Event: Zoë Modiga

Introspection: Zoë Modiga, Frantz Fanon and Nina Simone share a consciousness searching for self within the postcolonial malaise. Photos: Abdul Lesedi Tyrone Goulanka/Supplied But the constancy of my love had been forgotten. I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning. So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put its machinery together again. What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands,” writes Frantz Fanon in 1962. In 2003, Ghanaian philosopher, Ato Sekyi-Otu wrote that “after Fanon, African criticism cannot feign ignorance of history. But neither can they plead captivity to its consequences. Fanon is our pathfinder in that ‘conversation of discovery’ whose mission is to gather the voices of history and common dreams into the work of the critical imagination”. Stacked to the side of an old, rustic-looking glass and wooden cabinet is a large pile of vinyl records. Positioned in the corner of our open-plan dining room is this cabinet and therein sits my mother’s prized gramophone. Each Sunday, as the pot roast was thickening in flavour and the vegetables; coming alive to the steam of my mother’s Hart pot was the scratching of the gramophone pin as it moved from song to song. The room would be transformed by the raw quaver and deep register of Nina Simone. I wish I knew how it would feel to be free/ I wish I could break all the chains holding me/ I wish I could I say all the things that I should say/ Say ‘em loud, say ‘em clear/ For the whole wide to hear/ Nina Simone sings in I Wish I Knew How It Feels To Be Free. As Bill Taylor’s lyrics reverberated through the house in Simone’s melancholic plea for freedom, a shift…