Vusumzi Nkomo
(This article was originally published on the 25th of September, 2018)
Second year African film studies, I picked up a book by Manthia Diawara which carried a chilling excerpt whose exact words (like the title of the book) I cannot recall: someone was quoted saying: my politics is that my father bought me oxen, but I might not be able to do the same for my son.
I view(ed) this as a ‘particular’ ‘black-dilemma’, the ‘Lived Experience of the Black’, that throws into a crisis (simple) words like ‘transference’, ‘heir’, and more so, ‘inheritance’, or more fittingly, in the spirit of September, ‘heritage’.
black youth in South Africa are justified for arguing that they have not inherited anything/much.
the ‘Lived Experience of the Black’ . . . throws into a crisis (simple) words like ‘transference’, ‘heir’
In Star Wars (not too sure which one): the protagonist, a young white man, assures his father, “I will not fail you!” (I hereby argue that Inheritance makes this assurance possible). This statement works only, & is made possible, under these conditions: whatever it is that the patriarch-Father transferred to the Son is recognizable by the Son. Said differently: the patriarch-Father did not ‘fail’ the Son, and the Son knows this. This shared knowledge, between the patriarch and his junior, is part and parcel of this transferred inheritance=heritage. This means, had the patriarch-Father ‘failed’ the Son (either through parental ‘error’ or absence), they would be having a completely different conversation in that scene. The Son is indebted to the Father; inheritance/heritage can also be thought of as accrued possession against an imminent dispossession.
For black Sons and black Fathers, this channel of transference is a fractured channel. Not only are black Sons fatherless, it’s difficult to think of the black Son as ‘heir’ (because it’s also difficult to think of the black Father as a patriarch) without contradiction. We must, by way of Frank Wilderson III, understand that these social identities, positionalities, are not stable positions, conditions, for Blacks. Following this, I hereby propose a new way of thinking about inheritance = heritage.
What have we inherited? What have we not inherited? What is the nature of our heritage?
Kwaito? Gqom? the out-of-tune/off-beat/ness of our sonic offering to/for the world. Vosho? Babes Wodumo. Ourselves. We’ve inherited one another. Books shared amongst comrades. Promises and possibilities. Conundrums. camaraderie. cushions and couches that become home away from home. warm meals. the warmth between a lover’s legs. we’ve inherited the upheaval that is the black radical (aesthetic) tradition. The Anthemic Sister Betina. uMoya ka Johnny Dyani= Mbizo’s bass. Winston Ngozi’s Yakhal’ iNkomo. uBugqwirha bamaGxagxa. uMam’ Zondeni Sobukwe. Zanele Muholi. Biko’s brains. shared meals. our traumas, loss, collective ‘thingliness’, possession and dispossession. debt and indebtedness. blues. dues. a Varara truce (read compromise). o’Accuse.
We’ve inherited the Motenian compulsion; “…a historical and aesthetic compulsion; a compulsion to make or to produce everyday; to produce contradiction, painting, theory, to produce the lyrical, everyday disruption of ethnography, art, history …”
A compulsion to care for one another, the world. We inherited a world we are compelled to end; not its vices but the world that makes those vices possible and are immanent, that is, inherent, to it. It is also a world, because of a historical attunement to what Moten calls a “specific political intention”, we are compelled to Love. [it is out of Love that we must end the world].
We inherited a world we are compelled to end
[I’ve always loved the world-
and being in it.
Life,
with all its promises and possibilities, fascinate(d) me.
My grandma’s wrinkled hands,
my mom’s lap,
a slice of warm freshly baked bread with melted butter,
daydreaming, WWE Raw, and sounds of OutKast.]
My heritage.
bcoz they, these things, are what we have. if not the only things we have. (putting aside the fact that capital, unreasonably so, moves in, creeps in, invades not only these things but our very capacity to (re)produce these things, which, yet in another register, i shall call [political] ‘life’).
Gqom: (maybe we might think of Gqom as something, a thing, a sound, perhaps a ‘din’, that de-values art or aesthetics. or something, a thing, a sound, perhaps a ‘din’, with no aesthetic value. but if we think productively about and with Gqom, we might stumble across something quite interesting: Gqom, in thinking with Moten, is the idea of working, or moving, against the very idea of aesthetic value, cutting and eclipsing it. The negation of this notion. Gqom// the out-of-tune/off-beat/ness of our sonic offering to/for the world). Like it or hate it, we inherited it. Birthed in the diaspora.
Kwaito: the pre-94 energy of political mobilization and conscientisation which sought to shit on Verwoed and the irrational white consciousness (‘irrational’ white consciousness is tautological, btw!) which he personified was transposed to a whole new aesthetic elaboration on Black(ness)’s freedom dreams (which are always already deferred, anyways). The emergence of Kwaito has been linked with the apparent economic inertness of Black youth post-94 (see Sithole, Sipho: 2017). This view is limiting and limited; simply because it ignores the fact of the creative genius inherited by Kwaito’s pioneers: a creativity that precedes colonialism, and seems set to outlive it. This too, Kwaito as well as Bra Sipho Sithole’s intervention, is our heritage.
Gqom . . . is the idea of working, or moving, against the very idea of aesthetic value, cutting and eclipsing it
I want to think about heritage not as an economy of wisdom or/and social + cultural + religious + political accouterments only streaming from an often romanticized past (pre-94, pre-colonial-occupation), but as an organic process with no fixed temporal situatedness. There is no doubt our politics, aesthetics, are in conflict/critique, i.e, in dialogue with the past and its agents. In other words, we are ‘making’ heritage in as much as we are its recipients. Additionally, I want to move further from the dominant critique of Heritage (that, as young black people, we didn’t inherit anything/much) by way of exposing its limits and setting new parameters of thinking about ‘our’ Heritage, which I believe might usher us towards virgin critical avenues.