African self rhymes with revolutionary notes
MILES Davis once said a beautiful thing on becoming: “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”
We may think of these words by the jazz great as we think of this post-apartheid moment, where black students are demanding that we “decolonise now” — effectively a demand against the alienating effects of colonialism to find and create an African self.
The first port of call is to shut down business as usual and demand, as Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti sang: “Teacher don’t teach me nonsense.” Once we have ensured that the teacher ceases to teach Eurocentric “nonsense”, we ask ourselves what Afrocentric “sense” emerges from decolonisation.
Jazz, I would like to propose, offers itself as an answer. Allow me to explain.
March 14 2016. Opening night of the 19th edition of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Time of the Writer Festival. The room is abuzz with expectation.
Last year’s festival was auspicious: two major statements were made.
The first takes the form of poo thrown at the Cecil John Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town, seeding the #RhodesMustFall and the wider Fallist movement in earnest.
The second is a little quieter and is made at the festival as writer Thando Mgqolozana makes the “controversial” announcement that he is “quitting” the white South African literary industry, beginning a debate on decolonising that industry.
Many hands are wrung and tokenistic gestures made before Mgqolozana returns to the festival as curator of the theme “Decolonising the Book”.
Over the next few days, the festival decides to limit its activities in the elite university space and takes itself to Umlazi, KwaMashu, Cato Manor, Inanda and Clermont townships.
There are fewer panels of intellectuals on raised platforms spewing down knowledge on the decidedly middle-class audience and more egalitarian conversation between writers, students and the community.
In fact, one of these conversations, hosted at Clermont’s Qashana Khuzwayo Library, sees 18-year-old Zandile Manzini coin the term “ukuhlangana kwabantu.” as a Zulu interpretation of the decolonisation buzz word “intersectionality”.
On this night of many speeches, Mongane Wally Serote, Sindiwe Magona and Mgqolozana stand out. Mgqolozana invokes anticolonial intellectual Frantz Fanon’s argument that decolonisation is simply the realisation of Matthew 20:16, wherein “the last shall be first, and the first last”.
But it was the opening jazz performance by the Salim Washington Quintet that offered the most poetic statement on the moment we were seeking to birth.
Thinking back to their performance, I am taken to Toni Morrison’s reflection in her book Jazz: “I was struck by the modernity that jazz anticipated and directed . . . the music insisted that the past might haunt us, but would not entrap us. It demanded a future . . . ”
In other words, jazz as an ethic is blackness, as an art form it is decolonisation personified.
To understand what is meant by that, you have to understand the meaning and place of jazz in the history of black people as a colonised people, in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, in the history of the black Atlantic relations between black people in the new and old world.
Jazz emerges in the 20th century as a thoroughly disruptive art form championed by the young, dismissed as “noise” by the old. A frightening proposition for the old guard of the time because jazz, as is decolonisation, was and is Afrofuturistic, and yet grounded firmly in the present and past. It is Janus-faced, looking forward and backward at the same time.
In jazz, as Morrison notes, the structure does not merely enhance the meaning of the music, the structure is the meaning. That the structure of jazz was an improvisational art form offended the Western music fraternity that was used to “composing”. How fitting that jazz is improvisational — isn’t being black in the modern world a continuous exercise in improvisation?
You’ll get a rap on the knuckles if you think improvisation is just “jamming”. A trained ear will hear when the band is not “in tune” with each other.
“Decolonise now” is a call to suspend disbelief and begin an exercise in (re)imagination.
Guided by the ideological frameworks provided by panAfricanism, black consciousness and black feminism, the ground is prepared for us to do the work of decolonising and creating new African futures. To jazz is to decolonise. To decolonise is to jazz. It will be a long time before we are to “sound like ourselves”, but we Fallists improvise in the knowledge that we don’t know what we don’t know. We have the faith that, as Kuti said: “Who no know go know.”
Panashe Chigumadzi is a novelist and essayist. She is curator of the inaugural Abantu Book Festival next month
The key to understanding the Fallist tide of decolonisation on our campuses can perhaps be best explained through the medium of jazz, writes Panashe Chigumadzi