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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

SISCA JULIUS

Islands in the stream

My grandfather had a tattoo of the popular song Mr Big Stuff by Jean Knight on his right arm. He was tall and big and commanded the attention in any room, not only because of his body but for his loud and outrageous personality. He was a big man in every sense of the word. When Covid put its arms around his neck until the life seeped out, he was reduced to a small box, to be carried out of the church by the smallest grandchild. No vast and elaborate send-off, no gatherings to be held in his name, no body for us to wash ceremoniously, no cheek to kiss before placing him back into the ground. Ashes to ashes.

Pulled from the region of my birth by military force (well, the army sent my father away, so it wasn’t physical, yet still violent), I grew up being breastfed on my parents’ memories of the Land of Milk and Honey, or, rather, the Land of cheap plastic-bottled-Seabreeze-wine and Sourdough bread. A place renowned for its remarkable transformation which occurs every spring when the near life-less scrubland explodes into colour from thousands of flowers hidden in the dry dusty earth, brought to life by winter rains. 

A place with a people known for their swearing, “ ’fore one God, teacher, I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, so if you take me for a poes I will fuck you up stiffly”. 

A land where the Nama-words of a long-forgotten tribe lay safely nestled in the tongues of light brown mouths, foaming out alongside rigid Afrikaans sentence constructions, like a river running into an ocean. 

And because I grew up 800km away from the Promised Land, I felt robbed. Cheated out of my royal flush.

And as I eddied between Namaqualand, where I belong but do not fit, and Kimberley. where I fit but do not belong, I found myself a traveller in both places, a gambler aiming to play with the hand I was dealt.

The crickets are congregating, a band, playing their drums and singing loudly in the storeroom which we use to store our crates filled with empty beer bottles to be exchanged for full ones. A transaction waiting to occur.

We’re at my friend’s bachelor’s quarters at the first base. He’s a firefighter, but I’ve seen him start more fires than I’ve seen him put out.

He’s flicking through the channels to find a music channel, something that suits each of us, before Jared passes out with a glass of gin still standing in his hand, or I start to yell at someone for stealing the last beer.

I see a familiar face – one that looks like the smell of Cobra potpourri-polish and sourdough bread in the oven after a long day of school – on the 7 o’clock Etv-News. “Stop gou, asseblief”. He freezes the frame and my heart drops. I have one minute to go through the five stages of grief, to internally tear the clothes from my body and throw ash on my head, to mourn the loss of a man I have never met.

I feel a chunk of my childhood dissipate while the crickets continue to sing as though the comprehension of this entire world, this experience, this existence, is lost on them, or, as though they completely understand everything, but do not care.

My grandfather, who drove taxis and buses, used to hide my sister and I at the back, sometimes with a blanket thrown over our heads, in order to transport us free of charge from Kimberley to Springbok for school holidays. This was an activity I thoroughly enjoyed because in my 6-year-old mind, it was a game of hide and seek. I did not comprehend the risks.

On New Year’s Eve, we would drive up to Port Nolloth in the work’s Venture; my grandfather wearing his potjiekos-hat (and keeping hookah charcoal close-by so that, when pulled over by traffics, the alcohol would not be picked up on their little blowingthingy), and set up our tent on the beach where we would wait for the new year, the new beginning.

My great uncle would always steal the women’s flip-flops and sell them back to their original owners for R30, to buy three bottles of Seabreeze. 

My grandparents would be the only ones seated on the two camping chairs we owned and drink a bottle of Three Ships whiskey on the rocks, and, when we got home, stick the red stamp on the fridge.

When their relationship later mimicked the way they drank their whiskey, he left my grandmother for a younger woman, giving birth to my motto that I’d rather lose the man I love to the arms of death than to those of another woman. And, hopefully, I wouldn’t lose him to both.

And the number of Three Ships stamps on the fridge stayed the same, year after year, mocking my grandmother.

I’m not leaving you forever. 
But I got business farther down the line.
You got your troubles.
Baby I got mine.

I see my friend looking at me, becoming silent, the bereavement visible on my face, with the type of endearment you reserve for your dying mother, or your wife, for someone you’ve been with through the years. He does not realize that I’ve been giving him hints: Don’t fall in love with a dreamer.

“Hey, are you okay?” he asks, tilting the glass slightly while he pours the beer. He hands it to me and I nod. “Can we listen to Kenny Rogers?” I ask. He doesn’t answer.

My mother used to have a Kenny Rogers cassette she’d listen to while cleaning and baking. So many of my fondest memories are written between the lines, the notes, the melodies. My aunt later stole her cassette, and although we now have YouTube and can play her any song her heart desires, at any moment, she still mourns the loss of that very cassette, taped over a Britney Spears one saying that she’s not that innocent.

For nine months after Kenny’s death, which should not be so monumental to me, but is, I struggle to sleep. I writhe with dreams: it’s my parents’ wedding day and when the bridesmaids need to get dressed, they find that my grandmother has cut up all their dresses in a frantic fit. Or, my sister and I pick up 50c and 20c coins from the floor of my grandfather’s taxi. Many more weddings, many more brown coins, and I wake up knowing: my grandfather is going to die. And the hardest part of it is that I don’t know when. It’s like having the pudding and then waiting for the proof.

So, I stay awake for nine months, a gestation without birth. I run to the phone every time it rings. I start to mourn the living. 

Jared is passed out on the couch. This time, he put the glass down on the floor. My friend and I are listening to the fine time Lucille picked to leave him. Four hungry children and a crop in the field.

“Do you believe in a xdwah?” I ask him in Afrikaans and let the remnants of Nama cypher through.

“That’s premonitions, right?”

I nod, I’ve taught him well. He laughs, takes another sip of his Castle lite, “No, man. Those things are like voodoo, things people invent to make sense of the things they experience, to blame something else”.

I look at his picture of Jesus on the cross on the wall, then down at the open Bible on his desk (covered in little green and brown pips, next to a pair of scissors that are green from cutting some plant) take a sip of my beer and I don’t tell him that I’ve seen Griquas place an enamel pot filled with water and sand on a fire at weddings, and it makes the rain go away instantaneously. I don’t tell him that my mother burns sage throughout the house when my dreams keep me awake and I become a thin shadow. He doesn’t deserve to know these things, these things are like racism, they only exist once you’ve experienced them.

I dream it’s Christmas and my grandfather never left us. That we’re all sitting in the living room with the tiny Christmas tree next to the white Santa Claus that we forgot to buy batteries for. It’s my sister and I, my three aunts, my uncle, my grandparents, all staying in the four-roomed RDP with the outside toilet. And it’s wonderful. We’re watching Christmas movies rented from Mr Video, because those will be our Christmas gifts, the gift of memories. Outside, Dwergie is starting the fire, and Barrie is playing Judy Boucher (who is evidently dreaming of a little island).

I wake up to my sister sitting on my bed, rubbing my leg tenderly. “Dedda is weg”, she says as if it’s news to me. As if I haven’t spent the last nine months trying to will his death away, trying to grasp at VCR-tapes and Three Ships-whiskey and Kenny Rogers-cassettes.  I get up and go to the first base. To the storeroom we use to store our crates filled with empty bottles, all transactions will occur.

What will I do when you’re gone?
Who’s gonna tell me the truth?
Who’s gonna finish the stories I start
the way you used to do?

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OSWALD KUCHERERA
FAEEZ VAN DOORSEN
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