This month, I think about the many submissions we have received, and the variety of stories that we all have to tell. When I recently sat with Jennilyn Fiddler, to discuss my own thoughts about the CaribbeanTales project, I was asked about my own conception of storytelling and how it has come to shape my life, my history.

Click here to listen to an interview clip with Shana Calixte on CHRY

Of course, initially, I had thought that I really didn't have a story to tell. That my experience was just one that was not at all noteworthy. But through reading your submissions, feedback and email, I have begun to think about the experiences that we share as Caribbean peoples, the universal stories and tales that come out of our diversity. I often see myself in bits of each story, to hear your words, as if they came from my own voice.

Many of you have commented on that shared history, especially last month's story poem from Sandy Macintyre about Mahal – who many of you remember in your childhood days. These are the stories that don't get on the front pages, but that are shared within and across families, passed down through generations, and of course have resonance many years later. The power of storytelling rests in its accessibility, its transformative power, its ability to be shared, over generations, and across continents. CaribbeanTales hopes to continue to honor those stories.

In this issue, we continue on our theme of the accessibility of storytelling, and the importance of realizing and verbalizing your own story. Shani Mootoo, our Storyteller of the Month, shares with us some of her thoughts on writing, and on creating a space that challenges and pushes the boundaries of Caribbean identity. We also feature the lyrical writing of p! Barrington, in his article, Wey mi madda ‘ouda sey …an’ addaz tu! In this piece, p! seeks translations for sayings in languages that are part of his history, words passed to him by his mother and many other 'wise saws.' Our book review this month features Dominican Republic author Alan Cambeira's work called Azúcar! The Story of Sugar, excellently reviewed by Laurel Johnson.

We continue our theme of inviting you to get to know the people behind this project with our latest team member, Denise Herrera Jackson. She answers a few questions for us about her own work in the Caribbean community, and her thoughts on the CaribbeanTales project. CaribbeanTales was also present at the recent talk by film maker Spike Lee at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, and we have few thoughts about the evening that has been widely covered in local media.

Finally, Around the Fire editor Tumelo Phali speaks with playwright, novelist and film producer, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, part one of a powerful conversation about history and why the past really does matter.

We hope you enjoy this installment of the CaribbeanTales newsletter. Again, we are always looking for new and diverse stories for our pages. We know that many of you out there have interesting things to say, so please send them in. As once again, we all have stories to tell!

As a video producer, multimedia artist, painter and writer, Mootoo has come to grapple with some of the many themes in diasporic Caribbean work – those of identity, authenticity, hybridity and change – many resulting from her own experience of being a “multiple migrant”.

Of Indo-Caribbean ancestry, Mootoo was born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in Trinidad. At the age of 19, she moved to Canada, and has spent time in Vancouver and London, currently calling Calgary her home. As she says about her own identity, “I’m not Indian… I don’t know what I am. I grew up in an island within a family of Indian decent… I lived in Vancouver for more than half my life and every year was about the need to go somewhere else.”

And that may be why, unlike many storytellers from the Caribbean who are searching for their 'origin stories' Mootoo's writing and artistic life has unsettled the easy narratives of some Caribbean storytelling. She says, "The reason I make my art is not to complain that I don’t fit in – but don’t try to fit me anywhere – I’m comfortable being uncomfortable."

"In Trinidad I couldn’t step out of my Indian family and still be myself – I would have to go somewhere else for that identity as an individual. Also, in Canada one has a place to run to and you can actually exist like you are on an island because everyone around you doesn’t know you or ask about your background."

Mootoo's resume is long and diverse. Her video work includes English Lesson (1991), The Wild Women in the Woods (1993), Guerita and Prietita (1995) and View (2000) among many others. Her photo and painted artwork have been showcased in exhibitions internationally. She has recently finished her second novel, soon to be released.

Her written work, like her life, challenges the borders and boundaries of the self, reworking old and lifeless tropes of Caribbean identity, gender and sexuality. Her collection of short fiction, Out on Main Street, released in 1993 “exposes the uncertainty of the hybrid individual”, where lines of what it means to be “Indian”, “woman” “lesbian” all become blurred.

One story that showcases this theme shares the title of the collection and revolves around two Indo-lesbians browsing an Indo market in Vancouver. The narrator, a butch lesbian, recounts the story of trying to purchase sweets by using Indo-Trinidadian words, that have no resonance with the “main street” Indians in the market. As she brings to light the ways in which language, culture and identity have gone through a process of displacement from their supposed “origin”, those in the market try to understand both women in a narrow understanding of “Indian-ness”. The tale is a witty and funny one, as Motooo focuses on the clash of diasporic identities, where ideas of sexuality and culture are not always so linear or so stable.

Challenging the ever existing tropes of “Indo Caribbean womanhood”, Mootoo comments that she insists on occupying the uncomfortable space: “I always want the freedom to imagine who I want to be, where I want to be, might be or re-invent myself.”

Reinvention, it seems, is also a major theme in her 1997 novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Once again unsettling fixed notions of gender and sexuality, Mootoo's work is “bold and lyrical, sensual and highly charged...Cereus Blooms at Night is layered with unforgettable scenes of a world where love and treachery collide.” The novel is one that can not be summed up in a few words, and begs you to pick it up, to experience the compelling and imaginative story that Mootoo creates.

Although highly accomplished, Mootoo continues to produce and seek change, in herself and her work. “I don’t only want to be a Trinidadian woman - I want to be everything that is possible for me to be… That means having a profession I want, writing about what I want. Having an opinion or questioning things is not a sign of rebellion,” she says.

"Finding out who you are is a painful process. But I don’t know where this feeling to always find yourself and identity comes from. One other reason could be that one feels that one can be better than what you are – that you can better your last work...I’m not a writer until I have written seven books."

Enjoy these video clips, as CaribbeanTales catches up with Mootoo, to find out about her passion for food, for writing and her comfort in the uncomfortable.

A treatment that recounts the gnomes of old with modern accompaniments as to present Afro-Caribbean sayings that have travelled loops of time and place and captured with present day relevance. These sayings are extracted from a rich, vibrant landscape of wise saws and have been cultured and preserved as precious platitudes, for they maintain a timeless currency around the human experience.

The truisms as they have been tried and proven to become, underlie the pointed poignancy of grassroots minds not steeped in pretence or affected by schooling but sustained by such ‘earthy’ intelligence rooted in and nurtured by life’s real and didactic simplicities.

These respectable ‘ parables’ speak to an ‘Afrocestry’; they are communicated through a language –patois- which historically constituted a lingual ‘ ruse to master bemuse’ and which has remained as a cultural element in its graphic, esoteric essence. These sayings riff metaphors and allegories and are indeed parcels of a legitimate linguistic territory perhaps similar to that place from which Shakespeare wrote his influence; a territory now proudly occupied by constituents of the African Diaspora. And there the sayings are regarded as veritable rhetoric and musings that transcends geographic divides of residence or origin in their application.

These sayings have inexorably earned a deserved respect not merely as trite reverence for the forebears but for being pristine wisdom we ought to habituate as we forge our own unique expressions of enlightenment. They survive as legacies of a colourful, seductive ancestry and hold sway as an idiom of distinction within the Babel of Canadian multiculturalism. They are unwizened voices in my mind where they defy oblivion and rain a stream of humour and sense - mantras for life and living.

Written with an Oedipal fervour I channel my mother, the especial medium amongst the ‘ole time peeple passed’ and who guide this literary odyssey. I hope with her help (and theirs) (GOD BLESS THEIR SOULS!) the reader will experience the gist and joy borne in the purposive significance of these sayings in my head.

Having said that let see wey mi madda oudda sey.. an addaz tu! - according to one p!erson’s interpretation, p!’s.

‘Ag pickney sey to ag mumma… “mumma mek yu mout’ so lang?!”
Ag mumma sey to ag pickney. “Pickney!Yu dis a cum yu wi fine out!”

Translation:

The piglet said to to the mother sow.. “ Mummy, why is your snout so long?!”

The sow replied, “ My child you’re young, you will discover why, over time!”

This is indeed an apt gnome with which to ‘be-pen’ this journey. Not only have I had the agrestic advantage of dealings with pigs, (the quadrupeds) I have as well only just begun. I am fledgling and like a suckling, do not know what’s to happen along the passage of time that shall lead us ahead in this ode to our predecessors.

“Not everything can be explained…some things have to be experienced” is the essence of the wise saw as offered by a dear medium I know. Some of us have earned a wealth of skills that have been attained only through involvement and not passive transference as by ‘diffusion’ or whatever other means of indirect attainment.

The physical imagery the saying evokes is the contrast of experience and innocence. As a farm person I have had direct contact with pigs and their off springs. Thus I can unequivocally suggest that the snouts have enabled the animals to negotiate a lot of ‘shiza’ in their rearing. It is felt that a long mouth is associated with disgruntlement and grief. The suckling curiosity we experience from time to time defines an innocence that only engagement will enlighten. So on the one hand there is grief and on the other some added advantage in being grown up..are the two ever reconcilable?

New immigrants are especial in this regard. Coming to Canada or emigrating to any foreign country for that matter is a new ‘suckling experience’ that will be guided by the immersion / acculturation the transition entails. Some effects of the ‘new environs experience’ can not be fully understood or appreciated via the class style seminars that are held for the new immigrant a la ACCESS etc. or by the subjective guidance offered by earlier settlers. The element of snow or the season of winter might be explained as “Cold! Brr!” but would not be appreciated until the chill and the bite is lived and experienced.

Experience is the best teacher, afterall; hence the sow opted to explain the snout size difference only subtly. It seems that that is the best advice around full understanding the life experience if we so choose. There is an advantage in learning from others through their mistakes and consequences but as mother pig would have it it seems more beneficial to have actual experience. How else can you suggest that ‘ you’ve been there , done that!”. (Even if you wind up with a long mouth!) That latter day slang drives the development of the snout. You’ve just got to do it! As Nike exhorts or simply reside in your innocence or ignorance as the case may be. Of course the subtext to the saying is the suggestion that one retains the choice of determining which experience(s) one opts to experience. There is the presupposition that one will want to have experienced life’s challenges in order to arrive at a well-rounded and informed adulthood. The question of the necessity to do or not do to have or not have the direct benefit from engagement is in fact a consequence of one’s state or stage of innocence/ignorance. The end must justify the means so the pay-off will be driven by the extent of involvement one chooses to exercise. If for some reason one is faced with a foreign notion, an idea not familiar to one’s mindset then, momma pig requires one to live the idea before one can make an informed evaluation of the idea…

There is an associated thinking. It surrounds the effect of completion. It is a good thing to think a thought, a better thing to record it and the best thing yet is to bring it to life by enlivening, living it. We all know that a dream is nothing unless lived.

It’s like vocabulary for instance. A word is never fully understood until it is used. You might hear the meaning from someone else but it is not quite learned until you shape the word on your own tongue and lips to deliver it in appropriate context. Imagine the joy and full appeasement in accomplishing the learning.

So what can I tell you. There you have it..That’s for today “Wey mi madda ‘ouda sey …an’ addaz tu!” Keep tuned as I channel ‘dem adda wanz’ (I hope mum thinks this a good enough cause to interrupt her rest) to return with something for you to mull over.

p!eace

Denise arrived in Canada in 1980 from Trinidad and, like many black immigrants, faced an uphill struggle re-constructing her life, battling twice as hard for basic necessities. With the useful grounding from her paternal grandmother, she overcame many obstacles to realize her dreams and, at the same time, be a towering, shining inspiration to her black communities in Canada - after all, who better to follow than a “Who Is Who Of Canada?”

She did Journalism at the University of Western Ontario (B.A),
Resource Management at York University (Masters in Environment Studies) and is “in the progress” of completing Information Technology Management at Ryerson University.

This genial, unassuming social figure would much rather let her work speak louder than she can.

Although her long-term involvement has been in Information Technology, working since 1992 for IBM, HP Canada and telecommunications giants like Bell Canada (amongst many others), Denise has had the same uncompromised passion for the arts.

Currently a member of the programming committee at Toronto’s Harbourfront Center after starting as a member of the Board in 1995, she still promises to work even harder to ensure her community attains the recognition it deserves, not just in the arts but many other areas of their involvement as well.

caribbeantales.ca had a chat with this dedicated community builder about her work and everything else…..

Could you briefly share with us your childhood background and your experiences as a member of the Caribbean community living in Canada?

I grew up in a family of nine – six kids, two parents and a paternal grandmother who, I think, was way before her time as an independent woman. She got along very well with my mother – her only daughter-in-law (my father was an only child) and loved my mother’s siblings. The values that she and my parents imparted to me through words and actions continue to help me survive as a member of the Caribbean community living in Canada. I feel proud of my Trinidadian heritage although I am equally proud of being a Cari-Can.

From your own perspective as Member of the Board of this project, has the website and newsletter, in your assessment, met or achieved the objectives for which it was created?

The website and newsletter continue to showcase the organization to an audience that is far-reaching. In terms of a return on investment, both products are capable of raising the profile of caribbeantales.ca in a cost-effective way and helping the organization achieve one of its objectives of reaching a diverse and global audience.

Storytelling, heritage, oral culture and oral history are the core elements that caribbeantales.ca nurtures, what do all these issues mean to you personally as a member of the Caribbean community?

A good story becomes a great story when a gifted orator imparts it. The oral tradition is and continues to be the way that children are introduced to ideas, themes, people, and culture. Visit a day care at reading time and you will see the oral culture at work. Read to any child and you will see the wonderful response to the spoken word. And I have some fantastic memories of this oral culture through the stories that I heard as a child – because the memories of those stories evoke a range of emotions, sounds, sights that I will always carry within me.

Everyone at caribbeantales.ca has done a spectacular job pulling this together: has this venture and your interaction with your colleagues brought about any significant change to you as a person? If yes, what is it?

I am so proud of the staff at caribbeantales.ca and their commitment to the organization. I always enjoy working with people who respect what they do and are prepared to work hard. I have found that everyone who is involved is enthusiastic – and that enthusiasm keeps me very excited and dedicated to the organization.

Looking at your professional history, it mostly reveals an expansive involvement within the science and technology field – how do you reconcile this with your involvement in the cultural programs and the creative arts?

My involvement in the Information Technology field is just part of my life. I have always been interested in cultural programs and the creative arts. I used to co-produce commercial theatrical productions several years ago in Toronto. When I was growing up, I started playing the piano at age 7, sang and competed in several music festivals, and was also a member of a dance company. My aunt, who was also my godmother, used to teach ballet and up to now, I still see the results of that background in ballet because she walks so upright and beautifully. Dance is my most favorite cultural product.

What does your participation as member of the Board of the Harbourfront Center entail? Were you able to influence or establish discourse into matters of Carribean cultural interest?

Currently I am a member of the programming committee and the mandate of that committee is to ensure that the programs offered at Harbourfront Center reflect the diverse background of the Toronto community. So that includes programs of cultural interest to our community. There are also initiatives to ensure that the staff at the center also reflects the community.

Can you tell us about your involvement in the Harriet Tubman Games and what the games are about?

The annual Harriet Tubman Games was another initiative that members of the Caribbean community used to engage young talented people. The games gave competitors from different sporting and training clubs the opportunity to showcase their young and upcoming athletes. Donovan Bailey was one of the athletes who competed and won in track and field and he went on to win gold for Canada. I got involved because I was asked to come up with marketing and promotional plans that would get the mainstream media onside with the Games. And yes, I was successful (smile).

You were involved in the very first event honouring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s memory here in Toronto? Would you like to share with us your experience in the event?

My knowledge of the equal rights struggle and Dr. Martin Luther King was based on what I saw on television. The images that I saw were most horrifying and dehumanizing. But when I remember Dr King’s reactions to all the injustices and his ability to look beyond the inane stupidities of government politics and policies, I knew that I had to become involved in the first event honouring him in Toronto. It was also fantastic to work with people like the Hon. Jean Augustine, Dr. Rita Cox, and Charles Roach and contribute to that unique event which came off in a way that made us all proud and lifted us up another notch.

Finally, is there any new project that Denise is currently working on or just begun?

Funny you should ask that, I’m just starting as a mentor at "The Mentoring Place", an organization that deals with professional immigrants trying to break into the job market. Knowing from personal experience how difficult it is to transfer skills into the Canadian job market, I decided to offer my time to a new immigrant. I was fortunate to have a number of mentors so I know their value.

Whatever positive thing you got out of it, make sure you share with friends and families far and across from where you are.

The encouraging feedback we received from you can be harnessed as a necessary tonic that enables us to march even much further forward to deliver the message far and wide.

As promised, I’m very pleased to present to you our inaugural interview which features internationally acclaimed South African novelist, screenwriter and playwright, Mtutuzeli Matshoba. I had a chat with him at the Newtown Cultural Precinct in Johannesburg, South Africa, about his work and his passion for history and cultural heritage.

Due to the length of the interview, I’ve had to break it down into two installments to be carried over two issues of the newsletter - so this is the first half of the interview.

I look forward to your feedback - remember, we all have a stake in creation and preservation, let’s make it happen.

Enjoy the interview and don’t miss out on the 2nd and last half of it in the next issue.

Till you hear from me again, don’t stop feeding your mind.

The mini-market opposite the lofty facade of the celebrated Market Theater is teeming with theater-lovers checking out today’s line-up and shoppers looking to expand their collection of artistic merchandise – sculptures, paintings, pottery, fabric, movie videos, DVDs and an array of African handicrafts on sale and display – a welcome distraction for his wife who is looking to get something nice for herself. After a bit of a search Bra Mtutu and I settle at ‘Cup and Muffin’ a small café tucked away round the corner of the busy cultural center. We’ve hardly wiped our seats to sit when a white lady, the waitress, quickly rushes to our table - there’s hardly any customer at the rest of the tables. In a foreign accent she asks if we would like to have anything, a menu snappily follows the question. I politely ask her to give us time while we decide – she retreats with a smarmy smile.

There’s a man displaying handicrafts in front of the restaurant – I’m tempted to ask about the merchandise but I’ve got to act professional and wait till we finish the interview. The batteries that I have just bought would not work on my camera. I decide to prepare my dicta-phone for the recording.

The white lady is staring, tapping her pen against her little order book – a not so subtle reminder that she is waiting for us to finish deciding. Realizing that peace will be at a premium until we have ordered something, we place an order of a light meal and an accompanying drink each. Ah, a semblance of peace at last. Then Bra Mtutu asks if he can rush for a cigarette. What’s happening, I’m the one who is nervous here. He’s soon back and finds me still busy fiddling with my camera – it seems my nervousness has rubbed off onto it.

Can you say something about yourself?

I'm Mtutuzeli Matshoba, a short-storywriter-turned screenwriter from the seventies and eighties era of protest writing.

It seems like he can’t blow his own trumpet, so I’ll blow it for him: The man is beyond doubt an accomplished writer and his honours in the literary field will leave you green with envy - his CV can attest to that. He is a researcher of note, producer, copywriter - his work is known world-wide and has been adopted as learning material in a number of academic institutions both here and abroad.

I noted your passion about the subject of history when I first met you - where did it all begin?

First I’ll provide a background to this; It all began when my mother took me to a primary school in my village to enroll me as a pupil there. The teachers refused to register me because I didn’t have a ‘school name’.

In order to foist Christianity among the natives in South Africa, Black people were forced to adopt Christian or English names, called ‘school name’ at schools governed by missionaries.

My mother had to go and bribe the local Catholic priest to provide me such a name and issue a certificate saying I was baptized a Christian. At school I was told to use my new Christian name from then on. I didn’t understand what was wrong with my Xhosa name and this haunted my young mind. Years later when I had gotten to higher primary, I learnt during a history lesson about two natives, Ndlambe and Ngcika,( later corrupted to Gika) who were leaders in their villages. The narratives claim that Ndlambe was hostile to the European settlers and got his men to steal their livestock and bring them to the native communities. Ngcika on the other hand welcomed and collaborated with the white colonists. Our teacher asked us who, between the two leaders was a good man and a hero. When pupils answered that it was Ndlambe for he fought for the natives rights against the settlers, the teacher punished them and said Ngcika was the hero because he was a good man who loved peace.

After school the class bully asked; “who of the two characters was a hero?’ When the pupils answered that it was Ngcika, the bully slapped all of us and said Ndlambe was the good one because he took back what the white settlers had stolen from the natives.

These experiences raised puzzling questions which sparked my interest in history. I began to question the merits of what happened in history and what our educators forced us to believe.

From his accounts of his childhood education to his formative years as a literary activist, it is impressive how vividly Bra Mtutu remembers the events and their accompanying details; the titles of books and their respective authors and the names of people who influenced his path - almost like they happened yesterday.

Like many political legends in South African black history Bra Mtutu also got his grounding in political history at the Loveday Institution, near Fort Hare – the cradle of black resistance against colonialism.

At boarding school in the Eastern Cape he was introduced to the writings of Professor Jabavu -‘the originator of black newspaper’ and Mcayi’s poem, “The making of a servant”– a condensed history about how blacks were made into servants. He was also exposed to writers who were, though not directly so, trying to preserve history in the form of poetry.

But why history, does the past really matter?

We are all a product of history. History is a nation’s CV. Every nation is judged by its history. People with a history earn the respect of those without. That’s what it meant to our forebears and it should mean the same to us.

Bra Mtutu believes that parents in black communities, who bore the brunt of the apartheid force and kept the flames of our black history burning, deserve honours.

Our parents, much as we thought them illiterate, nestled the true stories of our past for posterity and we must thank them for encapsulating useful knowledge into little stories. Folklore and animal stories with philosophies in mind made us - in a sense - understand ourselves.

He laments the lack of knowledge and interest amongst the youth around Southern Afrikan historical heroes like Shaka of the Zulu nation, Chief Sekhukhune of the Bapedi tribe and King Moshoeshoe of the Basotho nation whose wisdom stabilized most of the Southern Afrikan region during Lifeqane, (a period of battles amongst black tribes in the region) and territorial battles against white settlers.

… and what inspired you to get involved in “the past”?

Through out my schooling I had been force-fed an overdose of ‘heroic’ stories – both fiction and factual - heavily featuring Europeans as main characters. Yet we had true stories past down from our grandparents telling us of brave native men and women who defended their territories with basic weaponry, amid murky clouds of smoke from guns and cannons, against colonizing intruders. I felt that through our education system we were being historically shortchanged. We know more about them (European heroes) than they do about us.

That’s when I started exploring history – our true history.

In my knowledge apartheid oppressed free thinking and the Afrikan philosophy as a whole. ... how did you go about exploring your true history then?

True. The censorship of Afrikan principles and propagators thereof led to an underground literary phenomenon here in South Afrika. We feverishly wanted to lay our hands on material that was taboo and didn’t praise the apartheid grand plan. We secretly listened to recordings of Marting Luther King’s speeches; essays of Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko’s consciousness ideals. We also read novels by activists such as E’skia Mphahlele, Anton Lembede, Alex La Guma and so on…” Such material spoke of “the other” world – the revolutionary world that the system was prohibiting us to explore.

How did u come to be in the art?

I realized the power of the media – the power to inspire the imagination of the written word. Civilization started when people started exchanging stories and modifying them to their own advantage. People don’t read much, but the media is a powerful, compensatory tool that we can always harness to convey these philosophies.

His art rides on the crest of this ‘powerful’ wave to reach the shore where he needs the liberating message delivered. Throughout the interview Bra Mtutu keeps harking back to the subject of the imperialist phenomenon that etched European consciousness on the impressionable minds of the less conscious amongst blacks. The self-centered system that gave birth to what I call “euroheroes”.

Why can’t we have an epic about King Moshoeshoe and put flesh onto the dead bone that is our heroes now? My passionate involvement is to do exactly what I commend our parents for - identify stories and enable youngsters to go into those stories that honestly talk about their origin and thereby articulate their aspiration for the future. We must forget about the Greek Achilles and find the Afrikan counterpart.

At this point I sympathize with the man’s passion – a noble desire to convince the young minds within his race that their roots can still grow deeper even without foreign nourishment - unfortunately, people like him are found among the already converted flock.

Has advance in technology within the media replaced the oral tradition?

I don’t think it will ever replace it. Technology can only complement the tradition. Cinema reaches a much larger proportion of people – just like radio – but a concept always starts in the mind and articulated in the imagination. Technology can only become the media of dissemination.

But, amongst your target group, the media is largely used to pander to their obsession - not for history lessons.

Media can be modified to relay relevant history. Afro-pop group Mafikizolo, for instance, have explored certain obsessions from the 50’s and have breathed new life into them for the benefit of their legion of young supporters. Now their followers know a bit about the life and culture then.

The 50’s in South Africa, as musically explored by Mafikizolo, for me represent the morphosis of black urban culture into microcosms of black American ethos of the period and not half as much about the history in question.

You were stunned by the inconsistencies in historical records which you say were shoved down your throat. That’s when you resolved to find out who you really are and search for what was hidden from you. At what point do you think your children, for instance, will start concerning themselves with who they really are?

That’s a difficult one. (finally I pose something difficult – he doesn’t realize my gloating. This is the time when I really feel the interview matters. Anyway, I just appreciate his honesty. )

The economy is still in the hands of the wealthy white minority. They are influenced by a first world which lives side by side with a third world - that's us. It’s difficult for them to be different under such circumstances. They say in my language ‘you brag in somebody else’s costume.’ (translated from isiXhosa – his mother-tongue.) Then they realize that the same first world doesn’t recognize their intrinsic values and the way they are – it is at that point when they realize they need their own platform. People get sick, people die or they need to get married – in many cultures this means going back to your home customs – that’s when you know where in the world you really belong.

Certain values are rooted too deep for one to go against – in custom-conscious communities within the Xhosa and BaSotho cultures, for instance, when there are feasts an old man who never went to initiation school cannot partake in a meal served for those who already have been initiated - even if they could be twenty years younger than him - in these instances adherence to custom gains one respect and earns one honours within society.

But one ironic fact strikes me: After so many years of spitting at what we call ‘English colonialism’, why are we still steeped in Europeanism? We have some countries in East Asia where parents are paying exorbitantly to have their children attend special schools to study the English language and culture.

Colonialism was enforced with violence. Theology, philosophy, modes of dress, etc. It’s the instinct of the conquered to adopt the ways of the perceived “better culture.” English has the biggest empire and citizens in such countries are well versed in the cultures and tradition of the English. We always go for those with stronger medicine than ours.

(He explains to me that since in our black culture we believe that every person is protected by their Gods (amadlozi) who are actually our ancestors, we always admire those whose Gods are the strongest. You know what I mean…?

We are interrupted by his cell phone ringing in his hand. It’s his wife… it seems she needs his opinion on something she would like to buy. He tells her he will join her soon and ends the call. Then he apologizes as he nestles the cell phone in his hand.

Um, where were we? Oh, ja. (he remembers) A majority of blacks speak more than three languages – therefore it gives them scope and broadens their understanding of the other foreign cultures - it’s okay, as long as they don’t neglect their being.

You got to trust him on this one because the man, although steeped in his Afrikan roots, has written works which have been prescribed for the English language department at University level and several of his books, like Call Me Not A Man, (a collection of short stories on urban black socio-political experiences of the 70’s), have been translated into major European languages for students in those countries.

We tend to follow the traditions of the powerful nations around us, it doesn't mean we have nothing unique to offer, does it?

Ubuntu has been overused and is cliché.

I’m glad you think so.

Yes,... so I’ll steer clear of the concept. What we have is the essence of our being. It’s an all-encompassing generosity as exemplified by the fact that Afrika is still a paradise if you abide by the definition of paradise in terms of the animal kingdom. Within our tribes we have clans associated with certain wild animals as their totems - Motloung, (the elephants) Mokoena (crocodile) Bakgatla (the apes) etc. This was to instill respect for those particular animals. It meant you couldn’t just kill any animal - it would be tantamount to declaring war on the clans associated with the particular animal.

A way of promoting conservation?

Yes. It was a clever way of instilling a sense of conservation and protecting our wildlife. A way of striking a peaceful co-existence with the animals. Conservation is not a foreign concept. It’s our concept.

He then relates to me a story of a certain white game warden who came to a village with his squad of hunters…

This time he doesn’t bother checking who it is. But I’m starting to feel bad for keeping him longer. He continues.

The phone rings. He answers.

Watch out for the continuation of this interview in the next issue of CaribbeanTales! in the Around The Fire sub-section.