His baritone made one imagine someplace one has never been and has always been, somewhere in the Africa we all are, somewhere deep within, out there and right here. The whole exercise made the listener feel special for eavesdropping on a man conversing with his musical instrument through the only way both knew how – music. Good unadulterated African folk music.
They say all those people who deal in people’s emotions – writers, musicians, and artists – are not very time conscious, and so when one called to apologise for the lateness to the agreed ten o’clock appointment one was expecting the unexpected. Johwa asked, “Where are you my friend? How many more minutes will you be late?”
“I think ten minutes,” came the answer, hoping Johwa would not cancel the whole thing only for the man to reply, “Yes. Don’t worry I too am still at home. I will be ten minutes late too”. Mambo Jazz Club is located in Gaborone West Phase Two in a double storey building that looks nothing like beautiful – a custom built piece of chunky architecture meant for housing small businesses and nothing else. But after two flights of stairs one gets to the jazz club itself and it looks nothing like the exterior. It is a large spacious hall, with a bar section and a stage and a drinking section. The chairs have been arranged in such a way that there is ample space for dancing and turn Johwa’s (and other musicians’) sessions here into jivey, body-rocking, feet shuffling sessions than passive, beer-guzzling and setting sessions. Ndingo Johwa’s joint is Botswana through and through and the bar says that loud: murals cover the back of the stage with baboons yawning, lions watching the landscape and a hunter drinking from an ostrich egg.
But Johwa is more than an artist. He is an artist with entrepreneurial sense. There are many Johwas. There is Johwa the baritone-voiced, deft fingered folk musician. Then there is Johwa the businessman. One trades in music recording and performance while the other runs an ostrich farm and a construction company. This is not striking per se. What is striking is that all these Johwas are close friends unlike in many cases in which the artist wants to exist alone, and thereby reduce the individual to the all too familiar gifted but broke artist.
But even as he sat down to discuss music, calls would come through his phone looking for the other Johwa. And he would be at hand. “Yes. We will arrange that. I am still with a journalist. Could you call me a bit later? Thank you,” he would say.
Posters and newspaper clippings of Johwa the artist at different stages of his music career line the walls of his office.
A few months ago another artist of Ikalanga origin, a Hip Hop musician, took the microphone and ripped the crowd with triple rhymes per beat in pure Ikalanga. At first, the crowd looked on a bit stunned but before long everyone was clapping and screaming to the flawless rhymes. But it is Johwa who could perhaps be credited with pioneering in recording music in the so-called minority language. How was it like for him to do that in the mid 90s? “That conservative state had a lot to do with the fact that we had not found faith in ourselves then. I don’t think it was tribalistic. I just thought we did not have that belief that we had something we could offer to the world as a people,” he explains.
And that lack of confidence in our cultural heritage also permeates music. “Instead of taking our original music and modernising it, we have run away from it and chosen to jump into the Kwaito and Rhumba bandwagon. The Kwaito and Kwasa Kwasa thing has been a big mistake. We did it the other way round. We should have started with our own roots like the music of Ratsie Setlhako, and modernised it with the new influences, instead of starting off doing Hip Hop or Kwaito and hoping that we could Tswanalise it,” he advises.
His singing in Ikalanga did not just break new ground in local cultural practice. It also proved to Batswana that they had a rich culture from which they could tap.
Weren’t the so-called majority tribes a bit pessimistic about the whole exercise?
“We Batswana cannot really be tribalist. Imagine how intermarried we have become. We are now related with each other to a point where each tribe is almost made up of another tribe. Do you know that I get bigger crowds in the south than up north? People may have felt uncomfortable because they were not used to a Kalanga singing in Ikalanga but that does not mean they were tribalist. They did not have faith in the local culture. It was a stage the whole country was in,” he adds.
Then he turns introspective. His fingers spread out and his hands move up and down. “If children could do Inola (a children’s dedication show on Radio Botswana) in Setswana, Ikalanga, Sesarwa, Herero….. Imagine how rich that would be. I think we can make this country the most beautiful country in the world to live in by recognising our unity through our diversity. But I think we are making progress, not just in that recognition of our diversity but in our cultural pride,” he explains.
He remembers a concert in which Batswana concert-goers started to leave before the South African main act could perform. “Soon as we Batswana artists finished, they did not wait for the scheduled artist who was supposed to be the main performer. They just left as soon as the last Motswana artist had performed,” he calls.
This is a sign that Batswana have found new faith in their culture and are realising its richness.
After selling a number of albums and being frequently inundated with requests for performances, Johwa has become one of the major musicians in Botswana and in the sub-continent. Only recently, he finished working on a project that featured such known musicians from the sub-continent as Zimbabwean Oliver Mtukudzi and Malawian George Phiri.
When the photographer comes in late, Johwa rises to grab his guitar. “Let’s play him that song, can we?” he asks putting the guitar on his lap. Soon his fingers are dancing up and down it and his baritone voice is playing around with lyrics. He rocks softly in his chair. It is in English and it goes, “Listen to the voice of the African woman. Calling for freedom. Listen to the voice of the African woman. Calling for equality. Listen to the voice of the African woman.”
His guitar sings with him.
