BaNtu Waltz (eBook)

Nya's Archangel Story

Malaika Mutere (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
396 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-8015-8 (ISBN)

Infos

'BaNtu Waltz' follows Nya Okatsa, who discovered her life's purpose through Jackson 5 play songs whilst coming into her womanhood in Kenya where she was born during the era of British colonialism. Nya pursues her calling in America where she meets Malik Nangwiro, an aspiring Master Drummer whose cultural grounding and mission complements and helps to elevate her own. Immersed in the communal mystery of African and Black popular musical traditions, Nya and Malik's lives are forever changed by ancient BaNtu Destiny becoming realized through the dance of their ascending Twin Souls.

Malaika Mutere (Ph.D.) is a writer, scholar, lecturer, and blogger. She has also been a consultant to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; Participant Productions; Program for Appropriate Technologies in Health (PATH); Search for Common Ground; the University of South Africa's Department of Communication Science; the UCLA School of Nursing; and CalArts Community Arts Partnership Program. Dr. Mutere's various commissions have addressed educational, public health, music, communication, media, conflict-resolution, homeless youth issues, and economic concerns through various applications of her culturally sensitive and Africa-centered approach. Her research is aimed towards evaluating Africa's cultural, spiritual, and material contributions to our collective human journey through what is a largely 3D western matrix. Mutere's oral-aesthetic motifs offer a culturally centered art-for-life's-sake perspective of the industrialized evolution of pop music. Learn more about her research approach and writing at www.malaikamutere.com.

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In Africa, it is said that each person has a rhythm to which she alone dances. Nya Okatsa found hers in the early play-songs of the Jackson 5 within which she'd received the call to 'bring salvation back'. To an impressionable young girl born in colonial Kenya, trapped for 9 months each year in a British legacy boarding school, the 'Sounds of Young America' were irresistible. As her beloved kuka (grandfather) and earthly guardian constantly reminded her, Nya isn't just any girl. She carries the legendary spirit of Nyabingi, an anti-colonial cultural icon after whom she was named, which adds to the gravitas of her quest when she ultimately travels from Kenya to America as an adult music scholar to fulfill her role in the cultural pact of UbuNtu she believed she'd made back in the day. The story of BaNtu Waltz traces the highs and lows Nya encounters during her American odyssey, including the shocking turning point and cultural reckoning that MJ's blockbuster release of 'Thriller' becomes for her. During the crisis of faith that follows, Nya eventually meets Malik Nangwiro - an aspiring Master Drummer who's been on his own challenging journey. As the two join forces and Malik rekindles Nya's drum, they're able to decode the message of salvation that causes their cultural shroud to finally lift. Twin Souls reunite and ascend to their higher timeline as Nya's dance at last reconciles with its true rhythm. "e;BaNtu Waltz: Nya's Archangel Story"e; will appeal to audiences who enjoy a multilayered love story told within the industrialized 3D universe of Black popular music on one hand (Michael Jackson fans), and the tensions created by the deeper cultural mandates of African oral traditions on the other. The two protagonists - Nya (dancer) and Malik (aspiring Master Drummer) - must meaningfully reconcile these cultural tensions and recalibrate their personal lives to navigate their conjoined Truth, Life Mission, and Destined Love.

Textauszug

CHAPTER 1
The BaNtu Way

The California sycamore in the upper meadow of the campus recreation center rustled as if it wasn’t done speaking. The generous late September canopy of leaves conspired with the sun and Pacific Ocean breeze to choreograph a dance of light and shadows against the screen of Nya Okatsa’s heavy, sleep-deprived eyelids. She’d posted a “reserved” sign at the entrance to the upper meadow, making it all hers for at least two hours. Enough time to take the edge off her Mississippi-to-Los Angeles jetlag before others arrived at the African Studies Center’s barbecue icebreaker for new master’s degree students like herself. A tree-whisperer from birth, Nya tried leaning just so against the sycamore’s sloping trunk to get her stressed back to relax. She winced. Not so much from pent-up stress as the sound of her name echoing in the agitated tree leaves – the full version of it that kuka always used when he wasn’t mincing words with his granddaughter.

“Nyabingi,” kuka began yesterday during her long-distance call to Kenya from the grad dorm to let her grandfather know she’d arrived and was settled in for the start of her fall, 1981 quarter. “Nya-bingi!” he repeated, shouting over her fangirl rambling about plans to score a ticket from scalpers at the Inglewood Forum for the Jacksons’ final Triumph concert that night. Nya fell silent, for a moment listening to kuka’s labored breathing over the intermittent phone static as he rifled through the pages of the local newspaper to find the article he’d just mentioned. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d addressed her that way. “Promise me you are not off the wall like these wazungu fanatics,” kuka pleaded, aggressively poking at the article some enterprising journalist had titled after Michael’s last solo album. “They look confused!” he ranted from his favorite stuffed chair on the verandah, as if she were sitting at his feet like she’d always done growing up and could simply look over his lap at the upsetting story. “Mark my words, kukhu, it is their very confusion that may already have become his undoing…”

Nya’s heart lurched at hearing the familiar ambient sounds of moos, bleats, and cowbells of the goats, sheep, and cows being herded along the dusty roadway outside the perimeter of kuka’s village compound. Her surge of homesickness collided with a sense of irony. Four years ago, as Nya received her beloved grandfather’s blessing, Mississippi was just a fancy name for the wilderness she was journeying to from Kenya for her undergraduate music studies. It was the route the ancestors had opened for kuka’s favorite grandchild to embark on her response to the special call he’d raised her to one day expect from the oral traditions of their BaNtu culture. It had been almost two years since Nya’s first “rabble” year as a student in Kenya High – known during its colonial days as the European Girls High School – when she heard her piece of their communal story come into play.

UbuNtu – their cultural bond and reminder that ‘I Am because We are’ – could not have been more poignantly communicated than it was in the words sung by eleven-year-old Michael Jackson in I’ll Be There. The very first time Nya heard the song, she instinctively understood the pact. Kuka had raised her to value the traditional sacredness of words – pieces of the BaNtu story which, together with her mission, would make their cultural universe whole. But after reading through the recent article with its close-up face shots of fan hysteria from some European concert venue, kuka could not disguise his mounting alarm about the dangers of this chosen track in his grand-daughter’s journey. Nya’s absence – four years, with another two to go – in the distant, culturally estranged American wilderness, only fueled his fears.

“This does not look like our BaNtu way,” kuka continued to tut-tut, disapproving of the photos of typical concert pandemonium as if they were unseemly displays of public porn. “Nothing good can come from this activity by those careless, greedy fools who cheapen our oral traditions and exploit our cultural resources like they did in colonial days, while corrupting the heart and soul of UbuNtu!”

“Wha-a-at?!” Nya exclaimed in response to her grandfather’s unequivocally negative take, frustrated by the space-time warp that was both geographical and generational between them, and on-edge because of the way he’d initially addressed her. It was at times like this that she felt conflicted and inconvenienced about the legendary spirit of great-great-grandmother Nyabingi that was said to inhabit her. With the exception of this particular conversation, kuka always affectionately referred to Nya as kukhu, their ethnic term for grandmother. His kukhu was her namesake and, as kuka was wont to remind her, like now, so much more…

“Kuka, attending the Los Angeles concert won’t make me lose my mind or undo our cultural bonds.”

“Eh-EHH!” kuka exclaimed, cutting her off with an upsurge of phlegm and over-protective zeal. “Grown women throwing their underwear on stage and begging to have this man’s children! Where is UbuNtu in all of this chaos? Surely, even their own men are confused… Look at their eyes!”

Though Nya could probably toss his disgust about the crass spectacle of industrialized entertainment into her private compartment of quaint kuka-isms, she couldn’t ignore his increasing conflict about her abiding fidelity to the cultural pact that she personally still held dear. Her calculated move from Mississippi to California to begin a two-year master’s program in African Studies with a music focus was as close as Nya had come on her journey. Her dismay over the non-existence of Black popular music as a standalone degree program at any campus, she hoped would partly be offset by her being in Los Angeles – the west coast hub of the music industry she had yet to learn about. Kuka’s crisis of faith over a newspaper article at this fresh stage in her journey was heartbreaking.

“Remember the saying: woman controls life… and man is a servant to life?” kuka asked, his cajoling tone suggesting that he had heard his grand-daughter’s heartbreak. Kuka waited patiently for Nya’s reluctant affirmation, knowing full well that she didn’t want to lose the ancestral blessing he’d sought and bestowed upon her. “And do you also remember that question you were always afraid to ask, kukhu…?”

Imagining she was looking up over kuka’s shoulders from the floor of the verandah where she loved to sit at his feet as a child, Nya envisioned her mother approaching with a hard look. Her eyes were never soft for her eldest daughter. Kuka wouldn’t need to turn around to see his daughter-in-law. The tension in his granddaughter’s body registered that she still felt like the eight-year-old who, after returning from a neighbor’s house where she’d watched a BBC show and an American western with her brother, was locked out of their family home for several hours that night – with only her mother’s old King James version of the bible, a glass of water, and a blanket – while her brother was allowed in. When Nya cried on her grandfather’s shoulders about her sense of unwelcome in her life, kuka simply reminded his kukhu’s namesake about her mother-tree in their village compound – the place where he reverently insisted that the legendary Nyabingi had chosen to be reborn. In her.

The sound of squirrels chasing each other up and down the rough bark of the pine trees that enclosed the upper meadow suddenly invaded Nya’s thoughts. Disoriented, she reflexively groped around wondering why the Mississippi magnolia tree and late summer fragrance of its blossoms were missing from her space, given their daily acquaintance over the past four years. The sounds of children delightedly splashing away in a pool in the adjoining meadow also seemed as out of place as the dry late-August breeze. Corralled by the muted hum of boulevard traffic outside the campus perimeter, Nya’s meanderings gave way to a slow grimacing burp as she returned to the therapeutic lull she always found in trees.

“This is your journey now, kukhu. Your understanding of the cultural gifts that were given through song on your behalf may be very different from this musician’s desires, or consciousness of his own purpose,” kuka had advised in softened, parting tones following what for Nya felt like their first ever real argument. “If none of my words sink in right now, hold fast to knowing that you are in this new city primarily for your BaNtu. I advise you strongly to remain open to how our ancestors guide your footsteps, especially after I question them once again on this new situation of yours, OK?”

“I will, kuka.” His sigh over the phone sounded weary. It was tinged with an edge of desperation that overrode the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.3.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-8015-8 / 9798350980158