Writer: Mthabisi Sithole | Photographs: Zivanai Matangi

If only I could A to Z in the tongues that matter in making it possible to speak such without sounding like iskri(er)pot. I can’t organise the letters in the orders my mother and father and theirs would, not with that same urgent precision. On a sudden impulse, Scrrrscrr…  I did not expect that we would be here again. Whenever you have spoken of something to aspire to, I am seized with an apprehension whose basis I am yet to comprehend.

My dear Chief, as I write to you, I am in the sediment of Nhlanhla Mahlangu’s performance lecture entitled Chant For Disinheriting Apartheid. With thanks to Thabang Mkhwanazi, Thulani Hlophe Zwane Muzi shili, Penwell Langa, Lindo Reb Thabede and Nondumiso Msimanga, the lecture sought to reframe Mahlangu’s repertoire as concomitant with 30 years of a democratic South Africa.

“At first you will run. Then you’ll grow tired and begin to walk. You’ll start running again, and tire and walk. In your tiredness and your walking, ingoma comes to the fore. It becomes your companion. As you walk, you’ll meet others along the way and, in your collective tiredness from the cyclical rhythm of walking and running, walking and running, you sync. Manje seniyarhuba, in companionship.”

– Nhlanhla Mahlangu

Kura uone – You will see when you find yourself older. What do you see when you look at democracy 30 years in? Do you see a village raising its children or children raising each other in a village on fire? As usual, the city comes to the uncivilised, backwards and yet to be formalised village. Humanity’s progressive ache is actually a primal inclination to nature. Never forget. Phila muntu. A chant is the beginning of the diverse “us”.

You often offer allusions of our unity as a multifarious gathering through time. This touches, I suppose again, on the core of nurturing and safeguarding a truly integrated liberatory outlook. Yet, it appears, the unity you punt as achieved and alive is largely gestural and served out in sparsely symbolic democratic apparitions. There is no showboating monument and flagship landmark that can feed the soul of a nation whose state knows to weaponise a people’s history and identity in self-perpetuation. I concur when Mahlangu impresses on us that identity is neither shield nor weapon. Bees have no interest in honey, bees be’s. I would add that identity need not ask permission to be nor to speak on its part.

Now, seeing as we have a shared interest in encouraging liberatory existences that realise this “unity”, I would like to perhaps check your blindspots as you are wont to do for me. I will not speak of democracy and its freedom(s). Let us speak of liberation and the convoluted avenues of its birth(ings). It is not by a seizure of enlightenment that, even now, South Africa is in the throes of another moment’s liberational movement – a soft walk which is, still, declaratively responsive

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The  regimental horror of being,

the days swing from soft landings

to steps floundering on sudden mines

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Liberation forever owes its endurance to the cacophonic echoes of a citizenry in a state of perpetual crisis. As my friends would continually quote, “Life is a crisis of decisions.” – Gabe Letswalo. History has innumerably shown that these movements have perpetually come about as rebuttals to the purported zeit(nation)state though seldom a perpetuation thereof.  That is how, gathered as we are in “unity in diversity”, freedom is again a struggle from which one, for its realisation… again, exists at edges where the body and voice thereof are near lacerated from each other. I can’t help but feel that memory, especially that which is recorded to be told, comes with an intent and it is for its inheriting contemporaries to advance, dismiss, reconfigure or whatever else on observing the extremities of its contours. Memory is a contemporary iteration of freedom’s bracts through liberation’s restless days and nights. Today is a gathering of more absurd spectacles of existence. In a bittersweetness, we’re acutely aware of the republic’s extreme brandstanding despite our palate’s compulsion to a strange amnesia. We’re here again.

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i did not know how language misbehaves

beyond the etchings of faceless names

i was not taught how my lungs know to burn

my feet to race to the gathering of millennials

posting libellous notes in doubt of the assembly’s sermons

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Surely, a proposed and accepted sequence to being “here”, 30 years of democracy in, is no manner of existing that speaks truth of/to what is, has been and may be. There seems no sufficient way to hold it accountable for its many shady dealings. I suppose, in the spirit of fairness, it comes with some congratulatory notes. From whom to whom though? Whose is it anyway? In contemplating its weird complexities, I propose we opt for an even softer hum that builds on a wider resonance with the certainties of, again, liberation’s varied avenues. This is to say, listen and trace internally with an anticipation that what is found and emergent is no less resonant with that contemporary locality in which the body finds itself.

In this way, the undulating shakes in yours and my voice temper and blanket each other against the nostalgia and wanton violence that continues to oust us from self-possession. The pursuit of liberation is a tiring exercise. Though our bodies are persistently found fragmented, barely holding together the wet concrete of our dreams, we can register our old, hopeful steps. In their meeting crescendos, we reveal a more radical honesty in the palms of presents and pasts our bruised tongues have for long fumbled.

Through Chant of Disinheriting Apartheid, Mahlangu for a moment posits that what we often speak of, we invoke into our midst. apartheid’s brutality is so anchored into the consciousness of first and second-hand survivors that how we engage the truth of its violence is at times akin to invoking that same devil into the freedom and equity of the libertory sojourn we aspire to.

Do you not envision living while living as opposed to dying while living in the shadows of a ghost? How would a ghost know to nurture and promote your healthy encounter with futurity? There must be a life beyond being tied to that which, via neocolonialisms, voraciously feeds off our sweat, grind, promises and fears. This cannot be the only manner in which we perceive living beyond trauma.

On the process of Chant For Disinheriting Apartheid becoming:

“We realised that, like, he’s a teacher. He’s a teacher at heart.

He teaches in the ways that he makes. He teaches in every way possible. And so the performance lecture also was really about that. Like, just actually seeing the people and then going, okay… Cool. So how do we teach other people about Nhlanhla Mahlangu’s practice?

You know, what do we need to know that you’ve been doing, you know. Sometimes intuitively, sometimes subconsciously, that now you can really also go, ‘this is it’… And so we even went back to, like, different documents that he’d written… a brief for a costume designer, you know, how he wrote the concept-note for funding proposals (etc), so that we could pick up on that… What is it that you knew already?

Yeah… Are you trying to know even more about how you do what you do and what it comes with and then the last part of it then was, then, where I started sending him specific prompts to, like, answer questions.

So I went to these questions that seem to be coming up. With some of the questions… I was like, you seem to be asking this question. Can you answer it? Sometimes I would go, ‘There seems to be this question… can you answer it this way?’ And then he started sending me, then, actual answers to questions that I asked.

• Nondumiso Msimanga

Memory. “Trauma”. Memory. “Trauma”… At this point, “trauma’s” existence in relation to what we become should only be a provocation for better dreaming and existing. And yet it is a “trigger” point of departure for contemporaneity as peculiarly reminiscent violences are still experienced on the daily. It is all part and parcel of how our bodies and voices gather as the calamitous beats and motions of apparently disparate places. All along so familiar, even our homes become new, strange and cry for a present mitigated by more than a mere coping through uncertainties as is often the case. It is the bickering for space in democracy that fills the streets with our bodies – as though sardines on an aesthetic narrative conveyor belt. The very existence of us appears to be a luxury buy of a historically desolating voice which hopes but cannot forget that we too exist.

The story from which you rose says you know the corridors through which you traverse in the earning and maintenance of this liberation’s facades. I do not believe that those through whom our “here” has been forged, subjected and made bleak their existences in pursuit of a vital freedom so that it becomes a reinvention of their lifetimes’ massacres. What do we make of such a selective freedom that thrives on systemically exclusionary mechanisms for its sustenance? Where do we go from here? In this place, it is for all possessing any liberatory inclinations to thrash out of reality any and all languid suggestions that our everyday aches are without covert historical betrayals.

I wonder if these betrayals are part of why Mahlangu insists that his compositions largely exist in the rehearsal space. They do not lend themselves well to recording – they begin and end in rehearsal regardless of the site of their aesthetic embodiment. This is due to the work being composed through the somatic utterance’s vigorous and vital nature. It cannot be repeated. It can only evolve. This text, elsewhere, asks the question: why should we continue to celebrate and make monuments of revolutions (= pains, too) if we still struggle with the bowels of this minimal language that knows only re-invention and never a local renaissance? This is the work of liberation… to check, embrace, dismiss, love, fuck around and find out (as the digiforms say). And still we figure ways forward in a world underscored by violence as the precedence of memories framed. Born of spasmodical provocations, the utterance has no interest in being anything more or less than that which it is.

When we cannot fully understand the moment we are in and perceive a crisis (death, disappointment, violence, neglect, etc.), we spasm and inadvertently find in ourselves a space to respond. This response is the residue of the spasm that becomes ingoma and, ultimately, the duplicitous and ,by now, synthetic, survival mechanism that is language. As I continued to speak to uNondumiso, who was stationed as the artificially intelligent power’s voice, concerned with narrative direction and contextualising throughout, in dance with Mahlangu’s presence, chant is re-enforced as a collaborative exercise in worldbuilding.

Back to the lecture:

In remembering this moment with you, there are redactions on the screen as we speak and we, somehow, find our voices present throughout. The soup’s bet is on our guts and tongues contorting to fit its mould and do the labour of building its envisioned scapes while we remain at the margins of fullness. They (alphabets) mark us and ask that we be committed to our own betrayals as though we have no primal means to hold ourselves whole, unfractured through the  pungent gutters of haphazardly survived happenings. This (A-Z) is where my apprehension originates – what this that is appears as a cyclical and ceaseless attempt to keep a hold of catastrophe as an indicator of being and existence? Through reminders of recent memory, we are systemically asked and encouraged to forget the fundamental knowledge/s of our existence. I say, ‘Phila muntu’.

We spoke on the process of building a new work as a collaboration.

N: As we were in conversation back and forth about what it (the work) could be and why, Nhlanhla then invited me to work alongside him because the piece itself as it continues developing is, really, part of his long-term research . And he’s, at the moment, trying to look at ways to formalise his work as a researcher.

“What is it that you knew already? Yeah. Are you trying to know even more

Mthabisi Sithole (M): As you’re sending him prompts, right, was it from the position of kind of, like, okay, having to look at what the practice or what, like, his compositions have been thus far and then sending prompts from that position? Or thinking about this new site of the work now? How do you both develop a new work, but also almost kind of contextualize all the work that has been?

Though the explication of Mahlangu’s Chant, we are able to navigate the crisis and simultaneously document its instances in our body. Mahlangu is inclined to assert that language is the result of catastrophe and our failure to comprehend its occurrence. Following that thought, we have yet to claim all the ways in which we might say “we are”. I now suppose it has to do with recognising the minute details of how the dispensation we find ourselves in disperses repetition as a form of freedom to be bought into i.e plurality of democracies. It is an alphabet soup of configurations with no full intention of holding us as whole. Instead, these configurations at all times feed back to us the meagre imagination of their own contours.

A momentarily born-free, my observation is that Mahlangu’s Chant is a choral reverberation from the body as a consequence of time. It is composed of private and public histories,  moments and mementos (the visceral confusions of multitemporal pains and joys). This comes with provocations of a selective history-making as critical to existence, and the dreaming and realising of more than habitable futures for blackness’. 

M: I kind of felt that there were a lot of moments where we frequently found ourselves almost immersed in walls of supposition or associations that presumed, rather, that, like, we have the same meanings and also ways of, like, saying things or understandings of things. (…) What role does association have in how Nhlanhla builds his compositions?

N: I think it’s one of the most major factors that he was excited to reveal, because as part of our conversations, I was also talking to him about the capacity that he can hold with dyslexia so that he can, you know, find ways to own that and not always be in a position of disadvantage because of the disability. Right?

And he was already, you know, working with revealing associations. He does that, and so one of the ways that it came up was that in the Chant series of works that he has, he often plays with the audience and invites them to participate in some way and invites them to  kind of, I would even call it be complicit, because he plays games where he also wants to put you into a position where you’re playing and you’re enjoying the game. but then he wants you to hear that the game itself is actually either talking about something that’s very difficult or is itself problematic. So he does that quite a bit, and I think there’s so many layers, actually, to how he does the work of association.

So even though the practice of association is very much an important part of what he does… because I had the chance to, like, listen to him for so long, I was able to then pick up that… oh, so this is also about association. This is also about association, and then come back to him with that so that he could also go,

‘oh, yeah!’, because sometimes he’s like,

‘okay, let’s just play with the audience, because I like doing that’, you know?

But then when he’s thinking about it also, there’s so many reasons why he’s doing it, and he does it, in part, as a kind of dyslexic strategy, because whenever he reads something, he starts, you know, making other connections, and he loses track of what he was actually trying to make logical sense of.

And so he spoke quite a bit about, you know, not necessarily following logic and allowing things to go in, you know… unfamiliar connections. And then, of course, he’s also doing that work of building us, right? So he works with the audience to, like, build a kind of, I’d call it like, it’s like crescendoing, right? (M: yeah)

It’s like an (M: yeah) emotional crescendo that happens, where the audience is, like, in the game, and you’re like, yes, and you’re like, yes. And it also even comes from storytelling.

He did that with the Mbawula story, where he’s like mbawula…. And all you’re doing is just repeating something, but with that repetition over and over.

(M: Something builds).

Yes, this urgency for… where are we going? And so there’s such an important way that he’s creating these sonic textures, right? In the body, through the sound, et cetera, et cetera. Uhmmmm…

That being said, the question remains… The traumas, pleasures and vice versa of one body have beeeeeen and apparently are the language of another. What then, in “libertory” terms, if ingoma enjalo ever is, do we call life without crisis? In a gist, liberation is in complicity with living, Phila Muntu.