KULTURE Blues: Needles, Pages & Song

KULTURE Blues: Needles, Pages & Song

Cultural labour rarely makes the headlines. It is the work that anchors the city. It lives in years spent digging through crates, in long hours over a canvas, in long nights crafting and reworking songs, searching for the right word, the right beat, the right flow, the right cadence. It is the slow, repetitive, often tedious work that holds everything in place.

On 1 May, while the full KULTURE Blues Festival waits on the horizon, we gather at Lit.Culture for a different kind of effort. This session is dedicated to the craft, and to the blues as a language of work, memory, and survival. We trace a lineage from the desert blues of Mali, its circular kora rhythms and griot storytelling, to its continuities in Southern Africa. This includes the melancholic strains of Maskandi, the percussive pulse of township blues, and the narrative traditions of unheralded stalwarts such as Tsonga musician General MD Shirinda and Eric Nomvete and the Big Five, of “Pondo Blues” fame. The selections will also draw from the work of Madala Kunene and Amanaz, known for “Khala My Friend”.

It is an opportunity to engage Muntu Vilakazi, Sumthin Brown, Lerato Lichaba, and Wenawedwa as keepers of culture and repositories of history. These are educators, playing sounds not often found elsewhere.

The selectors set the tone for Umzulu Phaqa, a fusion artist and storyteller moving between Afro-soul, house, and hip-hop, carried by isiZulu narratives. Alongside her, Nomashenge brings a live presentation of poetry and song shaped by a lifelong devotion to language, rhythm, and the interior world, where word, faith, and imagination meet.

On the walls, Levy Pooe’s figurative work renders everyday South African life as a public social diary, attentive to gesture, ritual, and conversation. Boitumelo Motau’s practice traces the city as an ever-expanding archive, carrying the histories of migrant labour across generations, where the past persists and returns in the present.

Tables of vinyl and books will be on site. This is the workshop and the archive. On Workers’ Day, we work the blues.

Date: Friday, 1 May 2026

Time: 14:00 to 22:00

Entry: Quicket R150 | Door R200