THE SONG AS ARCHIVE
To understand Stimela’s 1986 opus ‘Look, Listen and Decide’ is to understand the condition of the Black South African subject at the height of the State of Emergency. Released in a year when the apartheid state declared war on its own people, when detention without trial was normalised and the airwaves were policed, the album did not merely entertain. It instructed. It theorised. It documented.
Raymond Chikapa Enock Phiri (1947-2017), guitarist, bandleader, and organic intellectual from Nelspruit, understood what many failed to grasp: that under conditions of unfreedom, popular music becomes the most rigorous form of political theory.
Stimela — the steam train — was not a metaphor chosen lightly. It invoked the migrant labour system, the backbone of Southern African capitalism, the very train that carried men from Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho and rural South Africa to the mines of the Witwatersrand. It was an African signifier in itself.
THE HISTORICAL CONJUNCTURE: 1986
The year 1986 cannot be treated as an arbitrary chronological marker. It represents a definitive historical conjuncture in the trajectory of the South African liberation struggle and, by extension, the African condition.
· Firstly, on 12 June 1986, the apartheid state declared a nationwide State of Emergency. This was not a routine security measure, but a formal declaration of war by the state against the majority of its population, granting the security establishment unchecked powers of detention without trial, censorship, and extrajudicial force.
· Secondly, 1986 marks the recording of Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’, an album on which Ray Phiri’s distinctive guitar idiom was central to introducing South African musical forms to a global audience. This collaboration occurred in direct violation of the United Nations-endorsed cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa. It generated profound and legitimate contestation within the African National Congress, the United Democratic Front, and the international anti-apartheid movement regarding the politics of cultural engagement under conditions of oppression and the exploitation of Black artistic labour within global capitalism.
· Thirdly, 1986 witnessed the intensification of both mass mobilisation led by the United Democratic Front (UDF) — the internal wing of the liberation movement — and simultaneous, systematic state repression aimed at its decapitation.
Within this context, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), which functioned not as a public broadcaster but as an ideological apparatus of Afrikaner nationalist hegemony, proscribed Stimela’s preceding work “Whispers in the Deep.” The basis for the ban was its explicit exhortation: “Speak your mind, don’t be afraid.” The prohibition reveals the state’s recognition that cultural expression constituted a material threat.
Therefore, ‘Look, Listen and Decide’ was not released into a free market of cultural commodities. It was released into a war of ideas, where sound itself was a contested terrain of struggle.
THE TRILOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: LOOK, LISTEN, DECIDE
The title ‘Look, Listen and Decide’ must be understood not as a lyrical refrain, but as a deliberate methodology. Phiri constructs an epistemological sequence that directly counters and seeks to dismantle the epistemology of apartheid.
Look (Ukubuka/Ukujonga/Go Lebelela): The Decolonization of the Eye
Apartheid, as a system, was predicated on the systematic refusal to show or see. It required the invisibility of the township to the suburb, the invisibility of the mineworker to the shareholder, and the invisibility of Black suffering to white citizenship.
To “look” is therefore positioned as the primary act of defiance. It operationalises Frantz Fanon’s sociogenic principle — the imperative to perceive the structure itself, to see the train as a total system, to identify who occupies first class and who is compelled to stoke the coal. What Phiri demands is not passive sight, but critical visual literacy: a decolonised way of seeing that refuses the distortions of the apartheid gaze.
Listen (Ukulalela/Ukumamela/Go Reetsa): The Recovery of the Ear
Jabu Sibumbe, Stimela’s co-architect and bassist, has noted that the band’s sonic identity was shaped by LM Radio (Radio Lourenço Marques, 1936-1975), a transnational broadcaster that fused Crosby, Stills and Nash with mbaqanga, gospel with township funk.
To “listen,” in this context, constitutes an African act. It is an instruction to attend to what was systematically excluded from the broadcasts of Radio South Africa — to the whisper in the deep, to the oral archive, to the shebeen discourse, to the funeral oration, to the clandestine underground meeting. Under conditions where truth could not be spoken openly, truth was whispered. To listen attentively was not a passive act; it was a strategy for survival and a mode of political education.
Decide (Ukunquma/Gqiba/Go Tseya Sephetho): The Reclamation of Agency
This represents the most radical injunction of the triad. The apartheid state, and indeed the broader colonial project, is predicated upon the fundamental denial of Black decision-making capacity. The institutional architecture of oppression — the Bantustan, the passbook, the labour bureau — are all technologies designed to decide on behalf of the African subject, thereby negating his or her sovereignty.
Phiri’s counter-injunction — you must decide — is therefore not an articulation of liberal individualism. It is a call for collective self-determination. It resonates with what Kwame Nkrumah theorised as the African Personality and what Amilcar Cabral conceptualised as the return to the source: the restoration of the African people’s right to define their own history and future.
As Sibumbe prophetically observed years later: “If you look at those lyrics now, they seem to be asking the question: ‘After freedom, what is going on?’ It is like we have to look, listen and decide again.” This reflection confirms the enduring theoretical relevance of Phiri’s methodology beyond the apartheid conjuncture and into the contemporary post-colonial condition.
Stimela as All-African Institution
Stimela’s compositional structure defies narrow ethnic categorisation, a categorisation which itself was a central instrument of apartheid ideology through the Bantustan system. What I mean here is that being a Xhosa or Yoruba is not contradictory but a sign of collaborate diversity amongst Africans.
Phiri, as the son of a Malawian migrant guitarist, embodied a transnational lineage. His guitar praxis synthesised multiple traditions: jazz-funk infused with the logic of the Malawian thumb-piano, mbaqanga basslines rooted in South African urban experience, and American soul. This sonic assemblage was fronted by vocalists such as the late Nana Coyote, whose interpretive genius was grounded in township traditions.
This configuration represents the practical realisation of a collaborative African assembly. It is not a conference slogan or a diplomatic abstraction, but a lived, audible groove — a material demonstration of cultural integration across colonial borders.
Furthermore, the band’s creative methodology itself constitutes an African-centred epistemology of production. As Sibumbe recounts: “Ray would start mumbling something until he had a melody… it would simply come along the line, like a vibe from a shebeen.” There was no predetermined, rigid song structure, no rotation or formulaic arrangement imposed in advance.
This communal, fluid, and iterative process stands in direct opposition to Western formalist conceptions of musical composition, which prioritise written notation, fixed structure, and hierarchical authorship. Stimela’s method was oral, collective, and experiential — rooted in the communal ethos of the shebeen, which under apartheid functioned as a crucial space for Black sociality and intellectual exchange. It affirms an African creative paradigm where the song emerges through collective feeling rather than individual dictation.
THE UNFINISHED TASK
‘Look, Listen and Decide’ achieved gold certification, exceeding 100,000 units sold, without any support from state-controlled radio. This commercial fact is politically significant. It demonstrates that the people had already engaged in the methodology Phiri prescribed. They had looked. They had listened. They had decided, independent of and in opposition to the official channels of communication.
The contemporary relevance of this trilogy is uncompromising. In the present conjuncture, characterised by neocolonial economic arrangements, systematic information warfare, and the proliferation of disinformation through digital platforms and social media, Phiri’s epistemological sequence is more urgent than ever.
The train, Stimela, is still running. The fundamental questions of political economy that it symbolises remain unresolved:
· Who is driving it?
· Who owns the tracks?
· Who is compelled to load the coal?
· And who possesses the courage to look critically, to listen attentively, and finally, to decide collectively on its destination?
Phiri consistently maintained that the song is king. Yet, his life’s work was premised on a deeper understanding: that the people themselves must constitute the kingdom.
Raymond Chikapa Enock Phiri departed on 12 July 2017 in Nelspruit, Mpumalanga. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver by the South African government for his contribution to South African music. His guitar is now silent. His instruction endures as a methodological imperative for the future of the African continent.