‘The Wall’: the one Pink Floyd album banned by apartheid South Africa
Music has the power to inhabit our very souls, evoking emotions or providing moral support we never realised we possessed. A specific playlist can supercharge a gym session, while a favourite record can deliver a much-needed boost of serotonin on a gloomy day. At its best, music has the ability to transform how we feel and even how we act. The Wall by Pink Floyd is often referred to as a ‘concept album’ or a rock opera, but for many, it stands as a staunch and anthemic protest album.
Roger Waters’ record is undoubtedly an operatic masterpiece, and conceptually, it is as sound as ever. For those reasons alone, it has been developed and distributed far and wide as a bastion of unbridled creative energy. However, another magical facet of music creation is that those sets of songs can mean one thing to one listener and provide an entirely new sentiment to another. The Wall acts as a reminder of this power.
The album track ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)’ has a habit of getting feet stomping and producing a chemical reaction of defiant fury. The tune gained further gravitas after it gained traction as a protest anthem, and then it was banned in South Africa back in 1980. Some of the darkest moments of South Africa’s history are thankfully behind them, and apartheid, the implementation of racial segregation—a term coined by the nation—is one of the most horrific.
Waters has always used his fame and celebrity to properly champion humanitarian causes worldwide, using various subjects and actions. While it has often contributed to his sometimes sanctimonious demeanour and unwelcome public behaviour, it has also added a steely resolve to some of the band’s most cherished work. His rock opera The Wall is, of course, the shining example of these two sides of Waters and Pink Floyd meeting.
Though some of his work can feel a bit misaligned, on The Wall, Waters’ astute writing not only provided a huge stage show for Pink Floyd’s fans, nor just a set of anthems for the disaffected suburban youth of the Western world but also gave the poor black children of South Africa their own rallying song—a reason to stamp their feet and shake their fists—their own anthem.
South Africa had been entrenched in racial segregation since 1948, with its government unapologetically enforcing strict and oppressive rules until the collapse of apartheid in 1991. Yet, in 1980, one song echoed through South African schools long after it had fallen from the top of the US singles charts. Pink Floyd’s iconic track ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)’ became an anthemic call to arms for the children, embodying their resistance and desire for change.
The children were protesting the vast and unjust inequalities between the racially segregated schools and would sing the lyrics of the track, such as “we don’t need no thought control”. It was a way of showing their displeasure and a resolute way of unifying the entire school for one cause. Most potently, it was their unstoppable refrain of “we don’t need no education”, which had the overseers of apartheid quaking in their boots.
At the time, South Africa’s Directorate of Publications held all the cultural cards when it came to censorship, happy to ban books and records with a smiling swipe of a pen and, naturally, the song, with its foot-stomping push for protest, was quickly in the firing line. Soon enough, the track and the album were deemed to be ‘politically or morally undesirable’ and removed from the shelves in an apparent attempt to censor the growing swell of dissatisfaction the music allowed the children to properly vocalise. “People were really driven to frenzies of rage by it,” remembers Waters in The Guardian.
It would spark Waters into action and see the star refuse to play in apartheid South Africa’s own Sun City “until apartheid fell and white people and black people enjoyed equal rights”. Waters later said that one man who really understood the power of the song was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who “went on record,” according to Waters, “saying that if it’s very popular with school kids, then it must in some way be expressing some feelings that they have themselves.”
He added: “If one doesn’t like it, or however one feels about it, one should take the opportunity of using it as a starting point for discussion—which was exactly how I felt about it.”
The track and album were later performed in Berlin, at the Berlin Wall in 1990 and later in Israel’s infamous West Bank in 2006. Since the events, the song has become a rallying cry of the free-spirited, a gentle jaunt in the name of justice and equal rights that Roger Waters and Pink Floyd stood for.
Despite being banned by the South African government, it remained an anthem for the disaffected school children who would eventually see apartheid dismantled for good. The track and the record act as a reminder that art can deliver in the most unexpected ways. With the help of Waters’ lyrical narration, the story of Pink has become one of the most widely loved rock stories of all time and rightly deserves its kudos, but it has also become a blueprint for social defiance.
