Ja. Edition 2

13 March 2015 Edition 2

T

echnology-the modern day Jekyll and Hyde. It sucks because as an online magazine with its creators,

contributors, and stories scattered across different cities (and even continents in this edition), putting the final product together is less than simple. Meetings happen over Whatsapp/ Facebook/Gmail and if you’re out of data or the internet’s down again (thanks, crazy Cape winds), you’re kind of left in the dark (did we mention loadofbullshedding?).

However, it’s also great because once we’ve overcome those

glitches; we’re able to create something which is multimedia infused and ready for sharing by all the keyboard ninjazzz out there. Despite being made for the interwebs, Ja is also made for the good old fashioned hard copy loving reader. In fact, one of our contributors hates technology so much, he moved to a remote farm outside of Grahamstown to escape it. He still digs the mag though.

We also like content that’s in depth, so brace yourselves

if you‘re used to 50 word blurbs accompanied by a Youtube video that ‘can’t be displayed in your country’. We’re not that kind of multimedia.

Ja. So check it out, clicky-clicky on our hyperlinks, love it

or hate it, download it and share it, or hide it away on your desktop forever. Contribute. Plz. Ktxbai. #JaEdTwo Creators and contributors: Dave Mann, Niamh WalshVorster, Youlendree Appasamy, Kate Janse Van Rensberg, Carly Hosford-Israel, Daniel Nubian, Sloo Phaho, Oom Willie, Werner Goss-Ross, Yoraya Nydoo, Kayla Roux and Zanta.

The

Oom Willie-

man in the millimetres

By Dave Mann

Theatre can often be a gaudy industry with the spotlight falling on and illuminating a select few. Granted, they’re the ones you’ve spent your money to come and watch perform, but there’s more to a show than the people on stage, and I’m not talking about the sound and lighting technicians, because even they get a round of applause at the end of a show. I’m talking about the character who sits permanently offstage, working alone and late into the night creating with their bare hands, the worlds you see when the curtain eventually rises. Photographs by Niamh Walsh-Vorster

S

tepping through the warehouse sized sliding door into Oom Willie’s workshop is an experience in and of itself. Walls plastered with posters of shows and productions gone by stretch up to the height of two floors before they meet the ceiling.

Work tables and equipment take up the expansive wooden floors, and old show props and disengaged stage sets fill up the spaces in between. It’s as if you’ve stumbled across a secret archive of South African theatre.

Towards the back of the workshop sits a flight of stairs which lead up to an office, but it looks unoccupied from where I stand. The sharp, jarring sound of a turning machine directs me to Oom Willie, who’s busy making a wooden bowl from scratch. I wait for him to pause before I grab his attention, because you don’t interrupt

Oom Willie while he’s working. “Never try and talk to me when I’m operating a machine here. For my safety and for yours” he says ominously.

He’s a stern looking character in his beat up workers boots, faded blue jeans, and greying hair. He speaks in a brief, assertive, Afrikaans accent, and his handshake is far firmer than I’m used to.

As we climb the stairs to his office, I start to wonder if this is really the person they call the unofficial ‘Father of the Rhodes University Drama Department’.

“Ja, I built my first kitted out, wooden car when I was about eight years old” he says leaning back in his chair with his hands together in his lap. “I would get 95 for woodwork, but scrape 50 percent for everything else. I suppose I could’ve done better, but I didn’t care about anything else, I just wanted to create.”

The office itself is full of his creations.

Kudu horn vuvuzelas are perched in one corner of the room, finely carved wooden frames adorn the walls, and black, steel vines twist around a glass orb in the opposite corner while the front legs of his desk rest on an animal skin carpet, perhaps also kudu. A copy of ‘Bow Hunter’ magazine sits on the desk, next to an old leather bound compass. It would be easy to dismiss him as just another hardened, beer drinking, rugby watching patriarch, but listening to him talk about his days spent in dusty theatre workshops displayed an entirely different side to Oom Willie.

“I’ve always had a very fine feeling for the arts.” He says, turning his palms upwards as if talking to the individual cracks and creases carved into them.

His hands are rough, leathery, and well used. His knuckles are bulky with the skin stretched tightly around them.

He regards them gently as if handling his most precious tool. “Theatre is something lasting in a world full of meaningless, unmemorable television and internet based crap, because it is finely crafted. My mentor was a German by the name of Oom Arli. Oef, did I hate that bastard, but he was one of the best craftsmen I’ve ever known.

If anything, and I mean anything, even the slightest angle was off then he’d throw it away and start again. Theatre

is like that. It’s incredibly detailed.”

With decades of experience in woodwork, welding, boiling, steelwork, and even a little glass blowing, Oom Willie’s made just about anything you could think of seeing on a stage.

He knows the details of the stage too. He knows how a certain prop will look under the lights in front of an audience, how to make a table firm enough to support the weight of three or four actors, but light enough to be whisked around stage with them. He crafts sets that range from Renaissance pieces to modern day Jozi office blocks. Oom Willie is the man that takes the ambitious, outlandish conceptualisations of directors and brings them to life under the hot, bright theatre lights. According to his wife, the only thing Oom Willie hasn’t made is “a pink elephant that can walk backwards.”

“I remember Andrew Buckland coming to me with a piece of paper which he had scribbled his ideas for the set of ‘Moronto Don’ onto and I had no idea how the fuck I was going to make this thing” he says with a grin.

“It was about a week later when I was walking along the beach that I saw this giant boulder and it must have been something in the shape or the way this thing curved, but I suddenly knew exactly how I was going to construct the

set. You see, art is everywhere. Nature is itself a finely crafted thing, and I draw a lot of inspiration from it. I draw a lot of inspiration from the drama students too. They’re always creating and it’s a wonderful thing to see. They may not have the skills to turn their ideas into tangible creations, but that’s what I’m here for.”

He’s half way in to telling me about his favourite performances and most enjoyable sets when a student and part time assistant comes in to drop off a freshly made mug of coffee. Oom Willie stretches over the desk, ignores the handle and grips the hot mug in both hands. “Chris my boy, you are a man of steel,” he says to the student, before adding “Listen, Aunty Willie made you a muffin. She says she doesn’t know what to call it, but you must give it a taste and tell her what you think, alright boytjie?”

He may have more animal remnants and handmade knives in his workspace than the average butcher, and a vice grip for a handshake, but his passion for South African theatre is quiet and delicate. His work is mostly invisible but he doesn’t mind, because as long as he’s creating, he’s happy. “The difference between a phenomenal piece of theatre and an absolute train wreck,” explains Oom Willie, “can rely on the set. And that comes down to absolute millimetres.”

Darkness

is blackness is badness

By Youlendree Appasamy

All the aunties are sitting together around a decrepit looking chipboard table with plastic sheeting covering the scratch marks and hot pot burns. The food is cooking. We are all gossiping. Why does this sound so pretentious? Growing up in White River, not Durban, and religiously visiting family twice a year does this to a person. Pretty soon someone is going to pop out another screaming child. The usual speculations over the colour of the child will come into play. The woman is ‘fair’ and the man looks more like a ‘darkie’. The aunties all seem very worried about the skin-tone of the child. I’m more worried about the food.

Photographs by Kate Janse Van Rensberg

A

fter posting a cursory tweet about colourism in South African Indian communities, someone (@Nattygov) asked “What you mean like how lighter-skin women are automatically assumed to be prettier and more intelligent?” Yes. Exactly. Skin colour

stratification is more noticeable within people of colour and often with more detrimental effects.

Ever heard of Fair and Lovely? Or Santoor? These skin lightening creams operate on the more legal side of skin bleaching agents yet their

less legal counterparts have caused severely adverse effects on darker skin tones globally.

To the White Gaze, this obsession over skin-tone in People of Colour (POC) communities can seem wholly unnecessary. Growing up in White River, being clearly darker than white schoolmates, was one form of skintone awareness, but the commentary I heard within Indian communities about other Indian folks had the most impact. Indian folks who looked like ‘darkies’ (black folks) were frowned upon, to being openly criticised for being of a lesser breed of Indian.

I also noticed from a very young age that discrimination focalised around Indian women. Women are held up to ridiculously fantastical standards of beauty, this we know, but when you’re a Women of Colour (WOC) this intersects with white (hetero)normativity. ‘Fairer’ skin

equates closer to the White Beauty Standard. Men, are by and large, except from comparisons to this standard.

Darkness is blackness is badness.

It’s funny how the Manichean binary is so malleable that it constructs intra-racism too. This interesting confluence of racism and patriarchy ends up being colourism.

My mom relayed stories of how she tried to lighten her skin-tone by drinking lemon water and rubbing lemon juice, often mixed with manja (tumeric) on her skin. Her sister is much lighter-skinned than she is.

When I was an awkward pre-teen I first expressed the desire to become ‘fairer’. Snarky comments about my ‘tan’ mixed with derogatory comments made about Purple Indians, ‘blackies’ spurred me on. I wanted to be beautiful too. My mum didn’t question this desire but led me on the dark path of skin-lightening

home remedies, creams, serums and sunscreens (not her fault by the way.

Internalised oppression is a thing). I reached an obsessive stage of checking the mirror regularly, avoiding the sun and applying the creams. Sometimes I would mess up and spend too much time under the scorching Mpumalanga sun and would have to make up for it by a combo of turmeric, lemon water and Santoor (my lightening cream of choice). My sheets were stained from the manja. Each morning I would wash it off and check to see whether my ‘tan’ had lifted. If anything, I became a yellower version of myself.

This yellow version fantasised about all the male attention I would get when I became fairer, how much more like the Bollywood stars (one of the few Indian women role models I had at the time) I’d look like. How my children would be graced with fairer skin too

- I was aiming to marry a rich white man too, just to make sure the kids would turn out alright. Now, I cringe at my vanity. Underneath those layers of narcissism lay a very real sense of inferiority.

The sense of inferiority is a shared complex that many POC know, although not knowingly. Indentured workers, who were exported from India like chattel, came to work in South African sugar cane fields centuries ago. These workers themselves had faced direct British Imperial control in India. The caste system, which some have incorrectly concluded is the root cause of colourism in Indian communities, was a class system entrenched and exploited by British rule.

Economic class does play a role in colourism, however. The economic aspect to colourism is one that can be traced to master-slave relations under colonialism. This cool pdf explains more about hierarchies of colourism in the Latina and Black communities in USA as a result of colonial exploitation and oppression.

Her conclusions, although drawn from these case studies, can be applied to a large extent to SA – as the underlying premise is skin colour as social capital in POC communities. .

Rooftop,

parking lot, sidewalk

By Carly Hosford-Israel

I

have spent the past four years traveling back and forth between South Africa and the States, mostly for school and also for love, because in 2010 a South African and his country stole my heart. In fact it was my first day at UKZN, Howard College Campus, when I saw him in a sea of student protestors.

He was waving up at a small group of us study abroad students, summoning us into the waves of song, chants, and dance. I felt the pulse of protest pull me down the three stories of open air stairs and was immediately gathered up in the clamor. I knew then, in the faith and frustration fueled frenzy that I had found home.

Three weeks later I was sitting atop his Berea Road rooftop discussing the limits of formal education. I felt the itch of classroom inaction sparked by continued education on social oppressions. He listened as we gazed out over the CBD to the sea line, hugged by the thick East Coast air. Finally he told me that education

would lead me to more productive protest and that for now I should instead focus on patience. I knew he was right. He knew why I choose to go to college and why it was still worth my time. I fell in love with those earnest ears.

On another late evening we sat in the front of his pale green VW beetle talking the way you do when you first fall in love, the kind of talking where you peel back the person, their words undressing them in layers like those of an onion. His thoughts were fluid with honesty but I kept fighting mine to come to words, uncertain and bumpy.

I was caught up in my head, furiously translating the inner-personal into a conception of socially approachable. I stuttered, he stopped me. ‘Just say it’ he said. ‘I know, I’m just trying to find the right way to phrase it’ I replied. ‘There is no right way. There are only right intentions’. The levy of States produced political correctness crumbled as my translated thoughts were freed by a new found security beyond words, in my intentions.

A year later we were seated again, side by side, this time on rough roadside pavement in Glenwood. It was still sunny, and mixed in with my sweat were stormy tears. I had been teaching analogue photography to students from both a public and private Durban high school. My private school students had not shown up to class that day, not even one of them. I remember him wrapping his arm around my shoulder, squeezing, saying ‘my love’

over and again. I cried, he listened.

Finally he said ‘you are doing your best – that is all there is’. I knew he was right. Field research is not predicatively neat, and there are many lessons to be learnt in the messier processes and outcomes.

In four years South Africa and my

then South African partner taught me freedom: the freedom to trust myself completely, the freedom to take that trust and act with assurance, the freedom to know that we all have different bests and evolving expectations, the freedom to have faith and find pleasure in uncertainty.

Unlike the produced, packaged, and over-priced Stateside version, South Africa freedom is innate, inherent, fractured, and flawed. Staring off into South African horizon lines with the one I loved reminded me that I was necessarily imperfect, incomplete, and growing, just like everyone else.

Carly Hosford-Israel lives in Seattle,Washington. Currently documenting life through her Pentax K1000 film camera and iPhone whilst teaching people to ski. Always the sharer, Carly spent time teaching kids how to capture life around them in Joza, Grahamstown in 2014through the Point and Shoot Program.

Photographs by Carly Hosford-Israel

Bedside Monsters

By Daniel Nubian

hyllis walked into her bedroom and

P

do not need to worry. I am not here to

found the Boogie Monster staring

harm you. In fact I am your guardian

at her bed. As you can guess, she was

demon. I came here to inform you that

completely dumbstruck. There it was,

your guardian angel is dead.”

the green-eyed, hideous-looking, tall

and surprisingly well-dressed creature.

who she was, she could only muster one

She thought of screaming, and was

word: “Why?” Boogie looked Phyllis

about to, until she heard the monster

dead in the eye then explained, “I had

sobbing. A little fearful, and somewhat

to. She was on the verge of abusing her

confused, she closed the door and locked

power. She wanted to harm you. She

it behind her. Gathering all of the courage

wanted your beauty for herself and was

she could, Phyllis tentatively walked

prepared to do anything to acquire it.

up to the thing that had invaded her

She was about to end your life and go

room, her space, her place of sanctuary.

against the order of thing, so I killed

Noticing this, Boogie (as he called

her Phyllis. I killed your guardian

himself) wiped the tears from his eyes,

angel and was transformed into this

took a few moments to compose himself

hideous thing that stands before you.

then slowly turned around to face her.

You are destined for great things, even

For a 12-year-old, she was extremely

the demons know that. But in order for

beautiful, and had the type of physique

you to fulfil your destiny your guardian

that would fill out in later years to turn

angel had to die. I may not look like

this already magnificent duckling into a

much but I will make sure that you at

jaw-dropping swan.

least see it.”

“Hello Mr. Monster. My name is

Astonished that the monster knew

Boogie was about to leave but to

Phyllis. Why are you crying? Why are you

his surprise was stopped by Phyllis

in my room? Are you going to hurt me?”

just before he put his hand on the

she asked, trembling uncontrollably.

door handle. Staring directly at the

“Phyllis, I know who you are and you

monster, and smiling uncontrollably,

she hugged him tightly, kissed him on the cheek then softly whispered to Boogie, “Thank you. You are not hideous, you are perfect. I want you to stay with me because I think you are perfect. You are my guardian now…I love you.” Boogie was left stunned and thought to himself, “Her greatness has already begun”.

Daniel Nubian was born in Uganda but grew up in SA. He is currently in his first year of Masters in Music, majoring in Operatic Performance. His rule to live by is “just roll”. An honest character always down for good banter. He composes electronic music fused with African styles when he’s not sippin’ a cold one. A song was composed for this short story which you can play whilst you read. Photographs

by Niamh Walsh-Vorster

Click on image to play track

Why

more artists should tour

South Africa

By Sloo

F

irst of all, I’m South African so I admit that this article is rooted in my own thirst for more major international artists to make an appearance here. This is a thirst I share with many South Africans, but the thirst is justified. Most of the time, South Africa gets some good action.

We have festivals that bring some big bands and events like Axecess Jozi that bring some impressive international rappers. My issue is every time it does happen, it’s the most important thing

to happen in months, and the shows get sold out instantly, leaving most having to wait months for something equally worthwhile.

Of course South Africa has great, year-round local acts, so there’s one more thing I need to say but couldn’t fit in the title- I just as badly want local acts to succeed overseas as I want international acts to come here.

Local acts stay local for too long in SA. So while a huge local act can sell out medium-sized venues, they don’t

ever reach stadium level. It’s equally frustrating that we have brilliant stadiums (remnants of our World Cup), going unused by both local and international acts. Why allow these coliseums to collect dust? Sport may be popular here but let’s be real, there’s more people trying to get Jay-Z tickets than Ajax Cape Town tickets.

The more we keep our local acts local, the less excited our local crowds will be to flock to the shows in the first place. However, the more local musicians we have that are able to sell out crowds internationally, like New Zealand have in Lorde and Australia have in 5 Seconds of Summer, the more South Africa will become a staple in any World Tour, as it should be. This would not only put South Africa on the Music Industry’s map but catapult our local artists into potential superstardom.

Recent shows such as Kanye West’s Castle Lite-Sponsored performance at the Coco-Cola Dome or the All-Axecess Jozi showcase (which will bring artists

such as Kid Ink, Rae Sremmurd, Tyga & Schoolboy Q) are both promising.

It must be said however, that West’s performance was not a part of his actual tour, but a show specifically created due to fan’s thirst for Yeezy to make an appearance in South Africa. So it is still a bit worrying that cities as developed as Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town still aren’t worthy enough of competing with Sydney or Auckland for a place on Kanye’s acclaimed YEEZUS tour or Jay-Z and Beyonce’s On The Run tour.

The Vector Arena in Auckland is a 12000 seater, the Coca-Cola Dome on the other hand is a 19000 seater, this squashes any claims that a South African tour date would earn any less money than other cities.

In my opinion, the blame should fall on local artists and their fan bases, and the fact that we haven’t managed to break into the international scene in a big way. By this I mean that South Africa has no Billboard Chart-Toppers or VMA performers. While mainstream success is often bashed as an unnecessary part of artistic creation-that artists should do it “for the love” (snooooze)- one can’t deny the importance of an international mainstream presence. When Lorde gained international success, she essentially pushed other New Zealandbased musicians into global relevance.

What I’m trying to say is that, perhaps what South Africa needs is our own Lorde. Photo by Niamh Walsh-Vorster

Poem ‘YOU’ by Zanta Doodles by (top)Werner Goss-Ross, Yoraya Nydoo and (middle and bottom) Kayla Roux

I used to think surrender was a subservient undertaking Hands held up, slumped walk of defeat

Through you I know freedom,

gifting & majestic You smell of the earth.

Warm. Welcoming. Good.

I want to cradle myself in that

space between your

heart & brain.

Surround myself with the denseness of you.

I’m forever marked by you,

on an elemental level,

cells in my body still discuss the experience of your touch, your

conversation, your hardness.

To distract them, I entertain lessers,

kiss them harder

than I should.

Nothing ever seems to work,

nothing can rid me of you.

You’ve ruined me

Because you changed the standard.

Now I look for you in every song, every gesture, every interaction

But you’re gone Forever.

JaMagSa@gmail.com

@JaMagSA

JA.