KOPANO RATELE

“I’m amazing.”^{[1]Mills, D. R., West, K.O., Bhasker. J., Jenkins, J.W., Hudson-Mcildowie, B. & El Shabbaz Jones, M.Y. Amazing. Ultra Tunes, Universal Music Publishing Group.}
That is what I said. We can deal with the truthfulness of this later.
I was sampling Young Jeezy. It was the first launch of my book, The World Looks Like This From Here: Thoughts on African Psychology  at Nelson Mandela University (NMU) in Port Elizabeth, Friday 16 August 2019.

What I should have said was,

I’m amazin’/Born on the full moon/I was bred to get in/No spoon/That’s why I’m so goose/Summer time, no juice/Big family, small house, no rooms/They like ‘oh god’!/Why you go so hard?/Look what he’s been through/He deserves an applause/^{[2] Mills et al.}

Maybe to show some of the young in the crowd that I have been doing some listening, I could have said, I don’t fully know how I came to be ‘the only thing I’m afraid of’^{[3]Mills et al.}, but I will tell you a story anyway.
This is it.
All of it.
From right now, please pay close attention. Attention is an investment.
The lines are from the song “Amazing,” from Kanye West’s 2008 album 808s and Heartbreak. “Amazing” has a hypnotising beat, like a drumbeat for a circle of naked savage healer initiates who pray to the sublime dark One we have been waiting for. The flows are fine. But it is the featured voice of Young Jeezy, after Ye has had his time, and after the screaming bird, that stays with you.

His is not the singing voice of Andre 3000. Then, again, that is precisely the thing. Nor is it Sibongile Khumalo’s, Ray Charles’s, Bongeziwe Mabandla’s or Abbey Lincoln’s. Anyway, only Abbey can call on the Lord with the same spirit as Abbey. What Jeezy has is Snowman’s voice; a drunken master styling punctuated with deliberate pauses, breathing; a voice that lands on my ear like small pebbles on the tongue.

Voice always matters. I want to ask if you like your own voice. I want to ask why? I want to ask when it started, the pleasure or displeasure in your own voice?

Voice matters because it is one of the first things, often subconsciously, that we register when we meet new people. That also means it is one of the things others register first when you speak to them.

Voice helps us locate us – and them. We mind voice because it helps us interpret other minds.
And yet, while voice (as a disembodied sound, as the voice over the radio, meaning voice as the “natural sounds produced in the throat and mouth, especially in speaking or singing”^{[4]Garmonsway, G.N. (1991). The Penguin concise English dictionary. London: Bloomsbury Books. (813).}) is interesting in itself, I would like us to pay attention to more than natural sound from the throat and mouth, if that is ever possible. Voice, then, is more than sound. When we listen to a person speaking to us, or over the radio, or giving a talk on Ted, we hear more than the words, the jokes or message carried by the person’s voice.

I should say, I am not deaf, if I can say, to pitch and timbre. In attending to voice I take for granted this most ordinary of human abilities made possible by the “expiration of air with vibration or resonance produced when the vocal cords are drawn loosely together and the air is forced through the resulting narrow passage”.^{[5]Brown, L. (1993). The new shorter Oxford English dictionary on historical principals (vol. 2). Oxford: Clarendon Press. (3595).} My ear attends to type and tone too, definitely. Resonation, register, and rhythm conveyed by particular voices transfix me, as do speech impediments and disfluencies. Of course, vocal beauty is a subject of intrigue to me. So are voices that grate on the ear. These aspects of voice are important to how we hear and are heard.

Nevertheless, what I most want to draw attention to is, once more, something more than an individual’s natural sound. Let us refer to this thing as voice as accented breath, or simply accented voice.

Accent, the ways of pronouncing words peculiar to an individual or a group or place – we say a person has Cape Flats accent – is precisely what is of interest because it shows voice to be an expression of individuality but also indicative of home and history. The idea of voice as accented breath plus words is borrowed from Carli Coetzee’s use of the terms accent, accented, as well as accented thinking, accented conversation, and accented reading.^{[6]Coetzee. C. (2013). Accented futures: language activism at the ending of apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.} “In my work, she writes, “the accent is, in the first place, understood as resistance to absorption.”^{[7]Coetzee. C. (2013). (7)}

At the beginning, then, the voice matters because it is expressive of singularity.
It is signature. Talent. Style. Part of personality.
Yet voice is expressive of much more than of personality. We may say the voice can betray to the listener something about the people, the background, or the culture of the individual. We therefore have to pay mind too to the shadings of the individual’s voice by other voices. We can refer to this colouring heard in our individual voices as the spirit that shapes the voices of individuals.

You may have heard of the black spirit. We speak of black spirit inhabiting a song. I do not fully understand how that inhabitation happens – this fact that it is not only society that is made up of individual bodies, acts, and voices, but a singer’s voice being made up of different socialities, that is to say other people’s voices, perhaps even souls, objects, places, and smells. The inhabitation cannot be deliberative, not a mathematical equation, not a linear process. You can only hear it if you listen carefully and long enough. You will catch Makeba in Simphiwe. That is easy. But you can also catch Phuzekhemisi in Skwatta Kamp. (Genre is dead.) The easiest and mechanistic way to understand the spirit is what is called cultural influence. I don’t mind it. But for me the word spirit seems to be embracing enough for such diffusion.

There is the thing in the song, and the thing that is more than what is in the song. The idea of individual voice and spirit of blackness, and the multisided relations of one distinctive voice to others’ voices, is what gives an accent to an individual voice. And then, as I said, voice is also indicative of home. It seems to me, then, my voice is made up of many voices, of the many places that make my personality, of more unspoken histories than articulate ones, of many stories. A substantial number of these stories are usually not ‘written’ by the individual in whom we may be interested.

Voice is of course also a creative tool. It is an instrument for worlding. We make the world with our voice. The world inside us. The world in other people’s minds and hearts. They are made of voices.

At the most basic level, in naming things, in giving words to feelings and what we think, we construct a world. When one says, ‘You are not the man I know,’ one does more than merely represent a bare fact but is actively doing construction work. This is most clear when the speaker still looks like a man and you, as an observer, may even have seen the penis and testicles on his body. Words do not only yield ready information. They do not always open up the world. They can close things up. They often resist understanding. When one says, ‘you are not the man I know,’ who is this other man and who is this new man? From this example, surely, one can resist and create with their voice. We can, that is, see that there are multiple reasons why anyone would make music, perform, draw, or write poetry.

There is another powerful motivation still why even “a bird that seldom sees through his bars of rage opens his throat to sing.”^{[8]Angelou, M. (1994). The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. Random House. (194)} She has to sing because singing is all she has. She has to laugh too. The confrontation is with the possibility of being engulfed in others’ voices. The voice is resistance to being swallowed up, with imprisonment. We speak, ultimately, to resist meaningless death. No, if our voice is us, we speak so we can say we were here, be ourselves, persisting, live.

~

Back up a little and look at this.

How come I know Young Jeezy and Kanye West? We take it for granted that music from over there is played over here. Some of us are familiar with the names (and lives) of famous American hip hop and pop stars. Sometimes we know much more about American music than we know about music in our own countries. Long before MTV and Channel O, decades before Apple Music and Spotify, music, along with films and other artistic forms, was one of the most successful American cultural exports. That is the state of things.

From a certain perspective, it can make you sad if what you seek is cultural purity. I do not.
I listen to music from all over the world. Even while I have serious criticism of it, I have, therefore, real admiration for what American culture and psychology – I work in a psychology department at a South African university – has achieved over the course of a century. There is, at the same time, the realisation that we know quite a lot about American culture and psychology but Americans seem to know so little about our country – and that already tells you about the kind of people we are or have had to be. It can make some people sad to realise this. But it can make others feel superior as they can point out the ignorance of Americans. How I have come to think of it is how it reveals that one is open to the world, even when one did not wish to be so, or intentionally set out to be educated about America.

~

The aim was not to get the crowd fired up. It was not merely to stimulate the crowd to appreciate the genius of Yeezy.^{[9]Yeezy is one of Kanye West’s nicknames (attributed to Jay-Z’s rap where he referred to Kanye as Kanyeezy), as well as the label of his collaboration with Adidas.} What I did – and felt it was artful at the time – is point to the affects the music of black artists arouses in me. I am letting go of the of subtlety, and now explicitly state, that what I want to do is draw attention to the spirit that infects the work I do, that moves thought. These affects and spirits have led me to thinking differently about the work of psychologists as it is in Africa.

To a large degree, the work of psychologists seems out of touch with the spirit, has no authentic feeling.

I was then moved to fundamentally reappraise for myself the work we do as African psychologists and psychology students; to ask, among other questions, who is the “audience” of our work outside of lecture halls, conferences, journal pages, consulting rooms, hospital wards, and books; what are the best available explanations – also known as theories, models, conceptualisations, frameworks, interpretations – of aspects of psychological life in our societies; and most crucially, what is the model of psychologically healthy life that we, as African psychologists, can agree on and offer Africa if not for the world? Hopefully, a growing number of psychologists and psychology students who are coming after us are doing their own reappraisals of the work we discharge and get educated into as professionals and students in Africa.

It took a while to arrive at what I feel are satisfactory answers. They arrived from a different source than the one I have been paying most attention to. They finally and fully came to me when I heard black music. That is to say, not merely what I had been doing when I had been listening to it with my ears and brain, but when opened up to be affected by it. I caught sight of what a collection of voices can do, could be for, in the world. It is out of the collective – not a homogenous group but a collective made stronger by debate and differences – that we nurture unique talented voices.

I could have said, I feel like I am Moses Taiwa Molelekwa.

The inimitable gonzo journalist Bongani Madondo tells a little story about ‘his brother’ Taiwa (as he was commonly known). Writing about the art and death from suicide of the highly gifted jazz musician, Madondo says Taiwa called him ‘a callous snob that relied on brains rather feeling’ after Madondo questioned why Taiwa, ‘the Beautiful One’, was hanging out day and night with the ‘musically immature’ TKZee, ‘then the rock stars of the South African pop mini-universe’^{[10]Madondo, B. (2016). Sigh, the beloved country. Johannesburg: Picador Africa. (p.280, 281, 282).}. I like that story. That’s why, when the music rouses the spirits, bringing memories of both suffering and beauty to the surface of the mind, I feel as if I could also be a kwaito star like Tokollo, Kabelo, and Zwai – like a rock star –  just because I am here, writing this.

Perhaps you have asked, who is Taiwa, who is Zwai, why should I care? The question brings into view a variation of a common put-down remark made in jest by many a music lover: there is Thriller, and there is whatever?
Or, take Nigeria, it must have crossed someone why, after Fela Anikulapo Kuti, an artist even went into the studio? Or in South Africa, after Brenda Fassie, why bother if you are not going to be that famous?

We make music for many reasons. We make music because there is the need to make a living from our talents, certainly. We make music because it is of a different genre to what MJ made. While the large, multinational music companies export music worldwide, and this is how we come to know of Jeezy, different countries and subnational cultures have other music, other artists unknown beyond the subculture or national borders. There is also the individual artist’s refusal to be incorporated into what already exists, to be swallowed up by ancestors or peers, to put something new out. Of course, a musician may have the fantasy of being the next MJ, of Fela or Brenda. The next big thing.

Quite often the artist wants to create something novel. They do not want to follow. They crave uniqueness. This is then a refusal that springs from the will to give birth to newness itself. The motivation to create is directed outward, toward producing (something in) the world. At the same time, it is ineluctably inwardly directed, towards registering the individual’s existence. Hence, we can also describe what I am interested in as articulated self-making. I find that music, from rap to is’cathamiya, highlife to gnawa, helps me appreciate and explain why the refusal to allow one’s voice to be submerged under other voices not only works toward communication but also registers the individual’s right to put her sentiments and ideas into circulation.

I might have said, I could be Spikiri – and said “langen’ ikheshe kheshe”^{[11]Spikiri (2007). Kokota (King Don Father 2001). Composer Lyricist: Mandla Mofokeng/Composer: Danny Malewa. Kalawa Jazmee, under exclusive license to Universal Music (Pty) Ltd (ZA).} , even though I do not actually know what “ikheshe kheshe” means. It sounds provocative though. The story I would like to narrate is that there have been times, from a certain point in the not too distant past, when I came to feel this way. Along with that novel, otherwise feeling, I came to think a certain way about myself. I came to see my intimate and other social relations in new light. Most pertinent, my relations with my students and my work began to be understood in a different manner. From then on, at certain moments of sublime clarity, I begin to hear my voice. I could even hear my heartbeat. Was I breathing differently maybe, without as much anxiety?

To put it gently, it is as though I am floating above what still today appears to be nonsensical petty games we are made to play within the university and national innovation systems. One aspect of these games discourages publishing in local journals and encourages publishing in so-called international journals so that one might be regarded as an A-rated researcher. Note that international in this case does not mean Bolivia, Nigeria, or India. It refers highly industrialised countries. It is not hard to see what game is being played here.

Playing a game in which you neither believe nor trust can bring about a corrosive, disconcerting out-of-body affective and cognitive experience.

Having to discipline your labour, your body, feelings and mind, for end-goals which contradict your fundamental beliefs is ontologically alienating. For speakers of English as second or third language, there is also the injunction to speak in a certain way, what you might call an unnatural way, which is threaded into the game.

But time arrived when I found the voice to say, no more. When I came to hear the voice in my head I was enabled to be from here. I then came to see my own work, and to begin to help my students to see their work, as work from here for here.

By being from here I do mean, for example, interpreting (or acting, seeing, thinking, writing, or feeling) contextually. However, this is not to tritely rehash the apparently well-accepted idea of context as significant. Interpreting from here goes far beyond simplistic proclamation of context as principle. I understand to be from here to refer for instance to situating my work in an actual place, relatable to problems of living in that place, and as a product of dialogues with people or events in an identifiable place.

Often, when I am around there, I walk on the streets of downtown Durban. Or I spend a day in Langa township (between the airport and Cape Town central business district). Or I do some work with men in Vlakfontein (an informal settlement south of Johannesburg). Often, after such a day, when I come home or back to the hotel in which I am staying – I can escape, you see – I am filled with despair about the disconnectedness between the work I get paid for and the realities of where I have been. I have to process the chasm across which I and the people in these places appear to exist. I will tell myself once again that I have to find a way to connect, to talk beyond the airconditioned office, to the women in the taxi, the men on the street. Thus resolved, as I sit down and begin to write, I bring up the conversations I have had with actual people, the individuals I saw on the day, in this place, during this time, with their own stories.

But this is what will not happen. I know that what I write is likely not to be read by most of the diverse people I met out of the conference rooms, on the street, at the Mall, or even on the university campuses. Of course this knowledge divide is a result of the structuring of knowledge which in turn is the result of the massive socioeconomic inequality that characterises this society, and many others. Even as it had become clearer to what end I am writing, I ask myself again and again, like Ngugi wa Thiong’o had to, who exactly am “I writing for”?^{[12]Wa Thiong’o, N. (1992). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. (72)}

Sadly, too often what I write is for the small percentage who attend university, who can access the articles behind the paywalls, who can buy books. Part of this new otherwise feeling that I have to find and nurture new readers. And so it is that when I get home and listen to I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free I feel like Nina Simone is inhabiting me.

I recall the music of and bring up Mpharanyana, play him, and feel his speech-as-music (or is it music-as-speech) somewhere toward the centre of me. Maybe, I then think, I could be one of the Cannibals. I can talk/sing like him, can I not?

It may sound paradoxical, however it is precisely when I hear myself speak in my own voice that I feel inhabited by black music. I am, you could say, feeling these black musicians.

There are moments when an individual uses himself as a channel for others’ ideas, beliefs, attitudes, feelings or words. I have had many of those moments too, and still do sometimes. This is a distinct experience. It is as if the music releases me to be more of myself. I do not actually want to be Spikiri. I can hear him, I can even be him, but then in that moment, in feeling something more than the music, the spirit, I can then speak in my own voice. When I offer an interpretation, moreso in front of a largely a non-black audience, and experience congruency between the spirit, words, affects, and cognitions – at that moment I do not feel black, but authentically me. And it is precisely then, when I teach a largely non-black class in my own voice – with no autotune – and state that “some people like fighting”, that my mind brings up Ray Phiri. And it is then I also feel truly I am myself.

It is possible then, even desirable, for a psychologist to be an artist. I am not referring to what art therapists do, which may be necessary for certain patients and children, but an artist as far as they are concerned with the accent of their thought and practice. It is, in the face of the domination of certain voices in psychology, of considerable import to be occupied with the subject of voice, and so of psychology as an art; let us say, for example, to be absorbed with the topic of the language and form in which a therapy is delivered or knowledge is transmitted. Or to be seized with making new interpretations that go against the received ones. In general, then, with the idea of freedom of expression and thought as these relate to our lives as psychology professionals or psychology students instead of following the highly regulated terrain about what we can teach and do.

It is well-known that there is high pressure in many countries to have more young people to do subjects in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Perhaps a better term is not pressure but command. For example, in 2018, Hungary decided to withdraw accreditation for and defund gender studies programmes at two universities, including the Central European University. While the government of Viktor Orban did not offer any detailed public statement about its decision, apparently because there is no need for a discipline that critically interrogates the changes in gender and gender ideologies, relations, and structures.^{[13]Kent, L. & Tapfumaneyi, S. (2018). Hungary’s PM bans gender study at colleges saying ‘people are born either male or female. CNN (October 19). Retrieved July 7, 2020 from cnn}

In fact, with the rise of rightwing parties in Europe, gender studies came under attack, was declared to have no place in universities, and said to be an ideology rather than a proper discipline.^{[14]Apperly, E. (2019). Why Europe’s Far Right Is Targeting Gender Studies. The Atlantic (June 15). Retrieved July 7, 2020 from theatlantic} An interpretation we can make about the assault on gender studies, an assault that was about more than gender studies per se, and instead was about the reassertion of a certain political and social order, is that those who sought to bar gender studies seem to believe that we do not care for new ideas about gender, that the world of men and women is fine as it is. To be sure, knowledge and skills in STEM disciplines are vital are for national development. A country needs engineers and virologists too. There is however a widening black hole in the middle of many countries, certainly in Africa, a hole that can only be filled with stories of hope, stories of self-belief, of a different future, and life as it could be. That implies we need software developers, cosmologists, gynecologists, and chemists. However, we also need filmmakers and pianists, painters and other storytellers. The hole needs therapists to be artists of the soul to be able to repair it, teachers to tell stories necessary in building new humans.

Art can enrage and provoke. Remember Rhodes. Remember the statues of the confederate leaders in the U.S. against which the Black Lives Matter protest there directed their rage as part of the larger protest against racism and specifically police brutality following the public murder of George Floyd. Remember the protest in support of Black Live Matter in the United Kingdom against the statues of Rhodes and profiteers who made their money from slavery and the oppression of black people. But art can heal too.

Music can make us sad, pull our bodies to a rave, draw us to slow dance, and make us feel psychologically better. Stories, such the one of savages who cannot take care of their land or feel what other humans feel, can destroy a people. But stories can also build dreams.

When I say I was enabled to be from here I refer to what, but more like how, since at a certain point, I began to feel, along with reflections on that feeling and acting on that basis. It is a moment that seemed to arrive from nowhere. But there is a past to which I will try to attach these feelings.

From that point I seemed to begin to appreciate a little better how I have looked at Africa from South Africa and at the world from Africa. By ‘how I have looked at Africa from South Africa and at the world from Africa’ I am signifying my situatedness as a black and African subject in the world in which I come to relate to others, get educated, work, raise a child, and travel, identities and positions which turn out to need to unpack because they are not as self-evident as they seem. As I begin to grasp somewhat better how I see Africa and the world, I start to see how I (have allowed myself to) see Africa in the world and my place in these worlds in rather curious ways. I will get to re-interrogate many of the ways of seeing I had learnt over time – you may also say, practice unlearning some habits of looking. I will reexamine what I was giving my attention to, hearing, reading, and watching. I will rethink – you may also say, practice unthinking – what and how I think, feel, say, and act in relations, mainly in relation to my work, and to a lesser extent in some of the social relations in which I participate.

What I have come to appreciate is that attention costs time. Where time is a tradeable commodity, it means potential wealth sacrificed when you do not put enough value on who and what you give your time to. In the case of music, what we (are made to) listen to bleeds into our consciousness. It also sucks our time.

That means changing your listening habits can free your time and shift your consciousness.

I turn to Fela. I find I want to be like Fela. No, I want to be Fela. I enjoy Adele’s music. Very much so. I am fan of Coldplay. Diane Krall is on my playlists. I have sung along with Celine Dion. And I have listened to the Doors. But it is when I listen to Mambazo that I say, could I be part of them? I get something more than the music in Bra Hugh’s music. I am transported by Toumani Diabaté and my body can stand still when I hear Davido. Ami Faku’s was a star in my firmament from the first note I heard.

You do not necessarily have to be physically in the same room with the spirits of the women and men and “other genders” (for want of a better term) who have been here before me. Technology can have and does have downsides, yet it can also facilitate connections, as we saw so well during the lockdowns because of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. All you need is the voice over the app, YouTube video, or streaming service. But the older technologies, radio station, the vinyl record, TV channel, and the CD, do just fine. (In passing then, African-centred psychological perspectives must more deliberately, less ambivalently, and more energetically embrace technology).

In the last few years I have undertaken reassessing not just my own observations of psychological life but from a simple thing such as choices I make about dress to my reactions to unpleasant emotions; not just reexamining what I watch on television and asking why, but also the interpretations about African lives (if any) advanced in the work of others and implications thereof; reconsidering more consciously not only what I write and where I publish – which implies one has a choice, although choice can be constrained – but also asking about the intentions in writing and publishing.

It may be obvious, but I need to say, I was re-imagining what the black subject could be, how to be black and free. As part of that I was attempting to re-invent myself as a free black man, reconstructing my interior, reinventing those parts of me that I could. “I think the paradigm of self-reinvention is so central to black autobiography,” says the African American Baptist minister and university professor Michael Eric Dyson, “because there’s a powerful move toward transformation in black life. Those parallel moves between life and literature, between personal story and racial story, are quite essential in light of the narrative quality of black existence. We shape our lives through story, and through it we also shape our self-understanding.”^{[15]Dyson, M.E. (2003). Open Mike: Reflections on philosophy, race, sex, culture and religion. New York, N.Y.: Basic Civitas Books.}

As part of this work of self-re-invention that was going on I was also re-learning to play with a bit more abandon (reminding myself so often that some of what we call intellectual work, such as research, is a social game, even though our livelihoods depend on it); to act with less fear that I might be wrong. It may come more naturally to some people, but I had to (re)learn the freedom to be wrong, and to say we have to allow ourselves to make errors. It is an ongoing learning process.