Black common sense

abstract

This article explores ‘uhuru’ as a critical noun through a reading of the 2020 music video of Sun El-Musician (featuring Azana), ‘Not Yet Uhuru’. A form of rendition of Letta Mbulu’s (1993) ‘Not Yet Uhuru-Akhamandela’, various other echoes of this, conjured in Makhosazana Xaba’s (2019) poem of the same name, are double speak, elegy, repetition and onomatopoeic in action. One of its signifiers appears in the use of the biographical, with uses against a ‘knownness’ of iconographic Black figures, even while the music video appears in a space and time where a ‘new’ signifier of politics is conjured in the image of young black women. Turning to the figure of the Black femme as a belated figure of uhuru, Black common sense is an incursion on and against singular/linear time, os an ‘as is’ sensibility.

keywords:

• Sun-El Musician
• racial icon
• black culture
• uhuru
• black femme
• belated
• common sense
• Letta Mbulu
• Azana

Notes

1 Concurrent and continuous with #RMF, or #RhodesMust Fall.

2 I italicise this ‘becoming’, in the sense that Chow’s (2002) intervention about the relation between history (as invention, in coloniality’s terms) makes the verb-use ‘becomes’ something that operates on the basis of a singular teleological time.

3 I note here that linear translations often require what might be constructed in an assumptive ‘original’ language not only outside of the context of its point of enunciation and audience, and how this might shift the intentions of its meaning, but also approximates the grammatical structure of an ‘original’ to a monolingual English, where a noun, for example ‘freedom’, is interchangeable with a word that might within its own grammatical or orthographical structure be a phrase, for instance. This note on the conventions of translation also applies to the translations of the chorus on Sithole’s (2020) song, which makes vernaculars of isiZulu into a linear translation that makes the sentences transparent to the monolingual English reader – but also has encrypted within it often intended meanings for those who operate from the conditions of a constant process of code-switching.

4 See Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara (2022), who notes the contradictions of citizenship within the Constitution. Legal personhood adopted in this Constitution draws from the relation between the person and the company, the first ‘company’ as person being a reference to the VOC, the Dutch East India Company. She argues that “the company as an instrument of coloniality made in the image of the sovereign as a representative of God of earth, later replaced by the Enlightenment man […] allowed personhood to the exclusion of those that did not meet the criteria decided by such men. Personhood was used to relegate to non-human status and justify the subjugation of those excluded from the category of the person [… produced] in the context of a global economic system that designed and developed through the processes of European conquest and colonialism” (p. 106). The shift in language of the juristic person to democratic citizenship is not only something that haunts the present and the Constitution’s processes of admission, but also convenes the nation’s inheritances, dispossessions, settlements and time to the conditions of the bearing of this notion of the person.

5 This here is the “I and I”, in the Rastafarian/reggae/dancehall and related cosmologies and music genres; ‘eye and eye’, ‘I am because you are’.

6 The reference to gender-based violence in this statement is a connection to this context and frame of understanding of it, and in particular its circulation in various publics. I would also wish to consider as gender-based violence a wider range of gendered identities, gendered embodiments, gendered relations and how, for instance, violence between men, or between women at all three levels also operates outside of some of the normative connotations of normative references to the term that usually connote the face of black women almost as a direct reference to it.

7 See https://www.citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/2135051/spotlight-on-nompendulo-mkhatshwa-anc-mp-at-26/

8 See https://www.reddit.com/r/blackladies/comments/3q4v50/an_image_that_i_found_stirring_nompendulo/ This image was discussed on a Reddit thread titled, ‘Why is she standing there on her own?’, reflecting perhaps the strangeness of the staging of the image. This ‘standing at the centre alone’, partly reflects shifts in the staging of protest and recentring women’s presence in the ‘real’, but is also reflective of a cinematic strategy intentionally employed by photojournalists responding to this politics. The ‘sheen’-like quality of the first images of her at the Parliament buildings almost make them as if they were photographed in studio for a magazine. My use of ‘sheen’ I draw from Jaji’s (2013) use of ‘sheen reading’, a nod to the aesthetic value of sheen in African beauty standards. Jaji (2014) draws her concept from an examination of Bingo magazine, the first Francophone glossy magazine aimed towards African women, who are figuratively interpellated in an assemblage of print, audio and visual text in an entry and practice of modern self-hood, exemplified by the ‘cover girl’, for example.

9 I am using women/woman for the most part in approximation of a figurative and perhaps often normative formation, rather than a sociological status. The terms woman/womxn/non-binary/queer/gender non-conforming also operate, and in fact are signalled in the use ‘womxn’ which appears in many reflections on this period. This term’s intentions are inclusive and undo cis-normative conceptions of sex and gender. I am however cautious in appropriating in my use of them here, partly in principle because I see the circulation of the use of these terms as often only an inclusive gesture that does not designate itself to a critical engagement with how sex/gender/race operate and in many ways, the ‘use’ claims an unearned ethical gesture. Where I indicate a status that is not ‘woman’, I refer either to the use of the term by the interlocuter I am referencing, or specifically signally a shift in the figurative use of the term ‘woman’ (which I don’t mean cis-normatively) as it appears in the specific examples that I am using, and it may then also be clear how I see that shift operating. In summary, my aim is not to simply use ‘womxn’ descriptively. I also do not mean to state that in all cases of the use of womxn it necessarily designates non-critical engagement. This is also revealed in my use of black, while also using Black when the interlocutor does this.

10 The University of the North was a critical site for radical student mobilisation in the 1960s and 1970s and the establishment of the BCM, see Heffernan 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danai S. Mupotsa

DANAI S. MUPOTSA teaches in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is a member of the editorial collective of Agenda Feminist Media, and recently co-edited the Agenda special issue ‘Covid-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics’ (2021) with Moshibudi Motimele. Danai has edited several other volumes, including a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled ‘Time Out of Joint: The Queer and the Customary in Africa’ with Neville Hoad and Kirk Fiereck. She co-curated the Power Talks Johannesburg programme, along with the exhibition Practices of Repair at The Point of Order with Naadira Patel in September 2022. Danai was part of the research team working in collaboration with Urgent Action Fund - Africa that recently published IDS Working Paper 576 (2022), Contextualising Healing Justice as a Feminist Organising Framework in Africa. In 2018 she published her first collection of poetry entitled feeling and ugly. The Portuguese translation, feio e ugly (Sandra Tamele, trans.) was published in 2020 by Editora Trinta Zero Nove (Maputo). Email: [email protected]