Heathen Songs of the Natives

Charles Nhamo Rupare Culture 2021-05-12 03:49:10

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.

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Of Blacks and Their Condition – The Gospel According to Makhafula Vilakazi

Tshepiso Mabula ka Ndongeni Culture 2021-05-11 05:32:49

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.

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An Evening with Thandi Ntuli is a Prayer for Everybody

Nondumiso Msimanga Culture 2021-05-09 09:14:22

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

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Protest Blues ko Pitori

Arts Reporter Culture 2021-05-08 19:10:11

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’.

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Black Genocide As The Foundation of Today’s White Wealth & Power

Veli Mbele Culture 2021-05-08 09:19:05

“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).

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Boundaries & Demarcations: On Land and Humanity

Tshepiso Mabula ka Ndongeni Culture 2021-05-06 16:26:24

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.

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Biko’s Wildest Nightmare

Mbe Mbhele Culture 2021-05-06 15:42:34

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.

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Kulture Blues Festival: To Sleep or To Stay Woke?

Sive Mqikela Culture 2021-05-04 06:16:55

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!

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