Zozo and the Clash of African Giants

Tough but fair, Tom. I guess it has been more than a month.

I went out this weekend.

This is a big deal. I don’t leave my home at night and usually celebrate the end of a work week with a glass of wine, some knitting and garden work. Saturday night one of my favorite local artists, a Zimbabwean known as the King of African Rumba, was playing at city hall. The event was billed as the Clash of African Giants, Zozo being the first giant to appear. The handwritten sign advertising the event said “8 pm to 5 am” and so I prepared myself for our night on the town with a tall mug of coffee and packed an emergency flask of espresso.

They were stamping people’s hands at the door, but the guy wouldn’t stamp me because I “stand out”. Race as literal stamping. I’ll stew on this for a while.

Maybe a hundred and fifty people showed up. City Hall kind of looks like a high school gymnasium inside: there’s a wide expanse of floor that, if waxed, would probably be the sort of blonde wood that basketball teams play (on the other hand, it might just be dirty linoleum). The floor is flanked by bleachers on one side and a stage on the opposite. The performers were on the stage and the audience was in the bleachers, but in between us there was a large empty gulf of floor space.

The audience was mostly men. It was BYOB and a couple people brought two liter Fanta bottles filled with beer. There were also a couple children who put me to shame, staying animated throughout the night without the aid of stimulants.

The warm-up act had three female back-up singers wearing all white shirts. I would wager they were not from around here. In this area, when a woman wears a white shirt at night it communicates something very specific: I am a prostitute looking for a john. I guess these ladies didn’t get the memo.

Or maybe they did.

When Zozo finally came on, the mood did not change appreciably. People more or less remained seated in the bleachers except for two or three men who danced in front. I fantasized about throwing my bra toward the stage as a dramatic counter to Zozo’s otherwise apathetic reception: a lime green blur making a magnificent arc, ultimately crossing only half the length of the basketball court to land thirty feet away from Zozo’s feet.

Zozo was great. 3 out of 4 of the band members, including Zozo himself, were wearing beige slacks, polo shirts and leather jackets, for good measure. This fact, coupled with the interior of City Hall, made me feel sort of like I was at a high school dance at an all-boys school. [Rastetter, I’m thinking of you and your band at Regis, if I hadn’t made it clear enough.] The fourth man was wearing a red flannel shirt with turquoise, sequined Mwenda [a colorful Venda textile that I'm using as a tablecloth in this picture], two vertical stripes in the back, two horizontal stripes in the front. Every once in a while when Zozo went crazy on a riff, the fourth guy would be joined by 5 other men in similar shirts to do some amazing backup dancing that involved a lot of double-jointed, knee-buckling – think of a very sophisticated form of MC Hammer dance. In response this dancing, audience members would hurl open beer cans from the back of the bleachers in approval. I was sitting in the front row and not at all pleased.

Once the other African Giants got rolling, people really started to cut loose. All in all, a good time cut short by too many drunken intrusions of my personal space.

Updates: Congrats to Caz and Steve on their baby boy, Josh! Also a shout-out to Luke for graduating cum laude! The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.