He who brings kola brings life,” goes the Igbo proverb in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. But so bitter was it that, the first time I tasted it, I could not finish my lob of kola. I could not understand, in my naivety, how something so bitter was fêted as a life-giver.
I read Achebe’s novels about bitter leaf, egusi, ogbono, ukazi and other Nigerian dishes in high school. So when a Nigerian friend took me to a Nigerian restaurant, I ordered my food with a certain familiarity that surprised my host.
Two years on, it is not the acrid taste of the kola nut that lingers on, but the elegant ritual that accompanied the eating of the nuts. The ceremony begins with a prayer for life and health that invokes the ancestors, first the Nigerian ancestors and then Oliver Tambo, Govan Mbeki and others, ‘the guardian spirits of the land on which we are standing”.
After the prayer at one such impromptu ceremony, I reached out my hand to take a lob, at which point someone admonished me, saying, ‘The elders first.”
This and other traditions have wormed their way into South Africa’s cultural fabric. There is a motley mish-mash of subaltern traditions, quaint customs and beliefs that live in an uneasy peace alongside dominant local cultures. Although immigrants have arrived at something similar to what James Baldwin, when writing about the United States, described as the ‘melting pot”, most of these communities have ‘no intention of being melted”. ‘We have brought home here,” said Osita Ezeliora, a Nigerian national.
These immigrants hold on to an identity and image that is sometimes inward looking in its persistent upholding of the old ways — and they are battling to pass it on to the world and their children.
The Nigerian restaurant, as a source of sustenance, is central to the exiled Nigerian’s identity. So is the Nollywood DVD rental shop and the pentecostal churches. These are found in Hillbrow, Braamfontein and other areas where significant numbers of Nigerians reside. It is here that immigrants meet, discuss issues of mutual concern and attempt to recreate a mirage of home while in exile.
‘We hang on to our music, dress and culinary habits. Go to any Nigerian’s home and you will find Nigerian food. It is five times more expensive to eat like someone back home,” said Eno Bassey, adding somewhat haughtily: ‘We have to cling to our culinary experiences because we are the best cooks in Africa.”
For Zimbabweans, reggae and its sibling ragga unite and define the youth. Although Jah Seed of Bongo Maffin downplayed its magnetic pull for Zimbabweans, he nevertheless admitted that Zimbabweans ‘have been communicating with reggae for a long time, and reggae has been communicating with them”.
James Moyo, a Zimbabwean student studying at Wits, agrees. He pointed out that the influx of Zimbabweans has caused a surge of interest in the music genres. Ragga footfalls disturb the bluesy tranquility of the Newtown area as many Zimbabweans make their weekly pilgrimage to the musical shrine.
What is striking about these immigrant identities and subaltern cultures is that class and tribal differences are, at times, forgotten.
Maina Mutonya, a Kenyan national, remembers a Kenyan restaurant on Rockey Street, Yeoville, that used to be housed at what is now called Jahnitos. The bar area used to attract well-heeled corporate people, the sweet and curio vendors and students. The restaurant, its menu in Swahili, served Kenyan food: mukimo — a mixture of beans, maize, potatoes and spinach — and chapatti, Indian food that Kenyans enjoy.
Once Gidi Gidi Maju Maji, a Kenyan pop band, found time to visit the restaurant while recording in Johannesburg.
Local Kenyan music, such as mugiithi, was a major attraction. Mugiithi is a popular style that borrows beats and sounds from well-known songs, but contains corrupted lyrics that are sometimes vulgar.
The restaurant has since closed down — a rather inconvenient development for those who found fulfilment at joints such as these –increasing the sense of topophilia, a word with a nice ring to it that was coined by the scholar Yi-Fu Tuan. It denotes ‘visual pleasure and sensual delight, as well as fondness for a place, because it is familiar, because it is home and incarnates the past”. In this way, pride of ownership and creation is instigated among immigrants.
For Congolese people, topophilia comes alive at Kin Malebu in Rockey Street, a restaurant that specialises in Congolese cuisine. The menu is in French and Lingala, the official languages in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). When I asked a bar attendant what Kin Malebu meant, she would only say that Kin was a diminutive for Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, and Malebu could have been the name of the original owner of the restaurant.
When I went through the menu there was mikila yangombe, Lingala for oxtail. I ordered a fish dish called Mabundu ‘Dorade Grillee” instead. I don’t generally like fish, but this was quite some dish.
The restaurant was full, but not packed, and all around me I caught snatches of French. There was also a French programme being broadcast on the TV. The venue was elaborately decorated with wooden sculptures and quaint Afro-furnishings, so I was mildly suprised to see a small, pencil-drawn portrait of Nelson Mandela — although, we were in South Africa, after all. In the background, soft and alluring rumba music was playing.
Potentially the richest country in Africa, the DRC is not famous for its wealth, but for its music and sensual gyrating dances, such as the kwasa kwasa, ndombolo and others. It was with this in mind that I made my way to Chez Ntemba in Bruma, a club synonymous with Congolese music. It is one of a rumba club franchise with a regional presence in Zambia, Zimbabwe and the DRC.
I was met at the door by a fragrant man with a gold chain around his neck. He was dressed in an immaculate mauve cotton suit and spoke halting English with a Gallic lilt.
‘We play all types of music here,” he said. Indeed, they did. But the odd R&B song and Brenda Fassie’s Vulindlela were sandwiched between marathon rumba sessions. Subsumed in this reasoning, perhaps, is a consciousness that the world around the river Congo has been washed away and that the Congolese identity is now tempered with the realities and complexities of home and exile.
The club, in a way, mirrors the journey this musical genre has taken. Originally African, the music survived the slave boat to the Americas, where it fused with Cuban rhythms and came back in the 1930s as a well-fed mongrel to Leopoldville, now known as Kinshasa.
As I whiled away the night, I thought to myself that, even though I don’t exactly like rumba music, this was a place I could chill out at. ‘We are the kings of rumba,” said the man with the gold chain, waking me from my reverie. Differentiating it from soukous, rumba’s closest brother, he explained that ‘rumba hits you on the heart. You can hear the words of the song. But soukous music does not say much, there is not much message. Rumba has a message.”
Most of the music is in Lingala, a language I don’t understand, so whether it is soukous or rumba, the point is, it should keep my head bobbing. Which rumba — or was it soukous — certainly did.
Singing the Zim blues
Although Zimbabwean citizen and model Chengetai has been based in South Africa for about three years now — working with luminaries such as Louis Mhlanga and Selaelo Selota — she still operates more or less under the radar. The local media, not quite sure what to make of her urban cocktail of sweeping pan-African influences, has basically avoided her.
Her record label, Malaquai, a small indie owned by her Johannesburg-based producer Christophe le Du, does not quite have the muscle to guarantee her ubiquity just yet, but they are working on a long-term strategy. She is currently on a promotional tour of sorts in support of her second album under the imprint, entitled Nightingirl.
Chengetai has already made several appearances in venues such as Roca Bar, 88, the Alliance Française and Freedom Square in Kliptown, where she performed on Women’s Day.
My first encounter with her was at the new incarnation of the famed Monday Blues sessions a few weeks ago. CIA, the show’s organiser, was having some issues with the soundman, forcing Chengetai to perform with two amped-up guitars and no mic. Despite her giggly complaints about the missing mic and the frequency with which she was drowned out by bassist Nseka Bienvenu and guitarist Le Du, it was quite clear that she possesses a delicate, uniquely textured voice that is equally capable of holding floating notes and sustaining seductive growls.
Back at 88 for her second of three gigs there in three weeks, the debate is on with the woman seated next to me. She hears former Groove Theory chanteuse Amel Larrieux, I swear I hear Desiree. Her seven-piece band is three songs into her set of tortured love songs and it’s becoming obvious that they either need a sound engineer or they are not playing intuitively enough. Just as her voice is far back in the mix on her album, on stage the band tends to drown out her Shona, English and French lyrics instead of arranging the songs around her. A more varied use of dynamics, as on French roots reggae track A Villa das Mangas, would flatter her voice and enhance her act tremendously.
While capable of handling pacey numbers such as Rumba Ye Afrika, I must confess a bias to Chengetai’s more wistful material, such as the sparse rendition of Decembre, which she returned to the stage to dedicate to a special friend, cigarette precariously close to the mic chord.
While it’s too early for me to say for sure, Chengetai seems not to care about the demographics of her fan base. Her gig drew a handful of close friends and what I imagine are 88 regulars. As she said to me after her set: ‘If you’re in South Africa, to me, you’re South African.”
Her music, in fact, once fine-tuned, can have the cross-cultural mass appeal of, say, Freshlyground, which makes her grimace when Le Du lists the group as an inspiration. But in Chengetai’s case, tension is good. How else could a 24-year old sing the blues with such fiery aplomb? — Kwanele Sosibo