Fjedur: March 22, 2004

Last night, after reading the disheartening Clarke story, I rummaged around my cassettes to find some Fjedur. I needed a little South African Freedom music to lift my spirits. Fjedur was quite the thing in certain Lutheran circles in the mid-to-late Eighties :-) oh God, NOW I'm dating myself... LOL

These South African songs were published for the first time in Sweden in 1980 by the song group Fjedur and the Church of Sweden Mission, after a visit made by the group to South Africa. This music grew out of the suffering of the Black People under South Africa's apartheid system, as a way to keep hope and faith alive. In 1984 Fjedur published the landmark English-language album called Freedom is Coming, which led to several of these songs becoming popular and familiar performace pieces for choirs around the world (The Rainbow Harmony Project, Winnipeg's gay and lesbian chorus, has performed a couple of songs as part of their repertoire).

More about Fjedur's music and composer Anders Nyberg is here.   Quote: "Anders often uses the example of how the South African Freedom Songs were used in Estonia and other Eastern European countries when they went through their struggle for liberation. The Estonian people could identify with the South African struggle, and the words of the songs could be directly transferred to their situation."

You can hear a couple of samples of Fjedur's music online. It's great stuff, guaranteed to raise your spirits.

To my surprise, I can't seem to find the lyrics to one of my favourite Fjedur songs online at all! I believe it was called "Be the Vision, Be the Dream" and among the lyrics was this one which just stuck in my head: "Be song of hope in horror". Can anybody out there help me? I'd really like to find the words for this song, they were amazing. I had them in calligraphy on an old Lutheran church bulletin cover that I had kept, but I lost it and cannot find it.