PREVIEW

Bushbuckridge Unleashes - Slang G The Don

The name that his parents gave him is Eben Mkhabela and in hip hop circles; where you must have a fancy name to play the game he’s known as Slang G Da Don. The twenty years old rapper has been gracing the Luv Ur Hood hip hop session scene for some time now. His long participation in hip hop has produced a couple of never-heard-before songs; a couple of never-heard-before music videos mostly shot and directed by Mahlatse ‘Ndbas’ Ndabandaba. Those artworks still await their opportunity to be seen by the world – that’s if the world cares enough to go in search of work inspired by hunger and passion.

Slang G, like tens of other influencial artists and movers-plus-shakers comes from that hustler’s nightmare called Bushbuckridge. Please don’t be misled; Bushbuckridge is not a town but a whole tens of square kilometres that gave the world AB Crazy (though he loves to protest this), Shaft Moropane, Nkoto Malebye, Identicals etc. Talent oozes from this community’s reservoir like oil in Saudi Arabia. If talent was tradable at most Currency Exchanges; Bushbuckridge will be experiencing a US-funded civil war. However Slang is currently grinding in Pretoria where he is studying  and continuing where he left off in Bushbuckridge – making music. “I have always been in music from a very early age; I used to rap @ school with friends during lunch breaks as well as at home. I get my inspiration from listening to a lot of music from both local and international musicians such as Pro, Proverb, Kwesta, Teargas, Jay-Z and Kanye West just to name a few” he told Kasiekulture.

Being intimate with the Luv Ur Hood brand which was founded by Hlompho ‘Masta H’ Lekhuleni (Mapulaneng Mixtape Volume One) and Khutso ‘Katsuko’ Malele has afforded Slang G the opportunity to work with a number of great artists;  producers and dancers like WildKats, T-Master, Dobby, Matt from Radio Bushbuckridge, DND, EMAN and many others. “I have chosen to title my upcoming mixtape the EPIC MIXTAPE. I truly believe it’s going to be epic album since I put a lot of hard work into it and hope this will show in the way people respond to it” he says.

A single from the mixtape is currently available on Facebook, Soundcloud and also MP3tweet. The killer song currently on cyberspace rotation is called So FLY featuring Dobby from Pretoria. The song will soon have a BAIDA WEAR sponsored video preceding its viral success. “I want to work with a long list of artists from Mpumalanga especially Bushbuckridge people like Hasta H, Chirs KILLA, KHONGZ, TBOY, 012SOUTH and many others. I believe in Mpumalanga can take over the industry if we work togather and stay focused. I am willing to collaborate with different people from all over the province and I want our music to grow” Slang G says with finality

People can get hold of Slang G by emailing ebeneazy@gmail.com on Facebook as  Eben Eazy or my fanpage Slang G as well as twitter @EbenEazy.  

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OPINION

Not in my name Uncle Kofi (not coffee)

Kofi Annan, the flamboyant former Ghanaian diplomat who became a United Nations SG (Scapegoat according to former Iraqi PM Tariq Aziz or Secretary General according to the world) has developed an annoying habit of thinking that what old puppets should do is to rush back to their master and beg for a new gimmick to stay relevant. The world is a circus with one puppet master and many puppets in a hall called the UN General Assembly. I am a Black man who some hidden common sense would suggest I should be happy that a man from my continent (and the first Afrikan country to experience Uhuru) is trusted by both the UN and Arab League to solve an intricate human rights stalemate in Syria.

Now I need to put my cards on the table and confess that I have the same little faith in Annan as I had in Nelson Mandela throughout his reign and even now. I think the old man was given a statue in Sandton as a reminder of what he will never have. Uncle Kofi will get his at the UN someday.

Annan, those closer to history will remember was the chief of UN Peacekeeping Operations in 1994 as South Afrikans queued to cast their first democratic vote; a vote delayed over many decades by the United States vetoeing resolutions brought before the UN Security Council for apartheid to end. In 1994 while the southern tip of Afrika was in a jovial mood Annan was busy blocking efforts to reign in on the genocide that was taking place in Rwanda. With him on the corner was US President Bill Clinton who looked the other way when peace activists demanded that the US jam radio communication in the tiny Afrikan country since that medium was used to spread hate and call for murder. And some people dare call Clinton the first Black president - please!

Annan, regardless of numerous demands by the small UN Peacekeeping force led by a Canadian military commander to send reinforcements acted passive - leaving the final decision to the Security Council of an organisation so misrepresenting of Afrika's reality that it just couldn't be helpful. That apathy resulted in the death of one million Afrikans in at least 100 days. Okay, that's ten thousand a day; or at least 416 Afrikan souls an hour. Annan stood while a reporter from New York Times wrote that he was happy his ancestors made it out of Afrika during the slave trade because the butchery he was seeing in his 'motherland' was excessive. His article was titled Out of Africa - as a metaphor to Sorius Samura's documentary on the Sierra Leone.

The reporter recounted standing at a bridge in Kigali and seeing piles of bloated corpses washing down the river limbless; or machete-bitten. He remembered thinking he could have been one of those corpses if his ancestors were not shipped off to the 'Free World' to help build America.

And then the same flawed Afrikan went on to become the SG of a body which's Peacekeeping Operations he failed and had one million corpses to show. He became the UN Chief becasue the United States and its friends wanted him there after another crony Afrikan (or Arab) Boutros Boutros Ghali had failed Afrika and Palestinians dismally. How else to thank a sell-out Afrikan if not by elevating him to a position where he has absolute diplomatic immunity anywhere in the world - including his native Afrika. During his tenure Annan stifled the voices of Third World countries at the UN by pretending to be neutral while his position allowed him the leverage to provide political guidance to the world body. His vision for the organisation was always at loggerheads with what our then President Thabo Mbeki envisaged for Africa; a self-sufficient continent with mechanisms to solve its own socio-economic and geo-political problems. Mbeki envisaged a permanent Afrikan peace-solving tool such as the current day-Trioka, an Afrikan stand-by force for deployment to trouble hotspots such as Somalia and an approach to Africa's development that was not about the giver and receiver but building the internal capacity of Afrika to stand on its own feet, feed its own people and defend its borders and integrity.

Mbeki felt that the first stop towards achieving that would be for the UN Security Council to transform to the point whereby Afrika has two rotating (at the discretion of the AU) permanent seats at the Security Council. This would have been useful in ensuring that France does not conduct bombing adventures in its former colonies whenever if feels its version of 'civilisation' is threatened. Such a step would have required a UN Security Council vote which Afrika, advised by African Union would have vetoed and resorted to Afrikan solutions. Annan never took that to heart; he felt that the way the UN was, which is how it was in 1945 is fine. He shied away from curbing the growing influence of Muammar Gaddafi in North Africa since such a arrogance was funded in England and beneficial to the West.

Due to Uncle Kofi being in New York for sightseeing purposes today five countries decide who should be attacked and none of those countries is in Afrika or South America. Now, after his stint frustrating Mbeki, Olusegun Obasanjo and Abdel Aziz Bouteflika he came back home to a continent still suffering from an esteem problem. Here we were prepared to forget that his son was implicated in the Oil For Food programme; a capitalist-sanctioned Ponzi which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children as sanctions meant for the regime resulted in the deaths of civilians while Anna watched. Lots of Annan's friends made millions of dollars out of the programme while Nato conducted regular bombing raids in the two no-fly zones in the North and South of Iraq.

He arrived home and suddenly Kenya exploded and given his unquestionable 'clout' the AU deployed him to Nairobi to mediate the ethnic-fueled conflict. Actually, with the benefit of hindsight Annan failed to understand the complexities of the situation. His version of compromise required a constitutional amendment; which means he couldn't find solutions within the democratic constitutional order that is Kenya. The land of Kenyatta was suddenly burdened with a Prime Minister and a President; a bloated cabinet and more money for the bureaucracy.

I would like to delve into his current role as an UN-Arab League mediator in Syria. Funny enough, as they appointed him and gave him his terms of reference; including his paycheque Annan didn't ask them why he was not relevant a year ago when there was equal carnage in Libya? There is a massacre in Afrika, they don't deploy an Afrikan to mediate but when there is a civil war in Arabia they send an Afrikan to extinguish the flame. There's something that is dodgy about the fact that Arabs (the original slave-takers) always need someone from outside to solve their problems which a third of the time are actually caused by the US. Can you start to imagine that the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate was once mediated by George Mitchell and then Tony Blair; all from the West. It should make one wonder if there's no smart diplomat in one of the Arab countries who understand the area, the culture and the politics better to bring both adversaries in the region to the table.

Now, Uncle Kofi takes the poisoned chalice and runs to Damascus to meet a man who inherited power from his father (Hafez passed over the baton to Bashir). He thinks he has the respect of China and Russia who he alienated many times as UN head. He thinks those 'rebels', armed and trained by Saudi Arabia and Qatar will respect him while their budget of $1 million a day 'to fight' Al Assad will disappear if they cease fire. He thinks that his trip to Tehran, which is something the US probably told him to do will shift the balance of power on the streets of Aleppo, Idlib, Homs, Hama, Damascus and others. He goes to Iran on the deadline of the cessation of hostilities so that he can provide the US with enough fodder to say 'indeed we were right that Iran is responsible for the carnage'.

Unce Kofi should know that he is not representing any Afrikan as he criss-crosses the world as a pawn of the US, Britain and France. He should know that his mission is doomed to fail because Israel does not want the regime of Assad to fall and be replaced by Islamists who will be sympathetic to Hamas and Fatah. He should know that the so-called Free Syrian Army is a bunch of individuals who some are not even defectors but Mujahideen who were based in Northern Lebanon and Turkey.

I look at Uncle Kofi with the same prism as that of Mandela. The old man was obviously overrated because he didn't tip the status quo when he came to power in 1994. He was loved because what we fought for for many years will never be achieved. He was probably fighting for something different to what we were all fighting for. Eighteen years later we are still fighting for economic freedom, which is an ideal Mandela signed off during the CODESA negotiation and concealed in the controversial Sunset Clauses. So, instead of obsessing with Arabia, Kofi like Mandela should remember that whatever 'achievement' he notches he will never be mentioned in the same breath as Marcus Garvey, Franz Fanon, Julius Mualimu Nyerere, Robert Mugabe, Agosthino Neto, Patrice Lumumba, Samuel Nujoma, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Steve Biko, King Shakal, Thabo Mbeki etc. He will always be remembered as the man who babysat the genocide of one million Afrikans; sugar-coated an ethnic genocide in Kenya, blocked the transformation of the UN, monitored the removal of Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, the poisoning of Yasser Arafat, the suffocation of the Palestinian population etc.

To Uncle Kofi, there's more trouble in Afrika than the Middle East; leave that mess to those who caused it. Mali awaits at home!

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REVIEW

Luv Ur Hood -Easter 2012

While some people were lounging in familiar spaces (such as 606, Valencia, Civilize etc) getting sloshed, chatting under-age girls and lying to each other about how much they have in their banks and what car they will be driving in Summer the Luv Ur Hood bunch (Khutso 'Katsuko' Malele and Hlompho 'Masta H' Lekhuleni) was out at Kabila's Car Wash doing what they do best - hook up a tight show irrespective of the limitations of bad sound and an incoherent line-up - actually rag-tag. Like they say in other countries, 'even without you (Whitney Houston) the show must go on'.

And go on it did; opening as usual with the anthem 'Batho ba a shota' which gets Mr Doo on his element. This comical emcee was this day flipping the coin with a huge wall clock strapped around his neck. He lapped the stage and delved deep into his Sepulana and Xitsonga delivery that pokes fun at other rappers - alive and dead. The line I love with passion is when he says 'rappers masturbate with Rama'. Hahahaha, you should have heard how he got the whole crowd eating out of his palm.

But Do is a drop in an deep ocean made up of different sets, such as those from Thulamahashe (C-Well, Tazzy Taz, PLZNT etc). Some enthusiasts awaited a performance by another Thulas cat called SK but true to the hustler culture of the ghetto he was nowhere to be seen - gathering cash somewhere in this vast region of Bushbuckridge. I however spotted Spotja, Junia and Gazzolin. Spotja dropped a few lines during the freestyle stage together with another rythmatic emcee whose participation only ended there. Junia was strolling around like a Don let loose in the Carribean and never bothered to sing.

Masta H and KFB also took to the stage. KFB flamed the mike with two songs that come ripped straight from the streets. For a change it was refreshing to hear him go beyond his beat influenced freestyles and rapping something one can tell was scripted, edited and delivered with love for the game and fans. Whoever makes KFB's music truly understands his sound - playalistic and suave. KFB knows how to play on the beat as one can hear him on the Mapulaneng Mixtape's 1,2,3 Mabhebeza; together with Young K-Cee.

Speaking of Young K-Cee, he has matured since the days of his novice primary school lines reminiscent of everything despised about the Dirty South. Even though his delivery is tight he needs to evolve beyond rythming about stuff he loves (money), stuff he is (sickest kid emcee) and stuff he wants to be (Young Moolah). This young emcee must broaden his vocabulary and start using other people's experience to inform his lyrics. Hearing someone singing about mohawks and skinny jeans can't make for an interesting album. Young K-Cee the Kid needs serious mentorship; which he might get from his cousin Masta H.

Masta H was at his element. Actually it should be a conflict of interest for me to write about H since I also manage him. But as a fan his delivery is always on point. My judgment of his maturity goes beyond just the songs he performed, which come from his Mapulaneng Mixtape but also a song he recently recorded with J.O.P, where the hook is an intoxicating classical piece by Sabs (Masaba). It's a wedding song that can hold its own in the august halls of Italy alongsinde Placido Domingo and Jose Carerra.

Bushbuckridge was represented by its dons, the gothic crew that drinks and smokes like nobody's business and have scary rythmes that can get a coward shying away from College View, Maviljan and other town's outskirts. Even in the absence of Android the crew still held it down. These dudes need to have a mixtape and market it hard. The streets are waiting.

Obviously Katsuko was there too, threatening to rap and only doing it impoptu. Surely being an emcee is not the easiest role one can play. Familiar faces such as Sparkle, Dialectic (who dropped a verse or two), Adorn the Poet (who was manning the Luv Ur Hood merchandise stand), Black Pearl (who was expected to perform but didn't), Software (hmmmmm) and many more. Luv Ur Hood Easter rocked and they are planning another one for Youth Day! Ayeye!

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Reach for the Sky


Miss Mpumalanga hopeful Thato Matšie is only twenty-years old and can already see herself walking out of the Ehlanzeni Conference Centre with the crown on April 13. She is competing against 13 other equally beautiful and gifted young women – all hoping to continue to represent Mpumalanga at the Miss South Africa pageant later this year.

“I started modelling in high school, winning both the Miss Valentine, Lehlasedi, Shatale and Mapulaneng school contests. I am currently with Select Modelling Agency in Rosebank and have attended Miss SA workshops. At the workshops it finally dawned on me that if I want to be at the top I need to start at the bottom”, Thato says.

She adds that contrary to her earlier perceptions of modelling, it is not as easy as it is made out to look. Thato says her view was broadened at realising that she needs to be informed about what is happening politically, be intelligent and have a brain to understand the challenges faced by young people in the country. “I want to use my participation in Miss Mpumalanga to bring hope to the people of Bushbuckridge as a whole, rural areas and teenagers who are at a disadvantage, especially those who feel that they don’t have hope. I want them to know they can make it in life. I want to be their role model” says this hip-hop sensation Rick Ross fan.

Thato also confesses her liking for Thandiswa Mazwai and says ‘Mazwai is real, a woman-and-a-half. I love her personality’.

The leggy lass aspire to open beauty spas and libraries throughout communities as her way of reaching out. She says women’s health and beauty should not be exclusive to the elite but should be as affordable as a Pap Smear. “I want to be Miss South Africa, own cars and houses. My two role models are my mother, Lebo and Sibongile Sambo, founder of SRS Aviation. She’s the first black woman to own an aviation company and school in Africa. She’s a strong woman who has done a lot and motivated me. She comes from my hometown too”, Thato says fondly. She is also a Flight Attendant student in Johannesburg.

Last weekend her charity donated 250 school uniforms, shoes and bags to Lehlasedi High School and Boikhutšo Primary School learners.

“I believe that our fashion industry in South Africa must integrate our ethnic designs and fabrics into what are globally big brands like Gucci. We need to promote Africa and be more innovative instead of just being consumers” she says about our fashion industry. Her love for women’s beauty is one of the reasons why she wants to study Somantology later in her twenties.

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Kapture the Moment!

Very few South African producers would bet on Fruity Loops being their sound software of choice. They rather vouch for fancy brands such as Q-Base and MPC 300. However when one listens at the finished product the creativity fails the technology.

That’s until you meet Kapture, real name Ronald Malele (24). Born and raised in Bushbuckridge, Malele started his schooling at Saile and moved on to Ditau High School where he matriculated in 2007.
He says that he discovered his love for music, especially the innovation and creative side of things while he was studying PC Engineering in Joburg. While the world of technology is still what pays his bills he has ventured into serious beatmaking as his mixtape, which is still in the pipeline titled From the Underground bears testimony.
Driven largely by sampling underground skits and dodgy (unpopular) interludes his fascination with underground hip hop comes to the fore. “I grew up listening to house and hip hop but I loved hip hop more because of the messages it has. My favourite rappers were and still are Jedi Mind Tricks, Canibus, Gangstarr, Ben Shaper, Proverb, Optical Illusion etc.” Kapture says.
His evolution has resulted in him hooking up with Mpumalanga’s number one indigenous rapper Masta H (Mapulaneng Mixtape Volume One) on his follow-up mixtape. Masta H, real name Hlompho Lekhuleni swears by Kapture’s beats and says he is looking forward to working closely with him on his June release.
“I have worked with different producers such as Hydrogen, Rudy, Khulekani, Juniour, Tapsmash and many others but I find Kapture’s beats to be at another level and am looking forward to rapping my Sepulana rhymes on them”, he says.
Fruity Loops, the software that Kapture uses so well in real underground and deep songs such as The Graveyard, BBR Finest and The Angelic is also a favourite of award-winning 22-years old American producer Lex Luger. Luger has produced for artists such as Rick Ross, Snoop Dogg, Wiz Khalifa and many others.
Kapture is a very talented young man whose command of sampling reminds one of a younger and less-arrogant Kanye West, is on point. It will be smart for some of Mpumalanga’s hip hop artists to familiarise themselves with his sound, especially those on a conscious tip and wanting beats to carry their message across. “The Graveyard is the name of my production which I chose because the graveyard is the last place where we all rest, so this means my sound is the beginning of the end.”, Kapture says in conclusion

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Onse Artist in District Six

Outlaw artist Sandra McGregor understood the vast vistas of storytelling outside of the then much-hyped oral literature and the glam offered by DRUM magazine and its genius writers such as Can Themba and Blake Modisane. Afrikans have over the years succeeded in having their knowledge transferred from one generation to the next through campfire tales – that was before someone exposed the pen and paper to them. Folk tales have survived various assaults since nobody had the power to burn – literally every Black person with a story embedded in their mind. And when they started using various mediums such as photography (Alf Khumalo), sculpting, painting etc the apartheid wheels came off.

Thus, when Sandra McGregor saw District Six – a mixed residential area that had defied any attempt by the apartheid government to divide by race – and not rule the majority population of South Africa she saw a canvas hungry for her oil and brush. Over many years she recorded life in this ‘controversial’ part of the Cape, including the day the bulldozers came with instructions to bring to an end a social experiment gone gory.

It was 1962 when she settled there as an artist – almost an outsider in a community that was MADE IN PRETORIA. Dolores Fleischer, who authored Onse Artist in District Six made it her mission to trace the route that Sandra took, her muses, her rags to riches story, her inspiration, her uncelebrated talent and the probable reasons she felt at home at District Six.

When I have to review work as disarming as Onse Artist in District Six I am confronted with the reality that the best story of South Afrika’s artistic excellence, including its place in the world has not yet been told. The Van Goghs, Picassos and friends don’t have nothing on our artists. What with the robbery that took place during apartheid years – some through curators who took in their own possession classic works by South Afrikan exiled artists such as Gerald Sekoto and the raping of works by sculptors Noria Mabasa and Jackson Hlungwani to the point where they adorn majestic buildings outside of this country – bought at a pittance.

Paraphrasing what Steve Biko said about a people with two versions of history, Fleischer not only makes this poignant point to stick out throughout her biography of McGregor but she also uses it as a political tool to interrogate the past. “The individual spirit and its artistic expression can never be destroyed”, a blurb on the back cover makes that point very clear.

The destruction of District Six aimed at discouraging, through action human disregarding of the social engineering that was taking place in their mist, mirrors that of Sophiatown. The architects of poverty’s attempt to render history a lie by destroying the inspiration that ended up on McGregor’s canvass is not lost to Fleischer’s narrative which accompanies the paintings and the profile of biography artist.

Like The Artist in the Garden – the Quest for Moses Tladi by Angela Read Lloyd, the sting in the tail of these works is the fact that they are bios written to celebrate triumph of the human spirit – against odds larger than physical and legislative hurdles.

This is a beautiful book that will be useful more the day South Afrika answers back to critics of the modernity (contemporary claim) of its artistic landscape.

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The Artist in Our Garden - A Review


Apartheid was terrible because not only did it deny the majority of people a chance at self-determination but it also robbed its practitioners of an opportunity to discover a beauty outside of themselves. A beauty that was not pink or peach but Black – quite probably brown. Thus, the architects and their apologists were left existing in an aquarium environment of gross ignorance where everything that shone was gold.

This was the sad indictive conclusion I reached after reading – quite critically Angela Read Lloyd’s biography of Moses Tladi, the first South African Black artist working in an international style - titled The Artist in the Garden, the Quest for Moses Tladi. A beautiful picture-driven bio of an artist who never occupied any space in the mind of the Boer art fundis because their state decided he shall not be acknowledged as existing in a country of his birth. He is called the artist in the garden because, as apartheid would have liked it – the best idea of a Black person for anyone visiting South Africa was supposed to be that of a garden worker or miner who at the end of the day was so tired that he would not see the need to explore any career outside of the confines of subjugation.

Tladi, in that institutionalised oppressive system managed to become a painter, a brilliant one at that who captured the aesthetic of his institutional captivity with the view of a bird in a cage. When you look inside a cage all you see is a bird, but you’ll never know what it sees when it looks outside. One poet once said that ‘a bird, even in a golden cage still years for freedom’. True, the golden cage only charms the captor but the bird can see the freedom that exists beyond such glittering confines. Tladi escaped the cage in ways that made the captor angry and feel more the need to suppress his creative spirit.

The story of Tladi is the story of musician Enoch Sontonga, the story of author Merriam Tlali, the late sage Es’kia Mphahlele and all the Black soldiers who took part in the Second World War only to be relegated to footnotes when the story was finally told by Field Marshall Jan Smuts and his Boer generals.

It is a counter-story to Pablo Picasso’s imagined, media-hyped and celebrated genius, Breyten Breytenbach’s literary eccentricism and JM Coetzee’s purported eye for detail. The story of a star that continued to survive against all odds – even when the sun rose. The man who refused to be shackled and packaged in a box.

It’s for that reason that Lloyd’s endeavour to expose this rare gem deserves proper appraisal in a world that is known for giving posthumous awards instead of lifetime achievements and excellence prizes. While the consumption of artworks, especially the visual genre is still an elite hobby in our country it is through good narratives such as this that consciousness will someday replace literary apathy.

The Artist in the Garden – the Quest for Moses Tladi is available is all good book stores. I loved it and I promise you my sentiments shall be yours when you finally flip page 293







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A Series of Undesirable Events - A Review

I am a strong advocate of non-conformity. I don’t believe in structure. I detest any template and reject any notion that anything is absolute. Even the truth is not because it is ‘the truth according to???’ whose perception of it might have been strongly influenced by the tide of the times. The events of any era produce their own truths and lies. And such truths become lies once the table turns. So, I protest that anything is gospel unless inspired by the Creator. And the Bible is not a book of literature but history.
Being a non-conformist, if I was to put together my twelve disciples there would be, among them Zukiswa Waanner (whose experimental style in Men of the South and her retake of Can Themba’s The Suit breaks conformity barriers), Kgebetli Moele (for his shrewd use of his poetic license in Book of the Dead), Tshwarelo Mogakane and until last week Deon-Simphiwe Skade.

Now I know you are familiar with some of the writers I have mentioned above and you wonder why would I want to put together a disciple unit of scribes some of you might call rebels? I deliberately omitted Siphiwo Mahala whose retake of The Suit (The Suit Revisited) is still one of those short stories I read to remind myself that Afrika is the cradle.

Now, Skade’s novella titled A Series of Undesirable Events is a peep-show into what this writer, who I have never met has in store for our literary landscape. I often get tired of justifying why I appraise some books and deliver positive judgments while I stump other like a badly translated Holy Book. Comrades, I am a literary adjudicator in the English panel of the South African Literary Awards (SALA) where I serve with a Doctor and a Professor and my competence to put forward an argument on literary merit is unchallenged. Your book becomes literature when we say so because we have read hundreds if not thousands of titles and we know what a good book read like.

And I dare say, A Series of Undesirable Events is a blerry brilliant story – though more could have been said between these 90 pages. Skade could have thrashed out details about his characters and added more flesh on the novella weighing 165 in a city where novellas die. Impressive because this novella does not face its demise but survives to be appraised.

Skade’s flirting relationship with his characters and their intricate stories robs the reader of any opportunity to fall in love with them, embrace them and peel more layers to discover their aesthetic. He tells us what they all do for a living, which is good and often shines through the narrative. He delves deep into that – especially towards the end when it’s just Moshe, Tumi and Tshitso who are reminiscing about lost friends and acquaintances over green bottles.

The poems accompanying the prose add a necessary colour to the canvas, and leaves the reader wondering why can’t they stand alone – without being adulterated by the prose.

I love Skade’s narrative because of what I call non-conformity. Throughout the 90 pages he manages to be all the characters in the novella and see the world through their eyes. He even manages to become someone as miscellaneous as Lorraine. He juggles being a man and a woman with a passion Waanner would be proud of. Waanner is three times all ‘men’ in Men of the South.

Skade’s book is so well-written I had to read it seven times before formulating this thesis. I don’t kiss ass (even when I get free books for my growing private library) and I am brave to say that Skade is a useful addition to our literature family. His story is set in a city very few people have tackled without touching on its pre’76 geo-political make-up (not make-over). Cape Town never changes – and Skade’s narrative is a testament of activism about this magnet with a table – the magnet that should be declared the 8th Wonder of the World for its eternal captivity in a time warp. The last European outpost in the South.

If this book pitched for any award I adjudicate it would have stood a chance to walk away with an accolade for creativity – depending on with whom will it be swimming. A worthy read I am comfortable to call – the first in a line of many. Even though it’s not mine.

Skade is extremely talented, his style seductive and the simplicity with which he tells the Undesirable Events addictive. Go buy it and read.

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"Bare H ba tshware/ i got a new swag"

The much-anticipated Sepulana mixtape of Luv Ur Hood founder Hlompho ‘Masta H’ Lekhuleni was finally launched in September. Lekhuleni, who has since gone to outsell all the first copies in two months spoke Kasiekulture back then as the climax of his labour was shipped from Pretoria where the final touches were put.

The 17-track mixtape titled Mapulaneng Mixtape Volume 1 is the first hip hop recording to be done in the obscure language of Sepulana. “While the mixtape is a pure Sepulana album there are other artists who are featured who sing in their languages as well. It is a classic Mpumalanga potpourri”, says Masta H, popularly known as H. He says for the mixtape he worked with Junior Mkari, a producer based in Thulamahashe. He features on his songs rappers such as Shogun C-Well, KFB, Young KCee, Junior, Android and Adorn the Poet. The music was provided by beatmakers such as Hydrogen, TapMash, Bacteria, Rudo Charma, Calliber, Junior and KP.

The mixtape also includes individual songs by JOP (Lehlabula), Katsuko and Mr Doo (Yo Hip-hop). Yo Hip-hop has been making rounds for some time and is already a popular ringtone amongst Mapulana folk in Bushbuckridge, Daveyton, Soweto and Tembisa. “Katsuko’s Ke Tšwa Bush song is also on rotation already and has been adopted as the Luv Ur Hood anthem. It has a video on YouTube, which is rare for artists without a deal”, continued H.

However the same can be said about Lekhuleni as well. Having just recorded Mapulaneng Mixtape Volume 1 last month he has already featured in O’Mang, an SABC commissioned documentary where he raps in Sepulana. Four of the songs from his mixtape have already been procured for inclusion in the documentary. “Motshenyoleng wa Bhayiza, O’Mang, Mapulaneng and Mayibuye will get national acclaim when the doccie is screened” added H. It means that H saw his first paycheque before he had an album out.

On the week of his release H performed during a soccer tournament in his hometown of Shatale. He said the release of the mixtape was well-arranged to coincide with Heritage Month. “It is this month that we have to be proud of ourselves, where we come from and the languages of our ancestors”, he said. He added that he hopes that with his mixtape already out he hoped to feature in the province’s Heritage Month celebrations as there has never been any participation, especially in rap by Mapulana, who are an integral part of Mpumalanga.

“I hope the powers that be at Arts and Culture, government, promoters and municipalities are listening. This mixtape was long overdue and I know together with amaShangaan, amaNdebele and amaSwati, this potpourri of cultures is going places”, he concluded.

Well, that never happened, as the powers that be were busy obsessing with politics - tribal and partisan.

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