By
Siphokazi Magadla, Thought Leader, 23 September 2013
“Part
of what makes Simphiwe Dana so compelling for me, part of why I had
to write this book, is that she is almost impossible to govern,”
writes Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola in her latest book, A
renegade called Simphiwe.
This book is a “creative-intellectual portrait” of the public
(and private) life of the musician. In this country where our
imagination of political liberation has largely focused on the
soap-opera like manoeuvres of politicians, Gqola carefully recasts
our eyes by showing us the intersection between the creative and the
political. While we have been accustomed to colourful politically
focused book titles fit for Hollywood blockbusters fromEight
Days in September to Mangaung:
Kings and Kingmakers,
Gqola dares and goes against the grain in this book.
In
the book, Gqola tells us that Dana earns her status as a “renegade”
because her music and politics “widens people’s senses of what is
appropriate and imaginable”. The author insists that Dana’s
“rebel” status has much to tell us “about her and about
ourselves, collectively, when you pay attention to how we respond to
her”. The difficulty one experiences in trying to classify her
music is demonstrative of this, for while many can call it purely
jazz music her song Ilolo is
sure to get you dancing. While it is not gospel, Inkwenkwezi can
have you tearing up very quickly forcing you into an immediate
existential crisis. And while it is not classic protest music either,
the imagery she draws on Bantu
Biko Street will
sure make you yearn for a politics that values justice beyond mere
rhetoric.
Her music,
like its singer cannot be neatly boxed into coherent categories for
it is all of these things and then some. This is the same woman who
sings in the most mesmerising isiXhosa and yet thinks we should adopt
isiZulu as our national language! This is the woman who not only sees
herself as an artist but has the audacity to think that she can
rescue the disaster that is the South African education system. On
top of that she dares tell a premier and party leader, Helen Zille,
to get off her pedestal. As Gqola posits, Dana is captivating
“because she troubles many categories of belonging in the South
African imagination in the most remarkable ways”.
In the words
of Alice Walker in her poem “Be nobody’s darling”, we can say
safely say that Simphiwe is comfortable being uncool and is indeed
“pleased to walk alone”.
With that
said, however, in a country that has produced musical giants like
Miriam Makeba, one would not be faulted to argue that South African
history has produced a particular musician whose art is heavily
contaminated with the political. Makeba for instance not only used
her music as a political tool but went as far as addressing the
United Nations in 1963 against apartheid South Africa with as much
authority as any of the liberation leaders of the time. However she
was not alone for we also have greats likes Dolly Rathebe, Thandi
Klaasen, Letta Mbulu, Busi Mhlongo and of course, Brenda Fassie who
also engaged the politics of their time through the art they
produced. So in some ways, placed through time along a history of
renegades, many would say that Dana’s emergence and forceful
political presence is unremarkable.
What
is remarkable and noteworthy however about Dana’s emergence is
South Africa’s evident uneasy reception of artists like her who
remind us that making good art in this place
comes with the burden of speaking truth to power as part of the work
of citizenship. Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani has made the case
that to understand the work of citizenship is not to reduce it to
simply being entitled to access to resources. Instead Mamdani invites
us to see citizenship as entitling one to enter the struggle for
resources. Similarly, Melisa Harris-Perry tells us that citizenship
is fundamentally a “struggle for recognition”, a “nexus of
human identity and national identity”.
Dana
and her contemporaries such as Lebogang Mashile, Zanele Muholi,
Thandiswa Mazwai and many others come to us as mirrors that remind us
of the extent to which we are succeeding and failing in the duties of
citizenship. They force us to perpetually ask ourselves to expand the
image of the citizen and henceforth “the people”. These artists
challenge us to be curious about boundaries of citizens, where the
citizen can go, who they can love and how far they can dream. For
these artists, the circle can always be
bigger.
In
a country where there are a generous number of books written about
Julius Malema, Jacob Zuma and none written
about, for instance, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Phumzile
Mlambo-Ngcuka, I am reminded of the dearth of writing that shifts our
eyes from the so-called “Big Man”. We need more books like A
renegade called Simphiwe that
place at the centre of the political those that are often imagined as
mere spectators. I like that this book is written about a living
woman who will hopefully continue to disrupt our sensibilities in
small and big ways. As we move to the 20th anniversary of democracy,
we need more books like this, and many others like Lauretta
Ngcobo’s Prodigal
Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile,
that will disturb the dominant narratives of the tales of liberation.
In
this political moment when a national leader can reduce a woman to
“nopatazana”
and still be seen as a principled man of the left, there is need to
reclaim the centre as women’s natural dwelling. In this important
book, Gqola and Dana are going against the grain and leaving evidence
that her voice too has meaning worth hearing. Through this book, and
her artistry Dana is proclaiming she is unbowed and that her place is
everywhere. She will not be reduced to being someone’s “darling”
because she knows too well nguye
iqhawe –
she is the hero. She is qualified to live among her dead.
