Journeys - The Ocean

This expanse, our planet’s ‘blue lung’; is a wondrous monster teeming with other monsters beyond our imaginings. It is now a cancerous and dying drop that once reared civilizations and their brutal aims. Carried slave ships and became a burial cloak for ancestries of numerous generations, but still a beauty that astounds even sailors who obsessively traverse its channels and tides. This daunting majesty of nature’s exuberance endowed with life, remains an inertial entity with a frightful gait, home to nightmares for children who had never set foot or toe in its mass. We fear it, other worship it, yet its allure has seen man build vast cities at its edges and surfers battle its insurmountable waves. It was once sacred to many nations of antiquity, yet today, after years of its exploitation it has brewed storms and acidic climes that threaten all life on the planet.

A mystery to poets who claimed leagues beneath its boulders, and others who sought dead lessons muddied by its salty grasp.

This is the ocean, a destination of leisure for the privileged and a sewer dump for the self-same decrepit minions that feel it deserves no respect for its dainties.

I sadly cannot swim, but I have dipped my soul drunken from its pull and saw my minute stature before its gaze. Yet, I am forever enthralled by its rise and fall, the moon’s magic resonant with its laps around our sordid world.

But what have we done to it as a people with deft demands for living?

We have hunted its lot, the whales and fishes that call it home.

Guided by the languages of our judgements, we deemed the ocean our basket of treasure and taxed its worth at what we now call the pitch of our excellence, never mindful of the purpose of its existence. Religions called the earth once formless, because it was the earth of old and for concern of its plasticity we never abstained from its shores.

It knit our nations into a single rock, dared to lift us above its vegetation and spawn, but we crawled from its womb never mindful of its age and wisdom.

We, the instigators of all forms of baseness instructed not in temperance and self-restraint deserve its chastisement, judged by the Gods who reside fixed in its quarters.

We should taste the swords of its aging service now that global warming has depleted its heart and marrow, and the ranks of man must tumble under its raging discipline.

As we know no plainer way of living, this gluttonous race must hunger henceforth, so our splendid robes shall never hide our poisonous bellies. The ocean is sick, yes, and we children of excess and arrogance should starve for our tyranny.  

Headlong down the final precipice of our doom we should fall, for our fancies are perilous to existence on these mothering waters. Our courage to intrude even the depths of life has yielded this demise, yes; and our inferiority must be laid bare in the face a frenzied extinction we have caused for many life forms that shared the spoils of the ocean with us.

And yet these glossed eyes of indifference has us seeing the beauty of the waves, serene and swelling, boat of our conquest wading the blue; and we seem to forget the carcases buried beneath squandered by our mighty arms and rage at all thing living.

Will each day we also die, perhaps to become the weeds tangled about boulders and sharp rocks which will forever remain monuments of this befouled ancestor.

We delude ourselves and swim in the mess of excrement, swallowing gulps at heights of summer; and yes, it is beautiful. The veils our eyes have become to the horrors we baked convince us that all is well in this giant well of time’s mastery.

But there is death in this tomb, thus perhaps each never thinks of death until we glare at its sceptre rising above our frail bodies. This journey, this lie is but the cover of mistakes and pomp we possess.

Footprints of our frenzy carve memories of death within this immense graveyard, the natural world subdued by our lust.

And the ocean dies with each trip, each sail stretching, each roaring engine and the oils sucked from beneath its pressured breaths.

Images by: Khahliso Matela

Jazz At JAG

Drums brushed in tipsy strokes as bass walks.
Enraged fingers slithering on a Bosendorfer poked by a revered band leader in lament.
That was jazz, trumpet belched in twin storms, and the vaunted humbleness of Nduduzo Makhathini strutting over keys in a tempestuous calm seeming alchemical.
Could one assume that musos suffer a self-aggrandised demeanour to their vocation?
By divine setting, I was in the right place at the right time, when JAG was celebrating some 100 years of its existence and at this session organised by some of Jozi’s ardent followers of the local jazz scene.
The crowd was sensual, hypnotised by his musical aptitude.
They listened to all the escapades of fellow necromancers on their toys of choice.
At times I wondered if Tumi Mogorosi’s drum solos were bothering on trivia, when handling sticks with jovial nonchalance of loose rhythms and cymbal chimes.
I think that his is a genius of play that resurrects a child in any lover of music.
Undeniably their selection represented a potent force of libation for a forgotten ancestry, feisty and direct.
Nduduzo duly calls the music a voyage into ancestral realms, through their muddied sweat or something like that.
And as is, I believe these artists have their genesis in a body of classical folk songs which have moulded their sensibilities, and they sound well versed in compositions of giants.
And carried on those colossal shoulders of the departed, they could not falter but transpose those ancient wails into a new musical vernacular.

But how does his sound translate into a validation of information about his séances with the ancestral?
Perhaps, as I was convinced, this music is an invocation of the dead into the realm of us the living dead.
A call back from our graves of contemporary exclusion from the aural and thus providing a framework for his ensemble to reassemble emotional puzzles which seem to be Nduduzo’s dilemma about those who shut their eyes to the present.

The extraordinary freedom of improvisation embodied in his compositions, even though by knowledge the music is stringently composed, is something to ponder, because instead of palming off a fantasy of sodden deliverances his entourage seems to speak of real reserves of self-control inside the African psyche.
Take for instance the staccato gusts from Mthunzi Mvubu’s saxophone.
They seem too impenetrable for a layman like me, but I dug how he explodes into a wide range of tonal possibilities inherent in that instrument.
He adds mystery to mastery.
Thus I say, this ensemble, with unmistakable grace have forged an organically righteous sound of a same-minded communion, and if surprise is of the essence in artistic pleasure, there was plenty of that in their session.
Nduduzo’s compositional freedom comes with mastery of one’s craft, and one is thus compelled to appreciate the musician’s virtuous versatility and bravery to reinvent already existing aural dimensions to relay the new.

I'm no aficionado of jazz, but I was somewhat troubled by the seemingly overt white patronage of the session, but what could one expect when the JAG is a cathedral of white craft underscored by black expression caged in cubicles that are often obscured by granite and glass barricades?
But perhaps the tide of change has arrived, bagged in satchels of bespectacled revellers crowding Joubert Park, and those proselytes taunted by zealous pick-pocketing youngsters baked by the Jo-hazardous sun.

One crowning glory was sights of children gallivanting among heaving musicians, seemingly more interested in the gyrations of this five piece entourage in full swing under a slight drizzle.
No deafening silence was allowed by these children during intervals, and their voices, as part lyrical to the antique meanderings of sound, spread an ecstatic air among the patron of the session.
One such youngster was even assisting Nduduzo pour pianic milk into ears unclogged by wide open mouths stretched in mirth and awe.
And what mischievous little fingers they were.

Another artist stands in the periphery of my eye, sketching on a giant board what appears to be a piano, a band of instruments basically.
He seems to be in a trance of his own, music a shuttle in which he is navigating the canvas.

So, who actually are these cats?
Irrefutably some new colours in the motley tapestry of SA jazz, an addition to those contemporary musicians that matter, by the likes of Carlo Mambelli, Marcus Wyatt, McCoy Mrubata, Paul Hamner, Kasivan Naidoo and Siya Mkhuzeni to name a few.
And they are young.
Some quite younger than the musicians I just named.
Now, that has renewed my faith in the radical potential of jazz music in this country, its transformative intimacy that speaks to the divine in each one of us now seems possible in this desert of talent and museums of narcissistic performers, young and old.
And they are a dynamic, each holding their fort.

There was that small frame and sleight built trumpeter Robin Fassie Kock, lisping with vigour and us enjoying the spoils.
Bass thumbed and slapped by nimble pressure of Ariel Zamonsky’s astute hands.
Tumi Mogorosi’s solid rhythms letting them pace over black and white under Nduduzo’s grasp, and the kettle drum timbre, rattling the joint in applause of a saxophone’s entry.
The trumpet and sax seemed like twins at some moments of arrangements, but it made sense that the twins would bear an asymmetry ordained to all things in the universe.
But they waltzed in some dazed unison, blurting slurs and blessings in a dance only those born of the same wound would muster.

Oh!
I later eavesdropped on a conversation between fathers, suggesting that the sessions should have playgrounds for the little rascals.
Another went as far as suggesting a chaperone who would take them on tours about the gallery before the show.
I thought those would be cool ideas, also thinking about my young ones who should be here within these primordial walls now soothed by spiritual sounds.
So, we all best attend every first week of every month in support and to attest to an enduring wellspring of local talent in a space that is antiquated but brought to life each time a note is struck.

Images by: Khahliso Matela and Tseliso Monaheng

Journeys

There are different types of journeys that one can embark on; spiritual journeys towards enlightenment, journeys to Mecca, and journeys through childhood, journeys from small towns to cities, journeys home and away from home.

And what I have come to understand is that journeys are the essence of life in that as we are entwined with the ever flowing stream of time, our life experiences would culminate in journeys.

As a filmmaker, I thrive on journeys, those long enchanting drives through irrevocably lush pulchritude of vegetation in riotous colours and desert landscapes brushed by mischievous breezes, through ragged terrains of this mystifying country we call home.

It is during these journeys through our annexed lands that we will rekindle a truer reflection on our history, repudiate all lies censored into our collective memory which has sadly rendered many amnesiac towards the true nature of our bondage and destined freedoms.

Travel through the impeccably racists towns of our land and recall how our grand sires lost these treasure to the sleuths of imperialist agenda.

But I also realise the changing relationships between humankind and nature in the face of a rapidly advancing technological epoch, where we are often enticed to discard interpersonal interactions with ourselves as well as natural spaces, the great outdoors.

When we discard the yoke of common chores that characterise our consensual servitude in deranged cities and towns, when we opt to breathe that crisp air not clogged by smog of constant traffic jams, only then will our souls awaken.

We will look unto a vast sky and appreciate our place in the greater scheme of creation, and realise just how unnatural conditions that are assailing our minds contribute to the devastation now termed ‘industrial diseases’.

In the same breath, we will clearly witness the disparities in economic opportunities which are a legacy that deemed whites as superior to the natives of this land.

Despite its exaltation of urbanised living, society is awakening to the realization of its detrimental effect on the psyche.

The great majority of human beings (if they have not already died young) have been afflicted with misery and stress… a variety of stress syndromes are foreshadowed by incessant demands for excess that have covertly convinced many that they are working hard to reach their dreams, as a form of commitment to progress.

But I am also of the belief that a return to nature can alleviate many of the ills we suffer in the quest for economic productivity.

We can justifiably hold the belief that these lands of possibility exist, and that the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our existence could be in large measure surmounted by a concerted effort to journey beyond the walls of our metropoli.

These journeys would rouse a keen interest in life and its portable joys, its naked mysteries and sorrows, only if the empath dared to venture without insulant dread.

As I always take pleasure in capturing pictures of some of the places I journeyed to in my young life, I thought it best to therefore post these images with the hope that they would inspire many of us to travel more, leave the infernal noise of cities and loose ourselves in the majesty of nature and vestiges of spatial treasures our home planet is offering.

It is through these spontaneous journeys that we encounter people and the awe meeting other souls destined to cross our paths during our tenure on earth.

We see sights, objects that rouse curiosity; animals we feel within our innermost selves when stared at by their untarnished eyes.

That is perhaps why the posts presents a variety of images ranging from landscapes, portraits and even abstractions on that which had captured my eye.

And by the way, the phrase ‘capture my eye’ has something mystical about it, because it somehow implies that I am not solely the captor of the object I am photographing, but simultaneously a captive.

A Hundred Year Overdue War

The history of our paralysed country is written in blood, though history’s manicured words are censored to down-play the role of whites in the continued deterioration of the fabric of our unity as black people.

Our most fervent proclamations should be about the race as an itinerant component of politics in contemporary SA, which sadly remains the bedrock of elitist expansion through the African continent, and still relegates blacks to the lower echelon of social participation.

We must realise that the present democratic dispensation as a sell-out tactic devised by the white minority to wean out power under guises of liberal sentiment.

They will never give up the wealth usurped through mischief and murder of the natives, not even today.

So, our land and wealth must be taken back through brute force and not some legislative adage concocted by their puppets in government.

A people’s manifesto is necessary for this perilous venture, because the elite have inaugurated a police state that will only serve to safe guard the pearly gates of suburbanite affluence.

The deviltry of white supremacy should be countered by the impunity of an enraged black population, which if at all cruel, should be thrice as cruel as the conditions under which they trotted down our hapless ashy people.

We must exhibit that ‘recuperative power of our race’, as Pixley ka IsakaSeme proclaimed, and if may put it bluntly, undertake yet a new Bhambatha uprising with renewed vigour and less self-preservation.

The august temples of law, as founded on the conniving morals of whites, should be toppled, not by only violence, but an irrepressible demand for reparation for the theft they ploughed through our fields.

Their prisons should be shackled shut, if not populated by the plunderers of the wealth of this land.

Our economic servitude, dispensed by their mediocre education system should be dismantled by us who are now helots in the land of our ancestry.

I don’t see why ‘having white friends’ is good, when they are fed slavishly by our hungry mothers seated on verandas mowed by our sweat ridden fathers who today cannot even recognise their own families due to emasculation for a mere pittance.

Farm workers have picks and spades in their hands, and they should use those to replay Terreblanche’s death on all farms, Nat Turner style, marauding through our crops and watering them with ill blood of the oppressors.

And if you possess a nose worth its salt, you will understand why a war has been postponed for over a hundred years while they continue their pillage of our country.

The secret intentions of white colonists still play out a tragedy on black flesh, and our continued deputation which beggarly trivialise our dead who are turning in their graves.

And yes, my ravings could be construed as a lapse into African racial fundamentalism, but hell, why not.

I am of a race downtrodden by another calling itself God chosen.

This immense hatred of whiteness is not incidental nor gradual, but concrete and ordained by my bloodline. I am not oblivious to the fact that black problems are white and that every black person must dissociate themselves from everything white, privileges included, to attain true freedom.

Not this landless liberation myth devoid of historical recall.

If white thievery resulted in the land being in their hands through innumerable wars waged against blacks, then it is logical to adduce that through war we will reclaim our lost possessions.

Yes, their agents in the new SA managed to legislate the disarmament of blacks, but with or without gun, this land will be drenched in blood.

One might say, they have cars in which to flee this battlefield, but come on, petrol station attendants are us, we serve them food in restaurants and we know all sorts of poisons, we are tellers in their banks and stores.

Let Wouter Basson school kith and kin on what he did to our elders and tell them to expect worse.

Or do we think the move to be suicidal as racist pen paddlers fabricated Bhambata’s defeat and lynching as indignant?

He and his warriors laid the foundation for truth, even though that truth was vanquished by sword of perverts. He was not suicidal, but a martyr.

The war I am proposing is the finalization of the Bhambatha Uprising to resolve the debacle, with Moshoeshoe’s tactics, coupled with new technologies which by the way the white are fine tuning for the depopulation of Africa and all lands un-white.

Our accursed constitution is a sanguine document plagued with irrational policies about land issues, a triumph for the temper of our lounging oppressors and that has to be mentioned unequivocally.

The continued race humiliation endured by blacks in SA is a mockery of the ideals many of our stalwarts died for, and a blemish to any effort towards a regeneration of Africans in general.

It is obviously by concerted effort that our history has been lobotomised by white historians and their black intellectual cohorts.

A friend once asked why is that their archaeologists can find fossils from millennia ago, but cannot exhume the remains of ‘the millions massacred by Shaka Zulu’.

The only answer I could muster was that history is mostly a fabrication by a few who are charged with records, factual or not.

One has to look no further that their sacred texts which a cauldron of misinformation and prosaic heresy churned out of yellowed manuscripts.

The self-same sacred texts are the foundation of a religious fervour which has incapacitated our people, literally palsying them into submission; a deterrent from murdering the oppressors.

Let us henceforth abandon their religions which were instrumental in rendering us barbaric in the eyes of the world, and turn those churches into monasteries of revolt.

And I find it amnesiac and saddening that a plethora of educated blacks of proven intellect are now flocking to join ‘the Nationalist Party incarnate’, the DA, which is the white vote clinging to a long standing knuckle clutch on the land they stole.

I am not saying one has to endear themselves to the debauched ANC of latter days which has desecrated Bhambatha’s place of death with mansion for a scrupulous president. Well, unless the mansion is a kind of memorium for the Chief’s lynching.

But the political schizophrenia of the act leaves much to be desired, considering that whites are still landowners and us, their food slaves.

Our ‘new black government’ has become the watchdogs that shelter white privilege from black desperation and hunger, look at what happened in Marikana.

The same token blacks will slaughter their own people if land grabs had to erupt.

Now I ask, what is to be done, beside a complete overhaul of all structures of power that are lenient to white proprietorship of stolen property.

It still baffles me that even in this day of RDP houses, and willing buyer willing seller policies, our people consistently battle to receive title deeds for those measly pieces of stands now ridiculing their strife for land dispossessed by a racist nation of whites.

While our economic rape ensues, their children are flocking to rifle ranges to learn how to kill blacks effectively, and their wives drive SUV’s into shopping complexes to buy whatever they like with their ‘good looks’.

I ask again, why are there farm brutalities when the black government promised protection for all citizens?

Not the protection provided by the police, who are just an arm of subservient power mongers versed in ways of pleasing their pale master.

I ask, how does a black man in this day and age want to be a cop under a white superintendent, or a black parody of white superintends who brutalises fellow Africans with impunity?

That’s the only employment they can find others claim, but ask why is that the only job is to be a gate keeper to your oppressors mansions?

I recently attended a memorial lecture in Mkhondo (formerly known as Piet Retief), and all un-salved wounds of our people peeled wide my heart’s infernal blisters.

Perhaps that excursion was the well-spring of my rage as exposed in this cogitative article.

The giant that was Saul Mkhize (May his soul rest in peace) finally received his well-deserved recognition and his name embalmed into souls of our nervously living confusion called democracy.

Any ardent researcher acquainted with the annals of our unwritten history should know about this brave man, who in spite of a demonically christened white population’s repressive land grabs, stood strong with unparalleled bravery against an assault on his people’s dignity.

A vociferous leader and a former evictee of Sophiatown, his assassination by a white constable named Nienaber left indelible a mark on souls of black folk who faced and refused forced removals from their black owned farms of the Daggakraal communities.

That was the impunity with which our revolutionaries were dealt, yet none of us today can exhibit such resolve when fighting for the land that our forbearers tilled as inheritance for their future generations.

So why my ecclesiastical rage at all things white, even when raised by a white foster father, you might ask?

Read a bit between the syllables of a fabricated history wedged between pages of canonised books throttled down our throats at schools of their design, and you will comprehend my disarray.

I mean since time immemorial, whites have engineered poverty among black people, and that poverty is and remains the source of their wealth.

So, I will dare those shack dwellers crowded in squalor of Alexandra to go invade Sandton estates.