01-Winnie-075

Rest In Power, Mother

It’s almost 36 years since John Lennon died from an assassin’s bullet outside his home, The Dakota, in Manhattan, New York. Yet they still flock to mourn the Beatles guitarist, from Liverpool, at his memorial site in Central Park.
John Lennon, Bullet, Manhattan, New York, Memorial, Mark David Chapman, July 2016
It’s chilling to think how killer, Mark David Chapman, posed for a photo with Lennon, hours before he pulled the trigger. Chapman, who was a Lennon fan, was imprisoned for life and denied parole many times.
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Across the road from where Lennon was gunned down, his widow Yoko Ono built a 2.5-acre teardrop-shaped living memorial in Central Park. Their Dakota apartment overlooked the park where the couple often walked.
On Lennon’s birthday, October 9, 1985, Ono and thousands fans unveiled the memorial site and renamed it Strawberry Fields; the name of a song he wrote for the Beatles.
As a Lennon fan from Africa, I vowed to set my foot there before returning to the motherland in September. In my second month in New York, weekends passed without visiting the park. I had been promised tours of the Big Apple since I arrived but I stay on the other side of the Hudson River in Jersey City. All my colleagues are on other side in New York City and Manhattan.
At 6PM on a Saturday in May, I was caught up in the moment of despair as it seemed another weekend was going to waste, a text message beeped. It was Karsten Strauss, a colleague.
“Hi Thobile, (do you) still have time to hang out tomorrow? But first a question: are you a fan of John Lennon?”
“Yeah man, I am John Lennon groupie,” I replied.
Apparently Manhattan knows not Sunday rest and never sleeps. I took a train to Manhattan and followed instructions sent to my phone. Strauss was there waiting for me. We walked down a few miles and passed two guards in navy suits and matching marine caps at the gate of the Dakota apartment.
“Where did it happen, officer?” Strauss queried as we passed.
One guard, leaning on a sign that read ‘Authorized Persons Only Beyond This Point’, lowered his head and hit the ground with shiny black shoes. “Right here,” he replied.
As we entered the memorial, the walkway led to a small crowd taking photographs around the black and white mosaic circle with one word on it:  “Imagine”. The mosaic was a gift from the city of Naples, Italy.
Nearby, a busker strummed his guitar, very hard, playing a song I didn’t recognize; opposite him a grey-haired man in a stall sold souvenirs bearing Lennon quotes.
The excitement was overwhelming; I stepped to the mosaic and smiled to the camera with my African swagger. Unbeknown to me I had jumped the queue, I was embarrassed but I offered my sincere apology for the mishap. That’s not how I was raised. In the spirit of Lennon, peace was made.
Something about this memorial stirred thoughts of Africa. In 2007, South Africa mourned the death of a musician cut off in his prime. Reggae musician Lucky Dube was shot dead in front of his children as he dropped them off at a relative’s house in Rosettenville, Johannesburg. The man of sober habits – a non-smoker – died at the hands of carjackers.
Dube, born on a farm in Ermelo, Mpumalanga, was drawn to music after stumbling on instruments in a school cupboard. He released his first album in 1982; two years after Lennon died. He died 27 years after Lennon, and not much older, aged 43, with 21 albums and a record deal with Motown. Like Lennon, Dube carried a torch for peace.
The legacy of Lennon will be celebrated for many more decades in his adopted land. Dube, the man who stuck by his people and preached peace to the end, died with his good name and little else to remember him by other than his songs. There is no park, nor memorial, nor studio, to commemorate a man who meant as much to many Africans as Lennon ever did. Imagine.

Imagine?

During my first weeks in the United States (US), far from Africa; tension gripped a dimmed hall, as did a compelling voice narrating the chilling events of World War 1 more than a century ago. The war raged for more than four years, killing 17 million people and leaving millions more injured and bereaved.
Today, young and old, can sit on a bench and look down at a trench which has a group of soldiers walking in a line through the mud. A warplane soars over the exhausted soldiers. This is an astonishing reenactment of the Great War. It is one of the breathtaking sections of the 48-acre National World War 1 Museum and Memorial in Kansas City in Missouri State.
Since 1920, the National World War 1 Museum and Memorial, previously called the Liberty Memorial Museum, collected artefacts and documents from around the world. With about 75,000 items – ranging from a British soldier’s belt to a huge aircraft – the museum, in partnership with the Edward Jones Research Center, is home to one of the world’s largest Great War collection. This is how obsessed the Americans are about the war; despite the fact the country sent troops to the bloody trenches only in June 1917, nearly three years after the first shot was fired.
One would think the US alone won the war against Germany. They didn&#8217;t, the allies did – including hundreds of thousands of troops from a score of African nations.
Regardless, the grandstanding illusion stands. At the very least, the experience made some sense to the convoluted verses of outstanding poets, TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney, that I struggled to decipher two decades ago.
A short drive away there is life and style in the shape of the American Jazz Museum, that also houses the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. This is a world away from the gore of war.
Jazz legend Charlie Parker, known as ‘Bird’, grew up in this neighborhood. His huge portrait hangs over the entrance and his Grafton saxophone is here. There are many relics to rave about here, but we shall keep it tight: Ella Fitzgerald’s passé sequined gown and matching glasses; Louis Armstrong’s booth with the cover of TIME magazine, priced 20c, dated February 21, 1949. It is a cool portrait of the young Armstrong with eyes cast skywards; a golden crown made of six trumpets rests on his head. Armstrong was the first jazz musician to make the cover of TIME; quite right too.
Then there’s Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue around the corner on Brooklyn Avenue. They say it’s the first grilled meat shop in the US. It dates back to 1908 and its first owner was Henry Perry. The Bryant brothers, Charlie and Arthur, worked for Perry. When the founder died, in 1940, it was up to the brothers to run it and they named it after Arthur. The name stuck, despite ownership changes.
I couldn’t fathom why Arthur Bryant’s is still in business. For over five minutes, tables were heaped with fries, left-overs and leaked barbecue sauces that could drive your appetite out of the window. So, I cast my eye to the wall-of-fame.
Years before Barack Obama, the one who thinks Africans should be grateful for US toxic chicken, was elected as president of the United States, he dined here and took photographs with the staff. So did director Steven Spielberg, actors Danny Glover and Harrison Ford, and Republicans Sarah Palin and John McCain. Anyway, I still prefer my Stellenbosch braai back home to the dry ribs I had. Their famous sauces saved the day.
Phew! A day’s excursion to Kansas was a welcome break from a year’s study, squeezed into two weeks, for this journalist. Back in Columbia, my host city, after a two-hour drive, a New York band called The Wood Brothers was playing at the Blue Note bar. Forty dollars got my Turkish fellow, Gokce Aytulu, and I in and the drinks weren’t too bad for $6 a jug. For the first time in my life, I stuck out like a sore thumb in the crowd of 100 or so whites who found my accent akin to gibberish.
As they say, music is a universal language – who cared about being understood when The Wood Brothers were slaying it?

Tag: Memorial

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Rest In Power, Mother

Imagine?

The American Shock