The brilliant maskanda musician, popularly known as Mgqumani, has been called the South African Michael Jackson; and like Jackson, his luminous career was tragically cut short in his prime. Yet it could also be argued that Mgqumeni never died; that his voice remains vividly alive in the here and now. In this highly imaginative, innovative study, Kathryn Olsen shows that music uniquely enables such reincarnation, providing memory with sensuous synapses that traverse space and time, and make the past an active part of the present. * Jean Comaroff, Alfred North Whitehead Research Professor in Anthropology and African and African American Studies, Harvard University, USA * This book is a true reflection of the realities of what it takes to be a Maskanda Musician, this is also a piece that reveal what sometimes people in the Music industry shy away to talk about. This body of work depicts the ups and downs of the South African Music Industry, but also a showpiece which proves that against all odds it is possible to succeed. This book reveals uncomfortable truths about being a musician in a South African context especially a Maskanda musician. * Bhekani Buthelezi, Lecturer of Music, University of Zululand, South Africa * Kathryn Olsen's extraordinary, multilayered text the moving story of a brilliant young musician whose life was cut tragically short is also a captivating and important book about maskanda, memory, cosmology, living and dead, belonging and unbelonging, and a world made unhomely by poverty and violence. In that world the remarkable has become normal. Was the wrong person was buried in place of Mgqumeni? Is he really a crocodile? Is he risen from the dead? Has his zombified spirit entered the body of another? Why Professor 3 Seconds? Close encounters at the boundary between the real and the unreal are the riveting contexts of Mgqumenis songs, with their negotiation of different and simultaneous identities, their representations of a dichotomous world, their heart-rending expressions of his fear, sorrow and pain, and their visceral awareness of the ever-present possibility of his death. * Christopher Ballantine, Professor of Music Emeritus, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa *
