Jazz requiem of hypnotic storytelling
HERMAN Charles Bosman looms large in popular imagination as a giant of the short story genre. His Groot Marico tales occupy a unique place in South African literature as peerless vignettes that have poignantly captured the soul of rural Afrikaner life in the early decades of the 20th century.
The master storyteller’s spellbinding narrator, Oom Schalk Lourens, is a literary creation and raconteur without equal in local fiction. “I can tell the best stories of anybody in the Transvaal,” he boasts in Mafeking Road (1935), one of Bosman’s celebrated classics. And as Oom Schalk wisely observes, it is not the story that counts. What matters is the way it is told.
So it didn’t come as a surprise to me when a few years ago poet and writer Lesego Rampolokeng told me that he was going to Groot Marico in search of Bosman’s ghost. Perhaps it was his way of saying that he was done with the rat race of the concrete jungle and was looking for saner and less haunted environs where he could find some peace of mind and inspiration for some creative writing.
Maybe he was looking for a writer’s retreat in a region that has inspired the creation of immortal characters such as Krisjan Lemmer – “the biggest liar in the Bushveld”.
Or it could be that he was making a statement that literature and art are no respecters of racial borders – that in the process of storytelling a writer should embrace his society in its contradictions and complexities. Whatever motivated him to leave his native Soweto and relocate to Groot Marico, the result is a book that rewrites the rules of South African fiction. Although the author describes this innovative and refreshing literary venture as a novel, it is actually a multi-layered work that intricately weaves together various literary genres and conventions the likes of which South African literature has never seen.
As in Bosman’s voorkamer stories the novel has a principal narrator – Bavino Sekete, in his own words a hobo and nomad – “a sentient being” who dabbles in poetry and prose and the rest that accompany these two. The author’s first name is a reference to Bavino Bachana, his alternative name as it reflects in the anthology, the Bavino
Sermons (1999). The setting is the Soweto of the 1970s/1980s and Leseding, a small rural township in Madikwe, as the Tswana natives of Groot Marico refers to the North West district. If this was a movie, it would have been screened in flashbacks showing glimpses of a Soweto boyhood defined by epic soccer clashes at Orlando Stadium, the grim exploits of the Lovers Lane serial killer and the historic 1976 student uprisings – among others.
But the author’s cinematic writing is equal to the task. It transports the reader back to the era of bioscopes of Kung Fu movies and spaghetti westerns, Scope magazine and comic books
Fast-forward to contemporary South Africa. Leseding means “place of light” – a meaning which is in stark contrast to its desperately destitute state. It is a cesspool of immorality and alcoholism, a God-forsaken slum of poverty and hopelessness – an indictment on the fathers of democracy who promised the long-suffering black populace a place of milk and honey or at least a dignified existence through the provision of basic services, decent jobs and quality education.
Leseding is a place of dashed hopes and shattered dreams where racism still rules supreme. “The farmer owns this world,” the narrator informs us after a farmhand was whipped to death by the farmer Oubaas with the help of the deceased’s black colleagues. The tragic incident occurred after the farm worker had objected to being called a baboon. “Even my dog is smarter than they are. I tell it to go fetch the sheep. It goes, it gets them, it lines them up. And into the kraal. But them, they are stupid, all bloody baboons…” Oubaas had said, referring to his farm employees. There are equally cruel white employers in the retail shops, bottle stores, butcheries, brothels and shebeens of Leseding. Some of them are Chinese and Indian merchants. Blacks are the only ones who are at the receiving end in this post-apartheid community. For them rice and peas/for us lice and fleas…
Rampolokeng’s lyrical poetry is an essential element of the novel. It poignantly captures his innermost feelings where prose and other literary devices fall short. It is also a device he masterfully applies to eloquently express his abiding passion for jazz, for in the midst of the grime and crime of ghetto life that he unflinchingly, unapologetically and graphically paints, there is a soundtrack of jazz. The poetry – and by extension the book – is a requiem to the music of Charlie “Bird” Parker, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis – bebop’s rebels and iconoclastic inventors.
“You can’t write in the modern jazz idiom without noting a debt to Bird,” the narrator tells us. And you can’t write the story of jazz without mention of Kippie Moeketsi, Philip Tabane, Johnny Dyani, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Louis Moholo and other big South African names of this celebrated sound. The author either extols their genius in poetry or he quotes gems from them. All in all, the book shows how the jazz soundtrack has punctuated the black experience on both sides of the Atlantic.
Amid this constant celebration of jazz is the salute of literary heroes who have shaped the author’s literary identity as a distinct voice in South African writing. It is not just a story of a community. It is a hard-hitting commentary on the state of the nation.