Kagiso Mnisi gets plugged into Greg Tate’s central nervous system at Gallery MOMO during the late writer’s Flyboy Goes South residency. (Photo: Tseliso Monaheng)
To have been an audience to Greg Tate’s brilliance is a one-in-a-lifetime event; any attempt to sum it up would yield either abject failure or complete absurdity. And the willingness to fail in relaying his 35 years of poetic ferocity is by far the safer route to take, rather than to grandstand under a spotlight of competence.
I basked in the man’s glory at a time when he had made it to these shores for a month-long residency in 2016 entitled Flyboy Goes South. It was a brief public intervention curated by Bongani Madondo in partnership with Gallery MOMO.
In this snapshot, Tate’s lifelong mantra to “plug the reader” into his “central nervous system in its most hot-wired state” was no hyperbole. He, after all, was the prism through which writing and art were two sides of the same coin.
It would be an impromptu detour to eNdofaya with Tate, myself and fellow scribe, Tseliso Monaheng, that brought a revelation — through Tate’s verse mostly — that language and the world of ideas are concepts perpetually in progress. Meant to be bent to our tongue’s will, they should never be succumbed to as absolutes.
His embodiment of that idyll played out in what could have been a scene straight out of Paul Beatty’s second novel, Tuff. But instead of Tuffy, Smush and the rest of the stoop-chilling, smack-talking cabal of characters who second each other; here we were as three brothers, reacting to each other’s vices against the backdrop of Soweto without qualm.
The set up: a bite to eat with Ironman in Soweto
Pop psychology will have us believe that we are the sum of our experiences and the idioms that tether themselves to it. In my case, the streets that raised me and where I broke bread with Greg Tate are in Meadowlands “Ndofaya”, the heartland of seLista.
Call seLista a form of pidgin or slang at the risk of being red-flagged by lingo purists for false appropriation. seLista is a showcase of the durability of language, in which words and sentences, mostly rooted, in Setswana are spoken backwards. A word of endearment, such as “Ngwana”, attributed to neighbourhood kin, is bent to “Nangwa. In a conversation, this is to signal that your antennae is attuned to the local lingua franca and its poetic humour.
It is in similar vein, albeit across Atlantic Ocean, Tate’s signature verse as scholar got its booster-jab badassery from the street’s beat and poets such as Amiri Baraka and Ishmail Reed, the latter influence revealing “how you can take vernacular or colloquial language and use it to tell a complicated story about life, history and human interaction”, as Tate testified.
We take Ironman back to scorch Ndofaya earth, zone 1 in particular, a locale that historically holds waves of migratory narratives — a cacophony of vocabularies in stride — from the Sophiatown rush spliced with the influx of Batlhako Ba Mabeskraal circa the 1950s, as well as the yet to be reconciled memory of the early 1990s that was punctuated by political violence between Inkatha and ANC factions at the hostel on the outskirts of the zone 1, Meadowlands area.
In the later day during Tate’s visit, the same hood is a panoramic explosion of Somali-owned spaza shops, car-wash businesses, illegally-mined heaps of gold sand and an air of social apathy at the hands of democratic project that has devolved over time. But it was the score of spoken word that drew Greg in and its endearing cousinship, similar to that of folks in Ohio and Washington, DC where he developed his muscle for story. He joked about his cameo appearance in Ndofaya as one that made him break with the regimen of being vegetarian; the folks were so beautiful to be around that he was finger licking in awe at the local chicken joint.
The underneath of story
The syntactic similarity between seLista and Tate’s own polysyllabic and satirical approach, which coloured his oeuvre at The Village Voice, is that it habours real-time formation of breaks and joins to the ear while being spoken. This motif to “keep speak in the family” is often a means of expression by peoples under duress from an oppressive “other”, which, in line withTate’s bag of tricks, proved an anti-establishment move in which he, as rancouteur, ran circles around a largely white-, cisgender-owned media machinery whose sole purpose is to extract rather than invest.
He would relay, in conversation, how his body of work always presented challenges for an unhip copy editor in the newsroom. The drill would be to literally sit next to some white dude to ensure the appropriate crossing of Ts and dotting of Is, otherwise running the risk of getting a piece spiked because it was misunderstood.
Mimicry as love: S’khulumela aba ngesekho
A day after Tate’s passing, New Yorker writer Doreen St Felix shot a tweet that read, “The first step to it is mimicry and [who] we are all mimicking is Greg Tate … the greatest … and the kindest, so generous with his time and brain.”
Tate himself understood that the gifts of ancestry and lineage could not be overstated enough. He knew the rejuvenative qualities and gifts of improvisation from superheroes that came before him — including Stanley Crouch, Baraka, Octavia Butler and Ralph Ellison — which are akin to a cannon loaded with “insightful mechanism for comprehending how people of African descent had survived, transcended, transmuted, and transmogrified”.
The same accolade can be said about Soweto’s laureateship in Ingoapele Madingoane and Ike Mboneni Muila, whose prowess in iScamtho or seLista is root to the countless ways we gamble with words, even to this day.
Greg Tate threw down dice against the kerb so good that his streak was always favourable. Always ipop. As a port of refuge to many, we have read and mimicked him. As his acolytes across generations, spanning from the eighties to the present, we have known no greater freedom in music journalism and swallowed whole pieces such as Bad Brains: Hardcore of Darkness and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk. His cadence — not only in acutely observing the world around his subjects on the page, but also in self-examination — almost felt to the reader as if he were smirking or bursting in laughter mid-sentence. It is this trait many of us have inherited.
In full awareness of his own generosity and the necessity to pay it forward, Tate as a deity of black bohemia would in Mark Strickland’s short film-cum-downbeat music video, On My Mind, be the poetic marksman that glazes Bilal’s vocals and Pharaohe Monch’s raps to reveal to/of us, “We were all born into love/ and of love/ one world formed of love/ by whatever loving cosmic force.”
Greg Tate was love. Ndofaya and the world felt it. He understood the freedom with which he constantly reanimated this love, word after word. Tate was superlative in recognising that storytelling at its essence is a manifestation of spirit work. We are indebted to Ironman’s gentle showmanship in revealing that there is beauty in risking it all — failure included — through exploration, rather than settling for competence.
Kagiso Mnisi is a writer, broadcaster and cultural activist born and bred in Meadowlands, Soweto.