kagablog

“In the name we discover a struggle”
Ahmed Veriava and Prishani Naidoo (75)

“some meet the NEW DREAM with a scream”
Lesego Rampolokeng (76)

Steve Biko is a widely circulated icon in post-apartheid South Africa. Like a South African Che Guevara of sorts, Biko’s image, name, and key maxims are recycled on t-shirts, screen savers, and advertisements, and are commonly invoked in the rhetoric of political parties seeking to leverage his popular appeal as a revolutionary martyr. (77)

This was impressed upon me recently in August of 2009 while walking in the Newtown district of Johannesburg. In the course of this five minute walk I encountered posters for Lesego Rampolokeng’s play Bantu Ghost: a stream of (black) unconsciousness at the Market Theatre, vendors selling Biko (and Che Guevara) t-shirts on a sidewalk, and a vehicle painted with advertisements for a hair salon deriving its name from Biko’s. As the proximity of these Bantu Ghost posters to these various commercial strains of Biko’s legacy suggests, Biko poems are produced in relation not only to Biko’s own life and writings, but also in relation to the popular and political revaluation of Biko as a logo and sound byte. This relationship often arises within Biko poems quite overtly, as “the labor of the scream,” (78) the struggle to redeem the transgressive, performative value of Biko’s legacy in the present.

In this chapter, I will explore the manners in which this struggle manifests in contemporary Biko poems. Mphutlane wa Bofelo’s “Conversation with Bob Marley” (79) is a poem that is centrally animated by this struggle over Biko’s legacy. dwelling upon the question posed by Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” (80) namely, “How long shall they kill our prophets,” this poem considers the manners in which Biko, like other “prophets” of the anti-apartheid struggle (dead and living), is conspicuously refashioned in post-apartheid South Africa.

“Conversation with Bob Marley” begins by observing Marley’s question in relation to the manners in which corruption has eroded the progressive politics of those former activist leaders who have become greedy for power and money in the post-independence era:

“How long shall they kill our prophets?”
Hello, Bob Marley
Finally your question has an answer
Or shall we say has to be updated
They no longer kill the prophets
The wallets do the talking and prophets shut their mouths.
Once we deployed comrade Ram
From labor to the government sector
He re-deployed himself to the corporate sector
By chance I met him at a dinner party
Asked him to clarify the difference
Between retrenchment and rightsizing
“It is not cultured to talk while you are eating”, he said
My simple mind got the message:
How can you talk while the mouth is full?

With these images of “eating” as corruption and greed, Bofelo evokes the stuffing and silencing of the mouths of those prophets that survived apartheid only to betray the rank and file of their resistance movements, “re-deploying” themselves from public service to the corporate world. Thus, they no longer “speak” in resistance to oppression because their mouths are metaphorically filled with their new activity of “eating.”

While “Conversation with Bob Marley” depicts former prophets now preoccupied with gorging themselves, we encounter images of the disruptive politics of dead anti-colonial leaders such as Che Guevara and Steve Biko neutralized, hollowed out, and refashioned as commodities and icons for the materialism and privilege of a new black political and economic elite:

How long shall they kill our prophets?
Hey, Mister Bob Marley
This question begs for an update
Che’ is an ornament
Biko is collectors’ item
Designer labels bought with pomp and grandiose
Paraded at exclusive clubs
By strange creatures speaking a strange language
At home in New York, terrified in Soweto
Physical citizens of Azania, (81) mental residents of Europe

Re-minted as icons of buying power upon expensive trinkets and t-shirts, figures such as Guevara and Biko find new worth as commodities consumed by highly mobile elites ill at ease in black South Africa (“At home in New York, terrified in Soweto”). The irony is, of course, that these prophets who stood for socialism and, especially in Biko’s case, black self-love, are refashioned into icons of the opposite: elite capitalist privilege and the phobia of blackness. “Conversation with Bob Marley” thus casts this commodification and de-politicization of revolutionaries as the new method of “killing prophets,” living and dead.

Moreover, this deadly process impinges upon the nation’s art and poetry:

They build false monuments
In the name of the prophets
Turn heroes into iconoclast
Now they engineer cloned poets
Dreaded caricatures ejaculating sterile verses
Rhyme crazy, content shy morons
Spiting nursery rhymes for poetry

This stanza raises the troubling suggestion that prophets are silenced not only through corruption and post-mortem commodification, but also through art. Ossified in “false monuments” to a consumer culture, and praised by a prominent coterie of “cloned poets” with “sterile verses,” prophets are shown to be politically and aesthetically sterilized, assassinated in terms of Marley’s verse.

Yet, in this moment of poetic crisis Biko arises as an unsettling specter in “Conversation with Bob Marley.” Against the defeatism of the last words of “Redemption Song”—“Some say it’s just the part of it/We have to fulfill the book”— Bofelo observes Biko’s ghost lurking in the wings, amongst the shacks of Alexandra Township, pushing back against the fatality of the de-politicization inferred in Marley’s lyrics:

“Some say it’s just the part of it
We have to fulfill the book”
Hello, Mister Bob Marley
The book of real life is unfolding
Today it is murder by memory
Bureaucrats institutionalize
The legacy of our heroes
To build an empire for themselves
From the marginal zones of shanty Alex
Biko’s ghost watches in amazement
As he is re-membered
In a club-members only banquet
In the comfort zone of urban suburbia

This passage is evocative of the range of spectral invocations of Biko within contemporary Biko poems, for Biko’s ghost is cast in conflict with his commodified and “re-membered” status in the service of the interests of a post-apartheid national elite who congregate “In a club-members only banquet/In the comfort zone of urban suburbia.”

Here, Biko’s ghost arises haunting from the marginal shack lands of the country, suggesting the possibility of a politics of subaltern struggle in a context otherwise dominated by anti-humanistic values and the evacuation of hope. Here, Bofelo’s use of “Alex” (Alexandra Township), as the site of Biko’s spectral entrance is also highly symbolic, for this township sprawls with its notoriously convoluted and cramped quarters directly across the street from Sandton City, one of South Africa’s most opulent suburbs. Biko’s lurking ghost of emancipatory politics, this poem suggests, exists in the claims of the most marginalized upon the present, claims that multiply in spite of his “re-membrance” as an icon of elite privilege.

This struggle over the meaning of Biko’s legacy is further evident in poems by Bofelo such as “Verwoed [sic] is Black: Biko is on Holiday,” (82) which invokes Biko as a symbol of lost black self-love. With Biko “on Holiday,” Bofelo scathingly indicts the recent rise of xenophobic violence against “foreign” Africans in South Africa, comparing “negrophobic” South African vigilantes (of color) with the architect of apartheid, the late South African Prime Minister, Hendrick Verwoerd.

Poems such as Bandile Gumbi’s “After the Fact” (83), similarly call into question the presumed emancipation of blackness in these “supposedly post times,” in which Biko “lingers” as both an icon of elite privilege and the potentiality of the opposite, an unsettling subversive politics, a “phoenix,” she writes, of “nakedness and truth.” This struggle takes on rural tones in Vonani Bila’s “The Kowtowing Chiefs”, which contrasts the anti-apartheid leadership of figures such as Biko with the greed and corruption of contemporary rural leaders, who, while presumably assuming the mantle of past leaders such as Biko, are described by Bila as “a gluttonous waste/nothing else.” (84)

Biko poems can accordingly be seen to agitate against the political and aesthetic implications of Biko’s contemporary revaluation as a “name made common” (85) within popular and political discourses antithetical to the premises of Black Consciousness. Construed as “common,” Ahmed Veriava and Prishani Naidoo suggest, Biko becomes politically (and by extension, we may add, aesthetically) conservative, a contradiction to Biko’s articulation of Black Consciousness as a politics of the politically effaced and oppressed. This contradiction, Veriava and Naidoo argue, mak[es] our task of remembering Biko all the more urgent. For the name, Biko—the marker of a seditious style of life—has been made fashionable. Literally. Take a walk through the Zone in Rosebank and peek through one of the shop windows. You might be surprised to find Biko’s face staring back at you from a T-shirt selling for over R300. (86)

Sit down at one of the posh coffee shops and try to listen in on the conversation at the next table. Try not to act confused if you hear some black economic empowerment (BEE) executive expound on “Corporate Black consciousness” and the importance of black pride. Biko is “big” in Rosebank. So “big,” in fact, that one can’t help but be reminded of Walter Benjamin’s warning: “not even the dead will be safe if the enemy wins. And the enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” (87)

As Veriava and Naidoo’s general summation of the struggle over Biko’s legacy suggests, Biko poems arise not innocuously, but within a contested terrain in which Biko’s broader afterlife is being hashed out. Reading contemporary poetry through Biko’s “name” we thus encounter a productive labor in which Biko as “the marker of a [truly] seditious style of life” seeks to separate itself from Biko as “the name made common.”

Here, it is instructive to attend to the recent assertion by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel Gibson that the struggle over Biko’s legacy is animated on three key fronts. (88) The first two fronts, these scholars argue, consist of discourses emanating from the closely intertwined new economic and political elites that the novelist Zakes Mda has collectively called “the Aristocrats of the Revolution.” (89)

The first front in which these scholars locate Biko today is thus within the self-justifications of the new black business elite. These elites are commonly associated with the state-driven Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) program, through which the post-apartheid South African government has leveraged a form of affirmative action within the corporate economic sector to cultivate a small yet extravagantly wealthy new black economic elite. Biko, these scholars maintain, is invoked in this arena largely as an icon of black capitalist empowerment, which ultimately masks residual white economic dominance and the continuing economic exclusion of the majority of the population.

Drawing on the work of Moeletsi Mbeki, (90) Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson thus argue “that BEE was conceived by white business to legitimate itself in the postapartheid era,” and while it has produced a small black economic elite, the program has done little to mend the real racialized disparities in income in the country. (91) Biko is thus detached in this arena from his associations with the economic struggles of the oppressed, and is ushered forth as a symbol of “trickle down” economics antithetical to the systemic transformation of South Africa’s economy.

The second key strain of Biko’s contemporary legacy suggested by Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson emerges from the realm of “state-linked political and bureaucratic classes.” Here Biko is mobilized along with terms such as “transformation” and “representativity” (92) to outwardly signify mass black political enfranchisement while masking the entrenchment of a small black political elite closely intertwined with the new black economic elite. According to Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson, this resignification further obscures the fact that South Africa’s governing practices, like its economy, are seen and experienced by many as still structured upon “colonial and apartheid forms” of governance, which “As a bureaucracy […] confronts the majority of blacks as a cold, arrogant, often violent and indifferent system.” (93)

Together, the BEE Biko and the Biko of state power evoke a Biko who justifies the entrenchment of elite power and privilege, “a Biko”—Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson contend—“who is mute in the face of continued black suffering, exclusion, and humiliation.” (94) Such observations have led Lewis Gordon to argue that, “The structures that now more rigorously subordinate groups of South Africans in poverty (“the poors”) present themselves in ways that at first seem to make Biko’s appeal to a black consciousness problematic” in that they are perpetuated by an ostensibly black government. “Nevertheless,” Gordon continues, “the blacks who now represent blackness in the South African government are clearly not based on Biko’s political designation, but the old South African racial designations” in that the blackness of the state, like that of the BEE elite with which the state is entangled, is defined a priori through biology, without regard to Biko’s definition of blackness as the struggle of the politically effaced.

Gordon thus concludes that these black elites “have taken the reins from the whites and have presented a more rigorous means of disarming the political voice of excluded populations,” ultimately leading to the observation that, “If politics itself is what is at stake in the failure to address blackness,” beyond its associations with conservative elite privilege, “then there is the ironic conclusion that the contemporary South African state is also an antiblack one.” (95)

While Biko circulates through these two entangled (state and BEE) fronts as an icon of elite economic and political power, Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson also point out (like Gordon, as well as Veriava and Naidoo), that Biko’s legacy emerges from a third front as the struggle for political life by the county’s most disenfranchised. As Gibson has asserted elsewhere, the ideas that inspire movements such as the Durban-based shack-dwellers association Abahlali baseMjondolo, and the johannesburg-based Landless People’s Movement, both of which have gained international prominence for challenging the lack of equitable land and housing access in the post-apartheid era, are examples of Biko’s symbolic value in the transgressive politics of the otherwise politically absent. (96)

Key to Biko’s continuing relevance to this transgressive strain of black politics is the acute prescience shown within Biko’s writings about the contours of oppression in the post-apartheid era, what David Theo Goldberg has called “racial neoliberalization.” (97)

Without a fundamental, systemic revolution, Biko foresaw a nominally transformed post-apartheid South Africa, “in which the poor will grow poorer and the rich richer in a country where the poor have always been black […] driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds.”98 In a post-apartheid South Africa that has made the transition to a neoliberal economy at a dizzying pace, yet with simmering racial tensions and some of the world’s highest disparities in income and standards of living, (99) these scholars assert that Biko’s philosophy of black struggle for political life remains as pertinent as ever in “the shout of black majority for whom the formal ending of apartheid has not yet altered circumstances in any meaningful way.” (100)

Thus, Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson argue that it is this third front of struggle which is most aligned with Biko’s life and writings: “The legacy carriers of the BC philosophy are the excluded majority who continue to make life under extreme conditions and who, as Frantz Fanon once put it, cannot conceive of life otherwise than in the form of a battle against exploitation.” (101)

In terms of this dissertation, this analysis and Bofelo’s “Conversation with Bob Marley” are helpful in understanding Biko poems in that they evoke the logic so central to the performative understanding of Biko and Black Consciousness. Because blackness can only be realized in the process of struggle for political life from the margins, it cannot be reconciled with elite power or the status quo. It cannot be banked in monuments.

Blackness, in Biko’s terms, needs to struggle to emerge as the scream of the otherwise politically erased.

This logic explains the pervading sensitivity to (thematic focus upon) the struggle between these three fronts of Biko’s legacy in Biko poems, as well as their intense reflexive engagement with poetry as the performative instantiation of this struggle up from oblivion, what Veriava and Naidoo more generally describe as “the labor of the scream, the haunting presence that threatens to rise up against the present.” (102) As such, Biko poems are typically marked not only by descriptions of “continued black suffering, exclusion, and humiliation”(103) and overt rejections of Biko’s (BEE) commodification and adoption within the rhetoric of state power, but also indictments of other, usually generalized and unnamed, poets whose poetry serves to evacuate blackness from its transgressive performative associations. These, unoriginal “cloned poets/Dreaded caricatures ejaculating sterile verses,” Bofelo’s poem reminds us, are “content shy morons,” who fail ultimately in their inability to realize the political and aesthetic mandate within Biko’s legacy to performatively enact the struggle of blackness for presence.

To poetically invoke Biko in the post-apartheid present, Biko poems suggest, is thus to struggle along these fronts of Biko’s afterlife, to seek to actualize a transgressive, performative poetics from a position of political absence. It is to pursue in contemporary literature the “inward looking process” that Biko called for. This study subsequently unfolds as an inquiry into the manners in which this “labor of the scream” manifests within contemporary South African poetry.

75 Ahmed Veriava and Prishani Naidoo, “Remembering Biko for the Here and Now,” Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, eds. Andile Mngxitama, et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2008) 234. 76 Lesego Rampolokeng, “Welcome to the New Consciousness,” Talking Rain (Johannesburg: COSAW, 1993) 33‐34. 77 Veriava and Naidoo 234.

78 Veriava and Naidoo 235. 79 Mphutlane wa Bofelo, “Conversation with Bob Marley,” The Heart’s Interpreter (Qualbert, South Africa: Mphutlane wa Bofelo, 2007) 38‐39. 80 Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Redemption Song,” Uprising, Island, 1980.

81 Azania is a name for South Africa derived from Black Consciousness discourse.

82 Mphutlane wa Bofelo, “Verwoed is Black: Biko is on Holiday,” Bluesology &
Bofelosophy: Poetry & Essays (Braamfontein, South Africa: Botsotso, 2008) 25‐26.

83 Bandile Gumbi, “After the Fact,” Pangs of Initiation (Somerset West, South Africa: H.A. Hodge, 2004) 2‐3. 84 Vonani Bila, “The Kowtowing Chiefs,” Beauty Came Groveling Forward: Selected South African Poetry and Prose, ed. Gary Cummiskey. 2 December 2009 . 85 Veriava and Naidoo 234.

86 Roughly equivalent at the time of this writing to $45. 87 Veriava and Naidoo 234, emphasis retained. 88 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 16‐19.

89 Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness (New York: Picador, 2003) 33, 171. 90 Moeletsi Mbeki, “Concepts of Transformation and the Social Structure of South Africa,” Visions of Black Economic Empowerment, eds. Xolela Mangcu et al. (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2007) 216‐225. 91 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 16‐17.

92 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 17. 93 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 17. 94 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 18.

95 Gordon, “A Phenomenology” 91, emphasis retained. 96 Nigel Gibson, “Upright and free: Fanon in South Africa, from Biko to the shackdwellers’ movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo),” Social Identities 14.6 (November 2008): 683‐715. 97 Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism passim.

98 Biko, I Write 91. 99 A recent study by the South African Institute for Race Relations suggests that, while the gaps between racialized groups’ incomes have slightly shrunk over the past fifteen years of independence, South Africa remains highly stratified economically, such that, while the per capita income in South Africa in 2008 was R32,599, the per capita income for white South Africans during that period was R135,707, suggesting an almost insurmountable disparity in economic power between racialized groups. “White South Africans Still Top of the Income Pile,” Mail
& Guardian Online 4 December 2009 < http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009‐11‐24‐ white‐south‐africans‐still‐top‐of‐the‐income‐pile>. 100 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 18. 101 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 19.

102 Veriava and Naidoo 235. 103 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 18.

Dear Andile,

As a kid I was taught to fear God, hate kaffirs and love money. I failed at all three. Instead I sacrificed all of my potential at the altar of non-participation in a world predicated on cant and the illusion of free will. This sacrifice was my gift to the god I don’t believe in. But no matter how outside of the system one pretends to be we’re all secretly, mutely, legitimizing that system until that great day when we take up arms and storm the barricades. Well at least that’s how I feel on my up days. On my down days I can’t imagine anything more ludicrous than taking up arms and perpetuating the same old rise-decline and inevitable fall that all revolutions merely play out. Which is partly why I’m at the launch of a pamphlet style publication called New Frank Talk 6, written by Andile Mngxitama in critique of the way the South African government sold its people out in order to be taken seriously by the “international community” (read: “the whites”).

Now the first thing one does at these revolutionary meetings is look around for the spies. Anybody who gets there on time is suspicious, anybody actually early is obviously with the CIA. That would be the two earnest white ladies in their mid-twenties to my left, one of whom is frantically taking notes in longhand (don’t see much of that these days), the other one taking photographs of everyone else in the room using a camera implanted in what used to be her right eye. Her name’s probably Bionic Woman. Then there are the three gents dressed in smart tailored black at the back of the room, their necks rotating constantly, they’ve been trained not to miss a beat and consequently give themselves away almost before their recording wires are pushed “ON”.

The meeting commences with comrade Athi Mongezeleli Joja introducing comrade Reamogetse Jah’key Dichabe who introduces comrade Andile Mngxitama. The poor CIA lady on my left is struggling so hard to spell these unpronounceable names that the sweat beads from her forehead drop onto her page leaving ugly blotches that only serve to make those unpronounceable names unreadable as well.

In front of me a youngish man makes a poignant entry into the debate. “It’s hard to speak in this country. It’s hard to stand up and speak. We still talk a foreign language.” Comrade Andile winces, he’s got no time for this language stuff that tastes like nostalgia to him, he only wants to move on with what’s good for all black people now. But I can hear my mentor Bra’ Geoff Mphakathi’s strident voice intoning “Go fitlhela re bua maleme a rona ga go sepe se se tla re lokelang!” (Until we speak our own languages we are lost!) and a part of me wants to break down and weep. The meeting of course is conducted in English, in order to communicate across tribal divides but fundamentally this means that the content of the discussion is sieved into a colonial form. Black revolution is framed in white words. The tongues are all speaking in His Master’s Voice… and it really doesn’t matter what they are saying, the staging of the debate in a colonial language means that the black revolution will always be the property of whites.

But comrade Mngxitama is little interested in these philosophical nuances of language that he considers beside the point which is to galvanize black people into action now. He is not here to bury Biko nor to praise him. “We don’t care about the history of heroes.” A sister from Paarl who clearly stems from Poqo royalty stridently (and somewhat wryly) declares, “Black people have been queueing for so long for everything, now we gonna queue for revolution?” And she has a good point. How long? Gibson Kente wrote back in the seventies. In The Bus Queue was a choir standard back in the days of King Kong. Generations of South African blacks have been patiently standing in this metaphorical queue, occasionally slipping into symbolic disorder, but by and large (and contrary to the received white vision of them as unruly and anarchic) exhibiting an incomprehensible patience. It’s not that they have the patience of Job, the blacks exhibit the patience of stone.

When we drive convoy to Tagores in Obs Comrade Thabo lets slip to Comrade Mngxitama and I that he’s in a mystical mode tonight and that might explain why Comrade Joja did his best to keep Comrade Thabo away from the mic all through the meeting. Me I’m less inclined to fall for the spiritualism schtick and more inclined to believe my nose that tells me Comrade Thabo has been spliffing some mighty herb before during and after that political meeting and those of us with rastaman vibrations in our veins know that good weed and hard politics are two sauces that simply don’t mix.

At Tagores Tete’s Mbambisa’s Umthsakazi is playing; that’s the rousing opener from his 1976 classic Tete’s Big Sound. This is music that tells you you are in South Africa. Wherever that may be. Tells you that you are home. Whoever you might be. The barman from Jamaica is as unfriendly as unfriendly gets. Well that’s all right with me. I always feel compromised when people are friendly. What do they want? There’s inevitably an angle. I keep my trap shut and furiously try to figure it out before the fast one gets pulled. On me? Not a chance. I’m too wys for that. Not born yesterday. Born 46 years ago in fact. That’s a long time. Since before Pa fell off the bus.

Upstairs at Tagores the smell of skyf is thick and sweet but the comrades have forgotten to tell the whites they’re not welcome. It’s an amazing thing to watch. The whites always colonize any space they are in. It’s happening right now here in Tagores. There are only two of them but gradually the sound of black fire diminishes until it is only the cackling of the white hen in the middle of the room that can be heard. Everybody else is holding their breath. Is it politeness that damns the blacks? Or do they really deep in their hearts believe that whites have something interesting to say? Actually you can’t even hold this colonizing tendency against the whites. Would you hold it against a frog that it croaks?

Of course the white lady talking used to be a sangoma and that’s when I lose my pickle. I mean really, what language did her ancestors talk to her in? She lets rip with a howler: “It was isiXhosa. I didn’t understand a word they were saying…” Lunatics. These are the kind of people that would not find one single white person out there in the world of humans to take them seriously, but here in the heart of our Blackwash tribe there is a polite silence while this chick simply rabbits on and on. She’s delivering a litany of digressions. I wonder to myself, despairingly, will she ever get to the point? She grins, “Well I’m glad I gave you some material. How do I get in touch with my schizophrenic voices?” At least she knows she’s mad. Do any of the Blackwash comrades know how mad they are? I mean if they were sane they would have thrashed this white lady to within an inch of her life! Beaten her right here and now in Tagores with their belts and their shoes and their caps and their sticks! Instead it’s more zoned out politeness. Blacks zone out when whites talk. They zone out like they do when they are waiting for a bus. They have infinite patience because they’re not all there. Oh yes their black bodies occupy volume in space. But their black minds simply vanish. They go into that place where most of the universe is hiding. It’s called – and not by any accident let me tell you – dark matter. Yes it is true, most of the universe consists of black people waiting for some white person to shut up!

But I’m not going to!

I’m not finished yet!

(This by why of an auto-critique, you see, I’m no bladdy exception to the rule motherfuckers!)

Why do blacks even bother to engage with whites? Here opposite me in Tagores with Tete Mbambisa’s Stay Cool blazing out the speakers this white academic is lecturing comrade Athi about his oppression. As if Athi doesn’t know that, and how, he’s oppressed. The white always assumes that he’s got the real goods to offer. The white always holds the keys to the kingdom of true knowledge that is denied the black a priori because of his blackness. I have known white men to drive through a township once without stopping and come out on the other end EXPERTS ON TOWNSHIP BEHAVIOUR. Man they will write a 457 page book about their encounter with township life, they will appear on national television in talk shows discussing their “ENCOUNTER” with the blacks! A white who spends ten minutes with a black is an immediate expert on race relations. A black who has spent his or her entire life negotiating the white world is always and only a spectator at the trough of the real, at best able to nod mutely at his or her own exclusion from the Ta Ta Ma Chance glistening at the end of the white rainbow. But still they sit there quietly, lapping up this white verbal garbage that is pouring out of this lady’s mouth at twice the speed of light, let alone sound. I mean this lady is TALKING FAST. At some point she says “My father talks a lot” and I say “I’m very surprised” and she does not get it, she simply lacks any layer of self-reflection, there is no irony in this white, no interiority, it is all and only this monstrous colonizing exertion of verbal force outwards into the room. It is simply what she is, beyond her sympathies with the blacks, and even her literal kinship with them, she can do nothing else but COLONIZE. That is what whites are. Colonizers. If you are going to be with them you are going to accept that and be colonized. That’s it.

For the white radical, black desperate people are a captive audience. No whites would ever bother listening to his/her shrill ranting. So what and who’s not? Ultimately my interest is purely aesthetic. This smoky room upstairs at Tagores is pulsating with history. Tete Mbambisa’s 1976 classic Black Hero’s is playing. All around me the black heroes of now are playing out their tragic part in this great tragedy called South Africa. Everything is heightened now. It feels like how real life should. Comrade Mngxitama laughs deeply and points at the burly brudda Joja, “Comrade Athi is not disciplined. That’s why the comrades put him among the white people.” Then I get it. The whole thing’s a fucken comedy after all. Black suffering is a spiritual thing. Comrade Thabo was right after all. Whites are there as an ordeal to go through in order to get to the other side of the wide road of the soul where they will find… A CHICKEN. But not just any chicken, a chicken that speaks indigenous languages!!! “Go fitlhela re bua….” Bra’ geoff’s majestic voice roars at me from out of the dark soul of the night. It’s time to go home.

But back at my car I discover that Comrade Thabo has left all the New Frank Talks as well as his backpack filled with the molotov cocktails, the 5D and the 7D as well as all the ammunition underneath my 2 year old daughter’s portable car seat. I heft the backpack over my shoulder and lug the box full of anti-white propaganda back into the nicely crowded Tagores where Tete Mbambisa’s heroic Demdese is now playing. Drop all the goetes off with comrade Phumzile who frowns and asks “What are you doing with our books and our bombs?”

“Heish Phumz, Comrade Thabo forgot them in the car…”

“Oh right, well thanks boss.”

So it goes…

Finally back home and listening to the great Tete Mbambisa’s Unity – the final track on that classic 1976 album, I wonder, have you ever noticed how one white person’s personal tragedy is always more important than the entire black condition?

respectfully
ak46

this letter was first published on the new frank talk blog@book.co.za

Today’s international entertainment media is full of news of one of the 2010 Honorary Oscar honourees, the legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and his intention not to attend the Board of Governors ceremony on 13 November, when the statuettes will be presented.

Godard’s fellow honourees this year are American director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), American actor Eli Wallach (The Magnificent Seven, The Good the Bad and the Ugly) and British-born film historian, Kevin Brownlow.

The French filmmaker has reportedly not responded to any of the Academy Award correspondence alerting him to the fact that he’d been chosen to receive this special offer.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, an Australian newspaper tracked down Godard’s companion who said that Godard was “too old” to travel all that way to receive “a bit of metal”.

some great trumpet blowing on this new cd

contact blacki tempi at 073-1739555 or 021-6374301

email : ftempi@webmail.co.za

produced by blacky tempi and ricky bushula

bass by wakhile xhalisa

trombone by steven sokuyeka

(Un)veiling explores voyeurism and the power of the gaze. In the midst of the bustle of constrained living spaces in the city, privacy becomes a necessity but isn’t always a given. The city has eyes; it covers and uncovers and someone is always watching- hidden or revealed. Using the poem “Corner Café” by Gary Cummiskey, as its premise, (Un)veiling looks at the fine line between seeing, being seen and not seeing.

Music “is tragedy, pathos, death. It is the whole game, the trembling to the point of suicide. If music is not that, if it does not overtake and pass the limits, it is nothing”
(Foucault quoted in Eribon, 66)

Die 25 ste Oktober, 2002, is daar ‘n aantekening in die boek wat deur die deurwag gehou word hier onder. Dit was toe Faith hier besoek het. Sy moes haar naam teken. Sy was blykbaar baie ongelukkig daaroor. Die deurwag het vir iemand gesê dat hy daarop aangedring het. Het ek die vorige Sondag na haar kind gekyk? Of was dit ‘n ander Sondag? Hy kan nie meer onthou nie. Alles is deurmekaar.

Waarom het ek vir mense laat dink dat meer as een persoon my aangeval het? Dit was wat ek in ‘n beswyming in die hospitaal aan Hendrik gesê het. Het ek dit gesê?

Blykbaar nadat sy my hier vir dood agtergelaat het, het die vrou hier anderkant by die trappe, van die lawaai, na haar deur gekom. Faith het haar, blykbaar, gevra vir ‘n sigaret en toe eers ‘n sigaret gerook.

Sy is hier in die straat langsaan gesien met die Nigeriers?

Sy het blykbaar twee keer geklop. Gewoonlik het ek met my deur oop geslaap. Maar die dag was die deur gesluit. Ek het blykbaar ‘n aanval verwag. Ek is deur iets wat Faith, of was dit iemand anders, gewaarsku. Iets wat sy vir haar kind gesê het. Waarom kan ek nie die detail van die dag onthou nie? Die dag was die deur toegesluit. Ek het nie gedink aan die krag van ‘n bedwelmde vrou nie. Sy het geklop en geklop. Ek het geslaap. Sy is terug na die hysbak waar sy die vuurblusser gesien het en die gedagte dat sy die deur daarmee kan oopforseer deur haar gegaan het. Sy het die vuurblusser toegedraai in ‘n Air France handdoek-kombers wat sy by haar gehad het en teruggeloop na die deur wat sy oopgestamp het met die vuurblusser toegedraai in die handdoek-kombers en ingekom. Sy het die vuurblusser op ‘n bank in die sitkamer neergegooi. My skerp mes in die kombuis gegryp en na die kamer gekom waar ek nog gelê en slaap het. Sy het verwoed iets op my geskree: “Don’t you hear me when I knock!” Ek het in die bed met my gesig in die kussing iets gesê. Sy het my verwoed gesteek hier-bo in my skouer. Met my bloed wat my rug afloop, is ek na die sitkamer. Ek het gevra wat gaan nou aan. Sy het verwoed die vuurblusser na my kop geslinger en getref. Die vuurblusser en die Air France handdoek-kombers het hier op die vloer gelê. Die gewig van die vuurblusser was teveel vir my kop. Ek het weggeraak in ‘n wêreld van slaap en eers weer beneweld wakker geword ‘n ruk later. Sy het in my kamer gesoek na die geld wat ek die vorige nag getrek het en my kamera. Toe ek weer by my bewussyn was, was sy al weg. Sy het blykbaar geloop tot by die woonstel hier onder in die gang en vir die vrou wat bang by haar deur gestaan het gevra vir ‘n sigaret en ‘n paar trekke gevat en is toe weer vort.

“I always told you that she was on drugs” says Zaza.
“No you did’nt” I reply

“I saw her at Cool Runnings the other night. Dancing”

“With who were she dancing”

“With herself” sê sy voordat sy loop en ek dink aan Faith wat met haarself dans.

Ek weet nie eintlik wat gebeur het nie. In die gang het ek die man wat oorkant my bly, gevra of hy my hospitaal toe sou neem. Ek moes my klere aangetrek het. Wanneer het ek my klere aangetrek? Was dit terwyl Faith hier was? Toe ons in die sitkamer was? Ek moes by tye by my positiewe gewees het. Ek kan niks van hierdie nag onthou nie. My eerste herinnering is baie deurmekaar. Ek was in ‘n kar wat my by hierdie “plek” afgelaai het. Die plek onthou ek nie as ‘n hospitaal nie. Dit het eers later ‘n hospitaal geword. Ek onthou die boom en die hoek wat sigbaar was van my kamer buitekant. Dit is al. En ek onthou Hendrik se Christelike vriend, Markus, wat my kom sien het in die hospitaal. Ek het hom vertel dat daar ‘n funksie die aand gaan wees en het hom gevra of hy ook gaan. Dit is al wat ek van die tyd kan onthou.

Faith is volgens Heinrich op kampus van Natal-Universiteit gesien. Hy het gesien hoe ‘n man wat daar gesit het ‘n opmerking maak. Sy het onderlangs vir haarself iets gesê en toe voortgeloop.

Vrae wat my bybly is: Waarom het ek gedink Faith gaan my daardie oggend aanval. Was dit haar stelling aan haar kind dat sy my die dag voor ek opstaan gaan kom sien? Het sy dit gesê? Waarom sou sy my so vroeg kom sien? Waarom het hierdie dag soveel gevaar vir my beteken? Waarom wou ek nie doodgaan nie?

The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against Fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crookèd scythe and spade.

Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant fresh laurels where they kill:
But their strong nerves at last must yield;
They tame but one another still:
Early or late
They stoop to fate,
And must give up their murmuring breath
When they, pale captives, creep to death.

The garlands wither on your brow,
Then boast no more your mighty deeds!
Upon Death’s purple altar now
See where the victor-victim bleeds.
Your heads must come
To the cold tomb:
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

OUR country is facing serious political, economic and governance crises. Those we have entrusted with the responsibility of governing the country are failing us badly.

Now is not the time to leave things to the politicians, the commentators and “experts”.

For 16 years we have watched from the sidelines how political power has been used for self-enrichment, while throwing crumbs to the poor.

The current strike shows just how deep the problem is: we haven’t taken care of the most important things, we neglected to fix basics such as the education system, healthcare and housing.

Instead of democratising the economy so that all can benefit ,we have allowed a few to become the super rich in the name of black economic empowerment (BEE).

When our leaders spent more than R120billion on the Fifa 2010 World Cup we cheered on, now they say they can’t find just more than R5billion to meet the demands of the striking workers.

And at the same time a single BEE deal – that includes the president’s son – is worth R9billion!

The vision of liberation of OR Tambo, Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko has been defiled.

It’s time we started a frank discussion about how we fix things around here.

Ordinary citizens – not motivated by battles for positions in the ruling alliance – need to get together to give our country another possibility, to chisel out a plan to hold those we entrust with political power accountable. We can no longer vote and just hope!

One of the exciting initiatives of the people is the September National Imbizo (SNI), which will be held in Soweto later this month.

The SNI is a space for those who want to give our country another shot at real transformation.

Its discussion document raises many important questions, including a proposal for an economic justice commission.

We now know the Truth and Reconciliation Commission didn’t deal with issues of economic injustice, which was what the whole oppression of black people was about.

Whites established the evil system of apartheid to keep the wealth of our country to themselves.

Democracy has failed to address this central question, hence inequalities continue, and are now exacerbated by the new politically connected black capitalist class.

The economic justice commission should be a citizens’ process – to investigate what the cost of colonialism and apartheid is.

Such a commission must in the end present the bill – owed to black people – and be handed over to government so that accounting for past transgressions can be redressed so that real meaning can be given to the commitment of equality in our Constitution.

Reclaiming our country from the elite that promises much and delivers only to itself is the best tribute we can pay to those who died so that we may be free!

* The writer is one of the convenors of the SNI

this article first published in the sowetan

Alan Marks, pianoforte

Per l’esecuzione integrale dell’opera ripetere il video 105 volte.

Vexations appears to have had no performance history before the idea gained ground that the page was required to be played 840 times. The first of the ‘marathon’ performances of the work in this way was given by a team of pianists: John Cage, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Philip Corner, Viola Farber, Robert Wood, MacRae Cook, John Cale, David Del Tredici, James Tenney, Howard Klein (the New York Times reviewer, who coincidentally was asked to play in the course of the event) and Joshua Rifkin, with two reserves, on September 9, 1963, from 6 p.m. to 12:40 p.m. the following day. One person was present for the entire performance: Karl Schenzer.

spotted this in the culture section of the only near decent newspaper left in this country.

really depressed me.

it’s not against the law to be ignorant and uncultured.

but to be so damnably proud of one’s ignorance!

and for a newspaper editor to allow this to go unchecked in a “culture” column.

probably this crassness is indicative of the declining state of education in this country.

philistinism really has become the norm.

irreversible? perhaps.

sad. very.

aryan kaganof

i like all kinds
of dick
she says now,
black
white
purple and yellow
..as if human dicks
(in this case)
come in
purple
and yellow
hues..

reaches
for another
of her
whitened
expressions

practice
what you preach,
at least
then you can qualify
for my friendship,
i wince
laugh
.. to myself
and
ask under breath
if i like
white
purple
and yellow
pussy.

Choghtu Khong Tayiji, born Tümengken (1581-1637), was a ruler of the Khalkha Mongols. He expanded into Amdo (present-day Qinghai) to help the Karma sect of Tibetan Buddhism but was overthrown by Güüshi Khan, who supported the rival Geluk sect.

He established a base on the Tula river. Known as an intellectual he embraced the Karma sect and built monasteries and castles.

He submitted himself to Lingdan Khan, last grand khan of the Mongols. He took part in Lingdan’s campaign to Tibet to help the Karma sect although Lingdan Khan died in 1634 before they joined together. But he pursued the campaign. In the same year he conquered the Tümed around Kokonor (Qinghai Lake) and moved his base there. By request from Shamar Rabjampa he sent an army under his son Arslan to central Tibet in 1635. However, Arslan attacked his ally Tsang army. He met the fifth Dalai Lama and paid homage to Gelukpa monasteries instead of destructing them. Arslan was eventually assassinated by Choghtu’s order.

The Geluk sect asked for help Törü Bayikhu (Güüshi Khan), the leader of the Khoshuud tribe of the Oirat confederation. In 1636 Törö Bayikhu led the Khoshuud and the Dzungars to Tibet. In the next year a decisive war between Choghtu Khong Tayiji and Törü Bayikhu ended in the latter’s victory and Choght was killed.

Descendants of Sutai Yeldeng, Choghtu’s grandson, succeeded the jasagh of a banner in Sayin Noyan Ayimagh.

He has traditionally been portrayed as evil by the Geluk sect. On the other hand, the Mongolian movie “Tsogt tayj” (1945) treated him as a national hero. It reflected the communist regime’s attitude toward Tibetan Buddhism.

Director: Hester Scheurwater
Country: The Netherlands
Year: div
Duration: ±90 minutes
Language:

Hester Scheurwater studeerde op het KABK en volgde workshops van o.a. Frans Zwartjes en Nan Hoover. Haar werk bestaat voornamelijk uit video-installaties en fotografie. Ze schuwt het niet om met inhoudelijke en controversiële beeldtaal haar hoofd boven het maaiveld uit te steken. Hierdoor verschijnt ze vaak in het nieuws. Zo is ze ook te gast geweest bij Paul de Leeuw en heeft ze veel online-volgers via Facebook en Youtube. De verkenning van grenzen van censuur en taboe in haar werk en de heftige reacties daarop remmen haar niet af, maar intrigeren en wekken juist haar interesse.

“With my short films I like to make suggestive images which stimulate the fantasy of the viewer without telling a story. The film experiments show fantasies concerning fears, desires, obsessions and memories with my own body as a film object. I start with a fantasy and by filming this I try to deal with it. Using this path I want to record an inner reflection. By experimenting I build up a film and I surrender to the ideas of the moment.”
Scheurwater schrikt niet terug van een lading hatemails of de zoveelste blokkering van haar facebook account. Zelfs Youtube is begonnen haar werk te verwijderen, veroordeeld om expliciete stills uit haar videokunst. Scheurwater is te gast op het symposium “Grenzen verkennen en overschrijden?” Tevens zullen haar korte films vertoond worden als kort filmblok, met o.a.: Heal me (2001) i.s.m. Roald de Boer, Poster Girl (2003), I Must Be Beautiful Too (2001), Mama (2005) en Inner Walk (2001).

screening: winkelmandje
Friday Sept . 10, 18:00h.
Nieuwe Veste Theatre 1

more info here

Angel watches the flowerbed/graveyard of heaven

and imagines Mbali in the smothering breeze.

Her eyes twinkle with pain

as she tries to bury a face in the outer darkness

behind the blue neon glow of the Holiday Inn.

Her body is scarred as her lips ripen

to a suicidal dream.

Her newborn was all alcohol

and no blood.

For how long will the braids still hide

the itching loss of skin,

the imprints on her body

of the narrow stairways to night clubs.

She was baptized in tequila

and salt on the thumb.

Betrayal is the principle of life.

She embraces a friend,

the skeleton of the night,

and smiles as the day breaks on her nipples

and she coughs and coughs and coughs

as a ship comes into its harbor.

I did not know how easy the coming would be. I have been with you in dreams and night wishes, but often this was only when the world was not going well with me. Aches and fears and troubles brought my thoughts running to you.

I am confessing to you now. Be kind to me: a new child coming back to you. You knew me ready to die again and enter this world those here above think so real, this world which you know is only the passing flesh of everything that lasts, the soul of our people.

Coming home to you put fear into me at times. Do not laugh at me. I did not see you clearly, and I had been so long in this other world that I had no idea but fear.

Death. That was the frightening thing, the final sound. Now I see in it another birth, just as among you the birth of an infant here is mourned as the traveling of another spirit. Do not judge me harshly for the times I thought less of you than of the thousand things I had gathered around my body to give it comfort; they were to me then like living babies bound to me by thirty navels, and I thought I could never bear to cut them; there have been times when life was so sweet. For what purpose do you throw us such blinding sweetness when our aim is death?

I am reproaching you. Forgive me. I know of the screens of life you have left us: veils that rise in front of us, cutting into easy pieces eternity and the circle of the world, so that until we have grown tall enough to look behind the next veil we think the whole world and the whole of life is the little we are allowed to see, and this little we clutch at with such desperation. What a thing for you to laugh at, when we grow just tall enough and, still clutching the useless shreds of a world worn out, we peep behind the veil just passed and find in wonder a more fantastic world, making us fools in our own eyes to have believed that the old paltriness was all. But again we hold fast to the new shadows we find. We are fooled again, and once more taste the sharp unpleasantness of surprise, though we thought we had grown wise.

I am here against the last of my veils. Take me. I am ready. You are the end. The beginning. You have have no end. I am coming.

Ayi Kwei Armah
Fragments, 1969

this review first published on deon skade’s blog acoustic strings