ONE LOVE: REGGAE: Jonathan Day: Musican, Reader in Transmedia Arts

“I'm going to talk about a track and it's by Tappa Zukie and it's called {quote}Biko{quote}. It was around the time of Stephen Biko's death so this really hit me you know this was a student activist .. a young man who was beat to death in a South African prison. So I lived for a year in South Africa as a child with my parents who went over there with work. So I really experienced, at an age when I don't think people are so critical, as a kid you just see the world you think.. that's it, that's the way it is .. so I experienced apartheid. And coming back and growing older and realising the whole notion and nature of what was happening you know it's incredibly difficult and complex, all the people that I interacted with in South Africa that are black are migrants, as of course the white people are. The indigenous people were all made extinct by the British and the Boer, the Hottentot and the veldt San. So you know I had really powerful feelings about that and people tried to acknowledge what had happened to this young man in that cell. I mean I saw the battles on the street, I saw the beatings froth South African police on black people. And of course Peter Gabriel did a really famous track called {quote}Biko{quote} which I listened to and it's really powerful and he combined that with another one called {quote}Wallflower{quote} which is about somebody incarcerated unfairly. But there was something about that Tappa Zukie track which is so simple, it's kind of mantra like. It sort of repeats the name in a mantra like way that just got, despite those other great tributes, it just got right to the heart in the simplicity of it. You know the line was ' They shouldn't have killed Biko', it just sounds so conversational, so every day and yet somehow in that track was incredibly powerful and that really hit me, you know, that really affected me.”Jonathan Day: Parkside Building, Birmingham City University, 4th April 2018Tappa Zukie: Tribute to Steve Biko released 1978 (From the LP {quote}Peace in the Ghetto.{quote}Jonathan Day
Jonathan Day: Musican, Reader in Transmedia Arts, Tappa Zukie: Tribute to Steve Biko

 

“I'm going to talk about a track and it's by Tappa Zukie and it's called "Biko". It was around the time of Stephen Biko's death so this really hit me you know this was a student activist .. a young man who was beat to death in a South African prison. So I lived for a year in South Africa as a child with my parents who went over there with work. So I really experienced, at an age when I don't think people are so critical, as a kid you just see the world you think.. that's it, that's the way it is .. so I experienced apartheid. And coming back and growing older and realising the whole notion and nature of what was happening you know it's incredibly difficult and complex, all the people that I interacted with in South Africa that are black are migrants, as of course the white people are. The indigenous people were all made extinct by the British and the Boer, the Hottentot and the veldt San. So you know I had really powerful feelings about that and people tried to acknowledge what had happened to this young man in that cell. I mean I saw the battles on the street, I saw the beatings froth South African police on black people. And of course Peter Gabriel did a really famous track called "Biko" which I listened to and it's really powerful and he combined that with another one called "Wallflower" which is about somebody incarcerated unfairly. But there was something about that Tappa Zukie track which is so simple, it's kind of mantra like. It sort of repeats the name in a mantra like way that just got, despite those other great tributes, it just got right to the heart in the simplicity of it. You know the line was ' They shouldn't have killed Biko', it just sounds so conversational, so every day and yet somehow in that track was incredibly powerful and that really hit me, you know, that really affected me.” 

Jonathan Day: Parkside Building, Birmingham City University, 4th April 2018 

Tappa Zukie: Tribute to Steve Biko released 1978 (From the LP "Peace in the Ghetto." 

Jonathan Day