The first time I heard The Brother Moves On, they were on stage performing Good Times. The song is a gradually building experiment in theatrical storytelling that feels impossible to categorise. Is it jazz, rock, funk or folk music? It’s all of the above and none of them.
Frontman Siyabonga Mthembu narrates the story, in first person, of a miner who takes his first pay check from toiling underground directly to the tavern to celebrate, buying beers for himself and others around him. But when he later leaves the tavern on his own he’s mugged of every cent he has left.
“The good times are over,” the other members of the band in the form of a Greek chorus tell the unfortunate miner as he laments, “Are they really over?” before being told emphatically “yes!”. A di fedile? Good times di fedile!
It’s easy to dismiss a song like this as a funny story to provoke some laughter and nothing more but a big part of Siyabonga’s philosophy is that the music often dismissed as frivolous is deeply political.
“There’s no such thing as apolitical music,” he tells me during a conversation we had on the eve of local government elections.
“Amapiano gets popular in this country because it’s highly politicised music. Go listen to De Mthuda’s lyrics where he talks about living in a one-bedroom place as a whole family. People are like: ‘That’s not political’ — you’re an idiot.’ You want to hear academia in every song. It’s a political song and I love it for that.” It’s no coincidence that Good Times came out in 2012 not long after 34 miners were gunned down by police officers during a strike at the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana.
That moment, which constituted the most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since the end of apartheid, became emblematic of the failed promises of South Africa’s transition into democracy. But the inspiration for the song came from experience.
Back in the early days of TBMO when the band consisted of Siyabonga, his now-late-brother Nkululeko and Zelizwe, the three of them were mugged after returning from a rehearsal in Randfontein by train. They got off the train at Birchleigh station in Kempton Park only to be met by seven guys carrying three guns and two knives.
“They cleared us of our clothes down to our underwear, they cleared us of our guitars and the next day we wrote Good Times,” Siyabonga says. What stays with Siyabonga isn’t the violence but what happened next. The muggers were tying their victims up with shoelaces and leaving them face down in the grass. By the time the band arrived, about 10 people were lying there. Then the gang approached two more men walking from the station, only to find that they, too, were looking for someone to rob. Everyone burst out laughing. “That was the moment where I realised [we] weren’t gonna die, because the blackness came out of it,” he says. “We’re inherently not evil, man.”
What frightens him is the sense that this kind of laughter is disappearing, along with something larger. “Over the next few coming years, it’s just like we lose Ubuntu in this true sense,” he says. “And not in the Americans telling us what Ubuntu is but in the true sense, what’s actually how to survive. Xenophobia can’t exist with Ubuntu in the same conversation.”
On the eve of the local government elections, it’s a fear that shapes how he talks about the vote. He’s blunt about the ballot box, too. “Our democracy is broken,” Siyabonga says. “I don’t think it was ever fixed.” His complaint is less about politicians than about the citizens who let them off the hook. “We uphold capitalism quicker than we hold democracy in this country.”
Lately, though, it’s talking to his 10-year-old daughter that has made him think hardest about where the country stands. “It’s so interesting having a 10-year-old and a 30-year-old democracy,” he says.
“In ’94, I was 10.” The parallel unsettles him. “We’re stuck in a repetitive loop. And I want us to just be a little careful in defining it as failure.
“I don’t think it’s a dream deferred. I don’t think it’s a dream failed. I don’t think we ever defined the dream.”
He’d rather see the past three decades as a learning curve and wants South Africans to decide what the country should look like 30 to 50 years from now.
As for the vote, he’s undecided.
“I don’t know who I want to vote for,” he says, describing the choice as being about who not to vote for rather than who to vote for. But a vote every five years, Siyabonga says, is no substitute for real engagement. “Nothing’s gonna happen tomorrow. I’m not blaming leadership anymore. I’m blaming the citizenry.”
He sees his job on stage as naming what unnerves everyone and handing it back in a form people can talk about, which is why he has spent months raising 4 November at shows. Even love songs, he argues, belong to politics: “What’s political is the personal.”
That outlook is what drew him to Ngeke!, the free, non-partisan festival at The Nest in Johannesburg on Saturday 7 November, where TBMO will share a stage with Nomfundo Moh, BLVQ IRIS & The Crossroads and ZANAH. The organisers promise no parties and no predictions, only accountability.
Siyabonga went in curious rather than certain. Last year he led a choir project with Corruption Watch and a German development agency, after telling the curator that artists are often brought in at the end of a process to deliver a slogan. He agreed to Ngeke!, to see whether it had the complexity he looks for or simply wanted “poster boys” for anti-corruption. “Art’s job is not to give a perspective but to open perspective and conversation.” Siyabonga bristles at being called a protest band. “We’re not a protest band. We’re a band that plays issues,” he says. “This country is not convenient. It’s complex.”
That appetite for difficulty extends beyond festival bills.
“I like playing things that seem like they’re difficult,” he says, and offers an example of his own. Someone, he recalls, once asked him whether he would play in Tel Aviv. “I’m like: ‘Yes.’ So I can stand on that stage and say: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ Why? Because I’m from that kind of country. You can stand. We’re not afraid to be against the tide.”
That refusal of easy answers has run through TBMO since 2009, when Siyabonga and Nkululeko started it as a loose collective of musicians, performers and visual artists. Nkululeko died weeks before the release of their debut album, A New Myth, on 5 December 2013, the same day Nelson Mandela died.
On 27 November, the band marks 13 years since the album, with a concert at Untitled Basement in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.
The line-up that will play it is built around four permanent members: Siyabonga on vocals, Zelizwe Mthembu on guitar, Sakhile Nkosi on bass and Simphiwe Tshabalala on drums. A rotating circle of collaborators fills out the sound, among them Mthunzi Mvubu on alto saxophone, Ofentse Sebula on tenor saxophone, Lebogang Komane on trumpet and Solethu Madasa on keys.
It suits a band that began as a collective of musicians, performers and visual artists and has always treated its stage as a space for more than a standard rock line-up.
The work of defining where the country wants to go, he says, can’t wait for album cycles or election days. “We’re not yet Uhuru. It’s time to define where we want to go.”