AfriPOP! exclusive: Tumi – POWA (listen and download)
“Hey guys, I got provoked by a very special kind of sickness, that calls South Africa home,” said an email to us from poet and MC Tumi. He’d just walked off a plane coming off a 6-week European tour with his band Tumi and the Volume, and right into the thick of a nationwide uproar surrounding the internationally reported case of a 15-year-old girl at the time claiming to have been raped by two of her high school mates – boys aged 14 and 16.
The case took ludicrous turns: the authorities ruled initially that the boys wouldn’t be arrested as they were busy with exams, and the charges against the boys were dropped for lack of evidence.
Not surprisingly, it hit the collective nerve of a country whose grim rape statistics (1 in 4 South African men admit to it) continue to shade its overall reputation. And so the debate raged. Not least on twitter, where a young blogger Akona Ndungane coined the campaign I Said No based on her own personal experience of assault.
Anyone who knows Tumi knows the plight of women is foremost in his conscience. His seminal poem Yvonne and the song Maria testify to this.
Yet again he put pen to paper over the beat for Kanye West’s Power to make this heartfelt track and debuted it last night with a live performance on South African music magazine programme Live, impressing Angie Stone, who was a guest on the same show and blowing away the massive TV audience. Here is an excerpt of the lyrics, all of which you can find on Tumi’s blog:
I shine my Thomas Edison on this heart-wrenching incident
Butt naked telling it, like surely there’s some better men
Looking at my reflection, cracking on better inspection
What all these headlines mention, is a judgment not just a sentence
Don’t examine the evidence
That is just irrelevant
Cuz Akona’s testament implicates my better sense
I wanna kill that specimen, hang him from a leather belt
But then again, it’s probably best to raise a gentleman
So when he turns fourteen he’d be the one protecting her
And when they talk orgies it wouldn’t make sense to him
But that’s later, this is now, the part to play is big and proud
Brave heart, love the scars away speak it out aloud
Click below to hear the track:
"POWA"
Saturday, November 20, 2010
POWA!!!!!!!!!!
To every girl I cheated on
Disrespected, beat on, called a whore,
Peed on, had sex with illegal, put hands on
Raped, slapped, love you, didn’t say it back,
Ladies I disappointed lied to and misinformed,
If you cry, I’ll listen for you
Now I am living for you
To every sister annoyed, pissed with these ignorant boys
That took what you build, destroyed
I’ll dream what my son draws, a pencil stick happy home
And sing what you’ve come for
No one man should have all that power
We put our seeds into school they get deflowered
From sweet sixteen to 20 something sour
When Mandela dies, who gone really care about us
I shine my Thomas Edison on this heart-wrenching incident
Butt naked telling it, like surely there’s some better men
Looking at my reflection, cracking on better inspection
What all these headlines mention, is a judgment not just a sentence
Don’t examine the evidence
That is just irrelevant
Cuz Akona’s testament implicates my better sense
I wanna kill that specimen, hang him from a leather belt
But then again, it’s probably best to raise a gentleman
So when he turns fourteen he’d be the one protecting her
And when they talk orgies it wouldn’t make sense to him
But that’s later, this is now, the part to play is big and proud
Brave heart, love the scars away speak it out aloud
No one man should have all that power
You put your hands on a woman, are you a coward?
Lady that’s not your shame, that there is ours
When Mandela dies, who gone really care about us
Can we march, picket, shout, scream,
Pass a law; wipe clean all her bloody bad dreams
Call Miss Patricia De lille, fix the ill, Helen Zille
J. Malema, help us heal
If JZ’s not with us he cannot get elected still
DJ Fresh, play a tune, make me forget it’s painful
Can we affect a change too, so sex doesn’t scare you?
I wanna kiss your earlobe, whisper you my hero
Take you out to party people where the music isn’t lethal
I am T from the V
That means my speech isn’t speech bro
You don’t have be Jules High
To have to sink to these lows,
That act is old De Niro
Apartheid Ghost, Lesilo
Adapted to the evil, we are drawn to it Zapiro
No one man should have all that power
We put our seeds into school they get deflowered
From sweet sixteen to 20 something sour
When Mandela dies, who gone really care about us
To every girl I cheated on
Disrespected, beat on, called a whore,
Peed on, had sex with illegal, put hands on
Raped, slapped, love you, didn’t say it back,
Ladies I disappointed lied to and misinformed,
If you cry, I’ll listen for you
Now I am living for you
To every sister annoyed, pissed with these ignorant boys
That took what you build, destroyed
I’ll dream what my son draws, a pencil stick happy home
And sing what you’ve come for
So if you fed up with it
Everybody do the power clap
Clap! Clap! Clap!
Help your sister bare witness
Everybody do the power clap
Clap! Clap! Clap!
You’d better be standing aint no sitting down
When we do the power clap
Clap! Clap! Clap!
Hate the act, love the child
Everybody do the power clap
Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap!
Boom!
>via: http://tumimolekane.blogspot.com/2010/11/powa.html
______________________________________
South African Girl, 15, Charged With Statutory Rape After Confessing Sex Act Was Consensual
A 15-year-old South African girl who initially claimed she was gang-raped is now being charged with statutory rape after agreeing the sex was consensual, the BBC reports.
After prosecutors dropped the initial rape charges due to lack of evidence, the girl wasreportedly charged with statutory rape by the national director of public prosecutions, Advocate Menzi Simelane, alongside two boys, age 14 and 16, initally thought to be her attackers. The girl originally claimed she had been drugged with a spiked drink before the assault, which was alleged to have taken place in front of other pupils who filmed it on their cell phones.
South African rights groups have slammed the shift in charges, and say the case will no longer serve the interests of the three involved teens and is a particularly harsh move for the female "victim," who attends Jules High School outside of Johannesburg, though she has now claimedthe act was consensual.
As South Africa's Independent Online reports:
"The tardy investigation of the case by the police and the recent decision to also charge the alleged victim is yet another indictment to the women of this country," said Alex Mashilo, provincial secretary of the Young Communist League of South Africa."It is a demonstration that far from being free and equal citizens in South Africa - with the equal protection and benefit of the law - women in this country still slave away under a patriarchal criminal justice machinery."
With South Africa having one of the highest assault rates in the world, others felt the case could set a harmful precedent for future victims. "There are other ways to handle to matter, the prosecutors are sending a horrific and harmful message to other rape survivors. That causes great concern," Lorenzo Wakefield of the Children's Right Project, a legal advice group at Western Cape University, told BBC News.
>via: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/18/south-african-girl-15-cha_n_785602.html
Posted: 11-18-10 03:41 PM