“Hey guys, I got provoked by a very special kind of sickness, that calls South Africa home,” said an email to us from poet and MC Tumi. He’d just walked off a plane coming off a 6-week European tour with his band Tumi and the Volume, and right into the thick of a nationwide uproar surrounding the internationally reported case of a 15-year-old girl at the time claiming to have been raped by two of her high school mates – boys aged 14 and 16.
The case took ludicrous turns: the authorities ruled initially that the boys wouldn’t be arrested as they were busy with exams, and the charges against the boys were dropped for lack of evidence.
Not surprisingly, it hit the collective nerve of a country whose grim rape statistics (1 in 4 South African men admit to it) continue to shade its overall reputation. And so the debate raged. Not least on twitter, where a young blogger Akona Ndungane coined the campaign I Said No based on her own personal experience of assault.
Anyone who knows Tumi knows the plight of women is foremost in his conscience. His seminal poem Yvonne and the song Maria testify to this.
Yet again he put pen to paper over the beat for Kanye West’s Power to make this heartfelt track and debuted it last night with a live performance on South African music magazine programme Live, impressing Angie Stone, who was a guest on the same show and blowing away the massive TV audience. Here is an excerpt of the lyrics, all of which you can find on Tumi’s blog:
I shine my Thomas Edison on this heart-wrenching incident
Butt naked telling it, like surely there’s some better men
Looking at my reflection, cracking on better inspection
What all these headlines mention, is a judgment not just a sentence
Don’t examine the evidence
That is just irrelevant
Cuz Akona’s testament implicates my better sense
I wanna kill that specimen, hang him from a leather belt
But then again, it’s probably best to raise a gentleman
So when he turns fourteen he’d be the one protecting her
And when they talk orgies it wouldn’t make sense to him
But that’s later, this is now, the part to play is big and proud
Brave heart, love the scars away speak it out aloud
Listen to the track here.
