MUSIC TO OUTWIT THE APARTHEID OPPRESSOR: THATHA, NGIM’JONGILE (TAKE, I’M WATCHING HIM)

This is a clip from one of our many trips to visit my family back in South Africa. My brother Baba is regaling us with an affirmation of a story I often tell in my creative music workshops around the world as an example of how we used music as a means of creatively outwitting our oppressor. The scenario he describes is from a typical experience during apartheid, when as young township kids we desired sweets or toys that we could not afford. We would enter the white man’s shop as a group and immediately the owner would raise his antennae, knowing that there was an increased risk of some of his prized goods disappearing. To conceal our intention we would enter singing and dancing, one of us playing a home-made tin-and-plank guitar strung with fishing gut or chicken wire. The white man would be distracted by our entertaining performance. In the meantime, the lead singer playing the guitar would use the upbeat music to communicate with us in our language so that the shopkeeper didn’t understand the instructions being sung to us as to the precise moment when it was safe for one of us to take the quarry and shove it under his shirt.
The phrase that my brother repeats in the video says, “Thatha, ngim’jongile”, which translates as, “Take, I’m watching him.”
Further on, my cousin Brian tells us about the seductive power of maskandi guitar music. One of the chief exponents of this genre was Mfazo’omnyama. His playing was so attractive that the staff at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet all stepped outside to enjoy the music, leaving the tills unattended.
Fimed by Azra Kayani