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The Jazz Goblin & His Rhythm
Brian Chikwava
December 05, 2005

Read Kubatana's interview with Brian Chikwava

Independence Day, Wednesday, 18 April 2001. I still remember the morning clearly enough. Save for my suitcase and sax, the bulk of my grubby belongings were still scattered in the open courtyard. Over the city of Harare, a dirty grey sky sagged like a vagrant’s winter rag, but I couldn’t care less. I had just moved into my new bedsit flat. One I didn’t have to share with anyone. Not with pimping goblins again. Never!

The bedsit was in a state; paint peeling off the walls and ceilings, a quarter of the parquet floor tiling coming off. A broken geyser. Still I didn’t mind. The squalid loneliness of my new home was a welcome relief. Whilst I felt I now understood Harare and its people, I also felt that there was something that I had completely misunderstood about the city; perhaps nine months is not long enough to fully understand a city. Before he died, my grandfather always said you can never really know a place until you have 1) fallen in love with its music 2) fallen in love with its women and 3) tried the mbanje that grows out of its soil. I had done all but fall in love with Harare women, and my faith in my grandfather had deserted me. But for completely unrelated reasons, I thrust my hand into my junk filled pocket and excavated a sachet of mbanje. I rolled it with care; Malawi gold; the best that you could get in Harare then. With hindsight, I think this may be where I went wrong because Malawi gold was smuggled from Malawi. I avoided Harare grown mbanje because I imagined there was not much difference between smoking it and smoking my grandfather’s white beard. ‘See where you got it wrong? You didn’t smoke mbanje from Harare,’ I can imagine him croaking.

As I puffed away I could hear the wailing of sirens from a distance. Being Independence Day, I knew it could only be Uncle Bob’s motorcade on its way to the National Sports Stadium where he would be addressing the nation; reminding it again why it should never forget the liberation struggle. I admire Bob, but for reasons that are completely different to those held by his ministers who dread dropping out of his rear. I just like confidence tricksters.

Sitting on the dusty floor, I rolled more of my Malawi gold and started to reflect. It had been nine months since I left Bulawayo for Harare. My mother had thrown me out of the family home because, as she had put it ‘I’m not disowning you my child, but it brings bad luck for a woman to keep looking after a child who has grown a beard.’ I didn’t have much of a beard, but I didn’t want to start another quarrel. When I got off the bus in Harare, I flung my bag over my shoulder and headed straight for The Terreskane Beer Garden. I didn’t want to go to my cousin’s house straight away because I wanted to defer exploiting her hospitality for as long as I could; but I also wasn’t quite ready to immerse myself in her heroic domesticity. She had a couple of toddlers and had just had twins that cried all the time and stuck to her breasts like ticks. It made conversation with her a bit like shovelling coal onto a truck with a teaspoon. And the arrival of her husband from work did not change much either. After walking into the house, he would come to stand in the kitchen doorway in his grey suit. Looking startled, either by my presence or what had become of his life, he would remove his heavy-rimmed glasses, rub his eyes, before saying ‘Hullo Jabu.’ Then he would disappear to change his clothes. After that, I would only see him pottering around in flip flops, never saying much, never listening to much; just waiting for an opportunity to give my cousin another baby.

I remember stopping to buy a cigarette from a street vendor at the corner of Herbert Chitepo Avenue and Second Street, not far from The Terreskane or TK as everyone called it. I put my bag down, stretched my shoulders and yawned. My bag was fat with a pumpkin that my mother had asked me to take to my cousin, two pairs of jeans, a couple of t-shirts and an African shirt that was Made in Malaysia.

‘Une Madson?’ I asked. The vendor nodded, opened a box of Madison Red and shoved it into my face. I took one cigarette and lit it.

‘I’ve got a pumpkin, you can have it for a good price,’ I said to him after my first puff. He smiled, shook his head politely and stared straight ahead as if I wasn’t there at all. I picked my bag and left him alone.

I contemplated first dropping the constipated bag at my cousin’s, but knew it would be an involved process, requiring excuses, a bunch of lies and a host of other forms of deceit that would leave me carrying a skipload of guilt. Where would I dump such a load? I had been to Harare several times, but not enough to know where its psychological garbage dump sites were. In the end I just went to The TK and got drunk.

The TK is a place that writhes with sleep starved civil servants, labourers, prostitutes, musicians, thieves and daring tourists, all after foul sex and disease. Still I had not counted on coming across The Jazz Goblin on that very first night.

The Jazz Goblin.
Wicked boy!

I’ve had lots of time to reflect on that first night now that they have locked me up in this south London mental asylum; the psychiatrist says I hear voices, but I’m not sure he’s aware that’s just new Labour using him to plug their dogma about choice. The only voice I hear these days is clearly that of The Jazz Goblin; I don’t need anyone giving me hundreds of other choices and confusing me.

I remember that I was anxious to introduce myself to him on the first night, but couldn’t pluck up the courage; I had to psyche myself up for two weeks before doing it. People dubbed him The Jazz Goblin because his band was called The Jazz Goblin & His Rhythm; I just liked his confidence. He was their frontman, ripping it out on vocals and guitar, propping his performance with clichéd showmanship: ‘You drop and die on the dance floor, you on your own. You wan stop us having fun?’ he would bark into his mic. He was accompanied by two absent minded musicians; Zuze, on pennywhistle and Costa on percussion. But it was his colourful following that did it for me: hard drinking clerks, mbanje vendors, Figo; a football crazy security guard who also sold mbanje, and nearly always, a troupe of girls that lived by a motto they never uttered: wherever I lay my punani that’s my home. I liked the set up; I had to join The Jazz Goblin & His Rhythm even though I knew they were rubbish. It would be an interesting entry into Harare’s live music scene anyway, I thought then.

Joining the trio was easier than I expected. Tafi seemed pleased by my desire to be part of his band. I thought he was simply a useful idiot. Tafi thought I was kool, I could tell but didn’t know why. Maybe it was because I had approached him with a fist-on-fist greeting and he had fumbled with an open hand before folding it to reciprocate my salutation. Then, I knew I had the upper hand. I was more streetwise; I had dictated the way this jazz goblin greeted me. I felt kool.

The downside of this is that koolness always comes with a grossly magnified awareness of self invention. Because you are all too aware of your own self invention, you see it in other people, and lose your nerve when you see someone being kool with satanic deftness. That happened to me when I asked Tafi on what days the band rehearsed. He threw his head back on his chair, lit a cigarette, blew smoke up into the air and shrugged his shoulders with a dab of detached swagger. ‘Just bring your sax when we have a gig. You can play what you want, no problem.’ My heart leapt. He looked kool. Really kool. For a moment I worried that I would be rumbled in that psychological hide and seek. That was the first time I remember being overawed by his presence.

Over the coming weeks new things began to emerge about Tafi, but they did little to diminish the effect he had had on me. For instance he carried his guitar everywhere. I learnt that this had nothing to do with his dedication to his craft but a housing issue. I had also heard that he spent his afternoons at Market Square being hired, along with his touting chums, to unleash violence on intransigent members of the public. But by the time all this came to my realisation it was too late. I was already caught up in the affairs of The Jazz Goblin & His Rhythm.

I had just got a job as a motor mechanic apprentice and was moving out of my cousin’s place into a two bed flat some ten minutes walk from The TK. I was looking for someone to take the other room. That’s when The Jazz Goblin came to me to say ‘I can take the other room and can look after the flat during the day when you are at work.’

I sensed an implicit threat of malicious burglary, yet I wasn’t ready to live with Tafi so that he could guard the flat against himself. After an awkward silence I answered, ‘As long as you’re happy with the rent. It’s Z$10,000 a month.’

He fell silent, threw his half finished cigarette onto the floor, and took his time to put it out by grinding it with the sole of his shoe. I knew him well enough then to know that he could not afford to throw away half a cigarette, but I didn’t want to let it bother me even though I sensed something lurking beneath his calm exterior.

A couple of days later after a gig he asked me if he could spend a night at my flat. ‘Just tonight. I won’t bring the girls,’ he said. ‘Yea, no problem,’ I said trying not to sound thrown off. You don’t want someone thinking that you are sensing their threats, it gives them an upper hand. Inside I was praying that it would be just the one night.

When I came from work the following day I found him still in the flat. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want it to look like I was kicking him out. That would ruin the dynamics within the band, I reasoned. But he had eaten all my bread. I locked myself up in the bathroom for an hour while he strummed his guitar and smoked mbanje in the lounge. For the first time I hated the smell of mbanje. Tafi looked too comfortable in the flat. I consoled myself with the fact that he could not possibly hijack the other room because a colleague from work was going to be moving in over the weekend. Half an hour later I was back in the bathroom kicking myself for having just told Tafi he could stay until Saturday. He had just gazed at me vacantly and continued strumming his guitar when I expected gratitude. My insignificance weighed down on me.

I know it may look as if I didn’t like Tafi, was scared of him or something like that. That may be true, but I also had other plans for the flat. After thinking about it over the previous month I had decided that this being the first time I was living independently, I would turn the flat into an environment with which I would be able to make an emotional connection. I had read from an interior deco magazine that ‘emotional connection’ was the in thing. But I wasn’t sure I would be able to create such a place while living with a jazz goblin. I figured out that for me, this meant sticking fotos of my family all over the flat; a kind of shrine to my family: my mother, sister, my grandfather, my disappeared father, and my late younger brother who was run over by a truck at the age of nine. Looking at his fotos I remembered him for his grasp of the concept of ‘intention’. One day he bawled after I threw a lemon at him because he kept following me around in the house, stopping me from stealing my mother’s condensed milk.

When my mother asked him what was wrong, my brother had said I had narrowly missed hitting him with a lemon. My mother thought he was being ridiculous. So did I. But that was because I failed to appreciate that what he was querying was my intention to hurt him. This may explain my unwillingness to appreciate Tafi’s intentions when he asked to spend just one night at my flat.

When on Saturday, my work mate, Andrew moved in, Tafi simply dragged the reed mat that he slept on into the lounge. Save for a Tonga stool, the lounge was raving empty anyway so I didn’t say anything; I wanted to preserve my street cred. A month later Tafi had successfully drilled himself to eat Andrew’s food during the day while remaining impervious to any protests. Andrew promptly moved out of the flat sneezing distress. Unlike him I was not affected by Tafi’s eating habits as I had quickly stopped buying any food and only ate out. With Andrew gone Tafi quickly hauled a horse sized prostitute into the vacant room. He called her Bhiza Ramambo – the emperor’s horse.

Another month down the line, my ‘emotional connection’ project looked like a preposterous endeavour and if I had died pursuing it, my epitaph would probably have read ‘died of misadventure.’ Tafi owned both the flat and myself; the band rehearsed at the flat and Tafi told me when to come in on a song. He even told me who to buy mbanje from, which meant mbanje vendors that he had not yet fallen out with for abusing the credit they gave him. He bought fish on credit from a fishmonger who regularly came to our block of flats and expected me to pay.

‘The fish was for the family,’ he would remind me and I would nod sheepishly, knowing that ‘family’ meant Tafi since I never even once tasted the fish. But there were times when my resentments pushed me to challenge the unfairness of our silent agreement. Then I would try to bring the matter of the rent up; Tafi would simply slither into his less fathomable persona.

‘You know why I sometimes write poetry Jabu?’ he would ask.

‘Why?’

‘It’s a better substitute for things that I sometimes feel like doing,’ he would say, rolling some mbanje. Not knowing if this was meant to be a threat or performance poetry I would ask, ‘What do you sometimes feel like doing?’ but he would not answer. Instead he would start strumming his guitar, his guttural voice softly:

I ignored him.

Come the beginning of April 2001, Tafi was demanding that I make him tea and bring it into his room because he was band leader. By then, the emperor’s horse had bolted out of the stable with The Goblin’s guitar. It turned out she had been servicing The Jazz Goblin on credit and in the end had told him that if he was not prepared to pay up, he should buy himself a rubber punani. ‘There are plenty available for sale now!’ She had screamed from the front door. I kept well out of it because I didn’t want what Tafi owed her to end up as another family expense. That wasn’t difficult given that I had paid every time I mounted his majesty’s horse. In return, she had been generous with genital lice, which I began to suspect originated from Tafi. I think during that time I may have had a couple of nightmares in which armies of lice were marching into my room, instructed by Tafi to sieze control of my body. I can’t be sure though; Harare upset a lot of certainties in my life I tell you.

Anyway, at the time The Jazz Goblin was being told to downgrade to rubber if he couldn’t afford the real thing, I owed workmates nearly a Z$120,000. That’s six months’ wages. Everything seemed strange then; from the wall in the lounge, my grandfather stared with ever narrowing eyes, my brother chuckled ceaselessly, my mother was giving me that eye of hers, while my father remained completely disconnected.

Then one Friday evening I came back from work to find that Tafi had moved a pair of prostitutes into the flat. One, Maria, had lost her front teeth but said that the feel of her gum was a delight to the one eyed snake, while the other, Ranga, said for Z$3,000 she could make me cry. ‘$5,000 for both of us?’ Maria offered. Sitting on my reed mat, his eyes having turned into wicked slits, Tafi was puffing mbanje from a corner of his mouth and likely calculating his cut. Without a word I scurried into my room and found myself taking stock: a pimp in his vice shack with his vice girls? That was it for me. I spent the following week quietly plotting a stealthy exit. On the 18^th of April, when Tafi, Maria and Ranga left the flat for free food and a free football match at the independence celebrations, I made my move.

I’m not going to go into the boring details of it except that for a loaf of bread each, I hired a rag tag platoon of street kids to carry my belongings. In just under an hour and a half my independence had been won. That’s why I still remember the morning clearly. From the cold floor of my new flat, the rhythm of the jazz goblin was distant. All I could hear coming in through the broken window was the wailing sound of sirens; a horrid creature of folklore was strutting its stuff, on its way to addressing the nation about its hard won independence. I had just won mine. I took another drag of my Malawi gold; through an oval mouth I let out a lariat of smoke that caught my thoughts mid air and brought them crashing down, accumulating and multiplying in the far corner of the cold floor like my mother’s beads. For the first time my thoughts were collected. It felt like home.

©All rights reserved by author Brian Chikwava. Please email at kutamba_hangu@yahoo.com for any enquiries.

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