The people need a new myth

The Brother Moves On is not anti-ANC. Their new music rather speaks to the ideals of the liberation movement and asks if this is what we fought for.

Siya Mthembu of The Brother Moves On. (Photo: Tseliso Monaheng).

Johannesburg outfit The Brother Moves On have finally released a full-length album, their first after two EPs and a series of loose songs floating on the internet. We had a very brief conversation with frontman Siyabonga Mthembu during a listening session this past week about the significance of the album, especially following the death of founding member Nkululeko Mthembu.

What was the motivation for this gathering today? 

We wanted to play to a bunch of our friends — the people we hardly get to see — to purge the fact that a brother of ours has passed, and the fact that we need to move on and release an album in the same month without a stop. We needed to touch base before we set out and go play far away again and this helped; it was exactly that healing.

Please speak a bit on the album.

The album is weirdly enough entitled A New Myth. It was titled this while Nkush (Nkululeko) was alive. It was first gonna be The Greatest Hits and we thought we’re not that kind of band. It’s not an album that’s gonna be about buying my mom’s first house, it’s for a group of people who need to know this happened, and that group of people needs a new myth. The space we find ourselves in the world, in our country, in our very lives — it’s a very difficult one. We need a new myth, our old ones are lies to us now, and we know it, it’s obvious.

But why is it that we fail to accept that these old ideas are dying?

Because we haven’t gotten a new one yet …

Here is the first single from the new album.

Further Reading

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.