5/21/2023 2 Comments Dana point unpluggedShe says her social-activism persona came to the surface during the time she spent in the city. Those who follow Dana on Twitter - about 24 000 - will know of her tenacious and at times aggressive approach to dialogue when she senses an injustice. “The weight of your skin colour, you feel it -” she says, trailing off. There are the toxic race clouds that, for some, seem to hover over Cape Town. The reason for her return may include her break-up with her American partner, Hessel Pole, but it was not just personal. After a two-year stay she is back in Johannesburg. I had lived in Johannesburg for 10 years and my partner wanted to move there,” she says. Until recently Dana was living in Cape Town, the city to which she relocated two years ago. The singer’s increased civic engagements outside of her career as a musician invite those old concerns about whether artists should immerse themselves in politics. Dubbed the Black Culture Education Tour, it was the culmination of Dana’s marathon round trip to 26 schools in five provinces. The launch, which I attended, was meant to discuss the problems that beset public schools. Using her celebrity pulling power, Dana was able to bring people such as former national director of public prosecutions Menzi Simelane, ex-AngloGold Ashanti chief executive Bobby Godsell and former higher education bureaucrat Mary Metcalfe to the initial lekgotla at the Park Hyatt, a posh hotel in Johannesburg. This, in a sense, is part of her project to get schools to adopt mother language instruction, a follow-up to the education stokvel initiative she launched in September. Just last month she stood in Parliament yet again, delivering a paper on the Languages Bill, a draft law on how government departments will communicate with South Africans. But unlike most of the half-mute tribe, she is out there: debating politicians on radio, presenting papers in Parliament or conversing with the hundreds of fans who come to her shows (for some reason, people with speech impediments do not stammer or stutter when they sing). This insular world - one of tremulous sentences that come out as if through a sieve, delayed and lingering sentiments robbed of punch lines and the playful teasing of children who find stammerers funny - is one Dana inhabited for a long time. Stammering normally involves repeating a couple of letters rather than a whole word, as in “br-br- brewery”, whereas stuttering involves hesitating and repeating words as in “please, please, could, could”.) This is quite unusual most times I can tell that a person stutters or stammers even before they hesitate to open their mouths. It took me a little while to realise that Dana, like myself, has a stammer. The expectations of the silent crowd and the nerve-wracking discomfort they set off often result in a comic, yet pitiful sight.Īfro-blues singer Simphiwe Dana has largely tamed her speech impediment. In the most severe cases, people who stammer always contrive to avoid situations in which they have to speak before an audience.
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