Rehilwe Mooketsi, BA economics and sociology second-year student at the University of the Witwatersrand, is set to undertake a tour that features a series of live solo acoustic music supported by Business Arts Council South Africa and the Wits Transformation and Employment Equity Office.
The singer and songwriter who goes by the stage name Mmadikatara set the tour in motion last year with a live solo acoustic show, Answer Songs to Queerphobia, at the Wits Atrium.
In response to a recent incident of vandalism during the annual Wits Pride month, where anti-queer slurs and other derogatory slurs were written on a communal graffiti wall which had been painted with the colours of the queer community flag, the live concerts are a set of original response songs which address queerphobia.
“To unpack how songs can be a useful platform for communication, one must understand the history behind this particular movement. Response or answer songs were extremely popular in country music in the 1950s and 1960s, as female singer-songwriters responded to an original hit by a male artist, and responded with ‘diss’ or ‘beef’ songs,” Mooketsi said.
Mooketsi said she hoped the tour will be a unique opportunity to foster safe and positive spaces for queer bodies and ‘otherised’ bodies on university campuses in South Africa.
The young muso describes her music as new acoustic music, folk rock, township soul and spiritual with a focus on themes of queerphobia, fatphobia, romantic love, normative privileges, tolerance and the economic problems.
The rest of the tour will take place at five university campuses, Wits University, University of Johannesburg, NWU Mafikeng, NWU Pukke, the University of Cape Town and Monash University.
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