giant steps featuring - we are going to pretoria - lefifi tladi
Afurukan: Good afternoon and welcome, welcome, thank you very very much for coming out …for hearing the call, for coming to share with us what is truly South Africa’s most raw and undiscovered, unearthed talent mixed with something legendary… something fresh, something a lot of us still don’t know anything about and we are so open minded to learn. Today we are honoring Mr. Lefifi Tladi. I know a lot of you are going, who is that? Yes Mr. Lefifi Tladi, I do not have the right I believe because I’m to young to actually say anything about him so as time goes by I’ll get somebody on stage who will give us proper introduction of Mr. Lefifi Tladi.
Lefifi Tladi: The way Kgafela reads poetry inspires me. I’ll read a short poem that I like. It illustrates the depth of our language [Setstwana], it goes like this.
Toro, A Thorn fig, not toro, a dream.
To vomit God is to cut off the wings of angels, is to make a hole out of dreams of slavery.
It is to free ourselves to breathe through the third eye, unpicked by the thorns of the thorn fig (Foreign elements)…
…or to put it another way.
When God vomits I cut off the wings of angels…
… I drill holes for you to dream in.
Lefifi Tladi: I wrote this piece as an exercise in cryptic writing. I’ll have to put on my glasses to see what I’ve written. (laughter) This one also needs to be understood by listening carefully to the intonation of the words… because what is important with these poems is to listen deeply. We’ll start with one that goes like this …Which means I should explain this very clearly now…it means…you see…
Lefifi Tladi: To blind the eyes of bald headed soft-chested twins.
Kgafela oa Magogodi: That was the mother fucking tongue!
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