Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 358

The Double Consciousness of Burni Aman: Can a woman in hip hop speak on her own terms?

Former Godessa MC Burni Aman’s debut solo album, Sweet Science, is long time coming. Godessa – featuring Burni Aman, Shameema Williams and EJ von Lyrik – stood out as a leading female hip-hop crew from Cape Town, reaching local and international audiences.

I first  interviewed Godessa in 2003 while I was conducting research towards my PhD. In that interview, Williams said that Godessa took its lead from politically conscious hip-hop crew, Prophets of da City (POC), recognized as pioneers of rapping ‘in the vernac’ [mother tongue] and hip-hop activism in South Africa. Godessa followed suit by addressing political themes in their music and by participating in youth development workshops.

“Since Godessa split up, it was definitely difficult to establish myself as a solo artist,” says Aman. “I had a certain voice, a certain way of expressing myself through music and creatively within the crew and to actually find my own unique voice through the album was a quite a long struggle and journey,” she explains.

The crew held its own in the largely male-dominated hip-hop scene. Their music video, “Social Ills”, tackled gender politics and consumer culture – setting off debates in academic circles (see my book Stealing Empire). However, it wasn’t easy for them on the male dominated scene. Some of the criticism leveled at the crew was that they did not battle.

Battling refers to freestyle rap contests in which MCs’ lyrical dexterity, use of humor and insults determine who is the best ‘battle cat’. Masculinist braggadocio is a key element of the impromptu performance and it is hardly surprising that it is male dominated. Hostility towards Godessa was not always qualified, though. In one of my lectures on hip-hop’s gender politics, one hip-hop head blurted out bluntly, “Godessa is whack!” Finished en klaar. On the other hand, Godessa was annoyed that they were expected to bear the burden of speaking for all women in hip-hop – a gendered variation of the burden of blackness in which certain black people are expected for all black people, as diverse as they are.

Aman reflects diplomatically, “We live in a very patriarchal society where females are expected to take more of a side role … I am not saying male [hip-hop] heads support other male heads more, but they have certain ideas of what they might perceive a female MC to be.”

Godessa’s work in the early to mid-2000s came at a time in which there was a growing recognition that hip-hop activists had a role to play in gaining the youth’s attention and critically engaging with the ways in which marketing and advertising campaigns target the youth. For example, Bush Radio hosted the oldest hip-hop show, Headwarmaz. This show was used as a platform to draw enthusiasts into a critical theory workshop, ALKEMY, headed for former POC MC Shaheen Ariefdien and Nazli Abrahams. By this time, Black Noise’s Emile YX? had established Heal the Hood, which arranged workshops that focused on hip-hop and life orientation. 

Culture jammers (like Adbusters) helped to generate this awareness and, locally, Laugh It Off Media were spoofing a range of brands (including Carling Black Label) aimed at the youth market. At the same time, advertisers were using hip-hop to sell anything from beer to energy drinks to branded clothing. The story of hip-hop’s commercial co-option was not far away.

Abroad, spoken word artists like Saul Williams and Sarah Jones offered gender and race critiques of hip-hop’s commercial co-option via ‘gangsta’ rap’s stereotypical representations of black masculinity and embrace of consumer desire. A classic exhortation from Saul Williams on “Apocalypse” on his first album, Amethyst Rock Star, “My people, let Pharaoh go!” Are we clinging to our oppressors / the things that oppress us?

Godessa’s work spoke to this critique of consumerism and brand fetishism, and contested dominant representations of ideal femininity. Their work took on both race and gender body politics: “Switch the norm from light to dark / Don’t you know Adam and Eve draped leaves from the start? It’s hard to think why you don’t wear what you like / You wear what you think they think is tight / And I don’t think it’s right to find replicas of Jennifers all over the world / Every boy and girl’s as fake as extensions and curls.” This was taken up in publications, such as the feminist journal Agenda, which published a special issue on urban culture that helped to make the female contribution to youth culture visible. 

Their 2009 break-up left each MC to face the harsh realities of the poor support women receive in the music industry.  Aman, EJ von Lyrik, Kanyi, Miss Celaneous, Patti Monroe, Black Athena, Evesdrop and Shameema Williams are the most prominent Cape female MCs – just about eight of them.

While Aman’s attempts to crowdsource funding for her album were not very successful in South Africa, her ties with the Swiss hip-hop scene actually gave her access to production tools and resources that many local heads would not normally be able use – unless they were comfortably middle class.

Quality studio equipment aside, Aman worked with a choice selection of Swiss producers along with musicians from Egypt, Senegal, the US and Italy. The band’s soul, funk and jazz aesthetics are put to work on lyrical and poetic tracks like “Die Kaa” (a Ghoema track), “Darknessbright” and “Summerbreeze”. 

But my favorite is the sexy “Ultimate Song”, which has Burni letting her imagination run free with thoughts of what her ultimate song would sound like and where it would take the listener – referencing Coelho, even. This song suggests that play, aesthetics and message are not mutually exclusive. I’m reminded of Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux’s sensual “Delta” (who shot to international fame when her music featured in Breaking Bad) or Hemel Besem’s “Verskillende Tafels”. Who says ‘conscious’ heads should be just one thing?

She parodies the ‘blacker than thou’ crowd to question how we measure political consciousness on the track “Black”. Do head wraps, Afros and Ché T-shirts make you black? Or reading black authors? Making the call for claiming your agency in the act of self-definition beyond the use of superficial surface signifiers of race, Burni sums it up, “Everybody’s got their own definition of black / but don’t let anybody tell you how to act.” “I love your blackness,” she repeats in the fade-out with a hint of irony.

For Aman, we need to accept our dualities and complexities. Female artists should be able to express themselves on their own terms without being judged by a set of standards that stifle them.

It sounds as if she is taking on Du Boisian ‘double consciousness’ in both gender and racial terms. Writing about the dehumanization of racist discursive practices in post-slavery US, W.E.B. Du Bois says that African Americans have a form of double consciousness. They have to negotiate seemingly mutually exclusive identities to: the fact of their blackness and their American identities. In their interaction with white America, they are aware of how white citizens see them. This is in conflict with how they see themselves and the agency that they wish to assert in the act of self-definition. They are forced to measure themselves by the “tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Aman refuses to measure her soul by the tape of an essentialist world that presumes to speak for and position her.

*Sweet Science is available on iTunes, Juno, Amazon, BandCamp and at Aman’s website.

The Double Consciousness of Burni Aman’s ‘Double Consciousness’: Can a woman in hip-hop speak on her own terms?

Former Godessa MC Burni Aman’s debut solo album, Sweet Science, is long time coming. Godessa – featuring Burni Aman, Shameema Williams and EJ von Lyrik – stood out as a leading female hip-hop crew from Cape Town, reaching local and international audiences.

I first  interviewed Godessa in 2003 while I was conducting research towards my PhD. In that interview, Williams said that Godessa took its lead from politically conscious hip-hop crew, Prophets of da City (POC), recognized as pioneers of rapping ‘in the vernac’ [mother tongue] and hip-hop activism in South Africa. Godessa followed suit by addressing political themes in their music and by participating in youth development workshops.

“Since Godessa split up, it was definitely difficult to establish myself as a solo artist,” says Aman. “I had a certain voice, a certain way of expressing myself through music and creatively within the crew and to actually find my own unique voice through the album was a quite a long struggle and journey,” she explains.

The crew held its own in the largely male-dominated hip-hop scene. Their music video, “Social Ills”, tackled gender politics and consumer culture – setting off debates in academic circles (see my book Stealing Empire). However, it wasn’t easy for them on the male dominated scene. Some of the criticism leveled at the crew was that they did not battle.

Battling refers to freestyle rap contests in which MCs’ lyrical dexterity, use of humor and insults determine who is the best ‘battle cat’. Masculinist braggadocio is a key element of the impromptu performance and it is hardly surprising that it is male dominated. Hostility towards Godessa was not always qualified, though. In one of my lectures on hip-hop’s gender politics, one hip-hop head blurted out bluntly, “Godessa is whack!” Finished en klaar. On the other hand, Godessa was annoyed that they were expected to bear the burden of speaking for all women in hip-hop – a gendered variation of the burden of blackness in which certain black people are expected for all black people, as diverse as they are.

Aman reflects diplomatically, “We live in a very patriarchal society where females are expected to take more of a side role … I am not saying male [hip-hop] heads support other male heads more, but they have certain ideas of what they might perceive a female MC to be.”

Godessa’s work in the early to mid-2000s came at a time in which there was a growing recognition that hip-hop activists had a role to play in gaining the youth’s attention and critically engaging with the ways in which marketing and advertising campaigns target the youth. For example, Bush Radio hosted the oldest hip-hop show, Headwarmaz. This show was used as a platform to draw enthusiasts into a critical theory workshop, ALKEMY, headed for former POC MC Shaheen Ariefdien and Nazli Abrahams. By this time, Black Noise’s Emile YX? had established Heal the Hood, which arranged workshops that focused on hip-hop and life orientation. 

Culture jammers (like Adbusters) helped to generate this awareness and, locally, Laugh It Off Media were spoofing a range of brands (including Carling Black Label) aimed at the youth market. At the same time, advertisers were using hip-hop to sell anything from beer to energy drinks to branded clothing. The story of hip-hop’s commercial co-option was not far away.

Abroad, spoken word artists like Saul Williams and Sarah Jones offered gender and race critiques of hip-hop’s commercial co-option via ‘gangsta’ rap’s stereotypical representations of black masculinity and embrace of consumer desire. A classic exhortation from Saul Williams on “Apocalypse” on his first album, Amethyst Rock Star, “My people, let Pharaoh go!” Are we clinging to our oppressors / the things that oppress us?

Godessa’s work spoke to this critique of consumerism and brand fetishism, and contested dominant representations of ideal femininity. Their work took on both race and gender body politics: “Switch the norm from light to dark / Don’t you know Adam and Eve draped leaves from the start? It’s hard to think why you don’t wear what you like / You wear what you think they think is tight / And I don’t think it’s right to find replicas of Jennifers all over the world / Every boy and girl’s as fake as extensions and curls.” This was taken up in publications, such as the feminist journal Agenda, which published a special issue on urban culture that helped to make the female contribution to youth culture visible. 

Their 2009 break-up left each MC to face the harsh realities of the poor support women receive in the music industry.  Aman, EJ von Lyrik, Kanyi, Miss Celaneous, Patti Monroe, Black Athena, Evesdrop and Shameema Williams are the most prominent Cape female MCs – just about eight of them.

While Aman’s attempts to crowdsource funding for her album were not very successful in South Africa, her ties with the Swiss hip-hop scene actually gave her access to production tools and resources that many local heads would not normally be able use – unless they were comfortably middle class.

Quality studio equipment aside, Aman worked with a choice selection of Swiss producers along with musicians from Egypt, Senegal, the US and Italy. The band’s soul, funk and jazz aesthetics are put to work on lyrical and poetic tracks like “Die Kaa” (a Ghoema track), “Darknessbright” and “Summerbreeze”. 

But my favorite is the sexy “Ultimate Song”, which has Burni letting her imagination run free with thoughts of what her ultimate song would sound like and where it would take the listener – referencing Coelho, even. This song suggests that play, aesthetics and message are not mutually exclusive. I’m reminded of Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux’s sensual “Delta” (who shot to international fame when her music featured in Breaking Bad) or Hemel Besem’s “Verskillende Tafels”. Who says ‘conscious’ heads should be just one thing?

She parodies the ‘blacker than thou’ crowd to question how we measure political consciousness on the track “Black”. Do head wraps, Afros and Ché T-shirts make you black? Or reading black authors? Making the call for claiming your agency in the act of self-definition beyond the use of superficial surface signifiers of race, Burni sums it up, “Everybody’s got their own definition of black / but don’t let anybody tell you how to act.” “I love your blackness,” she repeats in the fade-out with a hint of irony.

For Aman, we need to accept our dualities and complexities. Female artists should be able to express themselves on their own terms without being judged by a set of standards that stifle them.

It sounds as if she is taking on Du Boisian ‘double consciousness’ in both gender and racial terms. Writing about the dehumanization of racist discursive practices in post-slavery US, W.E.B. Du Bois says that African Americans have a form of double consciousness. They have to negotiate seemingly mutually exclusive identities to: the fact of their blackness and their American identities. In their interaction with white America, they are aware of how white citizens see them. This is in conflict with how they see themselves and the agency that they wish to assert in the act of self-definition. They are forced to measure themselves by the “tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Aman refuses to measure her soul by the tape of an essentialist world that presumes to speak for and position her.

*Sweet Science is available on iTunes, Juno, Amazon, BandCamp and at Aman’s website.

AIAC Video: South Africa’s ‘born frees’ gag on the rainbow nation pill they’ve been fed for the past 21 years

Chimani Maxwele, a student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa caused a real stink earlier this month by flinging poo at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the university’s upper campus, protesting that black students are offended by ‘colonial dominance’ at the university, was indifferent to black students’ classroom experiences and failed to racially transform. Max Price, UCT’s vice chancellor (the equivalent of a university president), who is white, was quick to defend the Cape’s colonial heritage, insisting on moving the statue rather than removing it. Students hit back and online debates quickly turned to protests with last week ending in the statue being wrapped in garbage bags and students demanding a removal date.

Meanwhile, 700 miles away, in Grahamstown () the Black Students Movement at Rhodes University stood in solidarity with UCT protestors and demanded that the name of their university be changed. It was a sticky situation for Dr. Sizwe Mabizela, Rhodes’s new vice chancellor (VC), just a few weeks after he was inaugurated as the “first black African VC” (the university’s boast). Last week Mabizela addressed a packed lecture theatre at an emergency student body meeting, insisting that the university would lose funding should the name change. Debates will continue this week as young black South Africans, known as the ‘born frees’, gag on the rainbow nation pill they’ve been fed for the past 21 years. Here’s some video shot for AIAC by student journalists at Rhodes University:

* We plan to post a “study guide” later today to provide further context

Watch: South Africa’s ‘born frees’ gag on the rainbow nation pill they’ve been fed for the past 21 years

Chimani Maxwele, a student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa caused a real stink earlier this month by flinging poo at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the university’s upper campus, protesting that black students are offended by ‘colonial dominance’ at the university, was indifferent to black students’ classroom experiences and failed to racially transform. Max Price, UCT’s vice chancellor (the equivalent of a university president), who is white, was quick to defend the Cape’s colonial heritage, insisting on moving the statue rather than removing it. Students hit back and online debates quickly turned to protests with last week ending in the statue being wrapped in garbage bags and students demanding a removal date.

Meanwhile, 700 miles away, in Grahamstown ()  the Black Students Movement at Rhodes University stood in solidarity with UCT protestors and demanded that the name of their university be changed. It was a sticky situation for Dr. Sizwe Mabizela, Rhodes’s new vice chancellor (VC), just a few weeks after he was inaugurated as the “first black African VC” (the university’s boast). Last week Mabizela addressed a packed lecture theatre at an emergency student body meeting, insisting that the university would lose funding should the name change. Debates will continue this week as young black South Africans, known as the ‘born frees’, gag on the rainbow nation pill they’ve been fed for the past 21 years. Here’s some video shot for AIAC by student journalists at Rhodes University:

* We plan to post a “study guide” later today to provide further context

On #SharpevilleDay: Sisonke Msimang on the myth of the new South Africa

In the past few weeks there has been much consternation about the de facto existence of the dompas in the Western Cape community of Worcester. The dreaded dompas was a humiliating fact of life in apartheid South Africa; my father had one and his memories of it are vivid and painful. The passbook was arguably the most visible aspect of the system of apartheid. Any white man could stop a black one on the street and ask to see his pass. In this way, the pass gave power to petty bureaucrats and ordinary white men. Passbooks allowed racial authority to be invoked on a pretty random basis, and this of course instilled fear in the hearts of black families. When black women resisted the pass in the 1920s and then in the more famous marches of the 1950s, it was because they had seen the effects of the passbook on their menfolk.

While it served the social purpose of elevating the status of even the poorest and least educated whites, the dompas played an important economic role as well. It was created to manage urbanisation and was an essential regulatory mechanism within the migrant labour system. It was also critical for the pursuance of the nonsensical homeland strategy. The dompas operated like a blacks-only passport within the borders of South Africa. It contained the fingerprints and photo of its bearer, his racial classification as well as the name and address of his employer. The pass contained information about how long the native had been employed and even described the characteristics of the pass holder, for example, ‘honest and courteous,’ or ‘speaks respectfully and always on time.’

The information in passbooks was crucial for determining whether or not black people were legally allowed to be in a certain town or suburb. If their employment details did not match up with the area in which they happened to be walking around, they could be harassed, jailed or have their permission to work revoked. Needless to say, only white people qualified as ‘employers’ and only black people required passes. Whites could travel freely wherever they wished.

So the discovery of the pass system – implemented with the active involvement of the police in a wealthy Western Cape community – has rocked the nation. Hands have been wrung and shock has been expressed. ‘How can this happen in the ‘new’ South Africa?’ many have asked. Fingers have been pointed. As usual the African National Congress and the Democratic Alliance have traded insults. Both parties have tried to abdicate responsibility for any part of the mess.

For all their hyped up indignation however it is obvious that neither the ANC nor the DA are interested in much more than point scoring. The issue of direct responsibility in this matter is important for stopping the practice but it is somewhat peripheral to the story of how it is that we come to have an active dompas system in South Africa in 2015.

Beginning in the 1760s pass laws were introduced. The dompas was officially repealed in November 1986. Growing popular resistance had made the country ‘ungovernable’ and in 1985 a state of emergency had given the government sweeping powers of arrest and detention. Those in power were well aware that tightening their grip on a society that was coming apart was not sustainable. In a move to diffuse tension the apartheid regime eased some of the more overt restrictions on black people. The dompas was an easy give – it had symbolic meaning, but its repeal would not undo the architecture of apartheid. With or without it, the Nats knew that blacks would continue to live on the 13% of the land that had been set aside for them and would have little access to health, education or full citizenship rights.

Almost thirty years later, the question that all South Africans should be asking is whether – in a metaphorical sense – the dompas was ever truly scrapped. Twenty years into the ‘new’ South African project, it is becoming clear that the apartheid horror show is far from over. Rather than having halted apartheid, it seems as though we simply pressed a pause button in 1994. This allowed the good people of South Africa to learn the rules of an inclusive democracy. It also provided breathing space for the old elements of apartheid to regroup.

In retrospect it is obvious that one of the first mistakes South Africans made in those heady transitional years was to believe our own hype. We fell for the language of the ‘new’ South Africa. We thought that apartheid – l’ancien regime – would die and that a ‘new’ South Africa would replace it. We were even prepared for apartheid to die a slow death.

It turns out that everything that was old in the country wasn’t dying – it was hardening.

In 1994 South Africans began to build new edifices. These edifices masked the institutions that stood behind them. The obvious ones bothered us: what had once been the Day of the vow became Reconciliation Day. For those of you who may have forgotten your history, let me refresh your memories.

Beginning in 1838 the Day of the Vow marked the solemn religious pact that the Voortrekkers made with God. They asked Him to deliver them victory against the Zulu nation, which stood in their way as they sought to make it to safety in the interior of the land. Three thousand Zulus were killed and the river ran red with their blood.

The less obvious ones were folded in corporate branding and we forgot about them entirely: Volksas People’s Bank was renamed ABSA and today ABSA has been gobbled up by Barclays. What was once the Argus Newspaper Group is now the ideologically contested Independent Newspaper Group. In it’s submission to the TRC, the Argus Group conceded, “The company applied the government’s petty apartheid laws on its premises, and this was broken down in some cases only by black disobedience action in the face of abuse from other company employees.”

South Africa was so busy racing towards the future that once the TRC had done its work, we told ourselves that we had no further need to look back. The work of the Commission was ground-breaking and crucial. It only began to scratch the surface but it gave us any clues. We did not fully understand at that time that there are some processes that cannot be rushed. Dismantling cultures, attitudes, systems and institutions of oppression takes time and energy: we poured all of ours into new things, rather than into the undoing of old ones.

It is clear now that much of our busyness has had the effect of fortifying what was already strong in this country. The new pieces – like our new education system – are made of cheap materials, slapped together impatiently rather than crafted with thought and care. No wonder then that the largest number of complaints of racism that are lodged each year with the Human rights Commission come from the education sector.

Some of the shiny new-ness of the ‘new’ South Africa starting to wear off. The notion that South Africa is new is no longer an unassailable truth. Worse — as events in Worcester reveal – some of us have begun to suspect that the new South Africa is just a fallacy, a powerful contemporary myth sold to us by people who needed to make difficult things palatable. Perhaps South Africans accepted the lie of the new because we needed something to believe in.

3

In hindsight of course we also believed in the ANC. Even with all the caveats and the platitudes that our leaders issued about how long the road ahead would be, many people around the world believed that that if any movement was capable of re-making the world, it was the ANC.

The ANC has always understood the iconography of freedom and resistance. Its list of fallen heroes stretches back a century: Pixley ka Seme, Chief Albert Luthuli, Lillian Ngoyi, J.B. Marks, Chris Hani, Oliver Tambo. Solomon Mahlangu. Its champions picked up trumpets and played dirges for the revolution. They sang the Pata Pata and then segued into A Luta continua. The ANC’s giants make Che Guevara look like a schoolboy and they look Thomas Jefferson dead in the eye. Their names stand out across the ages; their spirits watchful. They delivered us to freedom and the ANC wrote their histories and took their photos and documented it’s own soaring ascent. The ANC had the presence of mind to plan for nostalgia.

The ANC I remember is a funeral organiser, a sister, a lawyer and a surgeon. When comrades fall the ANC ensures that the casket is black green and gold. The ANC knows which cadres to dispatch to keep vigil over the body through the night. The ANC stands resolute. It fixes our eyes on the horizon. The ANC sends sophisticated natives to address the United Nations General Assembly. The ANC I cherish is a tapestry of human endeavour woven from threads of courage and dignity and intellectual rigour and all the things that black people have always been even as whites denied that we were fully human.

The ANC of today has fallen from grace. He has stumbled and is having difficulty standing straight. He sways drunkenly blinking against the future. The ANC of today is Marie Antoinette’s half sister. She swigs Veuve straight from the bottle and gives shout-outs to her homies still livin’ in the hood. We watch her descent in wounded surprise.

The ANC is the daddy who will not countenance dissent: Uncle Gwede wagging a stubby finger at journalists as he mocks yet another allegation of corruption. The ANC is a meme; it is Comrade Cronin using his diminishing intellect to circumscribe the truth. The ANC is a room full of overfed praise-singers who exalt the man at the helm.

And the man at the helm? Ah, make no mistake that he is a leader. He understands the ways of men. He knows their frailties and their doubts and so he is skilled in the art of lording power. When he laughs it is rarely authentic. This is not a man who is having fun. This is a mirth born of shame.

So is this the new ANC? Because today’s ANC looks so different from yesterday’s ANC, many of us are tempted to suggest that we are seeing the emergence of a ‘new’ ANC. We describe it as ‘the post-1994 ANC’. Mmusi Maimane – with his posh ways and his DA politics – spoilt it for us, but when he said it we knew he was right; ayisafani iANC.

It may not be entirely the same, but it is not new. We call the corrupt ANC ‘new’ because we cant accept that our heroes may have been flawed all along. We struggle to accept that the ANC today is exactly like the ANC of yesterday, but that the context has changed. We are wedded to the idea that heroes are sacrosanct: They could not be both liberators and con men; both intellectual giants and corrupt thieves; both just and unjust.

In an interview about this most recent book, Askari, Jacob Dlamini points out that our history isn’t only a story of victims and perpetrators. Dlamini argues, “There were people who were neither; they were something in between.”

Perhaps this is the key to understanding where we are today. While South Africa is not new, it would be foolhardy to suggest that it is completely old. Perhaps Dlamini’s phrasing, his insistence on complication, helps us here. Perhaps the ANC and South Africa are neither old nor new, but ‘something in-between.’

The racist white on black violence we have witnessed in the last year has provided a heartbreakingly old-school set of reminders that we are not yet in a new place. We are very far away from the post-race society that some people argued we might one day achieve. Sjamboks and dompases, gardeners and maids; this is humdrum, garden variety racism. There is nothing new or creative in this. It reeks in the way that it always has. This is how our grandfathers died. This is how our mothers were shamed: Through petty rules and random beatings on ordinary days.

If these events were not backed by an economic infrastructure that is as old as the British Empire, then I might be tempted to believe that they are simply signs of a dying order. But they cannot be shushed away. They are evidence of the strength of the old ways. They are not throwbacks. No, they are harbingers. In the absence of consistent and thoughtful leadership, the old is re-asserting itself at precisely the same moment in which the new is beginning to show signs of wear and tear.

It is true however that the faces behind the glass windows at government departments are now black faces. This was not the case twenty years ago. The faces on Parliamentary TV are also mainly black. This was also not the case in the old and ugly past. Both – the government faces and the parliamentary ones – reflect the demographics of our country and I concede that they are new and good developments.

But these gains – our black faces in positions of authority within the sagging state – are soft in the face of the hard power of the consultants and ‘service providers,’ who build and plan and maintain this country’s infrastructure. Our muscles are puny in contrast to heft of the families that have always wielded extraordinary power in our country. The Ruperts and the Oppenheimers and the Rhodes’ have not been hounded out of the country. Their mansions remain and their wealth has not been touched.

It is not just that their bank accounts and lifestyles that have gone unchallenged; I am fascinated that their legacies remain remarkably untroubled. Until students on the campus of UCT protested this past week, their monuments have remained standing. South African understand that the barons of old caused untold misery, but we have also been taught to respect their contributions to our society. We have not yet broken with them completely, their names are not thoroughly discredited.

4

In his will, John Cecil Rhodes stipulated that he was to be buried at Malindidzimu in the Matobo Hills outside Bulawayo. When he died in 1902, his body was transported as per his wishes and the ceremony duly took place. Ndebele chiefs attended the funeral – no doubt in part so that they could confirm that the old codger was truly gone. It is said that when it came time for the gun salute, the chiefs refused to allow the rifles to be mounted and fired as had been planned. They insisted that the shots would disturb the spirits of their dead.

Reading this across the ages, it is tempting to be pleased with this act of resistance. But read on, for nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

As he was lowered into the ground, the crowd of thousands flung a roar to the heavens. “Bayete!” they cried. A chief had passed and Lobengula’s people were there to bid him farewell. In doing so, they were offering Rhodes the highest honour, saluting him in a manner befitting royalty.

This is not a story about forgiveness. We have heard so many stories about forgiveness in the ne South Africa it is as though no other stories exist. We are nothing but forgivers and sinners. But these tales are told at the expense of others and so this is a story about dilemmas. It is about the conundrum of respect. One can hate a man and his deeds and recognize that he was powerful and therefore worthy of a grudging sort of respect. Those who witnessed his interment knew that something fearsome was leaving the world. They also knew that it was unlikely to rest easy.

Today our ambivalence about our colonialist and apartheid past is just as pronounced. In our contemporary politics, we do a strange sort of dance with history. Mandela smokes the peace pipe with the generals of the Broederbond. Tutu weeps. Mbeki intones, ‘I am an African.’ Malema says without economic transformation he will ‘drive the Boers into the sea’. We cheer for them all. We are radical but tentatively so. We are the Ndebele chiefs in the presence of the dead Rhodes. How else can we explain our curious relationship with the word ‘independence’?

We call ourselves the ‘new’ South Africa but we refuse to speak about ourselves as an independent African country. Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, Cote D’Ivoire, Congo – all of the former colonies that were once under the thumb of settlers or colonialists or (even better) settler-colonialists like those who ruled Rhodesia – mark their break from the past with a celebration on Independence Day. I have always wondered why we do not call it Independence Day as others do.

Sometimes words are important.

Instead, on the 27th of April, we celebrate Freedom Day. Some argue that freedom is more powerful a concept than independence. The former is a state of being whereas the latter is a nod to political autonomy. Freedom connotes signal moments in in black people’s history; the abolition of slavery, the Haitian Revolution, the Freedom Rides. Independence on the other hand describes the end of a colonial system and the beginning of self-government. I understand the allure of the language of freedom, but these very examples also speak to the necessity of independence. The American Civil War gave rise to the Independence that made the abolition of slavery possible. The Haitian Revolution led to the establishment of a Haitian state that was independent of France. In other words, freedom and independence are intertwined – whether the one precedes the other doesn’t matter much. What is most important is that both exist in the vocabulary of a nation.

Let me concede that there are places and sites of dreaming and doing and action and progress so that the feeling of South Africa having taken too many wrong turns is not overwhelming. I have seen with my own eyes that there are spaces in today’s South Africa that are in fact trying to be new. It would be wrong – disrespectful even – to deny this.

But let us also agree that on the whole, one of the most remarkable things about South Africa is the extent to which the rhetorical device of creating a ‘new’ place has functioned to protect those who have refused to change. As we enter our third decade of transition, perhaps it is time for us to address this squarely.

If we accept that we are neither the new nor entirely the old South Africa, then we can stop being incredulous in the face of evidence that the old ways persist. The epidemic of shock each time some new racist horror is revealed stems directly from this idea that the bad old days are over.

This is a naiveté we can scarcely afford. When violence exceeds what we have come to expect and when moral codes are broken, the response must of course be anger and outrage and a commitment to doing more and doing better. But these impulses to act must not be based on the idea that racist and sexist violence is somehow anomalous in our ‘new’ society. Our outrage must be predicated on an understanding that what we are often witnessing are continuities, that the old ways are still the current ways.

Forgive me, for I do not mean to sound cynical. I agree that there is no place for violence and racism and sexism and pain in the South Africa we wish to build. In my heart I believe still that we can make strong things out of broken ones, and like many of those who inhabit the new spaces in our country, I am convinced clear-eyed assessments are far more useful than myopic ones. I love sentimentality in my movies and sometimes in my books, but in my politics, in my country and in my people, I prefer disambiguation.

We must continue to be vigilant yes, but it must be a vigilance that is shorn of disbelief. Shock and surprise are the indulgences of children and South Africans are far too grown up for these sorts of pretend games. There is nothing surprising about racism and dispossession in South Africa. Let us agree to be outraged by inaction, even as we accept that the old is alive and well and surging alongside everything that is trying to be new.

Digital Archive No. 15–The Queering Slavery Working Group

Since I first started out selecting digital projects for this series, I have been struck by the wide range of forms and types of digital projects that have been and are being developed on Africa and the African Diaspora.  Although I could write on digital archives each week (and likely never get through them all), my post last week inspired me to think outside of the box and look at other styles and modes of digital engagement.  This week’s featured project, the Queering Slavery Working Group, is one of these new kinds of projects, a digital hybrid merging academic investigation with digital activism.

Founded by historians Vanessa Holden and Jessica Marie Johnson, the Queering Slavery Working Group formed, in their words, “to discuss issues related to reading, researching, and writing histories of intimacy, sex, and sexuality during the period of Atlantic slavery.”  These discussions aim to bring together streams of knowledge and discovery in black queer studies, slave histories, African diaspora studies, and other related fields into conversation with one another.  This effort is a hybrid one, operating on both digital and analog spaces in order to maintain accountability to both “members of the Queering Slavery Working Group and . . . to the queer of color community at large.”  So far, the group has organized a series of digital events, including a Google Hangout with Christina Sharpe and Omise’eke Tinsley, a reading group on Vincent Woodward’s The Delectable Negro and gatherings at conferences like ASALH 2014.

 

In  a presentation at the 2014 Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities, Holden gave a talk entitled “Tumbling Towards Scholarly Community: A Report on the Queering Slavery Working Group” (you can access the slideshow here).  In this presentation, Holden reflected on the choice of Tumblr for the group, particularly the use of altered images of slavery.  Holden and Johnson access traditional images of slavery and alters them using programs like Fotor and Picasa, adding hashtags associated with contemporary queer vocabulary.  Their goal is posting these images to Tumblr is to “prompt conversations around ways same-gender desire and intimate violence appeared in non-text sources in a forceful assertion of queer ubiquity in the archive.”

The QSWG Tumblr collects these images, in addition to stories about group events, tweets, and quotes from literature all relating to queering the archive of slavery.  This choice of this particular platform stems from the group’s dedication to accessibility, as well as an acknowledgment of the “collaborative potential” of Tumblr.  Holden acknowledge this potential in her 2014 presentation, noting that

Embedded in Tumblr is social practice akin to strategies enslaved and free people of African descent employed in community formation, politics, and resistance. Delighting in this similarity, the co-organizers curate a visual culture that is playful and provocative, productive and reproductive.

QSWG also utilizes Twitter for each of their events, compiling their results on Storify, then publishing them on the Tumblr (as well as Johnson’s personal Tumblr and website).  The QSWG Tumblr really is a compelling site, representing a continuous conversation between all of the members of the group; one that anyone can join in on at any time.  If you’re interested in joining QSWG, you can join by filling out this form.  You can also follow QSWG on Twitter and Tumblr.

As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!  Check back next time for a user-recommended review of Nigerian Nostalgia!

Digital Archive No. 15 – Queering Slavery Working Group

Since I first started out selecting digital projects for this series, I have been struck by the wide range of forms and types of digital projects that have been and are being developed on Africa and the African Diaspora.  Although I could write on digital archives each week (and likely never get through them all), my post last week inspired me to think outside of the box and look at other styles and modes of digital engagement.  This week’s featured project, the Queering Slavery Working Group, is one of these new kinds of projects, a digital hybrid merging academic investigation with digital activism.

Founded by historians Vanessa Holden and Jessica Marie Johnson, the Queering Slavery Working Group formed, in their words, “to discuss issues related to reading, researching, and writing histories of intimacy, sex, and sexuality during the period of Atlantic slavery.”  These discussions aim to bring together streams of knowledge and discovery in black queer studies, slave histories, African diaspora studies, and other related fields into conversation with one another.  This effort is a hybrid one, operating on both digital and analog spaces in order to maintain accountability to both “members of the Queering Slavery Working Group and . . . to the queer of color community at large.”  So far, the group has organized a series of digital events, including a Google Hangout with Christina Sharpe and Omise’eke Tinsley, a reading group on Vincent Woodward’s The Delectable Negro and gatherings at conferences like ASALH 2014.

 

In  a presentation at the 2014 Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities, Holden gave a talk entitled “Tumbling Towards Scholarly Community: A Report on the Queering Slavery Working Group” (you can access the slideshow here).  In this presentation, Holden reflected on the choice of Tumblr for the group, particularly the use of altered images of slavery.  Holden and Johnson access traditional images of slavery and alters them using programs like Fotor and Picasa, adding hashtags associated with contemporary queer vocabulary.  Their goal is posting these images to Tumblr is to “prompt conversations around ways same-gender desire and intimate violence appeared in non-text sources in a forceful assertion of queer ubiquity in the archive.”

The QSWG Tumblr collects these images, in addition to stories about group events, tweets, and quotes from literature all relating to queering the archive of slavery.  This choice of this particular platform stems from the group’s dedication to accessibility, as well as an acknowledgment of the “collaborative potential” of Tumblr.  Holden acknowledge this potential in her 2014 presentation, noting that

Embedded in Tumblr is social practice akin to strategies enslaved and free people of African descent employed in community formation, politics, and resistance. Delighting in this similarity, the co-organizers curate a visual culture that is playful and provocative, productive and reproductive.

QSWG also utilizes Twitter for each of their events, compiling their results on Storify, then publishing them on the Tumblr (as well as Johnson’s personal Tumblr and website).  The QSWG Tumblr really is a compelling site, representing a continuous conversation between all of the members of the group; one that anyone can join in on at any time.  If you’re interested in joining QSWG, you can join by filling out this form.  You can also follow QSWG on Twitter and Tumblr.

As always, feel free to send me suggestions in the comments or via Twitter of sites you might like to see covered in future editions of The Digital Archive!  Check back next time for a user-recommended review of Nigerian Nostalgia!

Out with the Old: Exploring the myth of the ‘new’ South Africa

In the past few weeks there has been much consternation about the de facto existence of the dompas in the Western Cape community of Worcester. The dreaded dompas was a humiliating fact of life in apartheid South Africa; my father had one and his memories of it are vivid and painful. The passbook was arguably the most visible aspect of the system of apartheid. Any white man could stop a black one on the street and ask to see his pass. In this way, the pass gave power to petty bureaucrats and ordinary white men. Passbooks allowed racial authority to be invoked on a pretty random basis, and this of course instilled fear in the hearts of black families. When black women resisted the pass in the 1920s and then in the more famous marches of the 1950s, it was because they had seen the effects of the passbook on their menfolk.

While it served the social purpose of elevating the status of even the poorest and least educated whites, the dompas played an important economic role as well. It was created to manage urbanisation and was an essential regulatory mechanism within the migrant labour system. It was also critical for the pursuance of the nonsensical homeland strategy. The dompas operated like a blacks-only passport within the borders of South Africa. It contained the fingerprints and photo of its bearer, his racial classification as well as the name and address of his employer. The pass contained information about how long the native had been employed and even described the characteristics of the pass holder, for example, ‘honest and courteous,’ or ‘speaks respectfully and always on time.’

The information in passbooks was crucial for determining whether or not black people were legally allowed to be in a certain town or suburb. If their employment details did not match up with the area in which they happened to be walking around, they could be harassed, jailed or have their permission to work revoked. Needless to say, only white people qualified as ‘employers’ and only black people required passes. Whites could travel freely wherever they wished.

So the discovery of the pass system – implemented with the active involvement of the police in a wealthy Western Cape community – has rocked the nation. Hands have been wrung and shock has been expressed. ‘How can this happen in the ‘new’ South Africa?’ many have asked. Fingers have been pointed. As usual the African National Congress and the Democratic Alliance have traded insults. Both parties have tried to abdicate responsibility for any part of the mess.

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For all their hyped up indignation however it is obvious that neither the ANC nor the DA are interested in much more than point scoring. The issue of direct responsibility in this matter is important for stopping the practice but it is somewhat peripheral to the story of how it is that we come to have an active dompas system in South Africa in 2015.

When Earl George Macartney introduced, in 1797, the first pass law seeking to regulate the movement of Africans, the objective of propertied whites was to keep natives out of the Cape Colony and the role of the state was to support the wishes of men of means. Today – in spite of the Constitution – little has changed. If you are poor and black you are subject to the whims of the wealthy and you often find yourself at the mercy of a state that continues to see itself as the upholder of laws that serve the interests of the few.

The dompas was officially repealed in November 1986. Growing popular resistance had made the country ‘ungovernable’ and in 1985 a state of emergency had given the government sweeping powers of arrest and detention. Those in power were well aware that tightening their grip on a society that was coming apart was not sustainable. In a move to diffuse tension the apartheid regime eased some of the more overt restrictions on black people. The dompas was an easy give – it had symbolic meaning, but its repeal would not undo the architecture of apartheid. With or without it, the Nats knew that blacks would continue to live on the 13% of the land that had been set aside for them and would have little access to health, education or full citizenship rights.

Almost thirty years later, the question that all South Africans should be asking is whether – in a metaphorical sense – the dompas was ever truly scrapped. Twenty years into the ‘new’ South African project, it is becoming clear that the apartheid horror show is far from over. Rather than having halted apartheid, it seems as though we simply pressed a pause button in 1994. This allowed the good people of South Africa to learn the rules of an inclusive democracy. It also provided breathing space for the old elements of apartheid to regroup.

In retrospect it is obvious that one of the first mistakes South Africans made in those heady transitional years was to believe our own hype. We fell for the language of the ‘new’ South Africa. We thought that apartheid – l’ancien regime – would die and that a ‘new’ South Africa would replace it. We were even prepared for apartheid to die a slow death.

It turns out that everything that was old in the country wasn’t dying – it was hardening.

In 1994 South Africans began to build new edifices. These edifices masked the institutions that stood behind them. The obvious ones bothered us: what had once been the Day of the vow became Reconciliation Day. For those of you who may have forgotten your history, let me refresh your memories.

Beginning in 1838 the Day of the Vow marked the solemn religious pact that the Voortrekkers made with God. They asked Him to deliver them victory against the Zulu nation, which stood in their way as they sought to make it to safety in the interior of the land. Three thousand Zulus were killed and the river ran red with their blood.

The less obvious ones were folded in corporate branding and we forgot about them entirely: Volksas People’s Bank was renamed ABSA and today ABSA has been gobbled up by Barclays. What was once the Argus Newspaper Group is now the ideologically contested Independent Newspaper Group. In it’s submission to the TRC, the Argus Group conceded, “The company applied the government’s petty apartheid laws on its premises, and this was broken down in some cases only by black disobedience action in the face of abuse from other company employees.”

South Africa was so busy racing towards the future that once the TRC had done its work, we told ourselves that we had no further need to look back. The work of the Commission was ground-breaking and crucial. It only began to scratch the surface but it gave us any clues. We did not fully understand at that time that there are some processes that cannot be rushed. Dismantling cultures, attitudes, systems and institutions of oppression takes time and energy: we poured all of ours into new things, rather than into the undoing of old ones.

It is clear now that much of our busyness has had the effect of fortifying what was already strong in this country. The new pieces – like our new education system – are made of cheap materials, slapped together impatiently rather than crafted with thought and care. No wonder then that the largest number of complaints of racism that are lodged each year with the Human rights Commission come from the education sector.

Some of the shiny new-ness of the ‘new’ South Africa starting to wear off. The notion that South Africa is new is no longer an unassailable truth. Worse — as events in Worcester reveal – some of us have begun to suspect that the new South Africa is just a fallacy, a powerful contemporary myth sold to us by people who needed to make difficult things palatable. Perhaps South Africans accepted the lie of the new because we needed something to believe in.

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In hindsight of course we also believed in the ANC. Even with all the caveats and the platitudes that our leaders issued about how long the road ahead would be, many people around the world believed that that if any movement was capable of re-making the world, it was the ANC.

The ANC has always understood the iconography of freedom and resistance. Its list of fallen heroes stretches back a century: Pixley ka Seme, Chief Albert Luthuli, Lillian Ngoyi, J.B. Marks, Chris Hani, Oliver Tambo. Solomon Mahlangu. Its champions picked up trumpets and played dirges for the revolution. They sang the Pata Pata and then segued into A Luta continua. The ANC’s giants make Che Guevara look like a schoolboy and they look Thomas Jefferson dead in the eye. Their names stand out across the ages; their spirits watchful. They delivered us to freedom and the ANC wrote their histories and took their photos and documented it’s own soaring ascent. The ANC had the presence of mind to plan for nostalgia.

The ANC I remember is a funeral organiser, a sister, a lawyer and a surgeon. When comrades fall the ANC ensures that the casket is black green and gold. The ANC knows which cadres to dispatch to keep vigil over the body through the night. The ANC stands resolute. It fixes our eyes on the horizon. The ANC sends sophisticated natives to address the United Nations General Assembly. The ANC I cherish is a tapestry of human endeavour woven from threads of courage and dignity and intellectual rigour and all the things that black people have always been even as whites denied that we were fully human.

The ANC of today has fallen from grace. He has stumbled and is having difficulty standing straight. He sways drunkenly blinking against the future. The ANC of today is Marie Antoinette’s half sister. She swigs Veuve straight from the bottle and gives shout-outs to her homies still livin’ in the hood. We watch her descent in wounded surprise.

The ANC is the daddy who will not countenance dissent: Uncle Gwede wagging a stubby finger at journalists as he mocks yet another allegation of corruption. The ANC is a meme; it is Comrade Cronin using his diminishing intellect to circumscribe the truth. The ANC is a room full of overfed praise-singers who exalt the man at the helm.

And the man at the helm? Ah, make no mistake that he is a leader. He understands the ways of men. He knows their frailties and their doubts and so he is skilled in the art of lording power. When he laughs it is rarely authentic. This is not a man who is having fun. This is a mirth born of shame.

So is this the new ANC? Because today’s ANC looks so different from yesterday’s ANC, many of us are tempted to suggest that we are seeing the emergence of a ‘new’ ANC. We describe it as ‘the post-1994 ANC’. Mmusi Maimane – with his posh ways and his DA politics – spoilt it for us, but when he said it we knew he was right; ayisafani iANC.

It may not be entirely the same, but it is not new. We call the corrupt ANC ‘new’ because we cant accept that our heroes may have been flawed all along. We struggle to accept that the ANC today is exactly like the ANC of yesterday, but that the context has changed. We are wedded to the idea that heroes are sacrosanct: They could not be both liberators and con men; both intellectual giants and corrupt thieves; both just and unjust.

In an interview about this most recent book, Askari, Jacob Dlamini points out that our history isn’t only a story of victims and perpetrators. Dlamini argues, “There were people who were neither; they were something in between.”

Perhaps this is the key to understanding where we are today. While South Africa is not new, it would be foolhardy to suggest that it is completely old. Perhaps Dlamini’s phrasing, his insistence on complication, helps us here. Perhaps the ANC and South Africa are neither old nor new, but ‘something in-between.’

The racist white on black violence we have witnessed in the last year has provided a heartbreakingly old-school set of reminders that we are not yet in a new place. We are very far away from the post-race society that some people argued we might one day achieve. Sjamboks and dompases, gardeners and maids; this is humdrum, garden variety racism. There is nothing new or creative in this. It reeks in the way that it always has. This is how our grandfathers died. This is how our mothers were shamed: Through petty rules and random beatings on ordinary days.

If these events were not backed by an economic infrastructure that is as old as the British Empire, then I might be tempted to believe that they are simply signs of a dying order. But they cannot be shushed away. They are evidence of the strength of the old ways. They are not throwbacks. No, they are harbingers. In the absence of consistent and thoughtful leadership, the old is re-asserting itself at precisely the same moment in which the new is beginning to show signs of wear and tear.

It is true however that the faces behind the glass windows at government departments are now black faces. This was not the case twenty years ago. The faces on Parliamentary TV are also mainly black. This was also not the case in the old and ugly past. Both – the government faces and the parliamentary ones – reflect the demographics of our country and I concede that they are new and good developments.

But these gains – our black faces in positions of authority within the sagging state – are soft in the face of the hard power of the consultants and ‘service providers,’ who build and plan and maintain this country’s infrastructure. Our muscles are puny in contrast to heft of the families that have always wielded extraordinary power in our country. The Ruperts and the Oppenheimers and the Rhodes’ have not been hounded out of the country. Their mansions remain and their wealth has not been touched.

It is not just that their bank accounts and lifestyles that have gone unchallenged; I am fascinated that their legacies remain remarkably untroubled. Until students on the campus of UCT protested this past week, their monuments have remained standing. South African understand that the barons of old caused untold misery, but we have also been taught to respect their contributions to our society. We have not yet broken with them completely, their names are not thoroughly discredited.

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In his will, John Cecil Rhodes stipulated that he was to be buried at Malindidzimu in the Matobo Hills outside Bulawayo. When he died in 1902, his body was transported as per his wishes and the ceremony duly took place. Ndebele chiefs attended the funeral – no doubt in part so that they could confirm that the old codger was truly gone. It is said that when it came time for the gun salute, the chiefs refused to allow the rifles to be mounted and fired as had been planned. They insisted that the shots would disturb the spirits of their dead.

Reading this across the ages, it is tempting to be pleased with this act of resistance. But read on, for nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

As he was lowered into the ground, the crowd of thousands flung a roar to the heavens. “Bayete!” they cried. A chief had passed and Lobengula’s people were there to bid him farewell. In doing so, they were offering Rhodes the highest honour, saluting him in a manner befitting royalty.

This is not a story about forgiveness. We have heard so many stories about forgiveness in the ne South Africa it is as though no other stories exist. We are nothing but forgivers and sinners. But these tales are told at the expense of others and so this is a story about dilemmas. It is about the conundrum of respect. One can hate a man and his deeds and recognize that he was powerful and therefore worthy of a grudging sort of respect. Those who witnessed his interment knew that something fearsome was leaving the world. They also knew that it was unlikely to rest easy.

Today our ambivalence about our colonialist and apartheid past is just as pronounced. In our contemporary politics, we do a strange sort of dance with history. Mandela smokes the peace pipe with the generals of the Broederbond. Tutu weeps. Mbeki intones, ‘I am an African.’ Malema says without economic transformation he will ‘drive the Boers into the sea’. We cheer for them all. We are radical but tentatively so. We are the Ndebele chiefs in the presence of the dead Rhodes. How else can we explain our curious relationship with the word ‘independence’?

We call ourselves the ‘new’ South Africa but we refuse to speak about ourselves as an independent African country. Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, Cote D’Ivoire, Congo – all of the former colonies that were once under the thumb of settlers or colonialists or (even better) settler-colonialists like those who ruled Rhodesia – mark their break from the past with a celebration on Independence Day. I have always wondered why we do not call it Independence Day as others do.

Sometimes words are important.

Instead, on the 27th of April, we celebrate Freedom Day. Some argue that freedom is more powerful a concept than independence. The former is a state of being whereas the latter is a nod to political autonomy. Freedom connotes signal moments in in black people’s history; the abolition of slavery, the Haitian Revolution, the Freedom Rides. Independence on the other hand describes the end of a colonial system and the beginning of self-government. I understand the allure of the language of freedom, but these very examples also speak to the necessity of independence. The American Civil War gave rise to the Independence that made the abolition of slavery possible. The Haitian Revolution led to the establishment of a Haitian state that was independent of France. In other words, freedom and independence are intertwined – whether the one precedes the other doesn’t matter much. What is most important is that both exist in the vocabulary of a nation.

Let me concede that there are places and sites of dreaming and doing and action and progress so that the feeling of South Africa having taken too many wrong turns is not overwhelming. I have seen with my own eyes that there are spaces in today’s South Africa that are in fact trying to be new. It would be wrong – disrespectful even – to deny this.

But let us also agree that on the whole, one of the most remarkable things about South Africa is the extent to which the rhetorical device of creating a ‘new’ place has functioned to protect those who have refused to change. As we enter our third decade of transition, perhaps it is time for us to address this squarely.

If we accept that we are neither the new nor entirely the old South Africa, then we can stop being incredulous in the face of evidence that the old ways persist. The epidemic of shock each time some new racist horror is revealed stems directly from this idea that the bad old days are over.

This is a naiveté we can scarcely afford. When violence exceeds what we have come to expect and when moral codes are broken, the response must of course be anger and outrage and a commitment to doing more and doing better. But these impulses to act must not be based on the idea that racist and sexist violence is somehow anomalous in our ‘new’ society. Our outrage must be predicated on an understanding that what we are often witnessing are continuities, that the old ways are still the current ways.

Forgive me, for I do not mean to sound cynical. I agree that there is no place for violence and racism and sexism and pain in the South Africa we wish to build. In my heart I believe still that we can make strong things out of broken ones, and like many of those who inhabit the new spaces in our country, I am convinced clear-eyed assessments are far more useful than myopic ones. I love sentimentality in my movies and sometimes in my books, but in my politics, in my country and in my people, I prefer disambiguation.

We must continue to be vigilant yes, but it must be a vigilance that is shorn of disbelief. Shock and surprise are the indulgences of children and South Africans are far too grown up for these sorts of pretend games. There is nothing surprising about racism and dispossession in South Africa. Let us agree to be outraged by inaction, even as we accept that the old is alive and well and surging alongside everything that is trying to be new.

Comedian Mpho “Popps” Modikoane: Spokesman of South Africa’s “Born frees”

Watching audiences during stand up comedy shows is thrilling. Makes me feel like Amélie turning around in the movie house. There is something so participatory about the whole performance; like a live feed of ratings on faces. I recently went to Mpho ‘Popps’ Modikoane’s first one-man show: Exhibit A: Bornographic Material. It was at The Lyric Theatre in Johannesburg, I was late and it was dark when I sat down, but I could see that it was packed like sardines in a crushed tin box.

Comedians are interesting for being both societal spectators – observing cultural norms and values – as well as performers of that same society’s provocations. Sure, the comedian bears witness to their time, using “social commentary, high-energy impersonations and hilariously personal accounts” to put on a rousing show that gets the people going, but increasingly I think that there’s a barely perceptible, finely nuanced difference between what comics as writers set out to do and what they end up doing.

They use their lives as a prism for current events, and what I like about it is that the result is a live performance of what novelist Akin Adesokan describes as “dimensions of experiences that are perennial, that aren’t easy to grasp historically or as past events.” Serendipitously, when performing these experiences on stage, skilled comedians seem to me to refract their experiences onto the faces of audiences. I feel a mild case of synesthesia amongst a crowd of happy comedy fans identifying with a joke, like I can hear lights in their laughter. Laughter in the dark has a special kind of luminescence.

It brought to mind an excellently dark article I had recently read in the Chimurenga Chronic called “Situation is Critical,” investigating the context in which African creative writing takes place by asking, “Where is the hope? Where are the dreams? Where is the demotic counterpoint?” as a response to why there just has to be so much war and violence in the stories African men write.

I enjoyed a secret giggle while watching the story on stage in front of me, because as part of a slideshow hovering behind Popps, there was this photograph of a white child with no mention of why it was there and it felt like a “my-best-friend-is-white” LOL leitmotif that went without saying the whole time. Similarly, neither the African experience (slavery, wars, colonialism, diseases) nor the South African experience (all of the above plus apartheid and Jacob Zuma) held much credence in the show, and I could almost taste the relief in the crowd on my tongue. It’s a difficult thing trying to write about a comedy set without trying to be funny (perhaps the best proof of infectiously good satire?), but I will abstain and sum up that his set coalesced around family, friends, failures, fortunes and the future. Popps has come to be known as “The Spokesman for the Born Frees” (previous titles include The Minister of Single Fathers and Roads), and when the lights flung his constituency into relief, the people looked palliated.

Image by the author

The symptoms of post-apartheid pathologies felt less severe, the seriousness of the State of the Nation disguised, and fears or suspicions apparently allayed by this funny guy with giant eyeballs. In better lighting after the show, I saw that the crowd was mostly young, urban and black with a demographically apt sprinkling of white and brown faces. I fully understood why he is the face of MiWay Insurance, punting himself as a born-free running loose and still winning makes a wide variety of people feel protected, their hopes and dreams indemnified by “demotic counterpoints” to the status quo. It made me think that stand-up comedy lets people know in layman’s terms that things will be okay, crazy dreams do come true. Turn the spotlight onto yourself and guffaw a bit at how far you have come and how far you still can go.

Perhaps, then writing comedy – trying to imagine how the crowd will respond to biographic material that has to be lived before it can be performed on stage – is as much writing a metanarrative for historical meaning, experience and knowledge as it is offering a society legitimation in the process.

According to Popps, “You have not lived the South African dream if you have not been a call centre agent.” This was said before he started living real dreams like Blacks Only and Bafunny Bafunny, not to mention his latest role in Vuzu TV drama Ayeye. A lesser known fact: he acted in Thina Sobalili: The Two of Us, directed by Ernest Nkosi (they co-founded a production company, The Monarchy Group). Made on a shoestring budget with no outside funding – either from a private investor or the State – the film is set in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra and is gut-wrenching in its account of sugar daddies and marital rape. It won the Audience Choice Award at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles this year. I would have loved to compare faces in that crowd to those at the Lyric.

I must admit that I groaned internally before the show when I saw him being touted as spokesperson for the “born frees” because the term has come to be so enervating, but to his credit, he started the show with the best disclaimer: “I am of the generation juuuust before the born frees,” while giving thanks to the generation juuuust before that one for making his whole fact of being on stage talking about a childhood in Soweto with a down ass white best friend possible.

Most born frees don’t have friends of different races, university education, access to creative success or opportunities to talk to hundreds of people about it. Even less so for the generation juuuust before. And obviously the one before that. So I felt proud of Popps for stating his case from the get go; that his show is about exploring the dimensions of his experience with different generations, races and classes. To normalize it. To make it real. To show thanks for the support and most importantly, to motivate the need for people to be the sole spokesperson of their own stories.

The situation is critical, there is a barely perceptible, finely nuanced semiotic war at work about who gets to decide what the future of the born frees will be. But the state of comedy (and its nation of gigglers) as refracted on the face of one of its most promising storytellers made me look forward to seeing faces at government gigs reflecting similar sentiments of laughing at luminaries as they struggle on, forging “bornographic material” as life-porn for future hopes and dreams.

The Spirits of the Dead Miners of Marikana

On Thursday, 13 March 2015, at Cape Town’s Company Gardens, during the Infecting the City Festival, a public arts festival in the City of Cape Town, something unspeakable happened. The widows of the Marikana Massacre victims (the August 2012 police killing of 34 striking platinum miners in South Africa’s Northwest Province), in a play titled Mari and Kana, were trying to wake up their husbands from their graves by yelling at them. Marking the gravesite, in front of the Iziko Museum, were thirty-nine white crosses laid out on the lawn.

During the play, the dead miner’s restless spirit circled above the Company Gardens. Even now, days after the crosses have been removed and the actors have long left the stage, the chilling atmosphere set by the play still hangs there.

The performance took place in front of the Iziko Museum, under the invasive statues of colonial rule. The space allowed the performance to be expansive, spreading out on the lawn. The play was haunting and convincing such that it became convincing that the miners were really lying in those graves. The play depicted reality with such preciseness that parts of it became the reality it was depicting.

The Infecting the City festival turns city streets and architecture into galleries and performance spaces, the everyday city walker and art coexist in the city streets, influencing or hindering each other’s movements, or completely rejecting each other. The festival, by virtue of confining itself in the city, is not without its problems of inclusivity. People who live far from the city have to come to the city to experience it. With Cape Town’s Group Areas Act mapping, this is particularly hard to do, even impossible, even though the majority of them converge in the city to access public transport, they are often in town for a limited time, so limited in fact that they are always running to the public transport terminals to catch an earlier bus, train, taxi home. That the festival took place during the week, only spilling to the weekend by its last day, made it extra hard for people to attend.

Long before the play was scheduled to start, the audience gathered around the lawn to see it, some were seated, some stood and others walked around in doubtful gaits, anticipating it.

During the delay, to while away time, I made my own doubtful gaits, to nowhere in particular. Behind the food stalls was the new garden plot.

Many centuries ago, at the same venue, a horror occurred here. The first was when Jan Van Riebeeck came and appropriated the land, named it after the Dutch East India Company and set it up as a vegetable garden. The second horror happened when historians erased the Khoikhoi, original inhabitants of the gardens from the history books.

The horror has unfortunately not stopped. The City of Cape Town recently completed a garden plot in the Company Gardens, which begn construction in February 2014. The new plot was constructed using Dutch colonial gardening principles. Its open stone-lined irrigation channels are also designed after the Dutch “leiwater” water channels. The city named the new garden plot section, the VOC Vegetable Garden (after the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie).

Mari and Kana was presented by Theatre4Change Therapeutic Theatre. The cast was made up of Aphiwe Livi, Azuza Radu, Thembelihle Komani, Thumeka Mzayiya, Abonga Sithela, Slovo Magida, and Lingua Franca.

On the festival programme, Mari and Kana, are described as “Mari and Kana invite us to experience the emotional journey of losing their fathers: The work explores attempts at finding consolations for those left behind by the protagonists’ brothers, sons, uncles and fathers after the Marikana Massacre. The 39 graves presented in public space allow audiences a more intimate and active engagement with the subject.”

During the performance, the gravesite was real such that when the homeless men and women who have made Company Gardens their home roamed around, within the graves, stomping on the graves of the dead, a chill rushed through my body. When kids fled their parents and walked on the graves, their mother’s faces were mortified. It was more than kids stomping on a stage, this was a gravesite, and nobody walks in the gravesite unless they are there to talk to the dead in the way that people talk to the dead.

On Friday evening, during its second performance, speaking to the director, Mandisi Sindo, the plot, he told me, was a narrative of two children, Mari and Kana, coming out of jail and finding their mothers grieving for their dead fathers. Sindo explained to me that the purpose of his theatre group, Theatre4Change Therapeutic Theatre is to help people heal.

To an extent the performance does this but also it does something else, something more terrifying than helping people heal. It opens wounds that have not healed.

When the actors ran frantically from one grave to the next, looking for their loved ones, shouting all the thirty-nine people who were massacred in the Marikana Massacre, screaming at them to wake up, one did not experience the feeling of healing but grief, anguish and the spirit of the dead circling around.

Even after the performance ended, the crosses never became mere props in a play. One could not walk on the lawn, where they were and not feel like stomping on the spirit of the dead.

Azuza Radu and Thumeka Mzayiya, the two leading actors were not concerned with the technicality of acting or entertaining the audience, this is not to say they do not how to act or entertain. Their acting was very real such that they were not simply playing widows looking for their husbands. When they kneeled on their husband’s graves, screaming and cyring at them to wake up, one wished they could walk to the stage and comfort them.

The play made its way into one’s heart not only with the dance but also with the text. The lyrics and the poems were poignant. The poetry was delivered without the accent of poetry or the dramatisation of dramatic theatre.

“It is you black police.

He will never send us money.

He will never write us a letter.”

The text of the music still haunts me many days later after the show. It echoes and echoes in the back of my mind, like a voice faintly and continuously yelling in the dark.

The play had no denouement because it would have been cheating its own narrative. The way it ended was with a song of healing, with an upbeat and somber lyrics.

“The day of the sun rising is coming.

The heaven is not going to rain and thunder forever.

Heal my son. Calm down my son.”

Long after the actors had left the stage, the audience had dispersed, and the stage was cleared of its props, I was left staring into the empty space where the play had taken place, reimagining it, dismissing it, attempting to abandon it there and not take it with but the play is still replaying in my mind, over and over again, action by action, haunting me to remember the Marikana Massacre.