A love letter for the landless
This new conceptual album has a militant and urgent hue, writes Kgomotso Moncho-Maripane
THE unkempt park in front of the Bassline in Newtown is inhabited by the bodies of men who sleep as if taking a break from waiting; and a hawker selling three pairs of worn-out shoes.
Newtown, a ghost clinging to its former glory, is the site of the first listening session for a conceptual album, Moya, performed by poetmusician Lebo Mashile and bold contemporary artist Majola.
The bleakness is a far cry from the Newtown of a decade ago, when Mashile recorded parts of her debut spoken-word album, Lebo Mashile Live, at the nowdefunct Horror Café. At the time Mashile’s show, A Dreamer’s Scenery, represented the blooming and progressive spirit of Joburg’s underground art scene for which Newtown was the meeting place.
If the emergence of kwaito was symbolic of a transitioning South African youth finding and expressing their voice, then poetry and underground rap in the early-mid 2000s were vehicles for the conversations urban youth were having about how they fit into the new South Africa.
These conversations were had stylishly in Stoned Cherrie Steve Biko T-Shirts or in simple unpoetic lines that sought to reclaim the self-love and affirmation apartheid stripped off the black being, evocative of Mashile’s last line from the poem Style: “Style is in the survival of my people.”
Survival, the political status quo and the current spirit of the Johannesburg metropolis and its inhabitants are the overarching themes that give Moya its militant and urgent hue.
“Moya” means spirit or air. The album title is a symbol for the winds of something imminent that characterise the state of South Africa’s politics — much like the gathering of energy for a task ahead. It sparks a pertinent dialogue.
Mashile: “This project is a love letter to the city. The issues we’re dealing with are political issues defined by the lives of people living in this city.”
Majola: “There’s a divide in the demographics of the country between the urban and rural. I walk the line between these two spaces and I know the pain that comes from having to suppress your values to survive in Joburg. So how do we heal?
“The sounds in the album are diverse — from traditional and soul to rock. We’re trying to bridge the divide and imagine what black love and life look like between the urban and rural.”
Mashile: “Throughout recording, Majola kept saying, Joburg is still Africa. Underneath this concrete there’s earth and a soul. It’s about reconnecting to that.
“This city is where my identity is rooted. Where we’ve come from — those connections are fragile now. Being landless has damaged my family’s ability to express our sense of self.
“I only started reflecting on this condition of landlessness with the student #FeesMustFall uprisings. That movement has forced all of us to think very differently about what it means to decolonise this space.”
Majola: “We reimagined Thina
Sizwe in the album and the issue of land is on everybody’s lips right now. The aspect of that which the album addresses is: how are we going to get ourselves back?
“To get the land, you must get yourself as well because somebody has to manage that land. And the ones in the rural areas, with their core values intact, may be the ones to lead us back to us.”
Sonically the album presents a harmonious and graceful synergy between music and poetry, where Mashile’s words have found a new rhythm to Majola’s soulful and operatic voice.
With its cinematic and theatrical sensibilities, the emotional intensity drives Mashile to let rip in her mother tongue in
Sabela; and the electric guitar riffs in Bones create enough drama for Majola’s vocals to soar when they are not chanting animatedly.
Love and politics find each other in the rich, warm base of the music. The production goes down like New Age protest art whose aesthetic is as commanding as the message. A balm for wounded souls.
Moya is a sophomore aural project for both Mashile and Majola and it is “the truth of the work we’ve done separately, brought together”, as Majola says.
Majola is Khanyisa Buti from Zwelitsha in the Eastern Cape, with a background in musical theatre. His seminal debut album,
Boet/Sissy (2014) about queer love and self-actualizing in a black township, sung in Xhosa to classical music, is a powerful contribution to the dismantling of shame and suppression around gay identity, much like the works of Nakhane Touré and films like The Wound. Mashile, a Noma awardwinning poet with two anthologies — In a Ribbon of Rhythm (2005) and Flying Above
the Sky (2008), has become iconic in making poetry live in different mainstream spaces.
From her ground-breaking television docu-series L’attitude to her many creative collaborations including Threads with Sylvia Glasser and Moving Into Dance, Mashile has, with the force of her words, restored the artistic, social and cultural relevance and impact of poetry, while showing off its kaleidoscopic qualities.
In a time when new voices such as Koleka Putuma are producing profound “survival poetry” and Warsan Shire verses colour one of pop culture’s boldest albums,
Lemonade, Mashile has already done the groundwork.
She releases a new anthology later this year.
‘I know the pain of having to suppress your values to survive’
Moya: the Lebo Mashile and Majola conceptual album will be released digitally this month