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!