In early February 2010, US-based website, Boing Boing, featured South African "zef rap-rave" group, Die Antwoord, on their site. Within days the group had over a million views of their music videos on YouTube, their Facebook fan-bases swelled, and their own website crashed with all the extra online traffic. There are now talks of big record deals and world tours. And comparisons with District 9. But far more interesting than their instant international fame was the fierce debate that ensued on countless internet forums over what Die Antwoord are about, over what - precisely - zef means.
It was entertaining stuff reading some of the imaginative and rather silly conclusions that some people reached, removed as they were from a South African context - one person asserted that the music was sung in Afrikaans, the same language the aliens spoke in District 9.
Although there is no clear definition, zef is generally associated with poor, or at least common, white Afrikaner culture, with a flair for white-trash antics (although it also implies at least a minimal display of ironic distancing from itself). Well, that seems pretty straight forward.
The name, as academic Albert Grundlingh has pointed out, comes from the Ford Zephyr, a model that preceded the Cortina and was popular in brandy-and-coke brandishing communities during apartheid. The website, Wat Kyk Jy, boasts a zef dictionary which, although it does not define zef, is in itself a kind of elaborate definition. Providing visitors with lists upon lists of cruder Afrikaans words and figures of speech for fighting, sex, masturbation, friends, and drinking, it offers up a vividly loose idea of zefness.
Amongst the debates that have raged over Die Antwoord, the most affectively charged have revolved around the real status of the group's racial and ethnic identity.
Are they actually white working-class Afrikaners? Are they English-speaking South Africans pretending to be Afrikaners pretending to be coloured from the Cape Flats? And so on.
While it is possible to establish a few basic facts on this score - for starters, that it is Waddy and Yolandi from Max Normal TV; that it is, without question, parody - the rest is open for interpretation.
Other commentators who concede the parodic status of the act have asked whether it is alright to make fun of a poor, under-educated, marginalised group, even if it is one that is typically racist and clings to old political ideals. I have some thoughts of my own here, which I will provide in an over-thought, and complicated psychoanalytic account of zef in my doctoral dissertation, but I'll keep these postulations to myself for a while longer.
In the meantime, google Die Antwoord. Their music videos are seriously seamless and, frankly, very funny, and their music is a fascinating patchwork of appropriations, including the 'Body Beat' theme tune for the chorus of the song, 'Zef Side'.
In any case, as Ninja says in an interview on YouTube, what zef means is "pretty self speaking."
For more on Die Antwoord and images of the group by Sean Meterlerkamp (as seen above), visit their Facebook profile. Also, for some more on 'zef cool' visit David Smith's debate in "Is Afrikaans cooler as Engels" for the M&G.
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