Black of skin and relegated to so-called dusty streets: these are the people for which Makhafula Vilakazi has written and spoken. The inhibitors of townships streets: walking long miles while merciless rains seep into the holes on the shoes barely covering their feet.

‘I feel it in my heart’, she says. ‘I feel it in my heart center definitely. There’s a lightness about it. There’s a very light, floaty-ness about it.’ With her eyes gently closed as she remembers the feeling of her last live performance in December 2020, Thandi Ntuli draws me into a moment I hadn’t actually experienced.

Pitori is set to be the scene for the resistant musical lamentations of Makhafula Vilakazi, Thandi Ntuli and Iphupo L’ka Biko. The triumvirate will converge upon the South African State Theatre on May 14 & 15 for the KULTURE Blues Festival, a sonic experience that will recite “compositions and vocals that channel the rhythms of life that inform music all around Africa” and “a dream of an Afrika that is radically different from the one we exist in now,” and relay the words of “an unflinching Africanist standing on top of a shack and shouting: ‘war to the enemy, peace among Africans’.

“The much celebrated and romanticised European economic renaissance was fueled through the captured slave labour of mainly Afrikans and the indigenous people of Latin America (this is probably the most dishonest aspect of European history).

Today we find ourselves imprisoned by the walls we built with our own hands. In the confines of fragile abodes we gather the ancestors who’ve endured the perils of this wretched earth. With our songs and prayers. We beat shudders and shocks against the four walls that are pieced together by bricks, mortar, sweat and tears.

It is 2016, thick in the midst of student protests. A poster is taped onto a white wall inside the Wits School of Arts, and what draws my attention are the bold letters IPHUPHO L’KA BIKO. I am intrigued, and I want to see this band of students who have bravely decided to use Biko’s name in a university that hates Black people.

If one statement should give you an idea about what the stay-woke type generation is all about, it is that: sleep must be resisted by any means!

“Philani and his associates continue to suffer. The gospel of transformation never brings salvation to them. They are blamed for their misery… and whites without matric play golf all day yet live beyond the means of every other race,” writes Molaodi Wa Sekake