Kwaito and the liberation children
--published in the Mail and Guardian as Freedom marches to kwaito's drum
I meet Sbu “The General” Nxumalo at his house on one the many numbered avenues of Melville. There’s a sanded down door perched on a white pillar on the backyard stoep. Two dogs run around vying for our attention, running and weaving in between paint brushes and tin cans of poly-urethane. Two street signs peek over the wooden fence, saluting the street outside. I never imagined that this is where we’d be talking about kwaito, over ginger tea with honey and lemon. What happened to the rock and roll?
A few hours before, I am in an attempted hi-jacking/smash-and grab situation in the birthplace of kwaito. This is on the fourth day of my stay at the Soweto Hotel on Freedom Square, Kliptown. On the night I check in, a man, stabbed and wounded, drags himself to the tiled stairs outside the lobby. He will be the first of four bodies in a week. The following day, the local branch of the ANC hosts a poorly attended rally on the square. The brick-cone pyramid of Freedom Torch stands unlit in the centre like dormant volcano. Like the threat of liberation. Still shaken, I ruminate on an idea that has been appearing in all my conversations over the past few weeks. People have different urgencies. People have different urgencies, and different imaginations to express them with.
This year the country celebrates twenty years of a South African democracy. We are still trying to figure out what it could mean. The nation as whole is feeling introspective, retrospective. Political parties auction off false-promises. We take stock, count the victories, look backwards. On the crux of a celebration, maybe tinged with mourning, we can’t help but ask, who the hell are we, and where are we going to?
“You see,” Sbu is now peeling open a banana. He disappeared into a room somewhere in the back of the house and returned in a new shirt. “His interview outfit,” he explains. “Unless you were a practitioner of kwaito, you don’t really know it. Sbu was one of the founding editors of the avant-garde, youth publication Y-Magazine. He was also there at the beginning of Y-FM, arguably one the first stations to give kwaito prevailing airplay, and facilitate a musical language and landscape for a newly liberated, urban black youth. He was around the music, fighting for it to have a platform, writing about the music, becoming deeply involved with it. “You can’t really know it, unless you were doing it. There was no difference between me and Rattenbury writing about Isandlwana. It’s just a fascination. Back then kwaito needed a platform, and YFM needed a tool. It was a natural, almost organic relationship.”
When Y-FM barraged the airwaves in 1997, it was from a studio in Bertrams, inner Jozi. A launch was held, quite ironically, in the polished and hardened facades of Sandton Square. The invitation letter-a Molotov cocktail in a clenched fist. “And when you opened it up, the fist had a finger up, like this” He gestures, raising his middle finger at me, pulling a zap sign. “The writing said ‘the struggle in not over’, but the fist had a gold chain on it, the fingers had rings...you know..that whole bling thing. That just shows that we didn’t understand it. We equated this new struggle to bling but we didn’t ask why. Why the bling? Why the gold? What does it mean?”
Before kwaito was looked at as a cultural signifier of the times, it took a lot of slack. For many, it had no depth. No musicality. No message. It’s about consumerism and over-glamourisation, they said. Expensive alcohol, flashy cars, and naked women. It was about looking like you’ve made it, adorning yourself in the ornamental apparel of success, and the things that come with it.
Almost every kwaito artist or group has a song proclaiming that they “have arrived”. TKZee, commanded that you tell everyone “ses’fikile”. So did Chiskop, Mashamplani, Bongo Maffin, Alaska. “Seng’khona,” they declare, over looping rhythms wound tight. They were and still are, planting flags on moons and mountains. “Kwaito was an expression of liberation.” Explains Ishmael Morabe. “It was a freedom of some sort. People were becoming more and more themselves. It was a take-it-or-leave it attitude. This is who I am, the way ngingakhona.” Ishmael should know. He entered mainstream musical consciousness as a vocalist for both Prophets of da City and Skeem. This was years before his stint as a soloist under 999 and Ghetto Ruff. “Kwaito was us, man. It was us.”
Its 1986. Senyaka, arguably South Africa’s first commercial rapper drops the self-titled, “Ntate Senyaka”. On this album, is Jabulani MC, a direct ancestor of the nascent Kwaito. Two years later, Cool Spot releases a male duo called MM Deluxe. It’s one part Mdu Masilela from Zola and one part Mandla Mofokeng from Meadowlands. On the cover of their debut album, dressed in stone-wash jeans, brown leathers and gold chains, they are far cry from their early musical genesis. Mdu is accomplished piano player; Mandla, the dancing son of preacher-man. Two albums later, they split. Mdu goes on to form M’Du Productions, and releases his breakthrough album, Tsiki tsiki in 1994. Mandla partners up with Mdu’s brother-in-law Jairus Nkwe. Together with Zynne Mahoota and Eugene Mthethwa, they found Trompies. Dickies and All Stars. Orange overall delelas and “Not Guilty, GP” t-shirts. Trompies is straight up pantsula. The country lines up to vote in its first democratic elections, hopeful and victorious, fearful and uncertain. Chris Hani is dead. Letta Mbulu returns from exile with slew of other repatriates. But while she laments that it is “not yet uhuru”, the kids are creating their own patchwork freedom. Like magpies, they collect and rebuild their own identity from the rubble amassing in the peripheries.
When local soccer star Screamer Tshabalala sends his kid off to the quiet, wood and brick edifice of St Stithian’s School in Bryanston, I imagine he was taking him as far away from the streets of Orlando East as possible. But it would here, during break times, after choir practise, mass and detention that Tokollo Tshabalala would meet up with Mzwandile Bala and Kabelo Mabalane. After a bad deal with M’Du and Mashamplane, Tokollo forms his own group with Kabelo and Zwai, TKZee. In 1996, the private school boys drop Take It Eezy, challenging the super-thuggish machismo that apart from Boom Shaka, had dominated the scene. Playful, fresh and with a lyricality as liquid as their parent’s bank accounts, they were gunning for the number one spot. Their follow-up album, Phalafala contains a direct swipe at the Godfather of Kwaito, Mdu, in Masimbela.
In 1997 Y-FM broadcasts its first song ever. Bongo Maffin’s “Makeba”. Thandiswa Mazwai, Stoane, Speedy and Jah Seed’s Shona rap beat out station manager Randall Abrahams choice, Biggie’s “Mo money, mo problems”. This was a symptom of the long-standing, sometimes real, sometimes imagined conflict between hip-hop and kwaito. Hip hop had already established itself as a more than just music. Like Jazz before it, it had been highly theorised and dissected. It had a walk and a look. A manner of speaking and being. In comparison, kwaito seems shambolic. Less than a year later, it starts to develop its own language. S’camto and iTaal - its vernacular. The first issue of Y-Magazine launches with Kwaito’s Cheesboys, TKZee on the cover. The editorials quote everyone from Milan Kundera to Thebe and Alaska. The publication reflects the multitudinous personality of a young and mobile black South African. It’s hood and well-travelled. It’s exalting the refreshing pleasures of iZamalek, while wine-tasting on the Garden Route. It’s surfing a wave in Muizenburg, and a train at Naledo Station.
So it’s the turn of the millennium and Y2K is on everyone’s lips. We’re sufficiently scared, appropriately non-plussed. We’re not really sure what it is. Is it a virus, maybe an impending alien Armageddon? Rumour has it that kwaito is dead. Maybe Y2K killed it. Mandoza fresh out of Chiskop, releases 9 II 5 Zola South. The Godfather, still defiant, announces that his long tenure on the throne is not coming to an end anytime soon. “Y2K or not Y2K, Mdu is back,” he laughs. The politics have shifted, and so has the music. The party continues, but a hangover is starting to set in. Lebo Mathosa drops her first effort without her Boom Shaka band members. She negotiates full publishing rights to the album and it reaches gold status in just under four weeks. The first song on the disc is “Ntozobantu”. “Kuyoze kubi nini sibulalana sodwa. Umuntu ngumuntu, ufana nawe,” she croons in a mbaqangesque rhythm. Meanwhile, Bonginkosi Dlamini, a student at Jabulani Technical, adopts the moniker Zola. His first record, Umdlwembe, is hard and rough-edged. In the video, he rides around in a tractor and Soweto’s car of choice, the BMW 325i, better know as iGusheshe. Chewing on a matchstick, he threatens to leave some mothers childless. He also adds that “it’s your life, mawuthand’ ungay’ phuza, mawuthand’ ungay’khanda.” The song ends with a hook samples from a gospel song. “Amagugu alelizwe azosal’emathuneni.”
There’s a perceptible switch in the message. From announcing and proclaiming, the coding becomes reflective. No longer throwing off chains, we were now telling people who were, and subsequently engaging with ourselves on a deeper level of consciousness. The lines that separated hip hop from kwaito begin to blur.
The street will always find its own dialect. A way of speaking about itself that in part, accepts its pariah status, while subverting it and making it its own. The more marginalised the kids felt, the harder they attempted to be seen. The very things that were seen thuggish and delinquent, were re-appropriated and turned into success. Bucket hats and All Stars. Worker’s overalls. Gusheshe’s and Golf Three’s. Kwaito becomes a lifestyle. “The streets are always inventing a voice, a musical voice. “ The General is trying to explain the parallels between Kwaito and Hip Hop. “And it’s not just about the racial dynamic between America and South Africa. This music (hip-hop and kwaito) paralleled the generation gap. It was a dialogue that existed in the gap.”
“Hip hop and kwaito are rebel voices, man. And it’s not so much about what you’re saying, it’s the doing. It’s about freeing up spaces. It’s about finding a clearer voice, an attitude. Guys like [rapper] Siya Shezi are unbundling that. They’re unbundling that one phrase, stretching it out and giving themselves space to embrace the lyrical form. Because it’s more lyrical, people say it’s hip-hop, but it’s kwaito man.”
I have a cousin lived in the backroom at my grandmother’s house in Jabulani. A number of years older than us but too young to be parental, he became an involuntary role model. Bhut’ Sipho wanted to be a kwaito star. According to us, he already was. He would line us up on the bright red stoep he’d woken up five am to polish. On that stoep, he would arrange in terms of height and give us all a part in his kwaito band, yet to be named. I was a singer and dancer, as most female kwaito musicians are. He was the “uh” guy. The “uh” is the most common part of any kwaito song. Sometimes in the foreground, sometimes the main part of the song or chorus. The “uh” is an unwavering constant. Bhut Sipho would wind up a cassette on pencil, put in the player and showcase his latest body of work. Mdu was his favourite. A baby-faced street-wise hustler in gold chains from Zola, just five minutes way from where we bounced and gyrated on a shiny, red stage. Sometimes, Bhut’ Sipho would “feature” with Boom Shaka or Brothers of Peace. Years later, I realise that it was impossible for him to have been on almost every, single kwaito song. But to my younger, gullible self, it was completely plausible. Of course kwaito stars didn’t do their own “uh’s’. Of course they brought someone in who specialised in “uh’s” and surely, Bhut’ Sipho was the “uh” guy. And why not? Kwaito then, was the summit of black success.
In 1994, Dr Khumalo and Bob Mabena would release a song sampled from C & C Music Factory’s “Do you want to get funky?” While the song went on to notoriously win a SAMA for Best Hip Hop, it was an unmistakable kwaito aspiration. Two dudes, on the top of their respective games, who only had one other avenue up. Kwaito.
Even soccer enfant terrible, Jabu Pule; and Bafana Bafana prodigal son Benni Mccarthy tried their hands at Kwaito, the latter collaborating with Kwaito’s Cheeseboys, TKZee on, the 1998 hit song. Shibobo.
The New school artists are looking back to the glory days for inspiration. In 2012, rappers Tumi and Zubz formed the amalgam, TZ Deluxe, inspired and Mdu and Spikiri’s MM Deluxe. On the cover of their nine-track mixtape, Zubz and Tumi photoshop their heads onto the bodies of the original Deluxe boys. Re-working the classics, they rap their through Mshoza’s “Kortez” and B.O.P’s “Egoli”, to name a few. DJ Fisherman, part of the Durban boys Afrotainment label, dropped a summer banger in December, sampling Mdu’s Tsiki Tsiki. Stablemate Duncan did the same. His rendition of Tsiki Tsiki Yo is a love-letter to kwaito. Ricky Rick and OkMaulmkoolkat’s “Amantobazane” could easily have come out of M’Du Productions in the late nineties. The bass reverberates and bounces back over itself. A lazy raps fills the space in between booms. Ismael aka Ismiza has a new single out, aptly called kwaito. It’s an ode to the times of “iSeven phezulu”. The heady days of kasi exuberance. Twenty years later, smack dab in the middle of a political quagmire, kwaito is still the musical intervention. Kwaito isn’t dead, it has just grown up.
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