Check out South African musician Spoek Mathambo’s electrifyingly spooky cover of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control. Filmed by uber-talented (and a Dramatic Need Supporter) SA photographer Pieter Hugo, the video is set in a graveyard with Mathambo in a white suit with an embroidered cross on his chest, and references township violence, police brutality during the Apartheid era and the HIV/AIDS pandemic which has so devastated his homeland.
Mathambo was born in 1985 in Soweto into the state of emergency. The rapper, whose family moved from Soweto to Sandown in the mid 1990s, remembers growing up terrified. It was a terror he didn’t notice in the “white kids I hung out with”.
During the state of emergency and the interparty violence that followed in the 1990s, roadblocks were erected all over townships. Soldiers and cops patrolled the streets, hippos (armoured trucks) roamed, maintaining a brittle quiet.
“We had a fear of Inkatha hacking us to pieces,” Mathambo said. Then there was Aids…From an article in the Mail & Guardian South Africa.
Read more on Mathambo here.
