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Lefifi Tladi Wears a Pharaoh’s jutting out goatee, with bright eyes and the ever brilliant smile. At the firm age of sixty (60), he is still the eager wildman whose stories and creative exploits gave color to Pretoria’s 70’s black life. Tladi is least troubled about the past, creatively. His art, he says “…is not in search of the past but in illuminating the future, in plotting new ways of seeing… opening up new scopes of perceiving”.

Lefifi Tladi (right) Motlabane ‘a Mashiangoako (left)

Thus the 1970s as a socio-cultural site produced a unique type of avant-garde in South African Art. Out of Ga-Rankuwa through a collectivist approach to Art making and culture-creation Lefifi Tladi and the Dashiki collective were shaped into astute vernacular creative intellectuals, something akin to what Antonio Gramsci termed “organic” intellectual and was later expounded on by Grant Farred on Black Vernacular intellectuals.

Dashiki, the band, in fusing music and politically charged poetry to their performances understood that… ”the political is not always pleasurable; but the pleasurable, within the vernacular, is always potentially political…” and so it was at one Jazz Festival in Mamelodi, east of Pretoria, with a defiantly festive crowed. “…as soon as Lefifi appeared onstage carrying one of his drums a forest of clenched fists shot up in the Black Power salute and they roared: JO-MO! JO-MO! The people had nicknamed him after Kenya’s independence hero Jomo Kenyatta”.

“…the formation of DASHIKI sort of crystallized our political role because it brought us into contact with the Black Consciousness Movement…” He remembers as he gazes into the air as if he is asking it to remind him.

He adds that combining poetry and music “… was an ultimate devise because it blended beautifully… and it became politically functional in the community… ” Dashiki acquired popular purchase through that mode in which the political and the popular conjoin identificatory pleasure with ideological resistance.

As early as 1966 they had given meaning to the concept of community art project, with a Youth Club they called ‘DeOlympia’ comprising among others Isaac Nkoana, Anthony Molongwana Makou, photographer Matsobane Legoabe… “…DeOlympia was a recreational thing, it was about encouraging more meaningful activities and interactions for our own development. It kept us off the street…” In 1971 Tladi and the collective transposed the House used for DeOlympia activities into a small museum for contemporary Black art in Ga-Rankuwa. Unfortunately, in 1974 it had to close down. The likes of Sir Isaac Nkoana, Anthony Makou used to work hard giving art workshops at this haven.

Encouraged within Black Consciousness thought the collectivist approach to art making, for one, explodes the construction of artist as individual genius separable from the general society and loftier than the environment that produces him, thus coining the cultural worker as an ideological posture in the broader community of resistance workers. “Through the Cultural wing of the Black consciousness Movement, CUL- COM (Culture Committee)…, Tladi recalls: …we organized a lot of Black art exhibitions at some of the Black universities and schools because we were aware of our people’s ignorance. Bantu education didn’t expose us as a nation to our own creative genius”. On the role of their art practice Tladi relates that theirs “was an instrument in the restoration of the harm done to the senses, apartheid had destroyed our people’s senses”. And, so the populace was always at the centre of their creative efforts because as once noted by Farred, “no post /anti- Colonial struggle can be sustained if it does not contain in it a cultural element moreover one that has popular purchase “

Forced into exile after the 1976 explosion, Lefifi and fellow exiled artists in Botswana established TUKA Cultural Unit. A cultural formation aimed at organizing group exhibitions and sustaining working relations with artists at home in S. Afrika. Through the assistance of the ANC, TUKA members managed to participate in the Pan African Arts Festival, F.A.S.T.A.C in Nigeria. The excursion also provided for a novel opportunity to tour other African countries on their way down to home in the south.

In 1980 Lefifi packed his bags and faced new vistas, as it were, headed for Sweden to study Fine Arts and Art history. Studying in Europe gave a global edge and perspective to ideas shaped in Pretoria’s townships, perhaps, molding what Franz fanon called the global native.

Though not quite returning “home”, in May 1995, the artist-poet-musician held his first exhibition in a democratic South Africa at the UNISA Art Gallery, titled “Xedzedze” Tsonga for “whirlwind”, alongside Fikile Magadlela another firebrand, of Dashiki days. Tladi now lives half and half in the (former) country of his exile and that of his birth: Sweden and South Africa respectively.

Our conversation wasn’t quite concluded, there was a pressing matter requiring his attention. So he lit up a cigarette declaring a wish to quite, his hand unsteady and shaky as he smiled and handed me a CD: Poetry for ARTvanced listeners, it’s an audio anthology of some his poems and Art lectures. He’s signed it:” these are some of our lasting impressions, for Brother Percy”.

Written by: Percy Mabandu
this article first appeared on dashiki dialogues