words of the grand master
Hello Kaganof,
Have finally watched the giant steps video and was very, very touched.
A beautiful and worthy tribute to Geoff.
I realized that in the course of the past 20 years I have gotten to know this man so well that I know his every move and most of his thoughts and the things that he was going to say. THANK you for making this thing possible.
When I spoke to Lizzy shortly after the documentary had been shown on tv, she told me they had been proud to see him like this.
A funny friend of mine gave me a copy of your book, about you and your dad, in Cape Town, the devil and god. Am enjoying it very much and spent many a moment during my holidays in ex-Yugoslavia with a big grin on my face while reading it.
Hope you are well,
and full of inspiration.
Take care,
I will see you in the fulness of time
Frieda Nicolai
August 25th, 2006 at 11:10 am
gaint steps is what i would call a visual sermon to enlighten us this generation of democracy or children who in their foreman see only the lack of intellect and stupity.its a great opportunity to watch our own backs without realying on shadows, even those we have scribed our trust to be leaders in this less political more pull the money state, for a two decade of breathing. yeh gaint steps have leaped onto our lathogic consciousness, im glad to be a 20 year old young man in mzantsi. athi joja
August 28th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
Wow.
I’m forwarding it to everyone I know. But don’t you think it’s a bit late? I mean, what meaningful dialogue about maleme a rona can we, the users of those maleme, have in those maleme? Aryan, my peers and I are so linguistically (and otherwise) colonized, I think the use of our languages is now relegated to little more than cultural relicism (I know it’s not a real word, but I hope u know what I mean). Or we simply bastardise English (or coloniser’s tongue) with them. I think we’re fucked, to be honest. It’s too late
p.s. will arrange the MM meeting 4 next week later this week. In mean time, please let me know when you can come in and I’ll check his diary.
Karabo Kgoleng
September 14th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
[…] In 2005 Kaganof co-directed ‘Giant Steps’ with Geoff Mphakati, who sadly passed during filming. A documentary aimed at exposing the true nature of African independence, the film cuts through Western notions of (ever-colonial) independence, and into the heart. Through a range of interviews with black intellectuals, poets and artists – most notably Lefifi Tladi, Lesego Rampolokeng, Don Laka and Geoff Mphakati himself – it is asserted that African consciousness has been abducted by Eurocentric ideologies: Post-colonial ‘independence’ is a dubious one, with African individuals merely ‘freed’ to live a Eurocentric reality. The music of Johnny Dyani and Zim Ngqawana are used to great effect, running through and sometimes over the dialogues, impatient with contribution to the conversations. Screened twice on SABC1, the documentary was invited to this year’s African and Latin American Film Festival in Milan. Censorship, its various manifestations, lies at the heart of Kaganof’s cinematographic output. His films are an attempt to reveal the dangers of a prescribed reality, the unacknowledged nihilism inherent in such suppression. From Kerkhof’s aggressive studies of the perversities which invariably burst from Man’s self-neutering, to later suggestions of the Possible which swells beyond ‘Iron curtains’, his cinema is bent on awakening human to the fertility of option, and the loss of self involved in its surrender. […]