The Fire at the Core. Discourses on African Aesthetics, Music, Jurisprudence, Ethno-Politics & Good Governance

The Fire at the Core

by

Malama Katulwende

Discourses on African Aesthetics,

Music, Jurisprudence, Ethno-Politics

& Good Governance

MONDIAL

(New York)

COPYRIGHT:

Malama Katulwende:

The Fire at the Core

Discourses on African Aesthetics,

Music, Jurisprudence, Ethno-Politics

& Good Governance

Published by Mondial at Smashwords.

© 2011: Mondial and Malama Katulwende

Cover: Mondial

ISBN (This electronic edition): 978-1-59569-204-7

ISBN (Paperback Edition): 978-1-59569-193-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011925243

www.mondialbooks.com

In Memory of

My late mother and father – Mwila and Kalunguti,

My late brother – Chisanshi,

&

My late dear friend – Margo Schouten.

Acknowledgements

In 2006 I met Camilla Hebo Buus, a Swedish lady who was interested in serious writers for her new publication to be called Perspective. After a long chat in her office in Kabulonga, Camilla offered me a contract to write articles for her on two conditions: the articles had to be very short and thoroughly researched. She offered me the freedom to choose any topics I liked. This was the start of a friendship which proved very consequential. Upon Camilla’s advice and insistence, I reluctantly offloaded a few articles to overseas markets for publication. I published in Sweden and, as luck was to have it, met Mr. Daniel Mwamba – the CEO of UKZambians – online. I put forward a proposal – that I had some articles which I wanted to get out of the way. Would UKZambians publish them all? Daniel obliged and has since published everything I had written.

The first of my works on the UKZambians website was titled Crisis: The Poverty and Futility of Zambian Hip-Hop. The article became an instant success. It was followed by Is Zambian Music Definable? After that, I wrote, On Art and Fame,, Art and Erotica, Why are Zambians so Dumb? and so on. I should also confess that some of my works have raised much controversy. In general, though, I have since written well over forty articles for the UKZambians website and built up a fan base which includes individuals, government officials, politicians and eminent scholars around the globe. I am, so to speak, a new voice for Africa. I am, therefore, very grateful to my readers who have followed my work. At other times, though, the articles have brought trouble into my life. On three occasions, I have been arrested by the Zambian Police Service in connection with my work. I’ve accepted the fact that a critic is bound to overstep the boundaries of the law at some time or the other. The law would catch up with him.

Except for The Clouds, all the articles in this anthology, The Fire at the Core, were first published on the UKZambians website. Let me, therefore, express my heartfelt gratitude to Mr. Daniel Mwamba for permission to reprint some of the work in this format. I am also indebted to the Post newspaper for using some of their news articles as excerpts. As the reader will perhaps agree, the works in this volume present aspects of Zambian aesthetics, art, law, politics, ethnicity, economics and history. Sometimes the articles are really Pan Africanist in character and in that sense appeal to larger audiences. Why did I write the pieces? For me, these articles are a celebration of Zambia’s challenges, culture and heritage. I hope that other Africans and peoples around the world will see their reflections in these pages.

I would now like to pay special tribute to members of my family. Special thanks to Chisala Katulwende and James Kapesa for having stood by me in some of the most difficult times of my life.

Lastly but not least, I thank my publisher, Mondial, in New York, for their support and patience ever since they first published my novel, Bitterness, in 2005. It is my sincere hope that The Fire at the Core will add some uniqueness to their collection of masterpieces.

Chapter 1

Crisis: The Poverty and Futility of Zambian Hip-Hop

When I first listened to some music by the Zambian hip-hop artiste, Crisis [who now calls himself Mr. Swagger], I had no doubt in my mind that I was enjoying yet another latest release by an American rapper. Like so many Zambians who are mesmerised by the American dream and urban culture, I was quite impressed by this new bloke whose lyrics and hate messages sounded like some angry nigger from the Bronx hitting out at the white-world.

I thought: This guy’s really good. He must come from the American West. Who’s he, anyway? I asked a friend at an internet café who was familiar with the latest trends on the Zambian music scene.

That’s Crisis, I was told. He’s actually Zambian and not American. His real name is Chisenga Katongo. I doubt whether he’s ever been to the States.

I was totally speechless. What had prompted Katongo to create an artistic genre that was denuded of that cultural identity that was Zambian? Could this music really be classified as Zambian - or, if not, what? I was now grappling with aesthetic questions of what constituted Zambian music and what was to be its basic criteria of acceptability and valuation.

Fortunately, however, I am not the first critic to raise some concerns over the direction some Zambian music has taken. For example, the veteran Zambian artiste, Maureen Lilanda, has advised upcoming artistes to look to their roots and culture for inspiration rather than the West.

In his Post newspaper article, Is the Death of Busteele Upon Us? the music critic and reviewer, Elvis Zuma, discussed the debacle of Zambian hip-hop music in the context of contemporary American Black music. The Post columnist, Edem Djokotoe, had observed in his article, Luvale Jazz Forever, that:

Anyone who has had the opportunity to listen to African artistes who have carved a niche for themselves on the international musical landscape like Lokua Kanza, Baba Maal, Oliver Mtukudzi and Angelique Kidjo will agree with me that there is something distinctly un-European and un-American about what they have to offer. The distinctiveness of their sound is what makes their music so intriguing in a world in danger of losing its soul to globalisation, this Western conspiracy to model the world in its own image. If we sacrifice ourselves on the altar stone of globalisation, we run the risk of becoming zombies, culturally speaking.

Put differently, the world of art is a battleground upon which the fragile artistic creations of the Third World Countries clash with the cultural interests of the West. However, it is impossible to become an internationally acclaimed artiste if your art, as an African, is not grounded in a distinct Africanness defined as such by Africans themselves. The Zambian artistes, therefore, have no choice but to define who they are without any excuses. They need to understand the ideological, pedagogical and material realms of their craft as a function of who they are (individually and collectively) in time and space.

But why did Crisis assume that imitating some American rappers constituted art?

The question of imitation in art, or the nature of art in general, has been debated by various artists or thinkers, such as Philokles of Egypt (who might have invented painting), Aristotle, Kant, and so on. In African art, however, this question assumes a different, existential meaning. Whereas Western art may be so abstract as to detach itself completely from the exigencies of life, African art and aesthetics – whether that of the Dogon peoples of Mali, the Bambala of the Congo, the Makishi Dancers of Zambia, the Yoruba of Nigeria or the great sculptors of Benin – had generally interpreted itself within the dynamics of religious, social, economic and political discourses in time and space. Their art either alluded to, or represented, the invisible and transcendental: the gods of the tribe, the ancestors, the community, birth, growth, initiation rites, death, rebirth, harvests, and so on.

This is the point that is explicitly expressed by John Mbiti in his work, African Philosophy and Religions, and by K.C Anyanwu and E. A Ruch Omi in African Philosophy, respectively.

In short, the great master artists of our African past have looked inward and rooted their creations within the living conditions of their people. Although they absorbed certain external influences outside their tribal art forms, they nonetheless resisted the temptation of renouncing their cultural roots and engaging the foreign and allowing it to dominate their media and take over. They retained the many-valued-logics of their craft and clung to their artistic identities which defined their greatness on the basis of originality and inventiveness.

However, in the modern world of globalisation where the boundaries between art and everyday life have shattered, mass artistic productions from industrialised nations have been unleashed upon the less developed world in order to alter their mental frameworks, mind-maps, attitudes and other categories of thought that mould their consciousnesses.

But granted that the Western world should use the arts to mould our emotional texture, languages, visual perceptions, thought shapes and ideologies as we try to understand who we have been, who we are and who we shall be, as Africans, then we have to face up to the dilemma of identity as we blindly continue to defend values that are not really ours but the Westerner’s.

On the other hand, the creative act as such consists in bringing forth into existence that which was previously non-existent or that which was not there in the first place. For to exist means to be, to come forth into the realm of light so that something whose existence has been affirmed only becomes because its identity is guaranteed.

But, on the contrary, a mere recital of the American rapper, Jay Z, or Mariah Carey, for example, is not doing very much. In as far as art is concerned, such a recitation is simply an exercise in futility because by merely imitating what is already there, the imitator is not introducing anything new into the world.

I raised the same objections in my novel, Bitterness, in a dialogue called Idols of the Cave (which I named after Francis Bacon). My arguments were thus: Some Zambian youths have imbibed the spirit and intent of American hip-hop and turned into rappers themselves without examining the intentionality and objectivity of their acts. For them, though, the mere act of imitation constitutes an achievement and an end. However, just as effects will always be inferior to causes, so will imitators to originators.

Yet the irony of life is that sometimes people are content with things of little value. Like prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who argue over passing shadows and images and give each other prizes and rewards, we have allowed our sensibilities to be dulled by fake rappers who, like shadows which are a mere representation of reality, are nothing but a semblance, copy, and figment of that which is actual and real.

Unless some Zambian artistes probe deeply into who they are and break free from the shackles of Western conventions, I am afraid they will always remain in the shadows of others and never stamp their artistic genius and authority upon this world.

Chapter 2

Is Zambian Music Definable?

My article, Crisis: The Poverty and Futility of Zambian Hip-Hop, has received some attention ever since it was posted on this website. Although some people have praised the spirit and intent of my work through their emails or phone calls, yet others (such as the anonymous NK) have actually risen in defence of the Zambian hip-hop artiste, Crisis, and accused me of hypocrisy and harshness.

To be sure, any criticism levelled against me is alright and very welcome provided it is objective and impersonal. On the other hand, I also ask my critics to understand that my attitude to Zambian hip-hop and art in general is not born out of spite. It is, I believe, intended to challenge our views on the contemporary Zambian art-forms and creative life so that the bases of our works and what we espouse to be objective, artistic values and truths are tested in the light of reason rather than natural instinct, blind faith, loyalty, propaganda and chance.

In the present article, therefore, I shall advance some arguments to counter the objections raised by N.K. The objections shall be reduced to two basic positions – namely: the constitution of Zambian music and the possibility of freedom in the creative act.

The question, then, of what constitutes Zambian music is both answerable and definable. A tree, a dog, or an apple beside me does not constitute Zambian music, nor does music by Papa Wemba, Antonio Vivaldi, Sergey Prokofiev, Beyonce, or Tupac Shakur. Yet my fancy takes Zambian music to denote the art and activity of systematically arranging sounds through human voices or various types of instruments, such as drums, gongs, sticks, flutes, and so on, in rhythmic, melodic and harmonic form with the intention of expressing joy, sadness, or other emotion that have been directly inspired by the cultural, social, economic and political conditions of a country we designate as Zambia.

By cultural, social, economic and political conditions, I refer to the ordinary meanings of the terms as they define a fixed and peculiar set of attitudes, beliefs and traditions of our people in their temporal and spatial settings. Furthermore, I take these conditions to be determined by changes in the manner in which our people reproduce their existence, or the physical forces which characterise, influence and alter their material intercourse of life.

Now since music is a representation of a feeling made audible in time, feeling and time being physical conditions derived from and reduced to the material basis of life, it follows that Zambian music ought to draw its existence from the living conditions of our people. On the other hand, a superficial reference or allusion to the living conditions of our people, like in the case of Crisis, is not enough to pass off as authentic Zambian music. There’s a rule of proportion. By this I mean that the choice and origination of musical forms, contents and meaning should be determined more by local conditions than foreign influences. In other words, Zambian music ceases to be so defined if it is not consciously expressed in terms of the cultural, social, political and economic relationships of our people in time and space.

The above definition provides an identity of what, in my view, constitutes Zambian music. Unlike NK who falsely believes that Zambian music will only develop when it becomes inclusive…including true rap’s ability to convey powerful messages… I fear it is this inclusiveness or vague universality which presents the greatest threat and challenge to the authenticity and individuality of our arts and creativity as Africans. Let me illustrate this further with the following examples.

In their study of African tribal, sculptural forms, William Fagg and Margaret Plass were struck by the immerse varieties and uniqueness of tribal art. They observed that just as language, religion, social institutions and customary law distinguished a tribe from its neighbours, so did art. In Africa, they observed, art does know frontiers, and tribality is its essence.

In his work, What is Art? Leo Tolstoy observed that a work of art must originate from the artist and not from imitating accepted artists. In yet another treatise, Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant argued that art was a form of production through freedom. Unlike imitation, however, it is a productive activity preceded by a deliberate and rational use of reason with a specific end in view. Yet this production through freedom does not in any way imply the renunciation of the past achievements of a particular art-form. It is, on the contrary, an appreciation of the preceding generations as no advancement in the arts, sciences or indeed any field whatever is possible without first situating oneself in the total context of what the giants of the past had done. That is to say, the great achievers of every age have reaped their successes after rooting their intuition and theoretical insights within the light and framework of the past.

As Margaret Trowell remarks in Classical African Sculpture, it would therefore be a great mistake for present-day African artists to turn a blind eye to the intellectual achievements of their past, for it is to a great extent through the appreciative study of the past that the modern African artist may hope to develop in his turn the undoubted artistic genius of his race. Lastly, Kwame Nkrumah said - in Consciencism - that: Our philosophy must find weapons in the environment and living conditions of the African people. It is from these conditions that the intellectual content of our philosophy must be created…

On the other hand, Crisis, like some young, upcoming, Zambian artistes such as Kapuka, has abandoned the drums and dances of his land and embraced American hip-hop in a belief that he was free to do so. But whether or not he was indeed free is an open question that begs answers. For my part, though, my position is very clear: African artists should not exist as if they were totally detached from the culture in which they were born. Instead, they should reflect and manifest that culture in terms of the aesthetic, metaphysical and material values that it typifies. To quote K.C Anyanwu:

Individuals are born into a community and their obligation is to manifest the spirit of the community in them by sharing in collective beliefs, works, duties and results. The African artist is an individual in relation to the community and this community embraces the past and future generations. His expressions embody both the individual and the communal characters.

It follows, therefore, that in so far as art is essentially self-expression (self-expression being the ability to communicate to others that-which-one-is), then self-identity is only meaningful in relation to the community. However, self-identity, self-awareness and self-disclosure as such do not come about by accident; they arise from a deep knowledge of what shapes one’s destiny in relation to all that one is not. The self (whether defined, for example, by Rene Descartes as an immaterial thinking substance which is connected to the body in a mysterious relationship of mutual interaction…the thing which thinks, feels, desires and perceives; or defined by David Hume as an organisation of memories, beliefs, and perceptions, or lastly by B.F Skinner and Gilbert Ryle, respectively, as derived from an understanding of environmental influences and subsequent changes in observable human behaviour) is still a dynamic identity and representation which doubts, hopes, laughs, cries and emanates other emotive feelings that have an allusion to one’s existence.

Now existence here refers to the act of emerging, issuing from, or being made visible or manifest in relation to other things. But to be truly visible or to be in the light, one has to assume an identity that is peculiar to oneself so that one’s properties are distinguished from other things that are not one. In other words, Crisis, in so far as he has not defined himself in the context of our existentiality except that of American rappers, is a shadow wrapped into nothingness…He is a nobody.

Chapter 3

On Art and Fame

Aboard a bus to Chelstone one cold evening, I happened to have a memorable encounter with Spraga, a young Zambian audio and visual artist who, besides many other accomplishments, had played a role in the production of our local television soap called Kabanana. I shall not burden you with the lengthy details of our disputation on the origin and nature of art, but shall only indicate the gist of what discomfited me the most: the priority of fame over art.

Should Zambian artists, in terms of their musical production and realisation, claim their greatness and immortality on the basis of popularity and good sales, or should they found their craft primarily on the purity and intrinsic value of art? This is the question.

There is no doubt that music in Zambia is enjoying unprecedented popularity never