Mandela & Obama: A Comparison of Icons

Time to compare these two world leaders and ask: what's next?

Trevor Noah in the US - South Africa's Comedian Connects

Vulindlela - A South African Voice on TV

For the first time, a South African stand up comic appeared on Leno. On Jan. 6, Trevor Noah, a young comedian from Jozi. Come to think of it, he may be the only South African comic to be on any major talk show.

TREVOR NOAH on LENO

Is he what Zulus once called Pal Simon when his Graceland with Ladysmith Black Mombaza broke through musically: vulindlela - opener of the gate?

Noah may be the only comedian in the world who can really make fun of Mandela in front on a American audience, then take on African Americans ("not really African - but we'll play along with that") and then flawlessly switch in and out of their accents.

  

He dresses like a young stockbroker and speaks with a plummy accent that sounds almost midatlantic - vaguely American, vaguely British and occasionally South Efrican.

  

When he does Julius Malema - his Africanisms are uncanny. When he pays Jacob Zuma telling the World Bank that he doesn't have the $150bn he owes them you'll die laughing. "Did you put that money in my hand, no!" When he can't get the IMF off his back ask his assistant for "mashini wami." You might have to explain that to an American friend but somehow they'll be laughing anyway.

  

Noah's story is that his mother is Xhosa and his father Swiss ("you know the Swiss, they like chocolate"). He grew up at the tail end of apartheid where he was technically an outlaw. He is bi-racial but not culturally what South Africans would call "colored."

  

That buys him a lot of license to take on just about anyone - which does with great intelligence and rare mimicry. It also makes him a kind of insider-outsider - rather like Obama who shares a similar characteristic of being bi-racial but not of the traditional African-American community.

  

All this makes Noah the first of his a kind - a biracial African comic that Americans of all races can get their heads around.

  

The question is - will his insight open the lid on South African culture generally? This really is the new Africa and one that American of all races can relate to.

  

I'm guessing that sooner or later his managers will put him in a Mandela shirt or at least stick some type of kente cloth in his breast pocket. But he's the new Africa, so who knows?

  

What I do know is that he is a talent worth watching and he will certainly make American want to know more about the amazing cultures and stories underlying the new South Africa.

Decoding "Die Antwoord" - South Africa’s New White Shocker - by White Shaka

It’s all about aliens, you’ll see. By Alan Brody

If disbelieving colleagues or your hip hop-friendly kids haven’t told you, the hottest thing on the "Interweb" is a wacky rap/rave duo called Die Antwoord from South Africa. What makes them so unique is the absolute filth coming out of their mouths, their white trash looks, modern primitivism and borderline amateurish performances that make for compelling, uproariously funny videos.

As rappers, they are not quite Jay-Z and as movers they are hardly Beyonce. Yet they spit out a riveting patter in a crude, obscure language that sounds like pidgin Klingon with extra gutturals.

The fact that they are all white and at the same time, lowlifes from Africa is an image we haven’t encountered before. In their opening video, Enter the Ninja, they also introduce the ghostly, rocking image of the world’s oldest Progeria survivor.

The net result is a kind of Mad Max, post-apocalyptic residue of degenerate white ravers abandoned in Africa.

Must the Gods Be that Crazy?

In a way they are. Watkins “Waddy” Tudor Jones, a/k/a Ninja, looks as skinny as George Orwell in his “Down and Out in London and Paris” days crossed with the truculence of a young Hitler. He is swathed in cheap jailhouse tattoos and, as his real name suggests, is a middle class fellow with a very fancy sounding, non-Afrikaner name. His sidekick, the eerie-voiced Yolandi Vi$$er who comes with Salvation Army couture, an atrociously hacked hairdo, Afrikaner name and a thing for white mice, is another assault on the senses.

Their disgusting references would blanche a sailor while Ninja’s willingness to peek-a-boo his privates or Yolandi’s occasional baring of her behind in public are pure shock.

Yet they are obviously more educated than they appear - as indeed they are. In fact, they a performance art couple that dabbled for years in white, mock hip hop music rooted in South Africa’s Cape town region under the moniker of Max Normal. They champion something called Zef style – white trash chic from our Cradle of Man continent taken to a new subterranean low.

This is a headscratcher, a guilty laugh for the uninitiated and something that brings on a disbelieving howl from actual South Africans. Natives could have no more imagined hearing Cape flats trash talk in the raver nightclubbing scene than to hear the Queen Mother speaking ghetto.

Yet there is a twist to it all that keeps people intrigued - even if they get that it’s more put-on than an exotic new kind of parolee patois. Even if they get that it might be a wacky response to the country's notorious crime issues - a kind of strident puffing of the cornered white redux.

It’s that talk about aliens that gives their odd vision away – even if a first it just sounds like more Waddy whack. This is not just Borat goes to Table Bay. The giveaway is that “the coolest guy” in Waddy’s world, is Neil Blomkamp, the director of District 9 who is also directing their next video.

District 9 is an inside joke about an area in Cape Town as well as a view of aliens as truly alien – not friendly-looking ET’s but low-rent, supersized shrimp with nasty demeanours, a dubious if, advanced technology and a thing for cat food.

That is ultimately what makes these people fascinating – they are in effect, channeling the alien creatures of District 9. This is, in itself is a play on the tragic District 6, a working-class district in Cape Town made up of what the apartheid government once considered "aliens" – Cape Coloureds - that mixture of whites, indigenous Hottentonts, migrating African Xhosas and former Malay slaves that challenged the separation-of-races ideology of apartheid. These people have a distinct dialect that can sound like a crude and sometimes mocking version of the former ruling white Afrikaner’s language. In the 1960’s they were pushed out of the portside district near central Cape Town to a barren area behind the signature Table mountain and its series of peaks – or “kraanse” in Afrikaans.

Die Atwoord's conceit is that if aliens are a base crew with a guttural language (in District 9 they sound like a race that speaks through a vacuum cleaner) with depraved standards well then, humanities redux may be in a better position to deal with aliens than the usual crew of pretentious, high-faluting sweet talkers with forked tongue.

The message is that, by finding their inner coloured and expressing their coarse inner being, these white people plus the occasional black African, become more in line with the true nature of aliens. Those familiar with UFO literature know that for all the glowing talk about “Grays” and “Nordics” it is the anticipation of the truly skin-crawling kind of aliens known as “Reptilians” or "Reptoids" that requires a drastic human adjustment. Even the mispronunciation of their name, as in Die Ant-ward is a reference to alien subjugation.

So, their message to you is Wakker Word - Wake Up! This is training wheels for alien encounters - if not actual invasion – of the absurd kind.

Hence their name, Die Antwoord (pronounced “Dee Unt –VOORD) which means “The Answer.” In one video someone asks, the answer to what: “whatever,” says Ninja.

In fact, their name is a line out of the surviving Afrikaner national anthem that was shotgun married to the ruling African National Congress’ Xhosa language anthem that now makes up the country’s national song.

“Uit onse ewige gebergtes,

Waar die kraanse antwoord gee.”

Or

“Over everlasting mountains,

where the cliffs give their answer.”

Their answer – although the joke is they are not actually showing it - is the biracial future. In this case, it is through their words as a kind of foul-mouthed Obama. It shows up their very first video where Ninja talks about all the races of Southern Africa – black, white, Hottentot, Bushman, Indian & Malay all smooshed into one. Not his exact word, of course, but you get it. To the foreign eye this is just the poor white detritus of post-colonial Africa married Cape Flats coloured gang talk. It’s not pretty which in this age makes it seem funny.

Like the poor Afrikaner whites who are the losers of post-colonialism, the coloureds also carry their own special tradition of seething anger. It their case they were unloved by the blacks and abandoned by the Afrikaner whites who at one point officially called them Cape Basters (bastards) although they share their language. Even today, the Coloureds congregate in a distinct area with their own culture. Die Antwood taps the intersection of the gangland version of their dialect with low-life whites, mad art with alien trash talk, castoff clothes and demented Haring-like graphics to send out this message:

Welkom vreemdelinge. Ons is sleg. Ernstig op.

“Welcome aliens. We’re bad. Seriously.”

The Dalai Lama and the Land of the Zulus....?

OK folks - here's where we get a little serious. Recently, South Africa pulled the welcome mat from under the Dalai Lama. There's a whole lot more to this than meets the eye, and in a way, it reflects on the book, White Shaka Boy.......

Read on - it's an eye-opener!

Owned by China: South Africa, Dalai Lama and.............America?

By Alan Brody

When South Africa disinvited the Dalai Lama from their Peace Conference on Monday, they did a lot more than become the laughing stock of the Civilized World. They signaled that China is the New Colonial Master of the Universe.

The Great Game is afoot again but only China seems to be playing. And this time, they are making up the rules: be bloodless, as invisible as possible and try to dominate world’s resources. So when the economy recovers and we need commodities again - guess who will be naming the price? And if China decides to call in our national debt, who will we be working for, Mr. Obama?

The South Africa incident is just the first, indirect public display of China’s ten-year resource invasion of the 3rd World. In the land of Mandela, sports officials, exhilarated at hosting the 2010 World Cup Soccer Games call on the Man of the Mandala. With billions invested in stadiums, housing and airport infrastructure, the country is ready to take their seat as the New Africa’s finest at the table of leading nations. So their three Nobel Peace laureates, Nelson Mandela, Bishop Tutu and F.W De Klerk grandly invite the Dalai Lama to join their showcase Peace Conference to let the World know - it’s more than soccer. They’ve arrived!

Then the government, under President Kgalema Motlanthe, very casually informs the World that the Dalai Lama is not welcome because his issues with China “will distract attention from the games.” Amazingly, even the South African Business Press is taken by surprise asking essentially how much business does China do that they would sell their prized moral status down the river? According to South Africa’s Business Day, China only purchases 20% of their commodities. They actually suggested that China needs South Africa more than they need China.

Wake up fellas – you are in post-20th Century, post apartheid-liberation denial. Europe is fading, the US has been leaving town. China is your leading trading partner at over $50+ billion and they just opened a $500 million investment fund in your backyard. What has Tibet done for you lately, anyway?

That South Africa just didn’t see it coming is testament to their economy’s diversity and advanced infrastructure. China’s influence is barely visible, showing up only in banks and lines of credit. So when China dropped $3.6bn in South Africa in 2006 - it was for a chunk of Standard Bank – the bank with Africa’s biggest reach.

But elsewhere in Africa, where there is little development, China’s simple goal – extract resources and cut out competition – is plain to see. They will pay off whomever they need to build whatever infrastructure it takes to get raw material “A” to port “B” to get it to Chinese factory “C.” In the truly impoverished but resource-rich countries, the locals see the new mines, the hydropower dam and one new road with the trucks driving their booty directly to the port. Scads of Chinese engineers show up, learn the language and do the job. Chinese food becomes available in the jungle, the locals get a lowly job or two and ton of Chinese manufactured goods which obliterate most local manufacture. However, Presidents stay in power, new Palaces and luxury cars appear and numbered accounts are opened.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo they have done something no western colonialist has done – built roads into the jungle – swapping some $6 billion for raw materials. They are developing mines and even planning a $60 billion dam that will tower over the colossal 3 Gorges Dam in China. In Nigeria, they put $8 billion into hydropower, and in Kenya, $580 million into dams. In Zimbabwe it is whatever weapons Mugabe needs to stay in power. China is the biggest investor in the Angola’s oil bonanza - putting our easy access to a huge spigot of Atlantic Ocean oil in question. In Darfur, you might want to ask who is funding the oil pipeline?

When I visited South Africa in 2005 to research my book, White Shaka Boy, a kind parable of western neo-colonialism, the only hint I saw of China was in the malls. Almost every product – except the local foodstuffs – were identical to those we found in America. The only reason we scooped up bargains is because we have opposite seasons, as theirnsummer approached, my family loaded up on winter closeouts to take back home.

If it were not for the seasonal arbitrage, the prices would have been about the same as the US. The brands were either exactly the same or jarringly similar. The products however, were exactly the same because, guess what - they are all made in China just like ours. Welcome to the Great Wall Mart, folks……..

Yet, just 10 years earlier when I had visited South Africa – before China began its great resource grab - there were few Supermalls and the products on sale were truly different. Clothing and furnishings were locally made. They were cheap and had genuine African and Indian influences or unique interpretations of European design. Now it’s all world brand/world design and made - in China. From clothes to housewares to electronics – almost every local attempt at manufacture has been hollowed out. Africans are now shopkeepers like everyone else in the world with mostly small scale and specialty manufacturing, assemblers of goods made elsewhere and producers of foodstuffs and of course, raw materials

Like Americans, South Africans have also been blinded to China’s encroachment because the visible side of overseas investment was in Real Estate - fueled by oil money. The northern coastal land, once relegated to sugar cane fields, was being rapidly transformed into luxury housing and resort complexes. The area on the KwaZulu/Natal coast where my Graphic Novel is set, is the site of South Africa’s leading filmmakers’ own multimillion dollar Miami-style real estate play - funded by Middle East money.

Yet event that has faded – the massive $500 million theme park – AmaZulu World, once planned by a Dubai company for the very area where my story is set on the Zulu coast, fell off the map when oil prices plummeted.

China however, remains.

Our only trump card is that Africans like us and they love the fact that we have an African America president. They create Rap on their laptops, wear Yankees caps, Knicks t-shirts and acquire our products wherever they can. Except that they are almost always made in China. So even if we decided to create a kind of African Marshall Plan to grow both continents economies, we’d very quickly discover the new Bamboo Curtain

That’s dark side of the Great New Game which we will see when the economy picks up again. As we need fresh commodities, those checks drawn on the money we borrowed, will all be made out to China at the prices they are likely to dictate. And it is not just Africa - if the Dalai Lama were to keynote a Peace Conference in most of Latin America, my guess is he’d find the welcome mat just as quickly removed. They’ve been dong the same thing there…….

So thank you Mr. Motlanthe, you just informed us of not only of who you’re working for, but who we’ll be working for: and it’s not Uncle Sam, because right now, he too is getting his paycheck from China.