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7
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

SANDILE MEMELA

Things My Father Taught Me

– there are more questions than answers –

My father was a messenger and registrar at an American research company, A. C. Nielsen, in Bree Street, Johannesburg. He walked the pavement to the central office in the CBD to collect or deliver letters and parcels. It was very important mail that carried survey results and other documents that told the story of market developments in society. Sometimes they measured the political mood.

I told friends that he was a clerk at work. He wore a white shirt and a jacket to the office. This made him look respectable.

He came to Johannesburg when he was 17 to start work in the mines. I don’t know how he ended up in high rise offices of Jozi. But he could read and write and spoke Shakespearean English, imitating a British accent sometimes. I learned that English was a powerful tool and instrument. If you spoke it well, you stood a chance in life. You could be mistaken for a highly educated or intelligent person. I think that is largely true.

My father had his standard 6, perhaps. I am not sure. As mentioned, he started work at 17 and was forced into early retirement at 60. He was devastated. He was a chain smoker and his lungs had almost collapsed. He had emphysema, a disease that smoked out your lungs. I don’t smoke.

For almost 30 years, I recall, he left the house around 6.30am or earlier. It did not matter whether there was Azikhwelwa or student upheavals in the township, he braved it to go to work. He was politically conscious but not an activist. I remember him saying as he quoted Shakespeare, “Politics is a game for knaves.” What are knaves, I asked. He advised me to learn to consult a dictionary. “Thugs,” he muttered.

In fact, he did not care for the much vaunted struggle. He believed that freedom or ‘one man one vote’ will not deliver equality and justice for the oppressed. He said every man had to work for himself. Fix the individual man, you fix the family. When a man fixes the family, he fixes the community. A happy man. A happy couple. A happy family. A happy community. Ultimately, a happy people. Thus a happy nation will be born.

I don’t remember a single day when he did not go to work because he had flu or a hangover. I guess he was a strong and healthy man who hid his pain and trauma. He was focused, disciplined and hard working in volunteered slavery.

He could not afford a decent life. We had to make do with whatever we had. I have always thought my father, this man who always came back home with a copy of The World newspaper, was the smartest man I knew. He would playfully hit me with the paper on the head and throw it on the table. He would look at me and say, “Read.”

“Dont forget to look up at least one word,” he would say.

When I was 7 years old, they called me Teacher Nhloko, the principal. I was regarded as a smart child because I read a newspaper at a young age. It was a compliment that boosted my confidence. And thus, because my father read the paper everyday, so did I. And we grew close to each other through this intellectual exercise. The written word is what bonded us.

I have no recollections of my father lifting me up or giving me a hug. I don’t remember when he kissed me or told me he loved me. He was a Zulu man who happened to live in the townships. He did not know how to express his feelings.

But he loved his family. He loved me, too.

When he was forced into early retirement because of his disease, he was not prepared. I don’t think he had any savings. They may have paid him for 3 months or so and let him go. Volunteered slavery, it was.

You get paid enough to come to the office.  One day he came back home with a new watch. It was given to him for long loyal service. He had been with the company for 20 years. And all he got was a watch. Eish, these Americans. They have modernized slavery to a voluntary exercise.

So, when he was not working, we spent a lot of time together. We would be reading and talking and debating and asking questions. Sometimes, I would buy him his favorite Gordons. But I was not allowed to drink with him. He set clear boundaries.

It was these intellectual exchanges I loved most. I learned to examine and question every assumption. He encouraged me to do that: ask questions.

And he would be drinking his dry gin. And he would be on a roll, talking a lot of truth mixed with wisdom. The truth smelt like dry gin.

You have to give credit to men like him. He was self-taught; an organic intellectual if you like. They knew so much yet they did not hold a Masters degree or PhD. They just knew. I guess they possessed the quality of comprehension. You need to understand what’s going on in order to break it down.

In retrospect, I am not sure if I enjoyed it when he, playfully, hit me, again, on the head with his knuckles. He did that often when he asked me hard questions I could not answer. I was young and he would ask me, of all people: “Who is God? Why do you pray to Him when I am here? I am his image,” he would declare.

“What is Oliver Tambo doing in London? Why did Nelson Mandela go jail, abandoning his law practice? Why is Africa in such a mess? Above all, Who are You? And why are you on earth? Do you have a purpose?”

He did not demand or expect the answers from me. He was teaching me a lesson: ask questions. Question everything.

I think questions are more important than answers. My father taught me that it is very important for me or any man to think for himself. It is only a man who thinks that can ask questions, right questions that cut through the BS, like Socrates did.

The mind is everything. And one of the ways to put it to good use is to ask questions.

I truly enjoyed my intellectual musing with my father. He was the first man to shape me to be who I am. I wake up with love for him in my heart on some mornings. This piece is in his memory. Sometimes I miss my father. But I know he is not dead. I am his son. And his spirit lives in me.

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HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
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