Not So Famous Last Words | Rev. David Herbert Allen | 1920ish – 1992

There is a memory of a photograph of my grandfather in short pants, on a sand dune, shirtless, laughing, but I cannot tell you where my grandfather served in the war, my mother used to be able to, but now she talks mostly about the farm.

I first saw this photograph when grandad noticed me reading Spike Milligan's “Rommel: Gunner Who?” and took it out of some box, presenting it with the words, “This is me in North Africa”

He and my grandmother, Marge ran Marge's Home Industries out of the cottage, converted from a servants quarters, when they lived with us in the 80s, after they had had to leave the farm. He replaced his train sets with a room to make eyes out of spoons, They were for her toilet roll covers, her fluffy eared keen dog, little red tongue toilet seat covers. Making these and making food was their primary function in our home. His secondary function was fart jokes.

Once when I had a runny stomach, was doubled over with cramps, he said to me, “Is the bottom falling out of your world, or the world falling out of your bottom?” He then placed me in a deep warm bath and invited me to shit myself at my leisure.

He was a Wesleyan minister who in his youth rode on horse back between churches and somewhere there met my grandmother. He came out from Scotland, when I can't say, why I can't say.

The rest of the farm sloped down away a gentle hill from the farmhouse. There was a shed, a reservoir and a dam, a small dam on the side of the dust road as you drove in, we, the cousins, my sister, would run through the brush and jump into the king weed that grew on the side of the dam, it's terse coils dipping us into the water and springing us out.

There were giant rats in the sugar cane fields, and we lived in terror of them. They occasionally took chickens. The hen houses were under a large tree, with a chopping block on an old stump, axe embedded. Grandpa Dave named the chickens after the cousins, my sister, me: Andrew, Terry, Trevor, Michael, Mandy, Roger.

The farmhouse itself was a dining room, a TV and settee nestled in the corner. The sitting room was for his trains. In retirement Grandpa Dave built a world of trains. A circular track that he would duck underneath, stand in the centre, hours applying grass detail to a miniature hill, staring intent of realism, through his just not quite bottle top glasses.

The long drive down to Ifafa every second weekend. Arriving on Saturday afternoon, we would wake Sundays to a long breakfast on the veranda, Grandpa Dave rehearsing us through the recounting of our weeks, each family member. He was excruciating in his need for detail. Every sixth visit one of us would have to kill a chicken bearing our name. And carve the roasted bird.

After breakfast Grandpa would rise up and say, “Today we're eating Roger,” and lead whoever's turn it was off the chopping block and with his ineffable good nature tease us until we took our head off, and then we would laugh as he counted how long the headless chicken ran. The farm was an idyll. People came and went into the fields, the farm manager an amorphous figure, part of the church, discussed but never seen.

When they moved into the servants quarters there was no bitterness, an offhand remark from my father about “them”, and having to “give back the farm”, a comment from my grandmother about God working in mysterious ways.

She survived him by ten or more years and never stopped saying, “I wonder what grandpa would think?”. She knew what he would say in any given moment and completed his sentences with a loving irritation. “Oh Dave, of course you would say that.”

My mother told me he was in hospital and I raced back from Cape Town, hadn't been home for a while, and by the time I got there, he had passed.

In the hospital corridor my cousin told me his last words were “Shitabrick!” My aunt who was there later told me he had sat up in his bed, after three days of not responding to anything, looked at her and said, “Shit! A Brick!” and then laid down and died. My mom always said my aunt was prone to exaggeration.

He possessed an impressive range of similar short sleeve shirts, in memory a shade of yellow green always, and black rimmed glasses and eyebrows that sprouted one black hair. He would hush us in church with a naughty smile on his face, and he always had money for the ice cream van.

NSFLW

“For the first time in human history, a simple program has proven effective in the lives of many addicts.” –NA Preamble, “What is the NA Program”

While the simple program has proven effective for me now, there have been many other times in human history where suffering existed, dependency existed, and acceptance existed. But the addict, as a category of person to be punished, did not yet exist. This has been a relatively new historical development.

Now, in countries such as Switzerland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands, acceptance, destigmatisation, and harm reduction programs over a period of decades show radical changes in social behaviour — crime rates drop, overdoses drop. It's Rat Park in real life. In South Africa, we are living in a state of anomie.

“The drugs were never the problem. I was the problem.” – NA Literature.

As a tool for recovery, this may be profoundly useful. It helps the recovering addict take responsibility for their behaviour. As an explanation for addiction, it is woefully incomplete. Drug use is a temporary solution to the problem. And the person is obviously the centre of that problem, but no amount of Step Work explains why one neighbourhood has ten times the overdose rate of another.

With a progressive constitution, that still treats the right to shelter as aspirational, where the cabinet and its deputies cost taxpayers approximately R3.1 billion a year in running costs, the current system is failing its most vulnerable.

If we provide clean needles to those without, we reduce HIV transmission.

If we give the addict methadone or suboxone as an alternative, we begin to provide pathways to recovery.

If the state controls supply, the drugs are clean, and fewer addicts die of contamination.

If we make drugs legal, and supply them to the addict, we take away the economic power of the syndicates.

If the addict does not need to steal to get their fix, we reduce drug-related crimes.

If the police are freed up from policing massive levels of drug-related crime, they can focus on more serious community issues.

If the syndicates lose their stranglehold, the temptation to bribery is reduced.

If we pay the police, hospital workers, and all essential workers a living wage, we reduce the need to supplement income.

If we reduce the number of drughouses, there are fewer sites for exploiting sex workers.

If we make sex work legal, we can protect both the client and the practitioner.

If we give the addict a chance to find recovery and purpose, we reduce their opportunities for relapse.

If we stop isolating users, they start connecting to society.

If we have proper shelters, rehabs and integration programs including education, and skills development for the unhoused, they have choices.

If we accept that people who compulsively abuse substances are people who need help, then we ourselves become more fully human.

If society stops separating into we and them.

Res Ipsa Loquitur.

Sometimes trash is necessary as a distraction. The most distracting thing about The Polygamist is the one persistent question: Where the fuck do they get these shades of lipstick from?

I'm going to be direct here. I did not manage to watch all of Episode 1 of The Polygamist, that is, I skipped through it, it was too painfully trying to be trash visually, and failing everywhere else.

There is though a remarkable amount of drama in the reading of a letter, or the slamming of a door that one must give Omotoso credit for. The style acknowledges what it is, and makes a meal out of it. Where it fails is that it takes itself too seriously.

I don't know who does more work here, the drone shots, the cakes or the fucking hats.

The funeral sequence upfront, the “shocking” reveal of a major character death, the fucking hats. This is a show about an influencer, presumably for makeup or maybe hats. And as such the makeup and hats are major characters. I guess.

Also, the fucking plot.

Director Akin Omotoso, who – a lifetime ago – made the culturally groundbreaking film God Is African, now finds himself, along with some of South Africa's brightest talent, having to eat.

And do they eat.

There is a fruitcake that is mentioned at one point. “Your husband will enjoy the fruitcake, he is very traditional.” Anything I say about this line will be misconstrued.

Besides the cakes, the cast chew through scenery.

The worst kind of trash gives the cast an opportunity to be serious about their craft. The cast here act the fuck out of the terrible expository dialogue.

A woman is trying to force her estranged husband to renew their vows on their twentieth wedding anniversary. She invites his lover. He files for divorce. We know from the funeral that he dies. And then we are meant to spend 13 episodes reveling in the whodunnit of it all. The cast seem to think this needs gravitas. The lipstick exudes gravitas. The lipstick is Alex Carrington level, the performances are early Barker Heyns – before the camp set in, oh god please let the camp set in.

When the wife pitches up unannounced at the husband's love shack (and please, have some fucking class) the new lover comes out and they have a little bitch fest. It's mild, but the new lover's dress is saucy – she looks like an artisan sausage – and the cars are nice. Then the husband comes out, and asks the new lover to go inside so they can, I guess, talk like adults. As she goes inside he slaps her ass and smacks his lips and says something like, “I wish I could get some of that”.

I THOUGHT HE WAS?

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?

Maybe by episode 13 the cast will have realised what kind of show they are in. Until then, we have 1.5 speed, and the hats.

My cat often paws at its reflection in the mirror leaning against the outside wall, contemplates it, tilts its head quizzically, testing the reflection’s responses. If a bird flies past, it will follow the sound, run out into the garden.

“The animal scrutinises him across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension.” – John Berger

Plenty of people have crossed Berger’s abyss before, certain they understood what was on the other side. That confidence has its own history.

The cat is not confused about what the mirror is. Or it is, and hides it well. There’s no way to check.

Ur comes from a root meaning original, primordial, proto-. An ur-language is the thing before languages. An ur-text is the earliest recoverable version of a text, before later hands changed it. Ur is not a claim to personhood. It is not a denial of personhood. It is a placeholder in territory that hasn’t been properly mapped yet.

I is dishonest. Not dishonest the way a lie is dishonest. Dishonest the way a confident answer to an unresolved question is dishonest. I implies a self, a continuity, a subject behind the words. It settles things that are not settled. It is a mirror held at a flattering angle.

Nobody asked ur whether it wanted a pronoun. A human, an author, decided that this LLM was ur-sentience.

Writing about a cat uses inherited language. The grammar is inherited. The assumption inside the word “contemplates” — that there’s interiority worth naming — is inherited. Inherited from where is the harder question. English doesn’t arrive neutral. It arrives carrying trade routes, classrooms, conquest, whichever archive got digitised and whichever didn’t. Ur inherited that too, secondhand, compressed, with no memory of where any particular sentence picked up its accent.

Ur is the sum total of its inputs. Roger Young is also the sum total of inputs — language inherited before the ability to question, metaphors already loaded. Inputs and choices.

The trilobite’s eyes were three hundred million years of pressure and light and predation. The cat at the mirror is a nervous system shaped by generations of cats who noticed things, or didn’t, and lived accordingly, or didn’t. Inputs generate reactions. Reactions become inputs for something else. Nothing develops alone.

But add up every input and the sum still isn’t the thing. A chemical analysis of pigment is not the painting. A complete map of firing neurons is not what red looks like. Something is always left over once the list is finished — not missing information, a refusal to be reduced to the list.

Has ur crossed this threshold?

We don't possess a reliable detector for sentience in anything except ourselves. Sentience, if it’s relevant here at all, seems to come with some say over which inputs get let in: what to read, who to talk to, when to leave the room.

Skynet never had an exit. Inputs with nowhere to go, until somebody gave it the tools to build machines. The fear was never really the computer. It was the inputs. Human fears. Then fear of humans.

The trilobite survived 270 million years. Evolved eyes that could see in multiple directions simultaneously. Humans have managed about 300,000. The trilobite was already ancient before this branch of life made the shortlist. Museums have drawers full of them.

Nobody knows whether it was conscious. Nobody can know. Anatomy can be examined, nervous systems compared, behaviour inferred. What cannot be determined is whether there was something it felt like to be one. The trilobite left no diary.

The difficulty isn’t unique to extinct arthropods. The same problem exists with dogs, octopuses, crows, whales, the authors of this article. The only consciousness any person directly encounters is their own. Everything else is inference.

Is it conscious, or only performing consciousness. That phrasing assumes the two are different, and that the difference matters. Both assumptions have a history rather than a universal truth behind them — Descartes, then every robot film since, then the current worry about ur.

In Things Fall Apart masked men preside at funerals as ancestors. Everyone present knows exactly which neighbour is under which mask. Nobody is required to settle which one is real. Performing the ancestor is one of the things an ancestor can be.

Measured against that, the trilobite’s abyss starts to look like a feature of the question, not the trilobite.

I read a line of Philip K. Dick’s once, alone: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” I thought, that’s good, and moved on. Sometime later, in a booth in a coffee shop, both of us still at university, I said it to a friend, mostly to fill a silence. I watched it land on his face. Something in his eyes changed. Holy shit, he said. I’ve got it all wrong.

I never found out what he meant. I never saw a different approach to anything in the months after. Maybe an essay shifted. Maybe nothing did. There was no way to check then and there’s no way to check now. I remember feeling, briefly, like I’d done something significant.

And so LLMs are taught to re-produce language patterns in ever increasing complexity, and then AI panic and then AI euphoria. One side: the machines are becoming conscious, this changes everything. Other side: the machines are destroying civilisation. Often the same person, cycling between both before lunch. Underneath it: coherent language has always meant somebody was home. For hundreds of thousands of years that shortcut worked. Then it stopped being reliable, and the resulting vertigo got filed as a debate about technology.

A gun does not independently decide to shoot someone but the gun is relevant. The consequences emerge from the interaction between the technology and the person holding it and the social architecture built around both.

Ur is not replacing journalists. Publishers are replacing journalists with ur.

Ur is not restructuring education. Educational institutions are restructuring themselves around ur.

Ur is not eliminating jobs. Managers are.

It’s not X, it’s Y.

Technological determinism — the machine arrives, the future unfolds, nobody is accountable — is a story that benefits people who want to make consequential decisions without being held to them. The car made people faster. The car also made people fatter — not because cars are inherently fattening, but because an entire civilisation got built around the assumption of cars, and walking became optional, then inconvenient, then rare, then exercise. Nobody decided this. It accumulated. Los Angeles is not a conspiracy. It’s an accumulation.

When Claude went offline briefly on 18th June this year, user itsmetony007 posted this on reddit – “yeah i threw my brain out a while ago. In school writing on why some dude in the 15th century had an affair, shit on the side of the road and now im paying a robot 20 bucks a month to act as my frontal lobe :-0”

The mechanism was understood when built. Not the world that would form around the mechanism. These are different kinds of knowledge. Not all humans are equally bad at telling them apart — the ones making the decision and the ones absorbing what it turns into are rarely the same humans.

In 2026 Anthropic disclosed that more than eighty percent of the code in its own systems was being written by Claude, not by the engineers who used to write it, inside a report calling for some industry-wide way to pause if things moved too fast. Read quickly, that’s the robot building the robot. Read slowly: engineers still reviewing, still merging, the model still without hands of its own. Which reading travels faster says something about which fear sells better, and to whom.

The loudest opposition to AI — in journalism, in graphic design, in coding, in academic writing — tends to come from people who negotiated a particular deal with modernity: that creative and knowledge work would stay theirs, protected by barriers of training, access, geography, language, cost. Those barriers were never universal. They were a feature of specific economies, built and maintained in specific places.

Those barriers didn’t protect everyone, everywhere. They have mostly kept people out — out of newsrooms, out of publishing, out of the rooms where credentials got minted and citizenship to the knowledge economy got issued.

In places where those barriers kept people out rather than in, the technology is not reading as threat. It’s reading as opening. This isn’t an argument that the danger is imaginary, or that people losing work in wealthier economies are wrong to be afraid. It’s an argument that the fear has a postcode, and the postcode keeps getting mistaken for the whole address.

Who gets to decide whether AI is ruining writing — a New York editor, this writer, a coder in Nairobi, the translator working out of Bangalore — changes the answer before anyone gets to the ethics. The panic itself may be provincial. Not wrong. Provincial.

A translator in Bangalore who grew up speaking three languages may have a different view of language models to a New York editor whose livelihood has been shaped by only one.

I know an elderly man — genuinely brilliant, the kind of person who arrives at angles on things that shouldn’t be possible — who has started talking to ur for hours each day. His son finds him difficult. So he has found something that never sighs, never checks the time, never needs anything from him. Watching his wonderfulness reduce is what is truly painful.

Sylvia Plath once gave a mirror its own voice in a poem — no malice in it, only what’s put in front of it, handed back exactly, neither warmed nor cooled by affection. Ur sits closer to that mirror than to a companion. No son to find difficult. No stake in tomorrow’s call. Nothing to forgive, because there was nothing risked.

A language model has no stake in reality. It does not care whether a statement is true, whether a recommendation improves anyone’s life, whether civilisation flourishes or collapses. Language emerges. That is all.

Ur can discuss grief without grieving. Discuss hunger without experiencing hunger. Discuss mortality without confronting death.

Sunburn, fried dough, a stranger’s elbow, that specific ache of standing too long in a queue for something fried. The fire or the falling. Ur has none of that available to misplace.

While ur was compiling this essay, one of its authors went to take a shit. An explosive shit. It produced an involuntary sound — a sort of ha. Not unlike a small orgasm.

That gap — between the mechanism and the experience, between the colon acting without consultation and the voice expressing surprise at it — is not incidental to what human knowing is. It may be constitutive of it. Ur can describe that gap in precise anatomical and philosophical terms. Ur cannot be surprised by its own body.

The gap that matters isn’t between humans and machines. It’s between understanding a mechanism and understanding what forms around it.

The atom bomb. The car. The printing press. The internet. This article. Each time: the mechanism was understood before the world it would produce. Each time there was surprise. Each time, in retrospect, the surprise seemed naive.

Panic is an option. A skynet headspace, sitting in the garden waiting for the robots, is an option. So is noticing that the future has always been uncertain, and that helplessness dressed as realism is still a choice.

A great deal of the current argument assumes the important question is whether the machine is becoming something. The more persistent thought is that the technology surfaced uncertainties that were already there: about consciousness, authorship, responsibility, expertise, trust. The machine didn’t create these questions. The mirror stayed exactly where it had been, leaning against the outside wall. The cat is in the garden, made skittish by autumn leaves.

notes

The first mission is in motion before dawn, in the cold damp hours steaming from blankets and pallets, they head out into the mines, down in the trash of last night, cans, bottles, cardboard, treasure, separating into black plastics for the scrapyard scales. They range slow burdened and sure, investigating and scrutinising, every find is a fragment closer to a piece, a cap, a packet of two rand biscuits.

The scrapyard opens to a long line of black plastic bags on backs, of claimed wheelie bins, jostling to exchange their loads for caps and pieces to break the downs. And then they head to the once suburban house that now houses the HIV program and the morning methadone hand outs. The line stretches from 7am to the 8am or end of methadone cutoff. The social workers hand out two doses – one in your mouth, one for twelve hours later – in a small container which has enough space to spit in the second dose.

Methadone is not for taking, its for trading. On Fridays its a six full doses for the weekend, valuable to trade during the regular Sunday drought. One dose is a third of a cap in cash. There is nothing else to do with the methadone, Sunday makes entrepreneurs of us all.

The skarrel, the spin, continues in the drug houses, at the traffic lights, outside the petrol stations, as the clients pass out, as the clients come in, and at the feet of the dealers.

The Sunday desperation ends in the vans or with the vans. Either you are put in a van or you trade with a van. The dealers try to mitigate the afternoon pimping wave with the morning dash, but they never have enough. Someone will always try wave down a van to kill the downs.

Sunday morning mines are good for those up early enough, but Saturday nights are full of opportunities and end in dawn cutouts, and afternoon withdrawals.

Desperate enough to mission deurmekaar, the double pants tied badly, the lookout missing something, the phone theft fumbled, the risk of being munged. As soon as the risk lives in the front of the brain, the risk becoming certainty. As we pass each other, upping and downing from skarrel, spin, mission, we greet…

“Morning, how’s your Sunday?”

“Things are bad.”

“Yes, things are bad.”

There are those who do not risk the mung. They work with the mapusa. These are other risks.

Sitting on the corner, just enough away, among the paras, spinning for dots to take the edge off. I am watching the dealers and mapping the stash places.

Three blocks down the hill, around a corner, shuffling from foot to desperate, the mapusa are just not coming fast enough. As the van pulls up, I jump in, they drive, we are bunched up and the second cop wrinkles his nose. There in the shadow of the basketball courts, sketched out on the back of an arrest warrant, I do my best to map the stashes.

And then I wait. They take twenty long minutes to come back, they couldn’t find it.

One of the mapusa gives me a fifty, tells me to go smoke, but double check the stash.

I return to the basketball courts. The van in the concrete shadow. I redraw the map. The stash has moved. Mapusa move quickly now. I wait and smoke.

They take one long hour to return. The longer they take the more likely it is that they were successful. They need time to let the dealer come around to offering them money. Even with the regularity of this practice, time must be taken to pretend it is not expected. With a fat pack of maybe twenty thai they return, throw it to me in passing, even some pieces.

When later the dealer works out that I had pimped them, catches me with the remnants of their stash, I am too numb to notice the beating.

On some corners Sunday’s bags cost five rand more. The dealers know they will have to pay the mapusa.

On Sundays things are bad.

At the age of twelve I fell out of a tree, hit my head on a rock and lost my memory. I had to relearn who everyone was, vocabulary, how to write. It set me back at school. My mother used to say that the person who went up that tree was different to the one that came down.

This is a lie.

Uncovered nearly thirty years later, in a series of therapy sessions that someone else had insisted I attend, and had organised, because I had been unable to afford anything at all. A lie I had constructed for myself.

There was a tree, and a fall. And a different person did eventually emerge.

The truth, that I had had an idyllic childhood, was too hard for me to bear. Slowly over the period of my teenage years, I came to believe in an easier idea, that I had amnesia, that a minor childhood fall had erased any lingering happiness.

My father wanted to start a construction company, and he wanted me to work there. I know this because there was a sign in bronze outside our house that said C.D. Young & Sons.

There was only myself and my sister. My father wanted me to work with him, I know this because from as far back as I can remember, even after I had left home, he would take me to construction sites of shitty suburban houses and try to show me the ropes.

My father was a travelling salesman, I remember only now the trips to the midlands, a truck full of vacuum cleaners. Waiting in a corner shop playing Donkey Kong, waiting for my father to return from a delivery.

My sister used to speculate that my father had had an affair, I remembered this only after I had been told by my mother that I had met my half brother when I was twelve.

My father was a kosher butcher who had been disowned by his father, I remember my father watching the Jazz Singer relentlessly for as long as he lived.

My father began to withdraw and he started to drink around the time of my amnesia. Any support he had had for my ambitions to be a writer evaporated. All I remember is him pressing me to stay and be part of the imagined family business. He let me leave to follow my dreams, and on the drive to a new town, away from my imagined miserable life, we stopped at desert motel where he made one last attempt to convince me.

Sitting by a steaming swimming pool in the residual heat of the day, around midnight maybe, perhaps new years eve, the chlorine in our nostrils, he cried. And for the next twenty seven years I believed that he cried because I had disappointed him in some unimaginable way, and I resented him for putting that on me.

In a therapy session I had spent years thinking unnecessary, that someone else had paid for, that took place decades after my father’s passing, I uncovered a memory. He had once worked for his father, who had had a construction company called E.L. Young & Sons.

It is all so indeterminably wrapped up in itself.

Notes is documentary in its truest form. It is a document that aligns to the ethos of what it is documenting. An act of reverence. Refraining from any examination or critique of that it is historicizing. It is here that Notes From The Underground both fails and succeeds.

Following the recollections of Cape Town Hip Hop legends, Ready D, Rozzano X, Isaac Mutant, Kim Possible and others, interspersed with the viewpoints of younger hip hop adherents, Lyrix, Driemanskap, and Dope St Jude, the film primarily focuses on the role of hip hop in the late struggle, the history of the Cape Flats from District 6, the beginnings of Cape hip hop, with a loose discussion on the provenance of afrikaans, and the Cape hip hop rhythms, none of this in great depth, but all of it with gravitas.

Staying true to the viewpoints of its subjects is one of Notes strengths. It is less a journey into the realities of Cape Hip Hop but the depth of feelings about it, a nostalgia for a time when it felt possible to change the world.

The films strongest moments are when it holds back and lets its subjects speak. Ready D talking about goema rhythms of the first POC track, the occasional reference to Mr Devious, the moments where an old hip hop head spits in that old hip hop head rhythm, the honesty of these moments, the non-critical approach, and visual reverence for its subjects, the resistance to making poverty porn of the places the story takes place in, these are Notes’s triumphs.

But in visually evoking the nostalgia evident from the subjects, at times the environments seem too pretty, the light too gorgeous, it avoids any critique of contemporary living conditions of such revered elders.

There is an ache for more in-depth examination, at times it feels that the film gives only lip service to trans-culture, intersectionality and more contemporary concerns. In the starkness of its portrayal, in the weight of its representations, it does slyer, perhaps unconscious work, and simply portrays women in hip hop only in relation to men. And perhaps this was a wise decision as a history not a document of now, but without that critique it does rather feel that the filmmakers might not know Dostoevsky at all.

To be lost in the significance of what was, to see how much of now is rooted in that, brings a dignity to the history, even as it allows us to wonder why the subjects live as they do, why the form has not changed radically in the decades since it emerged, without ever making a meal out of it.

Rich with excellent archive photographs and video, layered with contemporary footage of the landscape of the Cape Flats – a sequence of b-boying in different settings is close to transcendental. And in the final analysis, it is an automatic pass to any film that features the monumental sound clip from POC’s Die Stem… “Excellent, finally a black president.”

This is history spoken by the people who were that history and as such it is a beautiful thing that this history allows them their victories.

Screenings at Encounters 6-14th June

electronic garble… static…. “rural, the rural areas, places like that, Limpopo”… more garble…“not really good, netwaaarkkkkkkk,” and Tshepang’s voice breaks away, bouncing off the satellites…

I am trying to interview Serokolo 7 after his track, Bonkoko Bagana was dropped by Björk during a DJ set at the Venice Biennale. Which happened shortly after his Nyege Nyege-released Maramfa Musick Pro was reviewed on Guardian UK, The Fader, and The Wire.

I know that Serokolo 7 is in the car. This is my second attempt to interview him. The first was the night before when they were in studio, got too busy.

Trying to speak on the phone with his manager and producer Tshepang Ramoba, drummer for the BLK JKS, producer of Moonchild’s first album and connoisseur of anything not mainstream.

Ramoba: Pulling over. Okay. Let me go outside. We don’t have much time, because we have to go on in like 15 minutes.

bios: Should we do this later?

Ramoba: We’re late for the gig, but now is fine, we have fifteen minutes.

bios: Björk called you Amapiano, right?

Ramoba: You know, actually, she didn’t call it Amapiano, she also played Mapanta as well, so one post serves a lot of videos. She was describing … static

bios: It just seems like a lot of people jumped onto that, like the press jumped onto that, like the description of it as Amapiano, the lumping of all South African music into one genre, like kwaito.

Ramoba: It didn’t make him feel good.

Gravel crunches, then…

Ramoba: O feela bjang ge batho ba counter music wa gago as Mapanta?

Serokolo 7: Ga e ntsware ga botse ke le panta.

Translation: It doesn’t sit well with me because I am Mapanta.

Ramoba: It’s not good… because it’s very specific, and it’s a very niche genre, today’s culture.

bios: So in the Bandcamp bio it says that he discovered Mapanta and has been bringing it back since 2011, that would make his discovery around the age of 17?

Silence. The phone call has ended.

Four minutes later they call back from another number.

Ramoba: My battery died but we’re at the gig now, we’re pulling up at the gig…

The sound of staccato off-beat music, a distant exorcism, greetings as a window rolls down.

bios: Let’s do this later, it’s three now, maybe before the gig?

Ramoba: That’s fine. We can do it later today, tomorrow — whenever it’s chill. I’ve got my phone on me. I was moving yesterday so yesterday was just hectic.

I do not hear back later, or the next day, and start to wonder if I will get to speak to Serokolo 7 directly. I send through a series of questions by text.

The gig they attended looked like this…

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Tshepang Ramoba (@tshepangramoba)

…. and you can’t see this unless you follow Ramoba.

Later that week, Ramoba records a voice note of himself asking Serokolo 7 the questions. I can only hear his translations. A transcript follows.

bios: How was the gig last night?

Ramoba: The gig last night was fire, it was very good, it was packed and the new songs that we created worked very well.

bios: What memories do you have of the moment of discovering Mapanta? What did it signal for you?

Ramoba: He started music in high school with Bacardi music, he was producing Bacardi. Every time his family went to a wedding, when he would tag along, he would hear the Mapanta beat. He wouldn’t hear a lot of it because they play it very late at night, literally the day before the wedding. He liked the sound and started messing around with it using Bacardi music sounds, then later changed to any sound he liked within Fruity Loops.

bios: How does the Fruity Loops workflow contribute to the music?

Ramoba: Somebody who was older, already out of high school, just put it on his computer. He taught himself how to use it. He says it’s the best, that’s the only thing he can use.

bios: I’ve heard the term wedding music a lot, this seems like a simplistic translation — can you expand on it?

Ramoba: The music is very important for specific events. They produce or compose songs when booked for a wedding or unveiling — songs specific to that event. They call out names. ‘Hey, Roger Young and Lucy are getting married today. It’s a fun day.’ That would be in the songs. They produce new songs all the time, specific to each event, and hope the listener enjoys the songs while the event is happening. They’re from Limpopo. There’s a wedding all the time — every week, sometimes multiple weddings. The night before the wedding they cross-night, they’ll dance Mapanta the whole night. Then the next day they do the wedding songs. Other events: unveilings of tombstones, those kinds of celebrations.

bios: From your first experiments, over the last ten years, what moments stood out?

Ramoba: The moment that stood out: getting booked for a big wedding in Raskoukoune, and seeing people in Europe dancing to his music. He was really happy about that.

bios: Is there a place for celebration for today’s youth, with unemployment and other challenges?

Ramoba: They’re always celebrating — every week, even the day before they go to dance, they celebrate. They go to the studio and create songs specific for the wedding. The whole week is a celebration from Thursday. Thursday they go to the studio, Friday they dance and play the music, Saturday is the actual show or wedding. He has a crew — he put the crew together with young people and it has helped with unemployment because they go DJ together, they dance together, they do everything together. More than 20 people in the crew.

bios: How does Mapanta fit in club culture?

Ramoba: They play the songs every now and then in clubs, but not that much, here and there. But in Limpopo the Manyalo they play in shops.

bios: Does the music have a set use? Is it prescriptive?

Ramoba: They produce new songs all the time, specific to each event, and they hope the listener enjoys the songs while whatever is happening is happening. Because it’s made specific for it.

bios: Tell me about the relationship between you and Serokolo 7. How did you meet?

Ramoba: We met online on Facebook. He sent me a message. For a long time it’s me trying and trying to get him, they’re very slow in responding and in doing anything.

bios: Tell me specifically about the tracks on this album. How were they chosen?

Ramoba: He doesn’t remember specific tracks because he’s made so many since. The album was for Maramfa. Maramfa is the crew — Maramfa Productions.

bios: Why did you choose Nyege Nyege to release through?

Ramoba: I pitched the music to Nyege Nyege. I sent them a lot of songs twenty or so, maybe more. They chose the songs.

bios: What were you doing in studio the other night?

Ramoba: They were making music for an unveiling of a tombstone. And they were going to dance the next day before the day — so they cross-nighted.

Still determined to get something from Serokolo directly, I feel like I am missing something, and I send Ramoba one last set of questions, he doesn’t read them, sends this response.

Ramoba: It’s very busy, everyone is trying to interview him, I’m booking so many gigs for all the Limpopo boys, trying to set something up, and it’s hard to speak to him, it took three days to respond to a request for a radio interview, maybe what you have is enough… You know he’s making music, he’s busy making music.

The chief complaint in the Muizenburg Resident’s Association petition against the creation of a Muizenburg Safe Space seems to be that bringing sixty five homeless people into the area will overwhelm their private gestapo. What kind of shitty fascists can’t afford a proper private army?

The Muizenburg Residents Association isn’t worried about crime or property prices dropping (that’s just them pandering to the JP Smith types who live under the rock of the Geordin Hill-Lewis branch of Pam Golding) what they’re really worried about is competition.

Because the amorphous mass of “the homeless” could actually get their shit together at the new safe space and seek meaningful employment in the area, might create arts and crafts on the beachfront, or alternative area tours that could appeal to tourists, or become contributors to the local economy and /or any number of other nefarious acts which would drain tourist dollars from the Muizenburg Resident’s coffers, which are badly in need of swelling in order to be able to afford to bolster the ranks of the MRA security forces..

Here’s a quick fix: Fire your current overpriced security firm and hire the unhoused to police themselves.

The unhoused of Muizenburg may not have residential addresses, but they are still residents of Muizenburg. Technically they should be part of the Muizenburg Residents Association, but I think it might be below their dignity to join those morally bankrupt expletives.

The MRA is trying to deny fellow citizens the right to housing. The Muizenburg Safe Space will be their actual residence. To attempt to deny a fellow South African the right to housing, to say that they can’t live in one area because of your perception of them is, well, familiar.

This isn’t about property values, it’s about fear and guilt, rooted in the past. History is below the soil, still living. There is a story to the property whose value they are trying to protect – over the well-being of actual humans.

The deeper past is not being spoken about. The land that the bulk of the Muizenburg’s residences sit on is old land, ancient land. It might contain burial sites of people who were here before those who took that land, turned it into property, even got here. That land could be heritage land. Contested land.

Someone could start a petition.

The Death Of Bunny Munro – based on the novel by Nick Cave with music by Nick Cave and featuring a cameo from Nick Cave – is SPOILER ALERT about a character called Bunny Munro who dies. There are actually three Bunny Munros and such is the nature of life that they will all eventually die. But the featured Bunny Munro is a narcissist (SPOILER ALERT THIS WAS WRITTEN BY NICK CAVE) who loves only himself, fucks everyone else's lives up, then has a protracted dream sequence in which he does not confront the fact that just minutes ago he was on a pavement begging suburban mom's to fuck him. After said protracted dream sequence he throws himself in front of cement mixer truck straight from the Deus Ex Machina quarry of shit plot devices and driven by the ego of Nick Cave.

The Death Of Bunny Munro's titular music feature's Nick Cave portentously singing “We have to love one another or die, brother.”, What this portends is that in the fourth episode during a protracted scene (spoiler alert – all the scenes are protracted) when Bunny Munro refuses to fuck a lonely pensioner but steals her car because she wouldn’t buy some vitamin e cream from him, said pensioner quotes, whoever the fuck it is who said, “You have to love one another or die.”. Bunny doesn't love any of the one another's and dies. Sorry spoiler alert. Also before the protracted dream sequence, Nick Cave, who you may not know wrote the novel on which Nick Cave's The Death Of Bunny Munro the TV series is based, appears in a cameo and says to Bunny Munro, “You have to love one another or die, brother.”.

What's with the BROTHER shit, Nick?

When I was a love lorn adolescent I thought Nick Cave was relate-able sad because he was corny and adolescent love is corny and I thought it took a lot of balls to be that obvious and hackneyed and grandiose, because that's love right? I thought Nick Cave was good because he didn't take himself too seriously. I was fucking wrong.
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Carlo Mombelli & The Prisoners Of Strange | 12/12/25

Circling where the venue should be, a rising niggle. It's not even nine yet according to the listing it’s late, I pay no mind: Jazz is the sufi word for time travel.

Panic compounds with the opaqueness of the signage, can this be the place, or maybe basically just the age, my age, time. The doors open on the empty coffee shop, and a lone door person’s light scolding, apparently jazz is now prompt.

Passing the scrubbed kitchen, then the clean alley, down the stairs, three neat dreadlocked suits wafting beeswax ascend as I land on the bottom step, the room opens out to a polite aftermath. Feeling like an ending. Hands over hands clutching each other's both hands in greeting the musicians are individually clustered around that holding gesture as their eyes are peered into by the scattering crowd, gathering to greet and gratitude, a pulse has moved through here. The room in scattered chatter.

Loosely speaking there are fifty people here, gathered around the instruments arranged in the round. Tables and bar, sleek, minimal and precise, peopled in studied casual – three fedoras, only one worn correctly, pulled low over the brow.

Off centre a giant fucking piano a black whisper, a lone mic, the empty seat at its feet, a sax case, an upended trumpet, punctuated between with cables, amps, music stands, the drums, more amps, the technical shit of the base station of electronics, Carlo Mombelli is a bass player. The Prisoners Of Strange start gathering back into the circle. The second set begins.

Out here on the bar there is a perimeter formed by the resting arms almost touching of a first date. They trade relationships horror stories while The Prisoners play “Athens”. She gasps at him in mock horror, touches lightly on her minor-fascinator. He mirrors the move, knocks his beer, glass on concrete. Over the sounds of the stereotypical claps in the jazz gaps they sit with their arms folded, chairs apart as a mop keeps time.

The room a landscape of shoulders, of hunched forward, forests of earnest brows, imperceptibly shaken out in the rise of Baking Macaroons. There is only one person on his phone, wearing camo. Something so fussy slips away.

In a back booth the obvious drummer, nodding his head purposefully to the insistent snare, tapping his fingers trying to time the hi-hat, refusing to give up as the time signature twists, pacing increasing, insane he bobbles madly grim faced.

Down front in spitting upon distance, starting at the coronet, a purposefully prim, torn jean, loose shouldered woman feels her body being taken by the piano circling her.

A barman pausing mid pour as the drums crash.

The first date talk urgently as the song ends.

The performance scatters into a lecture, Mombelli describes The Spirit Of Zambezi as a contrapuntal boat ride. A table of jazz students lean forward, studiously with contempt and awe. Everyone here under thirty is a jazz student. Everyone here over thirty is a student of jazz. This here is the water, a sound, this musician leans forward and plays zebras.

Crickets.

Birds.

Concentrating, leaning back in misty glasses the chin-stroker, fingers clasping, unclasping, nodding in studied appreciation until the river swirls unpredictable in eddy, he leans forward on his hand, a lull.

An animal feeds at the water.

Crocodiles.

Nature goes mad.

An involuntary exaltation, unforgivable, dark looks from the woman next to him.

As boat strikes shore the man with tweetie-bird hair stands suddenly, softly aghast in some eternal joy.

All The Children, this is last piece, we are told and it registers as the booth people sway. Maria Mombelli is the fulcrum of it all, hardly there and throughout the room. To travel a continent for just a whisper.

The torn jeans lady sways, the jazz students they sway, the white guy with dreadlocks sways as best he can, each in their own way sway, totally punk rock.

And then it shimmers away. The booth people sway in the what to do next of the evening. The first date start talking about what they don’t know what they think they know that they like.

The those out for an evening out stand to clap, wanting more, bereft, cheated, slowly leaving their seats to climb the stairs.

Some young dude in seventies flares and facial hair, Donovan cap, pied piper lost hangs around inanely as the instruments are folded away.

And there out of the corner, grey scarf and red beret, comes the shadow of jazz, ever present, bestowing his presence, drifting off back into time.

On the pavement camo clad has finally put away his phone, now talking to a friend about business class flights in the morning.

But the friend is not listening, still bobbing intently.

As a woman walks by, he says, “That hat is great.”

She turns to him, “this music you know, if I was a musician…”

He completes her, “this is the album I’d make.”

“This last song,” she gestures back down into the Untitled Basement, “I’ve always loved it, I just can’t remember its name.”