He similarly sees no inherent affinity between art and friendship. My questions about artistic relationships as a form of friendship via inspiration, affiliation, or collaboration go unanswered. Nor is he prepared to directly engage any of the personal relationships that were seminal to him, to his writing, his existence, to his coming to consciousness. ‘We all know artists exploit artists,’ he says wryly, calling up a litany of failed friendships, betrayed dreams, the disappointed expectations and fraught alliances of community drawn together under economic and political or interpersonal stresses.
Close to his death, Ingoapele Madingoane was a lonely man. His BC comrades would have nothing to do with him. But after he died, sitting on the toilet with an axe in his skull, at his memorial the whole blasted fat piglet lot of them came out spouting platitudes. Friends.
Peter Makurube died in malnutrition and neglect after all the years he put in to the arts of poetry and music. He was persona non grata in all besuited over flabby frames and business spots. That history is a month-recent. Memorial and funeral, what happened? All the rats came out screaming praises. Friends.
Mafika Gwala died torn up, soul cut to pieces but spirit still flying high with defiance and an unchanged, solid belief in what he stood, a world beyond the grasping, clasping, clawed existence some sold on the stock exchange. That man brought me to consciousness. And at the end there he was in abject, dire circumstances. Eating away with the sickness coming in from without ... and then of course the Farts Minister had a lot of broken, hot wind to blow about how great Gwala was and that they’d been in negotiation to put him in the education-stream. Lies and bullshit. Faecal-faced friends.
Friendship is scary business. Mark that, about economics. I sit in the bushveld, no friendship in my field of vision, not even on the horizon.
A scholarly treatise for readers who never cared about scholarship, a memoir for those who have had enough with the insularity of simple confession, and a poetry book for the hip-hop generation, A Half Century Thing synthesizes the raw passion of a diary and the pleasure of a pop music album with the relevance and scope of nothing less than the history of South African literature, art, and music. Building on the ground traveled in Word Down the Line, extending beyond the tomb or grave, (‘message from immolation /cremation’) beyond homage (‘mindful of how Brother Ali warned … / i don’t disrespect the people who laid the tracks i travel on but ... / i write with the marrow in the center of my own creation-bone’), it’s a text that reads with an almost physical urgency, as though written in a human-heat (‘I’m the RA that came before the SUN / the fire-soul of fanon’s children’). Here Rampolokeng tangles and untangles a transgressive congregation of historic and fictional influences (Mafika Gwala, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Seitlhamo Motsapi, Sony Lab’ou Tansi, Yambo Ouologuem, Dambudzo Marechera — and his ‘cockroach eye-view’, Johnny Dyani, Mongezi Feza, Winston Mankunku Ngozi, Dumile Feni, Thami Mnyele, Fikile Magadlela, Miles Davis, Allen Ginsburg, Steve Biko, Frantz Fanon and oh, oh so many more), all while chronicling his disillusionment with the current dispensation:
like Brit Gervais comedian-perversion:
No Grace in climbing Nelson’s column Just penis & anus reconciliation
Ask Desmond the tutu-bishop
Only Black in the rainbow when my rectum raps
National flag misses my crap
and simultaneously trying to dig himself out of his own alienated funk:
Boots digging me out of my roots
Fists to my face not hitting me but my race
& police special .38s loaded with cold metal & solid hate
The authorities & my personality, how they relate ...
(how white lightning dictates what i write is frightening)
enlightening how (as) they say ‘it’s blackness in high places
Now throw the switch on your politics.’
From the word go, Rampolokeng moves forward in a stop-start fashion, jumping from decade to decade (‘from throwing stones & the [dynamite] sticks of june ’76 to tossing alternative Afrikaans rock with James the beboptist Phillips’, from ‘Amilcar Cabralised to howling with Ginsberg,[howling] not at the moon but at Armstrong … the Apollo creed was a bad seed’); fast-forwarding and rewinding (‘Got splinters of history lodged in my afrofuturism. / it takes the primitive to make the progressive / – fake dialectic’); ‘scratching beginnings & endings’; weaving in quotations and references; playing music off against the word (‘frozen, cramped between Jimmy Cliff’s “House of Exile” & Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger’), and blending other stories with his own.
There’s a collective thinking of this kinetic thing that Lesego engages — the participation in, the doing of, it. What emerges is a community based on the sharing of a refrain, on the creation of a path of thought not guaranteed by any root, by any integrity, by any violence, but only by its ongoing search for freedom and love for humanity. What the social, the political, the civic/civil world has surrendered from itself, has given up on, goes then into the realm of the imagination. As he writes in ‘LIBATION BLUES FOR MISTA GWALA’:
Tension contrast release what is freedom
Can you pin the insurrection tone down?
It vibrates pitched at liberation time.
Artistic downward spiral
Move from cellophane to the cyber-download plane
Was company exec’s stratospheric flight
to cut Mahlathini’s lion-mane
Bird’s grave was his sax
On top of him they shovelled narcotics
& between the orchestra & the soccer star
Lies the Hendrixian rockster
Words are medicine
Which is to mean also poison]]
six-nine can mean urine
But also conception
Half Century Thing is a devoted heresy, a sermon on the word, on politics and aesthetics that challenges what poetry does, what it can do, even what it is willing to address as a form. Most of all it’s a very beautiful tribute to friendship, one that articulates truly dissensual politics (in contrast to consensual), not a cult, but a culture of heterogeneity through which each of us accepted the singularity of the other.
In ‘Bass For Bra Willie’, the first of a ‘Movement in Four Body-Parts’, Lesego presents an idea of friendship that not only allows for critique, but insists on it. It’s at once a celebration and a scathing rap attack that riffs off and rips ups the constant jazz references that permeate Keorapetse Kgositsile’s oeuvre. In this poem, Lesego acknowledges his debt to Kgositsile’s practice by adopting its poetic strategies, while simultaneously turning those very tactics against the older poet.
In its passion and its wrath, its love and disdain, it corresponds with the idea of friendship based in brutal honesty developed between Amiri Baraka and Ed Dorn through their years of correspondence, as documented in the recent Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters (Pisano 2014). Here Baraka says on more than one occasion, ‘Dorn would rather make you an enemy than lie to you’. Lesego similarly shows his deep respect for Kgositsile by risking alienating him rather than perpetuating false platitudes.
In a conversation between Ramolokeng and Gwala published in the Chronic newspaper