such degenerative frameworks, ultimately, are therefore a way to 'sound' the modes of cultural trauma that accompany this conflict.
Reframing 'Deadly Work': Cultural Trauma and the South African Concertina As demonstrated above, the presence of the concertina in the South African War was constructed by the British as musically degenerative, an attitude that was perhaps only reinforced in racial attitudes to the significant role the instrument has since played in the development of Black and Afrikaner folk music in South Africa. 117 I argue, however, that in Afrikaner cultural memory the instrument also came to act as what Alexander has referred to as a 'script' of trauma that was 'performed in the theatres of everyday collective life'. 118 Notably, the associations of the instrument in these stories with the Boer soldiers being physically 'weak' and therefore 'susceptible' to being lured out of their hiding places are particularly at odds with the threads of Afrikaner nationalism that takes as a point of pride the idea that Afrikaners never surrender. In fact, 'Die Stem', the anthem of Apartheid South Africa, ended with the lines: 'Ons sal lewe, ons sal sterwe, ons vir jou Suid Afrika', which in the English version translates as 'We will live, we will die, we for thee, South Africa'. 119 For a culture in which surrendering was a last resort, then, the strains of the concertina have the potential to reinforce an unwavering allegiance to continually re-sounding the pain of the past.
Entrenched connotations of musical degeneracy have, indeed, continued to permeate constructions of the concertina in Afrikaner culture. As Willemien Froneman has explored, concertinas for twenty-first century Afrikaner communities still hold associations of wilderness and displacement, as well as being interwoven into histories of blackface minstrelsy not only in South Africa but also in Britain and across North America. 120 This comes from the instrument's associations with creating volatile wheezing, rasping sounds around the rural campfire; of the prevalence of the instrument in Black South African ensembles; and of the 'savage' possibilities of racial mixture within the varieties of hybrid ensembles that have permeated the concertina's history in South Africa, from its nineteenth-

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Nineteenth-Century Music Review century colonial origins until today. The concertina, in Froneman's construction, also carries associations with 'loss of composure and wild abandon'. 121 Moreover, because the concertina's colonial connotations verged on ideas of the 'savage', the '"screeching" and "wailing"' tones of the concertina therefore 'held the potential of activating a white musicality that was associated with, described, desired and derided as Black experience'. 122 The parallels here with Victorian ideas of musical degeneracythat playing the concertina renders one racially 'lesswhite'are stark. Such legacies suggest that from the late nineteenth century the concertina gained strong associations of suffering and oppression for Afrikaner communities. Froneman has affectingly described the Afrikaner concertina as an instrument that struggled to transcend these associations: The concertina carries with it all the pain of a personal cultural heritage fundamentally tainted by political transgression. It points to the initial success and inevitable demise of whiteness in Africa. It speaks of vulnerability, of frustration at unrealised potential, of work that has been in vain. It carries the burden of history, the attempts of people trying to live authentically despite this burden, the becoming unwanted on a continent one has called one's home. The concertina echoes the melancholy of the loss of power, of a way of life, of innocence, of freedoma nostalgia that cannot hide one's own cultural complicity in this sorry state of affairs. Boeremusiek cannot exist in contemporary South Africa: it can only exist in the subjunctive. 123 This multifaceted network of memory aroused by the Afrikaner concertina raises questions about where further studies might go in exploring the soundscapes of degeneration, suffering and trauma associated with the instrument. Indeed, as noted by several historians of the South African War, the memory of the concentration camps at large, like the mass migration of the Voortrek, has become an enduring 'emblem of Afrikaner suffering', 124 with strong parallels drawn as early as the nineteenth century between the plight of the Afrikaner peoples and the Israelites being predestined to wander, dispossessed, in the desert. 125 An ideology of oppression and predestined suffering that is directly related to the trauma of the concentration camps has, furthermore, helped to reinforce Afrikaner nationalist ideology since the war. According to van Heyningen, 121 Willemien Froneman, 'Blackface', unpublished paper, pre-circulated for a research seminar at King's College London, 'Blackface Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century London and South Africa', as part of the ERC-Funded Project, Music in London 1800-1851 (20-21 January 2017): 80. Sincere thanks to Froneman for kindly agreeing for this unpublished paper to be cited here. 122  124 Van Heyningen, 'Concentration Camps', 22. See also Ross, Cultural Contestation, 237; and Nasson, 'The South African War', 116-17, who argues that the 'Afrikaner story became one of seamless ethnic suffering; in the nineteenth century, the migrant Boer voortrekkers had been bloodied by black African savages, while in the early twentieth century, the "Boer" (to use the derogatory English sense) had been done in at the hands of the British'. 125 As Kloppers notes, '[t]he Voortrekkers/Boers saw a parallel between themselves and the Israelites of the Bible. They viewed themselves as "an Israel"a small and humble people among the (Black "heathen") nations, protected by God and whom God would even assist in war'; see Kloppers, 'Hymnic Identities', 188.

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'The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches' Afrikaner nationalists who draw upon a 'repetition of unending suffering' to 'justif[y] their demands for an independent political nation', take direct inspiration from the pacifist writers who campaigned for better conditions in the concentration camps, such as Emily Hobhouse. 126 Legacies of societal mourning have thus been deeply embedded into historiographies of Afrikaner suffering and nationalist identity. Liz Stanley's extensive study of mourning, memory and the South African War has likewise claimed that the construction of the concentration camps in Afrikaner memory has enabled Afrikaner nationalists to avoid taking 'responsibility for institutionalized racism and apartheid', with the result that 'what many people not think of as "the facts" and "the history" of the South African War concentration camps were constructed within nationalist political mythology, and are not supported by the historical record'. 127 In this way, if the ideas of a degenerate musical instrument were inflicted, consciously or unconsciously, on an oppressed community within a framework of communal suffering, then the traces of sonic trauma that were perpetuated in the decades to come can be linked back to a British imperial ideology of degeneracy, whether or not the 'historical record' of the Mafeking ruse was entirely accurate.
In modern-day South Africa, the concertina has often been seen to represent the perpetual nostalgia and grief about the ongoing soundscapes of Afrikaner music. 128 Froneman, for example, points to a pervasive rhetoric of 'embarrassment' over prevailing presumptions about Afrikaner nationalist music as unevolved, cringeworthy and unappreciated by mainstream South African musical discourses. 129 Further, studies of the cultures surrounding Afrikaner popular music more recently have suggested that boeremusiek has struggled to grasp a confident sense of its own identity throughout the twentieth century and continuing to the present day. 130