Teaching South Africa’s youth
Protest music and culture is part and parcel of being black, and of being human
Members of Iphupho L’ka Biko and The Brother Moves On were in Soweto facilitating a week-long workshop about past and present iterations of protest during a Morris Isaacson Centre for Music’s afterschool programme during the last week of June, which also happened to be the last week before the third wave of Covid-19 infections led to travel restrictions in and out of Gauteng during the better part of July.
The Soweto Theatre-assisted Youth Month programme culminated in a special Friday evening performance comprising songs composed during the week.
According to The Brother’s Siya Mthembu, who was tasked with coordinating the talent that delivered the sessions, the students were initially apprehensive when the concept of public protest was introduced to them. They questioned why public goods had to bear the brunt of people’s ire, and practically dismissed that approach as a barbaric act.
The chord struck when the students realised, through the intervention of the theatre-trained facilitators, that a state built on anti-poor, anti-black foundations will always have an excuse to exact maximum
force on its citizens for demanding the bare minimum. Peaceful or chaotic, the same tactics used by the state to silence what the students deem barbaric acts, would be employed on them with little regard
for the form of protest they chose. This happened in 2015 and 2016 when institutions of higher learning turned into militarised zones in response to students’ demands for a free education and a decolonised curriculum, accessible to everyone, across all spheres of learning.
Disenfranchised black and brown people across the Global South know all too well the feeling: of despair, of helplessness, of ultimate forced surrender in the face of global white supremacy. It’s this feeling that gets weaponised to keep us in mental cages, and to keep our voices in check. The workshops were essential because they emboldened the kids to trust their voices, and never to falter in the face of authoritarianism.
As multidisciplinary artist Pulane Mafatshe, herself a member of Iphupho, put it: “It’s absolutely necessary for us to teach young, black people struggle songs because the nature of the world that we live in advocates for white as right. So whether or not they like it, they will interact with the reality of what it means to play against, or with, Whiteness. It’s as though we’re equipping them for that moment when it dawns on them that actually, the black condition is this way.”
Mafatshe sees struggle songs as a personal repository in the toolbox of techniques to help us navigate countless instances of violence, and to stand upright and be militant in the face of white supremacist ideals.
“Space carries memories, and to be in this particular space that holds this particular history makes the exchange, even in terms of energy,