On Izikhotane, the Italian baroque, destruction as grammar, the Red Queen ko kasi Or what happens when a subculture becomes someone else’s finishing move.
One is whether izikhotane might be interested in an arts mentor to deepen their creativity to states of embodiment outside fancy garb.
Then, I would like to see this custard act on a Paris runway being replaced by a fire: kerosene, parafin, good old petrol. What prevented them for being the izikhotane they are at home? Who curated the performance? What discussion did not take place?
Then, what keeps them from burning, embody burning and be prepared to embody the body of the African male in Paris.
Fascinating and provocative. Appreciation for both your writing and understanding and for Nobonke's responses. I am not an artist. I am not young or black or male. Simply - to some extent culpable - curious and grateful.
As an artist myself I appreciate your slant towards the right of artistic expression, whatever it takes. I read your sentiments towards the artist's pedestrian embodiment of their own sense of worldiness as closer to performance art.
But I have serious questions around the ethico-aesthetic rights of artists who for instance would waste food as part of a performance, or neglecting an ecological sensibility of what they do to the environment. Would iziknotane resort under these, I ask?
If a group of righteous protestors burn down a school, or clinic for whatever reason, and the community is left without those services, would the argument of their rights due to historical, political reasons be justified? How far can SA bend over backwards for these acts of violence, in the name of grudges against systems that cripple communities.
I know I am taking a far curve with this argument to contest the destruction of clothing by a select group of almost "privileged" black men. How does this act (which I first witnessed on the media a good decade ago) affect members of the community who have to bear this display in their own threadbare existence? Would Europe make this all okay? Legitimate? Artistically ethical? What kind of dis/combobulated colonialism is being exacted here?
A very down to earth statement: I regularly give black woman a lift from a township towards a town in a prominent rural setting. Without fail, they look for an ear to hear how this permission of youthful consumptive violence destroys their lives and family life, existentially eroding a community. This is where they eke out their only meaning and existence, and which they claim to be im/possible.
Note that the European seal on African violence, is violent per se, an entangled violence one would find difficult to overlook if you care to look at the wider picture back home.
A quick clarification before anything else: my position is not “artistic expression, whatever it takes.” That is not what I argued, and I would appreciate engagement with what I actually wrote rather than a version of it that is easier to contest.
What I argued is specific: that izikhotane is a culturally legible practice with an internal logic rooted in a long history of sartorial resistance in South African township life, that the grandmother narrative misrepresents its economics, and that the shame it produces in Black audiences is worth interrogating rather than simply ratifying. None of that is a blank cheque for artistic destruction of any kind.
The comparisons you are reaching for, burning schools, wasting food, ecological damage, do not hold because they involve harm to shared resources and to people who did not consent to participate in the act. Izikhotane destroys privately owned objects in a communal performance that the community itself organises, witnesses, and judges. The township women you give lifts to have a real and serious perspective that deserves to be heard. But their discomfort, real as it is, is not the same thing as harm caused to them. Those are different claims and they require different arguments.
The question of European legitimation is actually the one I agree with you on, and it is precisely the critique I made of MaXhosa. The European seal does not make something ethical. It also does not make something unethical. The practice existed and had its own meaning long before Paris looked at it. That meaning does not depend on European approval or disapproval, and neither does my analysis of it.
The destruction you have substantially justified as a statement of idenity-survival.
I would even add the right to suicide may emulate the same sentiments, historically, politically, religiously, with the same nihilism that claims identity.
But my extra/ordinary nudge as a socially aware South African across generations has been the headlight of my particular curiosity about izikhotane since my first awareness of the phenomenon: Where does the money come from? And, my earliest information was the meagre "pension" received from the State by the grandmother who has to take care of younger generations. Not to mention the manner in which that "pension" was attained by these now celebrated generation of artistically venerated generation X, or whatever.
I think it would be responsible to research this source, as it remains the unanswered and unnecessarily mystified corner of a practice venerated in Europe for its further undergirding of what Africans are all about. The full story. If you want to go to Paris, go all the way. That is all I require.
This is a fair and serious provocation, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a defensive one. So let me offer one.
You are right that the essay does not follow the money. That is a real gap, and I will not dress it up as a deliberate omission. But I want to push back on the specific direction your question assumes, because the grandmother narrative, however widely circulated, is not quite the factual ground it presents itself as.
From my own embodied experience, living amongst and in genuine proximity to men and boys like these rather than observing from a critical distance, the money behind izikhotane mostly comes from gambling. Dice, played on street corners and at taxi ranks, on the same board by working men and the unemployed alike. That informal economy is where the spending power comes from, in the main. The grandmother’s pension is a moral image more than it is an accurate account.
And it is worth asking what work that image does, and why it circulates so insistently. Because I think it connects directly to what happened on Twitter when the MaXhosa moment went viral. The uproar was not simply about a runway. It was about shame. Black people watching izikhotane on a Paris runway did not feel pride; they felt exposure. What they saw read to them as hooliganism, as spectacle without dignity, as a failure to perform what we might call the burden of representation: the exhausting and unfair expectation that Black people in public must always be legible as aspirational, disciplined, respectable, worthy of the gaze that is always already judging.
Izikhotane refuses that burden completely. That is precisely its power and precisely why it produces shame in people who have internalised the terms of that burden without necessarily knowing they have done so. The grandmother narrative feeds directly into this dynamic. It gives the shame a moral justification that feels like a factual one. It says: this is not just embarrassing, it is wrong, it is harmful, it is predatory. It converts aesthetic discomfort into ethical condemnation. And once you have done that, the cultural analysis cannot happen, because the thing has already been sentenced.
The dice economy is a different ethical topology entirely. Men competing voluntarily on their own terms in a public informal space, then choosing to spend their winnings in another competitive public arena. The structure is consistent all the way through. It does not require anyone’s pension. It does not require shame. What it requires is a willingness to follow the actual economics rather than the emotionally convenient story, and to ask why the convenient story is so persistent and who benefits from its persistence.
The full story has to include all of this: the actual source of the money, the shame economy that misrepresents it, and the burden of representation that makes Black audiences reach for condemnation rather than curiosity when they see izikhotane on a stage the world is watching. Those are not separate questions. They are the same question asked from different angles.
So: go all the way, yes. But all the way means following the actual money, not the mythologised money, and following the shame back to its source. Those are not the same destination as the one the grandmother narrative points toward.
The insight that will stay with me is the lounge suite with the plastic still on. Not as a joke about protecting furniture from use, but as philosophy: 'I will not let use diminish what I have. I will keep it more perfect than function requires because perfection is the point, not function.' That reframes everything that comes after. The Rossimoda loafer, the DMD shirt, the Ultramel, the bitten iPhone—they are not poverty masquerading as wealth, or desperation performing abundance. They are a coherent aesthetic logic, arrived at independently, that happens to rhyme with Italian baroque. The plastic on the lounge suite and the burned shirt are the same gesture: preservation and destruction as two sides of a sovereignty that refuses to let the object define the self. The runway borrowed the custard but could not borrow the stakes. The stakes were always in the room where the plastic stayed on. Thank you for writing this.
A few thoughts.
One is whether izikhotane might be interested in an arts mentor to deepen their creativity to states of embodiment outside fancy garb.
Then, I would like to see this custard act on a Paris runway being replaced by a fire: kerosene, parafin, good old petrol. What prevented them for being the izikhotane they are at home? Who curated the performance? What discussion did not take place?
Then, what keeps them from burning, embody burning and be prepared to embody the body of the African male in Paris.
Just a few thoughts.
Fascinating and provocative. Appreciation for both your writing and understanding and for Nobonke's responses. I am not an artist. I am not young or black or male. Simply - to some extent culpable - curious and grateful.
Thank you always for taking the time 🤍
As an artist myself I appreciate your slant towards the right of artistic expression, whatever it takes. I read your sentiments towards the artist's pedestrian embodiment of their own sense of worldiness as closer to performance art.
But I have serious questions around the ethico-aesthetic rights of artists who for instance would waste food as part of a performance, or neglecting an ecological sensibility of what they do to the environment. Would iziknotane resort under these, I ask?
If a group of righteous protestors burn down a school, or clinic for whatever reason, and the community is left without those services, would the argument of their rights due to historical, political reasons be justified? How far can SA bend over backwards for these acts of violence, in the name of grudges against systems that cripple communities.
I know I am taking a far curve with this argument to contest the destruction of clothing by a select group of almost "privileged" black men. How does this act (which I first witnessed on the media a good decade ago) affect members of the community who have to bear this display in their own threadbare existence? Would Europe make this all okay? Legitimate? Artistically ethical? What kind of dis/combobulated colonialism is being exacted here?
A very down to earth statement: I regularly give black woman a lift from a township towards a town in a prominent rural setting. Without fail, they look for an ear to hear how this permission of youthful consumptive violence destroys their lives and family life, existentially eroding a community. This is where they eke out their only meaning and existence, and which they claim to be im/possible.
Note that the European seal on African violence, is violent per se, an entangled violence one would find difficult to overlook if you care to look at the wider picture back home.
A quick clarification before anything else: my position is not “artistic expression, whatever it takes.” That is not what I argued, and I would appreciate engagement with what I actually wrote rather than a version of it that is easier to contest.
What I argued is specific: that izikhotane is a culturally legible practice with an internal logic rooted in a long history of sartorial resistance in South African township life, that the grandmother narrative misrepresents its economics, and that the shame it produces in Black audiences is worth interrogating rather than simply ratifying. None of that is a blank cheque for artistic destruction of any kind.
The comparisons you are reaching for, burning schools, wasting food, ecological damage, do not hold because they involve harm to shared resources and to people who did not consent to participate in the act. Izikhotane destroys privately owned objects in a communal performance that the community itself organises, witnesses, and judges. The township women you give lifts to have a real and serious perspective that deserves to be heard. But their discomfort, real as it is, is not the same thing as harm caused to them. Those are different claims and they require different arguments.
The question of European legitimation is actually the one I agree with you on, and it is precisely the critique I made of MaXhosa. The European seal does not make something ethical. It also does not make something unethical. The practice existed and had its own meaning long before Paris looked at it. That meaning does not depend on European approval or disapproval, and neither does my analysis of it.
The destruction you have substantially justified as a statement of idenity-survival.
I would even add the right to suicide may emulate the same sentiments, historically, politically, religiously, with the same nihilism that claims identity.
But my extra/ordinary nudge as a socially aware South African across generations has been the headlight of my particular curiosity about izikhotane since my first awareness of the phenomenon: Where does the money come from? And, my earliest information was the meagre "pension" received from the State by the grandmother who has to take care of younger generations. Not to mention the manner in which that "pension" was attained by these now celebrated generation of artistically venerated generation X, or whatever.
I think it would be responsible to research this source, as it remains the unanswered and unnecessarily mystified corner of a practice venerated in Europe for its further undergirding of what Africans are all about. The full story. If you want to go to Paris, go all the way. That is all I require.
This is a fair and serious provocation, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a defensive one. So let me offer one.
You are right that the essay does not follow the money. That is a real gap, and I will not dress it up as a deliberate omission. But I want to push back on the specific direction your question assumes, because the grandmother narrative, however widely circulated, is not quite the factual ground it presents itself as.
From my own embodied experience, living amongst and in genuine proximity to men and boys like these rather than observing from a critical distance, the money behind izikhotane mostly comes from gambling. Dice, played on street corners and at taxi ranks, on the same board by working men and the unemployed alike. That informal economy is where the spending power comes from, in the main. The grandmother’s pension is a moral image more than it is an accurate account.
And it is worth asking what work that image does, and why it circulates so insistently. Because I think it connects directly to what happened on Twitter when the MaXhosa moment went viral. The uproar was not simply about a runway. It was about shame. Black people watching izikhotane on a Paris runway did not feel pride; they felt exposure. What they saw read to them as hooliganism, as spectacle without dignity, as a failure to perform what we might call the burden of representation: the exhausting and unfair expectation that Black people in public must always be legible as aspirational, disciplined, respectable, worthy of the gaze that is always already judging.
Izikhotane refuses that burden completely. That is precisely its power and precisely why it produces shame in people who have internalised the terms of that burden without necessarily knowing they have done so. The grandmother narrative feeds directly into this dynamic. It gives the shame a moral justification that feels like a factual one. It says: this is not just embarrassing, it is wrong, it is harmful, it is predatory. It converts aesthetic discomfort into ethical condemnation. And once you have done that, the cultural analysis cannot happen, because the thing has already been sentenced.
The dice economy is a different ethical topology entirely. Men competing voluntarily on their own terms in a public informal space, then choosing to spend their winnings in another competitive public arena. The structure is consistent all the way through. It does not require anyone’s pension. It does not require shame. What it requires is a willingness to follow the actual economics rather than the emotionally convenient story, and to ask why the convenient story is so persistent and who benefits from its persistence.
The full story has to include all of this: the actual source of the money, the shame economy that misrepresents it, and the burden of representation that makes Black audiences reach for condemnation rather than curiosity when they see izikhotane on a stage the world is watching. Those are not separate questions. They are the same question asked from different angles.
So: go all the way, yes. But all the way means following the actual money, not the mythologised money, and following the shame back to its source. Those are not the same destination as the one the grandmother narrative points toward.
The insight that will stay with me is the lounge suite with the plastic still on. Not as a joke about protecting furniture from use, but as philosophy: 'I will not let use diminish what I have. I will keep it more perfect than function requires because perfection is the point, not function.' That reframes everything that comes after. The Rossimoda loafer, the DMD shirt, the Ultramel, the bitten iPhone—they are not poverty masquerading as wealth, or desperation performing abundance. They are a coherent aesthetic logic, arrived at independently, that happens to rhyme with Italian baroque. The plastic on the lounge suite and the burned shirt are the same gesture: preservation and destruction as two sides of a sovereignty that refuses to let the object define the self. The runway borrowed the custard but could not borrow the stakes. The stakes were always in the room where the plastic stayed on. Thank you for writing this.