Sandile Dikeni
The quiet poet with the loudest voice
Poet, jazz experimentalist and columnist Sandile Dikeni, who passed on aged 53 this past weekend was, for a while, known as the ‘conscience’ of the nation. Bongani Madondo paints a portrait of the poet as a symbol of Quiet Beauty in a Cacophonous Landscape
Rereading Sandile Dikeni ushered me into a terrifying state of zen.
I will add to that din of voices, the billion words compressed into fastfood churned out down memory lanes by those who now claim kinship. I will recite the usual: Poet, journalist and jazz-diggin’ Bukowskian barfly, Sandile Dikeni, “son of Mgcina”, passed on Saturday evening after a long struggle with TB. I will wince as I tell you because which famous person not involved in a fatal accident does not die after “a long struggle” with some life-depleting ailment? And yet I won’t stop. I will lay thick a rather uninformed biography.
Sandile Dikeni was born on April 22 1966, the fifth of six children. His father, George, was a man of small means, just like all Africans and kleurlinge raising their families in Victoria West, while mama got by cleaning white folks’ homesteads. Dikeni completed his high school in Dimbaza in the then Ciskei, perhaps less a fortuitous happenstance than the simple attribute of fate.
Some of you might remember Dimbaza as a hamlet at the end of the Eastern Cape railway line, where Barney Pityana was “exiled” by those lovely boers who knew what’s right for us listless natives for whom the politics of liberation would prove so terrible to our health. This is the same Dimbaza in the title of the first-ever mainstream film directed by a black man, Nana Mohomo’s Last
Train to Dimbaza. Of course it was later tarred as a work supported by the CIA and the Nats in those halcyon days of the war of the
Reds versus the West, or if you bought the Kool-Aid from Washington DC, then “the rest”. Dimbaza then would imprint its wounds on the psyche of the future activist and poet.
I will also tell you, Dikeni managed to study journalism at the Cape’s Peninsula Technikon where, he proudly writes in his book,
Soul Fire, he was a beneficiary of “bursary schemes set up by the South African Institute of Race Relations and South African Student Trust”.
He was appointed the editor of a small but influential Afrikaans monthly magazine, Die Suid-Afrikaan, while still a student. And how, to use an expression of his in one of his poems, he “settled on the high soaring wings of fate” and got appointed as a columnist at the Cape Times in 1992, one of the earliest appointments of black scribes on such a lofty perch. Victoria West black bird clearly headed for the sky.
But how about his imprisonment in the mid-1980s and how his late-teen poem, Guava Juice, became a jailhouse anthem to rival Johnny Cash’s prison blues genre, San Quentin?
Having bored you with the biographical sketch, maybe then we should consider silence. A moment of silence for Dikeni. But also an appreciation of silence in his oeuvre.
Sandile Dikeni’s work reminded me of how quietness works to claim its pound of flesh as well as to the healing properties of quiet.
It reminded me there’s something about quietness that shocks and discomforts. “Quiet”, not “silence”: Quietude, not cowardice. Quietness, not reluctance. Quiet, not indifference.
It is also our age. The techno-super-wired age in which everyone steps forth into the world, outside and within themselves, armed with a phone; a double-whammy digital weapon which also functions as a loud-hailer. In the age, as it were, of click-clickety postures (yeah, flick your Peruvian extensions … uhhh, snap!), the age of clamour, emoticon-conveyed bipolar conditions and sudden whooping joy, and “cool” trial by digi-mob vigilantism. To be quiet is to accept one’s own death sentence. Thus, quiet art feels indulgent even. It need not be that way, folks.
It is 2am in my section of town not called “The Wilds” for nothing. Out of my kitchen window crickets are uncharacteristically loud in their choral music. Soon the earliest birds too will be scrambling for the fattest worms. Had been writing and weeping about Dikeni from my grandma’s house in the village, this very hour, I swear I wouldn’t be alone. I’d be in the omnipresent company of spirits, ghosts of the village, our beloved but fictional witches, sorceresses too. They too would have an opinion on Dikeni. Knowing them, they’d prefer to convey those opinions in their own fashion. The quiet way.
Sandile Dikeni’s profundity as a poet and as person issued out of his oneness with this world. His work invited us to be one with him and one with each other. All of that he achieved through a tone that was decidedly quiet, even when loud in its demands for a better world.
He is famously known for Guava Juice, also a metaphor for a petrol bomb. Some of the violence merchants were his very “comrades” who “sucked my grandmother’s milk dry before setting her alight”.
Despite its harrowing renunciation of the mindless violence, which by the mid to late 1980s had enveloped both would-be liberation fighters as well as apartheid’s supremacy, the poem and his performance of it at political rallies and cultural imbizos made him a star.
And yet at heart Sandile Dikeni was not a loud poet. Neither was he a loud writer.
Yes, he had a raucous laugh, especially after a tipple or two. His art, though, gently refused any drunken temptations. Nor did it make much room, if at all, for the clamorous, if banal, “zeit-shit” of the time.
In a chapter that bookended Soul Fire, his collection of columns and freewheelin’ prose entitled Who are My People?, Dikeni tells us that “my people are black people all over the world who are overtly or covertly discriminated against because of skin colour.
“My people are those who were victims of Nazis in their many death camps in pursuit of Aryan supremacy.”
Long before being openly queer became vogueish, despite the attendant violence it’s subjected to, Dikeni wrote: “My people are all the homosexuals who are still overtly and covertly oppressed and humiliated because of their sexual preferences. Everyone out there. Who. Dared. To love.”
It ain’t the song, but the singer of it, the woman had said. — James McBride, “Song Yet Sung”