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.
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?
Die Antwoord album covers, 2009-2020
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 of the mounting social disparities Mutant confronts.
In Mokgata’s and Rasebatha’s documentary, Mutant curses constantly, “motherfucker”, like a common drill rapper at this hopeless situation, forced to the margins of his society. In the picture of his immediate community, we see the same problems of service delivery, social neglect, homelessness, and drug abuse as they continue to decimate lives. We are also privy to scenes in the Cape Town seaside suburb of Hout Bay where barricades are erected, tyres are torched, and rocks hurled at representatives of law and order as collective grievances from the coloured community are ventilated.
The film’s official Facebook page, sub captioned (in the red circle), “I FIGHT FOR THE LITTLE MAN”.
Mutant is part of this aggrieved Capetonian minority within the larger South African nation space. Mutant discloses colouredness as an identity that remains racially devalued, hence the dissent and protests it highlights. This directorial choice serves to reestablish a viewpoint on the tensions that periodically break out over this perplexing state of affairs, pinpointing it most especially to the Western Cape province.
In a 2012 Tweet, former Western Province premier, Helen Zille, referred to South African pupils coming to the region predominantly from the Eastern Cape to access schooling, as “education refugees”. While her explanations gave way to the paucity of education opportunities in the Eastern Cape at the time, Zille’s insensitive remark disregarded the largely unreconstructed apartheid legacy and the history of the scourge of racial and socioeconomic inequality that continue to bedevil the country, then and since. Capetonians frustrated by the strain of public services have viewed the social divisions in the city and province in terms of a tussle between the local coloured community and black migrants, thereby compounding a historically fraught racial equation. From the viewpoint of Mutant, this is still the situation into the 2020s.
Cape Town in particular is infested with gangs and the violence that trails them. Guns, prostitution, protection rackets – all are cloaked with the glamour of violence, constant menace and illicit power. This is a context characterised by legacies of insidious colonial intrusion, rapacious land grabs, and toxic contestations over the spoils of conflict and power. This isn’t a situation to be mocked, mimicked or parodied. This is life and death, in which lives are casually terminated, as when Yolandi’s ex-lover Anies, a self-confessed hitman who belonged to the infamous ‘Numbers’ gang in jail and when outside of prison is a member of the Mitchell’s Plain (Cape Flats) ‘Ugly Americans’ gang, was killed in a driveby shooting, a fallout of the gangster lifestyle in 2020.
Anies appears in the Die Antwoord video, ‘Cookie Thumper!’ (2013), with missing front teeth and translucent diabolical eyes, feral-looking as he humps Yolandi from behind. Back then, this uncustomary choice of a lover makes Yolandi arguably bolder as well as more credible than her gimmick-enthralled musical partner, Ninja; now, after Anies’ death, it perhaps raises a whole series of reevaluations, responding to what have been the more open questions already asked of the band’s contributions to South African cultural ex/change.
While Die Antwoord’s shoots of short films of themselves as cartoonish characters in an array of off-kilter situations broaden their appeal, they also probe the uses and abuses of the grotesque. Indeed, Die Antwoord continue to turn this kind of existential adversity into a popularity drive, something akin to reality TV fare, almost hip, currently through their now “private zef community” website (https://www.dieantwoord.com/). As has been the case throughout the band’s life, they persist in projecting a lifestyle and condition to be emulated. Before their ‘cancellation’, their message was spread as they went about their global tours, winning fans who still know nothing of the South African cultural and racial backgrounds they were parodying. Now, they attract and rigorously maintain the diehard sets of online fans as part of a Die Antwoord ‘community’, with selective access to “new music, art, videos, zef secret party announcements, intimate AMA’s with Ninja and ¥o-landi, and other cool secret zef shit (including N&¥’s private diaries)”, all on an application-for-membership basis only.
Landing page at dieantwoord.com with the cover art from their track ‘Die Antwoord is Dead’, July 2022
The ambivalent attractions of the perverse, the strange, the bizarre in Die Antwoord comes now to elicit the alarming discomfort of simultaneous pity. The main figures of the grotesque in art – doubleness, hybridity, alterity and metamorphoses – give way to their undersides – deception, exploitation, appropriation and crass forgery. In this sense, examples of socially responsible or radical popular art as protest (or at least, those that strongly allude to the now vanishing cult of authenticity), as in the work of Mutant and those like him, are devalued or ignored; the counterfeit of what they stand for is disseminated, celebrated, and lushly remunerated. Artifice, as it appeared through the exemplars of Die Antwoord, had everything to gain, leaving its destructive trail behind it as it went. In the social context of South African art practice, popular and highbrow alike, surely this is the cruelest form of irony, a sour trick of today’s pop culture, carried off with apparently frightening ease and aplomb.
As for the current state of Die Antwoord’s career, it appears it’s been dispensed with, hubris dealt out largely by cancel culture, but also by the very mechanisms they have sought to exploit over the course of their local and international successes. After being stymied by serious allegations of homophobia, rape, bad faith and exploitation, it also appears they’ve lost the alt- online chatroom race, as well as all credibility in both the ‘hoods and the streets.
However, there is a trajectory that could see their relevance inserting itself anew in the industry, igniting itself in the rapid rise of the latest chapter of threat to artistic and musical integrity. Throughout the muddy histories of their rise and decline, in among what commentators have tried to make out over the years in analysing those ambivalent spaces that Die Antwoord have manipulated their way through, we see their remarkable inversion and disjunctive multiplication of reality. It is perhaps this that holds within it a dystopian and stark futurist possible twist, the culmination of which will be the post-human universe promised by AI and digital technology.
In an age where chatbots are able to produce music tracks and simulate lyrical prowess, stringing together words influenced by rap and, so, provide a digital simulacra of hip hop as a culture, the figure of the socially rooted urban artist as a central presence in popular life needs once again to be rethought. She lies entrapped between mass commodification, viral superfluity and sheer cultural redundancy. Perhaps Die Antwoord provides us with, if not the answer, an answer, their Afrikaans name hurling a warning shot across generative AI futures, the vigilance required on maintaining cultural specificities, and the power of self-positioning in among the play between art and artifice.
Sanya Osha is the author of several books including Postethnophilosophy (2011) and Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (Expanded Edition) (2021) among other publications. He works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.