Ted-Allan Ssekimpi
(This article was orriginally published on the 25th of September, 2018)
In Unathi Slasha’s ‘Jah Hills’, we are thrusted into the merciless terrain of Kwafindoda. The
heat is “unbearable”, conjuring rotting smells newly trimmed flesh, mirages of wells only
seen and heard by a select few, and a hunger that tests the imagination by rendering almost
everything edible. Upon the return of Umkhwetha from Kwafindoda awaits a special
ceremony (“umgidi woqobo”). The last one was held “five hundred years ago” because, due
to its reputation for being “a haven for witches and wicked spirits”, parents have warded off
their boys from going there. For Jah Hills, the novella’s titular character and Umkhwetha
(initiate), Kwafindoda is a cauldron of suffering and despair, a fact marked by the litany of
horrors that define his time there. But for Father and Mother, Kwafindoda represents an
opportunity to restore pride to the family due to the shame of “their favourite son”, his older
brother, undergoing Ulwako (intiation) at a location not deemed worthy of ‘real men’. This is
much to the chagrin of Jah Hills who vents in indignation that “They sent me to Kwafindoda.
Wanted me to die” and soon exclaims that “This being a Man business is bullshit.”
For Jah Hills . . . Kwafindoda is a cauldron of suffering and despair
Undergirding ‘Jah Hills’ narrative is this desire to confront the ‘essential’, and what
Kwafindoda reveals is that the essential, as much as it codifies identity, is also fraught with
violence, hybridity, and confusion. The ‘essential’ forms part of Slasha’s overall critical
literary enterprise but refigures itself as the ‘Real’ or rather realism and its formal imposition
on South African literature. As a formal category, realism works as a sign by which South
African literature earns its aspired ‘literariness’. The tyranny of realism in South African
literature, Slasha argues, stems, partly, from the consecration and valorisation of Njabulo
Ndebele’s essay ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary’ wherein Ndebele’s “confinement of the
ordinary to strictly ‘sobering rationality’ has played a role in enabling and institutionalising a
“literary limitation” upon Black writers. In a similar iteration, the legend of Somagaza, the
ancestral spirit said to have given the name of Swartkops to the sacred well of Kwafindoda,
and the last Umkhwetha to have received “umgidi woqobo”, himself an institution of
masculinity, could be seen as subject to Slasha’s critical intervention. Thus what
preoccupies Jah Hills, aside from its formal and stylistic modes and interventions, is the
debunking, reimagining and retelling of the archetypes and pillars of Nguni folkore. This is
all done not in the guise of consolidating the ‘real’/’essential’ but of lifting the veil of the
‘real’/’essential’ to uncover its dissonances, it’s violence (epistemic and/or intimate), and to
borrow from Artuad, its cruelty (its ‘rigor’, ‘implacable intention’, and ‘absolute
determination’). This is, I’m guessing, in keeping with his goal of surfacing the Unlanguaged
World of our present reality in South Africa.
Thus what preoccupies Jah Hills . . . is the debunking, reimagining and retelling of the archetypes and pillars of Nguni folkore
On the stylistic front, the narrative is carried in prose with sentences that oscillate widely
from terse (“They rope my hands together. Hands too. Can't say anything. Voice has been
eroded by fear”) to densely packed (“Leaves are thick, black, hard like the skin of black
oranges that sprout only in the soil of Kwafindoda”). The effect is jarring, and at times oddly
satisfying. Much akin to modal jazz, Jah Hills moves between modes in polyrhythmic hues.
This is most striking when Slasha shifts from the spiritual world to reality. In one instance this
shift is signalled by a brief clear image “They all fly near the moon” , an effective turn of
phrase that contrasts the world of “all the sorcerers riding their brooms and baboons to
Bakhuba” to that of “the self absorbed living engrossed in flea scratching.” But the intention
here and throughout doesn’t seem to map out these two worlds as separate. Instead it is to
draw out and harness their interdependence. When Sporho, a menacing spirit with insatiable
bloodlust, moves through night air he “flings, kicks objects, stones, empty cans, tables,
chairs, droms, and trolleys to make his presence felt.” What we consider ‘ordinary’ and
mundane, what we pass off as the silences and idle disturbances of the everyday are
attributed to a world banished from (cultural and individual) memory. For the “living”,
encounters with this world range from feeling “turbulence” to being “freaked out”. However,
Slasha doesn’t veer away from the notion that perhaps this world been monopolised by TV,
as it’s seen to be “talking to itself or to the empty room”. Nonetheless, Jah Hill’s explicit
brilliance lies in how it places these two worlds in conversation to reveal their vast
dissonances – all of which culminates in the ending.
The novella is not without its shortcomings. It can be read as decadently grotesque (“A jumble of bones and bits of battered flesh … in a mixture of blood and tears and shit and petrol…”) and childish (farts occur on a regular basis), but perhaps its greatest shortcomings are its casual inferences to rape and the lack of agency given to some women. When Jah comes across Nomzamo, a woman found dead in “some river” his first thoughts are “Always wanted to fuck her”. Earlier he “watches a woman and brush her long hair by the waters” and “felt umthondo (penis) bulging with lust” which he later dismisses due to the pain - “thought hard about the tough burden of fucking with umthondo obuhlungu and sneaked away instead”. I’m not sure what these scenes are meant to invoke in the reader. Perhaps alienation? Are we meant to feel sorry for Jah’s penis for being erect just days after circumcision? Jah Hills has a male gaze…so what!?
one thing that can’t be ignored is how [the novel] strives to disrupt the chain of literary production in South Africa
With author Unathi Slasha’s critical musings having raised many eyes and ears there was a
considerable amount of anticipation awaiting Jah Hills. Whether or not Jah Hills lives up to its purported standards will be a topic up for debate, but one thing that can’t be ignored is how it strives to disrupt the chain of literary production in South Africa. In its manner and parlance, Jah Hills is an anomaly in what has been considered and passed off as ‘literature’ in South Africa. Perhaps the most apt reaction to the arrival of Slasha’s fiction is embodied in
Nocwaka and Lum’s (Hill’s parents) reaction to seeing their son for the first time since he
was taken away to Kwafindoda: “Both speechless. Shock or excitement?”
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