Twenty years ago today, in the single most important moment in 360 years of South Africa’s blood-drenched history, Nelson Mandela walked away from Victor Verster Prison a free man. February 11* is a hallowed day in the local calendar. It may therefore seem inappropriate to profile a noisy, profane rap act named Die Antwoord (Afrikaans for “the answer”) by way of celebration. But, as Mandela marched out of jail into the future, he knew that his release posed a difficult question: Can South Africa transform into a nation united and governed by principles other than race? Die Antwoord, who appear to occupy an entirely different universe from Mandela, are the most articulate answer he could have hoped for.
Over the course of the past ten days or so, the band have been propelled by the likes of Boing Boing, Twitter, Pitchfork, Reuters, et al into the very maw of Fame 3.0. As lead rapper Waddy, a.k.a. Ninja, puts it: “Look at me now! All over the interweb.” Indeed, only two weeks ago, Ninja and his sidekicks Yo-landi “Rich Bitch” Vi$$er and the flabby DJ Hi-Tek were paying dues; now they’re rolling in nunchaku. For their international fans, Die Antwoord are exotic, furious, and, most importantly, new. But what their lyrics mean — or what they stand for precisely — no one in Brooklyn or Paris or São Paulo can say.
Ninja is, at first glance, your typical white trash rapper. He wears his hoodie low; his rangy body is marked with crude tattoos. It takes a second or two to realize that Run-D.M.C. were playing Applebee’s buffets by the time they were of Ninja’s vintage: he is closer to middle age than middle school. He raps in a scattershot mixture of English and Afrikaans; his accent is unfathomable. His lyrics reference the minutely specific to the hip-hop generic: “If you don’t like funerals, Ninja says don’t kick sand in his face,” recalls a South African peanut-butter commercial from the ’80s; “too hot to handle, to cold to hold,” fist-bumps vintage MC Hammer. The clue to Die Antwoord’s raison d’être hides in the intro of their astonishing debut album $O$, where Ninja informs us that, “I represent South African culture. In this place, you get a lot of different things…Blacks. Whites. Coloureds. English. Afrikans. Xhosa. Zulu. Watookal. I’m like all these different people, fucked into one person.” Then Ms. Vi$$er pipes in, dismissing him with a high-pitched “Whateva, man.”
For her part, Vi$$er has a voice like a band-saw powered by helium. She is, even by hip hop’s lofty standards, shockingly profane. (Afrikaans audiences have been appalled, which one assumes is the idea.) Diminutive, and weighing in at less than 100 lbs., she stalks the stage like a heavyweight boxer just before the knockout punch. When she spits out, “I’m the richest bitch with the nicest ass,” we’re inclined to believe her only on the second point. Vi$$er — like the band she raps for — is Afrikaans white trash elevated to performance art.
Zef-rap, the musical currency Die Antwoord have invented and trade in, is born of the badlands that seethe behind Table Mountain in South Africa’s second-largest city, Cape Town. Centuries before apartheid was institutionalized, the Cape flats were seen as the solution to what successive regimes considered to be the city’s most pressing problem, the so-called “coloured” population. The Cape coloureds are a racial mixture of the Khoisan people, white settlers, Malay slaves brought in by the Dutch, and blacks from other areas of southern Africa; their language reflects this mélange. They have long been considered a bastard race, and banished accordingly. (The most tragic of these instances was the razing of District Six that began in the late 1960s.)
The flats lie on a swathe of bitter, barren plateau. Its hoods are defined by rows and rows of single-storey brick houses, rusting chain-link fence, and coils of barbed wire. The streets are owned by the walking dead — crystal meth addicts, drunks, AIDS-emaciated wraiths. There is a vibrant gangland culture, a fuming streak of Islamic fundamentalism, and thousands of good families trying to make a go of it in the mayhem. As such, it is an incredibly rich cultural environment. Zef rap was birthed here, an ungodly potpourri of Top 40 hip hop, chintz house, rave music, DIY beat making, and bad techno. And this is where Ninja spent years, mining for meaning among the violence, the misery, the strong familial bonds — developing not just a style, but an entire persona.
What, one wonders, is an aging white musician from Johannesburg doing biting coloured style from the flats? Ninja’s story, like so many South Africans’, is defined by violence. His father was murdered in a carjacking; his brother committed suicide shortly after he matriculated. Before coming to Die Antwoord, he was a known entity in South African music, most notably with the intellectual hip-hop act Max Normal. Legend tells us that Ninja had his eureka moment when heard an awful beat thumping from a pimped ride driving out of the flats. He moved into the adjoining suburb of Durbanville, starting hanging with gangsters, got some prison tattoos, and gave himself the cheesiest sobriquet he could come up with.
“Rank cultural tourism!” wail the haters. In a country where the wealthy from Johannesburg’s northern suburbs take mini-bus tours of Soweto, a mere twenty minute’s drive from their homes, this sort of criticism is understandable. On Die Antwoord’s latest free download, “Jou Ma se Poes in ’n Fishpaste Jar” (don’t ask), Ninja tells us, “I hang with fuckin’ coloureds coz I am a fuckin’ coloured if I wanna be a coloured. My inner fuckin’ coloured just wants to be discovered.” Which is clearly more of a challenge than an explanation.
Yet understanding why Ninja chose the flats is essential to understanding Die Antwoord. There are, after all, other forms of South African rap, mostly notably kwaito, which had its coming-out party in the Oscar-nominated film Tsotsi. Kwaito belongs to the pantsula — the noble gangsta of the Highveld townships like Soweto and Daveytown, near Johannesburg. The form derives from the bubblegum pop of Brenda Fassie, the sharp horns of Hugh Masekela-era fusion, and gangsta rap.
Kwaito would — could — never welcome an Eminem. Music from the Cape flats is by nature more absorptive. Nonetheless, Die Antwoord take a culturally perilous left turn because Ninja has one more item on his agenda: He is trying to bridge two difficult, disparate musical legacies — coloured music with white Afrikaans hardcore.
When most people, South Africans included, think of Afrikaners, they conjure up a homogenous community blindly following the apartheid über-mind. Not so. There has always been a vibrant Afrikaans protest movement. André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach protested in poetry and prose, Rian Malan in prose and rock. After apartheid, Afrikaans culture predictably split into two cultural streams. One was nationalistic and confrontational, as in the hugely popular anthem lauding the Boer War Afrikaner hero Koos de la Rey. The other was an attempt to redefine Afrikaans culture and create a space outside of traditional nationalistic discourse. Bands like Fokofpolisiekar brought a hardcore punk sensibility to the conversation, and anti-art movements like Bitterkomix undermined Afrikaner nationalism and exceptionalism, viciously lampooning the rugby, barbeque, and lager set.
Die Antwoord are a rap act, certainly, but they are also a way-station along the lengthy road of this punk ethos. The links are clear — members of Fukofpolisiekar and Afrikaans junk-rapper Jack Parow guest on the album. But the differences are telling. Die Antwoord use the patois of the Cape flats, which swallows all, as their idiom. When the Guardian hastily compared Die Antwoord to London white trash garage rap, the paper missed the nuances of Ninja’s brilliant appropriation of Cape flats culture. Die Antwoord remind us in $O$ that South Africa is a mash-up nation. No South African community embodies this more than the Cape coloureds. They are black, white, English, Afrikaans, everyone. By moving to the flats and buying wholesale into local gangsta culture, Waddy is reframing South Africanism anew. While Afrikaans punks positioned themselves in opposition to the ultra-conservative, Calvanist ethos of die volk, what Die Antwoord are doing is not an act of rejection, but an act of embracing.
Ninja has sculpted, both with his flesh and his music, the ultimate South African. He is everything in the country, “fucked into one person.” That he is willing to go so far to embody this idea is thrillingly, gloriously radical. It is also an essential step for the South African generation tasked with healing, so that future generations can answer Mandela’s question — Can we one day unite and govern outside of race? — with a resounding “yes!” Every time Waddy’s wiry form grips the mike and he channels his “inner coloured,” Die Antwoord become an articulation of the country’s potential. I cannot think of a better way to celebrate this, the twentieth anniversary of one of the greatest days the world has ever known.
(Photo by Sean Metelerkamp)
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