The image that adorns 50funkYears, a new South African retrospective CD put out by the nearly decade-old party institution the Politburo Sessions, is one of a steely, Robben Island-era Nelson Mandela disguised in shades and a spottie. The original photograph was apparently captured in the mid-Eighties for the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, to satisfy it that political prisoners were not being tortured to death. It is one that Politburo Sessions co-founder S’fiso Ntuli hopes will one day rival the popular iconic Ché Guevara image in ubiquity.
‘We want to see people wear that image,†he exclaims. ‘So they can deal with the Madiba who stayed in a zozo in Alex and was a security guard … The image [of Madiba] the youth are faced with now is the Father Christmas who is nice to everyone.â€
In my conversation with Ntuli, the term ‘dumbing down†recurs frequently. As post-apartheid black South Africa wallows in material status symbols and the ‘reactionary†airbrushed glam of the Simunye culture, he stresses that it is essential to remember we are heirs to a much more substantial culture that was, save for the music, largely obliterated from public consciousness. 50funkYears, he argues, can be seen as a timely history lesson, a snapshot of a continuous soundtrek to be referred to by posterity in times of befuddlement.
‘This music is what informed us and motivated us to do things like the Politburo Sessions and to join the struggle for freedom,†says Ntuli. ‘It is like a mother’s nipple … and we drank because we were thirsty.â€
Ntuli says the disc is a natural progression of the research into how the politics of the time affected the music and vice versa. He first embarked on this study about 12 years ago while working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It eventually led to a meeting with Lee Hirsch, the American who directed Amandla: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, a film for which he played the role of consultant.
Although it is hard to imagine Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens’ Melodi Ya’lla, the Dark City Sisters‘ Tamatie Yo Yo or Satchmo’s billboard charting mid-Fifties rendition of the Southern Rhodesian Bantu Men’s Brass Band’s Skokiaan, for example, inspiring anyone to learn how to reassemble a stripped AK-47 in 30 seconds, the 15 tunes on the disc have an undeniably sobering effect. They cement one in an irrefutable South African aesthetic, which immediately inculcates a body language that suggests ‘no surrender against all oddsâ€. In a nutshell, at least to the compilers, they are a warning to the powers that be that should they persist with dumbing the children down, they’ll be inviting a serious case of shakara (retribution), as Nigerian Afrobeat singer Fela Anikulapo Kuti would put it.
The title of this compilation was adapted from Michael Harmel’s book 50 Fighting Years, which looked at the history of the South African Communist Party from 1921 to 1971. Engagement with communist symbolism by Ntuli and his fellow conspirator S’bu ‘The General†Nxumalo goes back beyond 2000, when the Politburo’s logo was designed. ‘We come from a left tradition. Whether we are communist or not is up for debate but our tastes are influenced by an aesthetic of struggle … besides it [Politburo] being a great name,†chuckles Nxumalo.
The logo, a sly take on the Communist Party emblem, features the sickle and a vintage microphone as a replacement for the hammer. ‘We grew up in the Cold War,†says Ntuli. ‘So the sickle represents the Russians and the microphone represents the Americans.†And by Americans, he is not just referring to the Nixons, the Eisenhowers and the Kennedys, but also to a sweating James Brown doing the splits. Conjoined, the two symbols simultaneously evoke the opiated masses unwittingly imbibing state propaganda and a discerning populace who, when the spirit moves them, put up a brave fight for their right to party with a capital ‘pâ€.
The Politburo Sessions began in 1996 from an entanglement of overlapping circumstances, including the closure of the Politburo, a Rockey Street club manned at one point by Nxumalo, and the advent of Dark City Jive (right next door), which was the once-exiled Ntuli’s determined attempt at getting Yeovillites to groove to various incarnations of reggae and other pan-African sounds. ‘One of the first things I noticed when I got back from Toronto was that South Africans were dancing to crap music. Anything American they latched on to. So it was a knee-jerk response to what was going on,†Ntuli explains.
According to Nxumalo, who would later become programme and music manager at Yfm (between 1997 and 1998) and later editor at YMag, the event survived under different guises until 2000, when its founding fathers moved on from their respective grinds and could better finance it. With various cultural provocateurs at both its epicentre and fringes, the sessions were invariably a step or two ahead of the mainstream, which meant that corporate sponsorship would forever remain at arm’s length. ‘It was not our aim never to be mainstream,†elaborates Nxumalo. ‘What we wanted was for good music to be patronised by lots of people because that’s obviously how we’d make our money … so it was more of a critique of the mainstream being shallow. Not that there isn’t a place for the mainstream but there are people who wanted to walk into a club and hear Salif [Keita].â€
Of course, veteran patrons and the competition may argue that the mainstream has caught up with the Politburo crew; that DJ-assisted jam sessions are not as novel as they once were in some corners of Jo’burg; that there are other (younger) cultural agitators who are more innovative and more edgy. Each to his own, asserts Nxumalo. ‘To me, it’s not an issue. If someone can do it better then so be it. We don’t have hegemony over the space. It’s not our birthright.â€
Having said that, though, you will still be hard-pressed to find a 12-hour party that features the likes of Mahotella Queens, Kwani Experience and the tireless jazz ensemble Voice on one bill unless it is littered with hideous, unsubtle markings of corporate interference, which, as you would appreciate, messes with the ‘aesthetics of struggle†somewhat.
But whether sponsors will be willing to part with their loot in future, the Nuff Said Kollektive, the group that puts the sessions together, will most likely continue until ‘we either crack it or die, whichever comes first†as Nxumalo promised me.
The launch of 50FunkYears takes place at The Color Bar, Milpark, Johannesburg on October 29 from 3pm to 3am. Tel: 072 223 2648