DAVID KRAMER (& JOHNNY CLEGG)

Those of you who have never heard of David Kramer, allow me to introduce you to one of the most remarkable figures in indigenous South African culture of the last century: like Johnny Clegg of the North of the country, David Kramer was also a Jew who took a deep and serious interest in our local culture, but while Johnny Clegg focused on Zulu culture (for which the French came to refer to him as "Le Zulu Blanc - The White Zulu", where he was genuinely received as one of their own), so in the South, David Kramer focused on the so-called "Coloureds" (whose genetic origins were less clear - probably the ragged remnants of the Xhoi San ("Hottentots") and miscegenation with the white settlers and likely even some Xhosa tribesmen) - in international terms a  creole people.

These people, who reside mostly on the West Coast and the Karoo (both of which Kramer has sung about in heart-rendingly affectionate ways) have very unique facial characteristics: probably as a result of generations of poverty and deprivation but also as a result of their Khoi-San origins, they are small and thin; they have high, prominent cheekbones and sharp eyes and they move with agile, darting movements. The most tragic aspect of their physiognomy is their characteristically flat faces, which are a dead giveaway of foetal alcohol syndrome - a by-product of both poverty and deprivation on the one hand, and a lack of education on the other.

Bear in mind that when Englishmen first encountered the "Hottentots", they could not distinguish or discern the whispering, whistling sounds that they made as human speech and as the power of speech was considered to be one of the distinguishing characteristics of Homo Sapiens, there was debate at the London Geographical Society as to whether "the Hottentots" could be classified as human or not! Can you imagine what their fate would have been, had they been classified as not human?

God bless the English! Sometimes I understand Robert Mugabe's almost obsessive hatred of England and the English.

Although the current South African government is busily rewriting the history of our country to exclude any possible credit to anyone save the black tribes, the stark truth, which I hope will never be forgotten, is that as with so many relatively new countries formed in the last century or two, we are a cauldron of nations which drew it's strength from a multitude of origins to produce a unique and completely new genus of Homo Sapiens - and as with every other group in the world, the genetic composition of the group is dynamic. It is still in flux, and it is thrilling to watch it evolve. When such a group becomes static, it starts to die - but we are very far from that at this point in our history.

Clegg and Kramer may not even have known of each other until later in life. They were contemporaries, but they wrote and performed in isolation and as far as I know there was no conscious collaboration between them. Each one just "happened" on his own. At the time of writing this they have both pretty much run their course. Clegg has already died, and Kramer is old. But he remains true to his cause, and the link below is a clip from a relatively recent performance.

The people who he wrote, sang and spoke about will walk into obscurity and oblivion very shortly. This, however, is not entirely a bad thing: they are not relics in a museum; they are living, breathing human beings and they are rapidly assimilating into the surrounding black and white populations - and the blacks and whites, too, are also assimilating into each other. My image of the cauldron again. I believe that the best and most workable solution for the melding of South Africa is that we should produce a single, brown population by cross-breeding over the next few generations. I look around me and I see how far we have already come in that regard, and my most fervent hope is that we should continue along that path. May the path become a freeway into the future!

Meanwhile, here is David Kramer at his shining best. He's loving it, and his audience loves him. Me, too.

I AM NOT GOING ANYWHERE TODAY

I am not going anywhere today. I am not doing anything. Everything hurts - everything. From my forehead to my legs, everything. Only my toes don't hurt and that may be because I haven't stood up yet. I haven't eaten. I won't eat. I swear, I just won't. It was freezing last night. It's a beautiful day but I'm not going out. The sun is shining cheerfully. Fuck off, cheerful sun. Go and be cheerful somewhere else. I should shave but you know what? - I'm not going to shave. I feel a sense of decay. I think I'm going off. I'll bet I stink. More than half the cells in my body are dying. They are at different stages of dying. From the moment of our conception we start to die. Up to the age of about thirty the number of growing cells in our bodies exceeds the number of dying cells but still, from the moment of conception there are dying cells. Part of us is already rotting in our mothers wombs. Life is nought but a long, long process of dying. That's because we were never meant to exist in the first place. We are an aberration. We are repulsive to nature, and to God. We offend the universe. Darkness is the natural state of the universe - darkness and inertia. We use energy to make light and we spend our lives fighting off the darkness but in the end it overcomes us anyway.

I have always been fascinated by these lines in the Hallel service - the "praise" service which we Jews say on festivals ("Hallelujah" in Hebrew, meaning, "praise be unto you") → "The Dead do not praise you, nor those who go down into silence - but we praise you … etc."

Who the hell are "those who go down into silence", if they are not dead? It's obviously some sort of kabbalistic reference. It really bothers me. I've asked a wise kabbalist about it but he changed the subject. Is it a secret? If so, why is it there? Is it that persistent, ever-present darkness, always out there on the edge of our consciousness, always pressing in on us, threatening to engulf us, menacing, as if to say, "I hide something so terrible that you would not be able to bear to see it, but one day, one horrible day, I am going to wrap this darkness around you, you will be engulfed in it, and THEN - THEN you will see it, you will see the nameless horror within me, the terrible Truth of this existence, and you will become part of it."

 

Once, in a morphine-induced dream, I dreamed that I was rolled up in a roll of barbed wire and lowered into a grave. I was in agony and I was bleeding, bleeding from the barbs that pressed into my flesh. Throughout the duration of this unbearably long dream, I bled constantly. And a small tunnel had been dug into one of the grave walls, and someone had climbed down into the grave after me and he pushed me into that tunnel. He carried a small blue oxygen cylinder and he said, "I am turning this on now, but when it runs out you will suffocate and die". And then he left, and closed the tunnel and the darkness pressed in and I listened as the hiss of the oxygen cylinder grew fainter. And then I became cold, lying in the pool of my blood. Darkness and silence. Silence and darkness. The last two of the vanguard of the Angel of Death.

 

So I am not getting out of this bed, because right now the Darkness has pressed in so far that it starts at the edges of the bed. This bed is all that I have left. I put my hands up and grab hold of my headboard, first of all to make sure that it is still there and secondly to increase my grip on the bed. There is nothing above me. There is nothing below me. There is nothing around me. Nothing. There is no sound at all. Have I gone deaf or is there really no sound anymore?. The darkness does not have hard edges. It has the quality of a cloud. Religious Jews say that the darkness which existed before creation was not merely an absence of light - it was a special, tactile, substantial darkness - and the plague of darkness which swept over Pharoah’s Egypt, was the same kind of darkness. And now this, too, is that kind of darkness - hence the sense of its pressing in on me.

 

There is no happy ending to this essay. (Is this an essay?) Happy endings are illusions for people who cannot face the truth, a sop handed to children and nervous adults. There are no happy endings. There are just endings, and you do with them what you will.

 

I once took a bus trip through a town called BRNO in the Czech Republic. Wikipedia says that it is “known for its modernist buildings” - that’s a bloody euphemism. BRNO - or what I saw of it - is a vision of hell. The ground was grey with dirty snow. The sky was grey from snow clouds. The buildings were unadorned concrete slabs, carbon copies of each other, all the same height, about ten stories high. Nothing moved in BRNO. If I was forced to spend 24 hours in BRNO, I wouldn’t survive those 24 hours. I would slit my wrists in the first half an hour. At least the red blood would improve the colour scheme. Whether you are drunk or sober, don’t go to BRNO.

 

Today is my day in BRNO. Don’t call me. Don’t write to me. Don’t pity me - I want to savour this cold dark hole. You can never know heaven, if you have never known hell. So lets just get this over with!

 

________________________________________   © Harry Friedland 9 June 2022

________________________________________   MY BLOG: MARIMBA

THE HUNGER MARCH

Some years ago I read a book (name escapes me) about a place where a pretty but isolated little house stood in a broad, open expanse surrounded by beautiful gardens full of roses. The occupants had everything that their hearts could desire. But in the distance a huge mass of people spreading from the one side of the horizon to the other, were approaching slowly. They looked like starving refugees from another world, dressed in torn grey rags, thin faces filled with misery and pain, pulling rickety carts bearing children and brick-a-brack, pathetic remnants of their earthtly possessions moving aimlessly across this mighty plain. It was a terrifying sight.

The occupants of that pretty little house knew that the roses in their gardens were not real: they were exquisitely beautiful Phoenician glass replicas, very expensive, and they sparkled magically in the sunlight. But they discovered that whenever they pulled up one of those beautiful roses it broke, and that starving horde would magically be pushed back to the horizon. They understood that this would not work forever because they only had a limited number of roses so their hope was that the threat would eventually go away - or that they would eventually find a solution to make it go away. But the solution did not come.

In fact, the starving horde grew, and every time it came back bigger and more menacing than the last time. And it got closer. The happiness in the lives of the family in the cottage diminished and grew into anxiety. Eventually they grew nervous about letting the children go out into the garden to play - at first they insisted that an adult must supervise and later they forbade it altogether. By now the miserable trudging hoard was visible all the time, from horizon to horizon, and faint sounds of their shuffling feet in their broken shoes and their ancient creaking carts could be heard through the cold, thin air.

Soon the groaning, the sighs and the voices of the crying children became a constant background to the increasingly tense occupants of the cottage.

And then one morning the beautiful daughter of the family in the cottage came inside and announced that there were no more roses, and they realised that they could not stay any longer.

So they hastily packed some bags, cannibalized the family motor-car and converted it into a heavy, hand-drawn cart, wrapped the rest of their worldly possessions into blankets, harnessed up all the able family members, assembled the family in the back yard, and got ready to go.

By now the sea of starving souls were at the front gate. They stretched as far as the eye could see. The groaning and wailing, the murmuring, the shuffling of feet, the coughing of rotten lungs, the crying of babies and hungry children filled the air. Suddenly the little front gate burst open with a loud crack, the little white picket fence was went down, and this slow-moving but inexorable mob swept into, round and over the cottage, it's bricks and staves and tiles tumbling down among them, window glass cracking under their cut and bruised feet.

There was no jubilation, no rejoicing, no malicious or spiteful behaviour from the mob at all. It was done unemotionally, indifferently, possibly without them even noticing what they were doing - they were that possessed by their own grief, their own need, their own desperation. You would have been wrong to call this a revolution or to try to categorise this event in any of those old ways, which were now utterly irrelevant. This was just dire need. They would have apologised if it would have made any difference. These were not angry, vengeful, politically driven fanatics. They were just penniless, starving, pitiful remnants of the human race, clinging to life - any life - as best they could. 

And now, our once-privileged, pretty little family are walking amongst the mob. They are no longer special. They will have to find a new way of living. They are heading into a dark and scary valley in human history. There will be much suffering and deprivation and sooner or later we are all going to join them. Our ranks will be depleted, our losses will be great, we will be engulfed by misfortune - but we will live.

The will to live is the strongest driver of human behaviour in the world, and the closer you get to death, the clearer that becomes. Bereft of absolutely everything, no matter how bewhildered you may be, that singular truth will eventually come to you.

It came to me as I lay in a hospital bed, confused by morphine, organs failing and racked with pain, convinced that God (if he had ever existed) had walked away and forgotten me. And yet, this thought came to me:

You must live. You must live at all and any cost. You must sacrifice whatever you have to sacrifice, abandon whatever you have to abandon, fight, lie, cheat, steal, kill, tear, break, take mad and badly calculated chances - just live, and then you can try to make good on any damage that you did afterwards. And in my mad and morphine-induced state I was eventually saved by the Angel of Death. Expressionless, without any sign of warm  compassion, he sewed up my wounds with a seamstress' sewing needle and a scrap of rough cotton and he stopped my bleeding and when it was clear that I was going to live he turned and walked away without a greeting and without looking back. The terrible moment was over, and I knew that I was going to live. And I never saw him again, to this day. He does not visit me in dreams. I do not see him standing on street corners or at the bedside of dying relatives. He chooses not to be seen.

But if you should ever see him - do not be afraid! Remember - everything is negotiable. And send him my regards - I think he'll remember me. And I will, of course, see him one more time - but this time, I'll recognise him.

__________________________________

© Harry Friedland, June 2022

My blog: https://hjfriedland.blogspot.com/