When Louis Armstrong met August Musarurwa.
Forthcoming in Your History with Me: The Films of Penny Siopis, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Duke University Press).
“Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’s music.”
1.
The African Dance Band of the Cold Storage Commission of Southern Rhodesia – it was the band with the longest name in the world. The words appear as faded images flicker across the screen: tobacco auctions, tourist cruises on the Zambezi river. A languorous saxophone plays.
So begins Penny Siopis’s ‘Welcome Visitors!’, a filmic reimagining of the life and music of August Musarurwa. Musarurwa was a bandleader and saxophonist who learned the instrument while working as a police interpreter in Bulawayo in the 1940s. The torrents and cataracts of the Zambezi keep unspooling as we hear the tune that made him famous: ‘Skokiaan’. The crackle of old vinyl joins the mottled footage – of farm labour, dance performances and colonial officials with awkward body language – and the original begins to play. Some quick-strumming banjos mark out a carnival rhythm, then comes a long, bending note on Musarurwa’s sax, sliding down to a riff that everyone knows
‘One day a European came to record Skokiaan’. This was Hugh Tracey, a British-born ethnomusicologist intent on capturing indigenous sounds as far afield as Uganda and Katanga for his International Library of African Music (a bit like Alan Lomax in the American South, amassing field recordings for the Library of Congress). Despite his disdain for ‘foreign inspired trivialities’, Tracey also doubled as adviser and talent scout for Eric Gallo, whose label was based in Johannesburg but often recorded out of Bulawayo.
Gallo Records was looking for tunes for audiences who were tired of colonial (and now apartheid) prescriptions around ethnic and cultural identity: your ‘tribe’ determining what language you should speak, where you should live, what radio station you should listen to, what music you should like. ‘Music of the Tribes’ was the title of a column in Johannesburg’s Drum magazine. ‘Ag, why do you dish out that stuff man?” the incoming editor recalled a man in the street saying to him in 1951: ‘Give us jazz and film stars, man! We want Duke Ellington, Satchmo, and hot dames! Yes, brother, anything American’.
‘Skokiaan’ was going to become American, very American: Satchmo was coming. But before that, before Louis Armstrong’s voice forever annexes Musarurwa’s wonderfully free lines on the sax, the original version is a local hit. A 1954 re-recording by the (now renamed) Bulawayo Sweet Rhythms Band sells 170 000 copies in southern Africa. Musarurwa described it as tsaba tsaba, a high-energy jive that sounds like New Orleans swing, vaudeville and jitterbug filtered through southern African jazz and vocal stylings, with some conga and rumba in there too. It was a Zimbabwean take on the marabi sound that came back with migrant workers returning from Johannesburg. But there is something – another detour through the circuits of the Black Atlantic and British Empire – that sets Musarurwa’s sound a little apart.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a ‘trad boom’ led to a revival of 1920s American swing in post-war Britain – so-called ‘traditional’ jazz, which was largely the sound innovated and globalised by Armstrong. British trad jazzers were reconstructing early ragtime and the New Orleans sound. One cycle of 20th-century nostalgia had run its course, producing big bands and skiffle groups, with people playing washboards and (in a throwback to the Jazz Age) the C melody sax. This is the instrument that Musarurwa holds in a photograph, its keys and neck subtly different to the more common alto or tenor. The C melody sax suited the down-home, DIY aesthetic of skiffle and the trad boom, partly because on this model (unlike the E flat alto or B flat tenor) you don’t have to transpose a score in order to join in: you can just play the notes as written, in the universal key of C.
These records – nostalgic British reworkings of American ‘hot’ jazz – then travelled to Northern Rhodesia (now Tanzania) and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) with the wave of white settlement that followed the Second World War: one more element in the transnational, transcultural saga that following a song like ‘Skokiaan’ takes you into. A Rhodesian ‘Police Band’ playing an anarchic, Afro-Dixie, colonial/carnival tune about a drink brewed against the law, sometimes drunk out of tea cups to fool the authorities: ‘Maize and sugar and a little meths. Strong and dangerous’. Moonshine in America, chikoliyana in Shona. In Zulu: skokiaan.
‘Everyone knows that’, says Musarurwa. But then reflects that perhaps the Americans didn’t quite get it, considering what boomeranged back when Gallo despatched the disc to UK Decca, who sent it on to their US subsidiary, London Records. ‘On the way the record broke but the American’s heard the tune through the crack’, read Musarurwa’s words: ‘Skokiaan was a hit’. The instrumental that he had crafted from two saxes, two banjos, traps and bass was immediately re-recorded (as hits by black artists generally were) for the ‘popular’ (i.e. white American) market.
‘Skokiaan’ was set to words by Tom Glazer, an American folk singer who had worked with Lomax at the Library of Congress (and would also transpose songs by Miriam Makeba and The Manhattan Brothers into English: ‘Kilimanjaro’, ‘Lovely Lies’). Glazer took the bouncy sax lines and made them into a horribly catchy ditty, one that charted in the US in three different versions, stayed there for eight weeks running and was covered at least 19 times within a year of its release. One version was by Louis Armstrong, whose famous, gravelly voice now closed a loop of African/American musical history:
Ooooh….Take a trip to Africa, any ship to Africa
Come on along and learn the lingo, beside a jungle bungalow…
If you go to Africa, happy, happy Africa,
You’ll linger longer like a king-oh, right in the jungle-ungleo.
Skokey-skokey, skokey-skokiaan
Okey dokey, anybody can
2.
Of the three channels – image, music, text – which make up Penny Siopis’s short films, the image and text tend to work in fairly constant ways, at least in terms of form and function. The visuals are culled from found footage: random 8mm or 16mm amateur spools that are sifted and arranged in a shifting collage according to intuition, happenstance and fascination. The text – resonant, revealing or cryptic phrases drawn from the artist’s research – ‘mimics the form but not the function of the subtitles we often find in foreign films’. It is not actually translating anything, in other words, but is experienced instead as a strangely intimate address, perhaps silently sounded out in the consciousness of the viewer.
But the third channel, audio, is perhaps more variable in the role that it plays, more flexible and harder to characterise. Sometimes, as in ‘My Lovely Day’, the sound is part of the archival grain, as when we hear a recording of the artist’s mother singing on a 78-rpm gramophone record. Sometimes, as in ‘The Master is Drowning’, the sound collage is made from fragments of Western classical music: piano sonatas and funereal marches, snatches of symphonies, fading in and out. With these the effect can be reminiscent (as the artist points out) of the music in early, ‘silent’ films of the 1920s and 30s: a means of emotional pacing, punctuation and emphasis.
By the mid-20th century, the Hollywood film soundtrack becomes the cultural terminus for large swathes of classical music (more accurately: German orchestral music of the Romantic era). Screen action or dialogue underscored by strings, piano, woodwinds and percussion: a globally shared and immediately legible means of coding emotional response, and of knowing what we are supposed to feel at any given moment. So when the music in Siopis’s films seems to be a soundtrack but isn’t really; when the emotional confirmation and guidance that comes built into the concept of the underscore is rendered fragmentary, discontinuous, stop-start or stuck in a loop – then it’s not quite so easy to work out what to feel, or what to do with the sentiment and nostalgia that has been automatically (perhaps fraudulently) released.
A large part of her sound world comes from Greek and Turkish folk music, particularly the mournful rembetika that emerged from the 1922 Turkish-Greek conflict, and the ‘exchange of populations’ that resulted (when ethnically Greek communities were expelled from homes in Asia Minor ‘to a Greece entirely foreign to them’). This is the prehistory that underlies the acerbic, subtitled words of Siopis’s grandmother in ‘My Lovely Day’, who is exasperated with the silly ‘escapades’ of her grandchildren as they fool around in the garden. The footage shows dress-up parties and synchronised swimming. Everyone kicks in a circle and the water churned up in the centre makes the screen burn white as if damaged or over-exposed.
In ‘Obscure White Messenger’, the string laments and hoarse chanting that accompany the words of Demetrios Tsafendas produce a strange, compelling mixture of sound and image. In one sense this rough-edged Turkish folk music seems discontinuous with the story that the viewer is trying to piece together: a South African story of the killing of apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd and the life of his assassin Tsafendas. The musical language is different to the conventional idiom of soundtracking or documentary: neither subtly insinuating string orchestras nor sentimental, nostalgia-suffused period pieces. The effect is bracing, liberating. Because the music is non-South African (and non-European?), you are not provided with recognisable cues and structures of feeling that would accompany, say, a background of 1950s Sophiatown jazz. Instead, the sound is fierce and strange, more like a mantra or a dirge than a narrative proposition. So the viewer is not offered the expected sonic handholds, and the intensity cannot easily be sublimated or translated into the correct emotional response.
This kind of disjunction works to create the dreamlike quality of the films – the word dreamlike is over-used, but I mean it as arising in a quite technical sense. It comes from the way that semi-random bits and pieces of found material (the film analogue of what Freud called the tagesreste: the ‘day’s residue’, the arbitrary bric-a-brac of everyday life) are shuffled and patterned into a puzzling, obscure new logic. And in a way similar to how the ‘dream-work’ runs its processes within the sleeping brain, using whatever clutter is to hand in the short-term memory. So the most ordinary scenes – life-saving practice, egg-and-spoon races, tourist footage of scenery, river cruises and carnivals – come to be imbued with a ‘psychical intensity’, a latent charge that cannot be explained by their surface or literal content. Then there is also the larger, political resonance that builds across the films: their evocation of colonialism and white rule in Africa as a kind of extended, waking dream. Such scenes were hardly ordinary in the first place, certainly not in a place like this.
In another sense, the music of ‘Obscure White Messenger’ does have a direct linkage to its words and images. This Mediterranean or Anatolian sound world resonates with the complex, wandering life of Tsafendas: a man of mixed Swazi and Cretan heritage who found solace in ports like Alexandria, Lisbon, Athens and Istanbul. And who (a recent biography of him reveals) loved folk music of deep historical struggle and resolve. His favourite song was a deep baritone version of ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ by Paul Robeson, the African American leader, actor and trade unionist who would become a leading voice in the civil rights movement. Tsafendas also liked ‘Zot Nit Keymol’ (Song of the Warsaw Ghetto) which he would sing in Yiddish, having memorised the lyrics.
His favourite books included Emile Zola’s Germinal (about the exploitation of 19th-century coal miners) and Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (the story of a political awakening in colonial India). He also loved Brecht and Dostoevsky, and would quote a line from Demons when discussing his killing of Verwoerd, in his old age: ‘It’s easy to condemn the offender, the difficulty is to understand him’. He travelled with a battered suitcase containing the Freedom Charter, a poster honouring Patrice Lumumba as well as several Bibles (in case he needed to pretend that he was a missionary). His reading habits meant that he was nicknamed ‘the lending library’ as a boy in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo). And when reminded of this by a friend who caught up with him in Umtali (now Mutare) in 1964, Tsafendas went to his battered suitcase and gave her copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
The open form of Siopis’s films – their way of amplifying the strangeness of the past the more they are looked at, rather than reducing or rendering it too easily knowable, recognisable or usable – this openness means that her moving and endlessly watchable treatment of Tsafendas’s life is able to do it a kind of justice denied by more narrowly documentary treatments of his life. ‘Obscure White Messenger’ absorbs these newly uncovered facts about the life of its subject into a ramifying dream-work, without needing to make them merely data points in an argument over whether Tsafendas’s act was ‘political’ or not (and so draining them of their resonance, or the psychic energy they transmit across time).
The more we know about the past, these film-works seem to say, the less we can say about it with any certainty. And then through all their sepia tints, sprocket marks and liver spots of aged celluloid, the scenes of vanished people and places also silently broach another, more universal question: Do you think I was any less real than you?
3.
In ‘Welcome Visitors!’, sound works differently again. The film is about a piece of music – its travels in time, space and cultural memory. So Musarurwa’s ‘Skokiaan’, crossfading into Armstrong’s ‘Happy Africa’, is as much a soundtrack to the images as the footage is an image track to the sound. If one masked the text, it might be closer to a ‘music video’, but one in which (as in all the best music videos) the relation between audio and images can be indirect and puzzling, playing with our need to make sense and connection. Sometimes the reel of images corresponds to and illustrates the music; sometimes it operates otherwise, becoming a kind of fertile visual ‘noise’ that cannot be made narrowly informational.
The story of ‘Skokiaan’ is in some ways a reprise of what happened to a much more famous tune from southern Africa. ‘Once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda’ – so begins Rian Malan’s account of ‘Mbube’ (The Lion), a song first recorded in 1939: ‘He just opened his mouth and out it came, a haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax.’
Malan’s 2000 piece for Rolling Stone, a non-fiction epic that runs to 11 000 words, plays deftly with flux and fixity in sound recording: how something improvised in the moment – ‘a small miracle’ in the brain, a ‘haunting skein of fifteen notes’ – comes to be etched into world history:
The third take was the great one, but it achieved immortality only in its dying seconds, when Linda took a deep breath, opened his mouth, and improvised the melody that the world now associates with these words: In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.
As the song migrates across the Atlantic, the chant of ‘Uyimbube, uyimbube’ by The Evening Birds is heard as ‘Wimoweh’ by Pete Seeger and The Weavers. This version is then remodelled by The Tokens, with Linda’s afterthought of a melody now moved centre stage, becoming a pop song so powerful, writes Malan, that Brian Wilson ‘had to pull off the road when he first heard it, totally overcome; a song that Carole King instantly pronounced “a motherfucker.”’ And a song also intimately intertwined with American power, from Disney musicals to the space race: ‘Miriam Makeba sang her version at JFK’s last birthday party, moments before Marilyn Monroe famously lisped, “Happy Birthday, Mister President.” Apollo astronauts listened to it on the take-off pads at Cape Canaveral.’ How was it (Malan seems constantly to be wondering) that so much potential cultural energy (and profit) could have been compressed into such a tiny unit of song? Linda’s throwaway riff becomes, through innumerable changes of phase and personnel and production, a ‘tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows’.
‘Skokiaan’ followed in the tracks of this enormous commercial success (success for distant others, that is). ‘The thin desperate arms of Tin Pan Alley will reach just about anywhere for a novelty tune’, wrote Newsweek on 23 August, 1954, when three different versions of Musarurwa’s tune, were in the US charts: ‘The alley’s latest number twenty hit is a Zulu drinking song’. And both hits, in their American incarnations, are forerunners of ‘world music’: that cultural process via which Euro-American labels absorb and re-package musical idioms from around the world, allowing an easy-listening safari to ‘the jungle’ or some other, archetypically foreign soundscape.
‘There is no jungle in the south’, Musarurwa reflects, ‘Only bushveld’. But by now his tune was far beyond his control, caught up in a series of trans-Atlantic echoes and feedback loops. In the 1950s, outside Boca Raton in Florida, a 350-acre property named ‘Africa U.S.A’ billed itself as ‘America’s First Cageless African Wildlife Theme Park’. The theme park had a theme song. In its car park and gift shop, ‘Skokiaan’ played all day – as recorded by a clean-cut, boy-next-door pop group called The Four Lads (the version which had charted highest in the States). Instead of the short o of the Afrikaans skok, ‘skokiaan’ is made to rhyme with that cloying Americana of ‘Skokie, Illinois’ or ‘On Top of Old Smoky’, or ‘stogie’ or ‘hoagie’ – places and things which I have no real idea about or connection to, but which are somehow lodged in my consciousness along with so much other bric-a-brac of the American century. A gift shop version of Musarurwa’s angular jive, playing on some infernal loop in ‘Africa U.S.A’; his bending, zig-zagging sax lines transformed (like Solomon Linda’s eerie falsetto) into an all-purpose vehicle for the titillating, easily reachable exotic (with ample parking).
Attractions at ‘Africa U.S.A’ included ‘Native dances’ and a cascade dubbed the ‘Zambezi Falls’ (which makes the ‘real’ footage of these in ‘Welcome Visitors!’ seem retrospectively prophetic, or dislocated in time). If you follow the melody’s journey through the unconscious of the internet, you’ll even turn up a ‘Japanese Skokiaan’, where ‘Skokie-skokie’ and ‘Okey-dokey’ have morphed into ‘Tokyo-okyo-okey-dokey-o’. A novelty song, in other words, where the melodic tail wags the dog and nonsense, mock-foreign lyrics are invented to fill out the rhythm. As when Louis Armstrong begins to scat – changing it into something else again.
4.
Armstrong enters ‘Welcome Visitors!’ at 3 minutes 26 seconds, getting off a plane and waving to the crowds, his signature white handkerchief tucked into his jacket. ‘One day something special happened’, Musarurwa remembers, ‘One day the great American came to Africa’. He recalls Satchmo’s visit of 1960, when the most recognisable jazz musician in the world came to find ‘the famous composer of Skokiaan’, gave him a jacket and (so the story goes) jammed with him as they walked through town to the American embassy.
Before arriving in Southern Rhodesia, Armstrong had played Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the Congo and been carried through the streets like royalty. But there is a story beyond the frame of the press photos and newsreel footage: an uneasy conjunction of musical celebration and political ruthlessness. Armstrong played his shows in the week that Patrice Lumumba was placed under house arrest following a coup d’etat led by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (with covert support from the CIA and the Eisenhower administration). At the time, American press coverage celebrated Armstrong’s visit as a demonstration of the universality of music and the ability to stop conflict. More sceptical accounts, in Le Monde for instance, felt sure that his feted appearances in Congo (and secessionist Katanga) worked as an unwitting but diversionary tactic for increasing American interference in central Africa (and the Cold War by proxy that was beginning to play out there).
Here is where the more complex historical overtones and ironies of ‘Welcome Visitors!’ begin to gather. American films, African American music, pop culture and literature had been a way out of late colonialism and racial apartheid in southern Africa, a means of exiting its rigid policing of roles and identities, its stultifying notions of tradition, ethnicity and assigned social roles. But the utopian promise of the United States – stretching from visiting minstrel shows and jubilee singers in the 19th century, through the Harlem renaissance, to the radical innovations of bebop and free improvisation – this promise was being held out at a moment when the post-war American empire was coming into its fullest force. And when the immeasurably complex set of histories and performance practices now called ‘jazz’ were being used by the US government as a form of soft power around the world (and a counter to Soviet Russia’s accusations of American cultural barbarity and racism).
By the time Louis Armstrong came to Africa (first in 1956, then in 1960) he was ‘Ambassador Satch’, touring the world at the behest of the State Department with a message of American goodwill and the universality of music. ‘I always say note is a note in any language’, he liked to tell interviewers, steering the conversation away from questions on politics and race, flashing his famous grin. ‘I loved the way Louis played trumpet, man’, Miles Davis used to say, ‘but I hated the way he had to grin in order to get over with some tired white folks’.
In ‘Welcome Visitors!’, Armstrong is not grinning, though, or not in that way. He looks very different from the cinematic, showbiz version of himself. He looks composed, rather serious, a little tired – a seasoned professional, a man of great power, judgment and authority (as all the biographies of him attest). By 1960 he had suffered a heart attack, and was troubled by tissue damage to his lips from a lifetime of blowing high notes. He had clashed with a ‘two-faced’ President Eisenhower over the 1957 Little Rock schools protest in Arkansas, refused to embark on a tour to Soviet Russia as a result, and would be monitored by the FBI for the rest of his life. In ‘Welcome Visitors!’ he begins to flash the smile when walking past some well-wishers; but then it begins to fade as soon as he moves along: the mask drops.
Armstrong’s smile, his mugging, his on-stage demeanour, his toying with minstrel stereotypes, his life-long desire (as he explains to Musarurwa) to be ‘King of the Zulus’ in the New Orleans parades: difficult, dangerous subjects. The contrast between the famous grin and the almost frightening intensity of his eyes when playing. Between the kitsch, sentimental, often embarrassing lyrics of the songs he chose to sing, and the other channels of meaning and significance that he brought to their performance. What kind of writing could ever hope to render this on the page?
In the 1989 documentary Satchmo, there is newsreel footage of Armstrong performing for Kwame Nkrumah and his cabinet in Ghana. This was in 1956, on Ambassador Satch’s first trip to the continent. He sings one of his standbys: ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?’. The tune was originally from a Broadway musical by Fats Waller, a comic song sung by a woman complaining of being unlucky in love because of her dark skin colour. Armstrong had taken it and, despite its cloying lyrics, transformed it into something closer to a protest song – though one still cloaked in vaudeville, stereotypes and painful comedy. ‘I’m white inside…but that don’t help my case’, he sings to the grandees of soon-to-be independent Ghana. Nkrumah and his circle look on: stylish, ultramodern, some perplexed or inscrutable, others laughing, perhaps a little nervously. ‘Cause I… can’t hide…what is in my face –’
And at that moment he begins to scat: no longer just ‘nonsense words’ padding out the rhythm, but a something more charged. A ‘telling inarticulacy’, a ‘liquefying’ of words, as Zora Neale Hurston put it, in which a seemingly comic voice is edged and haunted by other, unspeakable voices and histories: ‘Words and music have lost each other’, wrote W. E. B. Du Bois about the Sorrow Songs and how much experience – of diaspora, transculturation, slavery and resistance – they encoded: ‘Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate.’
The prologue to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) – one of the books in Tsafendas’s battered suitcase – gives Armstrong a crucial, emblematic role at the head of one of the 20th century’s greatest novels. The unnamed narrator – the Invisible Man secretly drawing off power in his underground lair full of electric bulbs and hi-fi equipment – speaks of wanting to ‘hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?’ – all at the same time’:
Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favourite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapour rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible.
Ellison (always a staunch defender of Armstrong) uses this musician’s calculated blitheness as a way of slipping the punch, and dropping the reader into a deep, twisted history of the American South. ‘Live with your head in the lion’s mouth’, the Invisible Man’s grandfather tells him when dying: ‘I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction’. This fraught tone – a ‘paradoxical advocacy of and regret over masked performance’ – is threaded all the way through Invisible Man, and captures something hard-to-express that hides in Armstrong’s lifelong act of being an All-American, good Southern boy – someone who always claimed (falsely) to have been born on the 4th of July 1900.
Listening, really listening to Armstrong’s playing makes the floor drop out from below the prose; his voice sets in motion the novel’s registers of phantasmagoria and carnival, scrambles its time signatures. Aided by a few drags on a reefer, the narrator tells us:
Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’s music.
The crux of ‘Welcome Visitors!’, its emotional core, seems to be Musarurwa’s wry and self-aware reckoning with how Armstrong both embodies and plays on American stereotypes of Africa. His words mix mild exasperation with a more intimate set of recognitions: an awareness of the partly debased, risky, easily misunderstood forms in which they were both forced to work.
As the film breaks amateur and newsreel footage into shards – removing the original frames around these scenes, changing their timbre and tone colour – it asks the viewer/listener to slip into the breaks of history and look around. To feel one’s way into the gap between ‘A Zulu drinking song’ (the cursory tag on the record label) and Armstrong’s life-long desire to be Crescent City’s ‘King of the Zulus’; to listen for other frequencies through the crack in a broken record. ‘Most of all’, wrote Ellison in 1986, looking back on his novel after 30 years, ‘I would have to approach racial stereotypes as a given fact of the social process and proceed, while gambling with the reader’s capacity for fictional truth, to reveal the human complexity which stereotypes are intended to conceal.’
‘Is there something Zulu in the song?’ Satchmo asks. ‘I told him we are family’, Musarurwa replies. But the moment of connection and communion exists only within these damaged, disembodied, nostalgic recollections. And, at a further remove, it is suspended within the waking dream of a dying colonialism: a filmic kaleidoscope of gumboot dancers in cowboy hats, of rickshaw pullers with beaded headdresses in Durban. Blackfaced minstrels process into a Cape Town stadium, celebrating freedom at the height of apartheid, dressed in the Stars and Stripes.
Armstrong, in all his enigmatic bonhomie, extends an impossible invitation to Musarurwa: ‘Come to America. We welcome visitors there’. But the film ends otherwise, with the invisible speaker returning to his home village, ‘near the ancient stones of the Great Zimbabwe kingdom’.
