Читать книгу A Renegade Called Simphiwe - Pumla Dineo Gqola - Страница 9

A renegade’s community

How can you not believe in your own brilliance, Black girl, at a time when the face of genius is Lebogang Mashile, Thandiswa Mazwai, Zanele Muholi, Gabeba Baderoon, Zukiswa Wanner, Xoliswa Sithole and Simphiwe Dana?

For a few years, I would ask this rhetorical question from my literature and media students at the university where I profess as part of teaching critical thinking about power through creative forms. It is a question that many of the students have commented on subsequent to this. When I asked this question, I was not saying this is the exclusive face of brilliance. I was drawing attention to the importance of thinking against the grain, encouraging an intellectual and political stance that functions differently from the dominant messages that Black girls and women are given about themselves, about ourselves, in contemporary South Africa and beyond. I was pointing out that, as brutal as South Africa, and South African public discourse, often is to young Black women, there was a certain type of woman artist who was achieving the previously unimaginable. As real as the policing of women’s bodies is in South Africa, and the world, it is possible for women to think of themselves – of ourselves – differently. It is important that a critique of power not end with reaction, but that it goes further to imagine something new, more exciting, more pleasurable. Picture what we can create if we dare give ourselves permission to imagine freely.

It is important to create alternatives just like it is necessary to speak truth to power. These need not even be separate processes, as the women artists above demonstrate.

This question, then, was one of a series of invitations to my students to look for what else is happening in the world around them, to choose to think differently about themselves. The artists whose names I listed – and sometimes the names were different from the ones noted here – embody something important to flag to these young people.

I am not just talking about having someone wonderful who looks like you available for emulation, what we sometimes call a role model, although there is nothing wrong with role models. They are to the spirit what air is to the body, to ordinary people what a muse is to artists: a generative life force. Role models, as people whose lives encourage you to live the one you want, to pursue the dreams you may not yet be able to say out loud, are crucial. Although it has become somewhat fashionable to use the tag ‘role model’ contemptuously, I continue to believe that their presence cannot be overstated. A role model is someone who affirms your desire to be more of yourself by mere virtue of living your own life courageously and joyfully. It makes sense to me that the women I listed should be role models, whether they actively set out to exist in this capacity or not. In any event, you do not choose to be a role model so much as people bestow the compliment on you as you go about your business.

When I listed the names above, I did not mean to highlight only the overlapping prominence, fame and genius. Yes, it matters that my students will recognise these names. It matters at least as much, although sometimes more, that each of these women is a game-changer. Game-changers are a breed of innovators who not only create something new, but shift the reference point on a certain matter or in a field. In other words, game-changers do more than come up with an exciting new product or way of doing things. Such discovery also changes the context of the innovation. These women are all courageous artists who dared produce and release publicly the kinds of visionary material that we did not have before. They are not just emulated and imitated on a daily basis; they have changed the rules of the game. And in the midst of contradictory messages about who they are, their value and their place in South African society, they survive. I see Simphiwe Dana as this kind of artist, and this kind of woman. Women artists like her are not the same person, carbon copies of each other, but they are products of this time and offer immense possibilities to think transformatively about ourselves and this time, on this part of earth that we live in.

Poet Lebogang Mashile often notes that as difficult as it is to think against the grain, and to pursue what you desire as a creative-intellectual in South Africa today, this time and place also offers possibilities that she cannot see elsewhere. In other words, there is something about South Africa right now that is making these artists possible, even if the response to their existence is not always as receptive and sophisticated as it could be.

I now turn to elaborate briefly on each of these women as part of my larger argument about Simphiwe’s place in our society.

Lebogang Mashile is the face of South African poetry. She is as magical in spoken word performance as she is elegant on the written page. As part of Feela Sistah, the poetry group that also comprised Ntsiki Mazwai, Napo Masheane and Myesha Jenkins, Mashile was key to shifting the largely male landscape of South African poetry to the current stage where the most prolific, exciting, productive poets are predominantly women. She is part of that generation that is unwavering in using its gift, profound intellect and sense of integrity to speak the unfashionable that nonetheless needs to be heard. Her presence in the public realm, painful though responses to her sometimes are, has been transformative and inspirational. Her television magazine programme, L’atitude presented an exciting fusion of beauty, critical commentary, creativity and diversity, initiating a formula that we would see repeated over the years with no accreditation in television programmes from Precious Africa to A country imagined. The popularity of the initially largely unknown Mashile testified to a phenomenon we have yet to grasp, intellectually, mired as we are in lazy diagnoses of ‘apolitical youth’ and ‘dumbing down’ of popular culture. This much patronised generation made L’atitude one of the most watched programmes even though this magazine programme was decidedly unglamorous in its topics, which encompassed menstruation, genocide, language death, the Jacob Zuma rape trial and cycles of complicity by the left, religious intolerance, spirituality and virginity testing. Furthermore, Mashile, as producer and presenter of the show, presented an inspirational image of femininity as narrator: a healthy-bodied, natural-hair-rocking, fresh-faced, opinionated femininity. Often without make-up, this young woman who asked difficult questions while showing a range of unscripted emotions on national television, then wrote and read a poem to wrap up each show. Mashile’s striking good looks and warm personality radiated off the television screen, but audiences were enchanted by more than her looks in an industry that is known for the high premium it places on beauty. Here, she achieved the difficult to explain: making feminist television the prime time viewers’ choice.

Her versatility has also led to her being cast in her debut acting role in the Academy Award-nominated film, Hotel Rwanda, a role in the 2008 Standard Bank National Arts Festival performance of an adaptation of K Sello Duiker’s 2001 novel The Quiet Violence of Dreams, and her multi-faceted collaborative pieces with choreographer Susan Glaser to produce Threads in celebration of Moving into Dance Mophatong’s 30^th anniversary celebration, which also went to the 2009 Grahamstown Arts Festival. She has admitted to not really knowing what the Noma Award was until after she received a phone call informing her that she would be the 2006 recipient of the premier award for African writing. Her critical acclaim transcends well beyond South Africa’s borders.

Thandiswa Mazwai is the supremely talented musician who debuted as the woman vocalist for the kwaito group, Bongo Maffin in 1998. Bongo Maffin, my favourite music group of all time, released six award-winning albums before unofficially splitting up in the mid noughties. There was no announcement of a formal split, and their website still describes them as a group, but they have not toured or released an album together in over a decade. Although many struggled to categorise the group’s music, in interview after interview, kwaito was the deliberate label Bongo Maffin members chose, much to the chagrin of those pockets of their fans who thought kwaito was something to be disowned in favour of something deemed more refined like Afrosoul or jazz. In one television interview with a weekend show, a very young Mazwai declared kwaito to be a lifestyle in the same idiom that hip-hop was, while the three young men who formed part of her group, Stoan, Appleseed (later Jah Seed), and Speedy, nodded in agreement. This claim to kwaito was deliberate identification given with as much confidence as the advanced musical choices reflected in the group’s music.

Following the break-up of the hugely successful group, Thandiswa Mazwai has enjoyed the most successful solo career out of the three, since Speedy had left Bongo Maffin a few years prior to Mazwai’s solo release. Her debut solo album, Zabalaza (2004), reached double platinum and raked in numerous awards, which included two Kora Awards, three South African Music Awards (SAMAs) and a Metro FM Award. Her second album and DVD, Ibokwe (2009) went gold within six weeks.

Mazwai’s natural great looks, with her increasing array of intricate hairstyles, which are artworks in and of themselves, and her dimples, offer her a canvas on which to play with notions of beauty in performance. Her body on stage is a canvas on and through which she plays with notions of identity, femininities, movement, Africanness and possibility. Being in the presence of Ms Mazwai performing live is to experience an explosion of the senses.

Her musical genius and adventurous spirit are staged equally through the collaborations she chooses, as in her subject matter. Although nuanced, her politics are unambiguous to the attentive listener. Such politics are clear in her musical repertoire across time, in her sound and lyrics. They reverberate in her careful choices about which musicians she opts to work with. In interviews, she speaks about the importance of releasing work that is both musically full of integrity and that represents her real vision for each project. She is involved in all aspects of her music and, as I write this, is in the middle of a country-wide search for an all-woman band. This is part of her renowned generosity and commitment to nurturing new talent.

I remember her response to comments on her careful Facebook status update expressing both admiration and concern for the young South African musician Zahara, when the artist first gained prominence in 2012. Mazwai had expressed her wish that the newer musician be allowed the space to be the kind of artist and person she wanted to be even with the glare of the media and new fans. In a global patriarchal culture obsessed with reading women’s relationships as primarily adversarial, some responded with corrective sentiments about how Mazwai should not feel threatened by new artists since she was established. Thandiswa Mazwai’s next update pointed out that there was room for many different kinds of women artists in the world, and that as a feminist, she had taught herself to relate to other women in non-competitive ways. Therefore, she was asserting that her concern was genuine and suggesting that there was room to read it as such.

There are endless questions and much speculation about Mazwai’s private life, but she has control over what is said about her. Her Twitter presence is another manifestation of this carefully crafted presence: fiercely intelligent, humane and witty. Managing a very active performance schedule domestically and abroad, she speaks her mind on a range of topics. As present in the public eye as she has been from so young, how does she manage to avoid scandal so well? Whatever the answers are to this question, it is in no small measure to the level of control she exercises over her own life and the boundaries of what is public and private.

Zanele Muholi is a multiple award-winning artist who has recently and somewhat reluctantly accepted this title. For a long time, Muholi stressed her activist identity and insisted that her camera was simply one of a range of tools she uses in the pursuit of a more just society. Co-founder, with Donna Smith, of Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW), the Black feminist lesbian NGO in Johannesburg, Muholi’s work challenges ways of seeing Black lesbians and, increasingly, other queer people. Initially concerned with rendering Black lesbian lives visible by casting a spotlight on the many layers of violence such women face for their sexual orientation, Muholi has constantly sought to complicate the ways in which women’s bodies, sexual orientation, violence and pleasure are imagined.

Muholi has had numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally, continentally and across the globe in the last decade. Her work has also garnered her awards such as the Casa Africa Award for best female photographer and the Jean-Paul Blanchere Award, both at the Bamako Biennale for African Photography (2009); the Fanny Ann Eddy prize for her outstanding contribution to the study of sexuality in Africa (2009); a Tollman Award for the Visual Arts (2005) and she has participated in the Venice Biennale (2011).

Her work is both an attempt to create an archive of images of varied Black women’s bodies, sexual expressions and identities and the crafting of new ways of seeing. While the former is something she deliberately foregrounded in her early work – visually chronicling Black women’s ways of loving – it is only recently that she has admitted to the presence of the latter in her photographs and short films. Muholi’s vision is at once startling, humane, questioning, archival and generative.

Responses to her work have been complex. Her exhibition openings across the country see much larger numbers of out Black lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex folk in attendance from outside the art world than most. When in 2010 the then South African Minister of Arts and Culture Lulu Xingwana made the faux pas of dismissing Muholi’s and Nandipha Mntambo’s work as not speaking to Black women’s real lived experience, the outrage from the Black (and wider) Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex (LGBTI) community was obvious in the public responses that emanated from this sector and community. Press releases from various NGOs such as FEW, Gender DynamiX, the Joint Working Group’s open letter to Minister Xingwana, as well as opinions published in the newspapers by Gabeba Baderoon, Gail Smith, Phylicia Oppelt, Eusebius McKaiser and myself, among many others, asserted the importance of Muholi’s vision. She is clearly deeply connected to the community she comes from, and continues to be active in many capacities although she no longer co-leads FEW.

Gabeba Baderoon is a celebrated poet and scholar. Her debut collection of poetry The Dream in the Next Body (2005) sold out in and went into reprint within six weeks, and had gone into its third reprint a year later, making not only South African literary history but also marking historic achievement and unprecedented success, especially for a writer who had only recently forayed into poetry. This same book saw her awarded the Daimler Chrysler Award for South African Poetry in 2005. It was also named a ‘notable book of 2005’ by the Sunday Independent and was a Sunday Times ‘recommended book’ the same year. Her next two collections were The Museum of Ordinary Life (2005) and A Hundred Silences (2007), and she also has a collection The Silence before Speaking, which brings together poems from the first two collections, and elsewhere, all translated into Swedish. A Hundred Silences was short listed for both the 2007 University of Johannesburg Prize and the Olive Schreiner Award. Baderoon had also been the winner of the Philadelphia City Paper Writing Contest in 1999 prior to the appearance of her first book.

Prolific as both an academic and a poet, Baderoon’s work is deeply concerned with issues of memory and embodiment, as well as developing a language to speak about layers of gendered, racialised, buried pasts and how they shape current ways of being South African. She reports being asked several times in her first few years as a poet about why she does not write like a South African poet, to which she responded: ‘I think I am a South African who writes about South African topics, but maybe I am redefining what that means to me. Maybe it means that a South African who writes about Iraq is a very normal South African, who, like most of us, thinks about the whole world’.

Zukiswa Wanner is a novelist, essayist and literary activist. She is the author of the popular novels The Madams (2006), Behind Every Successful Man (2008) and Men of the South (2010). She also collaborated with the late renowned photographer, Alf Khumalo, for their book 8115: A prisoner’s home in 2008. The Madams was shortlisted for the K Sello Duiker Award in 2007 and Men of the South for the 2011 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.

A big champion of writing, Wanner is a founding member of the ReadSA Initiative, a campaign to entrench reading culture among South Africans. Her work is unapologetically concerned with South African middle-class life in its many layers and messiness because this is what interests her, but also because, as she notes in a 2009 interview, ‘I believe I see enough of poor stories in Africa on CNN’. Highly irritated by being reminded that popular fiction – often going by that appellation ‘chick lit’ – is escapist, Wanner notes that she is interested in writing that keeps readers engrossed enough to keep reading, even if some of what is on the page unsettles and shifts them from their comfort zones.

Her columns in the South African women’s magazine, True Love, demonstrated the same pacey, witty and insightful tone that her readers have come to appreciate in her novels. The literary scholar Lynda Spencer points out that Wanner is one of a group of South African novelists who are choosing to focus shamelessly on Black femininities in ways that are not always conventional, paying attention to shifts, dilemmas and new possibilities. Although popular fiction is often dismissed as lightweight reading material, Wanner’s work is characterised as ‘provocative’ and in her doctoral dissertation, Canadian feminist literary critic, Denise Handlarski insists that Wanner uses an accessible form to explore topics that are usually relegated to more serious, high-brow kinds of prose. Wanner comments often in interviews that what readers say to her suggests that her chosen path works towards her interests.

Finally, Xoliswa Sithole is a socialist feminist filmmaker and owner of Nayanaya Pictures. Although Sithole started out as an actor, she was deeply frustrated by the kinds of roles available to her. She had roles in Cry Freedom and Mandela before turning her hand to filmmaking because of a paucity of the kinds of exciting, vibrant women’s roles she would be attracted to. As short hand, she often references that she yearned for roles in the spirit of characters like Winnie Mandela and Angela Davis. She is an independent filmmaker who values the ownership of her products, intellectual copyright aesthetically as well as politically.

Her first independent documentary film Shouting Silent (2002) shifted dominant discourse on child-headed households and HIV/AIDS stigma by locating herself as an AIDS orphan and granted interpretative authority to girls engaged in transactional sex and those living in areas ravaged by AIDS deaths. She returned to the topic in Orphans of Nkandla for which she received a British Academy Film and Television Award (BAFTA) in 2005, the first South African to do so. She received a second BAFTA in 2011 for Zimbabwe’s Forgotten Children, a harrowing film (which she shot entirely undercover) on the effect of the Zimbabwean crisis on children’s education. In 2011, this film also won her a Peabody, Canadian BANNF One World Media – Rockies Award, and the Gold Plaque at the 45^th Chicago Film Festival. For Sithole, this was a very personal film since she had grown up in Zimbabwe and had been privy to some of the best education available at the time. She had started filming a different film, which is more autobiographical, about the enabling, newly independent Zimbabwe that she was raised in from three to twenty-one years of age, and in a ZANUPF family, but that film, Return to Zimbabwe is still incomplete because Sithole was unable to silence her questions about contemporary Zimbabwe and focus exclusively on the film she set out to make. When she won her second BAFTA in 2011, another one of her films, South Africa’s Lost Girls, was also nominated for the same award.

Apart from the two BAFTAs, Sithole has received the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at Washington DC Independent Film Festival (2003), 2^nd Prize at the San Francisco Black Film Festival (2003), among others was South Africa’s representative to the Nantes Film Festival (2000) and Cannes Film Festival (1999), has shown at the prestigious Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the Tri-Continental Film Festival, Sithengi Film Festival and various others. She insists that she makes films about women and children as a deliberate political and aesthetic choice. Sithole has also made short documentaries for various news television channels across the world. She runs the UNiTE Film Festival, which is a joint project with the United Nations, to form a film festival with a difference. UNiTE uses a different set of films by and about women to encourage dialogue during the annual 16 Days of No Violence Against Women and Children Campaign, in a format designed and copyrighted by Yanaya Communications, a division of Nayanaya Productions. Sithole is also a founder member of Filmmakers Against Racism (FAR), a group of Johannesburg-based filmmakers who responded to the 2008 eruption of xenophobic violence against working-class and poor African nationals living in Johannesburg and Cape Town. FAR declared themselves “Proudly African first, and South African second”, and made a series of films, using their own resources, which were then shown in theatres, community halls and various other community spaces in order to intervene into the negrophobic violence and unsettle such feelings among South Africans. Her contribution to this project was the film Thandeka and Martine, and here she interrogated how women are affected by the displacement after the xenophobic outbreak. Focusing on Zimbabwean Thandeka and Congolese Martine, the film cast the spotlight on the layered gendered ways in which the crisis was experienced as well as the way in which it altered intimate relationships, parenting and senses of safety.

These are the kinds of artists that I think of as forming part of Simphiwe Dana’s community in a conceptual sense. There are others and different communities that a writer can claim for her subject, some of which are suggested in the chapters that follow. I have provided some information about each of the ones I mention in class and at the beginning of this chapter deliberately. I list them in order to say something about the very important ways in which these artists differ from each other, not only because they work in different artistic mediums, but also to illustrate something about the threads running through the off-centre choices they all make. They are also attractive to me partly because of their individual eccentricities which are evident within and in addition to their art works.

I am not saying that Simphiwe Dana’s renegade community is comprised only of artists, women, Black people, or only of Black women. But I have chosen to prioritise these artists for this chapter to clarify my own project here.

When I choose these particular artists to ask the question at the beginning of this chapter, it is to highlight both violence and possibility. Some of the most dangerous public messages in South Africa today are about Black girls. We are told often that they are not focused on the right things to build their future, that they are overly sexual, that they seek out sugar daddies, that they have reckless sex in order to get money from men and the State, that they are apolitical. Choosing such a list as I do here, then, I hope that my students will learn the tools to question dominance, choose to think for themselves, question whatever information is presented to them, and use these tools in order to be more than compliant citizens of the world. At the same time, it is not accidental that I have chosen to teach through creative genres, rather than choosing a Social Science discipline, which can also teach critical thinking and active citizenship as indeed all Humanities subjects are posed to do. While Social Sciences can teach critical thinking without a doubt, literary and other creative forms and their study require a double imaginative act: immersion in imaginative space in the viewing, listening and reading as well as the imaginative critical reading of the artwork as we try to understand what is at play, what matters, and what things mean.

My examples are all geniuses in creative genres. This is not an accident. They highlight quite explicitly the connections between speaking truth to power and creating alternatives. I also list artist game-changers because I want my students to think about the place of pleasure: as discovery, as disruptive and as a site of critical consciousness. This sounds counter-intuitive when expressed, but in fact, when I ask students to share what they associate these artists with, it is clear that this is not as far-fetched.

In response to any one of the named artists, inside and outside of class, even the reluctant fans or critical students say things like: ‘I think she’s beautiful but too intense’ or ‘I love her work but some of it makes me uncomfortable’ or ‘I disagree with the content of her work, but she makes me think’ or ‘I don’t like her work at all because she is so serious’ or even ‘I love her work, but I wish she’d make a happy film next time’. They know the work and feel strongly about it one way or another. Some students express more appreciative words of the artists.

It seems, then, that what these young people are saying is that these are women whose artworks and public presences make audiences think at the same time as they create products that are enjoyable. This is so much more than the bizarre South African obsession with ‘art that has a message’, which is only partly an inheritance from art for political ends. These are artists who are able to do something important in an age of celebrity culture where personalities are often famous for their capacity for self-promotion much more than for any particular capacity. Celebrity culture, as Thato Mapule shows, is often premised on the worship of the prominent figure in ways that are also at the same time linked to consumption. We cannot think about celebrity culture outside of the age of late capitalist consumerism. Fame meant something else a thousand years ago than it does now. It also required a different engagement. Mapule writes:

The preoccupation with famous individuals and stardom has its historical roots in the social fixation with monarchical subjects such as kings, queens and emperors. The status of these elite subjects was ascribed through lineage and blood line (Rojek 2001; Evans and Hesmondalgh 2007). Braudy’s (1987: 268) focus on Alexander the Great is useful in tracing the historical idealisation of fame and the emergence of charismatic authority as a central theme in conceptualising stardom and celebrity. The charismatic quality of these ascribed celebrities also distinguished them from ordinary individuals. These inherent talents were understood as a gift of nature or as god-given and could not, therefore, be explained rationally. The talents of ascribed celebrities represented the ideals that the untalented and ordinary individual could only dream of emulating and made such celebrated persons worthy of public admiration (Weber 2007:17–24; Dyer 1991: 57–60).

However, with the advent of democracy and capitalism, stardom has been democratised, giving way to a more utilitarian conception of stardom: celebrity (Turner 2004: 89). The notion of the utilitarian nature of celebrity was conceived of in Greek mythology, where the term ‘celebrity’ denoted to the fall of the gods and the rise of democratic governments and secular society. The Grecian conception of celebrity appears somewhat ironic when applied to the modern view of the term, as today’s famous persons do not possess royal or elitist lineage, but are ordinary individuals who have come to be treated like gods and are celebrated by many (Rojek 2001: 11).

In other words, as Mapule argues, the older model of fame applied to people seen as exceptional because they were born into that realm (royalty) or achieved such status (athletes or warriors). Such figures invited public admiration. They were seen as the polar opposite of what it meant to be ordinarily human. At the same time, Mapule shows that the more useful notions of celebrity are also not brand new because Greek mythology already possessed aspects of the famous as ordinary people who achieve celebrity.

Today, the definition of celebrity is much closer to being seen and manufactured. In her own words:

Celebrities are defined as public individuals who are held in great esteem in society because of their ubiquitous appearance within the media. The repetitive appearance of celebrities accrues these individuals’ discursive power in society over ordinary individuals… Unlike other famous persons within the history of fame, the modern celebrity lacks any talent or special achievement, but is deemed important because of their omnipresence within the mediums of print and broadcasting.

Something about Simphiwe Dana and the other artists I discuss above will not fit into this model of celebrity. Something about these women means they are able to retain a grasp of the collective imagination – whether creatively or sparking negativity – at the same time that they stand out. In other words, they can be on the cover of women’s magazines, have meals interrupted by fans who want to take photographs and request autographs, on the one hand, but they also have something that is very specific about them that even when copied does not transmit properly.

I don’t mean substance. All human beings have substance, whether they let it show or not.

There is clearly a book in there somewhere about how artists like these, who are both incredibly talented and so unlike any other artist of their time, are able to negotiate the kinds of presence that these women have. This is not that book, although people interested in the minutiae of how to build brands would benefit from that book.

There is also no doubt much to be learnt about details of these artists’ own lives, and I look forward to reading biographies on all of them. If you picked up this book hoping to find a lot of details of Simphiwe’s private life, you will be somewhat disappointed because where there are private details of her life, I do not use them in the same kind of way as her biographer might find them useful.

What I am interested in here is thinking about Simphiwe out loud. I have many questions that have continued to plague me about her role and place in South African society. I have been fascinated by both what she achieves and what she elicits. On the one hand, she is utterly adored by many as her awards, reviews, sales and audience responses show. On the other, she is constantly told that she does not know her place.

Why is it so important for her to know her place?

What is this place?

And why is there only one appropriate one?

Even more importantly, why do those who attempt to remind her of her waywardness feel compelled to point this out since it clearly contrasts with her own sense of what her places are?

As a human being, she is full of contradictions. But she lives some of hers in the public glare without seeming to experience any real crisis. That there are people who want to see her brought down a notch every now and again is nothing special – even if it must be hurtful. Thato Mapule reminds us that a central aspect of celebrity culture is the adoration of famous people that is always haunted by the desire for their downfall. In other words, we want celebrities to be like gods and goddesses that we constantly look up to and stalk. Yet we want them to fall to confirm that they are mere mortals, like us. It is not just Schadenfreude, therefore, that led to the mean-spirited tweeting after Sunday Sun revealed details of Simphiwe’s relationship with a married former kwaito musician in 2013. As Grace Musila pointed out in private correspondence with me over this book, this duality in celebrity culture is also reminiscent of older Greek tragic theatre. In such theatre ‘man unlimited’ is celebrated as the embodiment of the greatest human accomplishment, on the one hand. On the other hand, ‘man limited’ is also welcomed as it shows the flaws of the gods/goddesses, thereby bringing them to the level of the ordinary human.

These women whose names I list provide some of the context through which I discuss Simphiwe Dana’s relevance in South Africa today. By this, I do not mean that Dana is the kind of woman that the above are, although this would be difficult to show too, given how different all of these women are among themselves. At the same time, as individual as Simphiwe is, she also speaks to a time where women who are daringly ground-breaking in their craft and chosen life are possible. This is one of South Africa’s contradictions because it also makes such women possible.

When I note that these are the women who form the community that Simphiwe Dana is part of, I do not mean friendships, although some of these exist. There are also marked ways in which Simphiwe is different from the women I mention above. All the others are very unapologetic feminists. Simphiwe has a more fluid relationship with feminism, as I discuss in more detail in ‘Desiring Simphiwe 2: The soft feminist’, later in this book. We know more about her private life because she sometimes speaks about it in interviews, revealing much more often than the others. Yet, as a mother, some of her decisions to keep her two children out of the spotlight are very similar to those adopted by Mashile and Mazwai.

Simphiwe Dana is one of a generation of creatives who have emerged with such a brilliant signature that they have presented a model scarcely seen before. I am fascinated by these artists and their art. It is important that many come from places that ‘celebrity’ does not ordinarily come from, or that they conduct themselves in ways less afraid of the implications of their political power.

One of the reasons I think Simphiwe Dana is so captivating is because she troubles many categories of belonging in the South African public imagination in the most remarkable ways. By public imagination, I mean the collective language we adopt and see reflected in the press, in popular culture, in political rhetoric, on the letters’ pages, that is repeated in what callers who comment on talk radio shows say. In some respects, it is the received wisdom. It is not that there is only one way of thinking in South Africa or that the public imagination is coherent and thinks consistently in the same way.

At the same time, there are some things that are more specifically in line with the spirit of the time. I could use language that mentions people like Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere, or Raymond Williams’s structures of feelings. And indeed, what I have in mind is linked to, and has aspects of, these conceptions of zeitgeist. All of them attempt to describe something about the spirit of a time: a collectively recognised set of values, assumptions and meanings that becomes a visible truth and is contested in a specific place. They become a truth because they are repeated so much that we find ourselves believing them to be ‘normal’ and we use them to navigate our lives without even thinking about them. They all pop to the surface when specific topics are explicitly discussed; they lie unspoken but influential the rest of the time.

This is why Simphiwe is both so passionately adored and needs to be taken down a notch in the public’s eye, to varying ends, as I discuss in the chapter ‘Uncontained: Simphiwe’s Africa’. Most people want to analyse Ms Dana’s public exchange with the Premier of South Africa’s Western Cape Province, Helen Zille as a moment on its own to make sense of it. Such an exercise makes sense, but when analysed alongside other moments of public critique more is clarified about Simphiwe Dana and South Africa’s failure to engage the imagination fully, especially within the public sphere.

I met varied responses when I mentioned that I am writing this book. Some of these comments perfectly resonated with Simphiwe’s place in the public imagination. Some people insisted that a biography on her would be more interesting than anything else. To these, I suggested that there is room to write more than one kind of book concerned with Simphiwe. A few people suggested that there was biography overload in South Africa right now. But most people with whom I had any kind of conversation about the book were quite happy to imagine the kind of book that they wanted this to be, unmoored to what I had in mind. I was tickled by this somewhat.

This, then, is a book that responds to the very significant invitation to the courage and imagination that Simphiwe Dana issues. In it I scrutinise the many ways in which her public work offers us an opportunity to collectively shift our senses of what is possible. I am convinced that both the content of her work – her lyrics, her acting, her columns, her blogs – and our varied responses to her, show us something about where such a shift is needed. Her vision is daring and prophetic, and this explains many public responses to her. She has her finger on several pulses even if we are not always listening to her on the requisite frequency.

We come from people who for millennia knew that art is the site of wisdom, even though we now pretend otherwise. There is wisdom in Simphiwe’s work. There is also invitation and inspiration. She is a human being, so there is also evidence of where she has not yet come to terms with her own wisdom. This is not reason to postpone this response. This book, then, tries to amplify aspects of Simphiwe’s public life and significance.

Some of what she points to needs urgent hearing, but prophets are often unheard in their own time. At the same time, her profundity is not only in her prophetic vision. There is much freedom for our individual selves if we allow ourselves some of the permissions she wrestles with.