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A story ten foot tall
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Life without waiting for Brenda
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Time, Space, Change. 
Repairing the tappets of our discontinuity.
An interview with Abdullah Ibrahim

"As musicians we look deep within ourselves, because if we are to provide some meaningful kind of directive through the music, for ourselves, our families, our children and the nation, then we have to resolve those things within ourselves. We have to deal with our demons, so that we can create change in ourselves." 
Abdullah Ibrahim, pianist and director of M7 academy.

Introduction

In 1968, Adolphus Brand from Cape Town - who had been in exile since 1960 - converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdullah Ibrahim. 

He had had one name change before, although it was out of affection rather than conviction. His friends dubbed him him Dollar. Dollar Brand. The young Adolphus was never without a dollar in his pocket to buy the latest American jazz '78s, from the sailors who passed in and out of the Cape Town port. 

***

Abdullah Ibrahim is a big man. When he stretches out his arms they have the span of a small plane. When he plays the piano those big arms take in the universe. And when he talks, those big arms become the universe. Because that is the nature of the man. The universe is in him and he is in the universe.

He only ever wears two outfits of clothing, both designed by him. Loose fitting linen suits that enhance his presence with a Mao tse Tung austerity. He moves slowly - partly from age (he is almost 70), partly stylistically. He has been studying martial arts for more than 30 years now, and the discipline of Tai Chi has given his movement a poetic elegance. Everything he does and says is a study in thought and reason. 

"My martial arts teacher," he explains, "says many people say martial arts weapon is your hands and your feet. No. Martial arts weapon is time space change. Now in boxing they have what is called the one-two punch. They have a left-hand lead. They say if you have a longer lead you have an advantage because you can hit the opponent wih the left hand of your long reach. Because it'll take one second to reach the opponent with the left hand, and the right hand being further back will take 3 seconds to reach there. This the one two punch. 

"And this is also been adopted in our philosophy. The one two punch is how we think. Our jokes are a one two punch, the way we interact with people is also one two punch you see. Our whole lives, even our mindset is set in a one two punch. When we have conversation with people it's a one two punch, a question of how can I outsmart you, upstage you. One-upmanship. This is a South African dynamic, everybody knows everything but nobody knows anything. If you're in South Africa the worst thing you can do is say you don't know or admit you don't know. It would be a major disaster for yourself.

"Now Martial arts says to you, if it takes one second for the left hand to reach the opponent, it will also take one second for the right hand to reach the opponent. This is tototally different. But this is in tandem with Einstein's theory of relativity. So now we live in the nuclear age but we don't understand what it is about. We still don't understand what Einstein said. Einstein said here, e=mc2, energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. Energy into mass, mass into energy. God created us and to him we shall return. It's the same principal but we cannot connect it. We cannot connect it. This is resolution."

1. Time

"They took away time, and they gave us the clock". Abdullah Ibrahim, opening the film A Brother in Perfect Timing

For several years now Ibrahim has been setting up M7 - a music academy, a school of philosophical convergence and a platform dedicated to fostering personal growth and change. It's been an arduous process that has taken in many people and spat them out again. Such is the nature of creating an initiative for change that it must in and of itself go through many changes, permutations and obstacles. 

The time however, seems right now for M7 to fulifl its role. 

"The biggest problem in South Africa," says Ibrahim, "is that we have a disrupted timeline. Historically, politically, spiritually, economically, in people's minds in people's heads. It's like Credo Mutwa says: `we don't know who we are because we don't know who we were'." Other cultural commentators like Jethro Louw the Ghetto Poet and Khoisan activist from Cape Town are saying the same. Our timelines are disrupted. And it began when the rights of indigenous people were dismissed. Jethro says "So much has been taken from us since the beginning of our history that we don't know how to be who we are. 

***

Separation has broken us down completely, continues Ibrahim. "When the settlers came here they told us `you people are heathens, you don't believe in God.' But they never asked us! In San, God is Twekogam, and the messenger is Hgaitsi-Haybib, people call it Haybib for short. This is the tradition of the people. In Christianity God says for every nation we provide a form of worship and for every nation we've sent a messenger. See. So if you say God and Jesus, we say Allah Mohammed, the San say Twekogam Hgaitsi-Haybib. There's no difference. But our minds and our sense of self, have been warped because of this separation, separate, separate, separate." 

***

Music is the one constant thread through this disrupted timeline. Across hundreds of years, our musical tradition has survived, connecting us today with a past, tradition and unity we didn't know existed. It connects us with our history and therefore with ourselves. 

Music, inevitably, was the inspiration behind M7.

2. Space

"I know that time is a distance and distance is space". Johnny Clegg, in I Call Your Name.

There's an interesting spatial trend developing in major cities. They are called transitional spaces, small rest spaces no more than 10 or 20 square meters for city office workers to `come down in' before returning to the family environment. There is clearly a recognition at city management levels that it's necessary to create spaces of peace in our no-time-for-anything no-space-to-do-it-in world. In response to the need to relieve familial stress, a priest in the St John's Anglican Parish of Wynberg has started a transition service every workday evening at his church. It's a space for members of the congregation to move from work mode into family mode and bridge the discord in time and space between work and home. There are very few churches open full time, he says, and so very few spaces for people be alone in a state of peace and thought. There is neither space nor time enough to reflect and be able to find the inner strength and peace that is necessary to make the right decisions in life. 

***

Ibrahim quotes Rumi, the great Sufi poet. "We can only achieve through silence." Is this not surely the greatest space asks Ibrahim? "That space where we are able to engage with the unknown. To be able to engage with God. To wrestle with ourselves. It is in this unseen, inner space that you are eternal. And it is here that the solutions lie." 

Ibrahim created M7 as a response to this need for space. It is a school where philosophies are integrated into a cohesive whole. It is founded on the premise that exceptional musicians are merely a creative extension of exceptional human beings. And that to elicit extraordinary achievement, all areas of humanness must be addressed. And so in the spirit of the martial arts, Islam and Buddhist traditions, M7 is integration. Dance, nutrition, martial art, holistic healing and meditation converge, and the emphasis is internal and spiritual. "People ask me what is M7?", explains Ibrahim. "And I say M7 is you. M7 is whoever you are. We are here simply to guide, to equip you with the tools to enhance yourself. You see, western thinking tells you that because there's a mistake, or what you perceive to be a mistake, you have to find the resolution far away from your base, you see. The truth is that resolution lies within. And so at M7 we must focus on what is within you as the individual. And that is yourself."

M7 is in the Distrix Café building on the corner of Darling and Hannover Streets at the foot of old District Six. It's not a school with lots of rooms and a kitchen and that sort of infrastructure. M7 is one room. A hall on the second floor that is hallowed with the Basil Breakey and Hardy Stockman black and whites of Cape Town's musical heritage. Basil from Cape Town and Hardy from Germany were the photographers that captured the emergence of Cape Town's jazz scene from the late 50s onward. On the wall are Chris McGregor the avante garde pianist, Dudu Pukwana bent over the alto saxophone, Abdullah Ibrahim the grand pianist, Monty Weber the Manenberg drummer and Louis Moholo the fire drummer, Kippie Moeketsi the saxophonist with the cigarette on his lips, Mongezi Feza the scrawny kid trumpeter with the tragic early ending, Sathima Bea Benjamin the singer that Duke Ellington fell in love with and that Ibrahim married… the history of Cape Town city is in these photographs. 

Light shines into the hall in broad rays. It's warm from the sun and the wooden beam floors. 

From one side M7 looks onto the social and political history of our country and the past we have to remember, and on the other, toward the city centre, into the future we have to change. The students, some from Joburg most from Cape Town, step into a space connects them with all of this. From the moment they enter the challenge is set out. You are here to discover who you are. And in achieving that, to assist others in the same. 

3. Change

Where are the lights, there's no lights burning here. 

When he was 19, Mac McKenzie went to see Abdullah play at the Woodstock Town Hall. He was incredible, tells Mac. He went straight home and composed a growling bass driven song called Slow Slow, a song that the great gentelman of the saxophone Robbie Jansen has taken on as an anthem. Robbie growls. "Slow, so very very slow. Change! Change is calling, we're going slow, change is come, change is here. So very, very slow."

Change is always here because change is the greatest potential of self we have. But change is slow because as humans, it appears to be the natural order to be fearful of it. In Africa change has been slow. The move from colonialism to independence to democracy has been a tedious and painful one. In Angola its been almost 30 years, and though the civil war is over, nothing much is changing my Angolan students tell me. "The only way we will change anything is by starting in the families, by changing our own minds. You see nobody even remembers having the right to have a voice, to be heard beyond the home, so we've forgotten that the one thing we can change is the way we see things. That's the only way forward," says Jose Manuel Gourgel.

Bud Powell wrote a song called The Scene Changes. One night in a New York club during intermission they're about to start and Bud is nowhere to be found. They're looking for Bud, they look for Bud but they can't find Bud. Finally the bouncer discovers him in the alley next to the club, he's lying on top of the dumpster looking up at the sky. The bouncer shouts Hey Bud what you doing? Bud replies: I`m changing the scene."

You change the scene from within. If you change yourself, you change the scene. Cape Town's DJ Hamma told me a couple years ago that the only thing you can ever change is yourself. If you change the way you perceive things, then they change. It seems ludicrously obvious. But as Ibrahim says, our tendency is to externalise and shift responsibility. And so in order to realise change, the individual needs to realise his own complicity in the evil of the world. 

Change happens when time and space converge. No time, no space, no change. 

***

Ibrahim: "We are not actually aware of how deep this whole thing has affected us. The trauma of apartheid. We are only beginning to discover ourselves now. We as musicians have had the honour of being able to access this trauma much earlier, and resolve it. It's like dealing with your demons. This is what you call resolution. 

"To give you an example. We had a good friend of ours, living here in Cape Town. One of the wealthiest families, white family. We all grew up together. I used to play concerts for them, go to their homes, and this young lady moved to New York also. So then we had a chance to sit, she had a chance to join us in our normal traditional activity, cultural activity, which is talking. We spend hours and hours, people just sit and talk, like in the townships. In Senegal they have something called Wachtung. Wach means talk. So wachtung is just people sitting together and talking for days. Now we used to do that. This is basically the core of your social acitivity. Because a lot of things get resolved. Time space change.

"So now we are sitting with this young lady who comes from a wealthy wealthy family out in Sea point, and we're talking about our dreams and she's sitting there very quietly and she says you know, I've never told anybody about my dreams. We say what?! No, I never spoke to anybody about my dreams. This is the first time in my life. We say what?! Why?? Because I always dreamt about black people.

"Wow! So here's this kid coming to the breakfast table in this opulent house where she cannot talk about her dreams becaues its prohibited to have black folk in your life. So you could have apartheid during the day when your eyes were open, but when you close your eyes there was noway you could stop that dream. We've all been affected with this. 

"Now how to resolve this. My friend says it very beautifully. He says you see most people have been switched off. Where are the lights, there's no lights burning there? Our purpose [as musicians] is to switch on the light. Our purpose [as leaders] is to flick the switch of illumination."

***

When time and space and change converge, we find place. We arrive in Place when we resolve things. Place is peace of mind and understanding. Place is knowledge of self. Place is resolution. 

It is the responsibility of our leaders to create the platforms that can switch people back on. Platforms for dialogue, exchange and understanding. Encounters where people are able to come to a point of self-realisation. M7 is one such platform. Festivals - such as the great Pan-African arts festival in Brazzaville, Fespam, the MASA festival in Abidjan, the Cape Town Festival - are such platforms. Tourism can be such a platform. We have been so separated for so long that we cannot see the means of healing that separation. And the truth is that it is quite simple. We see it everyday. When people are able to come together across prejudice and disrupted timelines, they find a common humanity that is striking. That is when change happens. That is when resolution comes about. And if M7 is able to create this resolution in people, even if only ten people are changed, it has been successful.

Written by Iain Harris

This story was originally published in Leadership Magazine.