Article2
The black anti-thugs
On any Sunday
Bet you´ve seen them ´round your local mall clad in parachute sizedjeans and adorned in thick gold chains straight out of the anti-slavery film epic Sankofa. While the boys walk with an almost choreographed gait - what king of literary sneers Tom Wolfe has referred to as the "pimp roll" - their all too supple girls, called "fly gals" when they toe the line, "bitches and hoes" when they don´t are often identified through their noveau-Afro tank tops: aaaamandla!
Radicals they may be, but these boys are at home bump ´n´ grinding their way around marbled-floor malls in the latest Nike sneakers. "What, child slaves manufacture these sneakers in India? - ´Sorry man we´re just chillin´, " they´ll wave you away.
Well, if your scope of young blacks in the post-freedom era veers only as far as the above "demographic" - often referred to as the NBBPs or New Black Brat Packs - then you have not even begun scratching the surface of that perennially desperate question: "where is the youth - read ´black´ - vote"?
To answer it, you have to foot it to the townships, specifically Soweto´s much-romanticised dusty streets - still the bedrock of urban youth angst. These streets are the midwives of a new cynical, feisty, rap-inspired Afro-revolutionary vanguard, simply known as "Black Sunday" - an artistic and political cultural movement.
Black Sunday is a Soweto-born black ´n´ proud youth movement that takes place every Sunday in diverse areas of the township such as Diepkloof, Naledi and Meadowlands.
From a distance this might just qualify as the freshest, most musically politicised youth movement since the black beat Afro-jazzed poets of the 1970s, but in reality Black Sunday is as underground a movement as London´s Blacktronica and Soweto´s Medupe: a**ertive and proud.
Characterised by their quest for a "new Africa" that connects John Coltrane, and guitar gods Carlos Santana and Jimi Hendrix to historical figures such as vhaVenda King Makhado, Zulu icon Shaka and Basotho´s feminist Queen Manthatise, Black Sunday members inhabit a world of their own.
Take a stroll down the main road branching off Old Potch Road that leads to the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, down to Diepkloof´s Zone 5 on any Sunday afternoon.
Before long and amid the throngs of township dwellers - Pentecostal church-going grannies, Irish Linen-suited 4x4 black elites zig-zagging back to suburbia after an hour with "mom" - your eardrums are bombarded by a crackling cry or the scattergun lyrics piped through the open air by loudspeakers.
I made my way to the centre of a hidden recreational square, laagered by a rusty barbed wire fence where the peak point of new black artistic radical angst is at.
You´ve heard the sound miles away. Now your eyes are met by a gathering of hundreds if not thousands of black teenagers milling around.
As Common Man, one of Black Sunday´s superbrains and poet laureate put it, their "identity" separates them from the "mainstream black demographic." How? They aren´t talking. You are invited to "experience it".
"It´s located deep in the type of music and politics we try to create. Deep in that fibre, you check?" clarifies DJ Hempza, a father figure and one of the main organisers.
Also, they´ll tell you it´s all about "feeling". Which is really a yearning for a National Geographic Africa of yore to merge with a high-tech Africa. Here, a variety of poets chant and rap along to a backdrop of multi-ba** beats stored and clicked from Windows 2000 computers, MP3s and turntables, all connected by electricity stolen from the nearby community church.
"Afro-co-existence you see?" Hempza urges me. I don´t bite it, but of course I´m smitten by the DIY sensibilities at play here.
Soon, it becomes clear that the terms "microchip" and "umqusho" are both part of an edgy, refashioned lingua franca amongst these youth.
Some of them speak in a mangled, yet musically tilting New Age fanakalo that combines isiZulu, seTswana and American ebonics all wrapped into a rap lingo that is, you soon realise, a dialect understood by the cultural sect alone.
The poets - who are received either as street prophets if they are good and dispensable trash if they aren´t - are greeted with collective screams: "mo´ faya. Umlilo! mo-faa-ya . . ."
"Mo´ faya", slang for "go ahead raise the stakes", is part of a retrofied Rasta and hip-hop lingo meant to encourage and inspire the self-proclaimed warrior-poets to tap into their genius - if there´s any.
And there´s the story of the dress code, the easiest reflection of the cultural revisionism at play here. The movement´s young girls, often referred to as "Queens", are attired in ankle-touching, flowing skirts and a variety of long, back-sliding headgears, gold and copper fields of bangles and some huge Egyptian accessories for good measure.
Intrigued, I approached one of the Queens, to check how their Queendom gets to mix with such misogynistic art forms as rap is known to be.
"My name is Tutan," the young lady in an orange skirt says. "Tutan Khamun, queen of the sun," she introduces herself, but she couldn´t maintain the oh-so cordial African veneer for long. "Sorry sisi," I told her. "You can´t possibly be Tutankhamun. That was a pharaoh boy king, Akhenaten´s heir, wasn´t it? And wasn´t somebody called Osiris the actual queen of the sun, no?"
She quickly fired back: "I choose who I want to be. Wena uwubani?"
But it´s not all about fashion and the dead icons they hold in reverence - Bob Marley, Biko and rapper Talib Kweli make the holy trinity of deities. Having a slight insight into Peter Tosh´s lyrics makes you cooler than poring over Nelson Mandela´s Long Walk To Freedom within the Black Sundayers.
If not seen as a New Age drama king, the old man has sadly become fodder for jokes: "I mean he´s Naomi Campbell´s friend, right?" another teen girl with an Egyptian-sounding name laughs.
One boy choruses: "Yebo! Which makes him King of the Queens," he gesticulates, self-satisfied with his wit ´n irony all rolled in one. "Yeah. You should see him in famous photographs. Ol´man is King of the Queens. With Naomi this side and David Beckham, on the other side, Madiba really rocks, weee-ho ho ho," they all join in the punchline.
Afro-scepticism besides, talent and variety abound in these dusty streets. Within this "tribe" an array of alternative artists like hip-hop photographers, spin-deejays, self-taught computer programmers exist cheek by jowl with amateur home videographers and Afro-bead designers. "Do-it-yourself" is the big racket - oops, spiritual mantra here.
Also, like post-independent revolutionaries anywhere, language is a hot political potato.
Says chief organiser, Hempza: "We call our rappers izimbongi and only chronicle our stories in Zulu and other indigenous dialects. Don´t give us this rubbish American and private school accents."
In their proto-township, anti-private schools veneer they make strange bedfellows with kwaito exponents, even though they sneer at its "intellectual emptiness".
They see themselves as the vanguard of a future Africa, a romantic Africa that can be mouse clicked into new technology without upsetting its romance, history, amasiko . . .
On close inspection, these new Africanists with their seTswana and isiZulu sonic vignettes and scattergun rhyming, sound exactly like the self praising maskanda artists and elderly traditional village folk who rap of nothing else but conquering the enemy.
Also, like maskanda stars such as Ukhansela, the late Mfazi O´Mnyama and uTwalufu, these rappers´ lyrics are saturated with self-praise, their place of origins and family trees while priding themselves on their male prowess.
As an art they are hip-hop, but as a cultural movement their expression inadvertently aspires to the ancient Zulu, baKone, vhaVenda and other African nationalities whose menfolk would pride themselves on their hunting skills, their women, cattle and the number of enemies they´ve slain.
Still, it´s not all cultural pyrotechnics. Spending a day with them, it became clear that though accusations of "lost generation" are far-fetched, there is an unmistakable loss of innocence and a sadness here.
Clearly. African parents - who have abdicated their parental responsibilities to MTV and malls - shun these youths, practically leaving them to carve their own destiny.
But the moral petticoat was bound to slip somewhere, sometime: and in Black Sunday it´s the rampant abuse of dagga - all in the name of attaining a spiritual high - that irks the most.
Still, with such well-defined African nationalist pride, you cannot accuse them of being apolitical.
"The thing is, our politics are not theirs," says rapper Ngwenya, one of the movement´s products and possibly one of the most gifted black pop impressionists to come out of South Africa youth culture.
For me, adults could do well to revisit the genesis of kwela music, way back in Sophiatown.
It was kwela - with Aaron Lerole, Spokes Mashiane and Lemmy Special Mabaso hot on the pennywhistle - in the early 1950s Sophiatown that reflected black youth´s disgust at the oppressive Afrikaner regime, black adults´ conservatism and America´s big jazz band imperialism.
Though it had an impactful yet temporary reign in the 1950s, today kwela´s era is nostagically spoken of as the golden time of urban black youth´s cultural zenith; a reflection of a deeply felt yearning for pure, defiant fun.
Later in the day, while getting out of Diepkloof´s noisy, yet high-spirited streets one had a gut feeling that these young Sowetans won´t need half a century´s nostalgia to make revolutionaries of the youth, countrywide.
Not with the computer mouse in sight. Click!
- south african Sunday Times
