A friend emailed me a link to the latest video by Afrikaans hip-hop outfit, Die Antwoord. It’s for a song called ‘Evil Boy’, and it’s a cartoonish nightmare featuring phallic imagery overload, a shrieking succubus in a suit made of rats and a sort of prison fresh b-boy Winehouse on vox. Top it all off with some dubious lyricism from a rapping kid who looks about 15 (his crowning moment: ‘I don’t want to go to the bush with you, don’t touch my penis, I’m not a gay’...no I’m not joking), and you have all the ingredients for what appears to be one of the weirdest and most tasteless music videos that has ever been committed to tape.
EVIL BOY (official) from Die Antwoord on Vimeo.
Before you pick up the phone to the Daily Mail and alert them to the latest wave of SICK FILTH that’s infecting the brains of the yoof of today, hear this. The kid in the video, a young rapper called Wanga, hails from the South African Xhosa tribe. According to Xhosa tradition, in order to become a ‘man’ , boys aged 13-16 have to go into the bush to undergo a brutal circumcision ceremony where all the initiates line up and have their foreskin chopped off by a bloke wielding a rusty knife. Hygeine standards, anaesthesia, disinfectant and medical training are not required. The ritual is so risky that some boys die and others end up in hospital suffering from diseases like septicaemia and gangrene. Of the penis. Reading about it reminded me of a documentary I saw about a few months ago about the Ugandan ‘imbalu’ ritual, which looks like pretty much the same thing (warning: it gets bloody):
So what Wanga is actually banging on about is a barbaric and dangerous circumcision ritual that he doesn’t want to have to go through, and I don’t blame him. He doesn’t mince his words either, the word umnqunduwakho (translated as ‘you fokken asshole’) is apparently the nastiest, most offensive and unsaid word in the Xhosi language. The penis-butchers are called ‘gay’ because it’s apparently the most insulting thing you can say to a ‘traditional’ (read: homophobic) Xhosi man. Wanga goes all guns blazing on the ritual – public criticism of which is rare due to widespread fear amongst affected communities that the ‘hallowed ancient tradition’ (and therefore ‘traditional African culture’, naturally) might be under threat.
Nelson Mandela, also Xhosa, described feeling ‘as if fire was shooting through my veins’ during his own circumcision ritual, with ‘pain...so intense that I buried my chin in my chest’. Mandela never spoke out about it though...and he’s lucky to even still have a penis.
