kagablog

I started writing this piece at the landmark House vs. Kwaito jorl in Newtown in 1999.

Not literally: I was raving on a wicked cocktail of A & E that night and couldn’t hold my pen straight; but conceptually, in my head like.

Cathy Henegan drove us into town. We didn’t have tickets. We didn’t have money. But Cathy got us in. Under the fence. Pantsula extrordinaire. My thanks go out to the red head sister.

I had been out of South Africa for 16 years. She showed me some of what I had been missing out on. She took me around the early morning streets in her clapped out jammy. How she drove that thing I don’t know, we were both so trashed. Hammered.

The area around newtown was apocalyptic. Hundreds of street people, the rainbow homeless, making fires in the middle of the road, living in their own garbage – actually eating it, literally.

And then on to the Northcliff Tower where we polished off the last bankie, watching Jozi’s lights metropolize around us. When the cops came they didn’t even give us grief. With my big bushy beard I looked like one of them, a boet. Then on to Yeoville to score more dagga. Rocky street never closes. It was 4am but we still had 13 dealers to choose from.

Everybody knew by then that dagga was legal. Just the cops didn’t know. The government didn’t know.

In the weeks leading up to the election I got bawled out at the Full Stop in Melville for smoking my biggie bomba in public. The asshole shouting at me was the son of a struggle hero. He screamed “not in public, not in public.” That’s when I knew that the future was chains. Just the same old hypocrisy in a darker vest. Instead of legalising weed the ANC was smoking behind closed doors. Business as usual in the age old political game of musical chairs.

What pissed me off most of all was knowing that the “sons of” generation were all such worthless little shits. They had done their growing up in expensive public schools in England, spoke with larnie accents and did not tolerate back chat. They were the future.

Ruthless cold bureacrats, addicted to their elite status, to power. But kwaito isn’t about this future.

Kwaito is the street’s antidote to the rainbow doggerel. Remember, there isn’t any black in the rainbow.

Kwaito begins when Dr. Mandela is released from prison. Politics in culture is repositioned at this moment. Classic struggle culture is instantly old hat. The dialectic between struggle culture and bubblegum, pure entertainment, is made redundant. Kwaito fuses these previously opposed tendencies in township politics, positing a sophisticated, digital body liberation.

The dancing self becomes the site for a radical rejection of the traditional struggle lyrics. Rejecting previously held positionalities is both political and liberational; if only the politics of nihilism; the liberation of pleasure.

Kwaito does not have a program. It is not in the service of a higher goal. Kwaito primarily represents Jozi.

Kwaito spreads itself over the vast sprawl of Jozi by way of the mini-bus taxi cabs. In this way Zola and Sandton are connected.

Kwaito is the city’s nervous system. The consciousness phase of kwaito is yet to come. The body does not want to be preached to.

Kwaito is blacker than label, kwaito is the street cocking a snoot at all the politically correct monkeys in silk telling the people how to behave.

Kwaito is rude, uncontrollable. Kwaito throbs with a vibrant pulse, its roughneck dignity laughs at the terrified rich behind their high fences and barbed wire who are indeed, the prisoners of luxury.