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Issue #07
Contents
editorial
DJO BANKUNA
Pissing On The Rainbow Nation
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ôs haatie wit mense nie. Hoekô haat julle vi ôs?
GLENN HOLTZMAN
The Music Department in South Africa as a Mirror of Racial Tension and Transformative Struggle: A Critical Ethnographic Perspective
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Black artists and the paradox of the gift
Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani
ZWELEDINGA PALLO JORDAN
JOHNNY DYANI: A Portrait
JOHNNY MBIZO DYANI
A Letter From Mbizo
ARYAN KAGANOF
Johnny Dyani Interview 22-23 December 1985
SALIM WASHINGTON
“Don’t Sell Out”
LOUIS MOHOLO-MOHOLO & HERBIE TSOAELI WITH JOHNNY DYANI
In Conversation with Mbizo
ZOLISWA FIKELEPI-TWANI & NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
When Today Becomes The Past: The Archive as a Healing Process
ASHER GAMEDZE
Tradition as improvisation | Continuity and abstraction
GILBERT MATTHEWS & LEFIFI TLADI
An Interview with Lars Rasmussen
EUGENE SKEEF
The Musical Confluence of Johnny Dyani and Bheki Mseleku in Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script i: The Figure
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script ii: Ontology Of The Bass
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iii: Musical Offering
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iv: Home And Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script v: Experimental Philosophic Incantations
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script vi: The Posthumous Life
ED EPSTEIN
Spiritual
CAROL MULLER
Diasporic musical landscapes: Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Dyani, and Sathima Bea Benjamin in an African Space Program (1969-1980)
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Riot in Progress (Legalize Freedom)
S’MAKUHLE BOKWE MAFUNA
Notes on the Exile Years
KEI MURRAY MONGEZI PROSPER MCGREGOR
Who the Son was?
ARYAN KAGANOF
Somebody Blew Up South Africa
JONATHAN EATO
Interludes with Bra’ Tete Mbambisa
MAX ANNAS
Morduntersuchungskommission. Der Fall Daniela Nitschke
SHANE COOPER
Lonely Flower
THANDI ALLIN DYANI
"I love you. You don’t have to love me but I love you."
galleri
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Shades of Johnny Dyani
HUGH MDLALOSE
Jazz is my Life
TJOBOLO KHAHLISO
Shebeening
FEDERICO FEDERICI
Notes (not only) on asemic phenomenology
ANDRÉ CLEMENTS
Vita-Socio-Anarcho
DEREK DAVEY
Verge
borborygmus
MUSTAPHA JINADU
Trapped
VUSUMZI MOYO
From Cape-to-Cairo – AZANIA
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
In a foreign tongue...
SHARLENE KHAN
Imagining an African Feminist Press
DILIP MENON
Isithunguthu (A conversation in Joburg)
CATHERINE RUDENT
Against the “Grain of the Voice” - Studying the voice in songs
GEORGE LEWIS
Amo (2021), for five voices and electronics
STEVEN SHAVIRO
Exceeding Syncopation?
BRUCE LABRUCE
Notes on camp/anti-camp
PATRICIA PISTERS
Set and Setting of the Brain on Hallucinogen: Psychedelic Revival in the Acid Western
frictions
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Doctor Patient
KNEO MOKGOPA
Vuleka Mhlaba (What Would Happen if Madiba Returned?)
CHURCHIL NAUDE
Die mooi mooi gedig en anner massekinners ….
OSWALD KUCHERERA
Travelling on the Khayelitsha Train
SISCA JULIUS
Islands in the stream
FAEEZ VAN DOORSEN
Nobody’s Mullet
GADDAFI MAKHOSANDILE
The Face of Hope
VONANI BILA
Extracts from Phosakufa (the epic)
NIQ MHLONGO
Mistaken Identity
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships part 2
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
How to Become an African President
JEAN RHYS
The Doll
OSCAR HEMER
Coyote
MICHALIS PICHLER
Bibliophagia
claque
LINDELWA DALAMBA
From Kippie to Kippies and Beyond: the village welcomes this child
GWEN ANSELL
Zim Ngqawana: A child of the rain
MKHULULI
Black Noise: Notes on a Semanalysis of Mogorosi’s DeAesthetic
LIZE VAN ROBBROECK
DECOLONIZING ART BOOK FAIRS: Publishing Practices from the South(s).
DYLAN VALLEY
The Future lies with folk art: Max Schleser’s smartphone filmmaking THEORY AND PRACTICE
PAUL KHAHLISO
Riding Ruins
DIANA FERRUS
Ronelda Kamfer’s Kompoun: unapologetic and honest writing.
UNATHI SLASHA
Piecing Together the Barely Exquisite Corpse: On Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on the Speculative Archive
WANELISA XABA
One from the heart: Dimakatso Sedite's Yellow Shade
BLAQ PEARL (JANINE VAN ROOY-OVERMEYER)
Uit die Kroes: gedigte deur Lynthia Julius
FRANK MEINTJIES
Wild Has Roots: thinking about what it means to be human
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony - a discourse on the unrelenting and ruthless process of colonial conquest
ekaya
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Call Me By My Name: Ubizo and Ancestral Names for Abangoma
HILDE ROOS
In Conversation with Zakes Mda: "The full story must be told."
INGE ENGELBRECHT
Tribute to Sacks Williams: A composer from Genadendal
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
A tribute to Hilton Biscombe
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN
Resisting the Siren Song of Race
off the record
SANDILE MEMELA
Things My Father Taught Me
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
On returning to my grandmother’s land (notes for a film)
HILTON BISCOMBE
A boytjie from Stellenbosch
KHOLEKA SHANGE
Art, Archives, Anthropology
RITHULI ORLEYN
On Archives, Metadata and Aesthetics
KEYAN G. TOMASELLI
The Nomadic Mind of Teshome Gabriel: Hybridity, Identity and Diaspora
FINN DANIELS-YEOMAN & DARA WALDRON
Song For Hector - the utopian promise of the archive
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn - episode 2
GEORGE KING
Sustaining an Imagined Culture: Some Reflections on South African Music Research in Thirty-Five Years of Ars Nova
RAFI ALIYA CROCKETT
Loxion Fabulous: Temporality and Spaciality in South African Kwaito Performance
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    #07
  • borborygmus

DILIP MENON

Isithunguthu (A conversation in Joburg)

The other day Zazu and I were at Mall of Africa and I stopped to buy refills for my Lamy fountain pen. As often happens, the young salesman and I got to talking, and he asked whether I collected pens. I said, no, I write with them, and that I am an academic. He looked interested and asked what do you teach? When I said history, he asked whose history? A question that is in the public domain for many reasons.

I said, well I teach and research on histories of the global south; the world minus Europe and North America. He said “explain to me how you do this; is it our history alone?” I was moved that he included me in his use of “our” and asked him, “can I tell you a story?”

And I told him about a word in the volume that I recently edited on Concepts from the Global South. A word that John Wright and Cynthia Kros, two of SA’s finest historians wrote about. A Zulu word isithunguthu that is now forgotten and survives only on the margin of a colonial dictionary compiled by a man named James Stuart.

Stuart was compiling a Zulu-English dictionary at the end of the 19th century and word got around. An 80 year old man Gcabashe made a train journey on the new rail line to meet Stuart and ask him about his enterprise. Gcabashe was distantly related to Shaka Zulu so Stuart’s joy knew no bounds!

He pestered him with questions about the recently concluded wars and questions about legitimacy. At some point Gcabashe, wearied, says, “All that you have to do is read and write, as for me I am isithunguthu.”

Stuart, having never heard the word before, makes a marginal note and asks Gcabashe what he means. The old man says “I feel distressed and uneasy because your questions are not my questions; that is my feeling.” A crisper summary of the colonial encounter is harder to imagine.

The young pen salesman’s face lit up and he said “Yes, that is it. My questions are not the questions that obsess teachers and politicians.”

I said, “yes this is what our history writing and our education must address.”

He asked me to write down the word for him on the scribble pad.

Later on I asked Zazu what does isithunguthu mean?

“When your questions are not my questions, and it pisses me off.”

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