Writer: Linda Masilela | Photographs: Supplied
One can imagine how a pathologist, with precision, touches a dead body. Carefully examines every part to determine what might’ve led to its death. Tentatively dissecting, not like a mortician, but something akin to a fine artist drawing lines to produce a picture. This is the kind of soft touch, precision and dedication with which we approach ’94. The book is dead. Not in a nihilistic sense that leads us closer to Nietzsche, and not in a biological sense that trees had to die for these pages, but in a historico-poetical sense. ’94 is about death: metaphysical, racial, spiritual and aesthetic. Zama Madinana, the author, is the first witness. We are the pathologists, carefully examining what possibly led to the death. Whether this review is a postmortem report or a eulogy depends on your preconceived notions of death and the morality that guides it. So now our scalpels are out, lab coats and formalin ready. We are to examine this corpse.
The veneer that shackles Chapter I is love. A pure feeling that is unbridled and finds its true expression in the hearts of many. Madinana is no different. The poems in this chapter lilt from personal confessions to yearning, then eroticism. From the innocence of Anokuhle (“Sweet child of the moon”) to the kindred spirit of Mashombela (“No wrinkles can dim the light of your smile”), Madinana attempts to shackle a feeling of purity, one that remains suspended and perhaps deferred in most cases by the constant need to survive. The commentary in this chapter is glaring. It dramatizes the social landscape and pigeonholes interest while reminding us of the epoch we find ourselves in. The terrain Madinana explores is one of destitution, load shedding, promiscuity, all straddling the deliberate makings of a capitalistic, racist system. The adage “love is a struggle in a capitalistic world” is amplified here. What we meet is a constant struggle that winds one up in despair.
One of the standout features of this chapter is how each poem reads like a letter. A love letter. The epistolary nature titivates the interior, suspends empathy, and what we are left with is a broken black man trying to navigate a world that insulates itself and projects love as a privilege. Poems like Let There Be Peace and Lady of Flames titillate the senses, eroticise the private, and present lovemaking as a revolutionary act. Revolutionary in two ways: first, as a yearning to love and be loved despite physical or societal inhibitions. In Lady of Flames, Madinana writes that even load shedding cannot dim the desire: “your eyes and thighs never disappoint.” Second, the visceral posture Madinana chooses shows us that black people are not reduced to automatons engaging only in survival. As these poems suggest, we are capable of participating in love, in all its intimacy.
This chapter, terse yet punchy, ends with a raunchy poem that sets the stage for what follows. Madinana gets drunk and ends up between “the glory thighs of a German tourist.” This motif of drunkenness and a perpetual losing of self is explored further in later chapters. Madinana is cerebral, yet the words eviscerate through the page. The evanescent feeling of love is catapulted before us, and yet we are reminded that here, Madinana drinks and gets drunk. That consciousness is suspended, maybe for good reason. The following chapters reveal why one drowns themselves not only in lascivious behaviour but also in alcohol.
Poets choose, consciously or not, how they want their work to be read, perceived and critiqued. Nowhere does the so-called Madinana aesthetic become more visible than in Chapter II. These poems are pithy, fractious and atelic. Madinana bolts the zeitgeist, upends it with metaphors suffused with prescient musings, and ultimately calls us to pick up our crosses and heed the call to freedom. But Madinana is not callous in his posture. He maintains the metaxy he introduced earlier, an exploration that also interrogates the very notion of freedom. The opening poem, mandela, becomes a Cartesian plane that pits prisons and graveyards. What Madinana opines is that we are still struggling to locate where apartheid is buried, while stuck in an economic prison presumably built by Mandela and his ilk. The poems continue in this fashion. There is a sense of loss, but more dominant is the disappointment. We see it in House of Hunger, especially at the end where Madinana questions whether it was the ANC or the DA that ate the fatcake. We also see it in Thula Mama, a pensive poem that soothes even as Madinana’s pen flogs the dreams deferred by the failed project of a rainbow nation.
In this chapter, Madinana attempts to tear down the dominant edifices of post-apartheid South Africa. While defacing the statues of Rhodes and Kruger, he also tears down the ANC flag and interrogates the legacies of those we once called heroes. Freedom, as presented here, is a barque that sails elsewhere. Perhaps it never arrived. That’s the aperture Madinana’s writing forces into our line of vision. This is why poems such as Fragmented Freedom and Blood of Kalushi return to a similar leitmotif: illusory freedom. In Blood of Kalushi, he writes, “In the house of albert / things fall apart / & lies are told as truths.” If Chapter I gave us a Madinana that is introspective, seditious and poignant, then in Chapter II we witness wrath, pessimism and eventual acceptance of the status quo. Through Madinana’s optics, we are forced to participate in this Orwellian nightmare that subverts prevailing notions of nation-building and pokes us in the eye, making us see how dire things are.
Perhaps the best compliment to Madinana’s writing is the equality he insists on. Particularly visible in Chapter II is his notation, a refusal to use capital letters. This is no punctuation oversight. Where mandela is in lowercase, so is mambush, standing equally despite how history or society treats them. marikana, esidimeni, kalushi — all in lowercase. This consistency continues throughout the book. Perhaps those familiar with the Oulipian school of thought, which sets up restrictions in literary composition, might appreciate such experimental restraint. One famous exercise involves writing without the letter “e.” Whether Madinana’s refusal of capital letters aligns with that tradition or a broader idea of flattening hierarchies is open to interpretation. But the gesture is clear.
Stefan Chavez-Norgaard writes in the introduction, “Madinana is inspired by Steve Biko’s ideology of Black Consciousness and the importance of psychological freedom amidst colonial and apartheid afterlives.” Perhaps we can extend this to include Fanon. Many poems here testify to what Fanon warned, especially the dangers of neocolonialism. In later chapters, Fanon bleeds through ’94. In some poems, Madinana shows us the bruises. In others, society simply bandages the wounds.
Chapter III is set in the gloomy streets of Johannesburg, where the sun arches backwards and tickles the side of a rainbow. The narrative arc, brusque in some moments, isn’t a mere collection of writings. It’s blood splattered across Hillbrow, Parktown, Maboneng, Melville, Yeoville, Braam. Madinana maps how urban life coalesces in the psyche of the city dweller. The city is Madinana and Madinana is the city. The two are in constant dialogue. Through poetry, Madinana narrates Johannesburg’s stories, with all its alcoholism, longing, sickness, art, sex, death. The city opens like a flower, and remains so until we notice the wilting. The slow and painful demolition of spirit. Not in a Faustian sense, but in a Kafkaesque nightmare that leaves one lonely and empty. Poems such as After Sunsets and Black Scars read like dirges, mourning the fact that the city is a palliative care centre for black people.
Perhaps we are all foreigners here. Through Madinana’s eye, when we disembark at Park Station, we are all amakwerekwere, as he writes in the poem Park Station. This term becomes more than a signifier of our foreignness to the city. It insists that this place is not home, whether one is Zulu, Afrikaner, Shona, Tswana, Venda. No one belongs. This poem, like others in Chapter III, reveals Madinana’s strength — his use of the vernacular. Words like amakwerekwere, or lines such as “rea vaya bus amper hits a nyaope addict” in An Ode to Braam, give his poetry relatability. In an era that punishes simplicity and rewards word salads, Madinana straddles accessibility and poignancy.
In Braam Blues, he writes of a young woman who jumped from a flat, ending her life. The country sighed. Suicide and mental health returned to national discourse. In the poem, Madinana writes, “she descended from the sixth floor // with rucksack of shattered dreams in her heart.” It reads like an outsider looking in, narrating the events of 14 October 2017 at Blackburn Southpoint. This, too, feeds into the amakwerekwere state Madinana invokes — estranged, dislocated, and always trying to belong in a place that was never meant for us.
Chapter IV begins with a poem titled Drunk. It is the shortest poem in the book: “Last night / I got so drunk / I hugged my landlord / and called him my comrade.” This is not an innocuous joke. The landlord here is a fixture in the machinery of capitalism, one that alienates. So how does one end up calling them a comrade? Perhaps we must return to the previous chapter, where Johannesburg as a city had its foot pressed on Madinana’s neck. Drunkenness becomes a way of coping. Of shedding oneself, even if temporarily. Here, the narrator is not merely drunk. He is drowning.
This chapter holds the book’s central thesis. The narrator is freefalling. The trauma is not neatly framed like a photo at a gallery, it is sprawled across the pages. From alcohol abuse to grief, xenophobia and class warfare, this chapter is the most audacious, yet still remarkably coherent. The tone is pained. Like a groan stuck in one’s throat. There is also poetry that deals with family. In My Brother, Madinana asks, “What could I have done to save you?” One gets the sense that grief is not simply explored as a poetic device but lived. A breathing organism the poet wrestles with. The city and its heartbreaks catch up to the poet in this chapter. Grief lingers like a smell you can’t quite place.
It is also in this chapter that the poetic voice becomes more experimental. There’s a subtle performance of ideas, rather than explanation. In The 10 Rands Note, Madinana gives us a split-screen of a black man begging, white folk looking away, and an old woman giving the beggar money, while her own economic station is also vulnerable. The note, carried in the beggar’s pocket, becomes a tool of critique. “Once in my pocket, I become the enemy.” This line does the work of two chapters. Capitalism is the unseen villain here. It changes how the world interacts with you. There are echoes of Biko, Fanon and Marx here, but Madinana’s poetic register remains strikingly his own.
Some poems push even further. In SpongeBob SquarePants, Madinana imagines the beloved cartoon character as a child labourer in Indonesia, mass-producing plastic versions of himself. This allegorical move is no accident. He is asking: who benefits from pop culture? Whose childhood is suspended so that others may have theirs? What does it mean when even cartoons are implicated in the broader capitalist enterprise? The poem, without sacrificing playfulness, remains devastating in its implications. This is perhaps what makes Madinana a serious poet. He invites us to laugh, then indicts us for laughing. We too become enemies.
Chapter V is brief, and its restraint is deliberate. Only four poems appear here. The first of these, This Poem Was Not Written for You, draws us back to the formal preoccupations Madinana introduced in the earlier sections. He disrupts our sense of entitlement to art. The poem begins by asserting its own intention: “This poem was not written for you / it was written because I needed to write it.” It’s a refusal to perform pain for consumption. In a climate where black artists are often expected to aestheticise their trauma for largely indifferent audiences, this act of withholding is a powerful gesture.
In the same chapter, I Am Not Ok distils vulnerability without decoration. “I am not ok / but I am breathing,” the poem declares. There’s no resolve or arc to healing here. Just breath. The line stares blankly back at us. In a lesser poet’s hands, this might have been sentimental. But Madinana understands the difference between honesty and performance. He lets the line sit there, not as an appeal for empathy, but as a documentation of a state of being.
This Is How You Die in Johannesburg closes the chapter. It is not an epilogue, but a sharp intake of breath. The poet sketches a city that does not only kill you with violence, but with indifference, with poverty, with systems that are designed to let you slip. It is not just a warning—it is a record. Johannesburg is not metaphor. It is place. It is condition. It is the setting of the poet’s despair, the backdrop against which he reassembles the self.
If there is a grace note to end on, it may be found in the act of writing itself. Madinana does not offer solutions, and the book doesn’t pretend to resolve the crisis of meaning and survival. But the poems exist. They carry the injuries and the laughter, the contradictions and the complexity. And they persist. For all the despair, the voice does not vanish. In Johannesburg, that is its own kind of triumph.
