Words Are Weapons

The king of kwaito: Johannesburg musician Zola. Image courtesy Ghetto Ruff Records.

Tsotsi, which won the 2006 Academy Award for best foreign film, sums up South Africa’s socio-economic sea change with remarkable eloquence. It tells the story of a young thug (Percy Chweneyagae) who, after a bloody carjacking, finds himself in possession of his female victim’s BMW and, less advantageously, her baby. Shot in the grit of Daveyton township and the nearby electric-fenced compounds that are Johannesburg’s wealthier 'burbs, both the haves and the have-nots in Tsotsi are black.

The soundtrack to their grim allemande is kwaito, South Africa’s indigenous street music, which has quickly migrated from makeshift Soweto boomboxes to Bose sound systems in glittering suburban nightclubs. Kwaito is made up of thick, growled spoken-word rhymes and drowsy, bass-heavy house beats: an Africanized version of hip hop. After a journey of many centuries, the New World iteration of rhyming over a simple beat has finally wound its way back to its source, both barrels blazing.

If there is a king of kwaito, it is likely Zola, who takes his name from his birthplace, one of the most violent neighbourhoods in ’90s-era Soweto. Scarred but dashing, Zola has red-rimmed eyes that seem a fair shake more street-hardened than his 29 years should allow. He inhabits the role of the pantsula, a “noble” gangster who lives by a strict code of taking from the rich to give to the poor (with a little bit left over for himself, of course). During apartheid, when the townships were lawless, these men would make sure there was liquor, food, prostitutes and — most critically — security for the inhabitants of their 'hoods.

On the Tsotsi soundtrack, Zola’s call to arms is the rousing street anthem Umdlwembe (loosely translated as “Rogue Dog”); like its mangy inspiration, the song is a rabid monster that, on first listen, seems impossible to tame. You need to be fluent in tsotsitaal, the street slang of South Africa, to understand so much as a bar, but you quickly get the gist. Like the cratered streets he grew up on, Zola’s music is littered with the scree, broken glass, spent bullet casings and other detritus of recent township wars. The music is a collection of sonic snapshots taken under fire. Umdlwembe sets the tone:

Always looking for more booze
When we leave the only people left standing will be widows
Real men die and left will be the gangsters
The gangsters will die and leave the beers

“The fastest growing brand in South Africa,” screams Zola’s press kit. It’s barely an exaggeration. With four hit records (his debut, Umdlwembe, sold more than 300,000 units in South Africa alone), a popular reality TV show called Zola Seven (imagine the Make-A-Wish Foundation meets Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), a host of charitable initiatives across Africa and a starring role (and musical presence) in an Oscar-winning movie, Zola embodies the music he has helped popularize — fast, vital and upwardly mobile.

Get your snack on: Carousing in a Soweto shebeen (watering hole). Courtesy Ghetto Ruff Records.

If you map kwaito’s genome, you’ll find evidence of the soporific house grooves native to the shebeens (township drinking holes), jazz great Hugh Masekela’s distinctive horn and synth melodies, a farrago of found sounds (car horns, dog barks, laughter, gunshots) that capture township life and huge gobs of bubblegum, an ecstatic local pop music that was once owned by the immensely popular singer Brenda Fassie. In the ’90s, pioneers like Oscar and KZN combined these disparate elements and detailed the life around them in tsotsitaal rhymes that hit the mike like shrapnel. Yet, instead of coming off as newfangled, this music seemed bred in the bone, ancestral even. It was electronic kraal music, the venerable Zulu toyi-toyi (war chant) re-purposed for a new generation.

Kwaito’s genesis, like hip hop’s, can be traced back to simple four-bar blues, which has its origins in the spirituals sung on slave plantations in the New World. Blues informed jazz, which begat R&B, which in turn fathered soul and funk. And funk is where the breakbeats and samples elemental to hip hop were mined. The links to Africa are clear; after all, hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa took his name after a “life-changing trip to Africa” that heavily influenced the music he was in the process of inventing.

All this is of only marginal interest to Zola, whom I met at his home late one Friday night in April. He lives in a neighbourhood called Melville, which 15 years ago was Johannesburg’s repository of white liberal Bohemian culture. Now, it’s a trendy hangout for a racial mélange of cool students, artists, media types and, of course, musicians.

Zola speaks with a spitfire-quick, mellow Sowetan accent — he’s superbly articulate and superbly informed. He’s quick to remind me that there’s a social context to everything in South Africa, even dance music. “Don’t be fooled,” he tells me of kwaito’s origins. “Run-DMC were not that popular here. There was hip hop, ja. But it was music that we saw on TV — there wasn’t a hip-hop culture. On my side, I think I was too young and too poor to buy into that.”

This is no mere we-used-to-live-in-a-shoebox prattle. During the ’80s and ’90s, Zola’s namesake community was given the appellation “Beats Him To Death.” Desperately poverty stricken, wracked with violence, Zola and its environs were often as bad as present-day Baghdad; at the height of the township wars, Soweto could see 30 murders a day. This is Zola’s milieu, and the wretched womb of much of South Africa’s current chart-topping music. Reigning South African house deity DJ Cleo comes from Zola, as does kwaito super-producer Mandoza.

If kwaito bears close resemblance to any particular avatar of the hip-hop family, it’s grime, the South London genre that Dizzee Rascal introduced with the album Boy in Da Corner. And if there is a kwaito analog to the splendid grime primer Run The Road, it’s the Tsotsi soundtrack. Grime, like kwaito, reeks of its origins, bubbling up as it did from the illegal 2-step parties that proliferated in South London in the early naughts. Take the spare Casio-tone melodies pilfered from the arcades grime practitioners blew their small change in and add the vitriolic Souf London patois, and lo and behold, you have a music so evocative of a certain time and place, it’s a wonder it managed to cross over at all.

A big hit with the kids: Zola embracing some of his shortest fans. Courtesy Ghetto Ruff Records.

Astonishingly, Zola claims never to have heard grime before. “We don’t need another form of [musical] dictatorship,” he says, waving a dismissive arm. Besides, there are real differences between kwaito and the gangsta ethos prevalent in so much western hip hop. “There’s no dissing here [in kwaito]; there’s so much love,” says Zola, referring to the habit of North American hip-hop artists to rip into their rivals. “Maybe [Nelson] Mandela had something to do with that, maybe it was the west coast/east coast thing that did it. We understand the rule — and no one breaks it.”

I’m as allergic to conscious hip hop as the next wannabe gangsta, and kwaito artists never mount as lofty a soapbox as American rappers like Common and Talib Kweli. That may be because kwaito is above all dance music, a fact plainly in evidence on the Tsotsi soundtrack. Consider Bravo’s Skokho, where a thumping house beat is garnished with a shaggy, grin-inducing guitar riff that practically kidnaps your booty. There’s Brickz’s Tjovitjo, a genre-defining smash hit in South Africa that throws down a vuvezele sample (a Zulu celebratory whistle) over a slow-motion house groove and some wonky, shebeen-style guitar riffs. Then there’s Zola’s own Ghetto Scandalous, which features a crazed accordion melody and a snoozy house loop topped off by the artist’s signature rogue-dog growl, which at once evokes DMX, Biggie and a Zulu storytelling elder.

With some solid touring and decent label support for the Tsotsi soundtrack, kwaito’s royalty may find themselves on better North American iPods over the course of the summer. But to hear kwaito in its township origins — where it mirrors the sounds, the life, the essence of its surroundings — is to fully grasp its appeal.

“Maybe hip hop does not come from the States,” Zola proposes. “Rhyming over a beat? Zulus and Xhosas have been doing that for a long, long time.” If that is indeed the case, then kwaito has thrown hip hop just about the most raucous homecoming bash imaginable.

Richard Poplak is a Toronto-based writer. His first book, Ja, No, Man!: Growing Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa will be published by Penguin in 2007.

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