Steve Hofmeyr to include ‘Die Stem’ on new album

“It was purely by request,” said Hofmeyr who faced controversy after he sang it at the Innibos festival in Mbombela earlier this year, Beeld reported on Wednesday.

He plans to sing it with only a guitar as accompaniment, adding the audience – “all 40,000 of them” – who sang it with him at Innibos towards the end.

Asked whether he was doing it to annoy his critics or for his fans to sing along at home, he said “both”.

It will be the third in his “Toeka” (the past) series, which has sold 350,000 copies already and will fit in with the series’s theme of nostalgia, he said.

“I am just sorry I could not track Neelsie [CJ Langenhoven] himself down for a duet,” he quipped, referring to the composer of South Africa’s apartheid-era national anthem.

He is planning another release which will include the complete “Die Stem” and “Ken jy die Land”, the anthem of the independent Boer republic, also known as the national anthem of the Transvaal, and “Suikerbossie”.

– Sapa