Cecil John Rhodes: British Empire Hitman

“History will keep repeating itself if it is not known by the present, it is with its knowledge that a change can happen.”

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.