Year: 2013

Black laughter and suing Pontius Pilate

Black people’s relationship to laughter fascinates me. As a friend recently pondered, where does one begin understanding a Facebook status update that says: “That awkward moment when your mother dies”? Or how does one make sense of the Kenyan lawyer, Dola Indidis, who took such strong exception to the unfair prosecution of Jesus Christ that he decided to sue Pontius Pilate, Emperor Tiberius and King Herod at the International Criminal Court in The Hague in July 2013?

The obviousness of this move astonished me. Indeed, why hadn’t anyone thought of this before? Never mind that accused number one, Pontius Pilate is long dead and probably long forgiven by Christ— as are Emperor Tiberius and King Herod. Never mind, too, that not-so-small detail that the Christian in me is daily reminded of by my name: God authorised His son’s ‘unfair’ trial as an act of divine grace. Despite this — or as we say in Kenya, ‘irregardless’ – Indidis took serious umbrage to what he calls the abuse of Jesus’s human rights. So, he is suing Pilate for judicial misconduct, abuse of office, bias and prejudice. He is also suing the Republic of Rome and the State of Israel for their complicity in Jesus’s malicious prosecution. His aim? To have the trial of Jesus declared null and void; following a similar precedent in the nullification of the unfair trial of Joan of Arc. As a Christian, this is the part where I get stuck. It is all well that Joan of Arc got posthumous justice, but what would it mean for Jesus’s trial and crucifixion to be declared null and void?

In all honesty,  Indidis’s court case cracked my ribs when I first read it. But absurd as it sounds, anyone who has read Toni Morrison will know that black people’s seeming absurdities are not always a light affair. So, when you meet grown men and women bearing names like Tea-Cake and Baby Suggs, it is not funny in a Nandos-advert kind of way. It is funny in that funny-sad way that explains how Louis Armstrong‘s fans could fondly call him Satchmo [Satchel mouth] as a loving nickname.

Come to think of it, it is in naming that this contradictory blend of hurt and affirmation plays out most explicitly. My personal favorite is Pilate Dead, a woman in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Her family carries the unfortunate surname — Dead — courtesy of a drunk soldier who captured her father’s details wrongly for his identification papers. When he explained that he was from Macon and his father was dead, the soldier entered these details under ‘name’ and ‘surname’ respectively. And that is how many generations of the family came to be, well, Dead. But Pilate’s first name is an in-house job. The same father inaugurated a family tradition of naming children by opening a Bible and pointing a finger at a random page. Wherever a finger fell, that would be the child’s name. This tradition is strictly observed in the family, generations later, despite literacy. So, when her father’s finger landed on the unfortunate spot in the Bible, the name stuck, despite the midwife’s protests about saddling a new born baby girl with not just a man’s name, but a “Christ-killing man’s name.” Thanks to this tradition, Pilate has nieces named Magdalene Dead and First Corinthians Dead.

Pilate Dead and Satchmo’s names are a reminder that black people’s laughter embraces the grey ambiguities of life, in full recognition of the fact that life and death are next-door neighbours. So are pain and laughter. This sensibility was brought to me recently in a most bizarre way. It was a Sunday mid-morning, and I was looking at children’s clothes in a retail store at my local mall. It is generally a quiet shopping time, which I like. You have space for your thoughts, without bumping into everyone else’s thoughts in the aisles. Even the music is played at a lower volume. So, on this Sunday, as I looked at little boys’ shirts, the store was quiet enough for me to hear four attendants’ voices from different parts of the shop, having a loud lighthearted conversation, in Afrikaans, filled with relaxed laughter. They all seemed deeply amused at an inside joke. My entire Afrikaans is a few phrases picked up from 7de Laan and the inevitable swear words one tends to learn when one encounters a new language, so I had no clue what the joke was. But one phrase kept coming up, followed by long peals of laughter: “Easter bunny”. After the fifth Easter bunny, I looked around the shop, slightly confused: had this store decided to have a second Easter marketing campaign in the middle of August? But there was not a single ‘Easter-branded’ item or poster in sight.

I was still puzzled at this when I got to the pay counter, and one of the assistants called out to one of the colleagues they had been conversing with, to come and serve me. As Alex walked over to the counter laughing, he shouted, “Easter bunny!” to his colleague, who responded with another “Easter bunny”. And another laugh. It was when he came in my line of vision that I finally figured what the word was, and felt even more confused. It wasn’t Easter bunny. It was isitabane, laced with an Afrikaans accent.

I was speechless. To my knowledge, this is a derogatory, homophobic word. And Alex was clearly a gay black man. Many thoughts collided in my mind as Alex processed my purchase: When did this word become publicly sayable? Laughable? Was I witnessing the playful taming of a violent word? The softening of a hard, damaging label? Was this the same as the reclaiming of the word ‘queer’? Or was it normalising a hurtful word? Did the foreign languageness of the word make it easier for the Afrikaans speakers to play with it, in much the same way swear words in your mother tongue sound much dirtier than in English? Reading Siyanda Mohutsiwa’s concern about similar taming of hurtful racial and gendered words a few weeks ago, I was reminded of this conversation.

As I left the store this Sunday, wrestling with what this lighthearted banter between colleagues meant, I remembered another even more random conversation a few years earlier between two young ladies at Wits University:

“He says he will love you forever? Aawwww, chommie! That’s so romantic!”

“Ja, but forever is a long time, hey?” the friend responded, in a matter-of-fact tone.

Something about this conversation just killed me dead, as they say in Nollywood. It was both funny and profound. You see, forever IS a long time. This is the spirit in which Pilate Dead walks around with that name in Morrison’s novel. This is probably the same spirit with which a gay black man would be laughing at “Easter bunny”. It is the same logic behind Indidis’s pursuit of justice for Jesus. See, forever IS a long time to promise to love someone, but two thousand years isn’t too late to get justice for God’s son. This is that awkward moment when conventionalised logic gives way to unconventional logic.

Grace A. Musila is a Kenyan who studied in South Africa.

Cashing in on the lure of super-pastor TB Joshua

In Africa’s largest metropolis, the district of Ikotun Egbe in Lagos has turned into a boomtown. The draw? Temitope Balogun Joshua, one of Nigeria’s richest “super-pastors”, whose church attracts 50 000 worshippers weekly – more than the combined number of visitors to Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London.

TB Joshua. (Pic: EmmanuelTV)
TB Joshua. (Pic: EmmanuelTV)

Seeking promises of prosperity and life-changing spiritual experiences, visitors flock from around the globe. Enterprising Lagos residents – those not turfed out by landlords turning their properties into hotels – have transformed the rundown area into a hotbed of business.

On a Saturday afternoon, traffic swirls around the four-storey, giant-columned Synagogue Church of All Nations. Delegates are already pouring in before the following day’s service. “They should really build a branch in South Africa – it’s a long way to come and the hotels here are so-so,” said Mark, a sun-burnt businessman from Johannesburg, accompanied by two friends from Botswana.

As the church’s palm tree-lined entrance gives way to a maze of skinny, unpaved roads, knots of touts materialise. “In one year I made enough money to buy my first car,” said Chris, using a tattered hotel brochure to mop his brow. He is paid 100 naira (about 40 pence) for each client he brings in.

Sparkling new hotels rise incongruously among the shacks. At one, with a logo suspiciously similar to the Sheraton’s, a new chef has recently been employed. “He can cook food from Singapore, because we were having a lot of guests from there who struggle with Nigerian food,” said the manager, Ruky, at a reception desk framed by pictures of TB Joshua.

Tony Makinwa said most of his laundromat profits came from tourists. “God has favoured my business. People come here and fall in love with the place and overstay their visits,” he said.

Also doing a roaring trade are the international calling centres with foreign visitor discounts, the clothes shops offering outfits to celebrate miracles, and the plastic chair rentals that cater for church spillovers.

Isolo’s dirt streets are punctured by unfinished barn-like buildings as dozens of other churches offer all-day worship services. Almost as many mosques dot the area. Islam and Christianity are growing at blistering paces across Africa, with Nigeria home to the continent’s most populous mix of both faiths.

Money-changer Sidi Bah travelled thousands of miles from Mali to continue his trade here. “I came because I heard many people from many countries visit. In one day I can change six or seven different types of currency,” he said, adding: “There are more mosques here than in my village in [Muslim] Mali.”

Miracle-promising Pentecostal churches took root across the continent in the 1980s, as African economies were battered by falling world commodity prices. Migrant poured into slums in search of jobs and dreams.

Ruky has converted her cramped home into a 20-bed lodging where mainly rural workers stay for 800 naira a night. Mattresses are half-price. “If you are sick like me you have no job so you are used to sleeping on the floor anyhow,” said Andrew Olagbele whose spine was crushed by a car accident, lying on a mattress in a crammed room. “I pray the Lord will touch me tomorrow so I can walk again.”

As dusk sets in, cars continue streaming in. A man hanging from the open door of a car thundering gospel songs waves copies of homemade CDs for sale. Denis Kokou and his wife, a baby on her hip, look on with weary smiles. “This is our first time coming from [regional neighbour] Togo. We are so happy to be here with our daughter.”

Monica Mark for the Guardian

‘Walk-in vagina’ kindles anger and approval in SA

It lets out a high-pitched scream as you enter, then a sneering laugh. It’s a walk-in vagina, a conceptual art installation that has South Africans wagging their fingers and scratching their heads.

When 30-year-old South African artist Reshma Chhiba was asked to produce artwork for a disused apartheid-era women’s jail in Johannesburg, she wanted to make a statement about women’s power.

What she came up with was a talking “yoni”, or vagina in India’s ancient language, Sanskrit.

“It’s a screaming vagina within a space that once contained women and stifled women,” she told AFP. “It’s revolting against this space… mocking this space, by laughing at it.”

Visitors enter the 12m red padded velvet and cotton canal by first stepping onto a tongue-like padding. Thick, black acrylic wool mimics pubic hair around the opening.

A view of the art installation "Giant Walk-In Vagina" installed at a former women's prison by artist Reshma Chhiba in Johannesburg. (Pic: AFP)
A view of the art installation “Giant Walk-In Vagina” installed at a former women’s prison by artist Reshma Chhiba in Johannesburg. (Pic: AFP)

The shrill soundtrack that assaults visitors as they stroll through the tunnel is a revolt against the women’s jail, built in 1909, that held some of South Africa’s leading anti-apartheid activists.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was incarcerated there twice in 1958 and 1976.

“I definitely did not make this work for the sake of controversy,” said Chhiba.

For her, it was about artistic freedom and challenging deeply entrenched patriarchal systems .

“You don’t often hear men talking about their private parts and feeling disgust or shamed,” as women often do, she said.

“And that alone speaks volumes of how we’ve been brought up to think about our bodies, and what I am saying here is that it’s supposed to be an empowering space.”

The artist also wanted to address the scourge of rape in South Africa, where nearly 65 000 attacks on girls and women are reported a year in one of the highest incidences of rape in the world – with little improvement.

But the installation, on display throughout August, has collided with some sensitive cultural and religious taboos.

“It’s the most private part of my body. I grew up in the rural areas, we were taught not to expose your body, even your thighs let alone your vagina,” said Benathi Mangqaaleza, 24-year-old female security guard at the former prison that is now a tourist site.

“I think it’s pornographic, I think they have gone too far.”

‘A sacred space’
Twenty-four-year-old gardener Andile Wayi thought the exhibition — on the site of the Victorian-era brick women’s jail and another that once held Mahatma Gandhi – as well as the Constitutional Court – was wrong.

“The [Constitution] Hill is respected, it’s a heritage,” he said.

The fine arts graduate,who is also a practising Hindu, has spent years of research into the Hindu goddess Kali whom she views as a symbol of defiance.

She expressed “shock” at the media onslaught and allegations of blasphemy from some Hindu followers who complained through radio talk shows.

“To talk about the vagina, or visualise it, is something that is not out of the ordinary,” she insisted

The exhibition, entitled “The Two Talking Yonis”, was the product of two years of discussion with curator Nontobeko Ntombela on the mythology of female power in patriarchal systems.

Visitors have to take off their shoes to walk through the softly cushioned canal.

“By talking off your shoes, essentially you are respecting it, making it a divine space, a sacred space,” said Chhiba.

Gender Links, a lobby group promoting gender equality in southern Africa, praises Chhiba’s artwork for re-igniting discussion on a subject normally avoided.

“It is bringing the private into the public, that the woman’s body is not necessarily a private matter,” said Kubi Rama, Gender Links boss.

Music memos: Artists of the month

The face of music in Africa is changing. Musicians are seeking alternative routes to the shoddy label of ‘world music’, and finding unprecedented levels of success in the process. There is a growing amount of independent artists who, through their ability to combine global influences with localised flavours, have figured out how to capture a wide-ranging legion of followers.

For this month’s post, I’ve mined some treasure to present the second edition of African musicians to look out for. We chart territory ranging from pop music in South Africa to post-Fela beats in Nigeria. I also got in touch with Brooklyn-based Ghanaian rapper Blitz the Ambassador whose free-to-download offering entitled The Warm Up was released on Tuesday.

Beatenberg – Chelsea Blakemore

Beatenberg comprises three South African lads whose latest single Chelsea Blakemore harvests from their backgrounds in jazz and electronic music to add to their growing catalogue of hauntingly evocative songs. These, in drummer Robin Brink’s words, are aimed at “everyone ready for a fresh South African pop sound.” The lyrics are playfully gutsy – or painfully ironic depending on how receives them. This particular song is named after vocalist/guirarist Matthew Field’s ex-girlfriend. “We’re all tight friends” asserts Brink. Ross Dorkins’ touch of bass adds to the song’s smoothness, making it a potential favourite at the country’s festivals during the upcoming summer. Their full length album will be released by Universal Records in 2014.

Zone Fam – Translate

Zone Fam is a Zambia-based rap group who has done well in penetrating the consciousness of audiences across the continent since their break-away hit Shaka Zulu on em hit airwaves two years ago. With a new single circulating and a new album in the works, it’s exciting times for the quartet comprising Dope G, Jay Rox, Yung Verbal and Thugga. They’ve been nominated for the African Entertainment Awards – a ceremony aimed at honouring “the rich culture of african [sic] art and entertainment” – under the best group category. Their sophomore album is due for release later on in the year. They follow up their party-centric Lobola with this subdued homage to body language.

Burna Boy – Run My Race

The solid, gliding patterns of Afrobeats have ensured that Fela Kuti‘s legacy continues to exist in modern pop music. While bands elsewhere are taking the Afrobeat staple refined by Kuti, artists on the continent have resorted to panel-beating the danceable aspects of the genre into a new wave of sound referred to as Afrobeats, a sub-genre described by Olufemi Terry as “African pop about women, parties and success” in an article published by South Africa’s Rolling Stone magazine. Commenting on the Kuti/Afrobeats relationship, Terry pondered whether the legend would turn in his grave were he to hear the sound he was linked to this sound.

Burna Boy, the Nigerian-born artist who sang “They say I sound like a combination of Sizzla and Fela Kuti” on My Journey, has decided to embrace comparisons to the latter. He went to the Afrobeat legend’s shrine, the Kalakuta Republic, for the video of one of his latest works. Entitled Run My Race, the song is best experienced in sweaty clubs along West Africa, and increasingly across the continent.

Blitz the Ambassador

“From Tahrir Square to Madison Square the streets are crammed, Revolution will not be televised or Instagrammed,” raps American-based Ghanaian rapper Blitz the Ambassador. He set aside time to chat about how his song Bisa (What [are] you asking?) got made. The result is a fierce socio-political manifesto featuring UK-based rapper TY and Nigerian vocalist Nneka.

(Supplied)
(Supplied)

“There were only two collaborations that were done in person.   One was Nneka. That literally happened accidentally I recorded with her [over the] Internet for the actual album, ” Blitz the Ambassador explained.

“We facilitated that through the internet, it’s a brilliant song! I got to Paris; she just happened to be in town as well and wanted to link up. So I told her I was working and she came through to hang and say hello. She heard Bisa; I’d just started crafting it, and she was like ‘This is amazing, I’d love to jump on.’ I said: ‘Take a shot.’ That’s how the song ended up being made.”