For di time is nigh
When passion gather high
When di beat just lash
When di wall mus smash
An di beat will shif
As di culture alltah
When oppression scatah.
Bass Culture, Linton Kwesi Johnson
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Time: Minutes after 12pm
Year: April 1980
Setting: Rufaro Stadium
Bass culture is as old as Zimbabwe itself. The reggae mystic Robert Nesta Marley laid down the soundtrack to what we thought was the dawn of freedom in 1980.
“We don’t need no more trouble,” he chanted, whiffs of pungent teargas still hanging in the air at Harare’s Rufaro Stadium.
His arrival was low key: “Top Jamaican reggae artistes Bob Marley and the Wailers and an entourage of more than 20 arrived in Salisbury from London,” The Herald reported. “The band was warmly greeted by a small, but enthusiastic crowd of supporters and representatives from the local recording industry.”
When Marley caused a riot in Rufaro Stadium, I was only three.
Time: Minutes after 12pm
Year: Circa 1982
Setting: A street in a southern city
It’s 1982 and I am five. Time, which moves hesitantly but always forwards, like a chameleon, has since swallowed the body of Marley.
Yet the shaman’s spirit still hovers in the land of Chimurenga, where his music has become a staple.
It’s minutes after noon. I am walking home from crèche and Buffalo Soldier is blaring from a speaker placed outside a house: “Buffalo soldier, dressed like rasta.”
Reggae at noon.
That day, walking home as Buffalo Soldier played in the distance, was my introduction to bass culture.
The Zimbabwean masses loved the music — but not their ruler.
“The men want to sing and don’t go to colleges,” Robert Mugabe later said of Jamaicans. “Some are dreadlocked.”
The men are dirty and smell, the strongman might have added and reggae is the music of ruffians.
But I didn’t give a damn what he thought. Bass culture was my culture.
Even if the singers and the DJs smelled and smoked herb and grew filthy dreadlocks that reached their ankles, they were my heroes. I wouldn’t give them up for anything.
Fourteen years later. For time comes and goes. Always forwards, like a chameleon and never sinuously or backwards like a python.
Time: 4am
Year: 1996
Setting: Community hall of a nondescript farming town.
All about, the cocks are still asleep.
The covens of witches and wizards have probably just broken up to sidle into bed.
It wouldn’t do for the cocks to start making a ruckus before they were back home.
I am not in bed. A blaring speaker is my backrest and my pillow.
My tired legs stretched in front of me, I survey the dancehall in the crepuscular light. I have been up all night.
The dancehall owls are still at it. I see their silhouettes, throwing hands in the air to All Fruits Ripe by Junior Reid; when Limb by Limb by the gravelly-voiced Cutty Ranks is introduced, they jump for joy.
When the drum and bass blast from the bass-bin speakers, the contrapuntal riddims are so loud and declamatory they resound in my chest. My pants shake and shiver.
The black giant sound system is in town. The biggest sound system in the country is in town.
Everyone who knows their sound is here — those who can tell Buju Banton from Mega Banton; those who can’t tell Cocoa Tea from Freddie McGregor are at home asleep.
I told mother I am housesitting at my aunt’s.
She will be surprised to see me arriving home after 6am with the morning walkers.
Surely you could have slept in, she will say. What was the rush? I cannot tell her I was at the dance.
It was in those dances — bottles strewn about, the slightly sweet smell of marijuana smoke swirling in the air, burping a mixture of the traditional brew and Castle — where I tasted freedom.
For the privilege of listening to these dreadlocked ruffians Mugabe hated, I was ready to give up sleep.
Swiss alliance celebrates African
history
Echoes of Southern African Liberation Struggles is a collaborative research project on journalistic sound archives from southern Africa kept in Switzerland.
The digitised archives of Swiss broadcasters and individual journalists, most importantly the collection compiled by German-South African journalist Ruth Weiss at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, contain interviews with prominent politicians, such as Mugabe and Kenneth Kaunda, but also with women guerrilla fighters and ordinary people.
There are recordings of events such as the Geneva Conference of 1976, the meeting convened to help bring the end of the armed struggle in then colonial Southern Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe’s independence celebration in 1980, including Marley’s concert.
Melanie Boehi, a historian based at the University of Lausanne, invited journalists, artists and researchers from South Africa and Zimbabwe to listen to the archival recordings and reflect on their meaning in the present moment.
Re-arranging archival recordings with recordings from their personal collections and new sounds, the collaborators created mix-tapes which, together with a conversation about the process of making them, were released as podcasts.
The project also generated an accompanying zine, from which this piece by Percy Zvomuya is taken, as well as a graphic score.— Mail & Guardian
