Of ours shrouded in song
in the village but content at home among thousands of joy seekers. It rained and rained and rained until our tank tops and silky sarongs clung wet to our various African shapes like a thousand Mamlambo emerging from the depth of an ocean.
It didn’t matter that we were in a pop, commercial and drunken séance with no possible healing of any kind other than the fleeting sense of delirium millions of black folks crave after facing or running from a myriad depressions and social media-engineered raptures that are part of Mzansi’s tumult all year round.
The stadium has become too tiny a bowl for all these beautiful African fish, too suffocating a venue for a festival that has become a national symbol of local cultural patriotism at work.
If there’s anything to be learned, although it is lacking in gravitas and political will in other aspects of the arts, at least the city and the province’s leaders have realised that music is after all just about their only saving grace.
If usually depressed, the province’s story shrouded in blood-dripping white and red blankets of mountain initiation stories into manhood gone awry (though that narrative is partly the construct of the nouveau black middle class and its white cultural establishment’s handlers, as is the “msunery”, to reference the poet Koleka Putuma, of thug-life “gqhiras” and “magwazas” manipulating traditions for self-enrichment), come December, everything else stops and the province, indeed the country, lets out an animated “Ooooweeeeee-yeahhhh!”
In the Eastern Cape at least once a year, the only audible sound is the rhythmic beat of a people in anticipation of one gorgeous, physical and metaphysical release channelled through the most sacred and erotic of human expressions — dance!
The recent show’s line-up itself was brimful of pop culture’s prime movers and shakers.
Dig this! International electronic dance music producer Black Coffee, Destruction Boyz and, before you exclaim “Thixo! What kind of name is that?”, Lady Zamar and Oliver Mtukudzi, alongside homegrown talent such as Amanda Black, Berita, Vusi Nova, Ntando and two local acts umbilically wired to the topography of that land — Zahara and Ringo Madlingozi.
Collectively, a buffet of festival staple: omunye phezu ko munye!, as the no-translation-necessary street anthem goes.
Hardly a music-only bash, the festival has metamorphosed into a growing cultural stomp. The proceedings of the three-day affair kicked off on Friday with a fashion peacockstrutting. The second iteration after the 2016 one, and held at the Orient Theatre, the fashion do was ushered in by the scintillating performance of the grand Xhosa sage “uGogo Madosini”, the bow and hum queen.
The fashion shindig gave spotlights to Eastern Cape designers such as the world-renowned Laduma Ngxokolo of the ubiquitous label amaXhosa, Lungela Sijila, Zandile Goniwe and Onke Ludidi, alongside marquee brands such as the Mozambican designer Taibo Bacar, David Tlale, Thula Sindi and Gert-Johan Coetzee.
But it was on the wet grounds and muddy fringes of the arena that a Woodstockesque ritual blew up on Sunday.
Look here, voodoo child, throughout history and the scriptures, the centrality of music in all facets of human development cannot be overstated. Buyel’Ekhaya 2017?
’Tis on the middle of the pitch where thousands of black bodies coalesced matter and spirit in the transcendental no-man’s-land.
Do we expect a country to speak in one voice? A result of a wondrous and magical spiritual séance festival like this? Let’s not beat about the African bush — this country is swampy with festivals.
And yet, there’s something about this one that chimes with the renewed sense of local and regional pride right across the country, such as the Shumela Venda, Macufe in the Free State, the Klein Karoo Kunstefees, and so on — all regional pride restorative projects thriving in parallel and not in conflict with the national project.
Amid the delirium one ponders still: Are South Africa’s sum parts able to build, indeed coalesce, around culturally federalist arts spaces, if only for the development of local talent and economies?
If so, how would these sum parts entrench themselves and grow into culturally grounded trickledown economies without whipping up about the monster of ethnic chauvinism?
To wit, can local jive (as in song and dance) outlive and teach national jive (as in dissonant anxiety) some hot dance moves or two and agree to disagree along the way?
In the Eastern Cape at least once a year, the only audible sound is the rhythmic beat of a people in anticipation of one gorgeous, physical and metaphysical release channelled through the most sacred and erotic of human expressions — dance!