The Dream to See Ourselves Clearly

(This article was originally published on the 30th of July, 2018)

Iphupho by His & Hers Jams

Njabulo Zwane

Billed as “a sonic celebration of blackness”, AmaAfrika Amahle is the title of a series of shows that Braamfontein-based band, Iphupho L’ka Biko, have been presenting to audiences country-wide. The most recent of these shows was presented at this year’s National Arts Festival in Makhanda (or Rhini mawuthanda). This is the place where, if Black Consciousness Movement legend is to be believed, Steve Biko came to consciousness after the 1968 NUSAS conference. It is also where umGcina was arrested on his way home after a clandestine meeting with Neville Alexander in Cape Town. Both of these points make the city of Makhanda a fitting place to present this music as an offering to not only Biko and his BCM comrades, but to the “black methodologies that create this music” as Cecil Taylor would have it.

“Malifezeke…iphupho l’ka Biko” is this band’s call-and-response with its audiences. To perform at NAF is the dream for many a band. But to finally experience AmaAfrika Amahle live, after missing a couple of their Jozi gigs was mine. So one can imagine my excitement upon receiving my ticket and heading to Olde 65 to wait until the 10pm starting time. Suffice to say, I got too excited and as a result I made my way down New Street sans my ticket. (I would later find out from a brother of mine that it had fallen on the bench we were sitting on). The horror upon getting to Slipstream-SSS (that sports bar frequented by the town’s hippies) and seeing that I didn’t have my ticket on me! Luckily I happen to be tight with some of the crew members, and one of the band’s photographers, Mzoxolo Vimba, quickly borrowed me his artist pass. Take my seat next to abanye abantwana bakaBiko and the music starts…

Iphupho at The Orbit by Tshepo Bopape

Once during a spirited conversation, band-leader and bassist Nhlanhla Ngqaqu referred to singer Miseka Gaqa as the diva of the band. I can’t think of a more fitting description. Being classically-trained, our #SopranoBae follows in the footsteps of Mam’ Sibongile Khumalo, whose forays into the medium popularly known as jazz have had a remarkable impact on the Azanian songbook, turning it on its head in ways that have angered some and brought immense joy to others. But that is the nature of the tradition, it calls for constant argumentation, calls and responses. All of this is to say that Miseka operates at a level where there are no genres, and the only thing that exists is the music – which the band has a serious respect for. Perhaps it this notion of respect that is behind Gaqa’s preference that people sit down quietly during her shows (so I have been told). But it is also our respect for the music that refuses that we comply. Iphupho’s music is a call, an invitation, to dream. One writer describes it as a trip. To me this means that to listen to this music is to allow oneself to travel across space and time in search for a world where we young black people will not represent the problem that we currently embody. But because such a world does not exist, not here, not now, it means to listen to this music is to work and wait, as Bra Herbie Tsoaeli would have it.

Iphupho’s music is a call, an invitation, to dream

The music of Iphupho is a rich tapestry laying out the intellectual traditions that influenced the student movement of 2015 – 2016. Just as amagwijo are characterised by calls and responses, so too is the music of Iphupho. Here I am thinking particularly of the song “Ekuqaleni,” with its biblical lyrics taken from John 1, which I want to read as a black theological call to remember that our history does not, and cannot, begin with the colonial encounter. We were here long before that. What life looked like during that moment in time is something that we have got to imagine. Nduduzo Makhathini beckons us to do the same with his beautiful composition titled “Imagined Race”. Dreams of this past have animated the collective movement for freedom. A movement which has proceeded via the dialectic of culture. The band is obviously aware of this, especially its saxophonists, Muhammad Dawjee and Godfrey Mntambo, whose playing demonstrates a deep-seated desire to grapple with the multiple ways in which the majors have used that instruments as a horn with which to grab the bull(shit) of black life, as a voice to scream “Shit! Yakhal’inkomo!”, without losing themselves in the music. But for us in the crowd, this music is all we have, so we can afford to lose ourselves to it.

Iphupho. . .eek to point the country towards other freedom dreams that don’t rely on the construction of others as a precondition for the dream to become a reality

If black life-as-performance is a montage of refusals, then “Sobukwe no Biko” – one of the band’s more recent numbers – requires that we read it as a rejection of Mandela's dream of a rainbow nation. In a moment where everyday explanations are rarely ever enough, Iphupho, with this act of re-memberment, seek to point the country towards other freedom dreams that don’t rely on the construction of others as a precondition for the dream to become a reality. By exceptionalizing our oppression as one of a “special type” the sell-out was well under way. This means the rainbow vision was short-sighted from ekuqaleni. In a moment when old ghosts are refusing to die, choosing instead to roam the streets, frightening all in sight, there arises a need yokuxosha abathakathi who control these creatures of the night. At the moment, this task has been taken upon by Iphupho and their fellow young musicians whose music is popularly known as jazz (whatever that means). But this is not enough, we need a new mode of writing, moving and seeing to complement the deep listening (to borrow from Bra Tendayi Sithole) demanded by this music. Malifezeke!

V Njabulo Zwane is a Jozi-based cultural worker trying to write about sounds and stuff like that. . .