In South Africa, a song once again captures the mood

Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa — 

The song’s called “Revolutionary House” and it’s gone viral.

But its creator is difficult to track down. It takes several probes on Twitter, a lead from YouTube, an Internet search full of blind alleys, some e-mails and a couple of cold calls to strangers with online pseudonyms before someone responds with a tweet.

Eventually, a call comes. “I’m the one you want,” says a deep voice.

Hours later, David Law, 25, with disobedient, bristly hair and solemn eyes, turns up for an interview in a shopping mall. He’s wearing low-slung jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt.

He says he doesn’t want to make money from “Revolutionary House.” He wants to make people think, an impulse that places him in a long line of South Africans who have used music to protest and to inspire.

Law says it didn’t take him long to craft the song on his computer. It combines a thumping electronic beat and excerpts from a tirade by a leader of the ruling African National Congress, talking ominously of revolution and railing at a white BBC reporter who had jokingly pointed out that the leader lived in a cushy suburb.

“Don’t come here with that white tendency!” said Julius Malema, the ANC’s youth leader. “Not here! …This is a revolutionary house.… Bastard! Go out! Bloody agent!”

The outburst by Malema, a charismatic 29-year-old who inspires great loyalty among many young disempowered, jobless black men, crystallized the anxieties of the country’s white minority 16 years after South Africa’s first democratic election buried apartheid.

For whites fearful that the country is sliding into an abyss, and haunted by the example of neighboring Zimbabwe, Malema is a charged symbol: an advocate of nationalizing mines and land who is also known for his fondness for fast cars and his ostentatious wristwatch.

Law’s “Revolutionary House” is one of several songs by that name that surfaced after Malema’s eruption.

“The thing that stood out for me was the ‘revolutionary house,’ ” says Law, who is white. “It’s things like that that make you question the government.”

Duh-duh-thwacka, duh-duh-thwacka, duh-duh-thwacka, duh-duh-thwacka.

Blood-ee agent! Drrr-m-drrr.

Bastard! Drrr-m-drrr.

The televised tantrum, which drew a rebuke from President Jacob Zuma, undermined South Africa’s efforts to showcase itself as a tolerant, modern African democracy as it prepares to host soccer’s World Cup next month.

Racial tensions were already high in the country. A court had recently barred Malema from singing in public “Shoot the Boer,” an apartheid-era song calling for the killing of white farmers. (Malema had made a habit of singing it at political rallies.) Soon after the court ruling, white supremacist Eugene TerreBlanche was killed by two black farmworkers.

Law, a musician and sound engineer who produces jingles and music for advertisements, sliced up Malema’s invective from the news conference and laid it over a track of house music, a genre known for a heavy drum track and synthesized bass line injected with vocal samples. The result is rhythmic, punchy, funny and danceable.

Law comes from a white middle-class family anchored in Africa and calls himself a liberal. He got his first guitar at 14, took to songwriting and has been playing in bands ever since. No matter what happens, he says, he’ll never leave South Africa.

“I thought, it’s my country too, and I don’t want it to be tarnished by deluded individuals.”

Mtu Ntuli, 27, a black cartoonist and computer programmer, created his own song parody after Malema’s news conference. But it wasn’t fear, anger or even politics that got him thinking. It was the overheated, slightly absurd quality of Malema’s rhetoric.

“Firstly, everyone was angry at [Malema]. Later it became like a joke. When someone started criticizing someone else, they would say ‘Don’t be an agent!’ ” says Ntuli, who goes by the name DR Underscore.

To Ntuli, there’s “no way” Malema represents South African youth: “I didn’t vote for him. Most people didn’t even vote for the guy who is representing youth in the country.

“He’s trying to push this whole thing, trying to fight for the land, the Boer,” he says. “It’s not a reality in this country and everybody knows it. In my office, we have blacks and whites. We don’t feel this whole thing.”

Ntuli and his peers were too young to take part in the struggle against apartheid. But the music of the era still lives in their souls, a collective memory.

Music was a potent inspiration for apartheid’s opponents, from the rousing ANC struggle songs sung in the townships and by political prisoners on Robben Island to the joyful fusion of jazz and traditional African music of Miriam Makeba, who teamed with Harry Belafonte to sing about the plight of black South Africans in the 1960s.

Law’s “Revolutionary House” recalls the work of Warrick Sony, a white musician who founded the Kalahari Surfers, one of the country’s most daring protest bands of the 1980s. Sony spliced snatches of apartheid government-speak into songs. In that era, it was slow work that involved cutting up bits of tape.

“I suppose it was the absurdity of the way the previous government used the media,” Sony says. “There was a lot of propaganda. They were pretty good at it. They had the news sorted out, and they had all these things to keep people thinking that everything was all right. I’d grab things out, long before there was sampling. I used to do it with quarter-inch tape and a razor blade.”

A 1985 song titled “Reasonable Men” incorporated statements from a news conference at which the Soweto police chief, Brig. Jan Visser, and the country’s leader, P.W. Botha, announced repressive laws to regulate black townships:

Visser: “It may be necessary in certain prevailing conditions to declare that a particular curfew, ah, will prevail in a particular area. In other words, from a particular time to a particular time movement will be restricted.”

Botha: “I call upon all well-meaning and reasonable South Africans to take hands in these times and to stand together to restore order and peace. I wish to give the assurance that law-abiding people have nothing to fear as from midnight today.”

The phrases echo through the song:

Movement will be restricted.

Nothing to fear.

The Kalahari Surfers resonated with a generation of alienated young South Africans, including white men sucked into the system as army conscripts.

In 1982, the group tried to cut an album, “Own Affairs,” in South Africa. The sound engineer from the label EMI listened, dubiously, taking notes, recalls Sony, now 51.

“The guy heard my stuff and didn’t want anything to do with it,” Sony says. Several subsequent albums were made in Britain, but were banned in South Africa.

When apartheid ended in 1994, Sony was elated. But the musician, for many years an ardent ANC supporter, feels disillusioned today.

“I do. We all do,” he says. “I feel quite a lot of anger, really.”

His new album, “One Party State,” is about the absurdities of living in an African country “where there’s no one driving.”

Apartheid’s combination of religion and nationalism was abhorrent, Sony says, “and now we have got African nationalism, which is not a whole lot different.”

Amid these tensions, Malema’s blunt, racially colored rhetoric stirred primal fears.

“He’s planting the seeds of destruction and chaos in the minds of people who don’t know any better,” Law says. “We are in a very volatile state in the country at the moment. For him to say the things he’s saying and sing the songs he’s singing is stirring up something that can easily explode into a very serious situation.”

“Revolutionary House” struck a chord across the race line. On his Twitter feed, even Malema acknowledged liking the song (although it’s not clear which version). He also made a stab at humor.

“I have to admit, the ‘Revolutionary House’ track is good,” said the tweet. “Royalties?”

robyn.dixon@latimes.com