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RIP, Ali

In some grainy footage I still have of The Cypher, AliThatDude is alive and well. He’s ten years younger, sprightly and just as slight. A storm is brewing beyond Jojo’s large, industrial windows and Windhoek’s hip-hop heads scurry in, rain-blessed and ready for some rap.

We didn’t know it then but it’s the kind of night that stays with you amid a rose-coloured era that will break your heart a little every time it comes to mind. The city’s downtown art scene is alight in ways that a decade of decay makes hard to imagine.

Spoken Word, Song Night and Free Your Mind, a rowdy rotation of poets, singers and comics, are regular features at The Warehouse Theatre. Jojo’s Music and Arts Café is fresh on the scene and has come to change our creative lives. The WiFi is free whether you’re balling, broke or just need a place to be. The book and vinyl collection are an education and the stage welcomes whatever wills itself into existence.

Within the artistic microcosm that thrums and thrills between the two venues, Black Vulcanite’s Mark Mushiva, Nikolai ‘Okin’ Tjongarero and Alain ‘AliThatDude’ Villet are hip-hop royalty.

Verses from ‘I Hope They Write’, off Black Vulcanite’s seminal first project, ‘Remember the Future’ (2013), have long been ingrained in brains eager to consider Namibia, Africa and the world at large through cerebral, eloquent, homegrown hip-hop.

When Ali takes The Cypher stage, ‘Black Colonialists’, Black Vulcanite’s tremendous debut album, is a year away but everyone knows great things are coming. Ali’s swaggy, articulate, rapid-fire flow mesmerises the crowd and earns props from fellow The Cypher rappers The Boy Jay, Mappz, KP Illest and Malkovich while event host Harry Msimuko fans imaginary flames.

Ali, on his own, beyond the phenomenon that is Black Vulcanite (BV), has been busy with it and it shows.

After ‘Black Colonialists’, the next eight years will see devotees baying for the return of BV. But Ali, like his luminous brothers, will largely be exploring solo ambitions. I catch up with them in 2017. I write a feature, ‘Where in the World are The Vulcanites?’, to allay any fears of a break-up and to have the promise of a new album in writing.

Updates from all over the world assure me that the trio is still making music or performing poetry. Okin is studying in China, Mark is in Venice and diving into creative technology and Ali emails from Cape Town where he’s performing and promoting his mixtape ‘Stranger Things Have Happened’.

Ali’s pivoted to what he describes as “R’n’B, future beats and lyrical hip-hop”. He’s feeling good and finally treating music like a job. He says he’s learnt what working hard for what you want really means and that you should never take your family for granted.

In that moment, it feels like everything is possible. And for someone like Ali, it should have been.

If life tallied what we truly deserve, Ali would have earned points for undeniable rap prowess but he’d have banked just as many for being a kind, generous, gentle and humble soul.

Ali saw people – he saw the world. He spoke truth to power, mused on whether he’d live to see a Baster president, rapped about revolution and, in his later years, he spoke of love, ambition, hope, struggle and, yes, dying.

Lately, in my social media universe, I can’t log in without seeing Ali’s face. The tributes flow thick. They stream in from close friends, fans and Ali’s diverse musical collaborators.

Ali had time for everyone and he wanted us all to win.

“I’m rooting for all of you. We come from dirt, fam. We come from no hope, no belief and look at y’all now? LAND OF THE BRAVE! Take risks, make moves and if you get knocked down get up and dust yourself off. We go again!,” Tweeting in 2019, Ali leaves us more lines to live by.

I hadn’t seen Ali in years. I used to see him organically on the scene all the time. I’d laugh when he yelled “Marth Vader!”, when he gave me a squinty smile, a compliment about my work (especially when aimed at racists) or when he offered a warm hug that instantly eased my sporadic social anxiety.

But one day, I never saw him again.

He lived, he struggled, he tried and left.

With Ali’s death, the shock and the manner of it, an illusion shatters into a thousand pieces. I feel flung back in time, beyond everything that swallowed the creative worlds we built and the people we were meant to be whole.

I always thought we’d build it all back. The spaces, the crowds, the verve. But life makes no promises. No, just one … death.

What lies beyond is where we’ll find Ali.

Flow fierce, mic ablaze.

Free.
– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com

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