Magazine
While blackness, as an imposed reality, that creates a certain field around the subject, has come to be acknowledged as such, little has been done to problematise intersubjective relations between black people.
Poet Makhafula Vilakazi is tired of living in the shadow of Shakespearean poetry. Born Matodzi Ramashia in Chiawelo, Soweto, Makhafula has created a brand of poetry that sees him delivering his rap inspired lyrics in township slang.”
Nomaza was the kind of woman every wife on the street resented. Her honey skin reminded other women that their dark skin would never make men stop mid-sentence when they passed.
As a matter of fact, it was Khaya’s political activity that landed Biko in trouble when the two were arrested at school and detained. I recall how Bra Bisto, as Khaya was known, related to us as AZASCO members in 1995 how happy he was when Biko was arrested. This was because Biko was indifferent to political activity until that arrest.
In this performance, Miss Ntuli invites us into the deep corridors of her inner self, to witness a personal story of love, displacement, otherness and internal yearning. Like many a sublime artist, the art itself cuts tenfold, dwarfing this narration.
These songs of ours always get us into trouble. When we want peace, we sing. When we want to be heard we sing. Sound permeates our lives and like Fela Kuti said; Music is a weapon. Pipe smoking elders in Zimbabwe who spend lazy afternoons playing Mbira say a grunt in a chant spells trouble. This is the free voice of Afrikan music.
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.
It’s that place, I guess, where black people have been allowed to be themselves and allowed to tell the truth’, she says as she dives into her definition of the blues. She’s been thinking about what the blues are, as she prepares for the KULTURE Blues Festival. She’s been thinking about who she is and what she wants to say, since the start of the pandemic
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.
