Profoundly South African

The evolution of democracy is hinged on people’s ability to shake the cage and when it comes sticking it to the zookeepers, few are as elegantly insubordinate as Jonathan Shapiro.

Political cartoonist for the Mail & Guardian and Sunday Times, Zapiro has been in the game for over twenty years. It was during Nelson Mandela’s presidency that he injected himself into the national consciousness with flattering depictions of Madiba. In recent years, however, he has found a nemesis in the form of Jacob Zuma, creating iconic renderings of the President of the ANC with a showerhead protruding from his oddly-shaped cranium.

Last year, Zapiro collaborated on a television concept that has transformed his caricatures into puppets for a mock current affairs show entitled Z News. The idea was given legs at the SABC but has since been mysteriously paralyzed. Some suggest that the show’s uncertain future stems from attempts to censor its political content while others say that it simply lacks broad appeal. Nevertheless, fragments of a pilot episode have generated viral interest on the Internet. Queue Thabo Mbeki performing “I Will Survive” in drag on Idols!

Z News describes itself as “the most fun you can have with latex with your clothes on.” Although it is populated with profoundly South African characters like Godzille, it is by no means an original idea. Britain’s Spitting Image is its key ancestor and, given the fact that the godfather of the genre has spawned so many similar shows internationally, it’s hard to imagine that South Africa’s biggest audiences aren’t ready to exercise their right to mock political authority.

Clicks:

• Feedback: Tell Zapiro What You Think
• Spitting Image: Never Met a Nice South African

Share This

As the world grows more accustomed to the face at the helm of the United States, the phrase “first black president” is being less frequently tagged to the name Barack Obama. Given the history of discrimination in the United States, Obama’s achievement lent itself to being branded as symbolic of America’s progressive attitude towards race. The media, however, has all but exhausted this angle, providing an opportunity for free thinkers to reflect on what has really happened.

Naturally, President Obama’s physical appearance does have historical significance. In this respect, Obama’s inauguration provided an opportunity to reflect on America’s extraordinary Civil Rights Movement and the contributions of key African American figures to shifting the consciousness of the Unites States.

Nevertheless, by blindly dubbing Obama as “black,” the media has brought into play an old-school method of considering the slippery notion of race. Barack Obama is a person of dark-skinned Kenyan and light-skinned Hawaiian parentage. Describing him as “black” reflects a strain of binary mentality that harks back to America’s One-Drop Rule or South Africa’s profound Pencil Test.

What makes Barack Obama a really progressive choice from the perspective of race is that the fact that he is a figure who resists a simple racial tag. Ambiguity does a good job of dismantling defunct ideas! In reality, the concentration of melanin in Obama’s skin had as much to do with his success in the elections as the fact that his first name rhymes with Osama and his middle name is Hussein. The guy put together a much better campaign. Period.

If American liberals insist on patting themselves on the back for breaking the mould, let them take pride in contributing to bringing about regime change. As for the title of the world’s most significant “first black president,” this still belongs to South Africa. Nevertheless, South Africa’s national consciousness has yet to deal with prospect of a presidential candidate with a light complexion. Inconceivable? As a person of light-skinned Scottish and dark-skinned Jamaican parentage once said, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”

Clicks:

• Music Video: Brenda Fassie - Black President
• Brown Paper Bag Test: Chocolate News - First Black President?

Share This

The Kwazulu-Natal Midlands is where John van de Ruit’s Spud novels are set. The “Kwazulu” part, however, was absent when the events in the books took place. Nevertheless, van de Ruit conceived a profoundly South African setting for his upmarket boys boarding school. He took a lesson from the old adage that “truth is stranger fiction.” Names were changed to protect the identity of the people and places involved. Queue video.

Van de Ruit’s Spud novels are a South African publishing phenomenon. Despite our demographic penchant for not buying fiction, heads have popped up, ears are pricked, and hands are digging into pockets. Penguin has swept modesty aside and the first installment’s cover now heralds the fact that not 60 000, not 70 000, but over 80 000 copies have been sold. Their logic is implicit. If Spud is flying off the shelves, you should buy it too.

True, the Spud novels do have a lot going for them. Moreover, the beauty of their formula lies in its simplicity. Van de Ruit takes a familiar framework (the school diary) and inserts local content. Done! For South African readers bearing the yolk of a private boarding school background, the experience is akin to watching a True Hollywood Story of your adolescence. For the great unwashed, it’s a window onto the codes and rites of a masonic fraternity.

In spite of his nickname, the central character of the books has enormous appeal. A stranger in a strange land, Spud has entered an upper-class enclave on the back of a middle-class upbringing. The world filtered through his diary is engaging and his naivety (as the publisher puts it) is “wickedly funny.” It’s an easy read and the pages turn quickly. To top it off, van de Ruit has done an exemplary job of promoting himself and mobilising South Africa’s book-selling community.

Nevertheless, there is a bigger picture to the success of Spud and its sequel. What really sets them apart from other South African novels set in the 90s is the way they interrogate South Africa’s wobbly transition to democracy. In short, the “interrogation” part is absent. Spud’s boarding school diaries marginalize the realities of his bipolar country. Despite a handful of nuggets that provide social and political context, Spud’s world renders the outside one virtually inconsequential.

While Spud shows adequate disapproval for his family’s old-school take on South Africa, it is the ins and outs of his immediate surroundings that really count. As such, Spud’s diaries reflect an adolescent experience of the old South Africa, where politics hover on the periphery of the playground. He’s a kid with nothing to feel guilty about. In fact, for many book-buying South Africans in their thirties, Spud may very well be the first South African novel that legitimises their Apartheid experience. Could this be its bestselling ingredient?

Clicks:

• Spud: The Madness Continues Book Extract
• Related PSA Post: Apple of the Earth

Share This

Only the World Cup is capable of arousing authentic global collective consciousness. It’s an event that every media-consuming entity is sucked into. Every four years, for just one month, the World Cup infiltrates the broadest possible sweep of hearts and minds on the planet. It conjures South African football experts from thin air and elicits football commentary from the least likely sources.

World Cup interactions are hinged on TV sets. From the belligerent outbursts of friends in bars with big screens to the distracted eyes of shop assistants with small ones, the World Cup assembles every variety of media congregation. When the immediacy of the events have passed, the Internet steps in to archive memorable moments.

This brings me to what must surely be the most powerful stream of images from the 2006 World Cup Final. The streamlined arc of Zidane’s cranium as it sailed through the air, his body bent behind the shiny orb as it found its mark on Materazzi’s chest. The limp body of the Italian defender dropping to the ground, the mouth that had spat an insult at the French captain twisted into a different shape.

The most extraordinary aspect of the Zidane’s rage was the manner in which he chose to vent it. Of all the appendages available to the football legend, he chose to use his head. Somehow a fist would have been a crass substitute, the very essence of football being hinged on the rule that you can’t use your hands. Moreover, Zidane’s skull mercifully targeted Materazzi’s impact-resistant ribcage. It would have been ungentlemanly to pit his bulbous rock against the Italian’s eggshell noggin.

Some may say that Zidane’s final act as an international footballer besmirched his otherwise glorious career. I beg to differ. Zidane’s headbutt was a contained physical response to Materazzi’s hostile invective. It could have been an ugly act if Zidane had sought to elicit pain, but this wasn’t the case. Zidane’s was simply a demonstrative gesture that turned out to be a swan song that defied the expected hollywood ending.

In three years’ time, the nexus of World Cup media will shift to South Africa. Despite soapbox mutterings about 2010, Sepp Blatter recently assured us that “the only thing that will stop us from holding the World Cup in South Africa would be a natural disaster.” In four years’ times, a scattering of video clips and a handful of World Cup stadiums will be all that remains. No doubt our World Cup’s Internet footprint will include profoundly South African signs of divine intervention.

Clicks:

• Blatter on 2010: IOL Article
• Divine Intervention in World Cup History: Hand of God

Share This

Profoundly South African singer-songwriter Koos Kombuis stirred up a storm in 2006 with a whimsical tune entitled “Fokkol.” The free download sapped the width of thousands of broadbands from Worcester to Wollongong. The song paints a bleak picture of South Africa. A tour guide’s monologue from the year 2010, the lyrics lament the plight of a fallen country and fanatically expose its ruins. Smug expats were thrilled. Homecoming revolutionaries were indignant.

The song also appeared on a YouTube offering entitled “The New South Africa” (above). It was given English subtitles and accompanied by a montage of dystopian imagery showcasing the hack Movie Maker skills of a certain “sweetlove3ten.” While the song is described as “hilarious,” it should have been given the tag satire rather than parody. Nevertheless, most of the 314 comments generated by the video’s 58,860 views (circa the date of this post) push the idea of humor aside and vent an even more dire glimpse of the state of the nation.

“Fokkol” has been embraced with enthusiasm by those seeking to confirm their pessimism about South Africa. Those in denial want to pillory Koos Kombuis for being unpatriotic. Few seem to realise that they are responding to a work of science fiction. The monologue, after all, performs an imaginative time warp that gives the song its satirical edge. The lyrics simply suggest that tour guides in 2010 will have lots to talk about what little the country has to offer.

Nevertheless, satire is also directed at the tour guide’s bleak and critical eye. Will South Africa’s poor self-esteem go so far as to infect those whose task it is to take visitors to our places of national pride? Has seeking signs of failure become a South African fetish? Mind you, the guide in question speaks in Afrikaans, which suggests that he must be addressing a group of South African expats. Perhaps they’ve returned from exile to indulge in what they expect to be a World Cup disaster. Perhaps their tour guide is telling them exactly what they want to hear.

Clicks:

• Related Channel 24 Article: The New South Africa?

Share This