The Brother Moves On: Going back to move forward

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“I don’t feel like I’m in the wrong place. I feel like my people are with me – in all of it,” says Siyabonga Mthembu, lead vocalist of Johannesburg-based performance ensemble, The Brother Moves On (TBMO). He’s referring to Hamba the Reprise, the band’s remake of an old gospel song that’s been chorusing throughout black communities for as long as they can remember. Sung in congregation about heaven granting respite from life’s hardness that heart breaks.

“If you think of our psychology and the way we view ourselves, we’re not like white people, we don’t do ‘I’ in singing or talking and relating. We’re always ‘them’ – and those who came before us.”

Mthembu lost his father when he was 10, a man who was “umhedeni (heathen) until his death bed. And one of the last things he said to my mom was: ‘Ngicel’ukhulise labantwana bazi ukuthi uNkulunkulu ukhona’.” (please raise these children so they know God is real)

Hamba Nhliziyo Yami was his father’s favourite song.

Needle to vinyl on this track and you’re met with a gentle acapella soon accompanied by a harmonising from bass to tenor – the gents lending their voices. 

The song, a conversation with self, is a negotiation – a pleading. 

For Mthembu the song completes the circle. “I don’t need a Grammy, I don’t need a SAMA, I don’t need recognition… I’ve done what my lineage was about… I was meant to be here. I don’t feel like I’m in the wrong place. I feel like my people are with me – in all of it.”

Where music meets

TBMO is in the international-leg of their tour, having led with a national multi-city hop launching their new two-vinyl album, $/he Who Feeds You… Owns You – their latest offering released in late October. They played the Berlin Jazz Festival on the 3rd of November, Le Guess Who Festival on the 12th, and the London Jazz Festival on the 15th.

At their recent performance at Selective Live in Gardens, Cape Town, some of their songs move into a chanting that vibrates like a tapping into something ancient – a shroud of ritual. With speakers reverberating the chants are bold and pronounced guttural growls in moments, goosebumps-generating whispers hard to pin down in others. Either way – an invocation.

“For me, black music is the vector diagram of the church, protest, nobungoma. And we [TBMO] sit where these three circles intersect.” Mthembu air-draws three converging circles to emphasise the point. “Why I’m in love with Iphupho lika biko is that they sit in this tri-factor. That’s black music for me; it calls from there but it calls from here,” he says, gesturing between the circle fragments – traces still outlined in the air.

“[Black music] is present in that relation. It does that thing where it’s not the church. Mara asikho emzabalazweni. Asikho ebungomeni either. (but we’re not in the struggle, and we’re not in the traditional either). What I enjoy about South African music is how it flows between the three.”

What’s in a name?

The title is a hat tip to a delivery to the African Union by Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara, who overhauled oppressive social, economic, and ecological systems in Burkina Faso. Sankara markedly improved the quality of life of his people during his presidential term between 1983 and 1987, before he was assassinated. He was a strong advocate for women’s liberation and the elevation of child rights. He was a proponent for staving off hunger in his country and resourcing his people to be self-nourishing while refusing foreign aid.

The band’s naming of the record by referencing this past is deliberate. The energy the guys tap into with the title is considered.

“Being African and being black – the negatives are always highlighted first and foremost. Those who struggled in the positive are never used as an example to reflect on us. [Sankara] showed us what an African president is supposed to be.”

Mthembu says they posed the question while simultaneously answering it: “We have examples of greatness. Why isn’t the Burkina Faso story taught in schools? Why is the story of Thomas Sankara only of his assassination and not why he got assassinated? … As Africans we’re not telling those stories. The black conversation is one of denigrating our history. Fighting for them to see us when we don’t see ourselves.

“We [TBMO] see ourselves. We celebrate ourselves. But we’re also asking the big question of why we don’t see ourselves?”

Getting into the nuance of the title – the $/he, encapsulates the binary. One take is a stepping away from a patriarchal whitewash, significant because of who Sankara was and what his politics were. “It was important that [the title] not be centred on maleness,” he says.

The title also speaks to food security and sovereignty. Another take is the acknowledgement of the idiom ‘You are what you eat’. How crucial it is that you control what nourishes and builds you at a nutrient and DNA-level. Controlling the foundational systems of what you take in; agriculture, capitalism – is controlling, in essence, what you are, who you are – and who you become.

Ultimately, there is no single message this work wants to convey. It’s a catalyst. A stimulant. It goads. 

It is the beginning of the conversation – which Mthembu says is vital. Particularly in relation to “blackness, sexuality, gender, and ageism… The title keeps refreshing in the conversation space. Questions of ownership. Questions of land. The philosophy of land. The spirituality of land in relation to black people.” All of it.

Church, protest and nobungoma: The Brother Moves On released their new album $/He Who Feeds You… Owns You last month. Photo: Felix Zimmermann

Going back to move forwardTBMO’s oldest song, Puleng, first performed around six-or-eight years ago, takes its name from rain. The album enters with the Intro, and later, after the back-to-back powerful pulsates of Bayakhala and Sphila the Extended Version is brought in.

“Someone pointed out another food security relation there. [The track starting with] the uncle who leaves the hinterlands to the urban sprawl [for work]. The kids screaming: Umalume uyahamba.(uncle is leaving).  [The idea] keeps revealing itself, more than it being an inferred genius.”

The album has been termed a “time capsule of a moment before the pandemic”. It is this, yes, but the music also predates that time-warping lastingness of recent years. It’s a resurrection of the past. Reaches back into time seeking both landmark moments as well as the more subtle and understated.

Take their Itumeleng Revisited, an honouring of Itumeleng on the album Batsumi, released by an Afro-jazz outfit in 1974 which was led by brothers Jonny Mothopeng on guitar, and Lancelot on the keys, with bassist Zulu Bidi. Going back, revisiting the past, excavating from previous path walkers seems to be a unanimous ethos between the band members. TBMO’s rendition features Bokani Dyer on keys.

There’s a YouTube clip they sample for a song in their previous album Tolika Mtoliki, where the renowned pianist Moses Taiwa Molelekwa shares his thoughts on reincarnation: “I went through a couple of books to see how people describe musicians… describe music. I haven’t really found a satisfactory answer but I understand that it’s not in one lifetime that one becomes a musician – or becoming a master soul. You are born and you heal people and you can do miraculous things… It’s not only in one lifetime that you become a musician, it’s going through a couple of lifetimes.”

To this Mthembu says: “So he is reincarnated, constantly. Every time I watch Keenan [Ahrends] play. Every time I watch Tshepo Tsotsetsi play. Even [Moses’] son, Zoe. I gravitate towards his music… It’s the one thing that gives me solace – lets me know everything’s gonna be ok.

“We have these geniuses in our country… The world has acknowledged them but we don’t even know. It was vital to do that, to point to Moses, I think our generation gets it. But it’s vital to do that so that it doesn’t end with us. That’s why it’s important to keep chanting these names. OJabu Khanyile, Batsumi.”A reminder. A tradition. A continuation.

The album holds many things. It is also a sanctum. An entombment. Mazel is Zelizwe Mthembu’s three-note echo on guitar. Muhammad Dawjee’s Clarinet links hands and foreshadows Mthunzi’s Mvubu’s alto saxophone. Siyabonga Mthembu’s whistling – bearing resemblance to the intro in Umthandazo Wamagenge, a Thandi Ntuli sample and collaboration from Indaba Is. The whistling shapeshifts into an agonised crooning. A breaking. The deep love brothers hold woven with the hurt and complexity of that loss.A dedication to Mthembu’s brother, Nkululeko – a brother to all of them.

At the Selective Live performance, the lead vocalist describes him as: “The founder of The Brother Moves On who made us believe that what we are doing is gospel.”

Among those they’ve loved and lost is Shonisani Lethole who they hold in their hearts. Mthembu adds: “[This is an acknowledgement to] Those in mourning – mourning and hiding, as if we didn’t just lose our people in masses over the last short while.”

Listen to $/he Who Feeds You… Owns You here:   https://tbmo.bandcamp.com/album/he-who-feeds-you-owns-you.