Percy Zvomuya’s When Three Sevens Clash scores a literary hit

I confess gladly: I still miss Staffrider. In fact, I miss all the cultural publications, short- and long-lived, that flourished during the struggle era, from the MEDU Newsletter to the culture pages of trade union newspapers. They managed to be at the same time subversively irreverent and serious as your life. They cocked a snook at commercial genre labels and exclusionary definitions of culture. And they asserted a joyous eclecticism where not only did poetry, visual art and music talk to one another, but they all talked and listened to the lives of the people.

There’s not enough of that around today. Lamestream media focus on the commercial and commodified. Serious cultural publications such as the JRB https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/  do a great job reviewing books, but stay soberly within their boundaries. (There are, noticeably, far more platforms for books and literary criticism than any other art form.) Higher education institutions write and publish, but inside their own kinds of writer/reader walls. Bloggers pick up the joy and reject the boundaries but – let’s be honest – for every one that makes a reader’s heart sing (and they certainly exist) there are too many more shallow, un-researched, indigestible reads.

Staffrider stopped publishing in 1993. Community colleges and cultural groups and independent publishing initiatives worked to fill the gap for as long as funding held out, but as donors dropped out of South Africa faster than figs off the tree, the hope that government would effectively pick up the slack wasn’t realised.

No-boundaries arts writing initiatives since then, like Chimurenga, launched in 2002 https://chimurengachronic.co.za/ have often been regional or pan-African, and that’s no accident. Older in ostensible independence than SA, cultural workers in other African countries were already riding the rails of new decolonisation struggles.

So it’s no surprise that a new (and, for now, once-off) literary mag, centred on the work of a musician and packed with intelligent, challenging discourse, has its roots in Zimbabwe and its branches across the continent.

When Three Sevens Clash (Mbonga Editions), edited by Percy Zvomuya, hails the 77th birthday of exiled Zimbabwean musical prophet Thomas Mukanya Mapfumo with a riff on a Joseph Hill album title. It’s a call to resist the degradation of environment and ideas, to recall prophets passed and to think, acutely and elegantly, about who, how and where we are.

The 64-page, 13-essay collection visits Mukanya’s work both directly and indirectly. The central, holding essay by Musaemura Zimunya tracks the life and output of the artist, linking these to the historical events of his times and interrogating their human, political and spiritual power.

That’s backed by novelist Farai Mudzingwa’s beautifully evocative history of one of Mukanya’s places: Harare’s Seven Miles Hotel. That, in turn, links to another equally evocative spatial reminiscence: South African photojournalist Rafs Mayet’s photo-essay on the1988 Harare Human Rights Now Concert. That loops us back to another Harari – the South African band – and how their trip to then-Salisbury when they were still called The Beaters a dozen years before helped revolutionise their musical ideas, as drawn out by Atiyyah Khan’s sensitive interviewing of veteran band members.

That tangle of conceptual links and loops is emblematic of the kind of publication Three Sevens is. There’s another set around family, migrancy and identity, with a starting point in Muyanka’s early stint with the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band, whose members had roots in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. Marko Phiri’s essay on that has its branches entwined with Tawanda Madzonga’s further reflections on national identity as (mis)perceived through accent, on the fluidities and rigidities of gender identity as Rutendo Chabikwa remembers one of her uncles, and on the role of a quite remarkable (and to me at least previously unknown) 1958 Black music festival in asserting African identity.

There are many more underpinning connections between essays – but I’ll leave you to spot those for yourselves.

Editor Percy Zvomuya

Beyond the power of the contributions to make us think, though, Three Sevens also looks good and reads well. Ricky Hunt’s clean design and typographical choices make the most of the A5 size. The photo-essays carry real emotional impact; the faces of KB Mpofu’s artisanal miners asserting their pride in their work as well as its degraded environment and standing in contrast to the routinely stereotyped and demonising SA media portrayals of “zama-zamas”.

And the writing is just gorgeous. Some credit for that goes to editors Zvomuya (whose editorial is much more: a meditative essay in its own right), Geraldine Mukumbi and Katlego Tapala for selection and care with copy. But mainly it’s on the contributors. They know and feel what they want to say and declare it clearly, without the hedging and jargonising that weighs down too much academic arts writing. Listen to Brian Chikwava’s In Search of the Lost Riddim, invoking the power of some now unobtainable Blacks Unlimited recordings:

“… we see new horizons beyond which the song persists, even after the physical object has vanished.”(p.56)

For now, When Three Sevens Clash is a once-off for Mukanya’s anniversary. You can find it in Johannesburg at Love Books https://lovebooks.co.za/, Book Circle Capital https://bookcapital.co.za/ and Bridge Books https://bridgebooks.co.za/ , at District Six https://www.districtsix.co.za/shop/ and Clarke’s Bookshop https://clarkesbooks.co.za/  in Cape Town, and at The Orange Elephant in Bulawayo https://www.facebook.com/theorangeelephantbulawayo/ and Victoria Falls. Online, try www.bookfish.co.za  . But it would be great if this particular physical object didn’t vanish, but instead established another platform for intelligent writing not only about music but about all the tendrils that music extends into every aspect of our lives, and all the ways we reach back.

POSTSCRIPT: For more cultural writings from the Struggle era, the great news is that the archive of Botswana-based MEDU Art Ensemble – though still a collection in progress – is now up and accessible to researchers.