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Issue #05
Contents
editorial
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Redefined
GEORGE LEWIS
New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps
GIORGIO AGAMBEN
The Supreme Music. Music and Politics
Theme Social Impact
SAIDIYA HARTMAN
Riot and Refrain
THOMAS BERNHARD
Executioners
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN & STEPHANUS MULLER
Music’s “non-Political Neutrality”: When race dare not speak its name
STEVEN ROBINS
Spectres of Racial Science at Stellenbosch University: From Eugen Fischer’s Eugenics to the Department of Sport Sciences’ Retracted Article
MOHAMMAD SHABANGU
Education as the Practice of Freedom: Towards a Decolonisation of Desire
CHUMANI MAXWELE
The Solitary Protest That Gave Birth To #RhodesMustFall
SISCA JULIUS
Chappies bubblegum
EMILE YX? JANSEN
Heal the Hood & World with Afrocation
MESULI NALE
Move For Two: Educating for Leadership Through Dance
SARAH MALOTANE HENKEMAN
On the Social Impact of Telling Your Own Story in Your Own Way
ACHMAT DAVIDS
The Social Impact of Language: The "Coloured" Image of Afrikaans in Nineteenth Century Cape Town
JACKIE SHANDU
On the Social Impact of Self Hatred
AZOLA DAYILE
Imbamba – Uthunyiwe: On the Social Impact of Migrant Labour
YAMKELA F. SPENGANE
On the Social Impact of Name Changes
ANELE NZIMANDE
On the Social Impact of Motherhood
ZIYANA LATEGAN
Problems of and for Philosophy
galleri
JOAN OTIENO
Art as the Social Impact of Repurposing Waste Materials
GARTH ERASMUS
Xnau
GARTH ERASMUS
Virulent Strain
ANDREA ROLFES
Not the Paradise Garden
MZOXOLO VIMBA
Sunday best, kakade!
ROCHÉ VAN TIDDENS
Four Compositions
JAMES OATWAY & ALON SKUY
[BR]OTHER
borborygmus
ZIYANA LATEGAN
Invention as Ideological Reproduction
LETTA MBULU
Not Yet Uhuru (Amakhandela)
TUMI MOGOROSI
De
ANDREA LEIGH FARNHAM
A bad relationship with the truth
DAVID MWAMBARI
On the Social Impact of Reading Radical Literature
PHIWOKAZI QOZA
Choreographies of Protest Performance: 2. Somatic Communication and the experience of intensity
DUANE JETHRO
Shangaan Electro: shaping desire @180bpm
CLARE LOVEDAY
WOMEN IN MUSIC.co.za - A website for South African women music practitioners
ERNIE LARSEN
Escape Routes
LIZ SAVAGE
Myanmar: a post-colonial tale of fear, treachery and hope
STEVEN CRAIG HICKMAN
Weird Literature as Speculative Philosophy
frictions
VANGILE GANTSHO
"we have forgotten who we are"
JETHRO LOUW & GARTH ERASMUS
21st Century Khoisan Man
LUCY VALERIE GRAHAM
Seven settler poems
SERGIO HENRY BEN
Some Monday shit.
RIAAN OPPELT
The Boys in the Box
TRICIA WARDEN
Five Poems Two Songs and a Video
JOHAN VAN WYK
Man Bitch
ARI SITAS, GEORGE & DEBBIE MARI
Cold was the ground - A Requiem for Elephants Too**
ARI SITAS, GEORGE & DEBBIE MARI
Cold Was The Ground- A Requiem For Elephants Too* Part I
ARI SITAS, GEORGE & DEBBIE MARI
Cold was the ground - A Requiem for Elephants Too** Part II
claque
JANNOUS NKULULEKO AUKEMA
Something of Inexplicable Value: A Resurrection
FRANK MEINTJIES
From collective to corrective: South African poems of decolonisation
KNEO MOKGOPA
“This Bloodless Wound” - A Review of Kirsty Steinberg’s Confrontation
RONELDA S. KAMFER
Avoiding the obvious routes: Jolyn Phillips deconstructs the legend of Bientang
UNATHI SLASHA
Partaking in the Séance: Preliminary Remarks on Lesego Rampolokeng’s Bird-Monk Seding
WAMUWI MBAO
There are no barbarians: Michel Leiris - more phantom than Africa
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
Jess Auerbach's From Water to Wine: Becoming Middle Class in Angola
MBE MBHELE
Not nearly a review of Ontologicial Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation by Calvin L. Warren
MBALI KGAME
Mphutlane wa Bofelo's Transitions: from Post-Colonial Illusions to Decoloniality What went wrong and what now?
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
Why Do I Scream at God for the Rape of Babies?
TOAST COETZER
Country Conquerors: van blikkiesband tot firebrands – on the Social Impact of Rastafari
GEORGE KING
One Disc, Two Composers, Four Works: When Seven Defines the Music of Friendship
ERNESTO GARCIA MARQUES
Live Jimi Presley: white noise a la Neubauten
ekaya
DEREK DAVEY
Dodging the sjambok
CHRISTINE LUCIA
A Reflection on the Mohapeloa Edition
THEMBELA VOKWANA
Towards a Decolonial South African Musicology: Reflections on Christine Lucia’s Michael Mosoeu Moerane Scholarly Edition.
ANKE FROEHLICH & INGE ENGELBRECHT
Genadendal Music Collections Catalogue: an introduction
off the record
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil pilot project digital version
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil pilot chapter 5 charisma
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil pilot chapter 9 The Forest of Astravas
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil, pilot chapter 11 character
LOUIS CHUDE-SOKEI
When Echoes Return: roots, diaspora and possible Africas (a eulogy)
VEIT ERLMANN
The Disappearance of Otherness: ‘Africa Civilised, Africa Uncivilised’: Local Culture, World System and South African Music
IGNATIA MADALANE
From Paul to Penny: The Emergence and Development of Tsonga Disco (1985-1990s)
NIKLAS ZIMMER
Basil Breakey: Jazz contacts, Jazz culture.
OLIVIER LEDURE
Ted Joans
SAM MATHE
NDIKHO DOUGLAS XABA
CAN THEMBA
The Bottom of the Bottle
DANFORD TAFADZWA CHIBVONGODZE
Jonah Sithole’s Sabhuku
feedback
ALEXANDRA DODD
herri: a plenitude of material, ideas, sounds and voices
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Social Media Responses to herri issues 1 - 4
the selektah
ZARA JULIUS
A call for renewed internationalism: A sonic liberation front
PhD | Nicola Deane
DECENTERING THE ARCHIVE:
Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories
NICOLA DEANE
FRAGMENTS By Way of Introduction
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE I: SURFACES A Surface Reading of the DOMUS Archive: framing space & time
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE II: INVAGINATION A Subjective Fold of the DOMUS Archive: a pocket of one’s own
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE III: NOISE A Hauntological Reconstruction of the DOMUS Archive: the noise remains
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE IV: THE MASK (De)Scripting the DOMUS Archive as Faceless Protagonist
NICOLA DEANE
ELISABETH UNMASKED by Nicola Deane
NICOLA DEANE
CONCLUSION Irresolution
hotlynx
shopping
SHOP
Purchase or listen
KOLEKA PUTUMA
Black Girl Live
contributors
the back page
MIKE VAN GRAAN
Covid-19 and its Existential Challenge to Theatre
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #05
  • Theme Social Impact

JACKIE SHANDU

On the Social Impact of Self Hatred

Natives. We are so broken, it makes me wanna cry. We are addicted to the process of inflicting pain, the spectacle of humiliation, the performance of belittling one another. That’s what almost 400 years of brutal, savage and completely senseless white violence on us has done to us.

Killing Blacks, making them eat shit, burying them alive, raping a man’s wife in front of him and his children or sodomizing him in front them, raiding native quarters in the early hours with vicious dogs trained to devour blacks and the joy of watching natives tremble with terror, others running around naked. All this, and so much more has been the favourite sport of white enslavers and colonizers in dealing with Afrikans, whose humanity whites have always refuted, and still emphatically do. This trauma is deeply entrenched in our minds, bodies and souls and permanently plays itself out in the manner in which we Afrikans deal with ourselves. The lovelessness, the uncalled for harshness, impatience and deep hatred for ourselves and each other. Rape, murder, robbery, body mutilation, ukuthakathi and all other forms of black-on-black monstrous brutalization derives from our unexamined, untreated and, in many instances, unacknowledged racial trauma transferred from one generation to the next.

Where am I going? Black men, what is pleasurable, joyful, thrilling about a black man demolishing a house he had built for his woman – whatever the actual nature of their romantic/sexual liaisons? The sick victory and idiotic triumph you think you enjoy emanate from your own unacknowledged hatred of black women. Many of you envy that useless and foolish man, you wish it was you with the power to inflict that kind of pain on a woman.

We black men hate black women because first and foremost we hate ourselves. We see the meaninglessness of our lives, our spiritual emptiness, mental blankness, emotional hollowness and psychological castration. Our structural inability and sometimes sheer reluctance to attend to black women as grounded, loving, respectful and peaceful partners make us resent them so deeply because we fear they see us the way we see ourselves – as lack, emptiness and nothingness.

We ourselves are a creation historically, our collective subjectivity that is. Our ideas of manhood are not ours, and we are deprived of the means with which to meet the manhood standard as conceived and imposed by whiteness.

Performative obscene misogyny has become our recourse as we have epically failed to uproot the social-economic order that creates our subjectivity as nothing more than tools to sustain and reproduce white supremacy, white privilege and white racism. We can’t be a man as defined by whiteness. The white man lives luxuriously or, at the very least, very comfortably. He lives with his wife and kids, in affluent surbubia. They eat good food, dress smartly, drive fancy cars, have good schools and hospitals. White people in South Afrika enjoy living standards comparable with those of the wealthiest people in high-income industrialized economies of the West. Everything whites have in SA, is a direct result of historical plunder – massive violent land and livestock dispossession, economic super-exploitation and accumulation of white capital through oppressed native free labour.

The creation of monstrous white wealth through grotesque native deprivation and super-exploitation has gotten far worse, more intensive and extensive since the advent of democracy with the ANC slave-catcher government acting as legitimating factor of the viciously racist colonial-apartheid mode of production. Today whites drink the blood, sweat and tears of the dispossessed and deprived Afrikan native majority with a cool conscience, because it’s been blessed by the messianic Nelson Mandela.

We black men hate our reality but we don’t think it through thoroughly and critically. We don’t historicize it. We envy the white man but we know we can never be him, because to be like him we would also have to invade, rape, pillage, maim, disposses and exploit an entire people. We would have to part with morals as the white man has in dealing with black people since transatlantic slavery. We would have to be the super monster and engaging in graphic acts of bestiality on a scale similar to that of white savagery the world over. We know we simply lack the will for such evil. The fun, amusement and thrill we display at the suffering of black women is superficial, and beneath it lies deep pain, hurt, anger, anguish and despair. We need serious healing. We know we are men who are men only in form but have been stripped of everything essential in the shaping of male identity. The manhood was stripped when whites took the land and all its wealth, when the means with which to reproduce ourselves materially as black people were all suddenly confiscated. When our livelihood suddenly totally depended on our slaving for white people – if/when they so desired.

Our trauma can only be treated politically.

But our politicians are mega-sellouts and would never alter the politics to deal with our pain which causes us to perpetuate it on ourselves and on black women. Our politicians are bribed and controlled to dismiss the strong correlation between our violent behavior and our history. Hence their campaign against, and education on, Gender Based Violence is shallow and idiotic. Just as their antiracism campaign does not define racism as undue power to subjugate others on the basis of race, their narrative on GBV is that it is an individual act for which each individual must take responsibility.

For them GBV has no connection to poverty, hopelessness and the ghetto misery that produces bitter, angry, abused and broken boys whose ideas of manhood come from the same ghetto streets. For them, toxic communities do not produce toxic individuals. So they simply say STOP GBV. Just like they say STOP RACISM while leaving intact and fully operational all the conditions that produce both.

We hate ourselves. We hate black women. They hate us too, by the way. Misogyny and Misandry are the two most powerful forces mediating relations between black men and black women today. Whites can only marvel, with a great sense of substantiated triumph. They have won. We see each other through the prisms designed by them. They are very safe!

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ACHMAT DAVIDS
AZOLA DAYILE
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