AfricaIs aCountry

The Wrong Answer

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

The Wrong Answer

By
Sean Jacobs

The nonsense that foreign journalists, who don't understand Afrikaans or the language's creole cultural history, write about Die Antwood.

Yolandi Visser and Ninja (Waddy Jones). Promo Image.

The Guardian’s Music Blog has a post up about Die Antwoord, a mostly white rap (or rave-rap) band from Cape Town. The group is led by Waddy Jones, who as Max Normal (that was a long time ago) made some pretentious rap in the mid-1990s.  So not surprisingly there’s a lot of posing that comes with Die Antwoord (in English, The Answer). The group is now being paraded as the next best thing out of South Africa. (Not surprisingly hipster magazine Vice has an online feature on the group.)

Anyway Guardian blogger Scott Wright made a fool of himself twice in the piece. First he pretended to know the meaning of the Afrikaans slang word, “zef,” the name of the song featured in the video above. Wright claimed it is a musical style associated with Die Antwoord. That it also means “masturbate” and “vagina” in Afrikaans He could not been more wrong on both counts. It is not a musical style and if it was, Die Antwoord is only but one exponent of zef. Second, zef refers to working class attitudes among white working class and some coloureds and is mostly limited to the poorer suburbs of Cape Town (although people have noticed it in places like the capital Pretoria).  Think ghetto or trailer park. When people say someone is “common” (pronounced like “kommin”) or lower class, that’s what they mean by zef.

Then Wright claimed that Die Antwoord and another white rapper, Jack Parrow, invented Afrikaans rap. (Though Die Antwoord raps in Afrikaans also, the song featured on The Guardian Music Blog, “Enter the Ninja,” is entirely in English.)

Where has Wright been? Has he ever heard of Terror MC, Prophets of da City, Isaac Mutant, Brasse vannie Kaap, Mister Lee or even Kallitz and their work to shape Afrikaans rap for more than 20 years now?

If, like Scott Wright, you don’t know these bands, go google them.

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