Project Zabalaza

A wise man once declared that there could be no originality except on the basis of tradition.

He could not have been more correct for all the words we have, all the sounds, all the melodies, all the contemporary practices stands firmly on the shoulders of everything else that “was” said, sang and done.

Contemporary life requires a tradition; a heritage for its meaningfulness. But why then is a black person denied her heritage? For denying her a heritage amounts to denying her a claim to originality and authenticity. It amounts to denying her a “subject” status in history.

Yes, a black person is forever confronted by the fact that the traditions imposed on her, for all their claims to universality, have place in space. And this place is not the one she can claim without contestation and without her appearing a fake and a mockery to humanity.

On the other hand, her invocation of her culture, her own heritage, is forever met with resistance and hostility in much of Africa and the world over.

Those who believe in the goodness of progress brought about by modernisation are insisting that anything indigenous to Africa represents backwardness and, is therefore, detrimental to the developmental needs of Africa and its inhabitants.

The negative view towards indigenous African culture has, also, historically, been reinforced by the dominant Christian theology that has associated indigenous cultural beliefs and practices with danger and evil.

In time, entire theories and theologies have developed to demonstrate the causal links between the practice of African culture and the poverty encountered in Africa.

Exclusion of African indigenous culture in important institutions of our society has also suggested that African culture is not of high value relative to the cultures celebrated in these institutions.

All these factors have historically conspired in the formation of a negative and condescending attitude towards things local and indigenous. The negative attitude is passed to everything associated with African tradition and culture; the ritual, the belief, the philosophy, the aesthetic, and so on.

What is worse, the younger generation has also come to despise the older; the elders in the community, their parents, ancestors and all those who are minimally assimilated into white culture.

Along came Thandiswa Mazwai with her debut album “Zabalaza.” The album is rich with indigenous Xhosa sounds, long rendered archaic by white culture.

One of the songs decries the soul of youth colonised by the white middle-class culture and its values of individualism, indulgence and consumerism.

The song puts into lyrics a reality of rootlessness and centeredlesness among South African black youth: nizilibele ukuthi nizalwa ngobani! With her mellow voice, Thandiswa makes the old sound so new and fresh.

Sounds in the album represent a counter-hegemonic aesthetic rooted in African Xhosa culture. This aesthetic emancipates perception and consciousness about African culture.

No longer are the elders and their culture seen as sterile, static and immobile. There is rhythm, innovation, elaboration and mutation in African indigenous sounds.

What is in the sound evokes an essence; the productive essence that has historically, not only created sounds but has also enabled the elders to survive the harshest conditions under white supremacist powers bent on destroying a people, their culture, their humanity and their very being as subjects participating in the making of history and social reality.

The realization of vital essence; the awareness of creativity and innovativeness in one’s cultural lineage brought about by sounds in the album removes a wedge between sons and fathers, daughters and mothers, that has, in time, developed, when black youth began to associate the capacity to be a subject with white culture.

Sounds in Thandiswa’s album transforms perception about the elder and her culture. The elder emerges as a subject; a being with a sense of the aesthetic and a capacity to create. The young begins to see the elder in a different light. She is now someone they can look up to as they seek to become fully human.

But this emerging vision of self in relation to the culture of the elders and ancestors also affirms the young person herself. Though the colonial enterprise has put a wedge between youth and their elders, it didn’t completely erode the collective cultural unconscious connecting black youth consciousness to the cultural outlook of the elders and ancestors.

The sounds in the album has, in essence, prickled that layer between the repressed collective cultural unconscious (historically repressed for the purpose of survival within a world that rewards assimilation into white culture) and the everyday consciousness among youth, evoking an immediate, instant and excited response.

This response emerges from a sense of affirmation of one’s cultural heritage that the song evokes; a sense countering the pressure to assimilate into the dominant culture. The elders, hearing the sounds, smilingly nod their heads in approval. And I, will only say; Sana!