Many people do not know that Malose Malahlela and Rangoato Hlasane, the co-co-founders of Keleketla! Library are the co-founders of innacitycommunity, a then student collective at the then Mariston Hotel in Joubert Park, two blocks from the Drill Hall and the Johannesburg Art Gallery. This student collective started in 2003, 21 years ago.

While innacitycommunity used hip hop as a point of departure, it quite quickly turned into a site in which members could glean the little of what was useful in their respective, alienating Eurocentric curricula – curricula ya boloi – and apply to the collective. A parallel school to exorcise the dominant, pacifying curriculum. As such, innacitycommunity was bigger than hip hop. It was also bigger than a student accommodation, as word on street drew people to our 5 square meter rooms every Sunday, some coming from the townships around the city. Conversely, the collective of course embodied the name, engaged sites beyond the Mariston, including a large scale concert at the then Technikon Witwatersrand in partnership with the campus HIV education peer education campaigns. This was followed by invitation by the Joubert Part Project, then responsible for Arts, Culture and Heritage programming at the Drill Hall, to organise a two-weekend hip hop concert as part of Cascoland 2007. These two out-of-the student accommodation not only cemented out innacitycommunity-ness, but widened and deepened our network, suggesting a graduation from student-collective something bigger.

This collective operated until 2007, when our exit from the cubicles of student accommodation necessitated the grown-up inhabitancy of the charged site that is the Drill Hall, where we opened the wide doors in 2008. That’s how a library moves, with Keleketla! call and response. Taking over from the JPP meant inheriting an already multiyear long soft power cold war to keep the City of Johannesburg accountable for the neglect of a then relatively newly renovated Drill Hall to the tune R10 million. That cold war continues to date. The partnership with HKW is but one of such moves since 2008. And the journey’s far from done, we only just begun to echo line in Reflection Eternal’s ‘The Manifesto’. If you know about the Drill Hall and Berlin, the war metaphors are neither accidental nor glib. If you are in Berlin, join us for intramural, transcendental, spiritual and praxial warfare via a four-course Skaftien:

Bana ba Baloyi? (Sorcerer’s Children?), Side A – A night with Sun Xa Experiment: Concert

Cultural Advocacy for Whom by Who?: Discourse Programme

Bana ba Baloyi? (Sorcerer’s Children?), Side B – A night with Sun Xa Experiment: Concert

Aftershow: Towards 69 Years to the Treason Trial: Listening and Dance Party

If you are at home, don’t fret. Rest assured, as we plastered on the walls of HAU2 in 2018 as part of the 10^th Berlin Biennale that “We are Only Here for your Beautiful Gold”, your Skaftien is coming back home. It will be in the form of an 8-sided vinyl release with new texts, and much, much more intergenerational, interstellar nurturance.