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!