What follows is the first part of a (slightly compacted) dialogue between Bongani Madondo and Benj DeMott that began after DeMott sent Madondo New Year’s greetings with a link to a Nina Simone classic.
DeMott replies to Madondo above and Madondo then completes their correspondence here.
January 7th, 2016
Big B.
…Half of last year had a powerful, overwhelming, nostalgic wave, re-listening to the Miriam Makeba Songbook (her music from 1950s to 1980s, mostly). I’ve been obsessing about a biopic. Late past the voodoo hour. When I am up. Asleep. Or sleepwalking. So perhaps, these constant attacks of Makeba’s sonic blues are just part of the audio-research for a feature film completed down to the last scene in my head. Mazi. Miriam. Zenzi. NutBrown Baby. Ah. Mhhh: love in times of the revolution…a story about intense romance and love steeped in activism, actually.
Film is not only insanely expensive. It has its own complex politics. A spider-web of egos. Legalities. Family permissions. Denials. Envy. Protecting loved one’s legacies. And so on: So, it’s a snail pace project that might or might not happen in 2020. In any case, just that desire and movie-in-my-head trans-ferried me back to that which connected us in the beginning: her music.
I have this theory that for decades Makeba has been hailed more for her activism, and gal-from African village novelty (owing a great deal to her Svengali, Harry Belafonte’s sleek PR suss: organic, raw, gut-punch cultural compass and composure), and less about the deep magic powers embedded in her acutely restrained delivery. I think she’s simply one of the key players, one of the key shapers, of the American folk music idiom. Something unimaginable or so scary a thought as to deserve decades of non-analysis. Sure you are hip to that concept: Death by love. We love you madly, hon. Just as long as we don’t hafta deal with that complexity hidden beneath your easy-to-access, electrified, village-girl-done good, chocolate beauty.
Ewe!
Bro, the lady has shaped how generations of black/brown & blue(s) women in both the U.S. and the African continent have seen and continue to see themselves in matters of style, hair, body, etc. As you can imagine, I’ve been swallowed whole into the Makeba world-spirit-space. I think I have it for her, not unlike how half of the other America still have it for that dame Norma Jean, and the other half for Dorothy Dandridge, or whoever’s the current voguish, dead black, red hot siren these days.
But now I’ve come up for air. What more can I share with you?
Oh jah, ah know…check out the following:
a) a young un called Nakhane Toure
b) Zamo—Album called At Last
c) Luanga Choba—Album called Luanga Who?
d) Zonke—Album called Ina Ethe
e) You might want to revisit Vieux Farka-Toure, the late Ali’s son.
But man, I’m dealing with a lot, especially economic survival issues. So listening to sound with one ear.
You might have heard, South Africa is now in the GRIP of the most harrowing, loudest, angriest, divisive racial storms, accidents, outpourings, largely instigated by still unattended socio-economic needs of the black poor majority and tinder-lit by sporadic, but too numerous to ignore white supremacists, as well as ordinary, decent, white folks spewing out prejudice, playing out well-drilled, ahistorical, and dishonest, confusion: “what exactly do these people…Black people wants us do to, huh?” When not defending historic, evil-begotten privilege, outright. Sigh, the beloved, country—vein bleeding land of my fore-mother. Well, check, I also found out my folks might have originated from Congo…Robert Farris Thompson’s Congo and not Conrad’s “the Congo.” They could be from up in the Cameroun, where’s Skip Gates when you need him: Come to think of it, his ingenious DNA technics could be quite essential leveler of bullshit in times of strife. In countries such as South Africa and America, spiritually ripping apart at the seams, where history lessons were clearly not sewn tight for posterity.
As it is, S.A. is DEPRESSINGLY choking under the grip of the monster of racism…which then pushes a whole lotta black folks toward a Fanonian eye-for-an-eye p.o.v., as well as stoking long dormant black reverse psycho hatred where enraged, spat-upon young black folks talk, without irony, no sense of history, no nothing, of a wish to Auschwitz(ise) whites in this country just to teach them a lesson or two, and I am like WTF?
How will genocidal talk even begin to teach the racialist aggressor that African lives matter?
Have we not heard enough of these plaintive cries: We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with Our Families? Young University adrenalined bucks (shouldn’t they bring back compulsory conscription or some kind of coming-of-age life ritual, here, I sometimes wonder?) speak about: Doing to white South Africans (which in South Africa includes a sizable, educated, outspoken, media-trained, and prominent Jews) what Hitler did.
It’s such a blond thing to say: but mate, at core, it’s all about lack of manners. I mean you can be a fool, that’s, like, pretty normal: But do you want to be caught out broadcasting cruel foolishness? I blame my generation. We left their upbringing to television and toy war stories.
Auschwitz the day before yesterday, Kigali yesterday, Marikana today, and then what…a human race to prove who’s the most heartless?
How about ignoring, and strategically isolating specific supremacists? Or call them out fo-sho; even better, excel in what we can be, what we’ve been and who we are: God’s beloved among the other beloved in the universal league of nations? Sounds, like Mandela? Jimmy Baldwin? Look, I know this love shit can be flower-puerile…ineffective in times of strife, but I am just tired of raging against Whitey for Whitey is so used to those blues dirges, he no longer hears my people’s black and blue rock’n’roll yowls as calls to action to gaze deep within self but as cries for street manic dances, until we all get along just fine and disperse, all will be alright.
All will be forgotten. All will be frozen in tomorrow’s news bulletins’ headlines. And why not, we’ll all resume our roles: victim raging against the machine of the privileged.
In my country, the privileged look the same. It’s easy to spot them. It’s not their preppy blue blazers and quality Ralph Lauren khakis. (We call them Chinos down here. We’ve always done. Long before China angled for post-Cold War spoils from Cape to Cairo. Never imagined Mao and Rhodes could now be united in their imperialist after-lives.) They don’t look like they live in Soweto. And this is the thing I was wondering about just the other day, Big B:
Why, if we are to believe what the travel brochures tell us: if indeed Soweto is such a “modern, urban colorful, hip, exciting, sprawl of well-oiled African capitalism at play, great African cuisine, enthusiastic customer service at its shebeens, to-die-for high tech and high end mobile communications market, aspirational hot young thangs, hot wheels, huge-ass mansions dancing on the koppies (hill-tops) where public transport is right on time, with tram-like buses and snaking taxis” and all, and if my fellow white br’d’rn swear by Mandela so much whycome there’s zero white residents present in Mandela’s Soweto, twenty-how-many years since his long walk to freak-dom?
Why doesn’t Soweto have its gentrifying Middle Class?
How come Soweto has not had its share crop of hipster residents who go about their boho and bo-hoo-hoo’d lives attending loft parties where no one speaks to anyone? Sure, who wants to wish gentrification on his people? But here’s the thing: In South Africa; there are certain spaces, specific people, that even gentrification would not dare touch and not because the property developers are heritage-conscious. Nah. They just don’t want to fuck with black spaces. Doesn’t matter the length of wide-mile smiles black folks always welcome their fellow white “tourist” citizens in their communities, or braai with them on those days sleek PR machine stage rugby games between white only teams in Soweto, white folks will never put their tents and hang their hats over in Soweto. True, Soweto has several safe, well protected, million-dollar mansions, but still…
About the black anger. I’m personally depressed as I was one of those Black Consciousness activists who worked hard, breaking through the hard-core layer of rage, personally talking and writing about the need for radical-humanism or radical-liberalism which is what Baldwin, and my fore-grandparents as well as the turn of the 20th Century founders of the ANC, and others, such as Biko, were all about. A radicalism steeped in not exclusively-Anglo specific Liberal Traditions, inspired and built around the philosophy of love, spiritual dialogues at its centre.
I have been exploring that for the last five years or so…still looking for ways of firming it up, growing, and really getting it out there, WHILE ACTIVELY AVOIDING THE PATH of active activism.
I am a storyteller. A digger of tales, too.
Direct ideologue’s path, not for me. Even community work’s not for me, though it depends on what’s at stake.
With the refueled racial monster which I must state, is a specific White Racist Denial and unearned Exceptionalism—an ominous, unspoken, yet acted out smugness, that some claims was borne out of fact that black South Africans were too naïve to drive them into the sea.
That and the intense, Afrocentric rollback with its own half-baked responses, makes it implausible to even dare argue for the idea of love as a radical, humanist philosophy, through which we can all escape the murderous Ausch-witches in our heads.
True, friend: I sound defeated before I’ve ever started.
Perhaps, it’s because I am.
PS: Big B, you might want to check a piece, White Debt by Eula Biss in the New York Times Magazine, 2nd Dec. 2015. Your thoughts? … All the meandering in this email is your Little Boy Blue(s) brother’s response to the Nina gift. Nina made me do it. Blame Nina Simone.
[Part 2 of “Mad Love (& Hate)” here.]