WARRICK SWINNEY

“…an expert on secret paths to chaos.” (Nietzsche 179)

Foreground  

On the 13th of October 2009 an exhibition titled Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance opened at the Iziko South African National Gallery in the centre of Cape Town. A few of my early collages and record covers from the 1980s were on display, and I had also agreed to team up with Lesego Rampolokeng, who I had worked with on and off since the late 1980s. We were to perform a few of our more experimental pieces. Lesego was also to present the opening speech for the exhibition. I took advantage of his visit to synchronise some new recording work at my nearby studio.

After the opening, a number of people milled around with glasses of wine and snacks, some sitting on the lawn under the clear, warm, summer sky. Tourists wandered in to see what the occasion was. Lesego and I were talking to a couple from Gauteng; friends of his who had come to the Cape for a summer holiday. Standing behind us was my 14-year-old son and a school-friend, who had been comparing smart phones. Suddenly my son started agitating and pressuring us to leave. We said our farewells and moved off from the gallery, walking along the paved walkway in front of the planetarium and down to the road where our car was parked under spreading oak trees.

As we reached the road the school-friend said, “Hey bru, I’m just coming down!”

My son’s voice behind me said, “Don’t turn around, Dad, keep walking— we’ve just been mugged—they’re watching us.”

Lesego spun around, “What? Where? Show me.”

I remember him telling me that he was once a dab hand with an okapi, the ubiquitous wooden handled, lock-back knife favoured by gangsters.^{[1]Also used by gangsters (Rude Boys) in Kingston Jamaica, “the major emblem of the Rudie was his ratchet, a curved German gravity knife (Okapi was a favourite brand), made for scaling fish, that could be whipped out in the time it would take for an upset domino game to hit the floor” (Davis.1990:49-50).}

“No, leave it… let’s just go,” I said. I thought it better to get us all into the car and leave.

As I turned on the ignition a rush of white noise, like the sound of the sea filled my car. It was from a CD we were discussing when I had parked. Given to me by a new age healer, it purported to be the sonic healing frequencies of the Swine Flu (H1N1), which at that time was was infecting people across the globe. Apparently, playing the CD would boost the immune system making it less likely to contract the virus. We had been discussing the feasibility of hiding the sound in one of our tracks; a sort of Dada-esque absurdity.           

As we drove, the boys told us the story. A tall, thin, shirtless man in his late twenties had come up to them brandishing a knife, his T-Shirt stuffed into the back of his tracksuit pants, like a tail. He told them to hand over their phones and said, “Don’ make me do things I don’ wanna do.” His accomplice, an older man who hovered in the background said, more relaxedly, “Just do as he says.” The school-friend had asked if he could at least keep his SIM card. They had agreed and let him remove it and then strolled over, with the prize, to sit on a nearby wall. “We’re watching you,” was indicated with a hand/finger signal.

The white-middle-class nerd in me wondered what Lesego would have done if I had let his anger give vent to violence. The violence in his writing had long fascinated me and I suspected was a constant silent presence throughout his life. Did he still travel in the company of the okapi? Was he still up to speed? Long after the incident Lesego told me that if an altercation had taken place, he would have been the last man standing.

Lesego had grown up toughened by the abuses fostered in apartheid Soweto. In an interview with Douglas Valentine for the online magazine CounterPunch, he said:

“I grew up watching my mother get her face split under the fists and boots of a multitude of men, who…were pushed on to expend whatever excess anger, energy, fury-fuelled by their own emasculation they had left, on me. I carry the scars on my back, face, body as a reminder. Anyway…I am here. What more do you want to know?”  

I visited his family home once in Orlando in the early 1990s and met his father who told me that he had sold cannabis to put “that boy” through university. Rampolokeng senior, rather disparagingly, complained about his son’s choice of career. The man had emerged, affable and confident, from a smoke-filled, rusted shell of a wheel-less 1970s Austin 1100 which was propped up on bricks. It was a kind of smoking-room where he and two friends were passing the day. I was reminded of the LP cover by the reggae artist, U-Roy, where clouds of marijuana smoke obscured the portrait photograph.

Middleground

The Dada South? exhibition at the National Gallery “presented artworks of South African artists from the 1960s to the present day, in conjunction with some of the most iconic Dada artworks from the early-twentieth century” (Toussaint). This was a fitting place for Lesego to have his word-art acknowledged. He embraced the anti-art spirit of Dada with his opening speech on being disgusted to open an exhibition in an art institution. In his railing against “Art” he shared common ground with the Dadaists. These sentiments are echoed in the frequent substitution of the word ‘fart’ for ‘art’, which is prevalent in much of his writing, as in his 2017 novel Bird-Monk Seding:

      & then of course the Farts Minister had a lot of
broken hot wind to blow about how great Gwala[2]Mafika Gwala; the Black Consciousness poet who was the subject of Lesego’s PhD research.
was & that they’d been in negotiation to put him
in the education-stream. Lies & bullshit. Faecalfaced
Friends.  

poetry-hoboes & literary-tramps
not with fart-critics, gossip-colonists or glory-whores in power’s corridors
nor detractor-farmers with their tractors in my mind-field
I’m more the Jesus with a crown of thoughts. 

The early Dadaists were forged in the trenches of World War I and performed their rage-against-the-machine words on the stage at the Cabaret Voltaire. Lesego was forged in the trenches of the apartheid ghetto and dug his way out with his pen and his okapi. 

His first book Horns for Hondo announces that he is a “rapmaster supreme word-bomber in the extreme” and that “the word endures forever”. In the foreword to Dada: art and anti-art Hans Richter recounts the parting words of Tristan Tzara, “Don’t forget that  polemics always played a big part in Dada. The polemical was an important weapon for the Dadaists in the destruction of the status quo”.

Hugo Ball’s words delivered at the first Dada soiree in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich declare the polemical in literary terms:

A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.

Ball

The etymology of the word polemic is “pertaining to controversy”, from the Greek polemikos, “warlike, belligerent, stirring up hostility”. As we have come to expect from Rampolokeng, the “word-bomber in the extreme”, he is concerned with politics, greed, and the interplay of violence and religion; as Christo Doherty points out in his 1993 review of Horns for Hondo:

[I]t is apparent that Rampolokeng is not in any obvious sense of the word, a “political” poet. His vision is too apocalyptic; his imagery is too overwhelmingly Biblical, and even the references to the political lexicon of revolution, imperialism and capitalism are subsumed within strongly religious connotations.

Lesego had been introduced to me through a friend at the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW). He was sophisticated, hard hitting and, above all, unique; a totally nonpareil physical and metaphorical voice.

One of the first pieces we completed was a track titled Heavyweight from his book Horns for Hondo. Like the Dub masters, I relied heavily on technology to produce my music, working alone mostly during the studio’s downtime. Consequently much of my music was loop-based, rhythm section ideas—what Jamaican producers called the RIDDIM—grooves of drum and bass which I played myself. This was before the ubiquity of computers so the loop had to be played in real time. I would normally lay down four minutes of drums and then lay a bass guitar and build from there. Early samplers and synthesisers were deployed on the End Beginnings album particularly on the title track and on Heavyweight. So “putting the words to the sound of the drum”,^{[3]Interview with Robert Berold, New Coin, June 1999.} as Lesego said, was a natural progression when adopting the Dub/poetry process.

The Dub concept came out of the instrumental B-Side remixes of Jamaican hit songs that were played for members of the audience to freestyle their own words over; a rap style known as toasting. Heavyweight spoke of rioting (the language of stone) and the muting of communications (the freezing of the drum) with a historical context thrown in by the use of the word “rum”. The trope of the rum-guzzling pirate frames the poem and complemented, coincidentally, my own writing.

Told from the pirate’s point of view my earlier track Europeans (1985) employs the voice of agit-folk-singer, Roger Lucey who bellows out:

We come from across the sea
in wooden ships –
our scurvy eyes scour this new land….
We are Europeans,
our hearts are on fire
and we can’t stand the pulse
of the drums at night.  (Swinney)

Four years later Lesego’s voice answers this using the voice of the colonised in Heavyweight^{[4]A productive way of working which we never fully explored, though on the album Bantu Rejex the track Minority Report employs this technique; a poetic call and response. Listen here.}

They come in the heat of rum

To freeze the beat of my drum

Oh people take note

I wasn’t allowed to vote

They sang a song

sharp as the devil’s prong

They spoke

in the gun and rifle tone

I answered

in the language of stone

Rampolokeng ^{[5]Rap 33 in Horns for Hondo and track one on kalaharisurfer.}

The track opens the End Beginnings album with Lesego’s voice over a bed of electronic drones and pulses which I designed to create an atmosphere of creeping fear. A Roland CompuRhythm drum machine anchored the ominous two note synth-bass groove which played over electronic-keyboard pads and stabs, all idling at a slow 85 beats per minute (BPM). I imagined the sound of colonial steamers chugging up the Congo River through a drone of mosquitos. This was interspersed by a string sound hits and “stings” from our, then cutting edge, Roland S-50 sound sampling keyboard.^{[6]The Japanese produced  Roland S-50 (1986) could hold a sample of 12 seconds and save it onto a floppy disc.}

These keyboards were synchronised to each other through a master-slave electronic relationship, a nomenclature which still exists in computer, video and music technology. The drum-machine, when connected to various keyboards, is referred to as the master and the keyboards are the slaves; the heavier equipment typically driving the lighter. Ron Eglash in his paper “Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature”, traces the origin of this idea to an astronomer in Cape Town in 1904 who used it to describe the relationship between the various clocks in his sidereal clock innovation.^{[7]A sidereal clock is an astronomical clock regulated to sidereal time or expressed in relation to stars or constellations.} He writes:

The earliest use I have found dates to a 1904 report by the astronomer David Gill describing a sidereal clock he designed for the observatory in Cape Town, which consist[ed] of two separate instruments[:] (a) a pendulum (swinging in a nearly airtight enclosure maintained at uniform temperature and pressure, and (b) the ‘slave clock’ with wheel train and dead-beat escapement. Although today we associate South Africa with the racism of apartheid, at the time Gill wrote slavery had been outlawed in the Cape Colony for over sixty years, and Cape Town itself had been the home port of the Royal Navy’s West African Squadron, which was deeply involved in the suppression of the slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century.

The album End Beginnings was released on cassette in 1992; a post-script to the noise of the dying apartheid beast.^{[8]Kalahari Surfers on-line archive.} Most of the poems came from Horns for Hondo though a few were taken from Talking Rain published a year later.

Talking Rain provided more material for a second album, which we half-finished but much of it was lost in the change from analogue to digital formats. Strange tape-based digital machines in the interim allowed non-linear editing as well as non-linear ways of archiving which ensured that much of it was sadly lost.

One of the tracks that survived, however, was Johannesburg which rages against the brutality of the city “where dreams come to die” existing, merely “to keep the money belt spinning” (Rampolokeng 10) We recorded the poem to a bass guitar groove I had built around a drum-loop with a guitar track played by Louis Mhlanga. A rework appears several years later on the Bantu Rejex (2018) album released online.^{[9]Kalahari Surfers on-line archive.} This version is a more electro-dub production with the added sound/design element of a Sowetan coal seller calling his horse whilst riding through the streets.

The poem End Beginnings, which closes the Horns for Hondo book is, for me, one of the most surreal of Lesego’s works and, with its sharp allusion to Ingoapele Madingoane’s “Africa my beginning, Africa my end”, became the title of the album. It captures, in an almost tableau vivant, the essence of Dadaist/Surrealist imagery:

“archangel Gabriel still-born choked by a condom … Shaka was a cannibal & the pope had abortions for supper”.

The slow-motion videos of Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai come to mind, especially his Iyeza (2011) in which he re-creates “The Last Supper” as a historic and Surrealist framing device. It is tempting to link Lesego’s work to the Surrealist movement which, from its genesis, had strong connections to Africa, according to Franklin Rosemont and Robin Kelley:

Surrealism is the only major modern cultural movement of European origin in which men and women of African descent have long participated as equals, and in considerable numbers . . . African influence on the founders of Surrealism was evident even before they called themselves Surrealists—that is, before the formation of the movement in 1924.

The Surrealists, according to Richter, were “a weapon to destroy” Dada. They were interested in the workings of the subconscious, and the intersection of “dreams and chance carried to the point of hallucination”, and it is here that Lesego’s work fits more clearly the pragmatics of Dadaism. His writing is an art that takes a hammer to realism and re-shapes it. Strongly auto-biographical, he practices a story telling that is often jagged and un-believable but never fantastical.

End Beginnings came out in the same year as Vusi Mahlasela’s album, When You Come Back (1992) through Shifty Records. Mahlasela was an old friend of Lesego’s from their days at COSAW. Keith Lister of BMG-AFRICA loved Mahlasela’s album to such an extent that he bought a half share in the record company—henceforth called Shifty-BMG. And so, without really listening to what they’d purchased, BMG’s marketing department suddenly had to figure out what to do with Lesego’s album.

They had no experience in marketing a record that set out clearly from the start to avoid radio play and had lyrics that suggested that Jesus had died from excessive masturbation.

It was released as a limited cassette. The avant-garde / art music label, Recommended Records in the UK, thought better of it and released it on CD with a beautiful booklet containing all Lesego’s words as well as a series of photos from William Kentridge’s film, Johannesburg: 2^nd Greatest City after Paris (1991). I had been working on the sound design and music for the film and Kentridge kindly let us use selected images. Later, both Lesego and I worked on the Kentridge/Handspring Puppet theatre production, Faustus in Africa (1995).

After the ANC took power and elbowed out the UDF, Lesego became belligerent about how corrupt and untrustworthy the core leadership had become.^{[10]Prior to this the UDF had elbowed the Black Consciousness Movement out of the way: “The emergence of the UDF as a powerful umbrella body of organisations was itself a product of struggles that saw the ‘Congress-aligned’ organisations achieve dominance over those aligned to the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). This was a complex process, but by the early 1980s the organisational presence of the BCM was restricted to a handful of small organisations—as opposed to its broader cultural and ideological influence within the ANC and other organisations that remains to this day.” (Suttner 2004).}  His anger with Cyril Ramaphosa—who had removed him from an ANC cultural event—still simmers to this day. Despite their protestations, the ANC had little time for the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and their poets.

Much of the BCM leadership had been decimated by apartheid police, spies and hit squads. Their position was further weakened by the international support for the ANC who were seen as the only real opposition to the apartheid government. The academic literature on this generation of poets is scant. Lesego is currently chipping away at the nescience with his doctoral research work on Mafika Gwala, but more biographical work is essential, especially on Madingoane, Lefifi Tladi and the Medupe and Dashiki initiatives.

In Lesego’s novel Bird-Monk Seding, Bavino Sekete, the protagonist, says that Madingoane “died with an axe in his skull, sitting on a toilet” –– one of the most shocking images in the book. I tried to find out more on this, aware that the novel skirts a thin line between fact and fiction. The few articles I found on Madingoane’s death stated that the poet had “died after a long illness”, ^{[11]long illness: sowetanlive and: joburg.org.za passed away: onlyeverydaysa.} but I have come across no biographies or other information on the man despite numerous emails and extensive academic on-line searches. I remain open to correction here but until then I trust my source – Lesego. In an interview with Miles Keylock for the Mail & Guardian newspaper, regarding the overlooked poets—the missing voices of that time—Rampolokeng said:

Of all the poets … you can throw in Ingoapele Madingoane — and please mention this — he died with an axe in his skull. He had been abandoned by all these Black Consciousness comrades who bought into BEE [black economic empowerment] bullshit, into this coffee creamer crap. He died with an axe in his skull. Nobody cared for him. (“Interview with Miles Keylock”)

Lesego also draws a line between the BCM poets and the UDF/ANC torchbearers who he describes as, “The bring-on-the-poet-to-lick-the-stage-clean-for-the-politicians thing”;^{[12]Rampolokeng, L. & Mboneni, I., M. Muila. 1999.  Interviewed by Robert Berold.} (Oral Poetry”) a very real critique of the problem of the artist who aligns him or herself with a political movement.

Returning to Madingoane, Bavino Sekete, in Bird-Monk Seding laments:

[He] was a lonely man. His BC comrades would have nothing to do with him. But at his memorial the whole blasted fat-piglet lot of them came out spouting platitudes. Friends. Peter Makurube died of malnutrition and neglect after all the years he put into the arts of poetry & music. He was persona-non-grata to all besuited over-flabby frames & business spots. Memorial & funeral what happened, all the rats came out screaming praises. Friends. Mafika Gwala died torn up, soul cut to pieces but spirit still flying high with defiance & and unchanged, solid belief in what he stood for, a world beyond the grasping, clasping, clawed existence some sold on the stock exchange.

When the ANC exiles returned they took preference over UDF locals. Many had come from successful careers in the music and performing arts worlds of Europe and America. In 1994, amongst all this, Lesego and I were invited to Brazil to play some concerts at the “Festival Poesie BH’94” poetry festival in Belo Horizonte, the country’s second largest city.

We were interviewed by a journalist from São Paulo, the day before the opening and disagreed—much to the surprise of the Brazilian—over the concept of the new South Africa. The Hunt Lascaris advertising agency was employed by the Mandela government to sell optimistic promises of a better life which many people (including myself) thought was necessary to avoid violence and bloodshed. Lesego disagreed.

The bright new flag and happy rugby team was derided by him as window dressing, masking anger, fury and a corrupt and inept ANC who had not shown any interest in artists—especially non-partisan, free thinking, philosopher poets like himself. Talking Rain rants prophetically against the new order:

now the horse is out of the stable
the worm’s eaten the bird
time’s gone mad
the fowl’s seen the dog dead
the deranged slave runs the whole range
of fables of change
it’s boiling the mind
it tumbles in the gut 

His poem The Last Bribe uses the metaphorical selling out of Christ for a few shekels:

the hell of silver surrounding
the last cry on golgotha
rent the veil
coins fell into empty hands
a cold focus beyond reach
of warmth
an unutterable meaning
the phrasing of twilight’s
deep tenderness
a return to the earth
from the stars
shattered in realization 

In his later writing, Lesego’s polemic against the ruling dis-order is even more direct. The first poem in the collection Head on Fire, Orlando Cockroach Chronicles, shoots straight from the hip:

the struggle house a museum ‘buy a piece of struggle-dream’
where once mothers marched …
the leader’s house stands behind hope-high walls, eyes fall on
electric fence and surveillance cameras while next door old blind woman bends
under disability’s years weight of rape & robbery recipient the grant  

In the end it was the word, and the word was the beginning. His poem End Beginnings underscores the influence of Lesego’s Catholic Church background. The coupling of end and beginning, though Biblical, also alludes to Madingoane’s poem, Africa my beginning, Africa my ending. In his interview with Valentine, Lesego said that he encountered Black Consciousness at the Regina Mundi Catholic Church in Soweto, which was the church where he was baptised.

The Book of Revelations is re-purposed in this poem, and it is a frightening, Afro-Surrealist vaticination; a foretelling of the future, and of the world we now occupy^{[13]“I was baptized …by a Father Coleman. That is where I encountered “Black Consciousness.” ibid.}. The poem begins:

cock crows & owl goes to sleep..
kings sprout where slaves take root..
apocalypse is genesis..
sun a black glob of ice spurts
impotence into earth’s barren womb 

The poem twists through an abject landscape of Catholic iconography and ends with the lines, “the weakest inherit the earth…truth is treason now liars rule the world”.

The recording of End Beginnings was one of my first encounters with the digital technology which would influence sound processing for ever more. The sounds captured were digitised into one of the first user-friendly sampling devices on the market. I was able to process found voices, radio snippets and recordings made in the field. These are deployed as a chorus between the recitation.

The End Beginnings track starts with the sound of a Betamax video tape machine^{[14]Beta and VHS were the two rival formats for video capture.} fast forwarding to the words, “Welcome to the programme” and then shuttling to the word “peace”, where a loop of a sampled bow and atmospheric-pad holds a tonal centre, over which Lesego recites. A counter chorus made from a treated voice puts the Afrikaans words “Ja/Nee” into the mix. Excerpts from an interview recorded with Pik Botha cut in and out with lines like “I’m interested in the future” and “We can make a list of the wrongs of the past”, which are interrupted by right-wing AWB chants and audio scrubbing from a video. The piece ends with a jolly radio-ad excerpt of a group of white South Africans singing, “You just can’t beat a braai” and Mandela’s voice saying “Go back to school”.^{[15]Listen to End Beginnings here.}

It is tempting to place compositions like this, and indeed Lesego’s whole oeuvre, into the fashionable Afro-Futurist genre but his writing is too dark and Gothic to be aligned with what Kodwo Eshun describes as “engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present” (290). Lesego is far more punk^{[16]The root of punk as:”inferior, bad,” 1896, also as a noun, “something worthless”.}—where punk is synonymous with Dadaism. He is his own genre: Afro-Dadaism perhaps, or what Le Roi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) in his poem, Black Dada Nihilismus called “minds packed in straw”.

Lesego’s Christian iconography pulls the work from free association into social realism, where absurdism and nonsensical wordplay is replaced by the sub-realist theology of sufferance which, after all, is the bedrock of the Christian faith. Lesego’s Catholic veil is a backdrop to the theatre of an extraordinarily violent life. He often employs a prophetic voice to deliver messages of stinging rebuke and post-capitalist gore. Doherty, again, picked up on this in Lesego’s early writing:

Rampolokeng displays an Old Testament awareness of the complexities in the role of poet-prophet. Although he describes himself as ‘my people’s transmitter’ Rampolokeng is aware that the public poet in times of darkness is both a Moses urging his people forward and an Isaiah condemning falsehood wherever it may be discerned. Rampolokeng explores the antimonies of the role: at several points he imagines himself floating above the pain and despair like one of Blake’s prophets.

On 1^st May 2013 Lesego posted this to Facebook: “Four poems by Dambudzo Marechera, The Bar-Stool Edible Worm^{[17]My own retrieval from his, now deleted, Bavino Bachana, Facebook account. NB. This is not to be found in the Black Ghost Press publication “Facebook the poet” (2018) which is a selection of Lesego’s Facebook posts.}”. Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera—the product of an Anglican education—was writing with a punk/nihilistic attitude similar to Lesego’s. Marechera’s polemical Bar-Stool Edible Worm^{[18]Probably written in the early 1980s, published in the collection Cemetery of the Mind (1992).} has the lines:

I am against everything
Against war and those against War.
Against whatever diminishes
The individual’s blind impulse. 

There is a careless existentialism here, that echoes—though more intelligently— the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK: “I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it / I wanna destroy passers-by” (Sex Pistols). The fight against everything is also captured in Lesego’s poem We’re stick-fighting against extinction from Talking Rain. Here we have the nub of his own personal Black Dada Nihilismus; he is fighting against the state or fact of being rendered non-existent, physically unsound or useless.

Joanna Wright uses the word “syncretism” to explain the political non-alignment strategy in Lesego’s ‘resistance’ writing. She says he “appropriates the speaking position, social space and function of the praise poet, not aesthetically, but in terms of function and intention [and]… also uses this rhetorical space to criticize authority”.

I would suggest that the syncretic, as used in its Greek etymological root—a uniting against a third force—is the presence of the Church throughout almost all of his work. The so-called resistance, then, is a resistance to the father figure; God the father (or the god-father) who brings down violence and fury upon person and family. If syncretism is the “attempted reconciliation or union of irreconcilable principles” then both Marechera and Lesego are wrestling with the three-fold violences perpetuated upon them by the Church, the state and the family. “I answered in the language of stone,” writes Lesego in his poem Heavyweight; stick-fighting metaphorically; twisting, turning, break my bones— and the words that never hurt .

Words are Lesego’s life-blood; his reading is wide and ranges from the Negritude poets and theorists, to the abject Marechera, the surreal Tutuola and South Africans like Biko, Gwala and Bosman. The American and Caribbean electronic-spirit-words coming through Sun Ra and Lee Perry, Mutabaruka and Amiri Baraka are often referred to by him in conversation and text.

In a poet plus dancer performance he devised with producer Bobby Rodwell for the Grahamstown festival in 2009 he made a feature of this love of books and words, appearing onstage surrounded by them. Titled Bantu Ghost: A stream of (black) unconsciousness, the show had him sitting at a desk, dressed in white, and reading, while Nelisiwe Xaba performed a choreography of moving shapes, almost like a ghostly alphabet fluttering around, dreamlike, while she interacted with him. Books filled the stage and flowed like liquid from the desk onto the floor, each a parcel of possible enlightenment.

Books absorb sound.

They contain imaginary sound but physically are also acoustically useful. A number of bookshelves crammed with books formed the essential acoustic treatment of a ‘live room’ in the Shifty recording studio we set up during the early 1990s.

LP records also contribute to acoustical treatment in a similar way and we had a few shelves of my collection in the room. One album which caught Lesego’s eye—as opposed to ear—was My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) by Brian Eno and David Byrne, both big name music stars of the late 1970s and 1980s.

“Have you read the book?” Lesego asked.

“What book? I didn’t know there was a book.”

He then brought me a copy of Amos Tutuola’s 1954 My Life in the Bush of Ghosts which I read and then followed on with two others I could find: The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) and Feather Woman of the Jungle (1962).

I was intrigued by how each book seemed to fold into the other, though unconnected in narrative, chronology or location. There is a commonality that holds them that goes beyond language and style; a metaphysical clairvoyance, as if they are all part of the same dream that never ends, each book inhabiting an identical but different sur-reality. Tutuola was like no other author I had read. His spirit-worlds are visual word-pictures and seem to spring from a syncretism of African and Christian religious folklore—knowledge of aurality—melded together to form something new. Even though his characters occupy ghostly or dream-state realms, they are beyond death, but still occupy a real sense of darkness, a terrifying Gothic darkness that comes from a surprisingly casual disregard for death.

Perhaps this is the veil that W.E.B Du Bois writes about in The Souls of Black Folk; the veil that “black folk” slip behind, separating them from whites, and return to from time to time.

For Tutuola it is the veil of life and death.

I sense that a veil born from a similar almost casual violence is prevalent in Lesego’s work, although his is a wrestling with the South African psyche; a different beast, though equally Biblical, and still “slouching towards Bethlehem”.^{[19]From W.B.Yeats poem “The Second Coming”.}

In an interview with Robert Berold and Stacy Hardy, Lesego touches on the brutality of his childhood experiences—which I feel is key to understanding his writing. When asked about the many scatological references in his work he said:

I don’t know if you have encountered children who have been raped, who have been sexually violated, I’m speaking about kids specifically, to the extent where they don’t seem to have any control over their bowel movements. And I am not talking about infants; it could be a teenager. They just sit there and the next thing you know, there is faecal matter there and urination going on. I think that that continues their entire lives. I’ve seen that, it’s part of my reality. I present that without sanitising it.^{[20] (‘Interviewed by Robert Berold and Stacy Hardy’).}

Stick Fighting against extinction: end beginnings and other dada nihilismus polemics was first published in the Special Edition of Alternation: alternation.ukzn and was made possible through an Andrew W. Melon Foundation Fellowship.

This article is a chapter in Signal To Noise: sonic reflections on the South African transition period (1984-1998), A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English, University of the Western Cape. Supervisors: Jane Taylor and Jacobus Moolman.