[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM_Ew6zsnDY&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

Is this playful ode to coloured identity,* becoming the unofficial World Cup anthem?

Apparently South Africa’s football team–now finally scoring goals in warm up games celebrate by mimicking the dances associate with “(Show them) Make the circle bigger,” with a guest verse by rap mc, HHP.  The numbers of people using it as their Facebook update or signing off with it, are numerous.  Show them.

Sorry Shakira and K’Naan.

* For those unfamiliar with South African race talk, check right at the opening when comedian Joey Rasdien’s announces that “Coloured is a ou [old] term.’ Also interesting is the celebration–on t-shirts of coloured townships Heidedal (Bloemfontein), Eersterus (Pretoria) and Eldorodo Park (Johannesburg) on t-shirts. This unabashed celebration of coloured identity as an African identity is certainly new.

Sean Jacobs

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.