Post-Apartheid Pop

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The young South Africans now hitting drinking age are the first to grow up without the mental segregation that came with apartheid. Every camera snap, every pose is an expression of their birthright, a dance that says: our moment, our city, our space, ours. To understand the vibe, think the optimism of Motown, the pageant of black expressionism in late ’90s Atlanta, Chic’s “Good Times” anthem. Then multiply it by a whole country.

House music is the sound track of those aspirations, and the future wouldn’t look good for kwaito except that kwaito in some sense is house music. Much of kwaito’s originality comes in the lyrical content and the township subculture attached to it: the pantsula dance style; the uniform—a floppy Gilligan hat called a sporty (pronounced spotty), Dickies and Pro-Keds or Chuck Taylor techies; the slang called tsotsi-taal, or gangster talk. Take all that away and kwaito is basically slow house, making the current resurgence a weird return to its roots.

If there’s one section of the cultural landscape that hasn’t changed, it’s Alex. Established back in 1912, Alexandra is one of Jo’burg’s oldest black communities, predating even Soweto, and the kwaito subculture is alive and kicking there. Every Sunday afternoon, a backyard barbecue breaks out at Joe’s Butchery, where the DJ plays house, but the vibe is kwaito. From Joe’s everyone migrates to an open-air club up the street, and then on to the exclusive Club Zambezi. The next night they repeat the ritual on a bigger scale, spilling out of a small nightclub called Cheeks to transform 15th Street into a street dance.

Around 3 a.m., when the energy on 15th Street is winding down, some dude in a sporty will jump on top of a speaker stack or a dumpster and bust some pantsula steps, stiff arms held out dramatically, accentuating the long angles of the body like something between a pop-and-lock contortion and those ’70s funk poses you see on the intro to Good Times. The slim, dreadlocked girl running the turntables looks out the Plexiglas window of Cheeks, across the sea of people and the twinkling valley of shanties behind them, and pitches down a house record that sounds more or less like the last one, and suddenly everybody goes crazy.

Excerpted from the Fader(March 2008). Subscriptions: $19.95/yr. (8 issues) from 71 W. 23rd St., Floor 13, New York, NY 10010; www.thefader.com/magazine.

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