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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
feedback
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MOHAMMAD SHABANGU
Monday 20 January 2020
ANDILE KHUMALO
22 July 2021
STEPHANIE VOS
Monday 7 February 2022
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RAMPOLOKENG, MUYANGA, OOSTERLING, VD BRINK, GRUNEBAUM & KAGANOF
Forget Nietzsche
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #07
  • Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani

TENDAYI SITHOLE

Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script i: The Figure

Dedication
for the man himself
Johnny Mbizo Dyani
(1945-1986)
and
all souls he inspired and continues to inspire

SCRIPT I: THE FIGURE

Strange letter to Mhlekazi Dyani

Dear Mhlekazi Dyani
I am happy we met
It is not strange that you are dead and I am alive
We never saw each other
The music came to me through Witchdoctors Son
The faces looking at me at the frame of the green and yellow CD cover
The music sounded alive and I repeated Magwaza over and over again until I pressed the repeat button on the remote—the rest, as you know, was history
The whole idea of life was turned upside down—you were alive and I was alive

A friend of mine Joja warned me that you will cause me to be committed to the psychiatric institution and I will be lobotomised
Nothing strange about this
Madness is not a stranger
Strange thing
Music by a stranger
Stranger who has never been in my music, strangely we groove as if we were not strangers
Being vulnerable to the strange as I am going black and sublime

The strange music that evoked the strange feeling of being estranged from music

I write this strange letter
It is a sonic letter which is strange in these strange times where letters are taboo
It is the strange time of your posthumous without the post of the after life
The strange form of existence which is estranged from death
No maggots to eat your flesh

No rot or decomposition
Life is your soul—immortality beyond transcendence
You have never been flesh but soul
How can maggots eat your flesh then? Is it not strange? Not eaten—it is clear and there is no need for an autopsy

Strange that autopsy is dead
Strange that obituaries and tributes were inked
Strange that the ink was written on the mine who is alive
Collapsing from the stage in Berlin still remains a mystery of the dead man who is alive
Stage as a strange play to die a beautiful death which is the signature of the life of love
Strange stage which brings many accounts on how the black curtain fell in 1986
Strange year with the strange tightening of the state of emergency
Strange day in 24 October

I write to you this letter in a sound mode
Strange sonic letter with words in the air but not on “air”
No radio
It has always been Bantu Radio
Your ANC Radio Freedom is still fugitive where air is stolen to hear narratives outside apartheid propaganda
Strange that you are mentioned scantly in the archives of this radio—no radio
Only one draft of the biography/obituary declaring you dead—strange how you could be marginal while the concert was for those who you are fighting for
Strange how the fight for the people can be just an impasse where rigidity sets itself against fluidity

My sonic letter has no musicality in it
A dead letter
A letter to you is mute while it is in the language of music
Strange
A sonic letter in blue with my sincerest strange regards

Being and text

the name coming from the bass
precarious jazz scene, the domain of expression of joy and pain—all blues in black without colours mixing but entangled—the black blue
blues as blackness ushering the sound that is joyful and painful
being and text in blues
joy of blues, pain of blues
blue vibrations shaking the sky not the land where our black feet are firmly rooted

being and text as fighting culture
fighting being
fighting text
the incarnation and incantation of Fanon’s national culture

Mudimbe’s idea of Africa
Spillers’ idea of black culture
the inscription of being and text
testimony of black in black for blackness as the womb of blues

the name came from jazz
the name in paintings
the name in drawing
the name in texts
the name in photographs
the name in all sensibilities is the name of the black in blues

being and text as the call—imbizo
the call to let the textual mark to come to life
the ebb and flow of being and text as the subprime reign of love.

The body

the grotesque body
condemned for nothing but being black
flesh falling but the spirit remains standing

free spirit blowing notes in thick air contaminated with death
free music delivered
free music free spirit

the grotesque body
the embodied spirit
supreme beautiful in no hierarchy

combative plucking of barbed wired will eloquence
ABCD notes beyond notes to electrified folly
blood flowing from the lick of the barbered wire to nourish the grotesque body plunged in unbreakable thorns

Liner notes

narrating the narratives
contextualising the album
testimony of the album
endorsement of the album
album narrative

SIDE A
1.
2.

SIDE B
3.
4.

textual commentary
the textual authorisation
visualisation of listening
knowing about the music
reading the lines of what is not in line.

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EUGENE SKEEF
TENDAYI SITHOLE
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute