Body Politic: The Emergence of a “KwaitoNation” in South Africa

This paper discusses the extent to which Kwaito dance music embodies the socio-cultural practices of urban post-apartheid South Africa. The paper attempts to address the musical and cultural influences behind the conception of the genre; including a look at the significance of technology and the DJ culture in its early developments. The paper will also provide a comparative analysis exemplifying some of the prominent features, both musical and visual, present in Kwaito that demonstrate three pertinent socio-cultural practices of the township youth. The visual analysis is concerned with exploring dance performance and meaning through music videos and further address the significance of dance within the African society. In addition, this paper will seek to understand the genre’s reception during a very significant period in South Africa’s history and a look at the differing views on its enculturation into the society.

African Studies Review

2008

At the interstices of cultural geography and performance studies, this article continues the author's earlier research and writing on Jamaica's Dancehall culture, and analyzes the applicability of insights gained to other black performance genres, most notably South African Kwaito. Through research methods including interviews and participant observation, a comparative perspective on Dancehall and Kwaito reveals unexplored parallels, particularly ideological and spatial ones. I therefore expand the focus beyond musical and symbolic elements by privileging the spatial category. This focus reveals striking similarities across nations and their diasporas, and how identity, ideology and history merge in the articulation of self for the disenfranchised youth in a crosscultural context. Ultimately, this article contributes to a broader project of mapping New World performance geographies, in this instance using Dancehall and Kwaito as its main cases.

Contextualizing Kwaito in South Africa and Hip Hop in East Africa: Which influences determine the emergence and specific traits of youth culture and how do artists and their audiences navigate complex social systems while constructing meaningful identities within music and their social realities?

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The paper presents an analysis of how visual and musical aesthetics converge in the performed production of history, as creolization, and ethnically specific ‘heritage’, and how the self-stylization is employed in asserting a linguistic-cultural ‘identity’. This is done through an investigation of the aesthetics and politics of the ‘hip- hopera’ Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa.

This paper presents an analysis of kwaito and hip-hop on television in South Africa. It employs the locally produced Yizo Yizo as a case study to explore the intertextual relationship between music and television. Yizo Yizo, a reality-based drama series, was groundbreaking in propelling the experiences of black youth onto the national agenda. In representing what can be described as 'authentic township experiences', the series utilizes kwaito, and to a lesser degree, hip-hop, as signifiers of township and 'essentially' black youth experiences. Soundtracks to the series utilize both genres and local kwaito and hip-hop artists feature as themselves. The paper adopts a discursive approach to exploring intertextuality and the ways in which meanings embedded in a television series are related to music and other secondary texts and vice versa. It provides an overview of the television series and analysis of the most recent soundtrack (Yizo Yizo 3) specifically, in relation to the series' educative and educational value.

2001