SA doccie on show in the Big Apple
Editorista remembers seeing Zim Ngqawana playing jazz in the Netherlands at a festival, it was a moment of such pride tempered with intense home sickness for home sweet Africa as Zim’s music washed over the room, captivating the audience. Any African’s or anyone interested in African Jazz and our stories in general in and around New York City, catch Zim live as he sets the tone for the SA jazz doccie entitled “Unyazi of the Bushveld” that’s showing at the “Columbia Harlem Festival of Global Jazz Documentary Film” festival:
African Noise Foundation is proud to announce the selection of a South African documentary production for screening in the prestigious Columbia University Columbia Harlem Festival of Global Jazz Documentary Film.
The 29 september screening will be preceded by a concert of the Zim Ngqawana Quartet on 28 september.
“Unyazi of the Bushveld” (2007). Aryan Kaganof, director (South Africa). 45 min.
The Zulu word “unyazi” can be translated into English as “lightning,” an apposite double image of rupture and new beginnings for UNYAZI 2005, Africa’s first festival of electronic music, the brainchild of new music composer Dimitri Voudouris. Aryan Kaganof’s documentary on this singular historical event is suitably non-linear in structure, as it explores the complex relationship, both assumed and actual, among technology, the African and Afrodiasporic worlds, and the multiculturalism that mediates them. We are presented with a vision freed from the romantically anti-technological stances of the early Nègritude movement (and that of 1960s American black cultural nationalisms), and the concomitant assumptions that nothing of a technological nature can emerge from a black-ruled world. But we are never far from South Africa’s recent history. Until this festival, jazz drummer Louis Moholo, exiled since the early 1960s, had never been on the campus of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand–or rather, as he commented drily, “We came, but they chased us off with dogs. That was 1962.”
