"Si-ghetto Fabulous" ("We Are Ghetto Fabulous"): Kwaito Musical Performance and Consumption in Post-Apartheid South Africa - Project MUSE
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“Si-ghetto Fabulous” (“We Are Ghetto Fabulous”): Kwaito Musical Performance and Consumption in Post-Apartheid South Africa Xavier Livermon Black Music Research Journal, Volume 34, Number 2, Fall 2014, pp. 285-303 (Article) Published by University of Illinois Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/566785 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
“Si-ghetto Fabulous” (“We Are Ghetto Fabulous”): Kwaito Musical Performance and Consumption in Post-Apartheid South Africa Xavier Livermon The sweeping changes that ushered in the fall of the apartheid regime and the implementation of a Bill of Rights has generally meant that more at- tention has been paid to human rights and dignity in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly for those who were previously excluded from protec- tions during apartheid. This article looks at contemporary South African popular culture through the lens of kwaito music in order to dissect how, years after apartheid, there are still those bodies that retain infrahumanity.1 In particular, the article calls for a reevaluation of consumptive practices in contemporary youth and musical cultures, arguing for consumption as a right—as important as any other number of rights—granted toward the formerly disenfranchised in South Africa. While I stop short of arguing that consumption is a human right, I do insist that consumption becomes one of the primary vectors through which participation, citizenship, and human dignity are forged in a contemporary globalizing world. As such, spaces and moments of consumption should not be summarily dismissed as fostering increased cultural imperialism. Rather, consumption throughout the African continent and in an increasingly globalizing black world must be treated in relation to the historical specificities through which people participate in consumptive cultures. 1. I borrow the term “infrahumanity” from Paul Gilroy’s (2000) discussion of the concept in Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Infrahumanity is used to discuss the subhuman or less-than-human characteristics that get ascribed to the racialized Other, particularly those racialized as black. Xavier Livermon is an assistant professor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include cultural studies in post-apartheid South Africa with a particular focus on popular music, performance, and new media tech- nologies. He is currently at work on a forthcoming book on kwaito music and performance in post-apartheid South Africa tentatively entitled It’s about Time: Kwaito and the Performance of Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Black Music Research Journal Vol. 34, No. 2, Fall 2014 © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 285 11/25/14 10:29 AM
286 bmr journal Overall, I am invested in destabilizing the notion that consumption is, in and of itself, deleterious behavior that distracts from the real processes of social engagement and civic participation. Following the work of Néstor García Canclini (2001), I examine consumptive behavior in relationship to the ways in which consumer practices reveal the “reworking of citizenship under conditions of globalization in ways that displace older languages of politics, democracy, and citizenship” (Lukose, 2009, 9). Citizenship does not exist apart from cultural practices that “establish social belonging [and] social networks, which in this globalized era are steeped in consumption” (Canclini 2001, 20). Furthermore, I examine consumption as a social process that is “no longer a matter of acquiring a well defined set of commercial status symbols, but is a project of individual [and I might add commu- nal] self-creation” (Schor 2007, 20). Therefore, “subjectivity does not exist prior to the market (à la neoclassical economics) but is a product of it. This does not make subjectivity ‘false’ as in earlier critiques, but it does imply that subjectivity is constrained by and produced by the market” (Schor 2007, 24). My analysis resists dystopian critiques of consumptive behavior, particularly the behavior of those who are “excluded” or “marginalized.” While acknowledging the progressive intent of such critiques, I depart from them by suggesting that a thorough exploration of contemporary popu- lar musical practices in South Africa reveals processes of self-creation and self-fashioning. Ultimately, I call for rethinking the tendency to moralize about the consumptive practices attached to the “excluded,” and I resist the tendency to view consumptive practices as “irrational” (Canclini 2001, 20). The point is not to celebrate consumer culture, but in the vein of post- moralist anthropologists of consumption such as Douglas, Isherwood, and Schudson, as Horowitz states,“to understand people’s longing for affluence as inevitable and genuine” (quoted in Schudson 2007, 237). Thus consump- tion, even that which is not intended to be political, can have important consequences that are politicizing rather than distracting (242). On Moral Economies and the Concept of the Human I am interested in the concept of the human because, as I argue, the human precedes considerations of citizenship. To be a citizen, the body that inhabits the polity must be considered human and thus worthy of rights and protec- tions. These considerations do not necessarily cohere around the concept of citizenship. The long history of the racialization of infrahumanity suggests that carrying citizenship is not enough in and of itself to determine that the racialized body (in this case the black body) will be treated with dignity. Indeed, examples abound where citizens of nation-states are subject to indignity because their bodies, racialized as Other, are represented as less BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 286 11/25/14 10:29 AM
Livermon • “Si-ghetto Fabulous” 287 than human. Throughout South African history, the use of race to signify belonging and exclusion has a long and torturous history. The conversion of black bodies from guest workers in their land of birth to citizen-subjects in the post-apartheid order has not automatically conferred dignity onto those bodies. Racialization in combination with vectors of gender, sexual- ity, class, and national identity conspire to complicate easy narratives that equate citizenship with access to rights. Any consideration of the human must begin by marking its constitutive outside, its exclusions. By understanding who is “not human” we are able to get a firmer grasp on who occupies the space of humanity. For those in South Africa, these determinations were often a logical extension of co- lonialist policy codified during apartheid and based on social exclusion defined by race. That is, those who belonged to nonwhite categories of race as defined under apartheid were, for all intents and purposes, placed in categories of infrahumanity. Furthermore, those deemed undesirable by the apartheid government (e.g., prostitutes, gays, and lesbians) could occupy these positions of infrahumanity despite having access to white privilege. During apartheid, access to the category of the human was determined by a combination of factors linked not only to skin color and social group identification but also perceived or proven behavior. One of the most important tasks of the post-apartheid government, as outlined by numerous speeches by current government officials, is to re- store human dignity to those who were denied it during apartheid. De- spite a Bill of Rights that is quite unique in that it encodes a set of “social rights” (i.e., rights to land, health, etc.) in South Africa’s constitution, no one has delineated specifically how the contemporary government is to create dignity for all. Rhetorically and legally at the very least, however, people disenfranchised in the previous order were to be returned to the category of the human. Ostensibly, the building of houses, the provision of electricity and drinking water, the decriminalization of “homosexuality,” and the removal of gender bias in inheritance laws have been implemented to restore humanity to categories of people from whom it was previously denied. Unfortunately, the transition from a brutally inhuman system to an inclu- sive one that serves humanity is not so simple. If the progressive constitu- tion is read in isolation, it would be easy to assume that contemporary South Africa has no constitutive outside or exclusions among its national subjects. Everyone is now equal under the law, and social group identification or perceived and actual behavior should not be the basis for the denial of hu- man dignity. Contemporary instances of violations upon people’s bodies, however, prove that such a hopeful summation of events in post-apartheid South Africa is premature. My point here is not to provide further ammuni- BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 287 11/25/14 10:29 AM
288 bmr journal tion to attack the African National Congress government for following a neoliberal policy or its apparent bourgeois pretensions. Rather, I want to emphasize the creative ways that those who are on the outside, those who are excluded, use the very spaces that ostensibly oppress them in order to turn the vectors of power on themselves. These practices, à la Foucault (2003), do not stand outside of power and do not necessarily seek to over- turn capitalism. Instead, the possibilities inherent in these practices rest on the ways in which they create a politics of self-fashioning that destabilizes easy generalizations that bemoan the prevalence of the market in the lives of the working poor. In essence, I argue for the importance of a nuanced examination of the politics of consumption in South Africa, particularly as they relate to the working classes and the working poor. The ability to consume is implicated in questions about human dignity in contemporary global politics, especially as it relates to Afrodiasporic youth cultures both on and outside the African continent. I examine consumption as one aspect of the fight to achieve humanity by and for those who occupy tenuous relationships to the concept. While considering these questions, I am aware that there are cultural critics writing about Afrodiasporic culture, such as Paul Gilroy (2010), who would be troubled by my assertion that it might be useful to analyze contemporary black formations under a postmoralist rubric. Arguing for a return to the consideration of moral economies in relationship to black popular cultures, Gilroy expresses alarm at what he perceives to be a shift in black Atlantic cultural formations away from a moral imperative that served as a template for understanding both humanity and communal freedom toward an “antipolitical, immoral consumerism” (17). For Gilroy (2002), this tethering of processes of consumption to questions of freedom and human- ity turns the racialized black body and racialized difference into just another capitalist byproduct of American globalization. Equally troubling for him is how this circulating corporate blackness becomes hegemonic, eliminating local forms and varieties of blackness. While recognizing the possibilities of forms of immanent critique possible within such consumerism (Gilroy 2010, 26), he ultimately concludes that contemporary black popular culture poses freedom as “little more than winning a long-denied opportunity to shop on the same terms as the other, more privileged citizens further up the wobbly ladder of racial hierarchy and economic privilege” (25). For him, this form of freedom is obviously not freedom at all and is destruc- tive because it moves beyond “opening up” or “subjecting commodities to work”; instead, these commodities “speak on behalf of their owners,” sucking them into what he refers to as “the whirlpool of consumerism” (50). Gilroy further suggests that it is hard to “locate any crumbs of hope in the more pathological results of this process of surrender” (50). In what follows, BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 288 11/25/14 10:29 AM
Livermon • “Si-ghetto Fabulous” 289 I examine an aspect of contemporary black musical culture in South Africa that offers a counterpoint to this analysis. I reveal that immanent critique is still possible within black musical cultures and that blackness retains its uniqueness in different social locations. Consumption Reconsidered In 2007, Nelson Mandela, the mayor of Johannesburg Amos Masondo, Sowetan businessman Richard Maponya, a host of South African celebri- ties, and approximately one hundred thousand shoppers (including myself) braved damp and rainy early spring weather to witness and participate in the opening of the Maponya Mall in Pimville, Soweto. The mall represented the fulfillment of a dream for entrepreneur Maponya. Despite numerous threats and legal challenges from the apartheid state, Maponya had man- aged to keep in his possession a large tract of land in Pimville. In the 1980s, he resolved to develop a mall. He felt that the millions being spent each year on transportation to upmarket shopping venues in Johannesburg could be better spent in Soweto itself. The apartheid government thwarted his efforts to build the mall—then the market and rand crash of the mid-1990s made the project prohibitively expensive. Finally, in 2005, circumstances permit- ted Maponya, in partnership with a property development association, to break ground on the facility. Practically, the mall means access to full-range grocery stores, banks and other essential services that previously many had to travel outside the com- munity to obtain. According to Mayor Masondo, “the coming into being of this retail facility in Soweto will result in household budget savings, savings in travel time and generations of local jobs in the retail sector” (quoted in Da Silva 2007), among other things. However, Mandela, a host of celebrities, and tens of thousands of everyday Soweto citizens clearly were not present simply because the opening of the mall would keep money in the community by saving travel time and transportation costs and by creating local jobs. There was an excitement in the air that superseded the possible financial benefits of the mall’s presence. Finally, Soweto would get its own upmarket mall, comparable to those of the northern suburbs at which many Sowetans typi- cally shopped on a weekly basis despite the difficulty and costs of getting there. Unequal treatment, at least with respect to consumption, was being rectified. Some conveniences of living in “white” Johannesburg were being brought to black Sowetans. Maponya himself summed it up best: “Today I brought Sandton City [universally recognized as the most upscale mall in South Africa] to Soweto and the onus is now on you people to ensure that you take good care of this establishment. This property is yours and your children’s place, protect it” (quoted in Da Silva 2007). The excitement that BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 289 11/25/14 10:29 AM
290 bmr journal swirled around the opening of the mall was about more than the capitulation of Sowetans to consumer culture. It was also about the recognition that their rands were worth something and the dignity of having in their own neigh- borhoods facilities comparable to those routinely enjoyed by middle-class white South Africans. It is this idea of consumption as connected to dignity that I will explore further through an examination of kwaito musical culture. Consuming Kwaito While conducting my dissertation research, I became acutely aware of my own need to reposition assumptions about the role of consumption among my friends and interlocutors. Working with young, often underemployed and unemployed youth in the townships of Johannesburg, I became far more aware of consumer markers than I ever was in the United States. The coolest songs, the latest car by BMW, and the newest trends of fashion were omnipresent in the imaginary of young black South Africans. This group of people was excited by the new possibilities opened up to them by the changes in society. Yet, at the same time, they were equally constrained by their lack of capital (primarily economic, but also cultural and social) to fully participate in the fruits of the liberation. As part of my research, I attended a number of kwaito festivals, par- ties, clubs, and impromptu get-togethers. Definitions of what constitutes kwaito music and culture vary, and over the years there has been robust debate between fans, scholars, and musicians over exactly what kwaito is sonically and socioculturally. Space does not allow me to delve extensively into those debates. For the purposes of this article, I find Angela Impey’s (2001) definition useful since it references the fluid nature of defining kwaito and the importance of discursive and material practices in defining it.2 She writes: Kwaito is an encompassing term for a popular dance music that is associated with contemporary urban black youth style and identity. It took center stage simultaneously with the momentous developments which ushered in South Africa’s first democratically elected government in 1994. The present heir to a long tradition of cultural assimilation, kwaito more than any other local popular music style has entered into a complex alliance with global musical culture and technological trends. (2001, 44) In addition to being defined by musical sounds, kwaito events are also marked by the diverse ways in which the music organizes patterns of con- sumption. Typically, I arrived at kwaito functions after they had already 2. For more discussion defining kwaito see Peterson (2003) and Steingo (2005). BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 290 11/25/14 10:29 AM
Livermon • “Si-ghetto Fabulous” 291 started and met my friends there. However, on a few occasions, I arrived at my friends’ homes early and observed for myself the meticulous practices of self-fashioning that would mark preparations for an evening out. These practices included predominantly the use of clothing and the preparation of their bodies for exhibition and surveillance. Extensive text messaging on cell phones in order to arrange transportation, locate venues, and prepare pre- and post-party activities signaled the importance of cellular commu- nication both as a matter of practicality and as a matter of style. Because it was so central to creating social networks, the cell phone itself became a prized possession that marked individual and communal style. Therefore, while for me the device simply existed to make and receive calls and text messages, for the youth I worked with, it was an extension of self- and peer-group identity. This was particularly the case in situations where the other commodified markers of identity such as a car or clothing were pro- hibitively expensive. Many of the clothing styles desired most strongly by post-apartheid youth are either imported or locally created boutique lines that are priced well beyond their economic means. Thus, a majority of young people can only afford one or two well-placed clothing articles. Locally based tailors and designers specialize in making lookalike clothing that mimics highly desired local and international fashion. Clips from magazines are given to these designers, and they are often asked to recreate these looks at a fraction of the cost. Still, such re-creations can easily run into well over 600 rand for one outfit.3 Therefore, peer group relationships become extremely important in fashioning the appropriate look for a party. The ability to negotiate installment payments for clothing or borrow particular items of clothing from friends and family is extremely important. A de- signer look for the average partygoer is rarely accomplished alone. Instead it is a creative mix of the partygoers’ resources—both financial and social. The body is central to these constructions. The clothing frames it to create the self-fashioned look of the particular evening. Looks are scrutinized by peers, and outfits are often changed, reconsidered, and changed back again. Yet, the desire to look good is not only about framing the body; it is about the presentation of the body itself. Grooming rituals that involve the styling of hair are prominent around both sexes, and among women these grooming practices extend into nail care and makeup application. Hours are spent in salons and barbershops making sure they have the right look. Furthermore, gym memberships, particularly among young men, are increasingly popular with a number of affordable mom-and-pop 3. During the time that I did the bulk of my research (2003–2005) one dollar equaled from about six to eight rands. BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 291 11/25/14 10:29 AM
292 bmr journal type gyms using old equipment surfacing in township environments to serve the body-conscious community. Alcohol consumption, as the main social lubricant in these settings, also marks a form of self-fashioning. Particular ciders are marketed toward wom- en, making their consumption by men unusual, a marker of metrosexuality, or an indicatory of queerness. Certain beers connote an air of sophistication or wealth. Given the levels of alcohol consumption in South Africa, market- ers of alcoholic beverages are consistently aware that what one drinks is a marker of self. While advertisers can never guarantee that their product will be taken up in the way that they intend it to be, they search constantly for the right combination of “hipness” and popularity among the “cool” crowd in order to drive their sales. University students, targeted by public relations firms, can often earn extra funds serving as brand ambassadors for alcohol companies. In this way, the companies can have their particular brand associated with a specific group of partygoers who possess high social standing, which will in turn hopefully influence their brand prestige. Public relations firms are also central to identifying those who possess prestige in social circles to invite into exclusive promotion events that market their brands. The relationship is symbiotic. Pre-existing prestige in social circles gets one invited into these “exclusive” party events. Yet being invited to these parties (often times through social networks formed through friends, families, and coworkers) can enhance social prestige. The meticulous nature of preparing for a kwaito party, whether held in a park, at a stadium, in a club, at someone’s home, or on the street, highlights the various ways that consumption marks practices of the self among younger black South Africans. The various performances of preparation to look smart for a party constitute a measure of self-fashioning that is essential to under- standing the realities of post-apartheid South Africa. In fact, self-fashioning may be one of the few spaces of control that people who are otherwise dis- enfranchised exercise over their own bodies. Thus, the presence of expen- sive cars and flashy lifestyles exhibited in kwaito videos has a role to play in carving out a politics of performance that is as much about anticipatory structures of feeling as it is about crass consumerism. Clothing, cars, provi- sions, and, most importantly, alcohol mark important aspects of consumption in relation to kwaito musical practices. Local youth fashion, as discussed by scholars such as Zine Magubane (2004) and Sarah Nuttall (2004), is based on a creative mixture of local African designs and international hip-hop fashion. Labels are important, and popular brands including Diesel, Nike, Puma and Levi’s are all represented. Similar to the United States, working-class black teens are conscientious about luxury brands, and some of these brands such as Lacoste are considered particularly desirable. BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 292 11/25/14 10:29 AM
Livermon • “Si-ghetto Fabulous” 293 Being known as a serious partier with the correct clothes, the right group of friends, and the right provisions garners serious respect. But it also high- lights my point about it being useful to view patterns of consumption in terms of a Foucauldian ethics of the self. According to Foucault, “the regimes of truth and power no longer concern themselves with coercive practices but with the practices of self-formation of the subject” (1987, 113). While understanding the importance of the moment of liberation in the colonial framework, Foucault cautions that this is not sufficient in and of itself to guarantee that what emerges from the moment of liberation are practices of freedom. Self-fashioning then, is the process through which the “subject constitutes himself in an active fashion, by the practices of the self” (114). Yet what is important is that these practices are not the sole invention of the subject, rather they always occur within the matrix of power. Thus self- fashioning can be a generative process precisely because it manipulates and recontextualizes through the technologies of the self, the very power exercised over the individual by society. By “technologies of the self,” I mean the ways in which self-fashioning allows individuals to create either by themselves or within their community of peers “a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Foucault 1997, 225). That these technologies of the self may operate in moments that are fleeting does not make them less noteworthy. “The proliferation of iden- tity practices and lifestyle consumption communities should be viewed not as market provided social manipulation, but as consumption fuelled reappropriation of differentiated selves” (Arnould 2007, 102). Therefore, in a society still structured unevenly by racialized class, those moments where the individual can operate or fashion a technology of the self (even if only temporarily—let’s say at a party) remain of utmost importance. This self-fashioning is, as many scholars point out, an important facet of the “black good life.” Manthia Diawara (1998) notes that the parad- ing, particularly the masculine parading of self through fashion, cars, and other consumer products occurs in order to be seen specifically. As George Lipsitz (1994) has noted, young black people, understanding themselves to be the object of surveillance both within and outside their communities, consciously adorn their bodies for display with the intent to see and be seen. The black good life is a “freedom and energy associated with individual fulfillment that had been denied black people in spite of all the gains in the period of the posts [post civil rights, post-apartheid, post-colonial]” (Diawara 1998, 242). It is about an unapologetic celebration of life. In the midst of unequal life chances, the insistence on the black good life marks BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 293 11/25/14 10:29 AM
294 bmr journal a refusal to reduce one’s life experience to the real challenges faced by unequal access to capital in all its guises. The almost obsessive attention to styling in relation to wearing fashion, utilizing transportation and the obtaining of provisions reveals the young people with whom I did research not as drones imitating Western capital- ism and subject to the manipulation of corporations engaged in cultural production (à la Adorno and Horkheimer 2007), but rather as individuals using these moments to create spaces for self-articulation through the pos- sibilities afforded by consumption. According to Diawara, African intellectuals and European expatriates, blinded by an essentialized notion of western technology versus African tradition consider the consumer culture of the market alienating. They unleash a plethora of arguments draw- ing on anthropology, Marxism, and nationalism, against Muslim and Christian fundamentalism, which attempt to shield Africans in their authenticity, their pure relation to production, and their uncorrupted communion with God, from the exploitative alienation and identity crises wrought by Western Consumer culture. Although the alienation thesis may have been a meaningful argument during the early phases of nation building in Africa, or during colonialism, it has lost some of its explanatory power in the era of globalization. (1998, 149) Diawara suggests that today’s postmodern reality defines both historicity and ethics through consumption, “those who do not consume are left to die outside history and human dignity” (150). He observes that the spaces of consumption become places where diverse bands of people meet to assert their humanity and historicity and, most radically, he suggests that all Af- ricans have a right to consume. As David Coplan (2005) notes, the rampant materialism displayed by many in South African youth culture presents less a nihilistic consumer culture and more an expectation that the ill-gotten gains accrued by the white minority would be sufficiently transferred to the majority. Furthermore, Rita Barnard (2007) reveals that the apartheid state created a disdain for “egalitarian consumer culture.” Barnard cautions scholars to read consumer culture not simply as colonial mimicry, but as an anticipatory structure that creates an alternative psychological space of being, an alternative psychological space that I contend is closely connected with self-fashioning. Thus, the kwaito kids who represent the Y generation have more in mind than individual conspicuous consumption. As Caribbean scholar Deborah Thomas notes, these youth “could be refashioning selfhood and reshaping stereotypical assumptions about racial possibilities through rather than outside capitalism” (2004, 251). Indeed these images of consumption upset conventional understandings of blackness, as blackness is traditionally as- sociated with lack and impoverishment. BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 294 11/25/14 10:29 AM
Livermon • “Si-ghetto Fabulous” 295 Ghetto Fabulosity in Black Atlantic Cultures Ghetto fabulousness emerges as a key term in contemporary Afrodiasporic popular culture for its ability to straddle the apparent paradox between a space of poverty and enclosure—“the ghetto”—and the notion of wealth and excess expressed through “fabulousness.” Closely associated with the rise of party oriented hip-hop music of the mid- to late-1990s (most par- ticularly the stable of artists associated with Sean Combs’s label Bad Boy), ghetto fabulousness grew from a particular aesthetic centered in New York, combining high fashion and expensive tastes in consumer products with pride and celebration of being from the ghetto. Unlike the grittier hip-hop typically associated with New York rappers, artists affiliated with this label refused to confine their consciousness to their neighborhoods and spaces of home. Rather, they celebrated their ability to be mobile both literally and figuratively. Quoting former editor of Vibe magazine Danyell Smith, media scholar Christopher Holmes Smith defines ghetto fabulousness as “buying your way up and out [of the ghetto] even if mentally or physically you still live there . . . never quite tacky, ghetto fabulous is loud and wrong” (1997, 389). Importantly, ghetto fabulousness is not about being ashamed of hav- ing or retaining aspects of a “ghetto mentality.” Instead, such retention is a marker of authenticity and credibility. The deliberately oppositional perfor- mance of ghetto fabulousness, the willful retention of values and behaviors that oppose bourgeois middle-class sensibility is also about a savvy negotia- tion with structures of power. Indeed, those from these communities know very well that the economic system is structured to ensure their position at the bottom of it and to deny them access to spaces of privilege should they manage to overcome the odds and obtain access to capital. Ghetto fabulous- ness flows from an explicit acknowledgement of the racial and economic hierarchies that keep blacks “in their place” regardless of economic wealth. This refusal to perform bourgeois behavior on the part of those who ex- hibit ghetto fabulous tendencies represents a performance of oppositionality that is less about resistance and more about an agency that, in the words of Saba Mahmood (2001), produces “tangible effects.” Contestatory rather than resistant, these performances represent a “camouflaged means of ne- gotiation, a cultural alchemy where apparent isolation is transformed into contingently employed tactical maneuvers designed to foster inclusion with more mainstream social bodies no matter how fleeting, fraught, and limited that membership status may be” (Smith 1997, 348). As an example that ghetto fabulousness can be performed, consider the early 2000s instance of Black Entertainment Television’s (BET) controversial animated video series Cita’s World. Cita, a virtual-reality animated charac- ter, would host a series of popular hip-hop and R&B videos while offering BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 295 11/25/14 10:29 AM
296 bmr journal shock-jock-laden commentary concerning popular figures in U.S.-based black entertainment. The novelty of the computer-generated image, which represented a stereotypical black working-class woman, was routinely criti- cized by many in the black community. Cita became the object of debate and vilification at the height of her popularity in 2002. Most were concerned that she spoke in the worst stereotypical African-American Vernacular English and was therefore not a good role model for the thousands of black youth who were the primary target audience for the show. Nightline, a late-night news program, did an interview with the creator of the series, Tracye Kinzer, as well as the actress who played Cita, Kittie. Responding to criticisms that their show pandered to the worst possible stereotypes about black people, Kinzer and Kittie, both black women themselves, responded that Cita was far from ignorant and that she was simply “ghetto fabulous.” Their argu- ment was that Cita’s performance of black urban vernacular and nonstan- dard English was in fact a deliberate choice exercised by the character. That the middle-class actress who played Cita could easily shift in and out of the character seemed to confirm that for these women, ghetto fabulousness was not a fixed essence, but rather an iterative performative identity available to black people as a form of critique and as a tool in creating authenticity.4 Critics of Cita’s World clung to the notion that the main character’s perfor- mance would endanger those who were not privileged enough to shift in and out of standard English and black urban vernaculars. However, these critiques miss the point of ghetto fabulous as a strategy: for it is not about the inability to perform or behave “properly”—it is about the deliberate refusal to do so as a form of possibility and critique. Like many terms that originate in African-American popular culture, ghetto fabulous came to take on a life of its own, circulating throughout youth cultures of the African diaspora, and becoming meaningful in a va- riety of local contexts. In South Africa, ghetto fabulous was quickly taken up as a term in youth-oriented lingo. The notion of being ghetto fabulous did not shift drastically in the South African context. Rather, the different social meanings attached to blackness in relationship to wealth, whiteness, and space meant that the term functioned with a more acute sense of irony. Yet it remains attached to a sense of street culture and a defiant sense of valuation of the township origins. According to media studies scholar Jor- dache Abner Ellapen (2007), the township space has become increasingly valued as the repository of authentic black culture. However, I depart from Ellapen’s reading of the valuation of the township as relying on a nostalgic 4. The practices of ghetto fabulous can take on other, more sinister turns as ghetto fabu- lous parties in which white students dress in black face, wear Afro wigs, and drink malt liquor show the danger in appropriations of black performative identities, in this case by those who do not occupy blackness. BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 296 11/25/14 10:29 AM
Livermon • “Si-ghetto Fabulous” 297 fetishism. Rather, I believe the performance of ghetto fabulousness and the subsequent valuation of all things township are about a contestatory stance similar to that employed by other Afrodiasporic youth toward whiteness, capital accumulation, and the stark spatiality that divides township from city and rural areas. Indeed, the fact that such contestatory valuation of the space where the majority of urban people in South Africa reside is neces- sary points to the residual traces of colonial and apartheid hierarchies that still exist in South Africa. This is exemplified by kwaito singer Zola, who uses his seminal song “Ghetto Fabulous” to mark himself as being proudly from the township and to detail not only the challenges of township life but also its pleasures, thereby destabilizing the notion that one must leave the township (either physically or mentally or both) in order to experience fabulousness. Mandoza’s Ghetto Fabulosity and Consumption Mandoza is another kwaito artist who has managed to articulate a version of ghetto fabulousness in relationship to his performance persona. Whether dressed in fine suits, surrounded by leggy women in Sun City, or cruising through Soweto in his Chrysler Crossfire, Mandoza remains a role model for many young township men. An early life of crime that ended with a stint in Johannesburg’s notorious Sun City prison has shifted to a life of relative wealth and privilege with the trappings of middle-class success: a stay-at-home wife, two children, nice clothing, international travel, and a well-appointed home in the suburbs. While a detailed discussion of Man- doza’s latest troubles are beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that his recent change in appearance has fueled intense speculation about his health.5 This intense speculation, however, points to how Mandoza, like many other popular music artists in black South African communities, connects to a series of meanings that expand beyond his musical success. His frequent and continuous run-ins with the law consistently return Man- doza to his criminal past in ways that are baffling to people raised in more middle-class contexts. However, Mandoza’s poor decisions may represent another manifestation of ghetto fabulousness that Danyell Smith of Vibe magazine spoke about (quoted in Smith 1997). Mandoza’s frequent brushes with the law stem partly from his refusal to “behave properly,” that is to perform as expected by someone with his economic wealth. However, it is 5. In recent years Mandoza has faced a great deal of speculation concerning his financial status (with reports that he was forced to move back to the township), his legal troubles stemming from a driving under the influence incident in which a person was killed, and his HIV status given his gaunt appearance and skin discoloration. He was forced to go on national television to deny that he was HIV positive and to reassert that he was healthy. BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 297 11/25/14 10:29 AM
298 bmr journal Mandoza’s use of consumption, particularly his self-commodification, that is of particular relevance here and that I will analyze further. In a 2004 music video for his song “Indoda,” Mandoza appears to liter- ally make himself into a consumer product. Obviously, the formulation of black bodies into literal consumer objects is nothing new. The history of chattel slavery and near slave-like conditions for people of African descent in South Africa is well documented. Mandoza turning himself into a series of well-known South African brands yet rebranding them with his moniker might initially seem alarming given the history of state control of black bodies and black productive labor. However, in the post-apartheid period, the rules have been slightly rewritten. Mandoza has built a career trading on the image of the tsotsi or thug. He has shifted this stereotype of black masculinity from the margins of society to the center through his music and lyrics to the point where even wealthy white kids in Sandton (an upper-class suburb within Johannesburg) are familiar with aspects of township lingo. Mandoza’s performance of the thug represents a conscious manipulation and parodic reworking of the stereotype of dangerous black masculinity for market consumption and his own enrichment. Indeed, turning the trademark tsotsi into trademarked South African goods and consumptive products brings the tsotsi literally into the homes of everyday South Africans, and it does so in a way that is transformative of the meaning of the thug. Transformed from irredeemable infrahumanity, Mandoza’s thug is humanized, wanting the same things as the rest of us and focused on turning away from a life of crime to obtain the good life. Explaining his song “Sqelegeqe,” Mandoza says that he wanted the song to communicate the essence of a focused thug who reworked his life away from criminality, thus in many ways mirroring the artist’s own transformation from lawlessness to bourgeois respectability. Despite his relocation from Zola (known to be one of the toughest areas of Soweto) to the suburban life, he insists that he is still “itsotsi yase Zola.”6 In his music video, Mandoza maps his image (and thus, I argue, molds himself) into a number of branded products familiar to most South Africans. As he does so, he simultaneously makes himself into a branded product. Consumption is not figured here as alienation. Rather as Manthia Diawara (1998) points out, mobility and consumption come to the very center of the struggle for a “black good life.” Refusing to be confined to the township, Mandoza literally transforms himself into the everyday consumer items 6. The phrase can be translated loosely as “thug from Zola.” For more on Mandoza’s dis- cussion concerning his decision to leave Zola and relocate to the suburbs, see The Truth about Mandoza (2009). BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 298 11/25/14 10:29 AM
Livermon • “Si-ghetto Fabulous” 299 that we bring home. At the beginning of the video, the camera focuses on Mandoza’s face. He is inside a burning shack that, as he chants/raps, seems to fall away to reveal an informal settlement apparently engulfed by the same flames. His words forcefully remind us that a man can fall today, but tomorrow he will rise. As the fire burns around him, Mandoza’s face is imposed on a box of Lion Matches and a bottle of Black Label Beer, brands instantly recognizable to any township dweller. His face is placed onto a bank note that is then subsequently rolled up by Mandoza alluding to his struggles with cocaine use. Later in the clip, his brand is imposed onto the newspaper classifieds where Mandoza is selling everything from old-fashioned record players to potent home cures promising strength and youthful vigor. While he continues to remind us to never give up, we see a boxing scene where Mandoza appears to fight his mirror image. The video concludes with scenes of transportation and movement. Mandoza’s first brand appears on a minibus taxi. In the next scene we see Mandoza himself riding in a train, and in the concluding scene, he drives his Chrysler Cross- fire into the sunset. Small speedy cars such as the Crossfire and Mini Cooper feature in the imaginary of township motoring desire distinguishing these desires from those that are expressed in American hip-hop videos, which typically feature large sport utility vehicles or hyper-luxurious autos such as Maybachs and Bentleys. Rather than being defined by the racial stereotype of the black thug, Mandoza puts this very stereotype into the marketplace where the highest prices are obtained for it. In other words, through his music and his per- formance persona, Mandoza is marketing to the South African public the image of black thug masculinity. “Mobility and consumption thus become the vehicles through which young blacks control prevailing stereotypes and regain their individuality in the world” (Diawara 1998, 273). But what is Mandoza ultimately selling? Returning to the chorus of the song and juxtaposing it with images that include battles with himself, allusions to his troubled past, and symbolism of fire as destruction and rebirth, it would appear that Mandoza is ultimately selling the promise of redemption. In- terestingly, Mandoza’s tsotsi travels a different path to redemption from the one posited by Gavin Hood’s 2005 film of the same name.For this is not a redemption at the hands of the carceral state; instead, through the trials and tribulations of township life, Mandoza’s thug redeems himself through his own guises. Central to the narrative of the music video is the understanding that forms of consumption mark the movement of the tsotsi from nonhuman to human. Equally clear through the narrative is the un- derstanding that this is not a linear story—that successes can be followed by failures—and that one may have to fall in order to rise again. BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 299 11/25/14 10:29 AM
300 bmr journal Conclusion In this article I examined the question of just who is human in post-apart- heid South Africa in order to explore the notion of exclusion and inclusion. Indeed, even since the end of the apartheid state, there are still categories of people, based on their race, economic class, gender, and sexuality who do not enjoy the full rights of dignity. Yet, by looking at consumption, I have found one strategy that those excluded from the markers of wealth and human dignity pursue in order to regain their access as a human and, thus, the rights of citizenship. While I am not suggesting that the right to consume is a human right, I would like to insist that any discussion of human dignity and citizenship in present-day South Africa, in the African diaspora, and in a world in which capitalism is hegemonic, cannot occur outside the market. The young generation of kwaito participants under- stands this, and hopefully we will take the time to listen to, rather than dismiss, the ways they engage contemporary consumer culture. Kwaito musical practices reveal a vibrant, uniquely South African black musical culture whose consumptive practices cannot be reduced to a politics of surrender. As noted anthropologist Daniel Miller suggests, “When people are unable to perceive the means of self-creation, or because objective condi- tions prevent self-creation through consumption, it is here that alienation and social pathology emerge, not from the engagement with the market or consumption of objects themselves” (quoted in Arnauld 2007, 105). Moreover, I would like to assert that the forms of self-fashioning that I describe in this article and their connection to consumption practices suggests a different form of ethics than the one posited by Paul Gilroy (2010) and others who critique consumer culture from a stance of moral- ism. David Scott (1999) identifies the rise of this different form of ethics in his discussion of the rude-boy and Jamaican dancehall culture. In it, he suggests that the forms of public culture generated from the rude-boy experience are not the result of forms of alienation (Scott 1999). Rather than being alienated from middle-class nationalist values, Scott finds that rude-boy self-fashioning represents an indifference to those very values. Gilroy (2010) attempts to read the politics of consumption in re- lationship to contemporary Afrodiasporic musical cultures through the lens of alienation, and finding these cultures insufficiently resistant, he argues that they are morally bankrupt. My reading suggests something different. Commenting on what he terms the subaltern expressions of the poor and disenfranchised in the South African public sphere, Suren Pillay suggests that the individuals in this group create forms of self-fashioning that “do not articulate themselves in the familiar terms of the Marxist left nor the liberal-nationalist right, and an attempt to give a revolutionary BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 300 11/25/14 10:29 AM
Livermon • “Si-ghetto Fabulous” 301 or nationalist reading to them ends in an expression of disappointment and nostalgia . . . or a lament for a moment of what should be” (2008, 17). I would like to engage Pillay’s idea that what is at work in the post- apartheid public sphere is a form of “dangerous ordinary discourse” (17). These forms of expression are not immediately serviceable to either the nationalist goal of incorporation or the Marxist goal of resistance to alien- ation as Pillay points out. Instead, a more nuanced reading is required if we are to make sense of both the uses and limits of popular black musical expressions in post-apartheid South Africa. Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge York University’s Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples for sponsoring the symposium at which I presented an early version of this article. I would like to thank the participants of the Culture Industries in the African Diaspora symposium, all of whom offered insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The article benefited greatly from the generous and critical feedback offered by the anonymous reviewers. Lastly, I would like to give special thanks to my coeditor, Jeff Packman, whose tireless work from the beginning of this project made the special issue possible. References Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 2007. Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arnould, Eric J. 2007. Should consumer citizens escape the market? The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611, no. 1: 96–111. Barnard, Rita. 2007. Apartheid and beyond: South African writers and the politics of place. New York: Oxford University Press. Canclini, Néstor García. 2001. Citizenship and consumers: Globalization and multicul- tual conflicts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Coplan, David. 2005. God rock Africa: Thoughts on politics in popular black per- formance in South Africa. In African Studies 64, no. 1: 9–27. Da Silva, Issa Sikiti. 2007. Maponya mega-mall opens in Soweto. Accessed March 5, 2008. http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/160/18424.html. Diawara, Manthia. 1998. In search of Africa. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Ellapen, Jordache Abner. 2007. The cinematic township: Cinematic representa- tions of “township space” and who can claim the rights to representation in post-apartheid South African cinema. Journal of African Cultural Studies 19, no. 1: 113–138. BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 301 11/25/14 10:29 AM
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Livermon • “Si-ghetto Fabulous” 303 Thomas, Deborah. 2004. “Modern blackness:” Nationalism, globalization, and the poli- tics of culture in Jamaica. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Discography Mandoza. Mandoza. EMI South Africa CCP 2036 (2004). Compact Disc. Zola. Ghetto fabulous. Yizo yizo 2: Soundtrack CCP World (2002). Compact Disc. Filmography Hood, Gavin. Tsotsi. Starring Presley Chweneyagae, Terry Pheto. Santa Monica, Calif.: Miramax, 2005. Videography Mandoza. Live in concert at Sun City. CCP World (2004). Digital Versatile Disc. BMRJ 34_2 text.indd 303 11/25/14 10:29 AM
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