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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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Monday 20 January 2020
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    #07
  • off the record

FINN DANIELS-YEOMAN & DARA WALDRON

Song For Hector - the utopian promise of the archive

FDY:  Aryan Kaganof’s Song for Hector is a five minute “found footage” film that discordantly remixes archival footage of the Soweto student uprisings of June 1976, a particularly violent episode in South African history in which apartheid police opened fire on students from the Soweto township as they protested against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in South African classrooms, killing hundreds. The film’s namesake, and to whom the film is dedicated, is 13-year old Hector Pieterson, one of the many children who died in these events. Played over M. Ward’s melancholic cover of David Bowie’s 1983 Let’s Dance, the grainy archive footage, which has been slowed and rearranged by a series of glitches, returns and repetitions, takes on a both mournful and ethereal quality in Kaganof’s treatment, resulting in a discordant, indeed angry, but also contemplative appropriation of this documented act of state-sponsored atrocity. Part of the film’s power, in this respect, is how Kaganof returns the violence within the footage back against the images themselves, in an act of cinematic iconoclasm that does not negate or somehow domesticate this violence. It rather works to defamiliarize it, or to make it strange, so as to see it again with a renewed impetus, and I think this is the source of the film’s intrigue as Dara mentions below.

DW: In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote to Aryan Kaganof to discuss the profound emotional impact his short found footage film Song for Hector had on me. I wasn’t sure why moved me so much. I was thinking about children and the way COVID-19 had altered their education. I remember thinking that Aryan must have missed my email, with no reply for nearly a week. Then, having written a brief ‘thank you,’ he took me by surprise by writing the following to me:

You know that work had a very deep personal background for me. I was 12 when those school riots took place. And I remember being shaken to my core by the way my mother and other white people around me responded to these kids being massacred. All the white people in my vicinity, all my family, were all delighted that these children had been shot down. I had already been pretty much dismembered from my mother and my family – but that event really exposed it for me, the naked evil of whiteness, their ability to respond to the loss of children’s lives as if those children were not in any way human. It was nauseating and many years later I hoped, by using ostensibly incompatible music, to give some sense of the individual humanity of each human child in that mass of demonstrating humans, that every single one of them was intensely, perfectly human and deserving not merely of these “rights” and “equality” but, most importantly of being recognized as human, of being loved. My mother’s maiden name was Peterson and, also because we were the same age, Hector Pieterson’s death made me think about brotherhood, being kin, how inter-related we all are. From Peterson to Pieterson is not far, just an “i”. Could it be the “i” in melanin? My mentor Bra’ Geoff Mphakathi taught me that a Black Consciousness perspective speaks ultimately to and for all humanity, that the stages of consciousness from racist white power, through reactive and liberatory black power, are meant to continue to evolve until we are always seeing humans in front of us whatever their melanin quotient.

(Aryan Kaganof, May 2020)

DW: I thought long and hard about what to write before replying with the following. Song for Hector is a harrowing watch. I agree. But it is also deeply affecting. It offers strange hope, channelling the ‘utopian promise’ I write about in my text New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory. It is a memorial to the massacred children of which Hector is one. But it is also a plea to the future; a hope for another form of life. M. Ward’s brooding version of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance brings a unique atmosphere to bear, beside the remixed archival images of the massacre; slowly repeating like a trauma that won’t abate. Repetition harmonises with the hushed tones of a song released a decade after the events shown in the film. One act of cultural appropriation begets another. Song for Hector offers in this way, a retracted cultural memory of the Soweto massacre, with the utopian promise of the archive all the while pushing against the horror these images evoke. Questions thus accrue. Does Bowie celebrate the dance so succinctly in song (‘under the moonlight’) as an instrument of utopian hope? If so, will we all dance together at some future point? Like the children in the film? And could such togetherness offset the trauma of the massacre itself? There are no answers given to these questions. Song for Hector doesn’t elicit the answers to the questions it so majestically evokes. There is only hope, hope that comes from the dance of image and sound. The dance is the archive invested with the poetry of the new; the promise of a shared future. The utopian promise is the glimpse of this future; a time when we dance together as one.

FDY: Released in 2007, Song for Hector resonates with similar episodes in South African history: the massacre of protesters in Sharpeville in 1960 and the notorious killing of striking miners by police forces at the Marikana Platinum Mine in 2012, the latter of which is the focus of Kaganof’s incendiary Night is Coming: Threnody for the Victims of Marikana (2014). Comparisons can also be made to the Fallist protests that rocked South African universities across 2015 and 2016, and indeed this short film is a harbinger of sorts, in both theme and form, to the trilogy that Kaganof released in response to these more recent student protests: Decolonising Wits (2016), Opening Stellenbosch: From Assimilation to Occupation (2016), and Metalepsis in Black (2017). Alarming similarities can also be drawn between the “1976 generation” and today’s so called “born frees”, notably between the calls to decolonize South Africa’s education system that occurred in Soweto in June of 1976 and the Fallist’s contestation of the entrenched forms of colonialism that continue to configure the institutional structures of the country’s higher education system more than two-decades after Apartheid’s official end. There is something compelling about watching Song for Hector in light of these events. It is a reminder, for those of us who need it, that struggles for decolonisation are by no means new and by no means over, and that state-sanctioned racialised violence, whether in the form of police brutality or otherwise, is as endemic in the “Rainbow Nation” as it was in Soweto in June 1976. 

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KEYAN G. TOMASELLI
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute