In my heart (and the multiple hearts that exist within my heart), I believe that as Black people we move through the physical world and psycho-spiritual worlds as archives. Your father’s nose on your face? Your mother’s wide hips? Your grandmother's high cheekbones? These exist as physical evidence of the endurance and invincibility of amaYirha, Batshweneng, ooXaba, ooJamabase, ooDlamini, Chavalala, Hlatshwayo as you move in the world.

During the peak of our political history, the road to civil war was paved with yellow police vans, generational dislike for canines rooted in PTSD, and a dream for freedom being the talk of the country. It was the dream of every black farmer who was stripped of his land and titles during the relocation process, the dream of every drunk uncle who as a young lad saw himself becoming a doctor, but the odds of the system traded his vision for the bloodstream of alcohol, isolation, torture, and violence.

A video surfaced recently on the web showing Nasty C hanging out with Snoop Dogg. Snoop seemed every bit the OG calming and majestically rolling his blunt, casually uttering nuggets of street lore at the head of the table, looking quite convincing as a street soldier turned paterfamilias.

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.