Zahara sings Limbisa with an exquisite voice. That's all that needs to be said, really. The rest is flourish. Limbisa is a hymnal plea for forgiveness, such as only God can truly and fully render. It is a mea culpa, when the heart is at its most earnest: "Naye lelo, kosenga bolimbisi." Three 'stringed' instruments are in use in this virtual confessional: Zahara's guitar, her own vocal chords, and her male companion's. I am not sure yet who he is, as I think Tresor Riziki is in a subsequent -- 'remix', or tweaking -- project. Wait! Language, Lingala (all the way from the two Congos), is veritably the fourth, on this imagined stage; at this make-believe altar. A quartet, then, of instruments; which blend into one elevating stream of melody. Lingala, always musical, is, it is clear I think to all ears, the anchor sound in this song. Zahara crosses borders to bring it here; to make it, something obviously borrowed, her own. It is in turn the bringer-of-everything-together, in Limbisa. All, all for the greater glory of The Forgiver. The words are chosen, and the lyrics are sequenced, with blessed and restrained passion. It's a perfect audio picture. It is picture-perfect. There are no video images in this offering, much as one would have liked to have them. Just a stunning camouflage of stillness. Awesome singularity. Final comment: For Zahara, as for Docteur Nico Kasanda before her, Love doesn't have to mean never having to say Limbisa.
Today's mass migration into Europe, I've recently been thinking, is a replay, of sorts, of African occupation of Europe c.30 to 50,000 years ago, when the Cro-Magnon were their only resistance. A Europe before Europa, even.
The Africans were not fleeing. They were going forth and multiplying -- populating a world, and then the world, without any profound level of Aristotelian thought -- Aristotle, who was their distant nephew -- about the consequences, for them and for the very same world (see Out of Africa: A Comment on..Roberts). At the same time, it's a wholly different thing.
There were no TV networks to record the Africans' movement, and the various arrivals. No social media. Perhaps talking drums. Perhaps smoke-talking. Perhaps an extinct precursor of vuvuzela under the armpit. No trains or rail-tracks. Only Cro-Magnons and wildlife. Only animal tracks to doggedly follow, then. An arsenal of stone things, perhaps. Wooden things. Stringed stuff. No gunnery.
No one to offer them shelter. Or winter clothing. Shelter offered itself, in the caves and hillsides and unreachable rocks. Or food. Or bottled water. Ah s'pose they had the wherewithal to grab and occupy unblemished bearskin from reluctant bears, who'd never seen apparitions such as that. Wolfskin from stunned wolves. Woolen gear from all those clueless rams in open spaces. Something of the woolly mammoth from altogether new neighborhoods -- and farther East, in the permafrost.
The smarts to be their own transport. Or create transportation and communication systems out of nothing. To build rafts and boats for slow rowing, paddling up the Rhine. Hither and thither, blakka than blu, on the Danube. Down, up Senghor's Seine. And else.
To feed off a land without ice cream. Beat all resistance.
They changed Europe beyond anyone's reverse-prediction, and changed a world which in turn changed them too. They're today's Europeans agonizing over the new migrants.
Perhaps there is something in Germany's Angela Merkel, now crowned Mama, that 'remembers' all of this and urges her to do what she's doing.
And if nothing of what I've said evokes enough going, perhaps Chidinma's video images in Kite will, thanks to Clarence Peters, connect enough visual dots and cross enough Ts of the mind to evoke the kind of epic future we keep going back to in our acts and our thotes. and which I was trying to say something about here.
[Update: September 11, 2015:The video portion of Kite does evoke the past I think it does. Yet in making that remark I overlooked the fact there is, at least for me, another stand-out imagery to the same effect that I have previously publicly noted. A more powerful evocation, if I may say so now. Here, look at what I tweeted in April this year about the video stream in Davido's hit song One of a Kind:
You will have to decide for yourself if we are to 'read' the visual text in One of a Kind the way I have read it. Forget the lyrics for a moment, or perhaps you shouldn't. Just contemplate this recreation, this pure levitation, of the generic inner gaze confronted -- as it must surely have, so long ago -- with the possibility of a future beyond mortal imagination, but one (of a kind) in which we now live and in which current events have begun to present as such a monumental throwback]:
Liberian Girl's got some attention, alright. First it was the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, twice (sort of): (1) in 1989 (uploaded in 2009) -- current count: 13,864,409 YouTube Views; and, (2) in a 2013 HD version (821,367 views, as of now). Now, Rough n Smooth, who hip and hop, have come calling from Ghana -- with a full-blast serenade (current count: 44,797 views).
Two suitors, two styles, then. The one refined, finely. The other gung-ho ("smoothly" so, so to speak): with unrestrained intent. Same difference? The girl always decides. But there are two different girls here, seems to me. Right?
So both win? O let's see. Here's Rough n Smooth's piece (2015):
