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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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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #07
  • frictions

OSCAR HEMER

Coyote

I cannot say that I had remembered him very well, but now a clear memory pops up from that boat journey we did together almost forty years ago. There was not much else to do on board, so we got to cling to each other and I listened day after day to his story about having been a coyote in Lima. He did not use that word, the nickname was my invention because that was exactly what he was, on the hippie hotels around Plaza de Armas – Comercio and Pacífico, if I am not mistaken; they are of course gone now. He was only nineteen but very cunning, if not only immensely naïve. As a decoy for some petty dealers, he himself got provisions of cocaine and marijuana.

That time he did not return to Peru, although I assumed that he was heading here. We broke up in Buenos Aires and never had any further contact. In a way that was odd, given how confidential we had become during two weeks at sea. But he had provided me with a secret to keep. There was nothing to add. Forty years later he looks astoundingly the same, although the hair is white and the face marked by deep furrows. The scars that he showed me then have been even more emphasised, a reminder of the two days and one night he could not account for. But the eyes which I recall as immensely sad are now rather taunting.

He could not possibly recognise Alicia – la ñusta as he had called her in his beautifying account – but he was obviously deeply touched, and even blushing, when he took her hand and then bowed down to kiss her on one cheek, the Argentinean way. She had of course no recollection of him. It amused my sadistic self to witness their encounter, one blind and completely paralysed, the other surprisingly well kept physically but still apparently marked by a life that had not turned out the way he had hoped. Already then, forty years ago, I made the reflection that he had gone out. A faint light sparked in his eyes only when he spoke about Alicia. I was cruel not to tell him about our relationship then. But what purpose would it have served to make him jealous? Or to give him hopes that would surely never be fulfilled. I am cruel now as well, but to disclose the secret retroactively would be even crueller. Now he greets my wheelchair-bound wife and not even her name induces any reaction. The connection is of course far too unlikely – and after fifty years he has possibly, certainly, overcome an infatuation that had more to do with obsession and madness than love. La ñusta, the Inca princess, the beauty queen of Ancash … Her more appropriate name would have been Mama Coca.

I don’t know how he ended up in her net. Maybe she played with him, as with all men, although strictly speaking he was only a boy. I had listened to his story with such great interest, because it gave me insight into a part of Alicia’s life that she was ashamed of. When we were colleagues at the Ministry of Agriculture, I was completely unaware of her double life. She never even presented me to her then husband, who was also a Swede and a drug fiend, yet unlike Coyote, only a consumer. The husband could afford to pay for the coke and the grass that never petered out in the two-room flat in Miraflores. She was, how do you say, co-dependent … No, in fact, she was the one who was most given to it, and it marvels me that she kept the glow up for so long. Only after the divorce did she go down. In the Ministry we assumed that she had taken leave to visit her family in Huaylas. We were not aware that she did not have one. What she did not want to talk about – and I did not want to know – was how she prostituted herself in order to keep up the expensive life in Lima. A full year that she could not account for, which we have erased from the calendar. Even after becoming wheelchair-bound, before she lost the ability to speak, she could jokingly present herself as a sober cocaine addict – cocainista sobria – and it always invoked a moment of awe, as to whether that was also the explanation for her disability. A punishment.

Lima was a small town then. Not innocent but forgiving. It was perhaps inevitable that two Swedes would run into each other. He stayed three weeks in their apartment, until the husband took his hand away from him and broke the spell. Coyote had then been disappeared for two days and one night and come back with his face cut up.

Why, after almost fifty years, had he come back now? To get clarity, he explains head-on. He had published a book a year after our encounter on the boat, on a small publishing imprint run by a group of Uruguayan anarchists in Swedish exile. I knew the leader, Rubén, with whom I had collaborated in Mexico, and he sent me a copy of the book. I can’t read Swedish, but I could detect that the conversation we had on Cabo San Vicente was partly reproduced. I gave the book to Alicia who remembered some scant Swedish from her first marriage, although she had never been to Sweden – the planned journey to see her husband’s family had never materialised. She started to stumble through the introduction but soon gave up. I don’t know if she was badly affected. The book lay on the table for a while and was then forgotten. I thought I had shelved it in the library in my study, but when I look for it now, it is gone. Maybe Alicia took being reminded about that time really badly – and threw it away. Now he tells me about the book that had taken so many years to write, apparently not aware that I already know about it. But it had turned into a cock-and-bull story about cocaine smuggling that had blocked the way for his understanding. Do you understand? He stares straight into my eyes and smiles tauntingly. A real wolf-grin.

I show him to his room. We make a long detour through many rooms and corridors, in order for him to lose his orientation. I don’t know why, but it amuses me to see him confused. He induces some strange grudge in me, a side of myself that I ought not want to acknowledge, a violence of which I did not think I was capable.

He comes into a house and cannot come out. All the rooms face an inner courtyard. From the courtyards all rooms look alike. He is always mistaken, but it doesn’t matter, because the rooms differ only in small details, the nuance of the curtain inside the jalousie, the damp stains on the wallpaper, the location of the wall sockets … He goes to sleep in a new bed with clean sheets every night. Thus, weeks go by, in semi-dormancy. The memories come back in a small runnel, most of them meaningless; they have long since lost contact with who he is, they go helplessly astray in search of the shadow of who he was, somebody he no longer knows. Enrique. As if the memories emanated from the place, not from his subliminal consciousness, as if they had come to the surface like melting permafrost from the Andine tundra (the earth before the conquest), from the walls, from the well beside which a woman in bowler hat and layer upon layer of garish garments is keeping watch day and night with a ball of yarn in her hand. Alicia, laDoña, with riding rod and boots. Under the layers of cardigans, she is much thinner than he remembered. More serene. The grey hair combed back in a topknot. The black eyes penetrating. The chest flat (double-fried eggs). The next day the hair is rash and the eyes cataract grey, for a vanishing moment it is his mother who sends a cold chill from head to perineum. The day after, she is the woman in the wheelchair, Don Sergio´s unseeing wife who greeted him with a lame hand in the foyer.

Alicia is anxious when I put her to bed. She senses that something is not right. I creep close to her and hold her tight, but she rejects me although she cannot move an inch; that’s how strong her integrity is. She does not see, but she feels, and although she cannot speak, I know that she understands. But I don’t know what it is she understands. The next morning, he is gone without a trace. The bed is made, as if nobody had slept in it. There is a folded note on the bedside table with a sentence in Swedish: en trebent gycklare i Limas djungel, så luden som koka.

When I typed it into Google translate it came out as rubbish: Un bromista de tres patas en la jungla limeña, tan peludo como hierve [A three-legged joker in the Lima jungle, as hairy as it boils]. To double-check I translate it back to Swedish and get a sentence that almost completely differs from the original. After another two or three trials back and forth, Google alters the final words to: peludo como un cocinero [hairy as a cook]. Then I see his wolf-grin and give up.

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MICHALIS PICHLER
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