Young black South Africans vs the "PC Thought Police"

Walker drew my attention to this article in the WSJ:

Did You Hear the One About Apartheid?

A group of young, black comics are breaking taboos, cracking controversial jokes and taking South Africa by storm.

After losing power in 1994, South Africa's white right-wingers withdrew into psychic exile, leaving the chattering classes to pursue a political agenda so correct that it sometimes verged on insanity. Newspapers were soon filled with great billows of soft-left pabulum. Talk show hosts routinely used appalling terms like "gendered" or "Othering," and almost everyone observed an unwritten law stating that it was unfair to criticize black people on the grounds that any failings they might exhibit were attributable to poverty, oppression and bad education, otherwise known as "the legacy of apartheid."

In time, I came to feel as if I were suffocating in a fog of high-minded pieties, a condition that often reduced me to cursing and throwing things at the TV set.

In the course of one such episode a few years ago, I switched channels and came upon a demented comedy sketch in which a gunman was tutoring a class of black schoolchildren in the finer points of armed robbery. "You got to have an inside source to tell you where the money is," yelled the gunman, "and when you get caught -- I just love this bit -- when you get caught, blame it on the legacy of apartheid. OK! So what have you learned today?" The children chorus, "Blame it on the legacy of apartheid!"

If you're not South African, you'll probably never understand how dumbfounding this was, but let's give it a try. What do you do, if you're young, gifted and African, when the Economist describes your home as "The Hopeless Continent"? Contest this assessment and you sound like a silly white liberal, which is anathema to a cool dude like comedian David Kibuuka. "The way the foreigners see Africa is sort of the way it is," he says. "Wars, people dying of diseases that were cured long ago and so on." But acknowledging such truths is dangerous, too, because some brothers are always going to accuse you of being a self-loathing sellout, and that's enough to keep most Africans quiet.

Not so for a group of young, black comedians who have taken South Africa by storm. Their attitude, says 30-year-old comic Kagiso Lediga, is, "Get lost if you can't take a joke. Our job is to talk about things that are wrong, and we'll keep doing it unless you kill us."

Based in Johannesburg, the comics first rose to prominence four years ago in a TV series called "The Pure Monate Show." The title meant "absolutely delicious scrumptious show" in a local African language, and its standard fare was outrage. The show lampooned the nation's obsession with crime, staged a conversation between sex toys of various races, and offered some comic sketches about life in neighboring Zimbabwe, which has been rocked by political and economic turmoil under President Robert Mugabe. In one such skit, a shady-looking character hands a great wad of cash to an underworld connection, who surreptitiously slips him a briefcase. Viewers think they're witnessing a Zimbabwe-style drug deal, but when the briefcase is opened, it contains a lone loaf of bread -- the consequence of a currency destroyed by an inflation rate that recently hit 2,200,000% a year.

On the domestic front, the show parodied the cultural peculiarities of racial and tribal minorities, and, in one memorable sketch, portrayed South Africa as a country where politics were so boring that most people stayed in bed on election day, thereby allowing the white rulers of yore to stage a comeback. This was presented as a trailer for a horror movie: "Apartheid II -- coming to a cinema near you."

The TV show was eventually cancelled by the Thought Police who run the state-owned TV so the young comedians decided to make a movie, Bunny Chow. (Bunny Chow is the most common South African "fast food." It consists of a hollowed-out loaf of bread filled with a mixture of curried vegetables and meats. It's used as a metaphor in the movie and is meant to represent the new "melting pot" of South Africa, where cultures, languages and ethnicities are constantly mixing.) They are now a very successful comedy team that tours South Africa.

Local whites get frequent lashings, too. The other night, Tsepo Mogale picked out some pale faces at a front-row table and said, "You whites are full of s-, you know." He proceeded to tell a story about how he pulled up at a traffic light alongside "a battered old Datsun carrying a white family" who locked their doors the instant they clocked black skin. "I'm going to hijack a Datsun?" he chuckled. "Get out of here. I drive a Mercedes."

[...]

South Africa's ruling African National Congress hopes to install Jacob Zuma as the country's next president, in spite of his facing charges arising from the alleged acceptance of a bribe from a French arms manufacturer.

[...]

It was against this tense backdrop that dignitaries gathered at Johannesburg's Emperors Palace casino for the Black Management Forum's 2008 gala dinner. Mr. Zuma was the keynote speaker, and entertainment was provided by Trevor Noah, 24, the newest star in Takunda Bimha's stable. Trusting that Mr. Zuma was big enough to take a joke, Mr. Noah launched into a monologue that went something like this: In apartheid's dying years, he said, hundreds of thousands of terrified white South Africans moved to Australia rather than live under a black government. Those who remained were charmed by Mandela, but when the old man stepped down in favor of Thabo Mbeki in 1999, whites thought, uh-oh, and there was a renewed exodus to the Antipodes. Blacks were amused by these outbreaks of paranoia, Mr. Noah concluded, but now that a Zuma presidency is on the cards, they aren't laughing anymore. Now you hear blacks saying, "How much is a ticket to Australia again?"

The all-black audience howled, but Mr. Noah had broken several powerful African taboos here. The taboo that says 24-year-olds must respect their elders. The taboo that says it's treachery for a brother to criticize a brother. Heck, even the universal conventions of good manners. All eyes swiveled in Mr. Zuma's direction, and lo: "He was laughing like crazy," says Mr. Noah. "Killing himself." (A spokeswoman for Mr. Zuma confirms he heard the joke, and says, "it would be entirely in character for him to laugh" at it.)

South Africa has a long tradition of political comedy and satire. Even during the apartheid era there were satirists like Pieter Dirk Uys who lampooned not only apartheid but also black politicians and white leftists. This tradition of freedom of speech is probably why South Africa is the freest nation in Africa. It's nice to see that South Africans are rediscovering their sense of humor and are no longer kowtowing to the "PC Thought Police."