IN A PIECE entitled The Queen of the Night falls silent — legendary soprano Mimi Coertse dies, writer Herman Lategan introduces a chain of hagiographic fantasy that reduces Coertse’s unashamed collaboration and open association with the PW Botha regime to a mere “fraught context of apartheid South Africa”.
The obituary seeks to recast Coertse as a victim of apartheid, rather than one of its celebrated stars. In the process the Nico Malan Opera House appears as though it were fully transformed from day one, a confabulation that compresses the history of our country into a political side-show.
Lategan casually mentions that “while artists such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela went into exile and openly opposed the regime, Coertse remained based in Europe, continuing to perform as a South African artist.” And “In Britain, the Equity boycott limited her appearances, a stark and correct reminder that politics could not be entirely avoided from the stage.”
The piece is a marvel of reinvention, that omits crucial details, what should be, by now, the requisite explanation that Coertse’s career was emblematic of the problem of race segregation — audiences were restricted from attended her shows according to strict race criteria. At no time did she express any public opposition to the racist status quo and was certainly not an ANC ambassador in exile, despite her receiving party accolades in later life.
A post-democracy meeting with Mandela is precisely that, nothing clandestine or in the order of meeting with him whilst he was on trial, or in Prison.
She did not return in the 1970s, as Lategan would have it, to begin a process of transformation inside the country, far from it.
It was only much later in 1999, alongside Neels Hansen, that Coertse co-founded the so-called ‘Black Tie Ensemble’, an organisation created in the post-transition period “specifically to preserve opera traditions in South Africa and open pathways for gifted young black singers to pursue careers on the opera stage.”
Lategan would have us believe in a strange Mimified mythology, one that completely exonerates all and sundry, as though apartheid were no big deal. And what next, a reappraisal of the life and times of tenor, Gérard “Gé”Korsten in which he is recast as the liberator of Madiba?
A Good Deal of Scepticism required
More concerning is the manner in which Lategan’s internal framing is self-serving. Lategan uses the phrase “what is beyond dispute” immediately before making a rhetorical claim of a ‘racially-motivated attack’ that should be treated with a good deal of skepticism, given the timeline and preponderance of similar claims made by apartheid protagonists during the Truth & Reconciliation hearings, and in the aftermath of the transition to democracy.
The rhetorical device typically signals the writer is aware the claim is not actually beyond dispute. Not even Thandi Klaasen, whose face was disfigured by acid, called her ordeal, ‘racially-motivated’.
Lategan provides no date, no perpetrator, no source, no police case number, and no witness. It is asserted with confidence precisely where evidence is absent.
- No contemporaneous record exists
There is not a single news report, police record, or dated account of the alleged attack anywhere in the online searchable record. For an arson attack on the home of a famous soprano, a national celebrity nogal, to have generated zero press coverage at the time (no Afrikaans media) is extremely unlikely, if it actually happened? - Coertse’s 2017 birthday interview actively contradicts the claim
Maroela Media’s interview with Coertse on her 85th birthday — conducted at her home in Pretoria — in which she is pictured sitting in her musiekkamer (music room) with her grand piano. The journalist describes “the cool music room” with its “arched window” in some detail. If that room had been destroyed in an arson attack, this would have been a natural topic in a profile interview. It is not mentioned at all. The music room appears intact and in regular use. - The sourcing chain is circular and escalating
The claim appears to originate from a sponsored Strauss & Co, 2025 advertorial in Daily Maverick on Coertse’s art collection — a promotional piece with no date, no source, and no detail about when the alleged attack occurred. Lategan’s Daily Maverick obituary softens it to “racially motivated attack” and adds the interpretive gloss “a direct consequence of her support for singers of other races.” - The chronological logic is problematic
If the attack was meant to punish her for supporting black singers during apartheid, it would have had to occur before 1994. But her documented cross-racial institution-building only began in 1999. If it occurred after 1994, calling it an “apartheid-era” racist attack becomes incoherent in a different way — and the narrative function it serves in the obituary, implying she faced personal danger for opposing apartheid, collapses entirely.
Whichever the facts, it is Coertse’s participation in the apartheid regime, as one of its celebrated stars, which is incontrovertible, and it is this collaboration, which is best seen as a tragedy whose latest spin by Lategan immediately brings to mind the propaganda tactics deployed by the apartheid era’s own ‘Minister Goebbels’ — Cliff Saunders, who similarly re-invented his career as ‘spokesperson for the SABC political bureau.’
Spindoctors
In the aftermath of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission Saunders falsely claimed that he was never in the country, but was rather in London all the time — and throughout the State of Emergency — as black Jazz musicians and persons of color were being banned, and white lefties were being detained.
The destruction of Roger Lucy’s career as a solo artist for instance, at the behest of the sinister Bureau of State Security (BOSS) whose agents targeted his gigs for having penned lyrics critical of the regime, and the fate of Bright Blue, banned for daring to include a few bars of our current national anthem Nkosi Sikelil iAfrica, for example, is never mentioned by persons such as Lategan.
Nor are the current and ongoing 1994-denialist attempts by the Afrikaner press, to contain dissent when it comes to the suppression of the words of the late jazz legend Robbie Jansen, alongside my own copy (achieved with complicity by the deep state), an undressed wound that continues to bleed today.
Lategan should thus be considered an apartheid revisionist, a confabulator who treads dangerously on the side of an invented reality — a new form of apartheid nostalgia — a simulacra where Coertse is the one who is in exile, and would have received wider acclaim, had it not been for an inconvenient Equity musician’s union boycott. Such distortions should be immediately dismissed as serving no purpose other than to aggrandize the perpetrators of a heinous crime against humanity.
NOTE: You can read about similar attempts by Naspers and the Ruperts, to alter the historical record here.