Singer Miriam Makeba, known as Mama Africa, died in November of 2008. Ten months earlier, I saw her perform at the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona, Spain. At the time, I didn’t understand what I was witnessing — the denouement of a fifty-year career, the last tour of a woman whom millions would mourn as a saint. Makeba, a South African political exile, American civil rights activist, stateswoman, and brilliant musician, was a hero of the pan-African movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and an influence on virtually every South African singer who has followed her.
In 1959, Makeba appeared in the anti-apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa. The filmmaker, American Lionel Rogosin, brought her to Cannes for the premiere. Come Back won the Critics’ Award; Makeba became an instant phenomenon, playing around New York and London, appearing on television, and recording under the guidance of Harry Belafonte, whom she’d met in the UK. However, when she tried to return home in 1960, she found that her South African passport had been revoked. Unable to re-enter her country, she lived in exile until Mandela was freed thirty years later. In the meantime, she introduced South African music (and, to a large extent, politics) to the West.
Mama Africa director Mika Kaurismäki grew up listening to Makeba’s songs on Finnish radio. His feature documentary almost wasn’t made, as Makeba passed away just before filming was scheduled to begin. Kaurismäki pursued the project anyway, partly from an urge to preserve the singer’s legacy. The film doesn’t suffer at all for the lack of its star — Makeba comes across intimately, her story as affecting as if she’d told it herself. Kaurismäki pieces her life together from interviews with Makeba’s grandchildren, former band members, friends, and prominent admirers, along with an enormous amount of wonderfully remastered archival footage. The portrait that emerges is of a woman without fault: a role model in the strictest sense. (Mama Africa mentions only two of Mama Africa’s five husbands.) This may be an unapologetic love letter, but few will object.
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…)
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…)
SOWETO—For my money, which lately consists of fistfuls of rand with pictures of buffalo gracing the bills, no sporting event invites greater tension and drama than a local derby. So when I realized that I would still be in Johannesburg for last Saturday’s match between the two giants of South African soccer, the Kaizer Chiefs and the Orlando Pirates, both based in Joburg’s predominantly black township of Soweto, it was an obvious must-Trot experience.
No matter how big a match gets, no matter how high the stakes, whether a league championship, a world final, or a match between college rivals, the contest against a faraway side is a shared experience for the local fans. While a Red Sox vs. Yankees “Armageddon? series may induce more coronaries in New England than a mandatory government program to provide intravenous injection of chowder (those crazy liberals!), the respective communities on each side experience the drama, for the most part, with their comrades in fandom. (more…)
KRUGER NATIONAL PARK—Hemingway, furious, would have shot me in the head. Orwell would have offered dignified applause, acknowledging my restraint and humanity.
Here we were, nine of us—including two of us brandishing powerful .458 calibre hunting rifles—tracking a herd of elephants on the southern edge of South Africa’s immense Kruger National Park. One of our guides, Lourens Botha, had spotted the herd in a nearby valley. Marching quickly across the African forest, we scaled a hill next to the valley and descended onto a rocky ledge. Beneath us, a mere twenty metres away, were elephants—lots of elephants. They were enjoying a substantial breakfast, ripping large branches off the trees with their powerful trunks. And they were standing right out in the open.
Lourens and his partner, Obakeng, both young guides from the park’s Berg-en-Dal lodge, confirmed the elephants hadn’t noticed us. They put down their rifles, rather than passing them along to one of us to line up a shot. They unpacked some juiceboxes and cheese and crackers, and we enjoyed a light breakfast alongside eighteen pachyderms doing the same.
No, we didn’t shoot the elephants. The .458s that Lourens and Obi carried were for protection only—a required precaution for a walking tour in the park. And watching these creatures tear up the forest floor in impressive fashion, and trample large swaths of bush in their wake, I never once felt the impulse to fix them in the cross-hairs of the rifle and pull the trigger. Nothing about that hypothetical encounter struck me as sporting. (more…)
PRETORIA—There’s a drink here in South Africa that they call “creme soda.” It’s probably like the cream soda you’re familiar with, only it’s a bright, shocking, emerald green.
Mostly, creme soda is used as a mixer for a drink they like to call a John Deere, usually taken as a double (especially if you want to, you know, act like a man) with two shots of 86-proof cane sugar alcohol. The resulting highball cocktail — whose name comes from the obvious colour association as well as the fact that it runs you over like a lawnmower — is delicious, refreshing, and quite deadly. Ordering a first round of John Deeres is commonly called “hopping aboard the cane train,? so stated because once you climb aboard the train, you generally ride it to the very last stop, occasionally waking up in the back seat of a strange car in an equally unfamiliar underground parking lot. True story. (more…)
JOHANNESBURG—I get a lot of fantastic fanmail here at camp Sportstrotter. Devoted readers wondering how I get to file dispatches from Vancouver Island, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, and now, Johannesburg. “I can’t believe The Walrus sends you to all those amazing places!? they write. “How do they afford it??
Well, I can tell you that the Sportstrotter is one of The Walrus’s greatest editorial priorities, and in addition to my embarrassingly opulent salary, I also have a practically unlimited travel budget. It’s clear that The Walrus understands that the future of Canadian journalism lies in semi-serious ramblings on the world of sport, posted weekly to a web site under a name that includes the word “trotter.? All hail the dauphin of the Great White North’s media sphere!
So here I am in Johannesburg, South Africa, the richest city on the continent and also one of its most dangerous. Jo’burg has seen the most substantial post-Apartheid integration in South Africa, but this mixing of the former oppressor and oppressed classes—the wildly wealthy and the desperately poor—has bred great resentment and violence. So, with the Sportstrotter fiancée working on a project here and logging long hours, and the streets not exactly safe to wander, I’ve been spending my daytime hours in the highly secure gated community (yes, barb-wire fences and all) across the street from our apartment, using their amazing gym and eating the fantastic food that Jo’burgers are lucky to enjoy on a daily basis (Springbok carpaccio is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted). (more…)
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