Native tongue Bafana Khumalo
THERE is another Dorkay House launch on the cards. This place has to hold the record for the highest number of attempts at resurrection and the highest number of failures at it.
This is the place where the best black creative talent was nurtured and sometimes came to fruition. Sometimes, like in the case of yours truly, the talent … just went, well … let’s say I cannot hold a tune as well as I am supposed to, considering that the entire continent can sing.
It was here that my parents’ dreams of their handsome and talented son blooming to become a creative musician were dashed.
I was 10 years old and my parents, realising that I was not making it into any of the township football teams, got it into their minds to send me to Dorkay House to study music.
Ja, those were great times for me, and the worst of times for the people who were supposed to teach me music. I think I single-handedly debunk the myth that all black people can sing and dance.
The first year I went to Dorkay House, religiously on Saturday mornings, I did not have any impact on the teachers for they assumed that the light would soon dawn on my young eyes that music was not made for me and I was not made for music. They were wrong, they really were _ because for two years every Saturday, instead of doing something typically township, I would wake up in the morning and head for Eloff Street in town where for five solid hours I would go through rudimentary lessons in playing the recorder and the piano.
I think I played pretty well for a 10-year-old kid who could never make it into any school choir. The people who taught me seemed not to concur with me for I never was asked to play a solo in any of the end-of-year concerts designed to entertain proud parents. They always made me play the triangle. I had no problem with that. Even if I only had to strike the stupid instrument three times in a five-minute-long piece, I was on stage, a performer, nay a star shining so bright that the audience had to wear shades. Big things have very small beginnings, I would lie to myself.
When the second year started, one of the teachers asked whether I was coming back to register. I confirmed her suspicions and she asked me why. I have never been able to suffer fools, and their foolish questions, so I kept quiet. The poor, ignorant woman who could see talent staring her in the face kept the peace for six months before she finally lost it one day. I remember it very well; it was one of those particularly cold mornings and I had a session with her where I had to play two pieces on the recorder, one which I had had to memorise and one which she would choose randomly from a music book. I thought that the louder I blew the wooden instrument the better it sounded. So I went through my memorised piece and the unforeseen one.
I blew all the right keys with the wrong intonation and pacing. In short _ this was her ill-informed opinion _ I stank. She was very patient and let me have my 15 minutes of glory and after I finished, satisfied with my performance, she looked at me and in all earnestness asked me: “Why don’t you go home and tell your mother to keep you there until you are old enough to be a mechanic?”
I decided the woman was a miracle of modern life as she was the only living person who had already donated her brain to science. Did she not see that I was a creative musician? That what she in her arrogant ignorance deemed to be a lousy performance was in fact a very creative, alternative interpretation? I thought her suggestion of a future career for me to be strange, for I had never seen myself lying under a stationary car with grease and oil dripping down my face. I dismissed the comment with the fact: White people are strange folk.
I still cannot play the recorder and I am still to fathom why she would have wanted me to work for Themba’s Same Day Service We Specialise in Minibus Taxis Panel Beaters. I never got to tell the woman what I thought of her for, shortly after this teaser, the 1976 outrage erupted and the place was shut down for a couple of months. After this, my brilliant musical career was relegated to the back burner. It stayed there until the fuel in the burner ran out.
Since then my dealings with Dorkay House have always been in the pages of the media, mostly when somebody is trying to resuscitate the place. Somebody is trying to light the flame again. As always, whoever is trying to do this harks back to its past and links with one of the most overrated symbols of South African history, Sophiatown.
While acknowledging that Dorkay House has made a major contribution to creativity in this country, looking at the number of times it has fallen on its face, isn’t it about time that it was given a rest? Just as much as Sophiatown was a great place to be in, any attempt to recreate it would be a disaster.
Maybe, like Sophiatown, Dorkay House is only potent as a symbol of what was once great. Maybe the money spent on trying to bring it back should be diverted to other ventures that are more likely to survive.