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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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© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #07
  • Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani

KEI MURRAY MONGEZI PROSPER MCGREGOR

Who the Son was?

Johnny. Bass player of the Blue Notes. A smile. Concentration. Freedom. Creation. Witchdoctor’s Son. Copenhagen. Sweden. A father for Thomas Dyani, conga player in the Brotherhood of Breath.

Growing up in Monclar d’Agenais, in the South of France in the ’70s, I was too small to physically recall the man. My childhood is rife with memories of acquaintances, mostly adults, atmospheres with music wafting through the house, people talking, cooking, smoking, playing… I seem to remember Dudu Pukwana’s big voice but perhaps I’ve just made that up from the black and white photos in my mother, Maxine McGregor’s albums…

The Blue Notes. As people, they sometimes seem remote to me, but as characters their momentous, life-shaping decisions and experiences are part of me, their individual and collective song travels as I travel, in the air, warming it and sweetening it. Then I discovered Witchdoctor’s Son[1]Witchdoctor’s Son, Steeplechase, 1978, Johnny Dyani with Dudu Pukwana and John Tchicai on one of my father, Chris McGregor’s many cassette tapes lying around the house. That’s all there was written on it. At the time I didn’t know who the Son was. Perhaps I still don’t. But I carry that sound around with me.

That sheer cry for life, that beautiful flow, and for me that’s Johnny. We were in the countryside in France, a rich, life-giving natural environment, the birds, hawks, butterflies, snakes, foxes, roedeer, bees, ants and beetles will always be part of my life. But the rich, life-giving chant of music came from far overseas, a place some of the adults around me called HOME, a place where, my father used to say, the sunset was special, because it was an African sunset, and the spikes on the trees were bigger, and the snakes were deadlier, black mambas he called them.

Exile. As a budding young musician I longed for folk music to dig my roots into, I wondered where the folk music of this countryside had gone. I wondered where my country was. The kids at school made it clear to me that I wasn’t French and didn’t belong. My mother tongue is English but when I travelled to England as a teenager I realised there was a lot I didn’t know about England and the English. I wasn’t South-African either, though…

I can only guess what it might have been like to live in exile, to leave everything you know and go off to a strange continent and have a go at life out there, in places where some people will forever consider you a stranger, but Johnny and the Blue Notes have created a musical home for me, a direction, like a star lighting up the night. Johnny always reminds me of the driving force, and I still discover a lot when rapturously reading Lars Rasmussen’s beautiful book, simply entitled Mbizo – A book About Johnny Dyani[2]Lars Rasmussen, Mbizo: A Book about Johnny Dyani (Copenhagen: The Booktrader) . This gives a lasting impression of the man’s creativity: beautiful, inspiring drawings, uplifting poems and interviews that give food for thought.

“MUSIC IS OUR RELIGION,”

Johnny and Mongezi chanted[3]Recited by Johnny Dyani and Mongezi Feza during a concert in Belgium, November 7, 1969, as recounted in Lars Rasmussen, Mbizo: A Book about Johnny Dyani (Copenhagen: The Booktrader) , and yes, I can definitely relate to such spirituality. Mongezi is my South-African given name, and when I listen to the song Magwaza on Witchdoctor’s Son – or is it “Witchdoctor’s Song”?- I always fancy Johnny is singing our family name, an africanised version of the “McGregor” of Scottish origin.

Well, origins are also our creation, and Johnny Mbizo Dyani is certainly a forefather for me, a trailblazer, a unique torchbearer lighting my way in this passage of life.

“Having a friend like you
Is to have confidence.[4]From “A Dedication”, on the backliner of the album Music for Xaba, Sonet SNTF-642, as recounted in Lars Rasmussen, Mbizo: A Book about Johnny Dyani (Copenhagen: The   Booktrader) ”

Johnny, these are your words, and your being and your creations give me confidence, in music, in human beings, in the song of life, in poems, in dreams, in our ancestors.

“We will, re-member, Mbizo!”, that’s one of my favourite chants on the beautiful album by District Six – To Be Free[5]District Six – To Be Free, Editions EG – EGED 53, 1987.

Thank you, Mbizo.
Bordeaux, France, Monday May 23rd, 2022.

The portrait of Chris McGregor on this page is a painting by David Barkham, oil on canvas, 80x60cm. Reproduction in herri by kind permission of the artist.

Notes
1. ↑ Witchdoctor’s Son, Steeplechase, 1978, Johnny Dyani with Dudu Pukwana and John Tchicai
2. ↑ Lars Rasmussen, Mbizo: A Book about Johnny Dyani (Copenhagen: The Booktrader)
3. ↑ Recited by Johnny Dyani and Mongezi Feza during a concert in Belgium, November 7, 1969, as recounted in Lars Rasmussen, Mbizo: A Book about Johnny Dyani (Copenhagen: The Booktrader)
4. ↑ From “A Dedication”, on the backliner of the album Music for Xaba, Sonet SNTF-642, as recounted in Lars Rasmussen, Mbizo: A Book about Johnny Dyani (Copenhagen: The   Booktrader)
5. ↑ District Six – To Be Free, Editions EG – EGED 53, 1987
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