South Africa

South Africa

TRAINSPOTTER: The EFF raps, the SABC bans, Arnie pumps. We’re supposed to stay sane somehow?

TRAINSPOTTER: The EFF raps, the SABC bans, Arnie pumps. We’re supposed to stay sane somehow?

It was one of those weirdo weekends in South Africa, when the frequencies began to align and the odd, eerie piano music in the background started to sound like some grand gothic opera in which we’re the ghostly extras. All the war talk, all the chatter about ass-kicking and neck-chopping, all the school burnings and tire burnings and vehicle burnings, all the banning of the broadcasting of violence on the SABC—all of it culminated in a steady stream of election violence from both within the ANC and without. Meanwhile, the EFF released a rap song, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was in the country trying to help us get less fat. But we don’t need a diet plan. We need a plan plan. By RICHARD POPLAK.

When things are getting strange, and there’s a big info-hole burning its way through your brain, it’s important to have someone to whom you can turn, a trusted source of information and solace—a homie, a bestie, a friendo.

What is the hottest hip hop single of the election campaign season?” I asked the mutant American steroid chicken in my head.

There can be only one,” replied Nuggets, ominously sucking on his signature Cohiba.

I’m almost certain that his Delphic utterance referred to a single called “EFF I Trust,” which dropped mid-last week amid a flurry of publicity. Widely disseminated on the social networks, “EFF I Trust” was hailed as the best—as the only—hip-hop single of the municipal election battle so far.

Watch: EFF I Trust (YouTube)

To my knowledge the DA have yet to release a campaign song—and nor did I bother asking Nuggets, who gets wound up by questions concerning the Democratic Alliance. Meanwhile, the ANC seems to be occupied with non-musical affairs, most notably trying to keep prospective counselors from slaughtering each other. Nonetheless, the ghosts have begun to mournfully wind their way through the party’s increasingly haunted office spaces, howling into empty filing cabinets and dusty I-Heart-Zuma t-shirt boxes.

But first, the song: “EFF I Trust” was composed and recorded, according to the press statement that announced its release, in order to “to mobilise [the] people through Conscious Rap Music to understand and appreciate the revolutionary struggle for economic emancipation.” And indeed, as far as hip-hop propaganda goes, it’s quite a good track, although a little heavy on the Auto-Tune for my tastes. It has a laconic West Coast top-down reefer-up quality, although it necessarily comes loaded with a Relevant Local Message. “I don’t accept your apology, my brothers is living in poverty,” spits the lead rapper. “Sibhatal’itax but asitholi nax,” he continues—We pay tax, but get nothing.

It was designed, I was told, to attract the “youth”.

Riding to the beat of this ditty, the EFF on Saturday entered Jacob Zuma’s humid, blood-soaked lair. KwaZulu-Natal: a place where the Fighters should have encountered parking lots full of browsing pigeons and the occasional stony-faced drunk, but instead faced the crowds deserting the ANC by the tens of thousands. As early as December 2014, during the EFF electoral conference in Mangaung, I was told that Malema and his people would start building structures across the fields and dales of Zumastan. It seemed impossible and dangerous and hardly worth the trouble, and Nuggets the Monster Chicken entirely wrote off their chances.

But what does Nuggets know?

There were, however, those who seemed unimpressed by the EFF’s presence. Over the course of the last week, as the upstarts in red made incursions into Zuma territory in Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, the violence slowly started to ramp up. On Saturday, an EFF member murdered at the hands of an “ANC mob” was buried in Ekurhuleni. “In the elections programmes held in Nkomazi and Mbombela,” stated the EFF’s official literature, “an organised and funded ANC mob shot guns, injured an EFF supporter and [threw] stones at EFF members and cars that [were] attending the meetings.”

This has long been coming. Last year, during the xenophobic violence that wrecked Alexandra township, I was at an EFF rally that baited the Zulu men who inhabit the crumbling Madala Hostel. One of their number fired a pistol into the crowd—five crisp shots, one of which embedded itself in a Fighter’s leg.

We are ready for war,” roared Malema at his election manifesto launch in Soweto a year or so later, “come and get us!” No price too high, especially when it’s always someone else paying the price. From a party that has ramped up the war talk, they are now walking the war walk. In KwaZulu-Natal, the EFF must have been counting on drawing some measure of violence from loyal Zumastanis, and were happily rewarded by rock-throwing locals in dusty, humid nMhlathuze municipality, where—to be fair—there isn’t much to do but throw rocks.

For the most part, ANC cadres are focused on the far more lucrative business of killing each other. What is happening in KZN is what will happen across this country: the province has been paralyzed by the forced replacement of former premier Senzo Mchunu with Zuma lapdog Sihle Zikalala, who will begin serving in 2019—which means the province is currently governed by a proxy/sap/puppet named Willies Mchunu. It’s a classic Zuma ANC battle, all about securing the president’s faction another pliant province come the 2017 electoral conference. If lots of people die in the process, that’s just the way these things go.

Into this swampy mess, into this gothic labyrinth of creaking banana trees and susurrating sugar-cane fields, swaggered the EFF. Perhaps one day the province will belong to them, but if Zuma has his way, they’ll presiding over fields of dead and little else besides.

Could Arnold Schwarzenegger help, I wondered? He was close by—in Johannesburg. During the Terminator movies, he hops back and forth through time employing a portal created by evil machines in order to chase down those in the past who could be of harm to the machines in the future. His iconic killer cyborg redefined evil, and then in Terminator 2: Judgment Day refined the redefinition of evil. Which was helpful. But postmodernism and capitalism are relentless masters and Arnie wasn’t here to teach us something metaphysical, but to launch some kind of fitness festival. We don’t need abs. We need a killer cyborg to redefine the redefinition of evil.

In the non-happenings in KwaZulu-Natal that will never make it onto Hlaudi-Vision, in the un-violence wracking the country that shall remain unrecorded and unremarked upon by the official arbiters of What Is Happening, Arnie seemed like the realest thing in South Africa. Could he not have recorded a guest verse on “EFF I Trust”, just to remind us that he was here? Could he not have time-jumped us to a better era?

In times like these, it’s important to have a homie, a bestie, a friend. If they’re a good pal, like Nuggets the mutant American steroid chicken, they’ll remind you that it’s all good.

Watch the TV. There’s nothing burning.

No problemo. DM

Photo: A cover of EFF I Trust hip-hop single.

Gallery

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