Requiem for Gaji

I don’t know when I first met Luvuyo “Laganja” Gaji. It might have been at a hearsay influenced meeting at a poetry recital, or was it a drama gathering? Wasn’t it at Moxion (Hip-hop/Kwaito artist) CD launch at the Delft South Taxi Rank in 2006, with me invited to recite my dry angry poetry? But though I’m not sure I’m exact about how he made me feel- after our first talk he left me in an anxiously happy state of being: I was left thinking-“ yeyaphi leoutie?” it’s not like I didn’t know where he stayed in Delft, I had often heard people talking about him- some phrasing him others calling him out. But I was attracted by his love for life, and his masculine effervescence.

Gaji always seemed to be the centre of a group, with a discussion going on or just pure frolicking and goofing around. But there was always a tension in his face betraying an unfulfilled promise. A face tatooed a covenant that overburdened him- an ambitiousness that threatened to sink him. A deep-seated ambitiousness wrestling with the negativity that is ghetto life to hopefully emerge at the other end. Also, Gaji was an innovator by nature. Wasn’t it him who singlehandedly created one of the first drama groups in Delft: namely, Sophumelela Drama And Entertainment Group, with the theme of success being used to name the group?

Wasn’t he a founding member of Rainbow Arts Organisation (R.A.O), with many other cultural activists in Delft? Wasn’t he also intimately involved with the gospel group from Nyanga east called “Bless them all?” Did we not always push him to the forefront when we wanted the community hall from those corrupt anc councillors who held young people’s development with a contempt which always left us deflated, but not Gaji? However, there was a weakness that Gaji suffered from which was borne from his “succeed at all cost mantra” which seemed to dominate his life; that is, the inability to respect history and how we should archive it in our minds as blacks at the margins; for example in an article pasted on the R.A.O offices in Delft, where they are interviewed by the Cape Argus or some other mainstream newspaper, him and Sisa Makaula, in the article in question they erroneously claim they created a group which was created by a collective, I.e. Rainbow Arts Organisation, a gross error if ever there was one! This corruption of history or the correct historical story or narrative would later trickle down to cultural groups like Lingua Franca, where those who started it are erased from its inception and its character is diluted, and a success driven-happy-go-lucky-one-love deep- people movement is created under the guise of professionalisation.

Be that as it may, when I heard Luvuyo “laGanja” Gaji was no more, something in me seemed to seep out and I couldn’t take it back, it was like a broken tap that just won’t or can’t be fixed. I kept crying “what a waste, or God what a waste”, thinking of Gaji as that water that ought to quench the thirst of a thirsty community slowly dying of thirst.  Luvuyo Gaji was the water that brought us to life from the precipice of dehydration; this dehydration emanating from a herculean task of trying to fashion artistic careers in this desolate milieu or desert we find ourselves in Cape Town. As he leaves us with all his imperfections, we are left with a question to whoever is in control of these matters; we ask-“ how do you take Luvuyo whilst we still learning from him, learning not to be “intlama” or fools, learning to dream and be actional towards fulfilling the very dreams that overburdened and left him sombre draining his mellifluous saying, “halala gobongwana” of its symbolical substance, so, God or Qamata as he often called him, how could you impoverish us like this?

 God how could you allow Gaji to escape to the land of our defeated ancestors whilst he has not finished his individual and collective work, that is, the transformation of this society into one that doesn’t demonise black dreams but caresses and affirms them? How could you God?

 This has been the question that dominated my mind since Gaji left us almost two months ago. When this difficult question ambushes me, and I think about it, I’m often left emotional hence my absence from his funeral and nemilaliso, I kept asking myself, how could I face Gaji in that coffin knowing very well that we nowhere close to materialising all those utopian dreams we discussed at his house. How could I be there when I knew his child will never know how it feels to have him say to him or her, “uyintlama, mntanam” or his legendary adage when his surprised or happy- “halala gobongwana!!”

I couldn’t, I hope his family and friends will forgive me!

In 1961, the world famous Algerian/ Martinique revolutionary named Frantz Fanon on his death bed in a country he deemed a land of lynchers (U.S.A), a country, he had reservations about and  didn’t want to go to for hospitalization after he got sick, in a correspondence with Roger Tayeb, his friend, had this to say about death:

“Death is always with us and what matters is not whether we can escape it, but whether we have achieved the maximum for the ideas we have made our own….We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slave of a cause, the cause of the people the cause of justice and liberty”.

Death might have robbed us of Luvuyo Gaji the person, but it has left us with a baton which Gaji dropped on that fateful day. Hence, it is up to us to pick it up and finish the race or to remain crippled by sorrow (something he would have accused us being intlama for if he were alive) or to do what we need to do- which is, to fulfil his mission in the Fanonian sense, and never ever betray it!

Hamba Kahle Mqithi, mna nditshayile okwangoku kwaye ndiyabulela!!!

Halala Gobongwana!!!