Tata Mandela

The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume whoever opposed apartheid was an alley- Steve Biko

I awaken to news that Nelson Mandela is no more. First I’m taken over by emotions which I can’t place. Am I happy, sad or just indifferent? A form of tiredness engulfs me. Some part of me seems to want to feel for Madiba, another says voetsek, don’t get carried away. I have not even checked what should be mass hysteria on facebook and twitter, but I feel if I don’t put on my political ideological lenses I might get sucked into the empty self-deceptive vortex of rainbowism. This is the biggest legacy of Mandela, it I.e. (rainbow nation idea) and his often cited justice relegating- white people protecting reconciliation, best represented by his friend Desmond Tutu’s truth and reconciliation commission (T.R.C) always occludes one’s eyes to the inherent dangers internal to those politics, which if one is unguarded incarcerates him or her in mushy sentimental feelings which obscures power.

The dominant narrative on Mandela is as follows. His made into a saint, iconized, and worshiped worldwide. The other narratives which contradict these views by virtue of the dominance of the former view remain stuck in the rubble of erasure or ignorance, unable to be retrieved and properly examined. Anyway, be that as it may I won’t be surprised if, every news outlet worldwide will bombard us with his pictures, pearls of wisdom, speeches and quotes. But the need to ask how he handled power questions will probably be buried underneath the very same above-mentioned rubble of uncritical gratitude, these questions are- for whom is he really a hero?. Is he the majority Africans/blacks hero or the minority white’s settler community hero, or both? If both who does this power arrangement work more for? The other pertinent question is in whose advantage where his policies directed towards?

Seeing that south Africa is the most unequal society as a result of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and new forms of post94 apartheid characterized by whites still dominating every sphere of this society and blacks being tolerated and constantly leading dehumanized dishonored living conditions crudely represented by townships-in the country of the forebears, nogal!-what does Mandela’s supposed symbolic gestures say to this conundrum as well as the questions I’ve already raised?. This is the most visible problem of Mandela-ism- the ideology of Mandela. His and his beloved ANC’s unwillingness to transform apartheid economic relations, that is to uproot South Africa’s economy from its colonial roots. This  is one of the worst facets of Mandela and ANC handling of political power- this leads one to think that Mandela and the A.N.C where fighting for inclusion in the white power structure instead of wanting to use political power destroying it. Mandela like all neocolonial African leaders failed to institute that famous Frantz Fanon injunction which is to turn the colonial world upside down or in his hearkening to that terse biblical advice- to make “the last to be first and the first to be last”

Even at the height of his radicalism this problem always surrounded him. Hence his almost mythical statement that in his life he has ‘fought against white and black domination”. The main question raised by all honest intellectuals particularly Andile Mngxitama on his controversial pamphlet Blacks Can’t be Racists is this, what is this black domination he was alluding to here? Who has ever experienced it? Whites? And more importantly if it has ever existed: where in the world did this black domination show itself?

On his aforementioned seminal text Mngxitama in explaining the problems of Mandela’s and Tutus politics unleashes this heavy criticism:

What Mandela and Tutu have achieved is a devastation that needs the kind of vision leader of the Haitian revolution, Jean Jacquas Dessalines had while standing on the ruins of his friend Toussaint L’overture, after the latter’s unnecessary surrender and subsequent murder after Haiti’s victory against napoleon. Dessalines, seeing the sellout, urged the fighting black masses on:

Your struggles against tyranny are not yet over…our laws, our customs, our cities, everything bears the characteristic of the French…and yet you believe yourself free and independent of that republic…and what a dishonorable absurdity-conquering in order to be slaves.

This Dessalines conundrum is at the heart of being sober about Mandela even when all those around you lose their minds. Asking difficult question about the position that blacks occupy in this society and this much talked about reconciliation. A stern faced president Jacob Zuma having appeared reading a eulogy on national television didn’t answer and I want to claim is incapable of answering this rather terse question as best explicated by Dessalines. What’s this freedom of Mandela if it’s unable to uproot the structures of oppression and exclusion that forced Mandela to go into struggle and to pick up arms in the 6o’s?

Do oppressed hungry people in the townships eat reconciliation and empty magnanimity?

Mandela’s passing caught me in the middle of reading a rather interesting book- Violence by Slavoj Zizek. Zizek is a world famous Slovenian communist philosopher. On chapter 2 of Violence entitled, Fear thy neighbor as thyself, therein explaining the emergence of new ideology which claims to be against ideology oxymoronically, Zizek sizzles, he says

Today’s predominant mode of politics is post- political bio-politics-an awesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: ‘post-political’ is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management and administration, while ‘bio-politics’ designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal….bio politics is ultimately a politics of fear

In this formulation Mandela functions more so on the last line of the quote paragraph. Ideological questions as I’ve already stated are jettisoned and irrational fear of the bloodletting that Mandela saved us from when he took over are constantly raised and then unthinking hagiographic views and sentimentality takes over. These clumsy theoretical moves fail to grasp that Mandela choose ideological stances that perpetuate apartheid structural violence highlighted by the constant bloodletting which occurs in our black townships every day. The difference is that as Zizek explains elsewhere in the book is that this violence is unseen and it is silent and systemic whilst violence of war, or terror as is the case of what is happening in the Central African Republic has an identifiable agent-i.e. military, rebels etc etc. this is the unseen violence Mandela’s prevention of civil war doesn’t grapple or account for. Mandela saved us from individualized civil war but structurally speaking he is no different to a war lord in Somalia or Central African Republic, C.A.R. And seeing that South Africans and the world fail to differentiate between individual and structural violence accurately many such leaders in the fold of Mandela will continue to get away with murder.  If u think I have a penchant for exaggeration, check statistics on our infant mortality, cheapness of black lives in townships, educational genocide in mostly rural areas and urban poor areas, prison industrial complex in places like poolsmoors and many other prisons in this country, and stubborn poverty and a tenacious untransformed racist economy. This is the true legacy of Nelson Mandela and his beloved ANC.

Maybe my epigraph should change in future and be correctly contextualized for the now. That Biko caution must now change to something like this:

The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume whoever opposed apartheid was or is a revolutionary in the proper sense of the word!

Hamba kahle tata.

Isibhilivane

“Do not lock love in institutionalized ways of thinking”- Pablo Neruda

“To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song: you must fashion the revolution with the people, the songs will come by themselves”- Sekou Toure


Indlulamthi, a giraffe in isiXhosa. A giraffe is, if not the tallest animal in the animal kingdom. It, by virtue of its height, possess the uncanny ability to see beyond trees- hence indlulamthi, which implies seeing beyond trees. A giraffe, therefore is able to see eminent danger quicker than the other animals.
Sizakele Gegana a Hip-hop artist from Cape Town calls himself Ndlulamthi, he possesses all the traits
of this beautiful creature except the ridiculously long neck. Sizakele (Ndlulamthi) is tall, gangly and meditative, most times, he is a vegetarian – indlulamthi is an herbivore, the affinities are easy to see. Whenever, before a performance he is introduced, people break out in fits of laughter, as they make the connection, between his height and his stage moniker. If blacks in an anti-black racist world are seen as seas of nameless darkies and kaffirs, as Frank Wilderson says in Biko Lives, then Sizakele is seen as the tall darkie, a minor cosmetic difference to the others.

A flashback to the 19th century in the “new world” and a new ship with new slaves, arrives. Ndlulamthi is in that ship standing next to another black man- a potential slave owner cries out as they are being auctioned in a southern drawl, “I want that tall nigger”, and this is how I think he would have been seen during those times.

Ndlulamthi is a painter, but unlike your usual painter, who uses a brush, paint and canvas, Sizakele uses words and beats to paint beautiful, pictorial representation of our gory living conditions after South Africa’s “miraculous” democratic dispensation. He works meticulously and diligently using words, to shape and re-shape what we see and experience as well as what we ought to see and ought to experience. His work is essentially about the ever present tension existing in this dichotomy or contradiction. And he is very good in handling this slippery eel of a problem!

After a long chorus of cries from fans for him to release a full length album, he has finally delivered, with his offering – Isibhilivana- the Love Letter.The first track called- Honey, the remix to MaXhoseni’s classic love joint also titled Honey. I find Ndlulamthi to be his usual conceptually gifted self as he “intrudes inserts himself like a concerned nosey friend in maxhoseni’s love affairs. In this he plays the role of the messenger with a sincere understanding of the situation at hand and its many complexities. But the let down in the song is Xabiso’s shaky unconvincing vocals on the chorus together with the nagging feeling that this song should not have made the album, as it sounds like an additional skip worthy mix tape track which does not go well with the overall feel of the album. But after this first misstep Ndlulamthi breaks free from what Common refers to on nag champa “a never ending battle to please magazine writers Emcees” which I think the Honey remix was made to do. After this he opens page after page of his very long love note, a note made long by its attendance to all the issues that characterize black life.

The track Idolophi is by far my favorite joint. A haunting meditation on the migrant labour system and how that system creates and sustains the break-up of black families, tensions between rural and cosmopolitan sectors of the black communities, as well as trying to trash out viable livelihoods in such difficult living conditions. This song takes care, of what Dr Cornel West refers to as the three aspects of time –past, present and future, and gives you a fleeting gaze into all three modes of time in a short space of time, sheer brilliance!. This work in conjunction with Imbawula and Isiqhamo represent height of his creativity in the album. These three songs are essentially about freedom, how it is conceived, understood and thought of, Ndulamthi seems to suggest that after 1994, we have not quite tasted the sweet nectar of freedom, but have gotten used to a dangerous GMO Monsanto type of sweetened taste. Another positive is his less than confrontational style in how he uses the Xhosa language. The usual in your face chauvinistic I’m more Xhosa than you tone is removed and replaced by a less force full more agreeable tone, even a non- Xhosa speaker can’t help but fall in love with his soothing voice an use of the language.

On the other hand I feel, the beats, delivery and CD cover could be of a higher degree. The beats or the canvass tends to be one dimensional, and one paced. This same problem shows its ugly face again with the delivery which can be a bit monotonous to the not so patient, uninitiated ear. But I’m mostly disappointed by the quality of the cd cover. The artwork seems to have done without any prior conceptual work to try to tie it with the overall theme of the music. You have just a random picture of the artist, standing there with no agency just looking like his trapped in a confused time warp with no strength, or agency. It is as if he took (the picture that would eventually become his cover photo and edited it on those picture editing applications on one’s phone, an artist of his caliber oughtn’t make such unforgivable errors, notwithstanding money problems that always afflict artist’s on the come up.

Another more problematic aspect is in how he understands the problems he raises and the possibilities of changing them or the underlying factors creating these problems. This is more in tune with how his ideology wrestles with the world he grapples with. Ndlulamthi’s body of work with all its attendant beauty and aesthetic complexity, only functions as a lament, a cry into a hollow hole where there’s no hope of help coming, except the internalization or sanitizing of that pain for it to surprise you some other day. It is in other words, putting a bandage in a wound without trying to understand who, or how did the wound come about in the first place. This then makes his call for justice for example in songs like idolophu to end up resembling the T.R.C, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a missed opportunity. Like any giraffe, Sizakele sees the danger coming but is unable to alert us in time as to when to react and how to react, why we should we react in the way we should in the first place?

But nonetheless isibhilivane is a must have. Up and coming musicians in the future will have to go through this body of work to understand the beauty that artists in the margins of the music industry unrepresented, represented post 94, especially in South African hip hop. Sout African hip hop is in need of more giraffes!

Dat - Suspeeda ngophangela!

I’m standing there spellbound. The stage is not easily visible. We are in Long Street, the club in question has a form of dinginess I detest which infuses you with an uneasy feeling of being unsafe. I'm squinting and complaining about the poor lighting, it has. I constantly see an energetic slender built silhouette moving sideways with a microphone in hand. I know the voice it is familiar. It pierces the darkness like the first rays of the sun in the morning. The guy in question is in his element. He takes breaks after every song, to pronounce on this and that, guerrilla marketing thrown in there for good measure.

The crowd is in a frenzied state. I'm screaming, yelling, rapping and clapping my hands too, in total deference or reverence to this shaman on stage. A late comer violently pushes to get to where I’m at, the front. He shouts with a horse voice reeking of bad, cheap liquor. He shrieks adjacent to my ears such that droplets of his disgusting slimy saliva wet my ears! I cry out, “Being a head is bad nhe?” His yells are drowned out by the equally noisy groans of the crowd. His is not deterred he persists. “D.A.T, ekse Dat, Ijunkie mfethu, ijunkie”. As he utters his words I'm enchanted by how his long arms flail, wildly, as if they are a clumsy arbitrary addition to a bruised and battered black body.

 Finally, Dat hears him. Disappointment is written all over his face as he is informed the song he likes and wants has already been done. He tries to register his reasons for being late to me. I feign interest and I look at Dat on stage hoping he will leave me and give some respite from his all conquering liquor stench. Luckily he does. Dat goes on and lets the beat drop. Its his characteristically sparse, obscure, quirky unmixed beats we are accustomed to.

I can’t help complaining whilst looking at my sister. “These beats kodwa marora”. She laughs and shrugs her shoulders. Her friend, Zanele is locked in a dreamy trance, “swimming in the music” as Willie Kgositsile calls it in his Ode to Johnny Dyani. I shout out to frizz my friend. “It’s a new joint tata, listen”. Frizz smiles at me in anticipation; we are both diehard fans of Dat.

The chorus begins “sus’pida ngophangela emlungwini/uzoxhomekeka, uretrentshwe, ulibele kus’pida ngophangela”. Loosely translated these lyrics warn: don’t be uppity just because you work for a white man. You will be forever dependent on him, and end up even being retrenched, though you’ve been uppity before.

I listen attentively as Dat rips through this song with his usual charismatic panache. This song is vitriolic towards those who are employed and look down upon their unemployed counterparts. He unfurls this problematic, in his hilarious way, such that the pain of being at the receiving end of the discrimination is fleetingly forgotten, by those his speaking for as he performs. I look around to ascertain if I'm the only one appreciating this beautiful tragicomic Dat is forcing us to see, he also shows how even the employed are as much victims of being employed only to be severely exploited. Isn’t this the Fanonian nervous condition, I find myself questioning myself. As I'm caught in this emotional quandary I hear an exasperated voice crying out. The hiphop head next to me is ready to pull him off stage. He shouts: “uyabona ngoku Dat, uthethi ikaka. Ndyamncaywa kodwa his talking shit”

He continues, “you want us not to work, how are we gonna make a living, if we do that? Asizo artist sonke maan voetsek!”. As I listen to this fuming guy my mind drifts off for a moment or too. Coincidentally I think of the so called Nonqawuse Cattle Killing saga, and how it eventually functioned as a precursor to our poverty curse and worse our transformation into workers in the greedy Capitalist sense. I wondered if Dat knew the can of proverbial worms he was opening wittingly or otherwise, nonetheless I was moved by the questions the song was raising. As I’m pondering some of the deeper political questions the song is raising a fleeting moment of depression settles and engulfs me, strangles, muffles me.

The depression has something to do with my personal state as well as state of this country’s racist economy pushing or excluding people like me i.e. “unemployable” degree less, unskilled black guys who reside at the epicentre of white supremacist logic of oppression and exploitation in South African.

As I'm standing there I ruminate over an honestly racist assertion from the doyen of liberal English imperialism, Cecil John Rhodes. I got the quote in question on Andile Mngxitama's article on Nigel Gibson's book Challenging Hegemony. Cecil John Rhodes is quoted as having said: “Every black man cannot have three acres and a cow or four morgen and a commonage right. We have to face the question and it must be brought home to them that in the future nine tenths of them will have to spend their lives in daily labour”.

This is how he saw blacks and envisaged their future by virtue of their skin colour. This is the genesis of what is the capitalist economy in this country and the continent as a whole. Blacks are nothing but objects to be used and abused and discarded when they are no longer useful. An artist i know called Ohayv has a song called Ingoma yabasenzi, or song of the workers, a completely disconcerting valorisation of what Dat is clumsily disrupting. Ohayv at this moment occupies or signifies the rubric of house Negro and Dat is the opposite if we take Malcom X’s analogy of the plantation as still structuring how we encounter the present.

Blacks are looking down on each and internalising a racist’s damning prophecy. And Dat was knowingly or unknowingly setting himself from the plantation or just question the ethical aspect of the plantation and its violent internalisation by someone like Ohayv.

As I make this connection In my mind’s eye I see Dat seating in his room, with Biko whispering these famous lines to guide his writing: “Liberation therefore is of paramount importance in the concept of Black Consciousness, for we cannot be conscious of ourselves and yet remain in bondage”. Black Consciousness adherents, I mean those that follow and honour that tradition adequately, centralise race discourse over class as Dat was doing that day. They wrestle with the legacy of racial oppression to do the “only thing in the world that’s worth the effort of starting: the end of the world, by God”.
After the show I talk to Frizz about how we had a good performance but the questions Dats song raised were and are still haunting me. He tells me that if there are still artists asking such difficult question we not as alone as we always think we are. I shout out to him, Kusezanyiwa marora! He shouts back, Bolekaja, bolekaja like a demented fool. He says to me, “We ought to be a problem always like Dat in such shows, i.e. horrify these fucks with the black truth oko bra!” He says this as a disclaimer.”Dat must untangle himself from his dangerous reactionary love for the Ghetto in order to move theoretically forward. Kaloku the Ghetto is used by white supremacy as a reservoir for cheap expendable labour, and that's a problem mfethu”. Before I can engage him in defence of Dat. we are interrupted by a mob of heads wanting to give us props for yet another good performance! Zanele is excited and energised by the show, she is singing, suspida ngophangela ad naseaum, and I understand her excitement, it was her first time at a hiphop gig. Zimasa arrives and we congregate, and prepare to leave. A great night we had we all in agreement about that!