On the shoulders of a wire coat hanger
Niren Tolsi
As a teenager I would make mixtapes for people I was crushing on. The songs I chose and how these were arranged were intended to tell stories: of the state of a relationship at a particular moment, of a conversation during a school excursion, of achingly idealistic (and often unrequited) young love.
My bias was, admittedly, towards lyrics over the mood that the music may create. Sometimes the juxtaposition of emotions was over-wrought. Often an underlying intention was to also make the recipient think I was worldly and cool, especially when the cassettes contained music banned in apartheid South Africa, or unavailable because of the cultural boycott.
These intentions all seem so naive and empty as I write this in Durban, South Africa in early July 2024. It has been 30 years since South Africans voted as equals, regardless of race, for the first time to signal the end of apartheid. 20 since I made my last mixtape.
The stories I tell as a journalist are not about me, anymore. But often, especially, with my slow journalism project about the 2012 Marikana massacre, when South African police killed 34 striking mineworkers on the country’s platinum belt, it is personal. When you have walked for over a decade with people who have suffered violence intimately and have yet to see justice or “closure” the relationship between journalist and story cannot be impersonal.
In the week of writing this blurb in July 2024 for a mixtape that prominently features the Jokanisi family of Lusikisiki in the Eastern Cape — who lost their son, father and brother, Semi, at Marikana during the strike — the Jokanisi family patriarch, Mr Goodman Jokanisi, asked me a question for which I have no answer:
“Will all my sons be killed by the police?”
A retired mineworker, Mr Jokanisi and his wife, the late Mrs Nomandiya Joyce Jokanisi, had five sons. Their youngest, Aphelele was killed by police on June 28, 2024. Mr Jokanisi was inconsolable at the time of our conversation. I doubt I will ever find the words to comfort him because after decades working as a journalist, I understand justice as an abstraction — especially for the working-class Black bodies in South Africa in 2024.
I could not find the words for Mr Jokanisi because I was there at the funeral of his eldest grandchild, Ayabonga, the son of Semi, who committed suicide on the second day of a school term at the age of 15 because he was bullied for his association with Marikana. I walked with his late wife Joyce as she carried the world on shoulders as thin as a wire coat hanger, while she herself struggled with the death of Semi. She fought against not knowing who had killed her eldest son and why, and popped anti-depressants to her early grave in 2021. I know that the criminal prosecution of the police accused of killing Semi will not be concluded in Mr Jokanisi’s lifetime — the criminal justice process is simply too slow and skewed towards the powerful.
I have no answers of comfort and fortitude for the Jokanisi family. I am as bereft as they are. But I hope that in the echoes of history and in the acknowledgement of the repetitive cycles of violence endured in the global South which intersperses itself on this mixtape — from the Jokanisi family experiences and hauntings, from the sound archives — there might be answers that I can no longer find in song lyrics or my own words.
Archival reference no: BAB TPA.43 22, 26, 81, BD5.
