Lebo Mashile
Podcast:
Conversation with Lebo Mashile,
One of Africa’s Strongest Voices
It was James Baldwin who said of Maya Angelou, “You will hear the regal woman, the mischievous street girl; you will hear the price of a black woman’s survival and you will hear of her generosity. Black, bitter and beautiful, she speaks of our survival”. It is to these words that I turned as I confronted the phenomenon that is Lebo Mashile. Join me on this wonderful voyage of discovery as I chat to a new South African icon, here on the Victor Dlamini Literary Podcast.
Lebo defies easy categorization because she has taken on so many roles: she is at once a poet (her first book of poetry, In a Ribbon of Rhythm, Oshun, 2006, received the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa); an actress, and presenter; a performance artist; an executive producer; a skills facilitator; and perhaps most importantly, a social and cultural activist.
In her writings and her public performances and utterances, Lebo speaks with great conviction and a refreshing directness. She tells of her unease at the “out of control consumer culture” gripping South Africa that she calls the “new religion”. Lebo also is much concerned with the “exile” experience that has been forced on so many of the world’s peoples – and she stretches the definition of “diaspora” to include much of the displacement that occurs even within a country’s own borders. She is not shy to refer to her own experiences of exile and socio-cultural dislocation, and how her coming back to South Africa was an important part of the healing and regeneration that she needed to make sense of her life.
Lebo reminds me so much of the “Phenomenal Woman” of Maya Angelou’s poem, and as she sits down next to me in the children’s section of Xarra Books in Newtown, Johannesburg, there is about her something of the regal bearing of the women of ancient Africa – especially those powerfully mysterious women of Egypt. Her headgear is resplendent in a dazzling gold that seems to mirror her own spirit. Like Maya Angelou, Lebo has performed at a Presidential Inauguration: she recited her poetry at the inauguration of President Thabo Mbeki, and in our conversation she shares with me how she is able to negotiate her way around the corridors of power, and yet still retain her artistic distance and skepticism.
Lebo is a young woman with a big and powerful presence whose artistic cord seems at once to connect her to the Johannesburg hip-hop scene, and also to the voices of pioneering women artists and writers such as Alice Walker, Bessie Head, Nikki Giovanni, Nawal el Saadawi, Nina Simone, Maya Angelou, Buchi Emecheta and Toni Morrison. She talks of her experiences when she revisited the United States – nine years after leaving it to return to South Africa – to attended the Yarri Yarri Phambari Writers Conference in New York City. She performed her poetry in the presence of many of the writers who had led her to fall in love with the written and spoken word – including Angelou, Walker and el Saadawi. Within South Africa she has shared the stage with the likes of Napo Masheane, Gabeba Baderoon and Maishe Maponya, and she counts Don Mattera and Keorapetse Kgositsile amongst her strongest influences
Lebo acted in the Academy Award-nominated film, Hotel Rwanda, and she links the genocide that took place in Rwanda to the many narratives of identity and power that were scripted into the lives of Africans by the colonial experience. In her poetry, Lebo does not flinch from one of the most pervasive social diseases that afflicts many South Africans, the predilection for sexual violence, and in this conversation she criticizes the tacit “cultural” endorsement of “hardship and brutality” as an inevitable condition of marriage.
In the short time that she has turned her attention to the world of entertainment and the arts, Lebo has emerged as one of the strongest of the young voices in South Africa – to be heard at many of our leading socio-cultural events, such as Poetry Africa, the Franschoek Literary Festival, the Cape Town Book Fair, as well as the hip-hop and other spoken word events that are daily mushrooming all over South Africa.
Please enjoy this stimulating conversation with one of Africa’s best and brightest:
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Lebo Mashile on the Victor Dlamini Literary Podcast [38:49m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download
