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“Thus inspired we must therefore write…to tell the the stories about ourselves, which nobody else will or can write”
Thabo Mbeki
President Thabo Mbeki writes these words on the preface to UNISA’s reprint of Eric William’s book, Capitalism and Slavery. President Mbeki shoulders the responsibility to write about Africa to Africans. He goes on to say we need to write both to dispel the myths about ourselves and to reassert our human dignity on the pages of history. Our stories have long been told by others and they have told them incorrectly and in many instances outright lied. It is out of that responsilibility that I feel compelled to write this ode to Kwaito.
In the burgeoning New South Africa of the 1990’s Kwaito took root. More than just a musical genre, Kwaito was a culture. It presented to us, young black South Africans, a way to reimagine ourselves. We were found on street corners sitting atop danger boxes, adorned in Loxion Kulca, Dickies bucket hats, sneakers and orange overalls with the words NOT GUILTY on our backs. A bold statement given the assumption that our blackness is also inherit criminality, an idea which subsists today.
The songs were uncomplicated and the lyrical content often translated to mean something as simple as ‘fingers in the air’ such as Makhendlas’ – Iminiwe. Kwaito made us walk different, in the literal sense we had a bounce to our step, we talked different too, often with an unlit match in our mouths, a habit I have noticed Zola 7 has recently abandoned.
The music was about people like us, in townships like our own, saying things we were saying or wanted to say. It was also orginally our own. It is did not sound like anything else in the world. It was South African.
In the quagmire of political, and the socio economic shifts of the death of apartheid and the birth of a democratic South Africa, we found ourselves in Kwaito.
They who have come to criminalise all black young people, particulalry black young people united in one idea, will tell you that Kwaito bred criminals. It did not. They will tell you that it inspired gangerism and drugs. It did not. In communities where those things were present, it was not the engineering of Kwaito. In fact it was that very Kwaito that afforded us the psychological escape from those inhabitable conditions. Kwaito saved us.
We therefore have an unending debt to the pioneers of that culture. It is also the reason why we miss Makhendlas, Lebo Mathosa, Brown Dash, Zombo and most recently Mandoza for whom our hearts truly bleed. It is hard to imagine any other kind of growing up where their music did not feature. It is even more difficult to imagine any other kind of blackness for myself than the one they inspired.
I mourn the death of Kwaito reluctantly because I do not truly believe it has died. Whenever I find myself in a gathering of young people and Mshoza’s Kortez comes on, something moves in everyone present. It is almost like an electric field runs through the room and forces everyone to their feet and our bodies suddenly recall the Kwasa, the Twalatsa and the Mnike like it has not been decades.
We love Kwaito. We miss Kwaito. We urge on the remaining of our Kwaito musicians to give us one more concert, a tour if you will. If Zola 7, Mdu, Kabelo, Zwai, Mshoza, Mzambiya, Msawawa, Trompies, Bongo Mufffin, Mapuputsi, Doc Shebeleza, Brickz and many others of our remaining Kwaito artists come across this article, South Africa misses you. We want Kwaito back.
