Tag: scoop makhathini

The Creative Self, According to Scoop Makhathini

Over December, Johannesburg is a city that empties. Residents escape to their family homes or holiday beaches, leaving the once-bustling metropolis surprisingly quiet. The Eastern Cape experiences a reverse effect as its towns and villages swell with relatives returning home. In Port Elizabeth, one of these returnees is Siyabonga Ngwekazi, who most of us know as Scoop Makhathini.

A prolific television presenter, and a high priest of South African street culture, Scoop serves as a cultural medium, a multi-spectral prism of the country’s street artistry.

‘Music and the arts, they come from this place that’s very godly, very heavenly’, Scoop says. Like any other medium, his talent has been to interpret the divine for an everyday audience; to draw linkages between past, present, and future; and to serve as an interpreter for the creative world.

“I think that’s why I’m here — it’s to take these pieces, or blocks, of creative South Africa. Because I understand where they’re coming from. And I can chop it up into little bite-sized pieces for your mainstream audience to understand to be able to digest: to be able to understand the weird crowd, the off-centre crowd. In a medium that’s easy to them. Most creatives can’t speak about themselves. They can’t explain. It’s hard for them because they feel like they leave it all out on the canvas, or they leave it all out in the sculpture, or they leave it all out in the track. So analyzing them and getting someone to understand, ‘Oh this is why this person paints like this or uses these colours. Oh I get it. It’s also relatable to who I am’”.

Often there is a chasm between Scoop’s TV audience, and the creative world he spends his time in, where so few people access media through television. His ability to reach across this gap, to a multiverse of audiences, is part his own artistry. “Anyone can be a TV presenter”, Scoop says, “but it’s about ‘What are you saying? Who are you speaking to?” In presenting, Scoop not only showcases local creativity to a mass audience. In doing so, he also interprets it, diagnoses it, and drives some of its biggest trends.

Part of what allows Scoop to translate across diverse peoples and places is that he, like so many generations of men before him, moves in a cyclical way from Johannesburg to the Eastern Cape, and back. Siyabonga grew up with three siblings. His mother was a teacher and his father a truck driver. He talks vividly about the bleak representations of black men in his 1980’s neighborhood: “the emerald green hat, the blue overalls, the checkered shirt, the denim jeans, and finally, “that boot”. “Those brown army boots with the steal toe that dads used to wear for MK or marches or toyi-toyi.”

Amidst all this, Siya dug his dreams into hip-hop and basketball, reaching through his television screen for portrayals of powerful blackness, thousands of miles away. “Rap and [American] sports were the first time in the 80s you saw a black guy look like something. You saw guys with the cars and the clothes and the jewelry and the girls and the confidence and the bravado. That’s when you knew the difference between America and South Africa. And even though they were oppressed, at least they could be this.” It’s clear that from very early in Scoop’s life, clothes, television and street culture carried powerful identity politics, and emancipatory potential.

Today, Scoop has 12 years of industry experience under his very-fashionable belt and a blossoming career.

As a trend-spotter, pioneer, and supporter of the country’s creative industry, Scoop’s notoriety has come from his ability to bring attention to others. “I think it’s because when I started getting cred, I never kept it. I see who’s next. I hear who’s next. I’ve seen what notoriety can do for someone’s life. Be it bills, or be it the confidence, or be it helping out the family”.

But there’s “this thing in Jo’burg”, he told me: “hoarding the props”. “People are very scared to tell someone how good they’re doing, or how that person inspired them, or how they’ve got respect for that person”. All for fear of losing their position. “When there’s nothing, it’s amazing how close everyone gets. But as soon as a breadcrumb lands in between two people, watch them scramble in the dark to find a crumb. Not even look for the loaf. Or the bakery.”

Scoop’s vision now is retrospective, focusing his prism on the knowledges of his ancestral past. “I’d really like to be home in Port Elizabeth, learning about how to slaughter a cow, how to clean its insides. From birth to death, I need to be able to recite which ceremonies need to be done, which liquor is needed, which rooms certain things are kept in.”

Always a medium, Scoop’s own reflections serve as a refracted mirror of a generation — their conflicts and their creativity.

“I [like so many others] have learnt about Jordan’s and Nike which has nothing to do with me! I’ve been to a school where all I’ve learned has fuck all to do with me! So I just want to learn about me. It’s been such a long road travelled now. What I’m really yearning for is to stay next to my father and have him teach me how to be black again.”

For Scoop, the biggest risk to the creative industry is the loss of self. Especially since, “the creative realm is just a realm in search of self. These kids think they’re searching for a label or a t-shirt. Everybody’s just searching for themselves”. And that ‘everyone’ includes Scoop Makhathini himself.

“I go to PE and it’s always where I learn how far I’ve drifted from being a normal person”. It’s clear that despite being a celebrity, and having unique access to ethereal artistry, Scoop remains deliberately (and sometimes controversially) committed to his own messy personhood. His Twitter feed and his show ‘Forever Young’ offer intimate access to Siyabonga the person, beyond Scoop the persona.

“I think it comes from a place [of] just wanting to be a human being, to experiment, to have views, even though they’re wrong. So often [in the industry], people have to fight to get liked. Everyone likes being liked, but I think I also like being disliked, because at least then I don’t have to retain that approval”.

Although we expect celebrity role models to strive for exemplary leadership, there is something powerful in Scoop’s embrace of the imperfect: it gives others the audacity to lead when they might have once have been off-put by the pressure to be faultless.

Like so many mediums before him, Scoop often speaks in metaphor. “I just like swimming upstream”, he says. “There’s not much to discover if I go that way with everyone else. There’s not much to discover about myself, about the world that we’re living in, about the people around me”. And that is what creative ‘success’, he believes, should be about. “What really pains me?”, he says. “We’ll excel at so many things, but we will not excel at being ourselves”.

Photography by Jamal Nxedlana

Assisted by Lesole Tauatswala

12 January 2017
Kicks are the Catalyst: Mkay Frash and The Synthesis of Street Culture

If Mkay Frash were a comic book character, he would levitate in celestial space, straddling comets, in constant orbit between worlds. His hands cupped, as though in telepathy with the surrounding sky-scape. From his outstretched fingers, threads extend like webs, connecting disparate planets, weaving transcendental tapestries. This would be his superpower: his ability to draw worlds together, curating spectacular cosmic collages. No wonder his suit is camo. Mkay is a cultural explorer on the hunt for kicks. In discovering aesthetic treasures and glistening brands, he also links them to a vast network of people and places.

Mkay is the don of South African sneaker culture. He’s founder and host of the online magazine Hunting For Kicks . Sneakers are his weapon, his tool and his metaphor. The shoes transport us, literally and figuratively. But they also leave imprints, documenting and celebrating a youth in motion. But more than sneakers, Mkay is an OG in the game: a long-time curator, commentator, and producer of street culture.

‘I’m a gangsta. I dowanna put myself in a box and say, “this is the type of person I am”, because if I wanna switch up, I don’t want you to look at me like, “Yo, you just switched up on me!” I’m a gangsta. I go for what I want. I can decide any time what I want to do.” A veteran shape-shifter, with camo-adaptability.

Mkay’s influence and longevity on the street scene have come from his ability to occupy in-between spaces: between artists and agents, between the corporate and the cutting edge, between peripheral hoods and central hubs, between people and product.

It started young. Mkay grew up in a place of assemblages, where multiple worlds met: a taxi rank in Marabastad, Pretoria. Before forced removals, Marabastad had been a site of racial and cultural synthesis — Pretoria’s District Six or Sophiatown.

‘My dad is a taxi owner. I grew up on a rank basically.’ That explains Mkay’s catch phrase: eTimer lePusha amaTaxi yena uPusha amaTakkie. Taxis connected ‘the hood’ to town. This meant that from an early age, Mkay was traversing two worlds, connecting the hood to city brands, and the city to hood threads. Because the taxi rank was a nexus — the starting point for all journeys — it was also an aesthetic explosion. ‘People, wherever they’re trying to get to, they go to the rank. Whether they’re travelling to the office, the jazz club, the tavern, each one brings their own style. I grew up seeing a lot of style as a young kid’.

Today, Mkay’s camo attire reads like a patchwork of jumbled pieces brought together. Camo was designed to resonate with the wearer’s surroundings. Appropriate since Mkay’s character was forged at the intersection of multiple stylistic cut-offs.

Just like the rank, his home was a meteoric style catalogue. ‘My mom was a teacher, a music conductor and a fashion designer. She used to dress us up in her own clothes. So Christmas day, we used to change four times, four times! I grew up like that. My pop’s wardrobe is crazy! My mom’s wardrobe is crazy! It’s like even a battle. The type of space clothing took in the house was just ridiculous.’

The attention to threads was stitched through Mkay’s early life, from his parents to his uncles, to the streets themselves. He tells the story of visiting one of his uncles in jail. After a long wait, his uncle emerged from the cells keen to show off his customised prison apparel: standard leather shoes transformed to suede. ‘I come from that’, Mkay says, ‘It’s not even flossing. It’s a lifestyle. That’s what we do.’

Amid Dead Prez and basketball courts, the taxi rank and family wardrobes, Mkay’s origin story unfolded. He discovered the transformative power of the right kicks and the right threads. ‘For me clothing was always that. When I rock somethin’, girls react to me in a certain way. People treat me differently. After I tasted that, for me it was like a no brainer. I was like, I gotta look fresh if I wanna get this type of treatment or this type of vibe’.

In his first year of college, Mkay, a 19-year old maverick, co-founded a streetwear store, stocking local brands. It was dubbed 100% Flavour. That was when the Magents crew recognised his magic, teleporting him to Jo’burg. Nineties fashion trailblazers, Magents were putting their streetwear on some of the country’s biggest kwaito, house, jazz and hip-hop stars. While coordinating the brand’s PR, Mkay worked with the likes of Mandoza, Trompies, Lebo Mathosa, and Rudeboy Paul. In 2006, he teamed up with Scoop Makhatini and Nkosana Modise to launch Ama Kip Kip — a brand that blew up on the scene.

Mkay was picked up by Nike in 2008. Like Spiderman’s radio-active spider bite or The Flash’s lightning bolt, connecting with Nike injected Mkay’s already exceptional craft with super-capacities. Nike saw Mkay’s talent for re-aligning the cultural cityscape: connecting crowd to commodity and clothing to culture. ‘They wanted to open a space where influential people could come through and grab product’. This marked the beginning of Gallery on 4^th in Melville, which Mkay describes as ‘an interaction billboard, where kids could come in and check out Tier Zero stuff from Nike — the latest, limited and most special product’.

Lit by Mkay’s power to bring worlds together, Gallery on 4^th became a key meeting place for cultural producers. He and his crew hosted the regular Jumble Rumble, showcasing local urban brands, including Strussbop, Head Honcho, Butan and Thesis, to a soundtrack of Jo’burg DJs and live performances.

The Gallery also spurred a number of creative collectives. At the end of 2009, Mkay was asked to compile a team to ‘work the space’ — marking the beginning of Boyz’nBucks. ‘We did a lot of crazy shit with big artists at that time.’

With clothes as the catalyst, Boyz’nBucks detonated into audio-aesthetic debris. ‘The fashion thing was always the thread. That’s how we started’.

For Mkay, it’s been sneakers. They are the stuff of the streets, the courts, the hip-hop stages, and the backyard battles. More than that, takkies have been enigmatic double-symbols: of creativity and consumption, solidarity and status, nostalgia and aspiration. Mkay explains that ‘when the Nike shit popped’ was when he got serious about the sneaker game. Sure, he’d owned some premium kicks before, but with less sense of direction, without having plugged sneakers into his personal compass. ‘I was collecting then, but now it’s a thing now, because you go deeper into it. You understand the culture. You see cats who are 40 and doing it. Like damn, there’s longevity in this shit!’

Sneakers are art, ambition and identity, but they are also money. Growing up on hip-hop and b-ball, Mkay knew that his mom would be hurting when she copped him the latest J’s. He’s tried to use his platform to celebrate sneakers, while also pushing back on consumerism.

‘I always say, “don’t believe the hype”. I’m always into the shit that I’m into. Aint no blogger that will tell me what’s ill. No, I know what’s ill. I know what I like. If I don’t like them, I don’t like them. You can hype them as much as you want. And I always try to push that. Buy the shit that you like and buy below your belt, you know. Cos sometimes you’ve got a Gucci aspiration, but you don’t have a Gucci wallet. You don’t have Gucci money. You can still be stylish without rocking Gucci. How you gonna compete with an engineer when you in matric? You’re putting your mom under pressure.’

Mkay’s sneaker show, Hunting for Kicks, started four years ago, while he and a friend were literally hunting for kicks in Cape Town. There was a massive Concords release: ‘We managed to get like 20 pairs [for reselling]. It’s crazy, back then you could get away with a limited shoe, 20 pairs, and they would let you buy the whole stock. I wanted to record the joint. So I’ve got my Macbook on my lap [and] he’s driving. So we do this mini-clip talking about these Concords: when did they come out, why are they so important to the culture, all of that. [Later] I took a look at this clip and was like “this clip is dope”. I put it on Facebook and a lot of people reacted. And I was like “oh shit I can do a lot of this”’.

Since then, Hunting for Kicks has offered intimate insight into local sneaker culture and featured some of the biggest names in the game: Marc Mac, Jake Lipman, Haydan Manual, Scoop. The list also includes some of the flyest women on the scene: Urban Mosadi, Thithi Nteta, Empress Mrs Mome, Sumaya Peterson.

‘I always wanted to capture the whole sneaker culture in SA. I felt like it’s gonna be essential in the future looking back, you know. I felt there was a need for that. The stories sometimes get diluted when written by people who are not part of the culture. So I felt like I was the right person to actually tell that story’. And in telling the story, Mkay, as he so often does, has weaved disparate narratives together. The stories of each cultural practitioner are interlinked through sneakers. ‘It’s funny that learning about the shoe, I also get to learn about my friends.’ Testament to Mkay’s urge for creative collaboration, Hunting For Kicks currently have a mixtape out with Hype magazine. ‘I got like 12 rappers, rapping about sneakers,’ Mkay chimes.

For every superhero, there’s an urban stage and Johannesburg has been Mkay’s Kryptonopolis. Braamfontein pavements have served as the dominant backdrop for Hunting for Kicks. It was as though these streets resonated from Mkay’s chest. He was the man who wove worlds together and the city echoed his vision. ‘You and me, people like us, we come from small towns. My crew are from Durban, Eastern Cape, wherever. We’re coming to Jo’burg to come dig this gold. We’re coming for work. So our style becomes fused to the city that we live in, and its game over! You can’t copy that. It can’t be trendy. Me and my crew we’re so different because we come from different towns. We absorb the whole shit in different ways’.

The man lives borderless — straddling borders, and connecting across them, on our behalf. Because he knows that people are porous, Mkay has always been about the team — about bringing people together. He has stood for the idea that if young black creatives are to rise, they’ll do it together. Camo, then, becomes an outward symbol for rolling squad-deep and having one another’s backs.

‘We all Shakas in the game. Every man wants to have his own kingdom. But when it’s your project, I’m your boy. We’re going 100 percent for you. I look at it more like an Odd Future mission or a Wu Tang [mission]. Everybody’s got their own thing and we still come together’.

Undertaking to back local creativity, Mkay has helped get local urban labels into big stores like Shesha, and plugged creative collaborations between South African designers and US sneaker brands. He intends to start an agency, linking brands to street culture influencers — the act of connecting that has defined much of his prior work.

‘I’ll be sitting in a boardroom fighting for checks for the arts. Then I’ll be sitting with cats on the streets saying, “If you really wanna get this money, this is how it’s done”. It’s the best of both worlds. It keeps me on the edge with my own businesses. I know I can’t commercialise it that much, and I can’t neglect the business side of the whole thing. I gotta stay authentic, but I gotta make money while doing it’.

In between his packed-out bookings, Mkay works with Slim [Jerome Du Plooy] on a charity project: Sunday School Foundation in collaboration with Slim Cares. For the past three years, they have taken 150 kids from Orlando West on regular outings: to the zoo, for ice skating, for Christmas parties. And again, he’s threading worlds together. ‘Expose them to different stuff so that they can see the world in a different way. Three years later, their confidence is crazy. We do bursaries too. But our main mission is to instil confidence’.

Like the best of sneaker customizers, Mkay knows how to un-piece street culture, and then re-stitch its elements, curating undiscovered combinations. As he does this, he pulls people towards each other, links them to the cultural coalface, and generates spectacular collisions of people, product and place.

15 June 2016
UMSWENKO: Johannesburg’s Post Sub-cultural movement

The earliest existing use of the hashtag UMSWENKO can be found on a May. 31, 2012 photo posted by @1phiko (Phiko Mditshwa) a member of and digital co-ordinator for the rap crew Boyzn Bucks. The image posted was a screenshot of Siyabonga Ngwekazi aka “Scoop Makhathini” performing in Khaya “Bhubesii” Sibiya’s music video for the track “Members Only” (Scoop and Bhubesii also happen to be members of Boyzn Bucks). Nine hundred and two days later, the hashtag has been used over 8000 times, in what seems to be the embrace of a post-subcultural approach to the creation of youth cultural identity in South Africa’s emerging black middle-class.

Swank is an English word, which means to “display one’s wealth, knowledge or achievements in a way that is intended to impress others” (The Oxford Dictionary, 2014). It is through the appropriation of this word into the Zulu vernacular that “swenka” and #UMSWENKO have their roots.

In the Zulu language “uswenka” is someone who is well dressed, that is the premise on, which “swenking” (the subculture) was later formed. Mr Ngubane, chairman of Iphimbo Scathamiya and Swenka Music Organisation believes that “swenka’s” were around in Johannesburg, as early as the 1920’s. He says that “swenking” had a code, “there was a way of behaving and a way of dressing”.

The latest incarnation of the English word swank, is the hashtag UMSWENKO, which shows, through its remix of the word swenka, consideration of the words historical and cultural significance. At the same time though, by remixing the word swenka it signals an attempt to assign additional meaning to it. Adding “um” as a prefix to the word swenka, changes it grammatically. It changes from verb to noun and in doing so creates a word that denotes a much broader youth cultural-identity. That identity, in its outlook is unified only by its post-modern attitude, which legitimises affiliation with many “different” identities. Everything from footwear, to clothes, rings, bags, watches, hair, the body, “combos”, dance, music, alcohol, cars, electronics, events and even work, have been hash tagged UMSWENKO. And there are no rules governing how they should be appropriated or consumed. Nor is the consumption of commodities “practiced as a strategy of resistance” as was common in subcultural movements. UMSWENKO can be understood better through post-subcultural theory, which envisages “consumption as creative process of youth style distinction” (Bennett 1999). Thats not to say though that there isn’t a predominant style underpinning the hashtag. Currently streetwear, in particular the sneaker and the bucket hat, are the most significant symbols of the trend.

Solo artist and Boyzn Bucks crew member Smiso Zwane aka Okmalumkoolkat is the embodiment of the trend. His image, impersonations of his image, as illustrations and renders populate the feed, together with images of Rikhado Makhado aka Riky Rick, another member of the Boyzn Bucks crew. If Zwane was instrumental in coining and continuing to reimagine what UMSWENKO means then Makhodo, with his mass-appeal is certainly the Reason the trend has gone viral. The release of Dj Speedsta’s track Hangout, which features a verse where Riky Rick riffs on the hook “Umswenko! rip it! Umswenko!” of upcoming Boyzn Bucks single “Umswenkofontein” coincides with the period the hashtag really began taking off.

History will credit Okmalumkoolkat for UMSWENKO as he first embedded it into popular culture in mid-2010 (before Instagram was even a thing) when he recited the lines “umswenko is a must, sidume njengesinkwa” on the LV track “Boomslang”, which was released through London based label Hyperdub. The “power of consumer images, objects and texts”, which Roberts (2007) feels “evoke heightened levels of reflexivity among youth” cannot be discounted though, as they provide valuable insight into the complex “cultural terrain” within, which the trend emerged. (Bennett, 2011).

The concept of terrain now includes the virtual realm as well, which allows identity to be constructed through posting as opposed to purchasing. UMSWENKO has also been hash tagged on other social networking and blogging platforms signalling perhaps, the beginning of a new chapter in South African youth movements. It is however Boyzn Bucks’ embrace of “individual lifestyle and consumption choices” (Shildrick, T. A. and MacDonald, R. 2006) within the framework of a collective that will define post-subcultural movements in South Africa. Okmalumkoolkats juxtapositional expressions “uptownskhothane” or “internationalpantsula” (both are also hashtags) perfectly sum up the emerging sentiment. The youth does not need to identify as local or as international, they can be both at the same time. They can be whoever they want to be no boundaries…VOETSEK!

17 May 2015