A Chila Nathi Special: In The Golden Wake

Chila Nathi: In The Golden Wake is an intimate night of remembrance, reflection, and solidarity. taking place at the Total Refreshment Centre as part of the EFG London Jazz festival, introducing the explosive Cape Town jazz ensemble, Kujenga, to London for the first time. 30 years on from the ‘official’ end of apartheid, join us for conversations, record-playback listening sessions and live music exploring the afterlives of decades of freedom songs.

Each ticket includes refreshments and, if you attend, we’re pleased to offer a special discount for Sikelela at the Barbican on 24th November.

“They are the future”, is how their mentor Siya Mthembu, The Brother Moves On frontman and curator describes Kujenga. Formed in 2015, their name, meaning “to build” in Swahili, gestures to both their Pan African commitments and communal ambitions. Kujenga’s sound is driven by a steely-punk mettle rooted in communal muscle memory, elegy and aliveness. Inflections of blues, gospel and soulful punk surge through their searching compositions, where the past and present wrestle with the urgent question of survival. Theirs is a resonant, afro-diasporic commons where echoes of Cape Jazz, Cape Malay, Maskandi reverberate to find new expression in conversation with the Black Radical Tradition.

Chila Nathi: In The Golden Wake traces a throughline between releases from Kujenga, the Black Radical Tradition and South Africa’s rich music history. These nights offer a rare opportunity for a close dialogue between artists, activists and audiences to explore the political and artistic legacies of South African history, including London’s place in those stories of struggle and cultural production as a location of both exile and solidarity.

The band released their debut album Nationality in 2019, and followed it with their sophomore offering In The Wake in March 2024. To date, they have headlined festivals such as Cape Town International Jazz Festival (alongside their friends, Kokoroko), Standard Bank Joy of Jazz. They were the 2024 recipients of the Newcomer of The Year at the Mzansi Jazz Awards and were nominated for a SAMA Award nomination for Best Jazz Album.

For their latest release, In The Wake, co-founder of Kujenga, Zwide Ndwandwe, took inspiration from scholar Christina Sharpe’s text ‘In The Wake:On Blackness and Being’, which offers a framework for attending to history and the present day experiences of Black people with care. ‘Wake’ refers to the trailing path left behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead and coming into consciousness. The album looks squarely on at global polycrises, asking: “what has it meant to live through the devastations of an ongoing pandemic along with the disasters that preceded it and the doom that has followed it?”

This music asks us to consider how commemorative efforts can numb us to ongoing legacies of the past, whilst calling us to pay attention to present day realities and active sites of struggle. Activist Mariame Kaba writes that ‘hope is a discipline’. In a similar vein, this is music that asks us to forgo the easy victories claimed by liberalism - steadying us to tarry in the chaos of uncertainty long enough to find new strategies for living, or as they would put it ‘to remember our capacity to think, act, dream and love’.

Host or Publisher Chila Nathi