Merle Colborne
With “two front covers, several middles and no back” in a format that’s “vertical, horizontal and partly upside down” you can read Mamba, the vibrant new Durban-based culturezine, standing on your head.
Thirty local writers, artists, photographers, designers and musicians (a few of whom slipped over the margins into the mainstream a good while ago) have contributed to the 90-page publication which sets out to “demelanise” African identity and give “visible meaning to the other self embedded in people’s minds”.
The contents of one or two of the minds represented seem to resemble nothing so much as “sliced white” but perhaps one needs a bit of blotting paper to soak up the headier stuff which can pack a lethal kick.
With so many different minds coming together between Mamba’s three covers one might have ended up with a “pavement special” of a publication. Not so. With its crafty inventors setting the overall tone, the zine has a sufficiently coherent look and feel – a unique identity. These include writer/editorial co-ordinator Mthandeni Ziqubu, designer/artist/writer Trueman Myaka, and publisher/editor Andy Mason who also happens to be director of Artworks, Mamba sponsor.
It was while the three were strolling together on the beach one March day last year, talking about the notion that “what people supposedly think, is merely a simulation produced by the establishment and the mainstream media”, that the idea of the magazine was conceived.
Ziqubu writes the way he speaks. You don’t need a dictionary to follow. You need several. The Greater Oxford English Dictionary (both the concise and the shorter are inadequate), a good Dictionary of Contemporary Critical Theory, and a comprehensive Who’s Who or Ever Has-Been in the scribbling, dribbling, cross-hatching, image-snatching, sound-making, mickey- taking, limb-moving, groin-grooving, hanging-upside-down-from-a-tightrope world of international artistic expression. Or you need the Internet.
“Mamba”, Ziqubu writes in a what-the-hell mix of metaphors, “expresses the surreal labyrinth, dichotomised and scattered in the arteries of our psyche as our raison d’ etre in the metropolis excuses nothing rather than to be cloned icons whose hearts are subplanted in the demands of the marketplace.”
Then, when he refers to Baudrillard I turn to the Internet. And find that this French writer “is incessantly playing with words, tempting the reader to concentrate more on his language than his opinions … His style illustrates his thesis – that we are leaving reality behind us.”
Artist Myaka’s etching style is wickedly exuberant, but when he writes he’s tauter, tarter. His eyes constantly peel the clothes from your body, and the thoughts from your face. He works a kind of kinetic excitement into words. Like “buttocks” which he says in his piece Sins of the Buttocks, “has a bulbous utterance … (that) creates a mouthfeel. There is a sense of air pressure which heaps up and then is swallowed down the oesophagus to the lungs and it perspires a sense of relief as much as buttocks do … There is nothing on earth as gorgeous as buttocks as much as there is nothing as disgusting as buttocks.”
Myaka’s other passion is anthropology. He did a three-year fine arts course at Natal Technikon and has lived in New England and New York. Ziqubu, on the other hand, did matric and stayed in his room and read – everything.
The wonder is that these two outstanding – and lonely – young men met. And that Mason was there for them. Who knows when the next issue of Mamba, spiral-bound for glory, will appear? For the moment there is the debut issue and that, to use one of Myaka’a words, has made me, at least, “gladful”.
Mamba costs R34.20 and is available at branches of Exclusive Books, or by telephone on (031) 303-6466