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| Kelly Gillespie introduces Neo Muyanga |
Johannesburg is a city that still produces messiahs at
high frequency. Preachers of gospels both spiritual and secular saturate the
air with their messages, promising salvation and liberation from all possible
imaginable oppressions. Money, power, sex, love, life, death – the holy people
of Jozi can tell you all about it. Academic travellers most likely meet those
belonging to the genres of cab drivers and drunkards in bars on 7th Street in
Melville. Stories shared during coffee breaks revealed that JWTC participants
were no strangers to these phenomena. But this blog does not dawdle with
peripheral prophets. Hadn’t we members of academia come to Johannesburg secretly
expecting to meet a real contemporary messiah, if not a club of messiahs? Was
the purpose of our congregation not sharing bits and pieces of the messianic
curricula that guide our own professional practices? After all, we had gathered
in Johannesburg to raise the question of the futures of nature. The devils of
oil capitalism, climate change politics and racist nature conservation
discourses hunt us day and night.
After a week of pondering the futures of nature, the
2012 JWTC was ready for a serious messiah. The messiah we encountered on the
evening of the seventh workshop day was Addis Shembe. We met her at the Dance
Factory in Newtown. Addis is the main figure in Neo Muyanga’s brilliant operetta
“The Flower of Shembe” (http://neomuyanga.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/the-flower-of-shembe-run-in-joburg/).
The play narrates the story of a girl born as “a new-messiah-in-the-making”,
the trials and tribulations she encounters and how she comes to terms with her
own destiny. After having resolved seven trials and returned home to participate
as a war general in the liberation of her people from the rule of a cruel
dictator, Addis speaks:
“contrary
to popular belief
the
problem is not
choice
but our
immutable instinct
for
self-preservation
the
very fact, our glory,
makes
it impossible for us to love”
(From
the libretto of “The Flower of Shembe)
Neo Muyanga and members of his NeoSong Company had introduced
“The Flower of Shembe” to us in a JWTC session moderated by Liz Gunner before
we went to see the show. According to the composer, the operetta is a story
about hope, joy and love. It is also a story that engages with spirituality,
politics, youth and leadership. Asked by Liz Gunner whether there was a need
for a new messiah today, Neo Muyanga answered that we live in cynical times and
offered the following proposal: “we can all be messiah individually if we give
up our self-preserving sense.”
Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks that “[a] man who possesses a language
possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this
language.” At the JWTC we discussed the epistemologies needed for practicing
theory and criticism from the South. How does it come about that many academics
these days take to writing about art? Are artists our new messiahs? Or is
writing about art our way to be messiah individually? “The Flower of Shembe” is
a story told in many languages that are brought together most eloquently. There
are languages of the body, languages of movement, languages of music and languages
of the visual. “The Flower of Shembe” is told in Sesotho, Maskanda, fashion
design, Zulu, painting, English, dance, flowers, Opera, sculpture, animation
short film (select listing with no particular order).
Being a historian of flowers and rather illiterate in
matters of music and dance, I will end this blog with few sentences about the
language of flowers used in the operetta and offer my own comment in the
language of flowers. Flowers are present in the play in various forms. “Addis”
means “flower” in Amharic. The stage setting contains beautiful huge metal
flowers. The poster and libretto for “The Flower of Shembe” feature a painting
of Addis with a protea on her forehead (http://neomuyanga.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/image.jpg).
The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus named the protea after the Greek god Proteus,
the sea-god who changes his appearance constantly as to remain unseen by those
who would approach him to use his gift of future telling. Linnaeus chose the
name due to the many different forms in which the flower appeared. The plant
also symbolically lives up to its name, as numerous meanings were attached to
it, shifting according to time and space. Dictionaries of the “Language of
Flowers” that fascinated 19th century Europe associate the protea with the
meaning “courage”. The protea was prominently adopted by white settlers as a
symbol of their South Africa and in 1976 the Protea cynaroides was officially declared the national flower. The
new democratic South Africa holds on to it as a truly protean symbol. Due to
their longevity, proteas and other fynbos plants have for long been popular as
grave decoration. But the protea also has a history that reaches back before the
flower represented death or nationalism. As Frieda Shenton’s mother in Zoë
Wicomb’s short story “A Trip to the Gifberge” says: “Only fools and cowards
would hand them over to the Boers. Those who put their stamp on things may see
in it their own histories and hopes. But a bush is a bush; it doesn’t become
what people think they turn it into. We know who lived in these mountains when
the Europeans were still shivering in their own country. What they think of the
veld and its flowers is of no interest to me.” (Zoë Wicomb, You can’t get lost in Cape Town
(Roggebaai: Umuzi, 2008), 189)
In the Language of flowers my blog about “The Flower
of Shembe” looks like this:
(Concept:
Melanie Boehi, Flower arrangement: Karin Bachmann, Photographer: Jayne
Batzofin)
Translation
drawn together from numerous Language of flowers’ dictionaries:
arum lilies magnificence
blue iris faith,
hope, wisdom, eloquence
protea courage,
diversity
red rose love
strelitzia faithfulness,
joyfulness, paradise
Melanie Boehi
University of Basel
Melanie Boehi
University of Basel
