In a conversation with Gillian Moore and Peter Wiegold, Eugene Skeef contrasts the flowing boundaries of identity and art in his traditional South African culture with the ‘beautiful strictures’ of Western thought and art. His work takes us to the heart of many themes in the book: music coming from a place, music arising out of direct human relationships, the togetherness – or separation – of art and life.

Togetherness and Separation

I grew up in a squalid, violent South African township and there was no privacy; everybody saw everybody’s business. As kids we would laugh and marvel at the fact that we saw people making love in a bush or behind some rickety shack made of corrugated iron with holes in it. We would see what was meant to be private business but was exposed to us. Everything was public. Even when I wrote poems back then, I couldn’t do it in total privacy, so I developed a way of using poetry to go into myself and in that way created something that I could share outwards.

I was brought up to have a respect for everything. We had this concept of ‘ubuntu’. There isn’t an exact English equivalent for that word, but you will understand the meaning of it. ‘Ntu’ means people. ‘Ubuntu’ can translate as ‘A person is a person through other people’. It refers to humans but the expression also goes out to the environment, to the rest of life, so that you treat animals beautifully and so on. For instance, the poaching of rhino is something that is in contradiction with our culture. It contradicts inherent values, which are to live in harmony. Of course there is poverty and colonisation and other things, but that is another story.

Westerners find it strange that the African does not consider him- or herself as an individual. I came here in Thatcher’s time, the time of the focus on the individual – I, I, I. A better translation for ‘ubuntu’ might be: ‘I am because you are.’ So that is my notion of people.

I was thirty when I fled South Africa. Before that, I studied medicine along with Steve Biko.