the artifice of art, the art of artifice

AiW Guest: Sanya Osha
…with a longer form read for us, at around 2.5k words…

The recent ‘cancellation’ of Die Antwoord – the South African ‘zef’ subculture-proclaiming, alternative hip hop duo – and their subsequent withdrawal from the public eye, elicits mixed feelings about the commercial music industry, and the art of manipulation and make-believe. Perhaps Die Antwoord – Afrikaans for ‘The Answer’, comprising ex Yeoville club MC Watkin Tudor ‘Ninja’ Jones and Arni ‘Yolandi  Visser’ du Toit – have never sought to make cultural comment or create art, but instead to produce a semblance of it, a tongue-in-cheek (mis)appropriation, exercised through their output and spread in reach through their worldwide fame. Certainly, their use of zef culture’s embrace of South African white trash tropes, also curiously hip, has proved to be culturally attractive to a global hip hop influenced generation, something the band appear to have repeatedly leveraged to their own particular brand of advantage.  

Last October, Adam Haupt, a professor of film and media studies at the University of Cape Town, published a piece in The Conversation, alleging that Die Antwoord are but privileged beneficiaries of cultural appropriation, at the expense of both the blue collar South African working class and the Cape Town gang culture the duo mimics, exploiting them in more ways than one. Die Antwoord, Haupt points out, are not prominent in the local South African music or hip hop scene. The majority of their international popularity stems from aggressive and skillful social media marketing, with the support of overseas music festivals. Yet, at various points in their career, the pair have seemed to take themselves, and their South African counterculture hype, very seriously. This has served to fuel charges of, what can only be at best, phoniness on their part, while other allegations have mired the band deeper into ever-murkier controversy. 

Revelations involving violence, sexism and misogyny, homophobia, trafficking, and racism have progressively eroded Die Antwoord’s stock. There have been accusations of sexual assault by those in the industry – most dramatically from young Australian female fan and musician, Zheani Sparkes, and notably, American singer Dionna Dal Monte. Last year, charges accusing the couple of child abuse, emotional, physical and sexual, emerged from Gabriel “Tokkie” du Preez, who, together with his sister, Meisie, had been formally adopted as minors under the couple’s care. Tokkie has a rare genetic condition, which Ninja and Yolandi exploited in crafting their “weird” visual image as a duo; both children were groomed for violence, and filmed for disturbing ritualistic videos, with a series of exposures which spilled into the kids’ home life; Tokkie was told he was the devil, and abandoned at home whilst Die Antwoord travelled the world for their off-beat performances. He was later disowned and expelled from a Die Antwoord residence after a car crash, as Tokkie claims in a 45 minute YouTube interview conducted by artist and filmmaker, Ben Jay Crossman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YenOVzUonFA

The visual identities the band transmit through elaborately crafted videos have been the strong encoders of much of their violent activities and gangster pretensions. G Boy, the Capetonian composer of their hit DntTakeMe4aPoes, recounts his being publicly humiliated by Ninja because he wasn’t able to lose himself fully whilst dancing in front of a growling cheetah during a shoot, or when he was forced to dance engulfed in flames without protective clothing, training or prep. The band have also used and then defended their use of distressing and derogatory ‘blackface’ in their videos. More than a decade ago, poet and critic Rustum Kozain wrote a short, reflective and powerful piece for Africa is a Country, ‘Die Antwoord is blackface’. It seemed even then that blackface and racialised mimicry were to be the duo’s main contributions to the globalised pop culture, into which they were fast being adopted and feted. 

In 2010, Kozain points up the band’s straddling of the interpretive ciphers in the trope’s attendant racial ambiguities and inherent “trickiness”. What he goes on to persuasively argue for is the lack of clarity in Die Antwoord’s ends, that is, the ends to which the means – the depth of “invention” of their highly self-fashioned visual identities that include the use of blackface – were being directed. His exploration of the crafting of Die Antwoord’s public personas reveals a conscious, purposeful “anthropological bent”. This gives lie to their responses, which feigned ignorance of their enactment of innate racist violence, and their claims that such tropes are not well known or understood in South Africa. Coming from a country plagued by racial discrimination, segregation and violence, how disingenuous could this be? 

Haupt’s later focus, too, is on the band’s appropriative tactics, leading with its copying of the styles of Cape Town artists who rap in Kaaps, or Afrikaaps – a language created in settler colonial South Africa, already well developed by the 1500s. Haupt amplifies Kozain’s sentiments more than a decade later with the words: “Die Antwoord’s success is thanks in part to racialised class inequality in South Africa and the fact that systemic racism has yet to be dismantled nearly three decades after democracy. The band used class privilege, social capital and networks to ensure that it succeeded – often at the expense of marginalised communities”. And, as Sean Jacobs (founder-editor of Africa is a Country) has put it for New Frame in late 2021, “Die Antwoord, comprising Ninja and Yolandi Visser, became viral for globally selling a version of ‘zef’ that combined the culture of lower-class white people with elements of the working-class community classified as coloured under apartheid”.

Together, these incisive commentaries show the race discourse, or those discursive mechanisms at work to maintain constructed social hierarchies, that Die Antwoord have so casually and powerfully manipulated, to be specifically South African; even more specifically, they are located, both geographically and historically, around the Western Cape. Ninja, the white duo’s de facto leader, parodies the postures, and the language and visual styles of Cape Flats township gangsters. The results are not always flattering. Nonetheless, on the back of this mockery, Die Antwoord have laughed themselves all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, a working-class Cape Town rapper with unmistakable street credibility that Die Antwoord has worked with, notably on their debut album, $O$ – a viral sensation, made stream-for-free on their website at the time – is festering in the doldrums as a result of the ravages of street life. 

In 2021, Nthato Mokgata and Lebogang Rasethaba produced a sly documentary on Isaac Mutant, a legendary figure within the Cape Flats underground rap movement, showing him dwelling in a squalid shack on the derelict fringes of Cape Town seaside suburb Hout Bay, sinking into anonymity, junkie squalor, and neglect. Aptly titled Mutant, the film leaves out more than it discloses. The award-winning doc’s blurb suggests an intimate portrait observed over 6 years, “which allows audiences to witness Isaac’s character evolve on screen, from being a militant and agitated aggressor to a man in pursuit of a greater peace”. But rather than amplifying Mutant’s contributions to Cape Town music culture, we see a run-down figure caught within cracks of precarity and socioeconomic dispossession.

Mutant’s niece claims in the documentary that at one time – most likely at the height of his drug addiction – he was sleeping in the streets, after his former band, DooKoom, released a controversial anti-Boer song that made national headlines in 2014.

Larney jou poes, Mutant’s smart, incendiary electro hip hop track about confronting the land-owning white farmer class, instigated divisive debate and venom among the various stakeholders in the agricultural sector. Writing the track, Mutant was inspired by workers’ demands for a more liveable wage during the De Doorns Wine Farm strike of 2012. Larney jou poes and its video, directed by young white filmmaker Dane Dodds, lay open the long faultline of oppression and human rights abuses on wine farms, stirring explosive controversy around the dire lack of essential services, adequate housing, and the still-existing practice of the ‘dop’ system, where white farmers paid their workers in alcohol, leaving the catastrophes of addiction and dependence in its wake. 

In Mutant, the portrayal of the radical protesting rap artist, who has shared a stage with Public Enemy and is aka the ‘God of Afrikaans Rap’ for his lyrical prowess, is of a man lost, unsure of what his next move would be. The avenues that hip hop can afford him seem to be his least preoccupation: his old crew have left him to form another band; he’s unable to derive any dividends from his music; and seems to have little or no access to the type of industry connections that would turn his life around. He is depicted as living day to day, held down by the conditions of his everyday situation which is marked by grim and despondent struggle. 

Moreover, Mutant demonstrates a man who questions his precarity as it is experienced through his coloured identity (in the official population categorisation initiated under apartheid), seemingly unsure of his racial status in a black-led South Africa. The film shows Mutant seemingly stranded in a purgatory between blackness and colouredness, while whiteness – the cause of this fraught racial dichotomy – appears as remote as ever, free of culpability, however tenuously in the face of the film’s exposure…