BKO Jan 2020 v1n1 - 10 - 20200302

V.4 N.1 March 2020
www.bkomagazine.co.za
Literature Magazine
Est. 2004
BOOK REVIEWS
OPINION
POETRY
BOOK EXTRACT
FLASH FICTION
Yakhal’inkomo
The World Looks Like
This from Here
Thirteen Cents
A Broken River Tent
Siren
The independent African
publishing pantheon
Freedom of the tongue
Author as the keeper of
social record
Athol Williams
Angie Chuma
Moemise Motsepe
Peter Horn
Thabiso Lakajoe
Moletlo wa Manong
by Sabata-mpho Mokae
A Thousand Years of Hate
by Binyavanga Wainaina
Secret Love
by Sisca Julius
Wild Life
by Lauri Kubuetsile
The Commission
by Andrew K MIller
Sabata-mpho Mokae
Author as
the keeper
of social
record

jan – march 2020 issue 4 number 1
3
4
5
7
editorial
Africa State of Mind this
first edition emphasises
the importance of
Afrocentricity
poetry
Poems from Moemise
Motsepe, Peter Horn,
Angie Thato Chuma, Athol
Williams, Thabiso Lakajoe
book reviews
Rolland Simpi Motaung
Vuyo Mzini
Phehello J Mofokeng
Lorraine Sithole
fiction
Secret Love is written by
the award-winning student
& grauate of SPU Sisca
Julius; Andrew Miller and
Laurie Kubuetsile also add
their vast experience to the
collection.
11
main feature
Sabata-mpho Mokae
opens up to us with a wellthought
out piece
14
author profile
Faith Chabalala interviews
author and scholar Sabatampho
Mokae
18
innerview
Sabata-mpho Mokae
answers questions about the
literature in the continent
21
book extracts
Enjoy an extract of Mokae’s
latest Setswana title Moletlo
wa Manong
Editor & Creative Director
phehello j mofokeng
Publisher
literature magazine since 2004. jan 2020
issue 4, number 1 joburg, mzansi. issn 2226-0447
www.bkomagazine.co.za
phehello j mofokeng
For geko publishing (pty) ltd
Created & curated by
phehello j mofokeng
Feature writing
sabata-mpho mokae
faith chabalala
phehello mofokeng
Contributors
andrew k. miller
sabata-mpho mokae
rossey nkutshweu
athol williams
sabelo mncinziba
sisca julius
angie chuma (Botswana)
peter horn (Posthumous)
lauri kubuetsile (Botswana)
vuyo mzini
lorraine sithole
rolland simpi motaung
Layout/design
geko publishing
Printing by dtp 2 print
alberton gauteng, mzansi
bko literature magazine is published and owned by Geko
Publishing (Pty) Ltd. It is a tri-monthly thought-leadership literature
publication, devoted to imaginative work. It publishes short stories,
poetry, experimental, flash fiction, essays (non-fiction) and other forms
of creative non-fiction. We encourage original, brave, thoughtful
and imaginative literary work that pushes the boundaries of genres;
emphasising stepping out of the quotidian and encouraging writers to
be political, opinionated and inventive in their storytelling.
issn 2226-0447 bko literature magazine
©All rights reserved, 2020.
All work herein is copyright of each individual author. No part of
this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other
electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written
permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial
uses permitted by copyright law.
We are cautious about the environment and small carbon footprint.
Please share this copy or dispose of it properly.
geko publishing (pty) ltd, honeydew, joburg, sa
www.gekopublishing.co.za | write@gekopublishing.co.za
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ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
words Phehello J Mofokeng (@MrPublisherSA)
image Thabiso Bale (@BaleThabiso)
Africa is a
state of mind
editorial: africa state of mind
The rise of the pantheon of independent, black African industry in literature is not
new but it is encouraging and hails the advent of a new future. What it is though is a
new form of democratisation of content, knowledge and their production – and we
own it. At its core, this pantheon is intellectual, revolutionary and subversive.
It is intellectual because
it is a genuine production
of black thought/thinking
and black expression. It
is revolutionary because
it challenges all the
century-old assumptions of
publishing of Africans. It is
also revolutionary because
it subverts the colonial
assumptions about what
African literature and black
thought/expression ought
to be. It is a fertile ground
for black radical thought,
for black African feminism
to find root – in expression
and in practice. At the
core of it, black African
independent publishers are
subverting or removing
the West from the centre.
Africa is becoming – it
has to be the new centre
and the black independent
African publisher is the
catalyst to this recentering.
This sentiment comes
from my work-in-progress;
a book called African
State of Mind – Scramble for
black, African publishing:
The rise of the black African
publishing pantheon, decolonial
misadventures and other literary
eruptions/disruptions on the
state of our industry.
It is with these sentiments
that we bring back our
flagship publication, BKO
Magazine, that I started
with friends in 2004. As this
is our first edition after a
long hiatus, we do not have
a theme; instead we focus
on the breadth and width of
things that BKO is going to
do in the future.
On this edition, our
featured writer is multiaward-winning
author and
intellectual; Sabata-mpho
Mokae. Mokae has given a
lot to Setswana literature.
He remains one of the
important Setswana writers
in Mzansi in the post-94
literary moment.
Then we get some new
poetry from young guns
such as Angie Chuma,
Lucius Ndimele and
the award-winning SPU
sensation, Sisca Julius. We
also have old classics such
as Moemise Motsepe and
Athol Williams. Exciting
guest editors are going to
curate their own editions/
issues of BKO Magazine
and I look forward to that ...
Ke ya leboha,
Phehello J Mofokeng
editor & publisher
Author: Sankomota – An
Ode in One Album
Author: Di Ya Thoteng
Inaugural Chair: Geko
Mofolo Prize for Outstanding
Fiction in Sesotho
P/3

poetry
The epilogue of venom
by Moemise Motsepe
When the children of our children
hold us to judgement
the currency of our being shall be
found in want
invalid and sterile,
grim and grey with decay
there on barren grit
Africa looking down at his feet
drained and dried to the core
sapped of all essence and worth
left poisoned and septic
and all by choice in the fact
It must have been written across the
skies
long, long ago when time began
when rivers were too young to flow
and long before mountains turned into
rocks of iron memory
it must have been written across and
beyond the seven seas
that when lighting strikes across Africa’s
back
when fire devours our crops
and the sun robs our rivers of their
sparkle
Africa would seek help from outside her
own
shun the wisdom of her people
spit on the majesty of her age
and so here we are
destined infernally across this vast
expanse
of a continent whose heart died long
before its birth
I refuse to listen to the wailing now
you and i are victims no more
we are alibis equal in guilt
allies in the affliction of self
we delight in the cracking of the whip
we revel in our flogging
as we scald our skins & twist our tongues
and burn our hair & auction our souls
tussling for foreign praise
pleading & praying for synthetic
inclusion
to exist in the throes of irony
and function by proxy with definitions
of alien root
We have devoured with a beastly
hunger
the slime and rot of hamburger
cultures
we have swallowed like swines
the viral filth of coca cola religions
as we celebrate plastic freedoms
and to bruise and wound & maim the self
our names come from the seas
Those who rise in the hereafter
will spit at the memory of our era
repulsed at the shame of our continent
for its addiction to the ways of lesser
continents
those who come when we are gone
the children of our children
will curse our tombs & burn our
remains
and expel our souls from the land
We shall have gone when the truth is
told, shed the flesh
gone gone the way of the dust
those who come to take our place
the children of our children
will pass a verdict torrid and flaming
with venom
the epilogue of wrath and rancour
when masks are peeled off layer by layer
and lies are dug out root by root
When the beautiful ones are born
our shame and loss will pass
satanic treaties will be torn to shreds
put to fire and brought to ashes
and the languages that were born of
this land
will once again sprout & flourish
and colour the land with their
splendour
when the blue-eyed kingdom of mud
is brought to the gravel
we, the golden brown
we, of the soil
must drink alone from the river Nile
And now it written with fire across
the universe
now it is written on a heart of stone
our dignity returns today
and today is the birth of the beautiful
ones
the children of our children shall be
born
when Biko rises at first light
7 March 1995, Harare, 3.50pm
The sandglass
by Athol Williams
We are orientated blind to time’s joys or sorrows unless
we can count and weigh it, like a celestial currency;
with no existence itself, time borrows the perfume,
the shape of the sandglass we construct to rule it;
in our human days stripped of meaning the sandglass
is a measure whose place no other can fill as gracefully;
it does not declare any hour, it only counts one by one
the sands of prayer and waiting, dwindling heartbeats;
seconds speed by in dust, isolated from a life of sky
and garden and space, secluded in their vial just like
the truthsayer secluded in his cell, marking slow hours,
burying them all with truth in perfectly fallen heaps.
Inspired by an extract from ‘Life and Flowers’ by Maurice Maeterlinck
The sacred philosophy of rain
by Athol Williams
I am shaped suddenly, a raindrop in a gravid cloud.
My vertical journey is filled with sensations of life –
sights of smiling mountains risen like frozen deities,
starlings in murmuration dance, whiffs of pine and mint,
of peat-smoked barley, ripples that awaken my open eyes.
I am a brushstroke in a grey-brown landscape, a note
in a symphonic storm. Then, on cue, I crash. A perfect
chaotic moment that vibrates as I become the lake.
I am no longer a noose, but this is not a death, I become
unbroken, memory and expectation, a heaven where all is
rearranged before vapour takes flight, charged with
fingerprints to feed the cloud, ready for its water to break.
P/4

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
Blowing Mankunku
back to life: Reading
Yakhal’inkomo: A
Portrait of a Jazz Classic
by Percy Mabandu
critique
words & image Phehello J Mofokeng
“It begins”– those are the
opening words of fine
artist and journalist Percy
Mabandu’s musical portrait
of Winston Mankunku
Ngozi’s Yakhal’inkomo of
1968. Mabandu is a wellaccomplished
music journalist
with an encyclopedic and
steep knowledge of jazz and
its traditions. He reflects
this knowledge in his
Yakhal’inkomo: A Portrait of a
Jazz Classic with impeccable
beauty and sincerity of a jazz
prophet.
Yakhal’inkomo (1968) is Winston
Mankunku Ngozi’s most important
contribution to not just the body of
jazz in SA, but in “black Atlantic.”
“Black Atlantic” is that commonality
of identity, representation and ideal,
expression of black experience,
music and culture that spread itself
from Africa, to the US, Europe and
Caribbean – that became fashionable
from the 1950s.
Mabandu is a fierce young writer with
a fiery pen that conjures up some of
the finest scribes of the Drum era.
Trained as a fine artist, Mabandu
became a journalist in a slipstream of
opportunity while at university where
he was also a radio DJ.
Yakhal’inkomo: Portrait of a Jazz
Classic is a project of passion,
tears, wisdom and love. It is also a
psychedelic intellectual trip down
the history lane. Mabandu worships
at the feet of the great giant and he
spills his guts defining the experience
of Yakhal’inkomo. He writes with the
anguished passion of a stalker-fan and
the precision of a mad academic.
This is a reflective essay of a giant
by a young man on his way to
being a musical historian of great
importance. At only 100-pages, I feel
like Mabandu should have written
more about this important album. He
calls the effect of this album a “kind
of trinity of witness and testimonium
to terrible and tumultuous lives.”
This trinity stems from the fact that
Yakhal’inkomo inspired Mongane
Wally Serote’s collection of poems
of the same title and a whole body
of work by the evergreen artist
Dumile Feni. Mabandu makes a meal
out of this – and he should. It is a
rarity to have such important artists
influenced by the same ideal and body
of work. Dumile Feni produced a
whole series of work in and around
1967 – just before Ngozi recorded
and released his Yakhal’inkomo –
around the metaphorical, cultural and
metaphysical importance of “inkomo”
to Africans. Mabandu recounts Feni’s
pointed account of how a cow that
was being slaughtered affected the
other cows in a kraal in his home. Feni
noted how the other cows bellowed as
if out of sympathy with the cow being
slaughtered. This was an important
moment for the young artist.
He shared this experience with
Mankunku Ngozi and when fellow
musicians heared his tenor sax, one
of them said his sound bellowed
like a cow. The legend and legacy of
Yakhal’inkomo was born. Once the
LP was pressed on acetate, Serote –
an important poet of the time – was
also spellbound by the sound of the
“bellowing cow”of Mankunku’s horn.
Mabandu’s account is excellent not
just for his words of endearment,
but because there is no other such
contemporary and honest text
on Mankunku’s groundbreaking
Yakhal’inkomo. Contemporaneity and
relevance of Yakhal’inkomo today, is
not the only reason Mabandu writes
this account – he writes it because
P/5

he is involved in the process of re-imagination and to
a large extent – of recreation – of this great work. He
implicates himself in the importance of Mankunku and
he injects himself in the trajectory of adaptations and
re-imagination of the jazz classic.
Percy Mabandu’s project of recreation of
Yakhal’inkomo also serves as a historical enterprise.
He lays out the musical trackways of 1968, the year
that Mankunku Ngozi’s album was recorded and
released. He outlines the influence of John Coltrane’s
era on Ngozi to Dollar Brand’s protestation of South
African artists mimicking the Americans. He outlines
the brutality of apartheid and how it paralysed the
genius of many artists but also how apartheid was the
fuel and reason for the explosion of essential music
and art in the 1960s.
Mabandu’s utility of language is lavish and indulgent,
but not over-the-top. He writes with a sweet
fluidity that is not pompous. He sufficiently uses
very academic musical terms, but even this is not
over-bearing. He attempts to balance the music of
Mankunku Ngozi with reason, circumstance and
history – and he is successful. The book does not
attempt to proffer a reason for the need to record
Yakhal’inkomo – in fact Mabandu makes it very
clear – through the words of the numerous theorists
he employ – that words often fail to explain music;
that often music exists for itself, to explain itself or
get close to “metamusic; music confided to itself.” He
is aware that finding language to describe music can
sometimes be a fruitless exercise.
This is the only critique I
have for this slim offering –
words do fall short, but not
to the extent that the author
waffles. Yakhal’inkomo is
a seminal work by one of
the continent’s finest jazz
musicians. How would
you trap the bigness of
Mankunku in one book?
What choice of words to
use? What figure of speech
does one use to capture the
expanse of Mankunku’s
talent? What language to use
What he also
achieves is a space
to ask metaphysical
questions and to
engage with the music
in an existential
manner that jazz
brings to life.
to encapsulate such genius?
Mabandu wrote a complete
tribute not a critique. He
wrote a personal reflection
with hints of an academic
text, not a eulogy. This
affords Mabandu wide-open
avenues for imagination
and creative latitude.
And he uses these to
personalise the effect on
Yakhal’inkomo on him while
he simoultaneously extends
this to capture the pain of
collective blackness of the
1960s and today. What he
also achieves is space to ask
metaphysical questions and
to engage with the music in
an existential manner that
jazz typically brings to life.
Portrait of a Jazz Classic is
used by academic music
schools in the country, to
signify the importance of
Mabandu’s contribution to
the body of jazz and ethnomusicography.
He listens
and views the album as a
perfect project. He offers
not a single line of criticism
– except when he interprets
Thembi Mtshali’s important
rendition and interpretation
of the song. He says that
Mankunku might have
completely ignored the
agency of women and the
effect or importance that
cows/cattle have in their
lives too. Mabandu is clearly
enthralled to the music of
Winston Mankunku Ngozi
to the point of idolising
him. And this approach is
correct because Mabandu
was not writing a biography,
but a contemporary
reawakening of the gigantic
album and musician. Portrait
also allows Mabandu to
explore the politics of
blackness through the lens
of jazz and he draws John
Coltrane’s influence of
Mankunku into the text
with great utility.
Winston Mankunku
Ngozi went the way of his
ancestors in 2009. A titan
had rested his bones and
“shook off his mortal coil.”
It was the end of an era and
a prolific saxophone rested.
It would be a very long
time before South Africans
would be so musically
blessed – and that blessing
came from the East of
Johannesburg, in the form
of a jazz tornado of Moses
Molelekwa.
First published in
afroliterature.com
phehello j mofokeng is
the author of Sankomota An
Ode in One Album and Di ya
Thoteng. He is an MA student
at Wits University.
P/6

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
book extract
Bring me
the obedient
children
words binyavanga wainaina
I want to live a life of a free
imagination. I want to work
with people around this
continent to make new,
exciting things. I want sci-fi
things. I want to make stories.
I want to be in pictures. I
want this generation of young
parents to have their kids see
Africans writing their own
stories, printing their own
stories. I think that’s the most
political act that one can have.
I want to see a continent where
every kind of person’s imagination is
not – does not have to look for being
allowed. Me I’m an African and I’m
a pan-Africanist. I want to see this
continent change.
This photocopy! Me I can’t do
photocopy. Me I will just tell you
live! I am prepared to even say I
have re-winded and I have confessed
and I am no longer a homosexual.
So long as you give me a contract
that says: “I am not photocopying.
I am not photocopying. I am not
photocopying.”
What you have is the same school that
said bring the obedient children of
you Africans, to this school, so that
you can become clerks and then we
drum syllabus into you to make you
go sing “God save the Queen” is still
the same idea that you don’t have an
imagination. You, you can’t imagine
outside those ma-parameters. You are
scared of imagining. We don’t have
sci-fi. Me I can’t find sci-fi. Like;
people write stories and all those
stories; they are from the syllabus. The
syllabus of “I don’t know what you call
moral-boring, moral-flat, moral crap.”
It is horrible! And you know where
that is happening is in the middle class.
Down there in the shacks, in ma-villages
all over Africa, guys imagine, dance
and do all kinds of shit. Me I came out
because my friend Kalota died, and
when he died, his parents were kicked
out of the church in Kisumu – poor,
poor people. And they were like, “oh it
is like that, you church step out.” When
we went for the memorial, the church
people were not there. Them they were
like ‘Bring all those friends of Kalota’s,
them they were not there to help us,
except to say you are kicking us out
of church.”And what you have in that
kind of simplicity; is fine.
But who has the opinion? The middle
class. So you are like: “Ok, Africa is
rising, you want to work for Barclays
Bank, which is fine.” But who is
making you things. “Oh, we need to
implement policies so that we can have
jobs.” And when guys send proposals,
they are like: “I want to trade.” If I
bring potatoes from Murang’a then I
make a profit that is fine. So fine; trade
is cool. But now what do you make
with those potatoes? How do you
make new things? How do you have
an education systems that makes us
think and innovate? Why do I feel like
I have gone to places where you sit in
class with a bunch of children and they
challenge you? Here, to challenge a
thing in class is to bring what my Math
teacher called ‘queer behavior.’ “That
is very queer behavior.” The syllabus is
a bullet point.
“And if you don’t stay inside the
syllabus, you will not pass your exam
and if don’t pass your exam you
will not go work as a clerk and die a
miserable sad death; necessarily.” No
there are no options. The options in
your life is when you are choosing your
university selection. And university
selection is: number one, engineering;
number two, ICT! Ehe! all those
things… so that you can go get a job in
an international organization, of which
2% of you get the job then 98% don’t.
kenneth binyavanga
wainaina (18 Jan
1971 – 21 May
2019) was a Kenyan
author, journalist
and 2002 winner of
the Caine Prize for
African Writing. In April 2014,
Time Magazine included Wainaina
in its annual TIME 100 as one
of the “Most Influential People in the
World.” a thousand years of hate:
reflective essay (Geko, 2020)
by Binyavanga Wainaina, edited by
Kiprop Kimutai, will be available by
June 2020 in all major bookstores or
by pre-order on gekopublishing.co.za
P/7

fiction
Secret lovers
words Sisca Julius
image Tess (@tesswilcox)
She was angry now. Shivering,
like she did back in her
primary school days on the
cold winter mornings in
Grootdrink, before she went
to Upington like only the
clever kids who want to do
more than work the vineyards
or pack the shelves in
Shoprite do.
On those mornings she reluctantly
put the kettle on to boil water for
laundry in the skotteltjie. The yellow
one they still have from when she was
a baby. Those mornings feel so very
far away now, like her father probably
is by now, his ship came in, whether
that was literal or figurative, they still
don’t know.
Hated her mother now like she hated
taking out the pisemmer every morning
to empty it into the long drop. She
resented the smallness of their home
ever since she went away and saw how
people could actually live, with baths
and hot water and toilets that flush, the
living room with its dirty green walls
sporting spots and bumps that look
kind of like Jungle Oats boiling in a
pot, gathering dust. The way she
resents her mother right now! She
rushed straight to the open Bible on
her mother’s dressing table, and just as
the thought of changing her mind
raced through her like an electric
current, she grabbed it. “Love is
patient? Love is kind?”she started
violently ripping pages out of the Book
like a tikkop pulling his hair out of his
scalp. She took the crumpled pages off
the floor and gathered them in her
trembling hands. Then went out the
back door to the makeshift braai her
father had made from half an old
geyser and the trolley part of a hospital
catering pulley. She threw it all in
there. His eyes, an ear, a mouth, a
tooth, a man in the stomach of a
whale, a parted sea, a honey comb in a
lion’s carcass, and watched it all go
down into flames.
It was in Grade Nine when she woke
up one morning and saw that the
sheets were blood stained. Her mother
walked in with a cigarette dangling
from her lips and said, “uhh, you will
mos, don’t think about bringing home
any babies.”
It was also in Grade Nine that she
started rolling up her skirt at the
waistband and straightening her thick,
coarse hair. It was in Grade Nine when
she went to high school in Upington
and saw him, tall and broad
shouldered, milky-coffee skinned. It
was as if an electric current ran
through her. He could command every
room he walk into. He was quiet, but
not timid. He didn’t seem to be
anything like the boys she knew. He
never day-dreamed about wheel caps
and GTIs. He didn’t get angry when
other boys spoke to her. He didn’t
become sulky when his cricket team
lost. And he was always elbow-deep
inside of a book instead of a bottle. In
turn, he noticed the way her cheeks
crimsoned when he was near. He liked
how rude she was, it made him think
of a chihuahua barking at an elephant.
He, of course couldn’t ask her out
directly, he would make sure to always
stand near the school gate so that
when she came, late as usual, he would
offer to carry her bag that looked to be
almost twice her size on her tiny
frame, to which she would always
reply, “If you like carrying bags so
much, why don’t you go work at
Shoprite.”
The same year he wrote his name on
her thigh with a permanent marker
under the pavilion at the rugby field
during break.
“Yirre Fhiekie, my mommy’s gunna see
it! Then it’s again another thing. Next
thing you know my curfew is ‘when
the streetlights come on.’”
“The course of true love never did run
smooth, my love.”
“Would’ve been romantic if Mrs Du
Plessis didn’t make us read that thing.
Rather pass the gwaai you fool.”
They walked hand in hand through
streets where the grass was green, to
P/8

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
coffee shops where they had mocha
lattés and did their homework while
she playfully punched him if he said
something stupid.
She felt – with him – what it must
feel like to dream of a better life. He
made her like herself, but he also made
her want to better herself. He took
her to museums that smelled of fresh
carpets and potpourri. They would
bunk school and sneak off to his
house which was close to the school
and after a while, his dog, Voetsek did
not bark at her. Laying on the old rug
in the garage, smoking cigarettes and
listening to Tracy Chapman, it didn’t
seem that there were shades of brown.
To him, it didn’t matter that her hair
would mimic cotton candy the second
the wind started to blow, or the first
rain drops started to fall.
She was startled by his world. The
electric remote-controlled gate, the
TV that descends from the ceiling at
the press of a button, the ice cream
machine. She’d never had anything so
good in her life. But there was always
something gnawing at her insides when
he came too close. Something that
sounded somewhat like her mother.
Something that said that a goat and a
sheep could graze in the same field but
would never sleep in the same kraal. It
was like being completely content in
your little house but always fearing a
knock at the door.
She would never let him pick her up or
drop her off at home. It would always
have to be two blocks away, so she
would get off at Joan’s corner and climb
through the wirefence and then walk
the five houses down to her house. She
didn’t want his pity. She didn’t want
to be the girl who needs to escape her
circumstances and turn around the
hand she was given. She just wanted to
be a girl being taken out by a boy who
she was terribly in love with.
There were countless times when she
considered doing it. Maybe things
wouldn’t be so scary. Maybe he’d be
okay in her world. Maybe her world
would be okay with him in it. She
would take him home in a mini bus
taxi. The ones where the drivers ask
the high school girls to sit in front
because “school sandwiches taste
better.” The ones where you don’t
have to give a location or directions.
The ones where you say “Jum’ boy,
mulberry tree, please” and he’d reply
“Ohk antie, the one where the old
lady extended the house with the road
accident moneys. Next to the child
who’s fat now ‘cos of the abortion?”
He’d hopefully laugh because it’s
funny. When you lived like this, in
colourful match boxes and untarred
streets, you’d have to look at any
bright side you could get. She’d have
to warn him beforehand not to sit
in the front seat, because that would
mean you count the money. Maybe
they’d get off there, stroll hand in hand
up the dusty streets, past the old library
that was hardly ever open, past the
green shop on the corner where you
had to pay an extra pipty cent for a R5
Vodacom.
They’d pass the shocking pink house
where Aunty Vroutjie always hides
behind the curtain. Jesus and Allah
would bury the hatchet. Just for a little
while. It would all be okay. She would
make two ends meet.
One Friday afternoon after school,
they had packed a cooler box with
ciders and sandwiches and drove out
to the lake twenty-five kilometres
out of town. The sky was so blue, as
though it had never before been grey.
They laid out an old blanket on the
grass next to a large oak tree, she in his
big arms, with her head rested against
his chest. They talked for hours, about
Star Wars and dark chocolate and
Edith Piaf. And for a small moment
the gears of time got stuck. The Bible
and the Qu’ran were buried and they
were just a boy and a girl kissing at the
side of the lake. But of course, as she
always knew it would, the knock at the
door came.
They were making their way back.
Rhafiek was driving with his hand on
her thigh and she was beaming at him.
“Can we just stay like this, here? “he
asked. “I wish” she said, for once with
no sarcastic comment. At that moment
it felt as though they were infinite.
Until they made the sharp
corner of the dusty road,
Joan’s house, and saw her
mother standing there, fire
burning in her eyes.
“Let that boy come with!” and she
knew the knock at the door, the one
she was all along fearing, caused
her little house of sticks to come
crumbling down. She walked in and
with his hand burning in hers and
as if for the first time, noticed how
simple her people actually were. It
was as if she’d never seen it before
that moment – the bouquet of plastic
fruit on the table, the room divider
full of trinkets and photographs, a
wedding photograph with her father
cropped out, the tear in the sofa that
was covered by a crocheted doily, the
wooden board with “As for me and my
house, we will serve the Lord”engraved. She
felt so small.
“I want nothing more of this. You
hear me? I’m not losing my sleep
over another baby. And you, samoosavretertjie,
you are not our kind. Two
gods in the same bed, worships the
devil instead!”
She ran after Rhafiek all the way to
the gate. Begging. Pleading. He didn’t
look back. She came back inside to
her mother, watching 7de Laan as if
nothing happened. “You lied to me
mummy! You said there’s only white
and black. Your heart is white or your
heart is black! You fucking lied!”
sisca julius is a Sol
Plaatje University BA
graduate. She loves
writing for and about
the Northern Cape
(especially the dialect
which is highly misrepresented in
literature). She won the K&L Prize for
African Literature in 2019.
P/9

Freedom of
the tongue
words Sabata-mpho Mokae image Thabiso Bale
main feature
with this year (2019) having
been declared the year of
indigenous languages by the
united nations, perhaps at
the beginning one should
ask a question: how did we
get here? may we also take a
minute to appraise the here
that i am referring to. here
is the present.
I toil at a university in this city, one of the only two postapartheid
universities in our country, where for about a
year, our Department of Languages and
Communications, has been struggling to find a senior
lecturer in Setswana without any plausible success. In fact
at this point in time, in the whole Southern Africa (where
Setswana is spoken in five countries), there are hardly six
professors of Setswana with only one being a full
professor. It is a grave situation. How did we get to a
point where the teaching of African languages has
become a scarce skill on the African continent, more so
in a country whose constitution espouses not only the
equality of languages but has made the development of
those languages a legal obligation?
I will resist the temptation to borrow
from the late Keorapetse Willie
Kgositsile who once said “the present
is a dangerous place to live.” But is it
dangerous? Here I am in the Office
of the Premier of the Northern Cape
Province, delivering the Heritage
Day speech in English, a powerful
language of commerce, government
and education yet a minority home
language in this country and of
course across the African continent.
Perhaps the answer lies in the question “How did we
acquire English?” Or perhaps let me rephrase; how was
English thrust upon us?
When the European colonisers arrived in Africa, Asia as
well as North America, they had one idea “One God,
One Truth” through which they intended that those they
colonised across many geographical locations – and were
of different cultures, languages and creed – would, from
the time of colonisation speak one common language and
be unified under the crown (in this case I refer to English).
Basically this meant that attempts were made to melt into
thin air, the long-established languages that the colonised
had spoken prior to the arrival of the white man in their
shores. The extent of the obliteration of the languages of
P/10

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
those who were colonised by the
Europeans can be seen clearer when
one looks at the figures in relation to
the English language: out of 1500
million people who speak English
across the world, only 359 million are
first-language English speakers. This
means 1 141 million people had the
English language thrust upon them.
The Anglicisation of the colonised was
not a neat and dignified process. It was
often accompanied by military invasion
which led to economic deprivation of
the conquered. These were often
preceded by religious missions which
sought to civilize the ‘savages.’
The results of the above-mentioned
actions, in relation to language,
include the gradual and systematic
obliteration of the languages of the
colonised. An example closer to
home is a Northern Cape language
called /Nuu which is spoken by only
four people on earth.
Kenyan scholar and writer Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong’o recalls how, when you were
caught speaking your mother tongue
in the colonial Kenya, you would
be made to paste on your forehead
a piece of paper telling the whole
school that you were a donkey. This
was done to shame those who spoke
the languages of the uneducated,
which had no place in a school. This
struck an indelible blow on the psyche
of the colonised. He began to see
little or no value in his language and
began seeing the ability to speak the
coloniser’s language as an indication
of civilisation and sophistication.
After observing the above, Sol Plaatje,
a century ago became the first African
to translate William Shakespeare’s
plays into an African languages.
Julius Caesar became Dintšhontšho
tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara while Comedy of
Errors became Diphoshophosho. He
has reasoned that more and more
educated Africans were discarding
their mother tongue and started
speaking English, even at home.
Plaatje’s friend and fellow linguist
David Ramoshoana remarked that
such families spoke “hodge podge”
whenever they attempted to speak
their own languages. I argue that the
introduction of the English language
to us was the forerunner of the
introduction of Englishness as our
new cultural framework.
The other result is that, as Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong’o argued, the English
language gets enriched by the
languages of the colonised. For
instance, words like baboo, toddy and
veranda are originally Hindi words that
got to be spoken by the British who
had settled in India in the 1700s.
When you come closer to home and
read the poetry of the late poet
laureate of South Africa, Keorapetse
Kgositsile, you will see how often has
his native Setswana enriched the
English he wrote.
In a poem Son of Mokae which he
wrote in memory of his friend, Tony
Award-winning actor Zakes Mokae
he opens with a line “When you open
your eyes and say tha!”Any streetwise
Motswana will attest that this is a
well-known Setswana phrase that says
“fa o bula matlho o re tha!” In the same
poem Kgositsile introduces to the
English language a word “rootmen”
which in its typical derogatory
manner, the English would say is
“witchdoctor.” “Rootman” is a
direct translation of a Setswana word
“Rraditswammung.” The last line of the
first stanza of the same poem reads
“The rootmen say they have fallen like this
and like this” which would make not
much sense until one realises that it is
a direct translation of a phrase used
by the rootman when he throws the
bones and say “di ole jaana le jaana.”
In another poem titled When the Clouds
Clear, Kgositsile borrows again from
his native tongue. This time from one
of the many proverbs with a cattle
motif and takes the one of the god
with a wet nose. He writes:
What had the ancients observed
When they said of cattle
When I lack it, I have no sleep
When I have it, I have no sleep
A Setswana speaker would not take a
minute to identify the proverb: “… ka
e tlhoka ka tlhoka boroko, ka nna nayo ka
tlhoka boroko.”
Kgositsile’s poetry gives credence to
argument by Ngũgĩ that English gets
enriched every time it gets written
by people whose mother tongue
is not English. In fact Kgositsile
himself used to say that English is “a
sophisticated fanakalo.” He would
even argue that the Queen of England
probably does not know more than
P/11

half of what is called “The Queen’s
language.”
Another argument was made by
professors Recius Melato Malope
in the 1970s at the University of the
North and Shole Shole in the 1980s
at the UNISA that Sol Plaatje’s epic
novel Mhudi, which was the first fulllength
English novel by a black South
African, was “essentially a Setswana
novel” though written in English. The
same argument can be made of Ellen
Khuzwayo’s Call Me Woman, Martin
Koboekae’s Taung Wells and Kagiso
Lesego Molope’s This Book Betrays My
Brother.
Ideally languages should enrich one
another as they borrow from each
other. However, this seems to be onesided,
with the European language
continuously borrowing from the
languages of those once colonised
by Europeans. The two examples we
have employed above being Hindi
and Setswana. There are many other
examples that we will find in the
English writings of people who speak
Shona, Igbo, Twi, Swahili, Igbo etc.
A counter-argument to this would be:
our languages borrow from English all
the time and in that way get enriched
by English too. This argument battles
to hold water because time and time
again one hears people bemoaning that
African languages lack the relevant
terminology and therefore cannot
be used as languages of government,
education and commerce.
In The Rise of the African Novel Mukoma
wa Ngũgĩ argues that these languages
have not been given the opportunity
to develop the said terminology simply
because they are not written.
Mukoma quotes Obiajunwa Wali
who wrote in The Dead End of African
Literature: “One wonders what would
have happened to English literature
for instance, if writers like Spenser,
Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton,
had neglected English, and written
in Latin and Greek simply because
these classical languages were the
cosmopolitan languages of their
times.” In My Home Under Imperial Fire
Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe evokes
an Igbo proverb which translates:
“every village has enough firewood for
all the cooking it needs to do.”
This means the speakers of every
language, when given an opportunity
to develop its terminology, will be
able to express anything they wish to
express. When all is said and done, the
development of languages rests upon
its users who must use it without any
shame, its writers who must develop
new vocabulary and terminology and
lead the people in using it on a daily
basis.
Practically and on “a daily basis”means
writing letters, emails, text on the
phones and holding official meetings
in African languages that are widely
understood in a specific area. One
struggles to find a plausible reason for
council proceedings in Ga Segonyana
Municipality or legislature proceedings
in Mahikeng to be in English.
Is there any reason why Molo Mhlaba
in Cape Town is the only private
school in the country where the
medium of instruction is an African
language when most private schools’
existence and success is on the backs
of hardworking black parents whose
home languages are not English? Is
there a convincing argument why
Setswana is only an official language
in two out of the five southern African
countries in which it is spoken?
In fact, it is astonishing that in
Botswana, Setswana is in terms
of their constitution a “national
language” whereas English is the sole
official language. Could all these be
manifestations of the internalised
colonial racism which reasons that
there is nothing of value in African
languages, cultures and ways of life?
Could this be the realisation of the
dreaded hierarchy of languages, which
puts languages of the once conquered
at the rock bottom?
Perhaps in conclusion we need to
revisit Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s argument
that; central to one’s identity is one’s
language and marry it to Achebe’s
assertion that no man would be able
to enter his house through another
man’s gate.
A language is not just a means
to communicate; it is a body
of knowledge, a philosophy,
a way of knowing and seeing,
a cultural framework and
at times even a political
framework. Abandoning
one’s language is abandoning
oneself, so much akin to a tree
without its roots.
Giving credence to this broader
definition of language, Deborah
Seddon in her PhD thesis wrote of
Sol Plaatje’s Setswana writing: they
“represent a commitment to teaching
and developing the language, and
to preserving history, [and] the oral
tradition.”
I conclude this presentation with
a Kikuyu poem Titi la Mama by
Shaban Robert. I will read the English
translation by Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ. The
translated title is My Mother Tongue.
My mother-tongue I declare I will sing
your brightness to the blind and those who
have long lost memories of you
a mother’s breast is sweet to her young,
even a swine’s Mother, feed, flow, salve
our wounds and clotted veins.
A mother’s breast is sweet, another
simply would not fulfill
Mother, as a child my tongue was weighed
down.
Now that I can speak I see you were all
around me, a perfume to my heart and
senses.
Whether through the wilderness the river
Nile or the Indian ocean – Mother, you
carry me across.
Ke a leboga. Enkosi.
Dankie. Thank you.
this is a transcript of a speech
delivered, by sabata-mpho mokae
at the office of the premier
of northern cape, in november
2019.
P/12

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
The rank
by Angie Thato Chuma
The city pours itself here;
within the damp smell of roasting maize,
sweat,
and the snores of taxis and combis
travelling on half-dressed roads.
The city meets itself here;
Where the air holds every scent
Where mothers find hope in their vegetables,
And everything is known to be cheaper;
‘A hub of solutions for poor people’
God does not exist here,
Only sweat
Here,
Many layers of survival
Meet in their silences
Many lives are stitched together
You meet the hustler, the dreamer, and the forgotten
And those that wander
In the spell of their lives.
Reflection
by Angie Thato Chuma
Bleed child, that’s all you can do
Bleed the power he fails to see in himself
I know the knife he turns burns like slits
of a self-loathing queen
Revive his spirit in your screams,
silence is too still for him
I know your eyes are suffocating with his face
The pain that feels like eternity to you
Just bleed, my daughter
I know he has cursed you with reminders
Like pillows left pinned
Cry it all out
I know it burns your cheeks
The wilting of your soul won’t last much longer
I wanted to soothe your wounds
With honey and lavender
Thinking maybe the pain will taste sweeter for a while
I carried you in my heart knowing
the pieces he has taken
The pieces that can only be found
in the tears that wish to heal you
Bleed child, that’s all you can do
For blood, is said, to have saved humanity
A long time ago.
Thinking nightmares
by Prof Peter Horn
screams rhyme the shots
and the tin of the taxi
one bullet stuck in the pots
of the lady with the green maxi
the dance of the blood speeds
through the arteries and veins
broken bones in the yellow weeds
pieces of brain on black skeins
the silences are like forgotten lies
between the corpses on the street
the dogged hum of green flies
around the now decaying meat
the evening sky has lost its vital red
its cloudless white mourns our dead
Cold light
by Prof Peter Horn
cold is the light,
even colder the stone
in this house of death
the hangmen of our past
empty golden beakers
they have even
privatised water now
and the wells have been emptied
everything that could save us
has been taken from us
the children scream
they eat green grass
and ascend the mountain of hunger
and pray to heaven above
under the starless sky
we are blind and deaf
P/13

author feature
The author
is the keeper
of social
records
WORDS Faith Chabalala
IMAGE Thabiso Bale
main feature
Language is the greatest symbol of
human diversity, culture and knowledge.
Language is key to understanding who we
are. many indigenous languages are at the
risk of dying all around world. It becomes
imperative to anyone in society; especially
those who have access to big platforms to
change things. This is futuristic and it is
what one Motswana writer is doing.
I found him deftly seated under a lapa on a
round cement bench with a laptop and a
bottle of still water at Wildebeeskuil Rock Art
but I’m not complaining, the drive was well
worth it. My foremost question to the writer
was of course how his love for literature
Centre in Kimberley. As I approached him,
he stood up with a genuine smile on his face.
The gentleman had extra bottled water for
the interviewer. Perhaps an apology for
having me meet him a little out of Kimberley;
began. The storyteller painted a vivid picture
of how he grew up in Taung in North West.
Nothing much happens in the rural areas
except going to school, doing homework,
herding the cattle or playing street soccer.
P/14

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
Sabata-Mpho Mokae is a novelist,
translator, former journalist and an
academic. He was raised by his
maternal grandparents, with few
cousins in the household. In those
days, as may still be the case today;
employment was scarce. Parents had
to leave their homes and find
employment, the kids were often left
behind to be taken care of by their
grandparents or a relatives.
Emblematic of a rural household,
supper was not eaten in the main
house but outside, in the rondavel.
“We used to sit in a circle, around a
fire and have supper as a family. And
our grandparents told us all kinds of
stories about their life experiences”
he relates.
With a twinkle in the eye, he was
comparable to a child remembering
how granny used to spoil him with
candy. It was almost impossible for
the writer to hide the enjoyment of
speaking about his childhood and
grandparents. The young Mokae
found himself drawn to the history of
his country and captivated by the
elder’s gaudy, vivid storytelling
abilities, the knowledge they
possessed about their country.
In the 1950s, his grandmother lived in
Sophiatown and worked as a
domestic worker in suburban areas in
the western side of Joburg.
Sophiatown (also known as Kofifi or
Sof’town) is recognised for its rich
black culture, the political mayhem
that the communities endured under
the apartheid regime and its eventual
destruction by the government.
Mokae heard all about the protests,
raids, poverty and the violence. He
was also told about how the residents
celebrated life by dressing up and
going to discos where they indulged
in dance and music – the blues and
jazz – even though they were living at
the most abysmal time of apartheid.
His grandfather was born in Lesotho
and raised in Free State. He was also a
great story-teller with vivid memories
of his experiences of the political
turmoil in Lesotho and the
happenings that took place while
working at the goldmines of Welkom
in Free State. As the youngest of the
siblings, Mokae found himself the only
child left at home as time went by.
One day he stumbled upon a book, a
novel No Longer at Ease by Chinua
Achebe. He suspects the book
belonged to his mother who was an
educator and was the one who would
most likely own such a book.
The inquisitive lad began to read this
book. He was awed by the writer’s
clear, brilliant and simple way of
telling stories. Amazed at how he
could see the story unfolding in front
of his eyes, how the characters and
the happenings in the book became
so real and life-like. The idea of
storytelling through writing became
an attractive venture that early on.
Reading became fun and it eased the
boredom. Before long he started
writing his own stories.
At the age of 18, once he completed
his final year in high school, Mokae
set off from his homestead to study
further. During this time he started an
online publication with friends called
www.joni.com. The platform generally
focused on arts, literature and culture.
He subsequently started writing book
reviews for Mail & Guardian and later
wrote articles about the arts for
Sunday Independent, Rootz Magazine and
The Weekender. Confident and assured
that writing is what he wanted to do,
leaving his job at a government
department was an effortless
resolution. His career as a journalist
was taking off quite swiftly,
decorating the pages of various
publications with his with brilliant
insights. He contributed opinion
writing to Y Magazine while also being
a resident book reviewer on various
radio stations such as Motsweding FM
and Kaya FM which he did in his
native language Setswana.
Mokae learned about Solomon
Thekisho Plaatje like any other child
in school, the legendary literary icon
never left his mind. While freelancing
he decided to do feature stories on
the well-known Kimberley journalist.
Later he wrote a story about the
contested legacy of Sol Plaatje for
Sunday Independent. “I wanted to
investigate how the literary icon’s
legacy was being safeguarded and
preserved. When I got back to
Johannesburg I had the idea that I
could do more work on Plaatje” he
remembers. This led Mokae to travel
to Kimberley, where he met the
relatives of his subject and Johan
Cronje who was the director of the
Sol Plaatje Museum. At the time the
museum had funding for research
projects and this gave him the
opportunity to write and update the
Plaatje family tree.
Realising that all the biographies of
Plaatje were somewhat not accessible
to an everyday person, he decided to
write one, a journey he describes as
P/15

“remarkable.” The biography; The
Life of Solomon T Plaatje, was
published in 2010 by the Plaatje
Educational Trust. Mokae was invited
to a lecture in Kimberley while he was
writing this biography. At the same
lecture, he had the luck of meeting
and talking to Deputy President of
South Africa, Kgalema Motlanthe
who also delivered a lecture at the
Civic Centre and unveiled the Sol
Plaatje Monument. Deputy President
had a casual chat with Mokae and
asked him to keep in touch.
He wondered how an ordinary citizen
can keep in touch with a member of
cabinet until he had completed
writing the biography and he needed
a Foreword. Mokae sent an email to
the Deputy President’s office
requesting him to write a Foreword
for Sol Plaatje’s biography. Mokae
received a quick response from the
office and the Foreword was granted.
Mokae was later invited to the Deputy
President’s house and had a profound
conversation with Motlanthe about
politics, history and art. Mokae
describes Motlanthe as knowledgeable
and dignified.
Sol Plaatje had a huge impact on
Mokae’s literary career, his
exceptional writing style and how he
advocated for black people and the
pride he took in his culture and native
language. He fought for the dignity
and decolonisation of Africans. Mhudi
was Sol Plaatje’s first fictional work
and ‘first English novel by a black
South African’. Mokae describes this
book as contemporary, exceptional
and inspiring. “In a world where
women have taken back their identity
and patriarchy plagues society, Mhudi
did something phenomenal for that
time and now. As a protagonist
Mhudi is a strong female character
who takes the bull by its horns –
much like today’s women; who are
brave, take up space and become
what they were otherwise not allowed
to be” says Mokae with conviction.
The author says that it is important
that women see themselves as equal
and capable citizens. Mokae has since
become an active and respected
academic and intellectual of intense
rigour and important work.
Mokae and fellow scholar of Plaatje,
UK-based Prof Brian Willan are
currently co-editing a two-volume
book; Letters of Sol Plaatje. They are
working on yet another collection of
essays from various proficient writers
and scholars of Plaatje and his work.
This is scheduled to debut in June
2020, to celebrate the centenary
anniversary of Mhudi. This centenary
book will include work from writers
such as Zakes Mda, Chris Thurman,
Antjie Krog and many others.
“It is a great honour for me to work
with Prof Brian Wilan, who has
dedicated over 40 years researching
Solomon Plaatje and his life. Brian has
worked with me as a fellow scholar not
as a pupil or understudy” says Mokae.
He wishes that other older scholars
could have same kind of perception
and understanding when working with
younger scholars. Mokae is currently
writing his fourth Setswana novel, with
a working title: Mmu Le Lefatshe a novel
that takes place in the wake of the
1913 Native Land Act; much in the
spirit of Sol Plaatje.
* * * * *
Subsequent to writing the Plaatje
biography, Mokae became weekly
columnist at the Diamond Fields
Advertiser in Kimberley. On Monday’s,
the DFA reported on breaking news
which often had stories of murder,
rape and other violent activities that
took place over the weekend, where
alcohol and other substances would
be involved. This painted a picture of
how violent the province was. The
writer took it upon himself not to add
on to the grim realities of the
Northern Cape communities. He
decided to write something that will
entertain. He knew the importance of
feature stories as they offered the
lighter side of life. His column Corner
Bin, contained humor, fiction and
light-hearted stories. The name of the
column emanated from the location of
the DFA paper; corner of Bin Street
in Kimberley CBD. The central
character of Corner Bin was
Kanakotsame; a local teacher with a
romantic relationship with a female
learner at his school; who he has also
impregnated. As a result he was
suspended from his job. Even though
he was flawed in some ways, this was
a much-loved character in the local
community of Kimberley. He was a
grand, kind and stylish teacher. The
characters met at Parks’ Tarven. A
legendary pub where adults used to
meet to chat, watch the soccer games,
shake to the cadence of the music and
have a beer or two to get rid of the
scorching heat of Kimberley. This pub
was known for its strict policy on
attire and good behaviour;
something Kanakotsame epitomised
through his eccentric personality.
Corner Bin was heavily influenced by
the writer’s upbringing – richly
depicting the contemporary black
culture of the township.
P/16

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
One could also argue that Mokae’s
column was somewhat also
influenced by the old Drum Magazine
and its old canon of heavyweight
writers whose work brought all the
stories that he used to hear from his
grandparents to life. Writers such as
Can Themba, Todd Matshikiza,
Es’kia Mphahlele, Henry Nxumalo to
mention a few influenced his writing
and he admired them; not just for
their exceptional writing but for their
compelling periodic stories too.
Drum Magazine became a vital platform
for a new generation of journalists in
South Africa and transformed the way
black people were represented in
society; by giving them dignity and
pride. Drum celebrated black people
despite the racial discrimination,
poverty and violence; perhaps in some
cases to a point of romanticisation.
They wrote about phenomenal people
of Sophiatown and other townships
with panache and reverence; reflecting
culture, their love for jazz, blues,
mbaqanga, theatre, films, fashion and all
manner of sophistication. Mokae even
recalled the stories his grandparents
used to tell him and those stories came
to live again through Drum.
Mokae wrote Corner Bin for four
years amusing and entertaining
readers. Eventually, Kanakotsame was
published – as a collection of articles,
in 2012. To elucidate his versatility,
Mokae also released a poetry
collection Escaping Trauma, this after
contributing to a poetry anthology;
We Are (2005) edited and curated by
Natalia Molebatsi. Sabata-Mpho
Mokae has also translated Gcina
Mhlope’s two children’s books; from
English to Setswana, Dinaane tsa
Aforika (Tales of Africa) and Semaka
Sa Dinaane (Our Story Magic).
Mokae’s foray into writing had only
begun. In 2012, he wrote Ga ke Modisa
(Geko) published by Geko Publishing
– a small black-owned press based in
Johannesburg. Mokae is grateful that
Geko – a small, independent press
took a risk with this book; and as
posterity would have it, this launched
Mokae into the world of fiction and
his name was cast in stone. Ga ke
Modisa went on to win the M-Net
Literary Award for Best Novel in
Setswana as well as the M-Net Film
Award in 2013. It was the last time
that the M-Net Literary Awards were
awarded. His star was on the rise. Ga
ke Modisa became something of a
canon and had cult following among
Setswana readers. It is prescribed at
the University of North West and the
Central University of Technology in
the Free State.
To further show his versatility, Mokae
challenged himself to publish a teen
novella; a serious area of writing that
is not simple to crack. His teen
novella titled Dikeledi (Geko),
followed in 2014. Dikeledi loses her
mother to HIV/AIDS, leaving her to
take care of her younger siblings.
Mokae depicts the realities of childheaded
households and the terrible
ordeals that they have to bear.
Mokae is known for being a true
proponent of indigenous languages
to the extent that he took a decision
to write fiction; exclusively in
Setswana. The native language
activist writes in Setswana because it
is the opposite of what apartheid had
intended for Africans.
“African languages were not official
languages during apartheid. An
attempt to culturally confuse black
people by making them forget what
makes them who they are” he said.
According to Mokae, language cannot
be separated from culture as culture is
tied to people’s pride and identity.
“Africans have been made to think
that there is nothing of value in their
language, culture and what they look
like; thus black people aspired to look
different, speak different” adds. “It is
a pity that South Africa – as a multilingual
country – is largely Englishspeaking.
This causes Africans to
conform because we believe that
there is something wrong and
incomplete about us.”
Efforts are currently underway to
translate Ga ke Modisa into IsiZulu
and into English by Dr Lesego
Malepe in Boston, Massachusetts in
USA. It was because of this book that
in 2014 Mokae got accepted into a
prestigious writing residency at the
University of Iowa in USA. He was
later awarded an Honorary Fellowship
in Writing at the University. Ga ke
Modisa is a story about two brothers
Otsile and Thebe Modiri who are
caught in a love triangle with the
beautiful Nandi. When the lady finally
chooses the one she loves, tension
between the brothers soars as the
other is unable to accept defeat. While
at University of Iowa, he began his
draft of his latest novel Moletlo Wa
Manong (Xarra) released in 2018. “It
took me four years to complete, and
six rewrites over that period of time
to complete” says the novelist. One
can say the patience and perseverance
clearly paid off. The book; acts like
P/17

sequel to Ga ke Modisa, continues the
journey of a local skilful journalist,
Otsile Mothibi in the city of
Kimberley who investigates
corruption in government with tragic
results. The book is
contemporaneous and it brings
politics, conspiracies and realties of
state capture to our languages and
closer to our local audiences.
“Language is a way of seeing, it is a
way of knowing and interpreting life
and the world around us”
Moletlo wa Manong is currently
prescribed at the Northern West
University and is subject of an
Master’s Degree thesis at the same
university. The book was dedicated to
another literary icon who was born in
Kimberley, Aggrey Klaaste. A
journalist who was born in Kimberly
and came to be known as one of the
greatest journalist in the continent,
the father of the ambitious “nation
building” project which aimed to see
a unified South Africa, free from
racial discrimination.
Moletlo wa Manong has received a great
deal of recognition, further earning
Mokae a second SALA award in
2019; for best Setswana novel. In his
acceptance speech he wrote: “One
day I took a decision to stop writing
in English and did the unthinkable. I
wrote my first novel in Setswana, the
language suckled from my mother’s
breasts.
It was a moment of sheer madness. I
tasted freedom and I never looked
back. I think what encouraged me to
carry on was the appreciation from
the speakers of Setswana but also the
idea that one could create art in an
African language in Africa and be
mainstream.”
In this SALA acceptance speech,
Mokae paid tribute to the generation
of young Setswana musical artists who
made Motswako music popular and the
Setswana language “fashionable” –
artists such as HHP, Tuks Senganga,
Mo Molemi and Kuli Chana among
others.The writer joined Sol Plaatje
University (SPU) in 2014 as a Creative
Writing lecturer. The SPU is currently
the only university in South Africa that
offers creative writing in Setswana. A
platform he is grateful for, as he gets
to be part of the mid-wifery process of
a generation of African writers who
will continue to produce literature in
African languages. His students wrote
a stage play as part of a class
assignment which later participated at
the Grahamstown National Arts
Festival in 2019. Another student –
Sisca Julius – went to win the K&L
Prize for African Literature in 2019,
for a short story which was also a class
assignment. “I always check my
student’s scripts twice and give them
thorough feedback, he says. The
lecturer is evidently doing a proficient
job mentoring and managing the talent
at the University
“Language is not just a way of
communicating but a way of
being”
The Sol-Plaatje Literary Festival was
Mokae’s brain child. The festival was
established in the year 2009 in
partnership with the North West
University and the Department of
Arts and Culture (DSAC). He is also
the current curator of the Northern
Cape Writers Festival (NCWF) – now
in its 14th year. “It is a platform that
gives writers, readers and the
community to engage, create
awareness and to form networks. It is
a national festival and a rare
opportunity for developing writers of
this province to interact with
established writers from the rest of
the country and from abroad” Mokae
added. NCWF is an initiative of the
Northern Cape (DSAC) in
collaboration with SPU. Mokae is
reading for a doctorate; in African
Languages. His study is the work of
the indefatigable Kabelo Duncan
Kgatea. “Rre Kgatea is one of the
most important Setswana authors of
the post-apartheid era. He is prolific,
sharp with the language and he is
relentless. He has written at least 16
radio dramas, 6 novels and many
poems. There is no writer of
Setswana fiction; alive today who has
produce this amount of work. He is
truly exceptional.”
It is not surprising that Mokae ends
the interview this way – by praising a
fellow author of his language. He is a
geniune supporter of others and an
appreciator of those that advance
Setswana and other African languages
in the face of the onslaught of
English. Mokae is working on one of
the biggest challenges in his writing
life – translating Mariama Ba’s So
Long a Letter. This book is so different
from everything that many of us have
encountered and it is challenging on
so many levels – its original language
(Wolof), religion, culture and so
much more. “But I enjoy a good
challenge” Mokae closed the
interview. We cannot wait for another
Setswana gem, from this prolific
recorder of our society’s shenanigans.
faith chabalala is
a South African
feature writer with a
passion for events,
trends, lifestyle, arts,
literature,
entertainment, history and social
justice. In her writing she aims to
bring awareness and liberation. She
has been published in Northern Cape
News Network (NCNN) and
Solomon Star newspaper. When she
is not writing she works as a training
facilitator and coordinator. She holds
an Honours degree in Public
Management.
P/18

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
What happens
when you decide
to start over?
opinion
WORDS Rossey Nkutshweu
IMAGE Pexels
The life that I had created for myself mimicked that of what I
observed in my close proximity because that’s what grown-ups do –
at least that’s what my parents and other adults told me. Anyone who
didn’t live according to that script was shunned and ridiculed.
I didn’t want to be like them – the
outcasts. The people I wanted to be
like, went to varsity, had jobs, cars
and seemed to be living their best
lives; away from home. They were
revered creatures who we only got
to see during the holidays.
I, eventually, completed my final
year and graduated from varsity. I
had anxieties about finding a job,
fitting within the template and not
being left out. Eventually, I did find
multiple jobs and from the onset
(even though I had a desperate need
to keep one and start the next step
of the template), I had a unrelenting
feeling that I wouldn’t stay. And I
didn’t. My need for belonging and
obsession with parental approval lead
to a long struggle with depression
and anxiety because I wasn’t getting
this “adulting” life quite right, in
comparison to my peers.
At last, I landed a permanent job and
I thought “finally I can settle and
belong somewhere. Finally; I can
make my parents and other adults
proud.” It was good for a while. It
seemed like I was getting into it and
I could finally live according to the
template properly – that was a lie
and that feeling came back. I ignored
it for a while and I managed to
experience some personal growth for
the time I was there. I finally kicked
the depression and anxiety and started
being less “people-pleasey.” With
that, I gathered the strength to leave
the working environment so that I
could allow myself to discover my
purpose. Needless to say, my parents
didn’t take it well; but this piece isn’t
about them.
Now, that was a difficult one because;
for years I’ve been told that adults
work and earn salaries, which will
help them get what they want – the
house, the cars, the clothes, nice
things and here I was about to let all
that go. That didn’t make any sense.
What made even less sense was that
my job provided all these benefits
that only an insane person would let
go of; just like that. Wanting to leave
didn’t necessarily absolve me from not
wanting to live the life I had grown
accustomed to and the security blanket
it brought me; and for a moment, my
parents were somewhat pleased with
me. I could buy things I liked with
my own money, and I had my own
place, I could go anywhere, hang with
my peers and have something to talk
about. It was nice and comfortable
and I became familiar with those
surroundings and feelings. A time
came when a shift took place. It was
a sort of confirmation that I had to
leave this job and this self I had been
cultivating all this time, and that I had
to allow myself to fall into the one I’m
meant to be. Everything was different;
the interaction with peers and the
urge to perform whatever I felt was
necessary at that moment. Going to
work felt unnecessary because I knew I
didn’t have a place there anymore. The
curtain lifted from my eyes, everything
had changed and I couldn’t unsee it.
My life as I knew it was disconnected
from me. It felt like I was in a different
world or surrounded by strangers and
continuing to live like that didn’t make
sense. I finally decided to resign from
my job and go into the unknown. I
was scared of the unknown; but I was
suffocating in the known. I asked God
to help me move with faith so that His
will can be done.
I’ve noticed that I need to learn
discipline – discern between work
and leisure time. I’ve also noticed that
even though I had made the decision
to leave with the utmost assertion, I
am still the same person who wants to
hide and please, so I still lie about my
life, trying to maintain the pedestals
people put me on. I don’t know when
and how I’m going to unlearn this
but I guess that’s the beauty of the
journey to purpose.
rosey nkutshweu is a full-time
writer and former data scientist with
a multinational corporation. She is an
ice cream connoisseur and lover of
chocolates.
P/19

“Telling stories in
our languages, is
the real liberation
& decoloniality”
QUESTIONS Phehello J Mofokeng (PJM)
ANSWERS: Sabata-mpho Mokae (SMM)
IMAGE Thabiso Bale
innerview
PJM: Why is writing canon
in African languages an
important concern for you?
SMM: I think our liberation as a
people will not be complete until we
can tell, retell and retrace our stories.
This is an archive of a people, a point
of reference. A foundation of people
is their stories. Stories of heroes and
villains, of loyalties and betrayals, of
successes and failures.
PJM: Intellectually, you
are obsessed with Setswana
writing. Where does this
come from and how has this
obsession enriched your
intellectual pursuits, exploits
and experiences? I started
writing in English as a
journalist.
SMM: My first book, an accessible
biography of Solomon Plaatje,
was written in English. But it was
exposure to Plaatje’s work while I
was based at the Sol Plaatje Museum
in Kimberley that made me relook
at English as a default language for
African storytelling and intellectual
engagement. I got to understand
language beyond just being a means
to communicate but as a body of
knowledge and a way of knowing. I
got to know how much we lose when
we cease utilising our language. I also
got to understand the limitations of
the colonial language, for instance
when we look at language as a
facilitator of human relations.
I started a process of learning anew
my language, I started digging into
my linguistic archive. I was fortunate
to have grown up in a Setswanaspeaking
village in Taung. I will
always be grateful for that because
there is no place whose inhabitants
continue to demonstrate the beauty
of my language better than those
Batlhaping. When I started writing
my first Setswana novel, Ga ke
Modisa, it was a moment of madness.
But it was also a taste of freedom. I
got to know how it feels to artistically
express myself in my own language. I
no longer had an acquired language,
an European fanakalo for that
matter, to negotiate with on which
are best phrases to use in order to
tell stories set in Setswana-speaking
communities. I no longer had the
burden to explain and or translate. I
don’t care about that anymore. This,
for me, is the ultimate freedom.
In my life as an academic, I am
constantly looking for any work in
Setswana. I read any fiction, poetry
and works of nonfiction in Setswana.
It is refreshing. I see anew the world I
live in. This beautiful language
is a vista into its speakers, their
philosophies, their science, their
histories. I realise what a tragedy
it is that we spent so much time
unlearning our languages.
P/20

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
English is a worldview and this
means that by not using our
languages we end up seeing
the world through borrowed
spectacles. This goes back to the
relationship between coloniser and
the colonised being the teacherpupil
relationship. The coloniser
believes there is nothing of value
in the language, the culture or the
worldview of the colonised and
drums that kind of thinking in the
head of the colonised. Central to
colonisation is the unforming and/
or reforming the colonised. The
colonisers made evil anything that
he did not understand, whether
it was important to us or not. To
an intellectual, whose major asset
or device is language, central to
decolonisation is awareness of
the evil of westernisation and the
reclaiming of what is possible to
reclaim, develop that which could
not be aware that one needs to
define oneself because those who
define you, derive a benefit from
such definition.
I have been deep into Sol Plaatje’s
world. Recently Professor Brian
Willan and I have completed
a book of Plaatje’s letters,
many of them in Setswana.
This gave me an opportunity
to understand Plaatje’s battles
with the missionary societies
and universities on matters of
orthography in the 1920s, his
commitment to his Setswana-
English newspapers which
were great platforms for the
development of Setswana as
a written language. This year
we mark the centenary of his
English novel Mhudi and I get
to engage with arguments by the
likes of Recius Malope and Shole
Shole that Mhudi is essentially a
Setswana novel. I get to see how
Plaatje’s Setswana has enriched his
English and instances where the
Setswana translations of this
novel have actually freed the
story from the limitations of
English. There are academic
debates around the use of African
languages in a mainstream way.
How can Africans achieve
this – be it at government,
official capacity or in commerce?
It takes political will. English
was not always the language of
government and education in
England. Afrikaans would also
not be where it is, sans political
will. But one must also say
leaders – as in politicians – need
to be conscious enough to get to
that level. I doubt the sloganeering
band can think at that level.
So we’re on our own: artists
– including us writers – must
produce work in these languages;
films, novels, music etc. But it
boils down to political will and
legislation.
PJM: Writing in your
natural language
in the manner
that you do
is a very
serious
political act
and one
that should
not make any
academic sense. But
it is your Setswana
writing that
has opened doors and portals that
many writers will not reach in two
lifetimes. Outside of its political
imperative, your writing is also
linguistically rich. Please expand
on these points and why you took
this route.
SMM: I think the world is ready
to open up and receive anyone
who has something interesting
or nearly unique to offer. For
a reason I don’t know, many
people who have invited me
to writing programmes abroad
seem to be fascinated by my
decision to turn my back on
English. My approach is this: I
write not only what I like but in
the language I like. It is political.
In other words I show a middle
finger to the colonisers. It’s
being a unrepenting rebel, it’s
being a native who does not
seek to be understood by the
settler. I chose to write in
my language it’s language I
know better than any other
language on earth and I
believe there are many
people who would like
to read stories in it. South
Africa alone has over four
P/21

million Setswana speakers. That’s the
total populations of Lesotho and
Botswana put together. That’s more
than eleven times the population of
Iceland. That’s not a small number
at all. To some extent, I believe,
central to a people’s identity is their
language. I don’t need to quote
Ngügí on this. It’s simple logic. So
a freed slave or formerly oppressed
person’s liberation is not complete
while one still sees the world through
the spectacles violently imposed on
them by those that deemed them
subhuman.
But apart from the political, I read
Setswana books like my life depends
on it (actually my career does). I listen
to Setswana-medium radio stations
(there are around 15 of those in SA
alone). So on a daily basis I try to
learn new words in this beautiful
language, I learn how to use the
words I know better, I learn new
phrases, I compose new terms for
newer things such as Twitter and
Facebook, I oppose the use of some
old proverbs and idioms and phrases
that justify or promote things I don’t
agree with – patriarchy, violence.
PJM: You call Makerere University
Conference of 1962 a “literary crime
scene” (a point that I agree with you
on). In your view, how did this crime
scene sidetrack the development
of African languages writing in the
continent and elsewhere? We still
feel its effects even today. How can
we reverse these or work towards
correcting this ‘crime scene’s’ legacy?
SMM: I think the conference was
huge as far as the Anglophone
Africa literature is concerned, and
its exclusionary nature was and
remains the problem. It was called
Conference of African Writers of
English Expression and true to its
name, it excluded African writers
who wrote in African languages or
French or Portuguese. This means
that someone with a contribution
as huge and eternally important as
Thomas Mofolo who gave us the
first Sesotho novella in 1907 and
later Chaka which is still read and
taught in many countries today,
would not have been allowed in
that conference had he been alive
at that time. The danger here is that
the magnanimity of that Conference
borders on it directly or indirectly
stating what is African literature and
what it is not. Most of the people
who attended the Conference went
on to be major writers of African
literature in English.
The conference not only sidelined
African literature in African
languages but created a template for
future contempt of such. What we
need to do is create awareness that
these languages are an integral part
of us, that we cannot divorce them
from who we are. Then we need to
write in these languages. There is no
language that develops without it
being written.
Creating literature in any language
gives it an opportunity to develop
new terminology and borrow where
necessary. We need to make sure that
we speak our languages at home and
make them languages of commerce,
education and government. There is
no plausible reason why proceedings
in the North West Provincial
Legislature are in English except
that MPLs are under an illuision
that speaking English turns their
nonsensical speeches into quotable
wisdom.
PJM: In your writing, you have
managed to avoid romanticising
the typical concerns of the ‘African
novel’. Many novelists romanticise
poverty, sickness (especially HIV),
the township and so on. Surely this
is intentional. What would you say is
your approach to the typical settings,
plots and issues that you concern
yourself with in your writing?
SMM: I’m of the idea that the life
of an average black person in this
country is sad. Township is hell, we
are generally landless, we pay black
tax, our Saturdays are for funerals,
Sundays are for the white man’s
church, Mondays are for work
so that we pay the 20-year bond,
month-ends are for paying unending
debts, Fridays are for shebeens
because we drink to stay sane.
It’s hell. We haven’t healed from
apartheid. I’m angry. I know I don’t
look and sound angry but anger
makes me write about heroes of the
anti-apartheid struggle becoming
common criminals, about us being
packed like sardines in townships
when a white family has a farm
bigger than any of South Africa’s
major township. My approach
is rugged honesty, no pretence,
no trying to sound smart, no
mangamanga. But I love my beautiful
language.
PJM: Do you think the African novel
written in natural languages can
be pedagogical? Or is this flying too
close to the ‘anthropological duty’ of
the African novel?
SMM: It is a fine line. An African
writer exists, as Chinua Achebe
argued, because the telling was done
and because (s)he did not like the
telling, (s)he decided to do the telling
him/herself. That is to an extent
pedagogical and may border of the
anthropological, especially when
the African writer feels that (s)he
has to right the wrongs of depiction
and presentation as done by others
about him/her and Africa. There is
P/22

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
a need though, to tell a story without
the need to be pedagogical, perhaps
a story for the story’s sake but the
risk is that emanating from a hugely
misrepresented ‘dark’ continent, one
may not have such luxury.
PJM: There is an expectation of
sorts – I suppose; because of the
‘white gaze’ – that African authors
and their writing has to fulfill a
certain duty – moral, educational,
‘anthropological’ etc; while English
writers of novels – or non-African
novels are not burdened with this
expectation. The English novel –
especially when written by a white
writer, can be about anything and it
is not burdened by any ‘duty’. Would
you say this is a fair assessment of
the status of the African novel?
It is not a fair assessment and puts
an unnecessary burden on the
African writer. This has its roots
in missionary education as well as
apartheid. The latter reduced African
language literature to be literature of
the classroom with no use on the real
world trade, politics and daily life. I
personally refuse to write in order to
fulfill the above-mentioned.
I write stories that simply demand
and deserve to be told. If anything
anthropological or educational is
derived from these stories it is merely
unintended consequence. I write
with no white reader in mind because
the need to explain ourselves begins
the moment we think of that white
man that we feel we are presenting
ourselves to. Of course our realities
are too harsh and if we reflect that in
our stories, one may realise that it is
not easy for an African writer to write
about daffodils and butterflies.
PJM: Your PhD is on another
important Setswana author, Kabelo
Duncan Kgatea. Can you broadly
and generally explain why is Kgatea
such an important figure of Setswana
fiction in the post-1994 and expand
on his rapport or body of work?
SMM: Kgatea has produced more
work of Setswana fiction than
any other person alive today. He
wrote six novels, all of them in the
post-apartheid era. He has also
written 16 radio dramas that have
been broadcast on national radio.
He is not even 60 years old. In all
his novels he writes about human
condition in the post-apartheid South
Africa, basically he writes about
the delicate process of rebuilding a
broken, polarised and fragmented
nation. When you read his novels
you may be tempted to see Desmond
Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation
at best, as an incomplete healing
process or at worst as a farce – a
process in which perpetrators knew
what was in it for them while the
victims were sold something as a
dream called closure. Kgatea shows
us, as Sol Plaatje did a century ago,
the cruelty of landlessness, the pain
of being a second class citizen or as
Plaatje wrote; ‘a pariah in the land
of’ your ‘birth’. But Kgatea also
simplifies Paulo Freire’s argument
that it is the oppressed who has
the ability to grant freedom to the
oppressor rather than the other
way round. Kgatea, through his
novels, part-takes in a conversation
started by his icon Sol Plaatje over
a hundred years ago. He unpacks
what Plaatje termed the ‘black man’s
burden.’
My interest in Kgatea’s work is
focused on his six novels, all written
in the post ‘94 dispensation and
all a form of kaleidoscope into a
multiracial (as opposed to nonracial)
society, a close-up of a nation in
the time of profound change. I am
interested in race and reconciliation
in these novels. In all of these novels
Kgatea has all the South African
races and shows how the country
negotiates a new, post-apartheid
order. He shows how SA is battling
to create a state nation out of what
apartheid had intended to be some
sort of a group of nation ‘states’.
Puo ya letswele
ka Thabiso Lakajoe
Puo ya letswele hana ka puo e se
timele lemeng la Rantsho,
Ikatele nnake tse ding dipuo di se
ke tsa wa ka wena,
Wa qhekanyetswa, wa jaka ka la
hao leleme,
Neena ho ba mojaki kapa yena
mofo ‘fatsheng la hao.
Naba jwaloka mokopu lemeng la
Mosotho,
Lokololloha nnake ‘fatshe lena ke
la hao
Phatsa ‘tjhaba sa hao ka tlhaka ya
hao e tukang malakabe.
Maleme a hopole puo, melomo e
dutle puo.
O tlale lefatshe, o kgantshe lefatshe,
o ikgantshe.
Mosotho a kgabe ka ya hae puo,
A e behe sehlohlolong, a ikonke ka
yona.
Bosotho bo se timele, bo phalle ka
kotloloho mading.
Tse ding dipuo di kgahlwe ke botle
ba leleme.
Bokgowanatshwana ba hlobaele!
P/23

nopolo ya padi
Moletlo wa Manong
ka Sabata-mpho Mokae
xarra books 2018 978-0-62079-949-2 R220 xarrabooks.co.za or bargain books
Nandi o gorogile kwa
dikantorong tsa Lefapha
la Boitekanelo metsotso e
le mmalwa pele ga ura ya
borobong. E rile a tsena
a gakgamadiwa ke bontsi
jwa dijanaga tsa maemo
tse di emisitsweng gaufi le
dikantoro.“Badiredipuso
ba amogela madi a mantsi
tlhe!”A bua a le nosi.
Go ne go na le tsa maotwana a
a gokeletsweng kwa morago, tsa
dipeipi tse pedi tse di ntshang mosi
kwa morago le tse di bulwang
matlhabaphefo le ditswalo beng ba
tsona emetse kgakajana le tsona.
Dikantoro tsa lefapha di ne di
dikaganyeditswe ke ditlhare le
malomo a mebalabala. Bojang bo
ne bo le botala, go bonala fa bo
nosediwa ka dinako tsotlhe. E ne e re
o tsena ka dikantoro, o utlwe mowa o
o tsiditsana.
“Dumelang! Ke nna Nandi
Mothibi. ke tlile fano go bona rre
Kgopodimetsi.”
Kgopodimetsi o ne a lelediwa mogala
mme a laela gore mothusi wa gagwe a
supetse Nandi gore kantoro ya gagwe
e fa kae. E ne e le kantoro e kgolo, e
na le malomo a go bonalang a sa tswa
go kgetlhiwa kwa tshingwaneng. Go
ne go na le setsidifatsi. Mo godimo ga
tafole go ne go na le ditshwantsho tsa
maloko a lelapa la gagwe; mogatse le
bana ba babedi.
“Dumela, mma. Ke solofela fa o
tsogile sentle,”Kgopodimetsi a
otlolola seatla sa moja go dumedisa
Nandi.
“Agee, rra. Ee, ke tsogile sentle. A rre
o tsogile sentle?”
“Ee, mma. Tlhabo ya letsatsi re e
bone.”
Boitumelo mo sefatlhegong sa ga
Kgopodimetsi bo ne ba bakela Nandi
go sa iketlang go go rileng. Bo ne ba
mo gopotsa phokoje e e matlhajana
le boferefere, e a neng a tlhola a
tlotlelwa ka yona ke mmaagwemogolo
mo dinaaneng fa a ne a sa le ngwana.
“Mme o tlaa rata go nwa eng? Re na
le dinotsididi le mogodungwana.”
“Ke tlaa itumelela mogodungwana,
rra.”
“Mma, re amogetse kopo ya gago ya
tiro, mme e re pele ke ya kgakala ke
botse gore a mme ke mogatse Otsile
Mothibi wa mmegadikgang?”
“Ee, rra. Ke nyetswe ke Otsile. E le
gore mogatsake ena o tsena kae mo
kopong ya me ya tiro?”
“O tlaa lemoga fa re ntse re tlotla
gore mogatso ke karolo e kgolo ya
kopano eno.”
Nandi o ne a gakgamala. “Re tlaa
bona teng!”A buela mo pelong.
Go ne ga tsena mosetsana yo
mosetlhana yo moleele, a tlisitse
mogodungwana. E rile a nyenya,
matlho a gagwe a tlala kgalalelo.
A motho yo montle! Nandi o ne a
gakgamadiwa ke gore mosetsana yo,
o ne a sa bitse mongwaagwe a re rre
Kgopodimetsi; o ne a mmitsa ka leina
la sekgoa la Andrew. E ne e le sengwe
se se sa tlwaelegang mo lefelong la
tiro. Kgopodimetsi o ne a lemoga
gore Nandi o maketse.
“Se makale, mma. Batho ba ba dirang
ka fa tlase ga me ba mpitsa ka leina.
Le wena fa o ka dira fa, o tlaa feleletsa
o mpitsa Andrew.”
Ba ne ba simolola go nwa
mogodungwana.
“Mma, lefapha ga le tlhole le na le
phatlhatiro e o tsentseng kopo ya
yona.”
Nandi o ne a ipotsa gore fa
phatlhatiro e sa tlhole e le teng, o
bileditswe eng. O ne a simolola go
utlwa monkgo wa legotlo le le suleng.
Kgopodimetsi o ne a bolelela Nandi
fa e le leloko la mokgatlho o o
busang.
“Re utlwile ka ‘tlhokwa la tsela gore
mogatso o ntse o batlisisa modusetulo
wa rona e bile o tshwere ditokomane
tse di bonweng le go gatisiwa ka
bokhukhuntshwane. A o itse sengwe
mabapi le se ke buang ka sona?”
Nandi o ne a bona gore dilo ga di
tsamae jaaka go tshwanetse; a batla
a fela pelo. O ne a batla go itse
P/24

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
gore ena o tsena jang mo tirong ya
ga Otsile le gore kopano ya gagwe
le Kgopodimetsi e amana jang le
dipatlisiso tse di dirwang ke mogatse.
Kgopodimetsi o ne a mo kopa go se
bolelele ope ka ga puisano ya bona.
Nandi a dumela fela le fa letswalo la
gagwe le ne le sa mo fe kagiso.
“Mma, ke filwe taelo ya go tlhola
phatlhatiro e e seyong mo lefapheng.
Fa o ka dirisana le rona, phatlhatiro
eo ke ya gago. Kana ke bua ka maemo
a a kwa godimo thata mo lefapheng.
Jaanong ke kopa gore nna le wena
re utlwane; o tlhaloganya sentle gore
puo ya me e lebile kae!”Kgopodimetsi
a leka go tlhalosa, mme Nandi a mo
kopa gore a tlogele go dirisa puo e e
bofitlha, a bue puophaa.
“Rra, ga ke batle go inaganela le go
swetsa gore o batla go reng. Ke kopa
gore o tlhalose maikaelelo a gago
sentle.”
Kgopodimetsi o ne a lemoga gore
Nandi ga se mofologelo o a neng a o
solofetse.
“Kopo ya rona ke gore mogatso
a emise ka dipatlisiso tse a
tshwaraganeng le tsona. Re batla le
gore a re busetse dikgatiso tsotlhe tsa
ditokomane tse a nang le tsona. Ke
solofela fa o ntlhaloganya jaanong.”
Nandi o ne a gagamatsa molala. “E
le gore a rre o ne a ka se ke a ya kwa
go Otsile mme a mo itheela? Le gona,
golo fa o bua ka wena le mang kgotsa
le bomang?”
Kgopodimetsi o ne a mmolelela gore
maina a batho a ka mo tsenya ka
kgoro ya kgolegelo, ka jalo ga a na go
bua gore ba bangwe ke bomang le fa a
tlhalositse kwa tshimologong gore ke
leloko la mokgatlho o o busang.
“Mma, ke go bileditse kwano gore
re tle go buisana. Fa o dumela go
buisana le mogatso, maemo a ke
ntseng ke bua ka ona ke a gago gona
fela jaanong.”
Nandi o ne a kopa go bolelelwa ka ga
maemo a go buiwang ka ona.
“Mma, tuelo ya kgwedi le kgwedi e ka
nna dikete di le masome a matlhano a
diranta. Tota nna fa ke ne ke le wena,
ke ne ke se na go tlogela tšhono e e
kalo e mpheta. Ga se tšhono e motho
o e bonang ‘tsatsi le letsatsi.”
“Ke a go utlwa, rra. Fela ke sa ntse ke
batla go itse gore ke tiro e e ntseng
jang e o buang ka yona,”Nandi
a bua a menne phatla, a tlhomile
Kgopodimetsi matlho.
“Mma, ke maemo a botsamaisi. Jaaka
ke go boleletse gore ke laetswe go
tlhola phatlhatiro eo, fa o sena go e
amogela, nna le wena re tlaa tsaya
tshwetso ya gore o tlaa dira tiro ya
mofuta mang. Tiro eo e tshwanetse e
tsamaelane le kitso le maitemogelo a
gago jaaka mmamelemo.”
Nandi o ne a bona fela gore golo fa
o tlile go tsena mo seraing, fa a sa se
kakologe go sa ntse go le gale.
“Rra, nte ke ye go ikakanya pele. Ke
tlaa boela mo go wena morago ga
malatsi a le mmalwa.”
“Se re diegele, mma. O nne o itse
gore nako ga e lete ope.”
Moletlo wa Manong e phasaladitswe
ka 2018 ke Xarra Books. E gapile
South African Literary Award ka go
nna padi e e gaisitseng mo ngwageng
wa 2019.
moletlo wa manong,
by Sabata-mpho Mokae,
Xarra Books, (2018),
978-0-62079-949-2. R220
xarrabooks.co.za or Bargain Books
P/25

book review
Thirteen Cents,
by Sello K. Duiker
WORDS Vuyo Mzini
image Kwela Books
kwela books 2018 978-0-62079-949-2 R220 exclusive books or bargain books
“I think and keep walking.
I scratch in my pocket and
take out my money. Thirteen
Cents. I must have lost one
cent on the mountain. I put it
back in my pocket and keep
walking” – Azure; “Thirteen
Cents”
Thirteen Cents, the debut novel of
the late K. Sello Duiker, uses the
extremely upsetting reality of street
kids that are forced to give up being
playful and imaginative children and
become hardened yet broken adults,
to drive the message of a post-1994
South Africa that has lost the glow of
hope and promise of a happy ending.
The book itself ends with an
invocation of the ultimate cleansing
that some feel should’ve marked the
transition out of apartheid. The book
makes an anthropological comment
on the savagery of human society in
a similar way to William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies; by seeing the world
through the eyes of the child.
Azure is a three-syllable name
belonging to a boy who lives on the
streets of Sea Point just outside of
Cape Town’s City Bowl. He originates
from a Johannesburg township but
trekked and hitch hiked to the Cape
upon the murder of his father and
mother. His story is sad. Before his
parents’ deaths he’s the victim of
school yard bullying by kids who
don’t like the blue of his eyes. After
his parents’ deaths and his relocation
to the sea views, he’s the recipient of
even more sinister abuse. Statutory
rape. Physical beatings by adults.
Stealing of his property. Terror.
Duiker’s detailing of the grit in this
young man’s experiences leaves the
reader thoroughly depressed. The
categorisation of the book as fiction
is your only refuge initially, until you
realise that the author’s inspiration
came from spending time with Cape
Town street children. An experience
harrowing enough for him that it led
to his temporary institutionalisation. It’s
a lot. But it’s also magical, in that way
that art tends and often needs to be.
The book has a good dosage of
magical realism. This is a writing
technique that adds fantastical
elements and characters into an
otherwise realistic context. All
without explanation of any oddity
from the author. It’s usually the kind
of thing that makes you page back a
couple of times to see if you haven’t
missed anything. The first such weird
encounter is a confusing conversation
between Azure and his only friend
in the story, Vincent. Azure has, at
this point, suffered serious beatings
and abuse from the city’s lead
gangster; the violent, merciless and
characteristically insecure Gerald. The
crime committed by the boy seems
harmless enough. Azure mistakenly
calls Gerald by the name of one
of his lackeys Sealy. The coloured
Gerald takes serious offence to being
identified even mistakenly as a black
man. The punishment is gruesome
and offensive and ends with Azure in
a leg cast. The whole episode is also a
baptism of sorts, with Gerald giving
Azure a new name – Blue – and
effectively co-opting him into the
gang. After the whole ordeal Blue
meets up with Vincent and has a
conversation puzzling to both himself
and the reader, wherein Vincent
reveals Gerald to be a clairvoyant
dinosaur:
“Vincent: T-rex, he’s hungry. He’s always
hungry.
Blue: What do you mean? What is that
T-rex shit?
Vincent: I mean T-rex is hungry.
Blue: But who is T-rex?
Vincent: Azure, this isn’t hard man […]
If you’ve got enough voetsek in you and you
know the right people, with a bit of money
you can do anything. And that’s what
Gerald did. He’s T-rex […]Blue: What
does T-rex want with me?
Vincent: Don’t ever mention T-rex when
you talk about Gerald again
Blue: Why?
Vincent: Why? You ask stupid questions
sometimes you know. You must ask
questions that go somewhere. You see that
bird over there? […] That’s right. He can
hear us. So you see, don’t fuck with Gerald.
He’ll destroy you.”
The confusion of this dialogue
is followed by a surreal moment
between Gerald and Blue in which
the gangster takes on Sangoma
powers and re-tells intimate details
to Blue about his abused mother, his
aggressive father, their murder and an
early childhood incident that even we
as readers only got a hint to earlier in
P/26

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
the book. Gerald seems to be some
guardian angel (or whatever the evil
equivalent of an angel is) that’s been
with Blue since before his mom gave
him the name Azure. It’s at this point
that you realise that Duiker is no
ordinary post-apartheid South Africa
story-teller.
The themes of the book seem centred
on identity. The young South African
democracy pops out as a proxy
protagonist, especially at the time of
the book’s publishing. In fact, Azure
approximates some of the struggles
of the country’s emergence from its
wicked past. There’s the confused
identity of a seemingly African boy
with Aryan eyes; a metaphor for the
nation’s forced identity as a rainbow
nation, even though rainbows have
neither black nor white in them. The
insensitive looting of Azure by nonwhite
gangsterism. The prostitution
of Azure to white capitalist society
as represented by the wealthy
married men in who’s lofty Sea Point
apartments and bathrooms Azure
finds himself earning most of his
living. Then there are the magical
meet-ups that also act as symbols of
the state of the nation.
Azure ascends Table
Mountain after extended
abuse from Gerald, where
he meets (in his dreams
this time) Saartjie who
is married to an actual
T-Rex, and who has as a
father an old man named
Mantis who dies from
eating the sun. Saartjie is
“…a woman who looks
like she lived a very long
time ago. She is short and
her bum is big…”
By all accounts this
image speaks to Saartjie
Baartman; the encounters
she has with the two
peculiar males in Azure’s
dreams speak to the long
standing and apartheidsurviving
abuse and
suffering of African
women.
The story’s progression marks the
growth of a quiet violence inside
Azure. There’s a consistent obsession
with water which in the beginning
seems to be a yearning for cleanliness
and purity, but in the middle of the
story becomes about quenching
a kindling that’s happening in the
boy’s soul. No doubt from all the
incendiary experiences. By the end,
the water comes to a boil as Azure
summons fire to what becomes an
apocalyptic climax. The whole affair is
a saddening fate of a society that eats
its young. Duiker’s point is on the
corruptions and inconsistencies that
adults expose children to, a problem
Azure laments throughout the book
in his interactions with adults, and
a subject also explored in similarly
lyrical and energetic prose in Slick
Rick’s Children’s Story and the Roots’
Singing Man. In both songs, a young’n
is corrupted by an adult and then
bears the brunt of the authoritative
wrath that comes thereafter. The
imagery from Black Thought’s verse
in the “The Rising Down” album is
fitting for Azure’s loss of peace and
purity:
“13-year-old killer, he look 35
He changed his name to little no man survive
When he smoked that leaf shorty believed he could
fly
He loot and terrorise; he shoot between the eyes
Who to blame? It’s a shame the youth was
demonised
Wishing he could rearrange the truth to see the lies
And he wouldn’t have to raise his barrel to target
you
His heart can’t get through the years of scar tissue”
Around the time K. Sello Duiker
wrote the novel, South Africa still
minted a one cent coin as part of the
currency. The book was published
in the year 2000, preceded by two
years the discontinuation of the coin.
The tail end of the currency depicted
two sparrows on a branch, which is
said to be a reference to a bible verse
invoked by the women of one of the
concentration camps of the Anglo-
Boer War. The quote from the good
book is in Matthew 10: 29-31: “Are
not two sparrows sold for a penny?
Yet not one of them will fall to the
ground apart from the will of your
Father. And even the very hairs of
your head are all numbered. So don’t
be afraid; you are worth more than
many sparrows.” The symbolism on
the lowest currency denomination in
the country is an affirmation of the
worthiness and significance of even
the smallest of our humble existence.
I don’t know if Duiker was a religious
man (although he seems to have
definitely been a spiritual being), but
it’s uncanny that the symbols of the
one cent coin; particularly the loss
of this coin by Azure to leave him
with thirteen cents; tie up with the
struggle against disregard and abuse
and the fight for worth and hope that
imprint the nearly-thirteen-year-old
protagonist’s life in the novel.
thirteen cents, by Sello K Duiker
(Kwela, 2000) 978-0-8214-2036-2 is
available in all major bookstores in South
Africa and online bookshops.
vuyo mzini is a reader extraordianire
and a book whisperer. He lives in
Johannesburg.
P/27

book review
A Broken River Tent,
by Mphuthumi Ntabeni
WORDS Phehello J Mofokeng
image BlackBird Books
a broken river tent
2018 978-1-928337-45-4 R195 www.jacana.co.za
or Exclusive Books
uj debut prize winner
2019
We live in a time when some white people deny that apartheid was a
crime against humanity. In the midst of such clear and utter madness,
fiction, not history – jerks us back into reality – to remind us that not
only was apartheid a crime against humanity, but this country and the
economy of the world is built on a murderous civilization that enslaved
people the world over and in the main, dispossessed them of their land.
The Broken River Tent is one such book
of fiction – it is a left-hand slap on
the face of a slumbering democratic
nation and a jab on the gut of a nation
that seems to slowly wake up to the
reality of its current dispossession
and dire situation. The Broken River
Tent is a medley of historical fiction,
psychological drama (for lack of a
better genre or classification) and the
story of imagination. It is a journey
of questions, existential debates
and musings. It is a philosophical
conversation between ancient Xhosa
wisdom and the vanity of the modern
democratic society of South Africa.
It is a conversation between the
past, casting aspersions on the
present while making well-defined
proclamations about the future – for
by living in the now, we are actively
creating the past, experiencing the
future. In this book, Ntabeni succeeds
in revealing many of his deeply
thought-out philosophies that indicate
the depth of not only his academic
knowledge, but true intelligence that
runs deep in his people. He also
succeeds in what he called “mining
the aesthetic rigour of history” and
not just so that he can polish the turd
that is history, but so that we can ask
deep questions about history itself.
Ntabeni uses fiction to traverse the
physical and the metaphysical – to
confront the past with his character’s
present. He interrogates the idea
of psychological sanity by placing
a historical figure who died two
centuries ago in the present timeline
of South Africa’s democratic madness.
P/28

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
This forces his main character to
question his own sanity and the
sanity of his generation and country.
Ntabeni’s interlocutory disposition
of the land question is prominent in
this book. His Maqoma – that true
son of amaXhosa did not just jump
out of the ancient moth-eaten pages
of history. Instead he waltzes – or
ukugida – into the young Phila’s life to
provide him with direction, spiritual
connection, traditional wisdom, and
to root him back to the historical
landscape of his forefathers. Ntabeni
is not cursory about the politics of
land dispossession of black Africans.
In fact, he is not shy to centralize the
issue that is relevant today as it was
400 years ago when colonialism hit our
shores. He is deliberately political and
provocative about the land question. I
am disheartened by the use of Latin and
German in this otherwise perfect blend
of history, drama, fact, fiction, fantasy,
mythology and prose as if Ntabeni is
over-hammering his intellect into the
heads of mere mortals.
Ntabeni is the new age author with the
correct dose of intellectual acuity and
traditional rigour and the correct Afropolitics
in his brilliant mind. This book
is a perfect account of the great lineages
and houses of Phalo, of Rharhabe, of
Ngcikana, of Sandile, of Ndlambe, of
Hintsa, of Gcaleka and the fascinating
intrigues of abaThembu, amaMfengu
and amaXhosa. I did not feel betrayed
by the highly-learned and often precise
language of the author.
Well done.
book reviewnyana
Siren, by Kuli Roberts
WORDS Lorraine Sithole image Kwela Books
siren 2019 978-1-928337-45-4 R195 www.jacana.co.za or Exclusive Books
Finished #siren this morning
& had to take time out. This
fast-paced scandalously sleazy
drama had me turning the
pages, mouth agape.
Siren starts with a prologue titled
“Italian sports cars” narrating a
traumatic incident in 2018. It then
moves 39 years back to 1979 where
circumstances of Zinhle’s birth set
the tone of this story. We journey
with Zinhle living her dream of
TV stardom. The drugs, sex and
alcohol-fuelled escapades, sex for
parts and the filth and sleaze behind
TV productions. An eat or be eaten
existence for Zinhle. Up until page
133, Kuli delivers a Jackie Collinsesque
storyline with all the ingredients
to keep the reader hooked on what is
on offer and then some.
However, scratching beyond the
surface, the abuse of aspiring
starlets is an everyday occurrence,
the sham of manufactured lives
and the backstabbing will make you
start viewing your TV dramas in a
different light. Maybe you’ll have a
little sympathy towards the real people
behind these characters. A lot of the
subplots in Siren had a lot of truths
in them. These reality weddings ...
all may not seem like it is. There’s
always a hidden agenda. Siren begs the
question, why are we still hung up on
heteronormative codes in 2019? Like
really ... we have so many pressing
matters to attend to like low literacy
rates, the shrinking economy, the
rising youth unemployment rate etc.
I loved the gossip in the first half of
Siren but the second half had my heart.
The narrative changes and the shift is
handled beautifully. Kuli opens up and
presents us with a whole Zinhle.
I loved Siren because, although the
narrated time spans 41 years, the
narrative is not drawn out. Roberts
held my interest from the first page
to the last page. Siren will make you
cry, shout from joy, scream “Don’t do
it”, sigh out “How could you,” hold
your breath and eventually breath out
because we all return to ourselves
when the time is right. This book is
sleaze with the cheese (even if it is blue
cheese) and it is one of those quick
reads that is accessible to everyone.
While you cannot take it all in, in one
seating, you might need a strong drink
to help you belief it when art imitates
– or is even better than – real life. A
great present for your girlfriends. With
so many #girlsweekendaways this time of
the year, give your girls this gorgeously
packaged gift. You’ll thank me later.
lorraine sithole is a publisher,
reviewer, book professional and the
chairperson of Bookworms GP.
She is reader-extraordinaire and
organising committee member of
South African Book Fair.
P/29

book review
The World Looks Like This
From Here, by Kopano Ratele
WORDS Rolland Simpi Motaung
image Wits Press
the world looks like this from here 2018 978-1-928337-45-4 R195 Exclusive Books
This lyrical yet philosophical
book serves as one the latest
academic contributions to the
decolonialisation movement
of higher education in South
Africa; particularly in the field
of psychology.
The compelling arguments laid out by
Prof Kopano Ratele are on the (re)
development of definitions, methods
and models for a African-centered
psychology. In regards to what is
NOT African psychology, Prof Ratele
argues that African psychology is
not a field in psychology or a branch
of psychology like developmental
psychology or social psychology; and
African psychology is not a specific
area of study, such as the study of
traditional African healing practices.
The author infers that African
psychology is not only for Africans,
practices by Africans or only taught in
Africa, it can be taught at European
universities and applied in any therapy
room globally. According to Prof
Ratele African-centered psychology
is about consciously and intellectually
placing Africa at the center of your
psychological work in order to raise
consciousness or “conscientisation.”
African-centered psychology is an
emancipatory psychology that intends
to help students, researchers, therapist
and activists within as well as outside
Africa, to develop a stronger position
for psychological insights from Africa.
In relation to the current approach of
psychology in Africa, the author cites
some obstacles for psychologists and
students. The author argues that the
negative impacts of colonialism and
apartheid to the psyche have created
an inferiority complex amongst
African scholars. The author contends
that psychology students are taught
to rely heavily on Western knowledge
authorities, thereby made to forget
their own inborn voices and creativity.
Many of the teachers (who are also
psychologists or therapists) were never
taught to teach African psychology;
therefore they mimic how the
“Euroamerican”authorities explain
the contents of the mind, emotions
and behaviors. Eventually this
mimicry is taught to their students
leading to failure to come up with
contextually sound explanations and
models. Prof Ratele’s arguments not
only offer psychology practitioners
and students a point of departure, but
also chance for further research on
other various questions.
For instance how do we really define
who is an “African”within this field;
in regards to origins and “fathers”
of African psychology could it be
only settled to be Jan Smuts (1895),
William Wicocks (1917) or Noel
Chabani Manyani (1970) or there
could be others; and how could
African psychology study (and offer
solutions) current African issues such
as poverty, inequalities, mental illness
(such as depression) or women and
children abuse.
One has to prepare their intellectual
stomachs to feast on this book because
Prof Ratele has offered us real food
for thought with an array of bit size
chapters that interrogate the wildly
held conventions of psychology and
offers solid arguments on the need for
a broader African psychology.
Prof Kopano Ratele (b. 1969) is a
psychologist and men and masculinities
studies scholar. He is known for his
work on African-oriented psychology,
boys, men, masculinity, fatherhood,
identity, culture, sexuality and violence.
He is Professor in the Institute for
Social and Health Sciences at the
University of South Africa and
researcher in the Violence, Injury &
Peace Research Unit.
rolland simpi motaung is a literary
connoisuer and reader of note.
P/30

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
Holding society and
things by a thread
while the fire burns
on both ends
WORDS Sabelo Mncinziba
image Clem Onojeghuo (@clemono)
27 January 2020: I haven’t
written these entries since
the incident with the police...
perhaps one day I will write
about how debilitating and
disheartening it is to be
failed by your country at
the point of service (justice
or health) and worst of all,
you understand the causes
and reasons only too well
and while sympathetic to
the workers at the frontline,
they are at that point the
representatives of the system
that is content by holding
things by a thread consumed
by a fire that is burning on
both ends.
Perhaps I will not write about it
because it is the everyday grammar
of black life in South Africa and we
should save ink for new stories while
the history stubbornly over-inscribes
and superimposes itself on the
present and seemingly, if we continue
as we are, on the future. From then
till now, I have lived and lived out
loud and Phurah’s presence has
meant the world to me. I appreciate
and love this fellow trash from
deep within and our bromance has
been more lively than some of your
marriages and relationships, but we’re
not there.
Today, we tried for the umpteenth
time to pack and clean stuff and it
is clear that I’m a hoarder but I like
to think of myself as an archivist.
We then made our way, spent a bit
of with Mam’Khawula, my favourite
Member of Parliament in the history
of South Africa. After a few good
laughs with u-Ma, we did some admin
then we set to visit Bhut’ Fura. We
met brother Sbu Dikiza at the central
station and had brief chats about his
book selling business Botlhale and
planned hiking activities starting from
next month. Sbu doesn’t smile in
pictures because he is a revolutionary
and revolutionary apparently don’t
smile in pictures ‘til the land comes
back. So clearly Phurah and I are
sellouts and we’re okay with that. So
as Sbu departs, in comes Oscar. Now
Oscar is ... okay so there are beautiful
human beings and there are beings
that put beauty onto humanity and
that is who Oscar is. I absolutely love
this man, respect him and admire him
for so much as a thinker, a humanist
and all round ethical person with
sharp intellect. Gentle soul, loving,
caring and knows how to take care of
himself to be better for himself and
others around him. I hadn’t seen him
for what feels like forever. He was
P/31

with his niece and showing her how
to navigate Cape Town as she will be
studying here.
There are uncles and
then there’s Oscar, again,
phenomenal person so an
absolute blessing and treat to
see him. On that same spot at the
station, I am approached by an
old comrade from the Congolese
Society in South Africa. They
want to host an event that is
aimed at social cohesion and
when I get more details, I will
help with the publicity and it
would be good to have a strong
South African contingent as
pan-Africanism also means
internationalism and that means
solidarity.
Off we went to Tat’ uFura and we
made a brief stop to fit tweed jackets
in the Grand Parade. The persuasive
salesperson kept reminding us:
“fitting is free” so we fitted and we
will make a turn in future to buy,
which will not be free but then we get
to take it home.
Finally we arrive at Tat’ uFura’s place
and I am introduced to two lovely
brothers doing important work in
drama and I reconnect with a dear
sister and comrade from the days of
the September National Imbizo
(SNI), comrade Ngcwalisa. She makes
jewelry in Cape Town and is a
phenomenal musician from one of
the most conscious bands in Cape
Town, Soundz of the South. The
conversations were extremely rich
covering a wide range from local
music to relationshipping in the 21st
century. We had to leave
unfortunately to make it for the last
taxi. On the way to the taxi rank, I
was lucky again to bump into brother
Simon Rakei, one of the most lucid
minds in Rhodes Must Fall and the
only man to date who has better hair
than mine.
We arrived at the taxi rank and
immediately my fellow Rastas in
brown suits (those who know will
know) were targeting me to make
sales of kinds of herbs and roots.
As I am obviously a Rasta, I politely
declined by saying I already have my
supplier of all those good things and
my non-purchase was understood to
be rooted in loyalty.
We made it into the taxi with four
seats left and they filled up pretty
quickly. The music in the taxi is
exactly what the doctor ordered, a
mix of RnB songs to the fastest beats
imaginable and one never knows
if they are coming or going when
listening to such music but fewer
things give you a real experience of
Cape Town better than that. I took
a very important picture for parents
who bring children on to the taxi and
it’s a national rule, if they’re 3 and
above, they pay full price.
So we got off the taxi quite far from
the destination in order to get in
some brisk walking as a compromise
for the jog we had planned to do.
The walk was 31 minutes and it was
good for the heart. We made a stop
to buy supplies for tomorrow, which
is a writing day and if the weather
permits, swimming, soccer and
cooking.
For readings, I revisited parts of
brother PJ Mofokeng’s book on
Sankomota and this book is an
achievement, nothing short of an
inspiration of what cultural writings
on music in this country could
look like. Other readings for the
day included a critical piece on
Audre Lorde and another one on
complicated legacies of Kobe Bryant.
I liked both articles but I know more
about Audre Lorde than I do about
Kobe so I resonated more with it.
The friend who sent me the piece
hated it. I liked the piece and I said
this to her:
“So I finished the piece. I don’t
have a problem with it except
for some really mean-spirited
parts with a strong finger of
resentment but positioned as
critique. Overall, I do not have a
problem with what I understand
to be the objective of the article,
which is to humanize a human
being. We do get lost in idols
because we’re often deprived of
exemplary people.
You and I know brilliant people
that many would come close to
worshipping but we know their
feet of clay. We have these same
feet of clay and people who are
a safe distance from us worship
us too. I personally have no
desire to be a role model
and quite detest the imposed
pressure it comes with it.”
This may as well hold for Kobe
and his golden hands with feet of
clay. I am singularly committed to
appreciating complexity. My disdain
for Moses figures is well-known
amongst friends as I have personally
resisted and continue resisting being
a Moses of anything I am part of and
I caution against this in all things. I
live by a simple creed, eat chocolate
and ice cream and allow humans to
be human.
We are all complicated beings,
the lenses through which to
live life must see beyond good
and evil or angels and demons
because the same person
who is a hero in one story is a
villain in another and we live
to make choices of how we
remember those who mean(t)
a lot to us. I above all else,
choose love. Let me go brush
my teeth (unlike some of you)
and sleep.
sabelo mcinziba is the son of his
parents. He is an intelligent blackist,
strong community organiser, gentle
rebel-rouser with strong pan African
thoughts. An excellent organiser of
humans around a common purpose.
P/32

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
Wild life
WORDS Lauri Kubuetsile
image Clem Onojeghuo (@clemono)
“There! Under that camelthorn, to the left.”
Across the water Dikithi spotted the male
lion through the binoculars. It looked tired.
It was old, too old. Nature should have
taken care of it by now.
“It’s odd he’s out here so far, he never
comes here normally,” May said.
She sat back in the driver’s seat and
drove the Land Rover recklessly
through the shallow channel, getting
nearer to where the lion they’d been
searching for rested. Dikithi stood
at the back and held the roll bar as
the vehicle bumped along. No sleep
the night before was making it hard
to keep his mind on what they were
doing. May stopped the car and
climbed up in the back. She carried her
field laptop to enter the sighting of the
male lion they’d named Mustafa.
“He looks strange, let me see.” Dikithi
gave her the binoculars. She stood
next to him. “I think there’s something
wrong with his left foot. Have a
look, Dikithi. Can you see anything?”
He took the binoculars. A known
procedure. He would talk; she would
pretend to consider his position as if
she saw him as an equal. She didn’t;
she just liked believing that she did. As
long as he agreed with her everything
would be okay. “Yes, maybe a cut
from a branch or something in the
water. Maybe that’s why he’s out
here.”
She grabbed the binoculars back.
Dikithi, even from this distance, could
see the lion get up and limp to the
water’s edge to drink.
“It’s serious if he’s limping like that.
Out here alone, unable to hunt. He’ll
be dead in less than a week if it doesn’t
heal. Oh god this is a disaster. What
the fuck happened to him?”
May took the walkie-talkie from her
belt. “May to base camp.”
“Base camp over.”
“Carl, Mustafa is injured, I think it’s
critical.”
“Is he shot? Did they shoot him?”
“I don’t know. I’ll try to get closer, but
it looks bad.”
Carl’s voice caught all of May’s
concern. “Give me your coordinates,
I’ll fly to you.”
Dikithi listened but said nothing. Last
night his sister had called.
“Miriam is missing.”
“Missing? How does a four-year-old
girl go missing?” he asked her.
“Mme was sleeping and I was at the
back hanging the clothes. Miriam was
playing on the mat near the veranda. I
came back and she was gone.”
He tried not to panic. He was known
for his calm, mature way. “Are they
looking?”
“Everyone is looking. They’ve been
looking all day. But they didn’t find
her. I’m scared, Dikithi.”
“It’ll be fine. Should I come?”
“No. No, don’t come. I’ll phone you
when we find her.”
P/33

No one had phoned. So now he
waited.
“Dikithi!” May was in the driver’s seat
again. “Pay attention, man. We need to
get closer. As close as he’ll let us.”
The lion was back to its spot in the
shade. They drove nearly onto the
island and it didn’t move. It opened its
mouth wide and roared ineffectively.
Dikithi saw the wire snare on the lion’s
front left paw, but kept quiet.
May was back next to him. She was
fit for an old woman; he suspected
she was in her fifties. She had a tight
strong, sinewy body. Her hair was
short and grey, her face lined from
too much time in the sun. Around her
mouth was a fringe of tiny wrinkles
that revealed her as a smoker. She
was well educated: first university in
South Africa, where she was from,
then the UK, and a PhD from a
prestigious school in America. She’d
been studying lions in the Delta for
nearly ten years now. Before that there
was a project in Tanzania studying wild
dogs. She liked carnivores and liked
telling people she liked carnivores. She
thought it made her sound fierce.
She was unmarried, never had children.
Dikithi knew, though, she was not
sexless. He heard rumours and saw
the evidence of her affairs over the last
three years they’d worked together.
In the bush for weeks with a person
leads to connections that would not be
considered back in town. More than
once even Dikithi, nearly twenty years
younger than her, had felt a hand left
on his shoulder that moment too long.
He never pursued it, had no interest,
and knew better in any case. May
fired research assistants she’d tired of,
research assistants trained in the same
big universities as her. She would not
hesitate to get rid of Dikithi, a local,
trained at local universities that she did
not respect. After an affair, she quickly
got rid of those she no longer wanted
and Dikithi needed this job. It was
better for him to pretend such things
never happened, to act like he was not
privy to such hints, that he was not
sophisticated enough to know when she
was horny and he was the nearest lay at
hand. He understood it all and chose to
pretend he did not. It worked well for
both of them.
She had the binoculars; it would not
be long until she saw the snare. He
waited, looking back and forth from
the lion to the old woman.
“Fuck!” She’d found it. “Can you
fucking believe what these people
have done? That’s a snare on his foot!
I could murder them. Look at that
fucking thing digging into him. It’ll kill
him but these fucking people don’t
get it, they are too fucking stupid to
understand beauty. To understand the
value of this magnificent animal!”
She fumed and Dikithi watched in
silence. Such words no longer affected
him; at least that’s what he thought.
They waited more than an hour before
Carl arrived with the vet. They would
pay close to P30, 000 for the vet and
the helicopter. Dikithi made P4000
a month, despite his Bachelors of
Science degree and his nearly finished
masters in wildlife ecology. He didn’t
do the maths behind it all, it would
only annoy him.
Carl jumped out of the helicopter
followed by the vet, a Maun resident
from UK who lived in a big house on
the river mostly paid for by researchers
such as these ones. May ran to them
as they disembarked. The helicopter
left, headed back to Maun. Mustafa
watched it all and didn’t move. Dikithi
did the same.
“We’ll need to dart him,” the vet said
after taking a look in the binoculars.
“Dart him, then I’ll cut the snare off.
It doesn’t look too bad from here. He
ought to be fine.”
“I’m so sick of this brutality,” Carl
said. “What the fuck is wrong with
these people?”
“No compassion.” The vet’s tone
stated that he had come to the
conclusion after careful observation.
He was an expert on such thing. He
should be listened to. “Look at their
dogs. Thin, mangy, full of worms. Not
a one brought to the vet. It can make
you sick if you don’t accept this is just
how it is here with these people.”
Dikithi watched and listened without
much interest. He wished they’d be
quick so he could get back to Maun
where there was a cellphone signal.
He told himself that there was an sms
waiting for him, hanging in the air,
ready to get into his phone, to tell him
she’d been found. The little girl he’d
lived with since she was a baby. Clever
and kind Miriam, named after Miriam
Makeba. Always so happy to see her
Uncle Dikithi when he arrived from
work. Dear, dear Miriam was already
found. She had to be.
The lion lay on its side, knocked out
from the tranquiliser. The snare was a
simple one, used to catch buck. Dikithi
had made his share of them when he
was a boy hunting to supplement their
meagre store of food. A wire, nothing
more. The vet snipped it with a pair of
cutters. There was a raw patch where
the snare had dug in, but not deep. The
lion must have only had it for a day or
so. The vet applied a salve, gave the lion
an antibiotic injection. Dikithi knew
both the salve and the injection, both
used on his cattle. Total price: P15.00.
Total charge from the vet: P10, 500;
Dikithi had seen the invoices.
The researchers took the opportunity
to take all data they could while the lion
was down. They looked in his mouth,
they weighed him, they searched his fur
for ticks and put them in a tiny bottle,
they took blood. Anything they could
to collect more information on this
valuable study animal. The lion started
to move and they took refuge back in
the vehicle. They waited another hour
or so to make sure the lion was fully
awake, not in danger of being attacked
when he was compromised. Then they
headed back to Maun.
Dikithi drove so the three could talk
freely in the back. Though he was also
a researcher, a scientist, they never saw
him as such. He was the driver, the one
to send, the assistant—the boy. Never
any more than a paper cut-out of a
person.He drove and his mind was only
waiting to hear his phone beep. They
got to the tarred road, the sun setting
P/34

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
ruby-red behind them, and still Dikithi’s
phone was quiet.
He parked the car at the station after
dropping the vet at his big house.
Unloading the equipment, he finally
heard the waited-for beep of his phone.
It was an sms from his mother: call me.
He finished what he was doing. He was
not ready to call her, he didn’t want to
hear. He wanted to be away from this
place. Nerves were everywhere; even
good news would shatter him now. He
would not be compromised here – with
them. He parked the vehicle under the
shelter and went into the office.
“I’m finished.”
May looked up from the computer.
He suspected she was working on
her very popular blog about the lion
project, updating it with news about
Mustafa. He’d been to the site before,
had read the blog. It was written for
people in America and the UK, people
who thought May was a hero saving
the beautiful lions, the lions they saw
on David Attenborough doccies. The
lions which were being decimated by
the uneducated natives who cared
nothing about them. She got paid to
travel all over the world because of her
blog, because of her important work.
Because she was the saviour of the
lions of Botswana. She’d speak and
they would crowd around to listen. She
was the brave expert from the wild far
lands. Dikithi could nearly write the
comments that would fill the pages after
her post about what had happened to
Mustafa.
Such animals — how could they?!?
Maybe they should be treated the same
way. Hang them from a tree
Poor Mustafa, I feel as if a friend has
been harmed. Have they no heart? How
could a human being do this to such a
lovely animal?
Kill the fuckers!
“So can we go out again tomorrow to
check how Mustafa is doing?” May
asked as if Dikithi had any choice in the
matter.
“Sure. How about we leave at five?”
“Sounds great. Thanks, Dikithi. I
know it’s been a stressful day for all
of us. Have a good rest, I’ll see you
tomorrow.”
Dikithi got his bike from the shed
and rode home. He waited. He was
still not ready. If Miriam was found, if
she was safely home playing with the
chess board he’d bought her, sleeping
soundly with her puppy, Tlou— his
sister would have sent a message.
“She’s found! She’s safe!” it would have
said. He would not be asked to phone
his mother. At the room he rented
opposite the university, he pulled his
bike inside and leaned it against the wall.
He sat down on his bed. Only then did
he dial the number. A man answered.
“I’m looking for my mother. It’s
Dikithi.”
“Dikithi, it’s Kathumbi, your uncle
from Seronga. I think you’ve forgotten
me it’s been so long.”
“Yes... no... I remember you. Can I
speak to my mother?”
“Dikithi, there’s bad news here. Your
mother’s not fine.”
“Bad news?”
“It’s the child. She’s gone I’m sorry to
say.”
Dikithi breathed in and out and in and
out. Conscious of each breath. “Did
they find Miriam?”
“Yes, Dikithi. She must have gone to
the river. We found her body. Maybe a
hippo or a hyena. We don’t know. An
animal killed her. It was hot. Maybe
she went to the river to fetch water.
She was young, she didn’t understand
such things. No one knows what
happened. Only we know she’s safe
with Jesus now.”
Dikithi clicked off his phone. He sat
still. He pictured Miriam her tiny fingers
frozen by death, her young body torn
to pieces, her eyes closed and her – the
beautiful soul – missing. Gone forever.
The body now just a carcass like any
other. All of what Miriam was to
become lost in the ether, never to be
realised.
The walls of his room were too close,
the air heavy and mean. He got on his
bike and rode and rode. He thought he
should call his sister. Maybe he should
get on a bus and go home. He should
likely tell people he needed to go to his
village to prepare for his niece’s funeral.
But he could do none of that. None
of it seemed the right response to this.
He rode his bike faster and faster. The
tears fell down his face sprinkling the
ground behind him with their sadness.
He tried to ride so fast he would finally
escape the truth. He tried and tried, but
the truth followed at close distance and
would not leave him be.
The next morning, May came out of
the office to smoke a cigarette and
found Dikithi waiting by the vehicle.
“Oh .. you’re here early. Good, I was
worried about Mustafa in the night
too. Let’s get started.”
Dikithi waited at the vehicle, already
loaded and ready to leave. They drove
out the tarred road and then the dirt
and finally past the gate into the park.
May took out the receiver for the
VHF collar the lion wore. It beeped
immediately.
“Oh he’s nearby. That’s good news; it
means he’s walking again. He must be
feeling better. ”
“Yes. Very good news,” Dikithi said.
His voice was as dead as his insides.
May took no notice.
Dikithi drove where May instructed him
to, giving the direction informed by the
transmitter. He didn’t really need the
directions but took them anyway.
“He must be up here. Maybe across
that pond on that island there.” She
pointed to a small temporary island
created by the larger pond at the front
and the channel at the back. Dikithi
drove through the water and to the left
of the island.
“That’s odd. He must be here, but I
don’t see him anywhere.”
Dikithi looked through the binoculars
and spotted the lion immediately.
May put out her hand, but Dikithi
held them tightly. May looked at him
confused, her hand hovering in the air.
P/35

“My niece died yesterday.”
“Oh Dikithi, why didn’t you say
something? I’m sorry.”
He handed her the binoculars. A gasp
told him she saw the lion. It lay on its
side, obviously dead. “Oh no. Did you
see him? Oh god no! Dikithi, drive
closer.”
He drove next to the animal. It was
shot in the head with a rifle of large
calibre, like the one they kept in the
Land Rover. The animal’s foot looked
nearly healed. May fell to the lion and
lay prostrate on it. She wailed into its
fur.
“How could they? How could they
have done this to you?” she cried.
Dikithi looked down at her. He was
exhausted from all of it. It was hard to
hold your tongue, to keep still when
anger seethed. It took a lot of energy.
To listen to ignorance and falsehoods
and know nothing you say will
make any difference, to realise your
powerlessness in a place where your
power should trump theirs. It all took
endless supplies of energy, energy he
could no longer find.
Miriam’s death had gutted him;
nothing was left inside. He would go
home to his village deep in the Delta.
He would not think of any of this
again. It was time to live the life that
he was meant to, the one for this place,
the true one. He would push it until all
the Mays disappeared, until all of the
Mustafas reclaimed their place, not as
stars of blogs to build other’s fortunes
– but as nature decided. Of nature,
decided by nature, dictated by her rules
only. No room for the exploitation by
those not cognisant of the truth.
“There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s
go back to the station,” Dikithi said.
May looked at him as if he’d lost his
mind. “What do you mean? I can’t
leave him ...all alone …out here in the
bush. Not Mustafa...”
“Get in or I’ll leave you here,” Dikithi
said firmly.
May looked at him, her lips pursed in
anger showing each and every one of
the tiny, ingrained cigarette wrinkles.
He waited only another moment for
the unlikely chance that she might
change her mind. She didn’t.
He drove away, only glancing once at
the old woman sitting with the dead
lion. Only once and then they were
gone forever.
lauri kubuitsile is a well-accomplished
author with nearly 20 titles to her
name. She is a multi-award winning,
full-time writer living in Botswana.
Kubuetsile was shortlisted for the 2011
Caine Prize.
P/36

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
The
Commission
WORDS Andrew K Miller
image Steve Johnson (Pexels)
‘If I get it, this commission,’ said Slovo,
‘maybe you can fix the toilet seat?’
Michael Ford smiled in that way of his.
‘But you don’t need a seat, do you?
Your bathroom is fine?’ ‘Community
thing. People need to shit, in general.
It’s like a human right. You know. A
seat.’
Slovo’s landlord tracked across the
canvasses pinned to the studio wall,
spending particular time on his
favourite, a charcoal of a runaway
horse in a shopping mall. ‘He’s pretty
conservative,’ he eventually said, toilet
seat forgotten. ‘So he wants the same as
everyone else. You know, big African
boy face. The eyes. White frame, three
and a half by two and a half.’
‘Convenient,’ said Slovo. ‘I am an
African. I used to be a boy.’
‘I told him you were about the best of
the new crop.’
‘You lied.’
‘Ah, don’t be modest Slovo. You are
one of the best.’ ‘So... how much?’
‘Unclear at this stage, but market value I
guess, around seventy.’
‘So he takes it and we’re finished? I’m
paid up?’
‘Oh yes. Completely.’
‘Good news. I’ll bring the blowtorch.
You can burn the shackles off
personally.’
‘You’ve come a long way, Slovo,’ said
Michael Ford, proud parent. ‘In two
and a half years.
Amazing. It really is.’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s the top of the pile. Swedish. If he
takes one, he’ll take more. Famous for
his support of young African artists.
This could be a big break.’
‘Mine? My break?’
‘I think so. I really do.’
Michael Ford had inherited the building
from his father, who received five city
buildings from his father, who’s father
built them. Four were slums, slumping
in key areas, perpetually in danger of
being hijacked. But The Prison was
different, and always had been. Even in
his childhood it had been an arty place.
Watch it go, his father would say to
his mother, chuckling. These brats pay
proper money.
Bottom line: Michael Ford’s father
never gave a monkey’s ass about art,
or artists. He was a property owner
and rent collector. He swapped the
city buildings out for financial district
properties, one by one, but a white
guy without shoes offered him much
too much for one of the floors on
The Prison, and it went from there. By
the mi- 90s the place was filled with
similar types and the joy, the miracle,
was that they wanted it exactly as it
was. Unpainted, close to unserviced,
electricity and running water the only
needs.
Now The Prison was a city institution.
You couldn’t get a studio unless you
were deeply connected, and they never
came onto the market. Never. The
name – The Prison – was an in-joke
referencing the repressed psychospiritual
state of a Johannesburg city
artist. It was the career prison, actual
prison, or nothing, so they said. But as
the years passed, the sarcastic origins
were forgotten. Now, today, 21st
century, it was a brand. Michael Ford’s
master stroke.
He created it by holding back on new
rentals. When one of the old guys
left he hung on, found a young star,
someone fresh and on the rise. And
broke. Then signed him up, knowing
he wouldn’t make the rent, and took
payment in paintings. Which he
valued himself, dangling the keys in
desperado’s face.
Thus, Michael Ford built his very own
pipeline into the art world. Within a
decade of his father’s death he owned
one of the best collections on the
continent. He chatted to Presley, the
caretaker, on the way out.
Presley was thirty five years old, just
two years his boss’s senior, but his
girth, poor skin and worn blue work
overall made him look around fifty,
maybe even older. Michael Ford
P/37

treated him with the faux-veneration
generally reserved for the elderly,
which Presley cultivated to his
advantage. Example: he limped
strategically when Michael Ford and
others of the boss type were around
and the limp, which grew in depth
and magnitude over the years, secured
much in the way of outsourced
logistical support. At The Prison,
external providers were in and out
daily to change light bulbs, fix the gate
and so on.
Presley didn’t work as a caretaker as
such. He managed. He guided. He
outsourced.
Today, the conversation was about
night security – whether the outside
guard needed more than a truncheon
and a whistle. Presley reassured
his boss. Guns were dangerous for
everyone. Guards preferred not to be
pulled into that kind of thing. Besides,
they had phones. Armed response was
a speed dial away.
‘Dankie baba,’ Michael bowed
at Presley, bleeped his navy blue
BMW and drove out. He looked for
pedestrians – none – then edged the
vehicle’s nose to the right and round
the corner, checking the central
locking and accelerating quickly away.
The white heart beats fast in such
parts, and, familiar as he was with the
area, Michael Ford was fully focused
as he navigated the four tight turns
through the dark and the rubbish and
the places no one would ever want
to get stuck in a BMW. Back in his
studio, Slovo fell into a low-slung,
defeated couch, grabbed the mouse
and clicked through a mega sized Mac
screen. He clicked and roamed, clicked
and roamed, but the options were all
the same and he didn’t want music or
movies or porn or social media... he
wanted something else.
Which was often the case with Slovo.
In these moments, the wanting
moments, he empathized with the
drinkers and the smokers. He would
have loved to roll one up and fall back
to drift, but he wasn’t a smoker. So he
clicked and wandered some more.
He knew this buyer. Michael Ford had
no idea of this because Michael Ford
didn’t know much about anything.
Didn’t realise, for example, that he
himself had known Slovo for five
years longer than he thought. Had
met him when he – Slovo – was an
eighteen year old student. And had
met him again many times through
the intervening years, had shaken his
hand and asked him the same empty
questions over all this time. Had met
him, in fact, at college with this very
same Swedish dude – the buyer! – who
also shook his hand and asked him all
same shit about being black and young
and African. The cat had an impossibly
soft handshake and stank of money – a
deep olfactory hum more powerful
than any perfume.
So, the commission had always been
the plan. From a young age Slovo had
understood he would end up tangled
in someone like Michael Ford’s debt
chains, but he also knew that Ford had
the keys to the locks, and would offer
them. Ultimately, Michael Ford would
make sure you were selling enough
to pay everything off. At the end you
would go to the bank together, child
holding white daddy’s hand.
And now it was happening and all it
would take would be a dead-pan yet
hopeful African child, face, three and a
half by two and a half, big eyes of the
type Slovo had been drawing his whole
life, so, maybe three hours work,
possibly more, and he had three weeks,
so, well, this is exactly how you end up
on the couch pondering the meaning
of life. How you end up lying around
feeling wrong about the right things,
looking for a fight when the only
thing in the room is a bright, colourful
hologram of your future.
Slovo was six foot five and didn’t fit
on his couch. Thus, he prioritized
his head, which nestled in a groove/
indentation on the right arm,
supported by the only stuffing left
in the thing, which had gathered
obediently beneath his skull into a
pillow shape. From the knees down
his legs basically just hung off the
other arm. Whether it was destiny or
unwitting habit he didn’t know, but it
worked. With his feet close to touching
the cross-hatched parquet floor the
backs of his knees had worked their
own groove into the other couch arm,
and so in the two most important areas
he was truly nestled, and able to lie for
a long, long time.
This particular time stretched to nine
hours, the peace eventually broken
by a need to pee. People walked in
and out of his studio for the duration.
Some came to talk art. Some came
to see what he was watching. Some
came for company. Some came to
smoke. While he didn’t smoke himself,
Slovo enjoyed the act of smoking.
The rich green stink. The silly, wafting
conversations. Five kids arrived in the
early evening. Students. He engaged
with them as much as he could, casting
back to when he was that young but
also never moving off the couch. Made
them scrap on their own through the
sheets and sheets of canvas to find the
right pieces, then made them stand and
hold them by the corners – two people
per piece, for everyone to see – before
they rotated positions to get a decent
look for themselves. It was indulgent
and probably pretentious but he was
just in that mood.
Mostly, though, he thought about art.
He lay three inches from the floor,
heels brushing against the dusty wood,
clicking and snoozing, chatting and
staring into blank space, thinking
about art and the fact that he was able
to do this, lie around thinking, which
was, the more you thought about it,
extraordinary.
Also, within the general mess of
his current mind-state there was
a creeping sense of loss. A feeling
he was growing familiar with, and
which appeared to be an unexpected
side effect of career success. A
consequence of commissions. Maybe,
he thought to himself, there was a
karmic debt to be paid every time you
delivered one these big-eyed kids to
the white people. Maybe you lost a
fragment of your soul every time you
drew that expanding, hopeful face.
Maybe.
Anyway, the loss. As the art
thing turned from aspiration to
P/38

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
reality – something involving sales
and agents and galleries and media
coverage – Slovo felt a nugget of
discontent growing in his gut. A sense
of escalating disquiet. He tried to draw
it, paint it, and came out with seven
massive abstract swirls of human
forms breaking apart. As he drew them
he saw that these figures were, in his
own view of the thing, decomposing.
Which didn’t dampen the mind-noise,
nor deal with the internal energy.
Which actually amplified it. He
dropped a few clown noses in and
gave them titles that referenced Kafka
and they sold well, which only added
to the feelings.
Maybe, he thought, it was all a
response to attention. Maybe there
was something deeper going on that
he wouldn’t be able understand right
now. Maybe his psyche was getting
quietly damaged by all the old ladies
and their thick make up and gushing
arms and tentacle fingers. Or maybe,
equally, it was a spiritual kick back,
a consequence to the string of girls
always lined up. The career ones and
the funky ones and the little neon
lesbians and their boyfriends who came
off mostly as female or metrosexual or
whatever they called it...
So, maybe it was a fame thing.
Regardless, when he tried to give it –
this feeling, the nugget – a name, the
best he could do was sadness.
Slovo was getting sad.
He’d never been sad before, nor
prone to self-referential emotions.
Nor, in fact, to self analysis. But now,
unquestionably, he felt sad. And was
getting sadder. Which wasn’t the way
it was supposed to turn out. Before
his career accelerated he had painted
with a super-charged, rebellious fury.
It could last for weeks, the power. The
force. Three or four paintings a night.
Sleep at dawn, roam during the day,
then back at it. He could go for weeks
like that, months even, and it felt
exactly right, like each move he made
out in the world or within his studio
was charged with the right degree of
frisson. Like he was, within his own
self, nuclear. But now, in this moment,
lying on the couch and considering the
looming commission, it was all loss.
Sadness.
The next day, Presley knocked and
they shouted at each other about the
ladies toilet. Who kicked the door
down, Presley yelled. Why always
kick the door down? To which Slovo
reacted on multiple levels while trying
to keep his focus. God knows how
many men came through The Prison
on the daily, but at least two or three
of them needed to shit. Life is just like
this. People have to shit, and often in
an emergency kind of way. And when
there’s no seat on the toilet they are
prone to kick through the little pink
door to find one, which is just how life
is, but there’s no reason for this to be
happening – this shouting! – because
he, Slovo, doesn’t even use the public
toilets, he has his own at the studio, en
suite, so what the fuck really!
What the fuck.
Why won’t Michael just put a seat on?
These are artists studios. How can they
own us like this, take our paintings like
this, without ever bothering about a
toilet seat?
How?
Presley, being blue collar, and not
being an artist, struggled with the
shape of the argument. And also with
Slovo’s perpetually horizontal, couchlocked
form, which to him was an
affront to civil life, general respect for
others, basic masculinity and more.
It’s art, motherfucker, Slovo spat at
him. You don’t have to understand it.
Just get used to it. Me, lying here like
this. This is art!
It was a clear, simple message. A
construct, if you will. And, like all
good art constructs, it spread quickly,
albeit this time via the unusual prism
of the domestic network. Presley
had lunch with the waiters from the
restaurant in the gentrified quarter and
told them a long and elaborate story
about the building, the toilet seat and
the conflicts, concluding, via great and
furiously articulated exclamations, with
the battle with Slovo, on the couch,
legs dangling, being art.
From there, word spread. Up from the
basements and into the rarefied light
of ownership and artisanal coffee and
investment. One of the artists at The
Prison had actually become art, word
said. Was claiming his body to be art.
Was lying there, right now, being art.
And that was all it took. Slovo was an
installation.
Visitors arrived to take photos, and
posted them. Serious, long legged girls
from Finland and Switzerland and
Harvard sat next to him, stroking the
tatty couch arm as they asked him to
deconstruct, and if he was married, and
where he intended to take this next.
And on.
After day three it had become a real,
tangible thing. One of the cruising
journos wrote a story for the Sunday
papers, and, given Slovo’s already
rising profile, it – the thing, the art –
was cemented.
Michael Ford visited, twice, to express
concern about the commission. Mr
Swede was known to be indulgent of
many things, but also had a notorious
streak of fussiness when it came
to his young Africans. He valued,
Michael Ford said, stern and worried,
punctuality and timeliness. He would be
flying out in ten days and he expected
to take his art with him. Given the
extent of Slovo’s rent debt, this was
not a matter of options, or choices.
He had to do the piece. He had to do
it now. And it had to be right. Many
future trajectories rested on this. And,
therefore, as engaging to the media and
the groupies as this couch stuff was,
and as good as the pictures looked in
the newspapers, he, Slovo, would need
to get cracking pretty fucking soon if
the whole thing (ie, his entire career)
wasn’t going to collapse.
Slovo nodded, half an ear on the
bustling queues outside. Yes but, he
said. The thing is, the toilet seat.
At which Michael Ford took deep, next
level offense. Got all huffy and started
chanting about how he couldn’t be
expected to provide ablution facilities
for every itinerant artist in the whole
city who needed a shit. At which point
P/39

Slovo yelled over his shoulder and the
door opened and the visitors poured in.
Slovo had a lot of time to think on
that couch. Day after day he flapped
his ankles, which were starting to swell
and lose their shape, and thought.
Mostly he thought about the loss, and
the sadness. He tried to dig into it, this
unexpected and counter-intuitive force,
and always there, within the stream
of considerations, were ideas about
commissions. The strangeness of being
told what to do and the universality of
it – being instructed – through time
and space. As long as artists had existed
there had been rich fuckers hovering
around the edges of their lives telling
them what to paint, when, and how.
Fine.
But today, right now, circa 2019,
Jozi, said rich fuckers all wanted the
same African children, and what did
that say about the whites – locals and
Euros – that they needed, craved,
deeply desired, this specific image on
their walls? Charcoal textures. Big,
sweeping lines. Dashes of color but the
piece must be fundamentally black and
white and of course the big eyes. Those
enormous, pre-pubescent pools. Now,
he understood what they were painting.
The boys. His boys. His peers. It was
themselves, really. Young soon-to-bemen
about to head into it. Life. Big eyes
watching, taking notes. Fine. He could
paint his aspirant young self many times
over and he would come out with the
eyes they wanted to hang over their
couches. But why? Why did they need
those particular eyes? Why did they
want his eyes?
Because, look, no one was drawing –
or selling – white kids with big eyes.
They would if there was a market,
but there wasn’t. So why did Michael
Ford and Mr Swede and all the others
at the auctions and the cocktail parties
lust so hard for young black faces?
And, if there were so many already
on the market, done as well as they
had been by the big name artists, the
high value dudes, why did Mr Swede,
who owned a clutch of these things
already, need him, Slovo, to create
another one?
The thoughts occupied him mostly
in the quiet hours, the dead of night
when there was no one around.
During the day, on the couch, as the
visitors washed through, he tried not
to indulge in the mental at all. Rather,
he sought to relate to his audience. To
take their experience on-board and
share as authentically as possible with
them. To be the art they came to see.
Michael Ford began visiting daily,
often accompanied by Presley, who
hung in the background looking
judged and anxious and excited all at
the same time. The landlord actually
wrung his hands as he lectured about
the commission and careers and how
fragile they were, then more about rent
owed and the fact that Mr Swede was
not only already in town but in fact on
his way out in less than four days.
Slovo offered platitudes and
assurances but really, as the dance
continued he started to relish the
contest and perceive his interactions
with Michael Ford as their own kind
of art. Was this not, truly, creativity?
The push and pull between money
and talent, capital and labour, the
whore and the pimp? And, as if by
magic, the more he threw himself into
it, the battle, the contest, the more his
sense of loss dissipated. The longer
the lying on the couch piece went on,
the less sadness there was, and the
more of that old power. The more he
felt more alive. The more he actually
started to feel like art.
One of the critic kids, a writer, new
generation boy called Songeziwe, did
a story for the foreign press, which
kicked things higher, and further.
This was the joy of the new boys.
They had the English and some
other kind of fire, a need, an urgency,
to talk intellectual identity through
art, and if they got their claws into
you – and Songeziwe was all claws,
always – it was like they turned
you into an academic course or
something. The benefits were beyond
disproportionate.
It was for the Washington Post. After
which they queued at The Prison
gates. He, Slovo, on the couch, was
the main attraction, but they went
everywhere else as well, and everyone
was selling. The studios hummed with
transactions and even Slovo, rooted
to his couch, sold six, or was it seven,
from his old stuff.
Mr Swede eventually came to see.
Michael Ford issued a pre-warning,
told Slovo that this was serious, the
man was coming to lay down the law
re: his commission, but of course in
art there are no laws and Mr Swede,
still wrapped up in his scent, still
flicking his scarf back and forth over
his shoulder, was aflutter. Smitten.
Slovo held the spirit of the African
child close to his heart throughout.
Said little. Kept his eyes wide and
suggestive. Let them do all the
talking. And they did. They filled the
space he left open with all sorts of
shit, and the longer it went on, his
big-eyed silence, the more Michael
Ford and Mr Swede nattered away
like nervous young kids, and plans
were made, trajectories set and tickets
booked. Within three weeks he would
be lying on that couch in a gallery in
London and the fee was more, much
more than a portrait could ever have
brought, more than enough to free
him forever from all slaveries and
servitudes, all locks and chains.
‘I wonder,’ he said to them after his
new life had been mapped out, ‘if,
maybe, if London is a success, we
could apply for funding?’
‘Of course,’ said Mr Swede. ‘After
London, funding would be possible
for most things.’ ‘Toilet seats? Do they
fund plumbing peripherals?’ Michael
Ford stepped back from his artist, lips
curling with distaste. Mr Swede looked
confused, his eyes pinging between the
two. ‘Sorry?’ he said.
andrew miller is a Joburg-based
freelance writer. He has worked
extensively in the city arts scene over
the last decadeAndrew is a public
speaker and performance poet, and
has appeared on many stages across
Gauteng, from business schools to
the Daily Maverick Gatherings
P/40

ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
africa state of mind
The political,
intellectual and
revolutionary
act of black
African
independent
publishing
WORDS Phehello J Mofokeng
image Thabiso Bale
There has not been a time like
this in African literature – a
time where so many Africans
are active participants in their
own literature; as independent
publishers, authors,
independent booksellers,
readers and other active roleplayers
in the industry.
There has not been such a time of
high production and consumption
of literature by Africans in this
continent. Every other day in
Johannesburg alone, there are many
book launches, book events and
readings and a large contingent of
book clubs. The role of the black
African independent publisher
is multifold. It is to political,
revolutionary and intellectual. It
is a very political act to publish
the kind of work that some of us
publish in some African countries.
It is revolutionary in so far as it
subverts the old colonial models of
and attitudes towards publishing our
narratives and in our languages. It
is intellectual because it is a genuine
production of black thought/
thinking and black expression. It is
revolutionary because it challenges
all the century-old assumptions of
publishing of Africans. It is more so
because we do not write and publish
to “write back to Empire” – we do
not write/publish in a reactionary
manner. We also do not write to
please or comfort or put at ease,
white fear. We do not do it to be
revolutionary only to subvert the
colonial assumptions about what
African literature and black thought/
expression ought to be. We are
writing ourselves into existence. We
are involved in canon-making!
Black independent publishing is
a fertile ground for black radical
thought, for black African feminism
to find root – in expression and
in practice. If we assume that
writing (thought/expression) – not
necessarily the final, printed book
– is at the core of black African
independent publishing, it is easy to
see how black African independent
publishers are subverting or removing
the West from the centre. Africa
is becoming – it has to be the new
centre and the black independent
African publisher is the catalyst to
this recentering. This rise of the black
African, independently-published
books would not be anywhere
near where it is today without the
burgeoning self-publishing industry.
There is a wholesale dismissal
of some of these books, most
of which are self-published. The
argument goes a bit like this. Most
of these self-published books are
unprofessional, with bad English,
bad typesetting, questionable artwork
and unconvincing printing. Most of
these points are correct. In fact, my
personal experience is that many selfpublished
authors do so, to spite the
publishers that rejected them – not
because they have a genuine story to
tell in the main. This is not my main
point though.
The main reason for the mainstream
P/41

to dismiss self-publishing is far more
complex. Firstly, some of these
self-published titles go on to become
canonical work. They become
best-sellers and the traditional
publisher is left with a proverbial
egg on their face. Secondly, because
self-publishing is not as organised
– or cartel-like similar to traditional
publishing – it is hard to audit it,
to follow its money and to derive
reliable statistics out of it. Traditional
publishers who have for a long time
operated like cartels will fail in this
wild, West of self-publishing.
Thirdly, self-publishing is seen as an
informal economy. Informal economy
is any economy that is mostly
populated by average working-class
Africans. It is such a pity because this
term is the one adopted by African
governments too as if informal
economy uses different, less valuable
notes of currency. But I digress.
Self-publishing operates in the
shadows of the main publishing
economy and this is its strength.
This informal nature is exactly what
the traditional publishers reject –
because they cannot hold sway or
monopoly over it. It is one of the
few places where black Africans can
control every aspect of their books
and colonial; and this is against the
very tenets of traditional publishing
industry – tight control of every
control of black Africans lives. This is
the main reason it is dismissed.
Black African independent publishing
is also dismissed because of similar
reasons, while still slightly better
off. Black African publishing
exists on the fringes of the main
publishing industry that is in the
tight grip of the colonial and former
colonial publishers. It is my humble
suggestion that we are doing just fine
on these fringes and margins; because
this allows us to do things, to explore
solutions, to be experimental and to
be insanely innovative in ways that
the big (former) colonial publishers
can never be. This is one of the main
theses of this short reflective essay.
My other proposition is that
black African women have to
increase their participation
in this crucial industry of
African content creation,
curation, direction and
publishing. So far, women’s
participation is mainly
focused on supporting roles
of publishing – such as
editing, proofing, reading (in
and through book clubs).
I think we are under-utilising one of
the continent’s richest, wisest and
formidable resources – black African
women. Women have to take centre
stage in the curation (and success
of) Africa’s content that ends up as
books. There are some women who
are central to publishing in their
respective countries, but they are
not nearly enough. #SebenzaGirl,
#SebenzaMfazi Female publishers are
leaders of the pack
Patriarchy is still rife in the
industry and as men, we are still
condescending to women and we
treat them – especially the readers –
as second-class or tier of the market.
Bibi Bakare Yousouf of Cassava
Republic is leading the march in
a highly-literate, yet governancechallenged
Nigeria. Rose Francis has
been at it since the 1990s – at the
ebb of apartheid and the beginning
of Mandela years. Ndibi Xxxxx
(Chimamanda Adichie’s partner and
friend) of Qqqqqqqq is holding the
fort in Nigeria. In Rwanda, Louise
Umutoni of Huza Press is holding it
down and finding new paths in the
complex world of publishing in postgenocide
Rwanda.
I will focus this short reflective
essay on ‘black, African independent
publishers’. My definition of this
type of publishers is broad and
specific for a particular reason. My
definition is based on ownership and
creative control. By ‘black African
independents’ I mean publishers
who own and creatively control – at
the very least – one portion of the
publishing value chain. In the main,
black African independents own and
direct the creative output of their
published work. This means that
they may not necessarily be able to
control or creatively input in the
other parts of the value chain; namely
the mass market distribution channels
(especially chain bookstores) and the
print production means. There are
very few publishers who own their
own distribution channels. Where
they do, these are usually ‘informal’,
guerrilla and tactical.
There are few (if any) ‘black, African
independent publishers’ who own
machinery and print production
facilities. The effect of this is that
the publishing model for many of
these ‘black, African independents’,
is that they leak value at the two
crucial stages of their publishing
business – the crucial stage of print
production and the even-more crucial
stage of distribution or access. The
result of this is that books from these
publishers suffer a serious access
deficit and they are not in control of
pricing their own books, because the
biggest cost of publishing; which is
printing; is outsourced.
Black African publishing is
a deeply political act. It is an
act that is not done to prove
anything – because in Tony
Morrison’s words – and
I paraphrase: racism is a
distraction that makes you
try and prove yourself all the
time.
So this pantheon of publishers is
not involved in publishing to prove
anything – it is involved in publishing
for commercial and political reasons
of ownership of multiple African
narratives (voices), multiple African
representations (in fiction and
elsewhere), multiple commercial
imperatives.
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ja n-marc h 2020
4.1
It is a political act because we are
eventually saying “nothing about
us without us.” It is an important
political, social, psychological and
philosophical undertaking because
we have always been aware of the
importance of the printed word
– how it can affect people, how it
can shape a nation and how it can
be a means of identity formation.
In many ways, it is also a spiritual
act that evokes the “fireside tales”
of our ancestors. Of course, not all
publishers will see it this way; but it
is reflected in some of the titles that
they produce – that they are engaged
in an activity far more important than
a simple commercial endeavour, or
‘woke’ trade/industry.
The decolonial misadventure
Fanon’s point of departure about
colonialism and its counter-narrative
– or decolonisation is clear. He says
that decolonisation is a violent event.
It simply is a replacement of “a
certain “species of men” by another
“species” of men. This is the case
in this setting up of this renewed
estate – of black independent African
publishing.
This estate – or industry –
seeks to assert the centrality
of the African narrative; as a
point of decolonial departure.
It asserts itself – often in
jarring, missteps of not nearly
well-polished books, crude
and weak businesses – in a
proud, unapologetic presence
that stands a bulwark
against the cannibalisation
of the industry by colonial
publishers and their offshoots.
This publishing industry – small,
fractured, usually strapped for
finances, independent from foreign,
white money – is a presence in itself,
for itself; or at least it has to aspire to
this. It is not a response to the white
monopoly publishing; or at least it
should not be. It is not a rewriting, a
righting of a colonial perception of
Africans and telling of their stories.
It is not a return of the ‘white gaze’
or ‘colonial misrepresentation of
the African’. If black independent
publishing tries to be a response
to the white, colonial publishing
industry, it will be reactionary. If
it is reactionary, then the whole
decolonisation of the industry is a
misadventure.
The purpose of the black independent
African publishing should be to
produce meta-literature; that which
exists for itself or for other reasons
than responding to something –
especially not colonial thought,
representation and misdirection. This
kind of publishing has to take Fanon’s
median of ‘replacing a species of
men with another species of men’
to another level. It has to go beyond
that – by initiating its own ‘centre’
that does not concern itself with what
the former colonial publishing is
publishing or producing.
This new ‘centre’ – away from
Western thoughts, away from
former colonial representations and
away from whiteness (and all that
comes with it) – is the new African
meta-narrative; that exists for itself;
that which does not respond to the
Western representations or colonial
thoughts about Africa. It is a moment
of ‘near-tabula rasa’ – where nothing
existed before. This attitude of the
black independent African publisher
allows them to rethink the African
narrative, its languages of production
and existence, to rethink and re-find
‘natural audiences’ and to define itself
outside of colonial precepts of what
African literature should be.
Decoloniality therefore lies in many
parts of the publishing industry for
black Africans. In one part it lies
in the ownership of the publishing
entities. The other part is in the
genres that such decolonial publishers
will publish. In some cases, these
genres do not even exist yet and
black independent African publishers
have to innovate around this – and
a success here will be a major
decolonial turning point. Another
area of decoloniality is involvement
– at serious decision-making levels
of the industry – of black African
women.
Another area of decoloniality is in the
languages of these African literatures
and how they get ‘mainstreamed’
by the black independent African
publisher. And all of these are going
to involve some kind of violence and
resistance. The colonial and white
owners of the ‘mainstream’ publishing
industries are going to resist entry
of these decolonial efforts into the
bloodstreams of their businesses.
They will refuse – for a myriad of
reasons – to distribute and sell these
new, African narratives. They will
deem them shoddy, unprofessional,
lacking the market and so on. And
this is the main reason why the
main glory of decoloniality of this
industry is in ownership of the entire
publishing value chain.
Not one single element of the
business must take place outside of
the black independent publisher’s
spheres of influence.
This is going to be a violent
affair – because the WMC
publishers and colonial
publishers have kept a tight
grip on these levers of the
publishing business in the
continent and in the world.
To wrestle these from out
of their hands is already a
struggle to the end.
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