Mbuli bows out
29 August 2007


Piracy and lack of airtime for his records on radio and television are some of the reasons the “people’s poet,” Mzwakhe Mbuli. has decided to stop recording in South Africa.
He announced his “retirement” from the local industry today, saying he was forced to look for other avenues for his talent.
“I would love to be continuing to create and record music in South Africa until I am the age of someone like Miriam Makeba, but I can’t keep on fighting the battles,” Mbuli said through his public relations company.
He said it was in trying to get his latest album Thunder to the public that he realised that local stations would not give him airplay.
He named several radio stations, and said it was even more difficult to get airplay on television.
Mbuli also pointed to retailers for refusing to stock Thunder “in spite of what he said was public demand for the album”.
“The doors of the airwaves are closed and I can only point to a deep-seated conspiracy, and a culture of victimisation on the part of what I can only call a mafia on the airwaves,” the artist said.
Mbuli said he would only record again outside the borders of the country.
“It’s the practices of certain individuals at certain broadcasters who are forcing me to join the creative brain drain from the country.
"I will consider pursuing recording and performing outside South Africa’s borders because I cannot work here any longer,” he said.

Kuyashuba ngolokugwazisa oKhozini

By Dudu Busani

Ukushuba kwezinsolo zokugwaziswa kwabaculi ukuze kudlalwe umculo wabo emsakazweni uKhozi FM sekuphoqe iziphathimandla zalesi siteshi ukuba zisungule ikomidi elizobhekelela ukudlalwa komculo kulesi siteshi.

Yize kumanje kunekomidi labaphenyi elithunyelwe ukuba lizophenya ngalolu daba, izikhulu zalesi siteshi zisemi ekutheni akukho ozothathelwa izinyathelo bungekho ubufakazi ngisho noma kungaphakanyiswa igama lakhe.

Muva nje kusanda kuqubuka imibiko emaphephandabeni ethi kunabaculi abathi isiphelile imali yabo bekhokhela abantu abathize abaqashwe kwa-SABC ukuze kudlalwe umculo wabo.

Laba baculi bafunga bayagomela ukuthi ayikho imininingwane abazoyikhipha uma laba bantu bengathathelwa zinyathelo yilesi siteshi.

Yize kudalulwe ukuthi kukhona uphenyo olwenziwayo mayelana nalolu daba, emhlanganweni obuphakathi kwethimba lezikhulu zalesi siteshi nezintatheli izolo, lezi zikhulu zale zaphetha ukudalula amagama abantu abasolwayo neminye imininingwane yophenyo.

"Uma kungaba nozosinika yonke imininingwane mayelana nalokhu kukhohlakala okuthiwa kuyenzeka, kungaba lula ukuthi simthole simjezise lowo muntu othintekayo.

Kodwa-ke thina umsebenzi wethu ukuphatha isiteshi siqikelele nokuthi kunenqubekela phambili, okokuphenya ngemikhonyovu okuthiwa ikhona kunabantu bakho abaqashelwe khona," kusho uMnuz Zakes Dube oyimenenja yakwa-SABC esifundeni saKwaZulu-Natal.

Ngesikhathi Isolezwe lithintana nomculi odumile, uMzwakhe Mbuli ophinde abe ngumholi womkhankaso olwela amalungelo abaculi, i-Operation Dudula ngalolu daba, uthe kuyamangaza ukuthi namanje abemisakazo basaluphika lolu daba ngoba akekho ongazi ukuthi luyenzeka.

"Ukuthi kunophenyo olwenziwayo kuchaza khona ukuthi kukhona into engalungile. Into okufanele yenziwe nje ngukuthi laba bantu bathathelwe izinyathelo zomthetho ukuze iphele le nto," kusho lo mculi.

UMbuli uqhube wathi uyasamukela isinqumo sokusungulwa kwamakomidi azosingatha ukudlalwa komculo ngoba mhlawumbe kuzoqhamuka noshintsho.

Leli thimba lezikhulu ebelisemhlanganweni nezintatheli beliholwa nguDube, uMphathisiteshi, uMnuz Bhodloza Nzimande, noMphathi wezinhlelo, uMnuz Bheki Msane.

Akusikho okokuqala kuba nezikhalo zokugwazelwa ngabaculi kwabasakazi noma abathile emsakazweni njengoba kuyinto ehlale iqubuka minyaka yonke.

Kodwa-ke akukaze kube khona obekwa icala noma ojeziswayo ngalokhu njengoba imiphumela yophenyo oluhlale lwenziwa ingakaze idalulwe.

Amakomidi azobhekana nalo msebenzi ngabantu abasebenza kuso lesi siteshi abafana nophrojusa, abasakazi nabaphathi.

Published on the web by Isolezwe on August 3, 2007.

Electronic music, Kwaito and House, is now the order of the day. Mzwakhe Mbuli should wait for one of these unoriginal so called DJ's to mix his songs and that is when he might get air time. That is what it has come down to.

‘Poet’ is gone, long live poetry!
Fred Khumalo Column in the Sunday Times

Mzwakhe Mbuli’s retirement from the music industry is cause for alarm: How did he get there in the first place?

In Journalism, a week is a long time. During my recent one-week break I developed a love-hate relationship with newspapers and the media in general.

I did not want to read a newspaper or listen to radio or watch TV because I realised that the minute I started reading, I would begin thinking of story follow-up ideas. This would, invariably, put me back into work mode. Which I didn’t like.

Nevertheless, the news junkie in me wanted his fix — sniff-sniff what is Steve Hofmeyr angry about this week? Snort-snort, where is Msholozi looking for his machine gun this week? Gulp-gulp, where is Judge Motata drinking his tea before crashing his car this week? Where is Helen Zille getting arrested this time around?

I suppose the dilemma during my forced abstention was of the kind that confronts George W Bush at every wakeful moment: he suspects that Osama bin Laden is out there planning something horrible, but he would rather not find out what the bearded one is up to because the revelation will just be too much for him.
To stretch the metaphor further, it’s like Manto Tshabalala-Msimang dying to know what the Sunday Times is up to, but at the same time too scared to find out for the revelation might cause palpitations of her liver, sorry, heart.

Or it’s like Tshabalala-Msimang suddenly craving a beverage at a party, but only too aware of media practitioners in the crowd, silently egging her on, their fingers trembling around their cameras at the same time.

Anyway, when I came back from leave I couldn’t make sense of the coded language that my colleagues were using: quirky references to that Dali Mpofu letter. References were also made to the Minister in the Presidency, Essop Pahad, wanting to shut down the Sunday Times. Why, I wanted to know, and some colleagues looked at me as if I was crazy. I couldn’t make sense of all the things which, in any other week, would have been just up my street.

But the biggest news for me was that Mzwakhe Mbuli, the alleged people’s poet, had decided to take retirement from the music industry.

Confronted with the Mbuli story, which was told to me as if a tragedy too big to contemplate had befallen our planet, I was shocked. Shocked for an entirely different reason. I was shocked that Mbuli was still around, that he had survived this long in the music industry, such as it is.

The news of his retirement struck me with the force of the sight of a corpse walking out of a neighbourhood mortuary, tired of neglect, and finally determined to walk the remains of its life to the graveyard where it would bury itself.

Mzwakhe, apparently, is irritated with the industry which, he says, denies him airtime and that those who pirate his music are making more money than he is.

For the life of me, I think those who pirate his music are the Chinese fong- kong manufacturers who can’t tell their Steve Hofmeyr from their Phuzekhemisi. To them, it’s all Sous Aflican stuff. They employ a machine-gun approach to business, blasting everything and anything in sight in the hope that some of the bullets in their fusillade will hit the target.

Mbuli gave poetry a bad name. While teachers of poetry were having a bad enough time trying to dissuade their children from copying and regurgitating Shakespeare’s thees and thous without actually understanding what the Bard was saying, Mbuli came to the fore. He grabbed words by their ears, and forced them into shaky lines, lines which he mistook for sentences. Then, kicking and screaming, these shaky lines were forced into a rhyming frenzy.

I think he thought syntax was a tax for sins, or maybe pentameter was the speedometer of a car, driven by a pentium computer.

Some of his memorable lines — memorable because of their sheer banality — were: “It is a mess, mmm mess. Mphephu, Mangope, Sebe mess. It is now a mash. Mphephu, Mangope, Sebe, Holomisa, mmmm mmmash.”

Of course, the masses loved him when he recited at stadiums and halls. But wait a minute, now that I think about it, maybe they were not applauding, but were groaning, and the groans were so loud and outraged that they sounded like applause.

The pity is that some youngsters took him seriously. They suddenly developed a deep voice in an attempt to sound like him. Almost every cultural gathering these days will have yet another Mzwakhe. And many of these clones are bitter that the white, capitalist, right-wing, reactionary (I run short of the appropriate adjectives) publishing industry won’t touch their words with a barge pole.

When you politely point out to the young blood the folly of his ways, he suddenly lashes at you for being a coconut, a colonialist creature, a house nigger who is doing the white man’s bidding.

Ah, Mzwakhe, what did you do to us! Pitting generations of writers against each other. This is the guy who some years ago recited something like, “I and money do not mix, I and the truth do not collide.”

Suffice to say that a few years later there were collisions galore — involving our good man Mzwakhe. He was arrested in 1997 and served six of a 13-year jail sentence for armed robbery.
The man still maintains his innocence. But one is tempted to agree with the novelist Zakes Mda who, upon Mbuli’s arrest, enthused that the tall one should have long ago been arrested...for his bad verse.

You see, people, in the beginning there was The Word. Long before we were even dreamt of. So we had better respect The Word.

Leave The Word alone, Mzwakhe, it is sacred. Maybe join a dancing troupe. Anything, anything but The Word.