It seems inexplicable that Lockdown Chronicles is trumpeter Prince Lengoasa’s first album as leader. His horn has been ubiquitous on the scene since the late 1980s, and much longer if you count youthful church performances (he had started playing cornet and could sight-read by the time he was six) with his Salvation Army family. He’s featured at just about every South African festival, on club and concert hall stages, as part of theatre productions, and on albums with artists ranging from McCoy Mrubata (for 18 years and counting), Khaya Mahlangu, Steve Dyer (in Mantswe a Marabi) and Caiphus Semenya, to the late Johnny Mekoa, Jonas Gwangwa and Rene Maclean, as well as countless more. Lengoasa has been a music teacher with the Salvation Army, at the Alexandra Multi-arts Project, Parktown Boys’ School and, again, more places.
Currently he’s first trumpet with the Gauteng Jazz Orchestra, of which he was a founding member and first music director, as well as lay bandmaster of the Salvation Army Band at Johannesburg City Corps. Come the Christmas season, you might just catch him directing a cadre from the band as they perform carols in some glossy mall. Before the pandemic, he also began graduate studies at Wits, although that was one of the processes the period this album documents seriously disrupted.
Lockdown Chronicles, launched last Tuesday July 26 (which was also Lengoasa’s 60th birthday) at Leano in Braamfontein, presents nine original compositions and close to an hour of music. The quartet outing also features pianist Prince Darlington Okofu, bassist Emmanuel Paul and drummer Siphiwe Shiburi, with vocals from Lengoasa’s daughter Motheo.
Lengoasa told the SABC ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrDGamgUdbU ) that for him and the entire music community, the Covid period had been one of “starvation” – from music and the community of live performance, and from income, with musicians forced to sell possessions and lose their homes. In personal terms, the period saw the death of Lengoasa’s father, Israel Lehlokoa, at the age of 87 (though not from Covid) and the hospitalisation of his mother Rosemary, as well as the loss of friends and longtime musical collaborators, including, most poignantly, singer Sibongile Khumalo, in whose key the first-composed track, Lockdown 21, had been written, with her voice in mind.
All these are among the events the album chronicles. Blues for Papa is a homage to his father; Ngingathini Na a salute to his mother’s resilience. Madiepetsana revisits a song written for a theatre production of the late Walter Chakela, also hailed on Ballad for NanaChakela. Lengoasa’s musical and personal roots in Christian spirituality bookend the album, which opens with an Invocation, and closes with a suite based on Philippians 4:8, Whatever Is/ Think About Such Things.
Yet, while reflective, it is not a sad album. The title track is a call for mutual support. and national unity during hardship. Blues for Papa celebrates a man’s life. Think About Such Things looks towards ultimate hope and joy.
When Lengoasa, back in the ’90s, was still a rising star, he suffered from frequent comparisons with other prominent hornmen – usually Hugh Masekela – that really did not consider what his personal voice sounded like. His brass sound is far less clipped and acid than Masekela’s could be. Lengoasa’s most often a warm, lyrical balladeer – and that’s reflected in his own singing, too: a blast from the Ben Masinga past. But as the fast, Latin-styled Madiepetsana and the closing Think…demonstrate, the restrained warmth emerges from formidable chops. Like the architect he began his working life as, Lengoasa builds solid music on firm foundations but never forgets it needs to be pretty and clever too.
The rhythm section gives him the space for all that. Okofu is a gently supportive piano presence; Paul has a gorgeously resonant bass tone; Shiburi understands that the mood of this music demands textured embroidery, not obtrusive grand-standing. Lengoasa’s warmth is repaid in what the band gives back to him.
Stylistically, the music sits firmly in the South African mainstream. Perhaps because of the religious music influences both share, I was often reminded of Judith Sephuma’s early albums, particularly during Motheo Lengoasa’s songs. With beautiful pacing and diction, Motheo is the perfect singer for this material, where the words really matter. All the compositions are tuneful and instantly memorable: airplay magic for the few remaining radio jazz shows.
So, we may have waited too long for it, but this album at last does Lengoasa justice as both composer and leader. Let’s hope there are more to come.
[This interview was conducted in 2000 for the radio programme Ubuyile: Jazz Coming Home. Apart from editing some of the conversational tics and repetitions that don’t work so well in print, it’s presented entirely as Don Mattera spoke it on to the Radio Ulwazi tape recorder. I remember that apart from a few prompts such as asking him to date an event, I barely had to interview ]
Music in my family: Italy, jazz and the blues
“[Back then in Sophiatown”] we heard Lena Horne and we heard some powerful singers – Cab Calloway –all the great jazz and blues singers of the time. The Nicholson Brothers helped shape my jazz consciousness at a very early age. My mother tap-danced; she loved that honky-tonk music. She used to dance to tunes like Alexander’s Ragtime Band. My paternal aunts, my father’s two sisters, they had voices like nightingales and sang on radio. One of them sang the old wartime songs of singers like Vera Lynn.
“But we also had the music of Caruso in our family; of Mario Lanza. And my uncle, both uncles, played accordion; one also played the cello and the other the violin, playing both Italian music and jazz. My paternal grandfather was Italian, so what helped me was that all kinds of music and all kinds of sounds came into our family: Italian, American and African.
“Jazz was very high on the list because my late cousin Frank, or Koukie as we used to call him, was a collector and he had the best collection in Sophiatown. But what also went with that was that it influenced the jargon of our time. Our people started to speak like the Americans speak. In those days, when they’re dancing the jitterbug, they’re “cutting the rug”. Out of that even came jokes, like the one about a Native American father complaining that since his son went off to college he doesn’t weave rugs anymore – all he’s interested in is cutting the rug!
“So in our family jazz was tops – especially swing. I’m very close to swing: i love that and also West Coast music, like the sound of John Lewis and Two Degrees East; Three Degrees West. That kind of music was very powerful.
“Like I said, jazz also brought a linguistic influence from America, and that linguistic influence brought a political consciousness from the likes of Langston Hughes, the likes of so many African-Americans. Claude Mackay and his writings about jazz, about street women, and…and – oh, this sugar diabetes of mine makes one forget [names]! Josh White! And we had other great blues singers that brought music, brought a language that influenced our language and a language that influenced our politics.
“Back to Africa! – the likes of Countee Cullen, whose poetry I came to know well. But it was always poetry coupled with jazz, so every time we had readings, with people like Sol Rachilo, Zakes Mokae, Fats Bookholane, many others, we always coupled our poetry readings with jazz. My eldest brother Sanza – we called him Bra Sanza – he was the fundi of jazz and everything associated with it – even American clothes!
Africa and America
“We also had our own sounds, of course. The marabi, tsaba-tsaba: sounds that had a distinct African tribal tincture to them. At our poetry readings at Wits University – I remember there used to be a little place where we used to read with what we used to call the white liberals of the time. They’re almost an extinct species now! And then in Sophiatown itself, at Father Huddleston’s church library, we used to have readings there too. With the trumpeter Stompie Monana and many other characters whose names have now escaped me because until this conversation I haven’t taxed my mind with remembering those poetry sessions. But they were so important, because it was then we encountered the language of protest. Professor Mphahlele, whose name was Zeke, and Peter Abrahams. Nonie Jabavu confessed that their writings and their personas, their psyches, had been influenced by American literature, music, hymns and so on.
“But always within that there lurked the African influence: the fact that [for African-Americans] their great-grandfathers and grandmothers had been slaves; had been forcibly taken away from their continent and been planted in a place that was hostile to their culture and their religions. They had been forced into Christianity [when] they had been Muslims where they came from, and peoples of African faiths having their own churches and sacred music. If one listens to the chants of a lot of these African-American hymns and the gospel music they sing, one can hear the intonation and and ululation of African women and men.
“So our poetry readings captured and synthesised all of that history and language; all of that sound, all of that pain, all of that anguish and finally all of that victory.
Jazz as a doorway into politics
“I used to be a street kid and a gangster, but I was already a poet. I remember in ’52/53 I had already started reading the African Drum , which Bailey had started and which later became Drum. And it too had poetry. There were also libraries, with collections; there was a library in Western Native Township called the Margaret Holtbury library. Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude Mackay, Angelina Grimke and all these great Black African-Americans who had been enslaved and also suffered under racism. So from their works we garnered this protest – in libraries! We exchanged poetry readings and discussed with a man called Dr Ray Phillips, a sociologist from America who had instigated us in many ways against apartheid, against the order of the day.
“We’re talking here 1952, ‘53,4,5, 6 up to ’57. The times when the bulldozers had started to raze our homes and destroy our dreams, our hopes, whatever – the peace and little love that Sophiatown had offered us.
Sophiatown destroyed 1959
“So jazz was an important point of entry into our consciousness, but like I said to you it’s not just jazz music. It’s coupled with history, coupled with pain, coupled with all the hopes and aspirations of native peoples: the African-American people; the [Latinos] who had suffered under the Spanish and then under the oppression of the Americans – taking away from them places like California, taking away their countries and their land.
“All of these ballads, all these pieces of blues and jazz – The A Train and all that – they characterise and epitomise for us the journey towards our own liberation, both political and spiritual.
“And for us in South Africa it was a release, particularly in places like Alexandra, Sophiatown, Vrededorp, parts of Soweto, Msakeng, places like that…Where Miriam Makeba comes from, there was a township called Prospect, which is where the new abattoirs are now. [Even as far back as the 1930s] there was jazz even there: Mahalia Jackson, Jack Teagarden, Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong, all the kinds of music that brought with it a consciousness.
“So jazz was an idiom of art, but also an idiom of physical and spiritual liberation. We have songs like the Freedom Train [sings] “Freedom train, freedom train, I’s goin’ to the freedom train.” And the freedom train when it came to South Africa it meant something to us because like a lot of the oppressed people of the Americas we too had been suffering under colonial and imperial subjugation and apartheid, British rule, Dutch rule. And it was our hope and dream too to be liberated. Today you speak about Sophiatown jazz and you think of Zakes Nkosi, you think of Louis Rathebe-Peterson, Skip Phahlane. Kippie Moeketsi, who is not originally from Sophiatown but they came to us from George Goch, him and his brother. But jazz was everywhere.
Jazz and Sophiatown high society
“There were great families [in Sophiatown], like the Mabuza family: the paternal grandfather of Felicia Mabuza-Suttle. Willie’s father. His brother was Early Mabuza and he was a great young jazz drummer. They were an affluent family, and so was ours.And so were many Indian families and Chinese families. And everybody played together. Lennie Lee was one of the great jazz trumpeters in Sophiatown, even before the generation of Stompie Monana. Coincidentally, both of them were great painters too: Stompie and Lennie. Lennie Lee was from a Chinese family. He was very strongly Chinese but he had broken away from what I think was the Buddhist cultural hold, so he mixed freely with people like Hugh Masekela, who was just a young snot-kop then. Hugh grew up in front of us, and very precocious musically, although I was six years his senior. Lennie Lee was in my class in school and also slightly younger than I was.
“There was this great confluence in Sophiatown culture. There was another Chinese family – Ah Lun – who had all Black wives. His descendants today are still walking around. He had a younger brother, Giap and they had two beautiful sisters and oh, they were jazz-crazy Chinese women, but they didn’t live a Chinese life: they intermingled with Black people, so-called coloureds and Indians in Sophiatown. Then there was the Yung family, also Chinese: one of the handsomest families. They wore the best American clothes, they spoke tsotsitaal and they mixed with the people. There was a great Italian man who ran a bicycle shop. He was like a Mr Scrooge with a very bad temper. Many people thought he was the kind of man you should hate and want to kill – but when he died, he left his properties, his money, all to Black causes. He was a great guy. And then the Saloojees had a bicycle shop too where we used to dance in the street.
You see, this is the beauty about Sophiatown and other places where there is gregarity of spirit, of camaraderie among people of whatever culture, whatever language or religion they came from. Sophiatown was that kind of melting-pot: it brought all cultures, all people together. It pulled strands of music together, and languages together: Italians, there were French, there was Dutch people living there – yes, even boers living there. All mixing in this melting-pot of the great culture of jazz. We also had Indian music, which fused wonderfully as well with all of our strands.
The beginning of the end
“Because Sophiatown represented the antithesis of what the Boers wanted – apartheid, Calvinistic music, a Calvinistic history, Calvinistic norms and values – and here comes this jazz by these n***s, by these darkies, and here comes a Coon Carnival sound by the likes of the great Oliphant family in Sophiatown and this was too much for these people.
“They had to do away with it. But they thought that when they would destroy it they would destroy the cultures as well, they would destroy our memory.
“But like I say in my book: memory is a weapon. There’s nothing you can destroy. Memory always reaches back, touches, opens up wounds, joys, sorrows, ecstacies, expectations. All of these things are opened up by memory.
The Boers gave us 10-o-clock on our radios. They had Bantu Radio and at 10-o-clock they gave us 15 minutes of jazz. And we would leave what we were doing every Saturday to switch on our little Pilot radios and stand outside the bicycle shops and do our jiving there, in this very brief moment of generosity from our oppressors.We would dance and jive to the music of Louis Jordan.
Jazz and GBV
“But it was not always positive and beautiful. Most of this music was male-chauvinist-oriented and always spoke badly about women. One song I remember is “The streets are filled with women looking for romance/ but if you ain’t got a dollar, brother, you don’t stand a chance.” And other songs that belittled women, like “ain’t that just like a woman/They do it every time/You can buy a woman clothes and give her money on the side/No matter what you do she’s never satisfied/Ain’t that just like a woman?” Another stanza says “Samson though Delilah was on the square/Until one day she clipped all his hair / Ain’t that just like a woman/ Marie Antoinette met hungry cats at the gate/ They was cryin’ for bread; she said ‘Let them eat cake’/ Ain’t that just like a woman?” So these songs influenced our socialisation process, so much so that we oppressed our women, spoke down to them, misused our women because the songs did that to our psyches. It made us see not equals in women, not partners, but something that we should sleep with and misuse. And that was carried right through. Even today, these things happen. But in Zulu culture a woman is powerful. In Islamic culture a woman is powerful. A woman has a powerful place: she is the cradle of civilisation. Unlike what societies believe that the Zulus and Xhosas oppress their women – but it is not so!
The legacy of Sophiatown
“The KhoiKhoi and the San who were the original owners of this land, they also brought powerful culture to this country: a culture which made its way down into Sophiatown. Our languages – the tsotsitaal that we spoke – we did with language what professors of language can’t do today. It was a great time. And I wish to reiterate, jazz brought consciousness of politics, a value system, norms. It influenced our attitudes towards women for good or bad. But it also opened up a vista. Like the African-Americans, we have an enemy. We must be free and this freedom has a price. We fought, we sang, we died and now we are victorious.
The live scene
The dance halls were the places where we danced to the Sophiatown beat – as we call it: Kofifi Jazz. We danced to the jitterbug, and they were places of where you felt important, because we wore the best clothes. We were the best dressers in the whole country. We bought from America, we spoke like America, we danced like America – in fact, we were Americans. In fact we had gangs that were named after that.
“In the dance halls, fights would break out. But they would break out between two guys and not between ten. If we fought against you we would not fight against your husband or your children. Unlike today where we hear a slogan in the townships, “Umbali lenga inzako: I’ll kill you with your children and family too”. Sophiatown was not like that: the fight was between you and I only.
There was a thing they would shout out in the hall if a fight broke out: ‘Fair go’ – meaning no knives, no guns. Fists – a man fight. I went through many of those and of course they gave me the infamy: that I used to be a fighter and a killer too. But in the dance halls we showed off our women: the Miriam Makebas, the Dolly Rathebes, the Thandi Klaasens and many other gems of beauty that we took. But we took them along as a man would take a suitcase full of good clothes . We didn’t take them as what they really were: God’s creations with a special kind of beauty and talent.
“That is the sad thing about colonisation and imperialism. The values and norms of the oppressor rested in our psyches and became part of our lives.
Going to the opera
It was not only jitterbugs and dance halls. We went to recitals too. We went to the City Hall. We used to sit in the corner while the whites would occupy the best seats. And we listened to the likes of Beniamino Gigli: great singers of classical music. Great singers of jazz too – but that was a different audience.
“I remember one time I phoned to book some tickets for a show in the Colloseum and this woman asked me where I would like to sit. I said ‘in the corner on the left hand side facing the stage’. And she said: ‘But that’s where the Black people sit’ – except she didn’t say ‘Black people’, she said ‘natives’. Well, I’m Black, but I never said I was a ‘native’. And she said ‘What? But you sound white!’.
Going to the movies
But the cinema was a place of erudition. I’ve seen so many films. They’ve influenced my mind, my language. I’ve never been to college, never been to university, but I challenge any professor of English to come and sit next to me about any subject in English. And that is because the curiosity the ghetto can bring out in you is to learn to command, control and own. That is one of the things that drove us to the cinema. Even the likes of Bloke Modisane, one of our greatest authors, but uncelebrated in his time. Likewise Professor Mphahlele and many more of us. Great classic movies; great actors. Movies like ATale of Two Cities; actors like Paul Muni and Ronald Coleman. These are the people who gave me the English words, and to value words and value the spoken word.
“For me, that has been cardinal in my life and has helped me to shape the lives of so many others. I’ve trained more than 150 journalists, some of whom have top jobs in newspapers, TV and radio – because they’ve come to understand the power of the word. And that the word in the beginning was God, and still is God. And for me that is important.
After Kofifi was razed
After they cleared Kofifi, the music went to sit with the people who sang it. But now they were songs of pain, of loss. Miriam Makeba had a song ‘Let’s go, my children, let’s leave Sophiatown/ Let’s go to a place where we can stay in peace/Let’s go to Meadowlands/ No food to cook for my children/Trouble all day.’ When we moved, we took the songs with us, but we created new songs “Meadowlands…Meadowlands…’ – words that in themselves were words of protest, lamentations of what had become of us.
But like I told you, memory is a weapon. When we saw that our names had been destroyed, that our families had been scattered to the four winds, our friends that grew up with us were now called by their tribal names: Shangaans, Pedi, Tswana, Zulu, Xhosa, Venda and so forth, SiSwati, Ndebele.
“And we wondered why we were being left behind. And we were told: ‘Nee, julle’s boesmans – you are coloureds, you are mixed-bloods’. And many of us refused to be called by those names. We threw in our lot where our lot belonged, against the oppressors. And some of us paid. We were tortured in prison, had our houses searched 350 times; were detained 150 times; were killed.
“And we never talk about it; we never write about it. But the time will come and this is how memory works.
“When you see the piles of debris, when you see your father’s house that gave you warmth and supper and food; you see the rubble of bricks; you see things lying where they fell, and somebody says: ‘Hey, die Boere, hulle’s sterk – The Boers are strong.’ And you know they are only strong when we make them strong. Their strength lies in our weakness – when we are strong, they become weak.
Today (c. 2000)
OK, these dogs are free now. We didn’t drive them into the sea, we didn’t rape their daughters, we didn’t silence their culture. In fact, we assimilated them into this freedom because this is what it is about, being free. It is not just for Black people but for all people, and our music, our culture, our art included. Our great leader Nelson Mandela spoke about ‘the assimilation of humanity’. That they aren’t dogs, they, like us, are God’s children and we may call them whatever name we may but finally they are us and we are them.
“And this is the victory I’ve spoken about. The victory is not to rule, but to let them understand that we are one people under God’s sun; that we have one earth to inhabit and a very short space of life, and we must, for the best of this life, share it. Bringing us all finally together is what our poetry was about; what our music was about.
*****
“This poem, written before we were liberated, says it:
“When at last it comes/ This our tidal wave of song/comes swooping above the white domes./ Then shall our dreams burst through iron gates/and drown the long nightmare of unfree-ness./Then. Then we will know we waited and loved not in vain.
“When the skies speak again/Speak thunder speak lightning/speak timeless freedom/Calling down rains of courage on hearts dried by despair/Then. Then will I know we spoke not in vain.
“When the running and the falling has ceased/When the steel fences are torn down/And curfew bells lie quiet as the grave/Black feet and white feet will bathe their pain away/ Then I will know we marched and ran and fell not in vain.
“When the final threshing is done/And arrogant chaff thrown to the wind/ the fields restored to their rightful owners/Then will our stones grind without the force of whips/Then will the wheat of a new humanity produce a new bread for our sons and daughters/And for the sons and daughters of those who once held us in bondage/ Then. Then I will know we waited not in vain/We marched not in vain/We sang not in vain/We loved not in vain/We hoped not in vain/ We died not in vain/ Then. Then I will know, then I will know, then I will know….”
Back in the 2000s, when we were interviewing for the radio series Ubuyile, I was honoured to spend a morning talking about music with the late Dr Don Mattera. Parts of the transcript of that discussion contributed to my book Soweto Blues. But the full interview has never been published and remains in non-digital form. To mark his passing, I am now typing it up and as soon as I have finished I will publish it, whole and intact, as a memorial to a great writer and revolutionary. May his spirit rest in peace; Hamba Kahle
Do we need to keep South African concert music alive and growing? Of course! Do we need to broaden the opportunities for all South Africans to acquire musical skills and access experience as an audience across the full range of genres? Emphatically, yes! Should government assist with all that? Yes – if not government, then who?
The MNPO “Annual Report 2021/22” is nowhere officially online but has found its way into multiple arts-related online chat, research and news groups over the past week. It contains details of goals, costs and expenditure – those latter, interestingly, not represented by any corresponding line items in the DSAC budget vote (https://www.treasury.gov.za/documents/national%20budget/2022/ene/Vote%2037%Sports%20Arts%20and%20Culture.pdf).
The report reflects ambitious goals, listed as: transforming the orchestral music sector in SA; creating job opportunities and an ecosystem for orchestral music in SA; inclusivity, development, access and social cohesion; cultural diplomacy; funding (“for regional orchestras”); and advocacy (“for the value that orchestras bring to society”).
Let’s look at those in reverse order.
Advocacy for orchestral music is undeniably worthwhile. Music teachers and players, including many in the township,s have been undertaking such advocacy for generations, without even R30 of state support, let alone R30million.
It’s not clear how generous funding for a national orchestra will improve funding for already-existing, struggling – and nearly destroyed by inadequate support during Covid – local music teaching or regional orchestras.
South Africa suffers in many areas, including cultural policy, from a poorly spelled-out relationship between the national and the local, so how will this work in practice? Equally possible, as studies of “national” cultural projects elsewhere have demonstrated, is that a national orchestra, with its higher profile, could draw sponsorship away from local initiatives, particularly for donors who want a bigger bang for their buck.
Cultural diplomacy? A full-scale orchestra is extremely expensive to tour and may therefore enjoy only limited trips to international stages. Is it going, again, to draw support away from all the smaller touring theatre groups, popular music artists, visual creatives and others who also undertake cultural diplomacy through their compelling presence on overseas platforms? Or do only classical players in elite concert halls – the only places capable of hosting a large orchestra – count?
Inclusivity, development, social cohesion and access are by now standard tick-box items as goals for most government spending. But in truth they emerge from consistent, clean and effective government processes in communities: decent jobs, housing and infrastructure, improved education, state action against all forms of division including xenophobia, and more. They are not achieved simply by creating a product called an orchestra.
Job opportunities? Yes, sure. But one orchestra creates a finite number of employment roles on and off stage. Building local music initiatives and rebuilding those that were permitted to collapse during Covid might create more. We already, for example, have a wonderful national youth orchestra:
Creating an ecosystem for orchestral music in SA? One already existed. It was often elitist and massively problematic in many respects, including racial representivity, and it’s telling that many of the gripes against the MNPO concept come from members of that old establishment. There’s absolutely no argument about that vitally important first goal of ‘transformation’.
However, the case against revisioning and refunding what already exists rather than creating something completely new is not convincingly made in the document. Nor is it spelled out how the existence of a national entity can create an ecosystem, which, to flourish, needs firm roots in the local, including, most importantly,significantly stronger roots all across the education system. But that, if you’ll recall, had many of its broad music outcomes and opportunities for township schools stripped back when Curriculum 2000 was revised. Without a music process that begins in all schools, it’ll still predominantly be the graduates of elite institutions who eventually find places in MNPO.
When this project was first mooted, the idea was for a national indigenous orchestra, on the lines of the wonderful, Nkrumah-inspired Pan African Orchestra founded in 1988 by Nana Danso Abiam.
That notion now seems to have been displaced by the project of yet another Western-style symphony outfit. With a legacy stretching from Venda pipes to the split-tone voices and bows of the Eastern Cape and more, an indigenous orchestra would have been able to bring something unique and proudly South African to world stages. Where and how that idea was stifled merits serious investigation.
But that’s a debate for another time. It’s undeniable that creating more music opportunities, for both players and listeners, in all genres, would be good for this country. However, whether you’ll achieve that through spending on an MNPO remains very moot. Once more, spending showy money on a showy national product has been preferred to the more difficult long-term process of low-key, targeted and community-focused investment, building on what already exists and has struggled for years. It looks good in annual reports, though…
The logo of the publication, which formally ceased operation at the end of June.
Many of you by now may be aware that not-for-profit socialist news platform New Frame closed abruptly last Friday, with staff served Section 189 retrenchment notices immediately following the meeting where the decision was announced.
For the past four years this blog has enjoyed a positive relationship with New Frame‘s music pages, where I also contributed as a freelancer. I could, for example, write a short album review here and link readers to a longer profile of, or interview with, the artist there. That potential enriched and deepened both aspects of my coverage.
Public responses to the closure have focused on the behaviour of New Frame‘s main donor Roy Singham: the man who pulled the plug, as well as the apparently supine response to him of the publication’s Editor-in-Chief. As a freelancer who had even less access than full-timers did to the facts about those relationships (and fulltimers, by all accounts, were told almost nothing) I can’t shine more light on that situation.
What I can comment on are the specific meaning of the closedown for arts and music writing – and the ethics that ought to matter for anything calling itself a socialist publication.
New Frame was one of the last homes for long-form arts and music writing in South Africa. That wasn’t an add-on to the political, environmental and economic coverage, it was part of it. The potential of all peoples’ creativity, the joy to be found in collective cultural work, the voices whose vision transcends “becoming a brand” – all these are integral to decolonisation, to humanity making change and building a world that actually has a future.
New Frame had space, for example, for Atiyyah Khan excavating the near-forgotten history of Orlando’s Pelican Club, for Percy Zvomuya unfolding the decolonising practice of Zimbabwe’s Dzimbanhete Arts Centre; for Percy Mabandu tracing the interconnections between visual arts and music in this country’s cultural history; for Tseliso Monaheng delineating a radical international muralist who is not Banksy: District Six-born Falko; for Charles Leonard’s inspiring fortnightly mixtapes. This is a tiny sample; there is so much more, and so many more powerful writers covering what might otherwise never be documented about our arts and music. Without a record, such stories disappear under the all-erasing commercial concrete of mainstream “showbiz” and “lifestyle”. That archive (and New Frame has one of equivalent importance in asserting African peoples’ sporting history, too) must, somehow, be preserved.
The illustration for one of New Frame’s music playlists, drawn by Anastasya Eliseeva
But it needs more than a taxidermist’s glass case. It’s a living archive. It needs to grow, and be added to. And those great arts writers need jobs, and income, so that they can carry on doing precious work few others undertake. All have deep knowledge and a rich network of contracts related to this country and the continent’s progressive arts scene. They engage with the discourse of their subject matter and make us all think. What must they do now? Go off and write PR? To add your voice to the growing pressure to save the journalists and their journalism, please sign the petition at
But how could matters reach such a dismal conclusion at a self-declared socialist publication? Perhaps we need to think more about what that ought to mean, beyond slogans.Journalists and editors who call themselves socialist have three basic ethical responsibilities.
First, we have a responsibility to the people we create alongside – our journalist and editorial comrades. That demands open, transparent communication. Where there is disagreement (as there often will be: we’re a bolshy lot) it demands full democratic debate. The emerging litany of refusals to discuss, arbitrary closed-door decisions and attacks on individuals who dared question, suggests that newsroom praxis often fell far short of theory. That’s not surprising. As too many university socialists forget, practice is harder than theory.
Second, we have a responsibility to the people we create about: the sources of our stories and their truths. That plural is not a mistake. There are multiple truths about a situation. Interviewees may not tell us what we hoped to hear. So you talk to more people, to honestly represent that range and its tensions. You set words in the frame of illuminating context – and in a socialist publication, that will be the kind of context the mainstream media ignore – rather than rewrite or erase them.
That links to the third responsibility: to the people we create for – our audience. They deserve accessible truths too, not ignoring what donors may find inconvenient or unpalatable. The lacunae and silences of New Frame’s coverage created unease even for freelancers like me. Explicitly opposing cultural genocide or imperialist wars should matter to us, whether in Xinjiang, Palestine, Ukraine or Yemen, because our job is to serve our readers with knowledge.
I stand in solidarity with my comrades: all the retrenched writer-workers of New Frame. I know that if their informal collective can get the resource wings back on, a publication that lives these principles in daily practice can fly and sing again.
sisgwenjazz 