I recently moved from Pretoria to Johannesburg. But it does not feel like I have moved less than 60km, within the same province. Perhaps the same gulf would be experienced by a Ugandan shifting homes from Entebbe to Kampala.
Pretoria is a laager — homely, family-guarding and tribalistic. Johannesburg, Jozi, is a cacophony of smells, colours, movements bold and slow — and thievery. It is a clanging mix of noises, of nonchalance, of quietness.
It is a free-for-all home, yet closely guarded by Joburgers. This is the feeling I get reading Salimah Valiani’s anthology iGoli eGoli . They are beautiful, thoughtful and insightful poems, thrown around, and yet easily abstracted thematically.
Listen to Charlie Mingus’s Moanin’ . And, in those jazz trumpet notes, you will find the oomph, amandla!, the verve and bouncing madness you will feel in iGoli eGoli . iGoli, the first section of the collection, refers to a being — the beingness of the city.
There is memory — belonging in memory in a particular place out of choice in contrast to being placed in it out of birth; dispossession; the chameleon-like shift of identities between a thief and a usurper (when does one become which in a city with this history of dispossession and shifting identities?). It is about migrancy; the precariousness and mundaneness of black labour; the invisibility of black women’s pains hung out in public. The second half takes the city in its physicality and what goes into it.
It draws us closer to.
