African Voices Spring 2020 AVSPRING2020 | Page 7

Early Zake Memories
by Halifu Osumare
© 2020 Reprinted from Paintbrush: A Journal of Poetry and Translation, Vol. XXIII, Autumn,1996.
Kirksville, Missouri, pp.115-122.
San Francisco was alive, then. The Haight-Ashbury was still populated with “real” people, scoping,
searing, often slothful, and always searching. Sure,
writers were drugged out, but they were producing.
Some flower children were still around, but many
had already OD’d on LSD or mescaline or joined
a Mendocino farming commune. Dancers and
musicians were sped-up, but creating new work,
telling it like it was — new movement possibilities,
musical chords, and multimedia “happenings” that
remain some of the measuring sticks even today.
There were few fakes and minimal hangers-on
because it was about putting up or shutting up,
being real or being square, with little room for in-
betweeners.
And there was more. Ethnic Studies had taken
its stand, having received a few licks in the
process from President Hayakawa’s goons over
at San Francisco State University. LeRoi Jones
(Amiri Baraka) had come to town in the mid-60s
and organized the poets, writers, musicians and
directors like Ed Bullins, Marvin X, Jimmy Garrett,
and protégés of Joseph Jarmin into the Black artist
collective, The Black House. We were happenin’
on the West Coast. There was no stopping us. We didn’t need New York, D.C., Chicago, or Philly. We had
Oakland’s Black Panthers and Grove Street College where Black Studies was flourishing. UC Berkeley’s Free
Speech and Telegraph Ave. hippies, and San Francisco’s Experimental College at S.F. State, as well as the
infamous Haight-Ashbury where I lived.
Then along came an East Coast expatriate, via Los Angeles, and the Bay Area was never to be the same.
In the early 70s, we first heard Ntozake Shange on the radio on her show called “The Original Aboriginal
Dancing Girl.” KPOO, San Francisco’s hip subscriber community-based radio station, was where she
played her soul, samba, jazz, reggae, salsa mix with some traditional African and Afro-Cuban thrown in for
good measure. And what’s more, she laced it with her poetry, making it all come together like Mama Ethel’s
homemade bread rising with just the right kind and amount of image-yeast. Yeah, we knew she had something
right away; she was hip! She was where it all came together: the word, the movement, the song, while
screaming loud about the big “put-down” of the white persuasion, yet crooning mellow with the sweetness
of our people’s musical energy, like Langston and Zora before her. She could work up to a pitch, like she was
speaking in tongues like our holy-ghost grandmamas, yet tinged with the polyrhythmic santeria/lucumi sound
of Africa.
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