Black common sense

Abstract

abstract This article explores ‘uhuru’ as a critical noun through a reading of the 2020 music video of Sun El-Musician (featuring Azana), ‘Not Yet Uhuru’. A form of rendition of Letta Mbulu’s (1993) ‘Not Yet Uhuru-Akhamandela’, various other echoes of this, conjured in Makhosazana Xaba’s (2019) poem of the same name, are double speak, elegy, repetition and onomatopoeic in action. One of its signifiers appears in the use of the biographical, with uses against a ‘knownness’ of iconographic Black figures, even while the music video appears in a space and time where a ‘new’ signifier of politics is conjured in the image of young black women. Turning to the figure of the Black femme as a belated figure of uhuru, Black common sense is an incursion on and against singular/linear time, os an ‘as is’ sensibility.