Final Nail on Apartheid’s Coffin

Final Nail on Apartheid’s Coffin

By BRIAN KAJENGO

Hlompho Lekhuleni has just completed a music recording in a language that the apartheid regime tried to kill.

This Bushbuckridge (Mpumalanga) based artist recently released his Mapulaneng volume 11 CD which’s music is 70% Sepulana (so called Eastern Sotho).

This is the final nail on apartheid’s attempts to kill this rich language.

Due to decades of ethnic cleansing by successive regimes, Sepulana, and which not recognized as an official language by the South African constitution even though more than a million people speak it, and almost destroyed. Belief is that if apartheid persisted for a further ten years Sepulana would have disappeared from the African linguistic landscape.

Lekhuleni, known as Masta H made a decision to record his music in this prejudiced language as a way of contributing to the transformation of society and linguistic redress.

His Mapulaneng volume 11 is the second CD after the successful Mapulaneng Volume 1 which had songs that paid homage to Mapulana’s rite of passage (initiation) which is the highlight of the Bushbuckridge social calendar.

 Two songs from that recording feature in a yet to be screened television documentary. Even though apartheid boxed Mapulana as BaPedi in Lebowa today the difference is clear as their initiation graduation is the biggest cultural day in Mapulaneng.

“I don’t sing to make money but to decolonize my people’s minds. There is no other language which is rich than Sepulana. It’s pity that other people agreed to be manipulated to abandon their language and sing in some other people’s mother tongues.”

On his second CD Masta H has songs dedicated to young girls who go to the city to study and end up blinded by the lights (Gal Gone Bad), a song for his departed mother (O tla Ntseba Naa), love songs (Lerato, Ke Nako Yaka) and some tackling various society ills such as xenophobia. He says it’s his ‘heartfelt’ recording since he started making music while in high school.

Two videos (for Kosha ya Moshado and Bare H Batshware) are scheduled to be shot soon and Hlompho says he plans to encompass parts of his culture, especially the initiation part of it in his video repertoire.

“I think our culture is very important and we need to be the ones promoting it. Franz Fanon said that the language a person speaks is an affirmation of their ownership of the land in which they are standing. And we can’t claim to be liberated while we still keep our languages inferior to those of other nations.” says Lekhuleni.

This Tshwane University of Technology graduate believes that musicians can only unleash their full potential if they sing in the language of their ancestors; who he says were genius for having invented the language.

Sepulana has for some time been mistaken for Sepedi or a dialect of another language but it is a rich language that encompasses elements of many languages while sticking to its own genetic code. Lekhuleni believes he has a story to share with the world, both in his music and linguistic advocacy.