Stephen Tsoti Kasumali - "Banakatekwe". I know you have considered it: dismantling your life into its simplest parts, small pieces, discarding everything and emerging into a freer today. Sometimes I consider it as I am staring at a plot of grass. This lawn, this green lawn, just leaves. This song, just singing and handclaps and a drumstick and a bare guitar. But more often I consider the simplification of my life when I am reflecting on its present complexity. This life, this busy life, full of so many moving parts. I look at all these pieces and wonder how many other lives could be constituted from this stuff. Is the stuff of my life enough stuff for three lives, five, fifteen? Would my one complicated life be able to be reconstituted as fifteen simple lives? Plainer, happier lives, like singing and handclaps and a drumstick and a bare guitar? Not poor lives, ramshackle lives, like a row of shoeboxes - just lives like green lawns. It is too easy to fetishize the sound of faraway, to diminish the complexity of another person's experience purely because it is alien to you. And this is especially true when Westerners look at Africa. I do not believe that Stephen Tsoti Kasumali and the other musicians on "Banakatekwe" have simple lives; their lives are probably as complicated as mine. But "Banakatekwe" is a dream of something easier, freer, made of fewer parts. I wonder if they wonder this too, listening to the recording: Could I make my whole life like this?

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(Photo by Robert Knudsen. It's of Richard Nixon's final lunch before announcing that he was resigning as president of the USA.)