Abstract
On my left arm I have a tattoo inscription that reads, “ndim iqhawe”—I am the hero. These are the lyrics to South African musician Simphiwe Dana’s song where she proclaims herself as a hero—a wounded hero. A recent book about Dana, the first, titled A Renegade called Simphiwe (2013) by Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola, examines Dana’s fascination with heroism. Gqola asks: “What kind of heroism are we now called upon to embrace here? What does it mean to think about ourselves, our survival as heroic and therefore worthy of recognition at the same time that we attend to our woundedness?” (p. 22).
A Renegade called Simphiwe is a “creative-intellectual portrait” of the public (and private) life of the musician Simphiwe Dana (p. 150). Gqola defines the book as “one writer’s engagement with the Simphiwe Dana of the South African public imagination [who]… troubles many categories of belonging in the South African public imagination in remarkable ways” (pp. 17, 32). The book comes at a poignant time as South Africa reflects on the success and challenges of the first 20 years of democracy. Fittingly, Gqola positions Dana within a long tradition of griots in Africa whose art always spoke truth to power.
This is not surprising, because Dana’s everyday heroism is one that places ordinary people at the forefront of their struggles. This can, for instance, be seen in Dana challenging ordinary South Africans to take the lead in rescuing the country’s education system, which continues to subject its youth to appalling learning conditions. This education system challenged by Dana is reflected in a generation of South Africans that leave the school system with little real preparation to enter the “real” world with any skills. Amongst other issues that Dana has forced South Africans to pay attention to is the often-ignored debate about the loss of African languages, and an African sense of self in a country where mobility is equated with one’s ability to master the English language and English ways of doing.
Dana’s heroism is one based on an ethic of self-love. Gqola posits that Dana’s music is preoccupied with “African senses of self and healing, with new meanings of Blackness” and that the wounds that Dana’s music speaks to are that of “colonial wounding [and its] collective African memory of occupation, displacement and defeat” (p. 22). For Dana, Gqola tells us, “If we are to change things, we need to pay attention to both our extreme courage and our wound[s] – at the same time” (p. 24).
Dana is placed within both a Black Consciousness tradition and a feminist tradition. Dana’s second album is named after Black Consciousness Movement leader, Steve Bantu Biko, called One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street. In one of the songs on the album, Bantu Biko Street, Dana sings about walking, with purse in hand, proudly and with dignity in Bantu Biko Street in spite of the daily difficulties that she faces in life. For Gqola, Simphiwe Dana follows the Black Consciousness tradition where her music and praxis forces post-apartheid South Africa to understand that “what we call ourselves and others like us, our senses of our entitlement in the world, what we deem possible, what gives us joy, what wounds us, our experiences, matter” (p. 25). Gqola argues that this is also consistent with feminism, which “places emphasis on the interior world as important” (p. 25).
At the anniversary of 20 years of democracy South Africans are forced to ask, what does it mean to think heroism and woundedness in 2014? What does it mean to live in a country where, despite centuries of colonial woundedness, it would seem that (black) life is still disposable?
Gqola paints a picture of a South African public culture that, although resistant, still makes an artist like Dana possible. However, on the whole this artist earns her renegade status because she occupies a marginal space where she survives within a public culture that is becoming more and not less conservative. Gqola’s offering is further timely because through Dana, Gqola examines the ways in which the creation of the South African nation has become a masculine project that constrains women’s place in the public culture. This happens in a context where in South Africa “public misogyny” is rewarded despite all the rhetoric about a commitment to gender equality and the ending of gender based violence (p. 136).
Gqola offers a brief but fascinating discussion about a new dominant apolitical femininity that has arisen in post- apartheid South Africa, which she calls the “new South African woman”. This business-oriented, middle-class woman is sold as the feminine ideal. This is despite the fact that she is out of the reach of most South African women’s reality. I do wish that the author would have expanded more on new femininities in South Africa and their meaning for women’s place in public culture and in their private lives. How is it possible that a country with a clear history of women’s activism still renders artists like Dana “renegades” instead of the norm? What are the possibilities for the revival of an emancipatory feminist project in South Africa at this time?
In 1998, South African musician Letta Mbulu released an album in which she proclaimed “not yet uhuru”—not yet free—pointing to the continued inhumanity that still shapes everyday life in Africa in spite of the attainment of political freedom. Years later, Gqola and Dana recast our eyes by showing us the intersection between the creative and the political. At this political moment, South Africans better pay attention to this invitation by Dana and Gqola to re-examine the ways in which contemporary post-Apartheid life allows them to be heroes of their own lives.