AFRITUNES WEEK 115 - "Mamela! (Listen!)" Original Song by @jasperdick

Hello everybody on HIVE, and especially the AFRITUNES Community. My name is Jasper, and I'm writing (and singing) to you from Cape Town, South Africa! Welcome to Week 115 of AFRITUNES.

I love South Africa and some of the special flavours of music we get here, and I look forward to doing a few posts on AFRITUNES to bring you music from South Africa, or to show you my original songs that have South African inspiration…

After 7 weeks of playing some of my favourite South African songs (there will be more), I thought it might be nice to throw in the odd original song I’ve written myself, but where I know that I’ve been influenced by a traditional South African musical style, or where I use some words from another local South African language.

Today I would like to sing you an original song I have written called “Mamela!”.

“Mamela” means LISTEN in both isiZulu and isiXhosa, the two most widely spoken local languages here in South Africa. It tells the listener about how our current government has let the country down through a mixture of incompetence, corruption and focusing on the competition between factions within the ruling party, rather than focussing on the needs of the people and combatting our huge problems of poverty and unemployment.

On 29 May 2024, we get to vote in our next elections – 30 years after our first Democratic Elections that marked the end of Apartheid in 1994. The first two Presidents of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) did pretty well, but that generation has now been replaced by disgustingly corrupt Politicians who seem to steal everything, while our most basic services like electricity, water, roads and railways are falling apart.

South Africa has a violent crime level that can only be rivalled by the worst places in South America. I remember reading that we have literally the worst statistics for fatal stabbings in the entire world! As for income inequality, according to this wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality), South Africa has the WORST gini coefficient of all the countries they managed to get data from!

While it seems likely that the ANC will still get more votes than any other party, there is a good chance that they will finally score below 50% and will have to work in a coalition with another party. Not perfect, but hopefully a good start to them either fixing up their act, or losing even more support next time! So, I think this song “Mamela” is describing how more and more people, across all races, are feeling these days…

Lyrics for “Mamela” by @jasperdick (original)

Your father died a poor man, my friend
He struggled to survive
They said it would get better in the end, oh Baba…(Baba is a term of respect, meaning “Father”, for a man that is senior to you here in South Africa)
But the jobs did not arrive

Mamela! My brother!
Can you feel the anger that burns within you?
They’ve let us down

They say that they will help you today
But you will not forget
They’ve made you the same promise before, oh Baba…
They have not kept it yet

Mamela! My brother!
Can you feel the anger that burns within you?
They’ve let us down

They tell us lies… so don’t believe them…
If they don’t lead us, then we don’t need them…
We can fix it… if we work together…
Don’t let them make us… hate each other…

Mamela! My brother!
Can you feel the anger that burns within you?
They’ve let us down