Under a low bank of clouds, the Indian Ocean thundering before me, I stand looking at a Soccer City made of sand. Facsimiles of the major World Cup stadiums are dotted along Durban’s Marine Parade, and the rangy young architects expect coins in return for their work. Here’s Green Point, there’s Port Elizabeth*, and, behind a gory faux-naif piece entitled “Big Leopard Bites Poor Man,” Durban’s own Moses Mabhida Stadium. In the morning, of course, these works will be swept away with the tide; one doesn’t have to be Jimi Hendrix to locate the dread metaphor inherent in this small slice of beachfront: World Cup 2010 South Africa. Chimera.
The last time I visited Durban, I sat in a dusty, dying colonial-era gentleman’s club in the heart of downtown, interviewing one of South Africa’s ranking captains of industry. His mottled drunkard’s nose was testament to the fact that our mid-morning gin and tonics were a habit rather than an anomaly, and he told me the following: “This country’s major resource is its people and their energy. Soon, my kind will be dead. Then the blacks running the show will have a choice: use the energy, or squander it. This place can go to shit in a hurry. Or it can be the greatest nation on earth. But make no mistake, South Africa is a marketer’s dream — the easiest sell on earth.” This was 2007, and he undoubtedly had the World Cup on what remained of his mind.
I’d left the club, picking my way through a city that was crumbling in on itself, a great dystopian mess battered by a furious southwesterly. Durban: holiday town of my childhood. During apartheid, the city was a seaside playground; in 2007, it was on the verge of ruin. But flash-forward to present day, and I properly understand what the old fellow was talking about. Durban is temporarily reinvented: crime-free, clean, temperate, ebullient. The city’s nature — Zulu meets Indian meets Edwardian English — once subverted, is now fully expressed. It’s real, not the whitewashed sham of the apartheid years, nor the neglected post-transition orphan-apolis. The blacks running the show have done a fine job. The easiest sell on earth, indeed.
Now what? (more…)
Under a bruised sky and a gathering chill — as un-African a tableau as imaginable — a crowd gathers. Fourteen barely clad tribal dancers pronk around a stage in an artfully cobbled square, ringed by wine bars and meze bars and high-end food outlets. This is Melrose Arch, a luxury outdoor mall compound in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Built during the peak of the city’s post-apartheid violent crime wave, it has the simultaneous feel of a hyper-modern shopping emporium and a walled medieval city. Over the course of the World Cup, Melrose Arch has played host to one of Joburg’s most popular fan parks — or fan jols in FIFA-approved local parlance. Ghana’s Black Stars — recently defeated by Uruguay in a nasty quarter-final match that was stolen from them by the devil’s hand — are scheduled to drop by and say, “Thank you, South Africa, and adieu.”
The Black Stars have organized this encore appearance because locals, since the first-round elimination of Bafana Bafana, have embraced the team as their own. Indeed, it seems as if the whole continent has banded together, donning Ghana’s gold, red, and green, blasting those accursed vuvuzelas in an approximation of the Ghanaian national anthem. This pan-Africanism, having nothing to do with leaders the likes of Muammar Gaddafi or Ghana’s first post-independence president, Kwame Nkrumah, feels like the genuine deal. Such is the power of football; it has united a disparate continent, at least for a week or so.
Melrose Arch is the second of two scheduled stops on this impromptu whistle-stop tour, the first being Soweto’s Orlando West district. The drive the Black Stars are undertaking is weighted with symbolism. From Soweto to the northern suburbs: a half-hour trip through the South African divide. From the have-nots to the haves, and everything in between. (more…)
Earlier this week, I found myself traversing two worlds — both of them familiar, both suddenly upside-down. For years, I’ve been commuting between Toronto and Johannesburg, which is not quite as bad as the 400 to Barrie during rush hour, but comes a near second. This week, both cities have been in the news, if for very different reasons. The fifa World Cup Finals and the G20 summit may at first glance seem entirely disparate, but both events have had a profound effect on the narratives of their respective cities. Those narratives, at least this week, are linked, and deserve a review.
Let’s start with Toronto. On a recent Tuesday in June, I sat at a sushi restaurant in the downtown core, staring out at the long line of concrete and chain link barricades that suddenly dominated Wellington Street. I was reminded of Beirut, a city famously divided by such contrivances into segments, sectors, zones — “a house of many mansions,” as Kamil Salibi put it. The effect was profoundly disorienting, ameliorated only by the relative good repair of the surrounding skyscrapers. What struck me was how easy it is to fortify a city, to take command of it from above and afar, to wrest it from its citizenry as if they had no claim on it in the first place. Toronto, like Beirut, was now divided into security zones with varying degrees of access. All it took was the brute force of half a billion bucks — a pittance really, if you think of what it buys you: A major Western city, for a few days.
The twenty visiting luminaries and their vast entourages have accepted our invitation; in return, we owe them protection. Once every eight years, Canada gets to set the agenda at the G20 summit, and this is a not an insignificant forum. (Okay, perhaps it is. Such is the price of eating at the adults’ table.) Still, the price tag is a head scratcher, no matter how meticulously the government breaks it down. And as far as I’m concerned, money isn’t the worst of it. What, I can’t help wondering, is at stake here? (more…)
Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, is a never-done-before, 304-page work of experimental journalism. Based on thirty hours of raw digital footage shot by producer/publisher Alex Jansen and filmmaker Jason Gilmore, written by me — Richard Poplak* — and illustrated by Nick Marinkovich, the book tells the story of a Toronto man whom the international press dubbed “the most prolific bike thief in the world.”
Holly Jean Buck ponders why Igor Kenk needed to store 2,800 bikes in “Surviving the Apocalypse, on Two Wheels,” from The Walrus Blog
In the summer of 2008, Igor Kenk was arrested on suspicion of stealing a bicycle. Kenk was a legend in the Toronto’s Queen West neighbourhood, infamous for trading in bicycles of unknown provenance. The story turned weirder and weirder: The scruffy street merchant had a gorgeous Juilliard-trained pianist for a wife; police searches of his shop, home, and rented garages turned up almost 3,000 bicycles and plenty of drugs; Kenk made outrageous claims inside and outside of his court appearances. The city, and indeed the world, became fascinated with this outrageous character. Folks wanted to know more.
And so we have Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, which is an attempt to bridge an in-depth investigative profile with a graphic novel. The following pages are extracted from Chapter II, where we learn about Kenk’s childhood and his time back in Slovenia, which he generously terms “the old shithole.” (more…)
You’d think I’d know better. After spending the better part of three years examining the course of American pop culture in the Muslim world, I’ve waded into another fraught cultural cage match, thus inviting a second volley of apparently endless, staggeringly well-argued commentary and hate mail. Woe is me, and all that. The reaction to “Cape Flats Calling,” my Walrus Blog post on the so-called Zef-rap outfit Die Antwoord, along with the general interweb frenzy regarding the band, is a reminder that 150 years after Manet outraged the Paris salon with his Olympia remix, art can still get folks hot under the collar. Millions of Die Antwoord–related bits and bytes have been uploaded, a fair bit of actual ink has been spilled; it thus appears that a quick revisit is called for.
Die Antwoord are a white South African rap group, lead by a gangly fellow named Ninja, who channel (or appropriate, or ape, depending on your view of these things) Cape Town Flats–coloured gang culture, creating a mash-up of grime, rave, and old-school hip hop. In early February, after a number of influential blogs picked up on their free-to-download album $0$, they became the first genuine internet phenomena of this brand new decade. Entirely complicit in all the promotional brouhaha, Die Antwoord have surfed the capricious wave of Web 3.0 on, some say, the backs of a marginalized community who will decidedly not be joining them on the stage at Coachella. The band is now negotiating with the home of the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, and M.I.A., Interscope Records. Them’s the big leagues.
If journalism is literature in a hurry, then web-journalism is literature at warp speed. In my first post, I made a number of errors — since corrected — that somehow escaped the sentinels at my normally impenetrable factual firewall. For those, I was rightly taken to task. Interestingly, a measure of the criticism directed my way comes from a piece on indie music Mecca Pitchfork, in which Ninja called my assessment of their music “quite fuckin’ brilliant.” I have thus been labeled a Die Antwoord booster, as if the brokest band in the known universe sent a Lear Jet round to schlep me off to gigs, softening me up with tik, coconut bongs, and luxury guided tours of Cape Town’s ghettos. There was also some suggestion that Die Antwoord’s popularity was driven mostly by the fervour of people just like me, white South African expatriates who spend their time in Australia, the UK, and Canada trawling the net for: (a) anything that confirms the fact that SA is now an unlivable disaster zone rife with violent crime, thus validating their decision to emigrate, and (b) anything that scratches their paradoxical itch for home. But Interscope does not consider signing bands based on the listening requirements of white ex-Johannesburgers; Die Antwoord must thus be considered a genuine global pop cultural phenomenon. It’s worth considering why that may be. (more…)
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.” (more…)
This June’s FIFA World Cup Final South Africa represents a risky bet that, like many wagers, poses itself as a question: Can an African nation successfully host a massive sports tournament without descending into chaos? FIFA, soccer’s international organizing body, has smartly hedged. In choosing South Africa, they can ostensibly tap into the best of both worlds — an industrialized democratic African nation not currently undergoing a civil war, and a first class African country brimming with the continent’s possibilities.
The previous Olympics were, of course, also held in a developing nation, but that event was a breeze by comparison. In Beijing, the regime used an iron hand to tamp down potential flare-ups, especially regarding the key issues of infrastructure and security. The Chinese, however, had one city to deal with, while the 2010 World Cup organizers must manage nine. What’s more, there is no iron hand in South Africa, which is in part what made the country so appealing in the first place. But with horrendous violent crime statistics, Stygian transportation problems and an angry underclass that cannot be controlled by the state, the FIFA showcase could explode like a French striker facing an Italian midfielder.
How shall it all pan out? FIFA — a powerful extra-governmental organization sometimes compared to the pre-Renaissance Vatican — is holding thumbs, to say nothing of the South African authorities. Regardless, World Cup preparations are altering the country — arguably Africa’s most important — and it seems appropriate to document these changes. In this, the first of a series of posts leading up to the 2010 tournament, we shall kick off at centre field, as it were — in the newly refurbished FNB Stadium, now called Soccer City. (more…)
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