Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood(54)

So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he’s just another strongman from the history books. In all my time hanging out with Hitler, I never once asked myself, “Why is his name Hitler?” His name was Hitler because his mom named him Hitler.

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Once Bongani and I added the dancers to our DJ sets, we blew up. We called our group the Black and White Boys. The dancers were called the Springbok Boys. We started getting booked everywhere. Successful black families were moving to the suburbs, but their kids still wanted to have block parties and stay connected to the culture of the townships, so they’d book us to play their parties. Word of mouth traveled. Pretty soon we were getting booked more and more in the suburbs, meeting white people, playing for white people.

One kid we knew from the township, his mother was involved in creating cultural programs for schools. In America they’d be called “diversity programs.” They were springing up all over South Africa because we were supposed to be learning about and embracing one another in this post-apartheid era. This kid’s mom asked us if we wanted to play at a cultural day at some school in Linksfield, the wealthy suburb south of Sandringham where my pal Teddy had lived. There was going to be all sorts of different dancing and music, and everyone was going to come together and hang out and be cultural. She offered to pay, so we said sure. She sent us the information with the time and place and the name of the school: the King David School. A Jewish school.

The day of the event, we booked a minibus, loaded it up with our gear, and drove over. Once we arrived we waited in the back of the school’s assembly hall and watched the acts that went onstage before us, different groups took their turns performing, flamenco dancers, Greek dancers, traditional Zulu musicians. Then we were up. We were billed as the Hip Hop Pantsula Dancers—the South African B-Boys. We set up our sound system onstage. I looked out, and the whole hall was nothing but Jewish kids in their yarmulkes, ready to party.

I got on the mic. “Are you ready to rock out?!”

“Yeahhhhhh!”

“Make some noise!”

“Yeahhhhhh!”

I started playing. The bass was bumping, my crew was dancing, and everyone was having a great time. The teachers, the chaperones, the parents, hundreds of kids—they were all dancing like crazy. Our set was scheduled for fifteen minutes, and at the ten-minute mark came the moment for me to play “Let’s Get Dirty,” bring out my star dancer, and shut shit down.

I started the song, the dancers fanned out in their semicircle, and I got on the mic.

“Are you guys ready?!”

“Yeahhhhhh!”

“You guys are not ready! Are you ready?!”

“Yeeeaaahhhhhhhh!”

“All right! Give it up and make some noise for HIIIIIITTTTLLLLEERRRRR-RRRRR-!!!”

Hitler jumped out to the middle of the circle and started killing it. The guys around him were all chanting, “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!” They had their arms out in front of them, bouncing to the rhythm. “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!” And I was right there on the mic leading them along. “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!”

The whole room stopped. No one was dancing. The teachers, the chaperones, the parents, the hundreds of Jewish kids in their yarmulkes—they froze and stared aghast at us up on the stage. I was oblivious. So was Hitler. We kept going. For a good thirty seconds the only sound in the room was the beat of the music and me on the mic yelling, “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Put your hands in the air for Hitler, yo!”

A teacher ran up behind me and yanked the plug for my system out of the wall. The hall went dead silent, and she turned on me and she was livid. “How dare you?! This is disgusting! You horrible, disgusting vile creature! How dare you?!”

My mind was racing, trying to figure out what she was talking about. Then it clicked. Hitler had a special dance move called o spana va. It means “where you work” and it was very sexual: His hips would gyrate and thrust, like he was fucking the air. That was the move he was doing at the moment the teacher ran out, so clearly the dance was the thing she found so disgusting. But this was a move that African people do all the time. It’s a part of our culture. Here we were sharing our culture for a cultural day, and this woman was calling us disgusting. She was offended, and I was offended by her taking offense.

“Lady,” I said, “I think you need to calm down.”

“I will not calm down! How dare you come here and insult us?!”

“This is not insulting anyone. This is who we are!”

“Get out of here! You people are disgusting.”

And there it was. You people. Now I saw what the deal was: This lady was racist. She couldn’t see black men dancing suggestively and not get pissed off. As I started packing up my gear, we kept arguing.

“Listen, lady. We’re free now. We’re gonna do what we’re gonna do. You can’t stop us.”

“I’ll have you know that my people stopped people like you before, and we can stop you again.”

She was talking, of course, about stopping the Nazis in World War II, but that’s not what I was hearing. Jews in South Africa are just white people. All I was hearing was some white lady shouting about how white people beat us before and they’ll beat us again. I said, “You will never stop us again, lady”—and here’s where I played the trump card—“You’ll never stop us, because now we have Nelson Mandela on our side! And he told us we can do this!”