If everyone is alternative then nothing is alternative
Damian Strydom doesn’t sugarcoat what it costs to run an independent tour through towns most acts skip. “Funding and sponsorship is a bust. False promises and kak praat. Doen dit jouself!” he says. He has toured this country the hard way with his band Onskuldige Doodsvonnis: played shitty bars, got beaten up by biker gangs, slept in cars. “If you look at the numbers it doesn’t make sense to do it, but it’s taking that risk and that leap of faith and doing it nonetheless.”
That is the ground under the Boere Punk Tour, the five-date run Afrikalt sends out from today: starting off in Stellenbosch at Bohemia, Kreatief in Burgersdorp on the 16th, the Aasvoël Club in Bloemfontein on the 17th, Café Amsterdam in Klerksdorp on the 18th, and Railways Café in Centurion on the 19th. Each night rotates a different bill from Karel Bester en die Kraaines Band, Blitz, Worsie van Wyk, Skrikkeljaar, Kosmos Ens, Tydloos and Nikotien. No metro dates. No safety net. The press release calls it “philosophy on four wheels.” Up close, the philosophy is a car you might have to sleep in.
Some context, if the name is new to you. Afrikalt is the independent collective Strydom co-founded in 2023 and now fronts as its self-styled KALT-leier, part label and part movement, built to house Afrikaans artists working nowhere near the commercial mainstream. KALT is its word for the whole project, the new alternative it argues the old one stopped being. Breadth is the point, not one sound: Strydom’s own metal outfit Onskuldige Doodsvonnis, which writes in a homemade slang its scene calls skokkuns; the Cape Town surf-rock of The Karriers; the satirical dubstep of Die Fakboiz; the rock-‘n’-roll duo Kattekwaad; the punk-rap of ALTRA-MAL out of Worcester. We’ve covered them twice before, on their Cape tour and the 2024 Paarl na Pretoria run; Blus jou Lus 2 followed last December.
This fight has a history
Alternative Afrikaans has done a version of this before, and Afrikalt knows it. In 1989, Shifty Records and the anti-establishment paper Vrye Weekblad put the Voëlvry tour on the road under the headline “Die boere ruk op!” Johannes Kerkorrel, Koos Kombuis and Bernoldus Niemand played campuses and town halls with a censor board, the conscription office and the Dutch Reformed establishment squarely in their sights. A decade and a half later, Fokofpolisiekar and Van Coke Kartel did it again out of Bellville, landing the first Afrikaans song ever playlisted on 5FM and collecting death threats from the volk it grew up in.
Strydom isn’t guessing at that lineage. He’s traded long conversations with Voëlvry’s Dagga-Dirk Uys and Koos Kombuis and heard them bless the thing: “This is amazing, you guys are pushing it forward.” For him that’s the proof it isn’t nostalgia. “Afrikalt isn’t trying to be Voëlvry 2.0,” he says. “It’s a salute to the legacy, while proving that the story didn’t die with an era. The true story of alternative Afrikaans continues. The vehicle has just changed.”
And as the vehicle changed, so did the enemy.
An enemy that can’t arrest you
Voëlvry had a government that banned records and watched shows. Fokof had a church and a volk that wanted them gone. Ask Strydom what Afrikalt is up against in 2026 and the reply is quieter, and bigger than Afrikaans music. The enemy is the algorithm. “Everything is becoming increasingly manufactured, curated and designed to perform well rather than actually having something meaningful to say,” he says. “They look the part, they sound the part but they have got nothing to say, no substance.” His sharpest target is the word “alternative” itself. “If everyone is alternative then nothing is alternative. The word alternative is dead, but the spirit lives and that is where KALT comes in.”
It’s a sincere fight, and an honest reading has to admit it’s a softer target than a censor board. But there’s a case to be made that it’s a harder one. A state that bans your record is something you can face, name and organise against. It gives you a villain, a martyr and a cause, and Voëlvry had all three. An algorithm offers none of that. It doesn’t hate you, it just sorts you, and you can’t share a stage in Bloemfontein to spite a recommendation engine. The fight Afrikalt has picked is the more universal one, the same complaint a bedroom producer anywhere in the world would recognise, and also the slipperier one, because the thing making everything sound the same has no face to push back at.
“Why the fuck are we doing this?”
There’s a contradiction in the pitch worth naming. A movement that insists it’s “not about acceptance” leads its own release with Karel Bester en die Kraaines Band’s SAMA nomination for ONKRUID. Strydom doesn’t dodge it. “If success comes our way, amazing. We’re not going to reject success just for the sake of staying underground.” What he won’t do is let it become the reason. “Everyone is trying to find the recipe for success in algorithms, viral content, playlists, AI, whatever the next thing is. But then you have to come back to the most basic question: why the fuck are we doing this? If we’re doing it for fame, fortune, followers or validation, then we’ve already missed the point.”
He argues for the margins like someone who has stood on both sides of the line. “There’s something really fucking special about being underground. When nobody knows who you are, you have everything to prove. You’ve got that hunger. You walk onto a stage like you’ve got something to fucking say, because you do.” He’s watched bigger bands lose exactly that: “There’s a danger in becoming too comfortable.” It’s a theory that gets tested the moment one of his acts breaks through, the wall Fokofpolisiekar hit when the death threats turned into festival headline slots. Strydom’s answer could carry the whole movement: “Afrikalt isn’t about staying small. It’s about staying fucking real no matter how big we become.”
The word on the poster
Then there’s the word on the poster. In 2026, “Boere” is not a neutral thing to raise, and Strydom reaches for it deliberately. His is the “alternative boer,” the KALT Boer. “You don’t become less of a boer because you have tattoos, long hair, listen to punk or metal, ride a skateboard or reject the conventional mould of what an Afrikaner Boer is supposed to be,” he says. He can still braai, still farm, still knows where he comes from.
On the uglier freight the word carries, he doesn’t pretend it isn’t there. “It’s our responsibility to carry the good forward, to make it better, and to leave the bad behind,” he says. “We’re carrying something forward for our children one day. They should be able to inherit the good parts of where we come from without having to inherit the mistakes, bitterness and baggage that came with it.”
It’s a thoughtful answer, and it’s the one the movement will keep being handed. Deciding to leave an identity’s baggage at the door doesn’t settle whether you can, especially when the same word reads as pride in one room and a threat in the next. Afrikalt has chosen to carry it in the open and debate it in public. Most acts trading on the same imagery won’t.
Bring the show to the dorp
Strip the manifesto away and what’s left is unfashionably plain. They play the shows. “You can’t call yourself an artist if you haven’t toured outside of your home town,” Strydom says, and he means the whole country, not the festival circuit. Their longest tour to date, the first Blus jou Lus, ran 24 days and 12 bands from November 2024 into January 2025. Afrikalt started as a handful of underground artists deciding that if they didn’t do it now they never would. Everyone posts, almost nobody plays. He quotes his bandmate JP: “Almal speel in bands maar niemand speel meer shows nie.” (Everyone’s in a band, nobody plays anymore.)
Afrikalt started as a handful of underground artists deciding that if they didn’t do it now they never would. Everyone posts, almost nobody plays, the Jack Parow line from “Eksie Ou” that Strydom leans on: “Ons almal speel in bands, maar speel nooit fokken shows nie.” (We’re all in bands, but never play any fucking shows.)
So they drive. The 200km to the kid in a dorpie who can’t make it to a city show, the one Strydom reckons will care more than any metro crowd. “As jy nie na die show toe kan kom nie, dan bring ons die show na jou toe.” (If you can’t come to the show, we’ll bring it to you.) The infrastructure behind that is a phone full of contacts built the hard way over years on the road, bars that welcomed them back and bars that didn’t, strangers who opened their doors and turned into friends. No sponsor is underwriting the diesel.
The maths never balances and Strydom knows it. The tour won’t make money. What it makes is the thing money can’t: the songs you only write on the road, the proof that the scene is a real place and not a hashtag. That’s what separates KALT from everyone else claiming the word. The enemy it’s fighting can’t arrest anyone or ban a record. It can only make everything sound the same.
Afrikalt’s answer is this:
“Sit jou foon neer, begin ‘n band, en gaan op toer.” (“Put down your phone, start a band, and go on tour.”)
