There is something deeply personal in writing about music. It is an autobiographical act because music is one of the ways through which we make sense of our lives and the world around us.
In his classic essay on Brenda Fassie, Thinking of Brenda: the Desire to Be, Professor Njabulo Ndebele, chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, writes: "To remember songs is to remember time and place and circumstance … Thus, music can become one of the vital ways by which we connect with the world. How we map the trajectory of our feelings about where we have been, and where we are; about personal and historic events that we live through."
The confluence of time, place and circumstance when I first heard the music of The Brother Moves On was not a happy one – I was a physical and emotional wreck. My uncle Ed, who had been like a surrogate father to me, died quite unexpectedly one Saturday morning in 2012 and I went to work the following Monday and acted as if nothing had happened. I didn't tell any of my colleagues at the ad agency where I worked at the time and nearly all of my friends found out weeks after the fact.
How can I explain this?
Sometimes painful emotional experiences can render us mute. During those days of unspeakable grief, the music of The Brother Moves On assumed the quality of a flicker of light at the end of a long, dark passage. So many of their songs revolve around death and mourning; despite the bleakness of the subject matter there is always the promise: You will heal.
"Ba re go lukile (They say it's going to be okay)/ Bagolo ba fihlile (The elders have arrived)/ Ba re go lukile (They say it's going to be okay)."