Presence: An Essay About Black Peoples Presence In An Antiblack World
1. Events and Eventuality:
Recently the BAT Centre hosted a visual arts exhibition inspired by the life and socio-political works of Fela Anikulapo Kuti; the Nigerial bandleader and the most revered pioneer of Hi-Life and Afro-Beat music had such a profound impact on people’s lives globally. The exhibition was organised by a duo of young industrious Arts entrepreneurs calling themselves KMH Productions and it was received remarkably well by both the media and the audience.
The audio-visually stimulating show was something of an eye opener for the BAT Centre and for the people of Ethekwini in general as the BAT Centre has always promoted cutting edge projects that revolutionises the way people view arts and culture in general; but for the rest it was really a reminder of how imperative Pan Afrikanism is to a people who are usually compelled to forget their most radical teachers and healers.
Many people who had not even heard of Fela Kuti were pleasantly surprised and educated by what they saw and heard. The fact is in this antiblack world which is overly determined by Eurocentric cultures, the celebrating of truly authentic Afrikanness is largely frowned upon.
I am a student and teacher of Afrikology*, a burgeoning institution that focusses on the logical, methodical and impactful study of Afrika with the purpose of debunking misconceptions about the indigenous peoples of this great continent. Afrikology seeks to address the following issues logically:
• The prevailing Mis-education about Afrikan History and present state of being.
• Appreciation and understanding of traditional values, rituals and symbolism – Afrikan indigenous Knowledge Systems.
• The popularisation of terms such as Ubuntu and Afrikan Renaissance has not been followed up by appropriate definitions and practical values.
• To develop scholarship and the international necessity to explore, highlight, teach and network internationally on pan-Afrikan matters –based on Afrikan centred perspectives.
Being a Black Consciousness revolutionary, involved in the production, propagation and administration of Arts while also active within political formations means that I spend much of my time striving to balance several responsibilities that may appear irreconcilable. I have engaged in many robust dialogues dealing with the roles that Art and Culture play in societies, especially the black communities. While there are several perspectives and approaches which include the roles imposed by a potential “developmental state”, such as questionable celebrations of national heroes, promotion of social-cohesion and other dubious causes; it is well known that Art can also agitate and often be in conflict with a repressive state. Just like political activists who purport to speak truth to power, Arts and dynamic youth Culture usually maintains a healthy tension with the powers that govern and try to control individual and social expressions.
In Azania aka South Afrika, we have had many artists and cultural activists who have risked a lot to present their perspectives of the truth. Dumile Feni; Lefifi Tladi, Mandi ‘Poefficient’ Vundla; Simphiwe Dana; Lewis Nkosi; Lesego Rampolekgeng are some of the names that come to mind. But there are also many unsung ones who produce works of Dance, Choreography, Theatre, Music and other forms of Arts and Culture which add a wealth of knowledge to the great pool of Afrikan genius. The question is what impact are they having on the general public or on the collective Afrikan society? The other question is how do we ensure that the message of Black Power Pan Afrikanism permeates the media channels to such a degree as to embolden the masses of still oppressed peoples to fight for their rights and make a real revolution.
Beyond these “borders”, we have the likes of visual Artists such as Chris Ofili, whose works and story appear in the latest Financial Times weekend edition ( 8/9 November) ‘Life and Arts”, and Ariella Budick writes that “He doesn’t avoid ugly fights over race, sex, politics, but he cushions these issues in the plushness of surface”.
This brief depiction of one Black Artists work is one of the reasons why I decided to write this essay. There seems to be reluctance by many white writers to acknowledge or even recognise what lies beneath the surface of many Black Artists works.
The Black artist is sometimes made invisible through some carefully constructed words that on the surface may seem to applaud her, yet the reality is that the contemporary and powerfully opinionated white gaze often obscures the reality of black subjectivity. I am more interested in the present state of Black peoples across the globe. Thus I am always eager to engage meaningfully with fellow Afrikans who offer other practical and revolutionary solutions to the challenges that haunt us and urge us to act decisively through social, cultural and political means.
The significant role played by the Arts in this regard cannot be taken lightly. Although we have seen many Artists dealing with difficult questions of race, identity, and complex existential challenges of being Black in an anti-black world; it seems that the impact of Arts, studies, workshops and the painstaking scholarship on black people’s agency is hardly ever sustained. How many people in the townships ever get a chance to attend an Arts exhibition or a choreographed theatre piece and is the language that is used ever discernible?
The enemies of our liberation are always watching and listening and through various means the ones who seeks to maintain the status quo are doing their best to diminish the images and voices of dissent. In a place where lies are common, telling the truth becomes a crime.
This leads me to the conclusion that was already reached by Afrikan nationalist revolutionaries such as Patrice Lumumba during the early years of the struggle for independence. As Afrikans we need to assert ourselves more than ever and affirm our own genius without depending on white power structures, awards or vindication.
In 1963 Lumumba stated in a speech entitled A Rejection of European Rule with a Demand for Independence:
“The Afrikan personality must be expressed; that is the meaning of our policy of positive neutrality. Afrika will have no blocs such as you have in Europe. Instead there will be active Afrikan solidarity. The commonwealth regime, which is just a disguise for continuing the colonial regime, is going to fall soon.”
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Monday, November 3, 2014
Thursday, October 30, 2014
The Creator Has A Master Plan
Thoughtless Dancers or Dancing Thinkers?
In his book Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions; Kofi Agawu writes
"Inventing African Rhythm:
That the distinctive quality of African music lies in its rhythmic structure is a notion so persistently thematized that it has by now assumed the status of a commonplace, a topos. And so it is with related ideas that African rhythms are complex, that Africans possess a unique rhythmic sensibility, and that this rhythmic disposition marks them as ultimately different from others.
Consider a few of these characterizations. The eleventh-century Christian physician and theologian, Ibn Butlan, in a tract entitled "On how to buy slaves and how to detect bodily defects," claimed that Ïf a black were to fall from the sky to the earth, he would fall in rhythm." In other words, even while facing certain death - speaking as metaphorically as Butlan did-blacks (especially black women) continued to exhibit an essential and irreducible rhythmic disposition.
The association of dancing with death, the racialist referral of particular sensibilities on particular groups of people, and the construction of African rhythm as complex, superior, yet ultimately incomprehensible: these and other implications of Ibn Butlan's casual remark are found reproduced in diverse ways and with diverse accents throughout the history of discourse about African music.
In many twentieth century accounts, the emphasis on dance and the constancy of music-making are retained while rhythm as a separate dimension is singled out for special mention. Erich von Hornbostel describes a piece of African xylophone music in which he found one of the parts "syncopated past our comprehension."
And A.M. Jones, writing with charecteristic enthusiasm and confidence in 1949, declares that - "the African is far more skilled at drumming rhythms than we are - in fact our banal pom, pom, pom, pom on the drums is mere childs-play compared with the complicated and delicate interplay of rhythms in African drumming."
All the above clearly shows the various stereotypes and convinient generalization with which the Euro-Americans and also some lazy minded Afrikans have continued to view Afrika. This single story narrative has been analysed and rubbished by the likes of Franz Fanon and even Aime Cesaire in his Return To My Native Land and other essays, poems and songs from the Negritude and Black Power era's.
Recently the celebrated Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie did an TED Talk on this very notion of a single story, although she was speaking out against the expectations that weigh African writers down to the extent that they no longer have individual/personal or unique stories to tell since the world expects some types of narratives.
The rhythmic African narrative has even been thrust comically onto the public sphere by neo-liberals caricturering the South African president Jacob G. Zuma as a dancing buffoon with no other redeeming qualities.
They even go so far as contrasting him with the more Western palatable 'rhythmless' former President Thabo Mbeki. The problem with all these Eurocentric constructions and deconstructions of Africa is that many Africans follow suit unquestionably.
But fortunately for the thinking Afrikan, the Afrikologist, there are still many Black folks such as V.Y. Mudimbe who provides a sustained interrogation of the very idea of 'Africa', showing it to be a construction of European fantasy and discourse.
Mudimbe argues that beyond its relative stability as a geographical pointer,"Africa"is not readilly ontologized from within an imagined Afrikan worldview; nor is it easily graspable either as a unified cultural phenomenon or as a fruitful epistemological referent.
Kwame Appiah similarly argues that "the very invention of Africa ( as something more than a geographical entity) must be understood, ultimately, as an outgrowth of European racialism."
Yes we have rhythm, yes we gravitate towards the polyphonic and syncopated sounds of our cultural environment but that does not make "us" any more humane, or special as a species. We are just as fallible and as beautiful as any other people. But more than anything, Afrika's people are diverse and as multifaceted as the peoples of any other continent.
That Africa is a continent rather than a country, that crossing national borders is not - in terms of restrictions - like going from one American state to the next, that a greater portion of it is French - rather than English-speaking, that its numerous languages are not mutually comprehensible dialects of a few languages: knowledge of these and other "facts"cannot yet be taken for granted.
"Indeed, it is possible to discern an ongoing resistance to knowing Africa. Why should we bother to learn the strange and often unpronounceable names of people in remote places practicing weired customs when we can simply use the all purpose term Äfrica"?"
Allied to the retreat from comparison is a retreat from critical evaluation of African musical practice. The pious dignifying of all performances as if they were equally good, of all instruments as if they were tuned in an "interesting" way.
All of this reminds me of how Europe and America systemically underdeveloped Afrika and how this underdevelopment continues until this day and that popular music largely contributes to this colonization at least on a psychologically.
Our purported sense uncanny rhythmic ability may be a natural impulse but it may very well be our undoing as "a people".
The saga continues ....
In his book Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions; Kofi Agawu writes
"Inventing African Rhythm:
That the distinctive quality of African music lies in its rhythmic structure is a notion so persistently thematized that it has by now assumed the status of a commonplace, a topos. And so it is with related ideas that African rhythms are complex, that Africans possess a unique rhythmic sensibility, and that this rhythmic disposition marks them as ultimately different from others.
Consider a few of these characterizations. The eleventh-century Christian physician and theologian, Ibn Butlan, in a tract entitled "On how to buy slaves and how to detect bodily defects," claimed that Ïf a black were to fall from the sky to the earth, he would fall in rhythm." In other words, even while facing certain death - speaking as metaphorically as Butlan did-blacks (especially black women) continued to exhibit an essential and irreducible rhythmic disposition.
The association of dancing with death, the racialist referral of particular sensibilities on particular groups of people, and the construction of African rhythm as complex, superior, yet ultimately incomprehensible: these and other implications of Ibn Butlan's casual remark are found reproduced in diverse ways and with diverse accents throughout the history of discourse about African music.
In many twentieth century accounts, the emphasis on dance and the constancy of music-making are retained while rhythm as a separate dimension is singled out for special mention. Erich von Hornbostel describes a piece of African xylophone music in which he found one of the parts "syncopated past our comprehension."
And A.M. Jones, writing with charecteristic enthusiasm and confidence in 1949, declares that - "the African is far more skilled at drumming rhythms than we are - in fact our banal pom, pom, pom, pom on the drums is mere childs-play compared with the complicated and delicate interplay of rhythms in African drumming."
All the above clearly shows the various stereotypes and convinient generalization with which the Euro-Americans and also some lazy minded Afrikans have continued to view Afrika. This single story narrative has been analysed and rubbished by the likes of Franz Fanon and even Aime Cesaire in his Return To My Native Land and other essays, poems and songs from the Negritude and Black Power era's.
Recently the celebrated Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie did an TED Talk on this very notion of a single story, although she was speaking out against the expectations that weigh African writers down to the extent that they no longer have individual/personal or unique stories to tell since the world expects some types of narratives.
The rhythmic African narrative has even been thrust comically onto the public sphere by neo-liberals caricturering the South African president Jacob G. Zuma as a dancing buffoon with no other redeeming qualities.
They even go so far as contrasting him with the more Western palatable 'rhythmless' former President Thabo Mbeki. The problem with all these Eurocentric constructions and deconstructions of Africa is that many Africans follow suit unquestionably.
But fortunately for the thinking Afrikan, the Afrikologist, there are still many Black folks such as V.Y. Mudimbe who provides a sustained interrogation of the very idea of 'Africa', showing it to be a construction of European fantasy and discourse.
Mudimbe argues that beyond its relative stability as a geographical pointer,"Africa"is not readilly ontologized from within an imagined Afrikan worldview; nor is it easily graspable either as a unified cultural phenomenon or as a fruitful epistemological referent.
Kwame Appiah similarly argues that "the very invention of Africa ( as something more than a geographical entity) must be understood, ultimately, as an outgrowth of European racialism."
Yes we have rhythm, yes we gravitate towards the polyphonic and syncopated sounds of our cultural environment but that does not make "us" any more humane, or special as a species. We are just as fallible and as beautiful as any other people. But more than anything, Afrika's people are diverse and as multifaceted as the peoples of any other continent.
That Africa is a continent rather than a country, that crossing national borders is not - in terms of restrictions - like going from one American state to the next, that a greater portion of it is French - rather than English-speaking, that its numerous languages are not mutually comprehensible dialects of a few languages: knowledge of these and other "facts"cannot yet be taken for granted.
"Indeed, it is possible to discern an ongoing resistance to knowing Africa. Why should we bother to learn the strange and often unpronounceable names of people in remote places practicing weired customs when we can simply use the all purpose term Äfrica"?"
Allied to the retreat from comparison is a retreat from critical evaluation of African musical practice. The pious dignifying of all performances as if they were equally good, of all instruments as if they were tuned in an "interesting" way.
All of this reminds me of how Europe and America systemically underdeveloped Afrika and how this underdevelopment continues until this day and that popular music largely contributes to this colonization at least on a psychologically.
Our purported sense uncanny rhythmic ability may be a natural impulse but it may very well be our undoing as "a people".
The saga continues ....
Monday, October 20, 2014
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