"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 AM286 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
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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-
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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,
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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
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 AMLivermon • “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.
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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 AMLivermon • “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.
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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 AMYou can also read
