MOZART VS MTUKUDZI
As a tip to would-be festivalgoers, Chris du Plessis relates how he found solace amidst fellow jiti-jivers after a relentless intellectual onslaught at the previous Grahamstown Arts Fest
‘YOU’RE going to what?” my old varsity friend said, squinting like I had just confessed to joining a 12step programme. With all the options available, with this depth of high-kultcha at my disposal, this opportunity to drink in some real class classics at Africa’s largest arts festival, I had confessed to having tickets to an Oliver Mtukudzi concert.
I’d been to both mainstream and fringe events, many described as “nothing short of brilliant”, with “electrifying performances” by the artists. I’d shuffled quietly into the hallowed halls as I did as a child at the local church, talked in the same hushed tones as if I was about to experience a profound revelation, some sage edification about life and relationships. I’d settled in, silenced my cellphone, whispered behind my palm and paged ever-so-lightly through my programme to avoid disturbing the reverence until the heavy velvet curtains rose.
But after concentrating and frowning and sinking my chin into my palm. After shifting and re-shifting legs and arms and feet as surreptitiously as I could, I needed a car chase. Someone had to kill someone or at least break that tall glass of crystal in the Edwardian display case. Where’s the drama here, I silently screamed — becoming more concerned by the second at my lack of concern about harbouring such thoughts than at the notion itself.
I knew it was not purely as a result of being brainwashed by US television culture. I can sit through the gratuitous bloodletting and copious car-chasing as patiently as the next guy, but in reality it bores me nearly as much as cars left un-chased.
Neither was it my lack of understanding of iconoclastic, incest–obsessed intellectual Vikings such as Ibsen or the early Russian popstar exports like Tchaikovsky, or the ebullient multilingual thinker and unsung founder of the French hippy movement that was Voltaire. Or in fact the teachings of lecturers such as André Brink who spent years drumming the significance of the above-mentioned cultural champions into me at the university perched at the southern end of Grahamstown’s High Street.
But a deep instinct told me if I had to hear just one more brilliant ac-tohr, black or white, Asian or so-called coloured, projecting with a potato in their mouths, I would be in trouble. One more haughty pronouncement in a finely designed Victorian setting, a dramatic sweep of the arm under a twinkling chandelier or measured advance by some thespian in a three-piece herringbone tweed towards the drinks tray, I would have to get up and roar: “Just strangle the bitch and get it over with, you poephol. Talking her to death for screwing your brother is torturing us too.”
So there I was in the Victoria Girls’ High School Hall with Oliver Mtukudzi.
Tuku, as he is popularly known, is 63 years old, and he’s been out there pounding away at it since he turned 15. With more than 50 albums under his belt, his delicate blending of Chimurenga ballads, Harare jiti-jive and Congolese kwasa-kwasa is not hip. It’s a far cry from the nouveau Zimbabwean dancehall young Zimbabwean urbanites have latched on to, but to me it felt as fresh as an insightful TED talk after a parliamentary address by our president.
No hushed tones here, I noted. The audience actually seemed excited to see the show they had paid for and the buzz around the hall was as effervescent as the drinks at the temporary bar in the foyer.
Instead of furs, it was double brandies, whiskies and cold beers
Instead of furs and finely decorated fans, it was double brandies, triple whiskies and cold beers accompanying everyone into the half-darkened hall. As opposed to the bright lights that could make you confess to things you’d never even thought of doing preceding the “classic” performances down the road, this was perfect lighting for dozing off as the well-dressed lady two rows up to my right ably demonstrated.
When Tuku finally arrived, you could hear him before you saw him. He habitually starts tinkling on his guitar before slinking onstage from the wings. No dramatic intro, no explosive reveal — he’s simply suddenly there. Some people cheer loudly, others don’t.
As his first notes float over to the back of the hall, they lift half the people present from their seats like a pied piper’s piping. The remainder, swaying in tempo, continue with whatever they were doing in a monumental communal maelstrom of multitasking: unfolding and sharing a sarmie-packet, breezing in and out to the makeshift bar-counter, enjoying a hearty WhatsApp conference . . .
“This,” I mused, “is what a festival should look and sound like.”
The bustle suddenly abates, however, whenever Tuku wants it to. He swivels, writhes and groans. Buckles and bends in low as the pitch is reduced — and the entire audience hunches quietly in unison. There seems to be a distinct lack of division, physical or otherwise, between performer and audience, with the attendant clutter forming a natural response to his call.
Sometimes he suspends his playing completely, introducing an excruciatingly taut pause for a full 12 bars before creeping deliberately back up to a higher volume — while the suspended fanbase exponentially unfurls to its jitterbugging default position.
Halfway up one aisle a group of young men bellowed proudly along to a ballad’s bold chorus, translucent plastic brandy cups held aloft like torches. One in a loosened metallic blue shirt, with a hand over his heart, openly wept with nostalgic joy. Over there a group of young ladies threw their heads back laughing as they bumped and tsaba-tsaba-ed through the number.
No forcibly instilled house-rules and sanitised sense of decency silenced the audience and no contrived prompts to participate animated it to a point of frenzy. The artist himself conducted the mood and a truly appreciative audience. Not a single person seemed to be there out of a sense of duty or to become part of an exclusive intellectual elite.
This was interactive performance art at its unaffected best — a thriving example of Africa’s age-old communal call-and-response heritage embodied in a natural mesh of music, theatrics and participatory celebration.
Hours later, way past the scheduled time because no one was counting, Mtukudzi bade the still-packed hall adieu. Apart from his famous theme tunes such as Neria he had, for the most part, played but variations of a single musical movement in his own cyclically patterned style which became a distinguishable Zimbabwean genre during the 1980s known as Tuku Music.
A thoroughly elated throng of people, who had in all probability been subjected to the sort of hardships European playwrights could only dream about while creating their masterpieces, streamed from the hall.
There was no evidence of the solemnity commonly found in people emerging from the many highly regarded mainstream plays at the fest — that look of weltschmerz, anguish or sorrow — and the absolute absence of it among the sea of beaming faces was strangely unsettling.
I looked down at the events circled on my festival schedule for the following day and my own smile slowly dissipated.