Nutmeg Radio

For those of you going to South Africa for the World Cup, you’ll have some choices to make.  You can spend the entire time hanging out at spots listening to U2 and drum and bass and feel as if you’ve never left home, or you can seek out some spots that will play some kwaito, which shouldn’t be hard to find.

Kwaito is a style of South African music that emerged in the early 1990s that sounds like someone threw some hip-hop, house, and and a touch of South African seasoning into a blender.

I was introduced to kwaito in 1998 when I was studying/researching/playing soccer in Cape Town.  The group on everyone’s lips at the time was TKZee.  The song that you couldn’t avoid was called Shibobo and the video featured none other than West Ham’s South African, Benni McCarthy.  Shibobo quickly became the highest selling single in South African history.

TKZee’s collaboration with Benni wasn’t the group’s only connection to the footballing world.  Tokollo, one of TKZee’s members, is the son of former Bafana Bafana (the South African National Team) coach Stanley Tshabalala.  So perhaps TKZee and Benni were destined to collaborate.

In 1998, Benni was like ketchup in South Africa.  He was on everything.  A poor kid from the Cape Flats, one of Cape Town’s poorest areas, McCarthy climbed from obscurity to the top of South African football in the blink of an eye.  At the beginning of 1998, he was playing for Ajax in Holland.  But during February 1998, we were watching Benni in Burkina Faso at the 1998 African Cup of Nations.

Watching South Africa march to the final from Cape Town was electric.  As Benni set the tournament on fire en route to becoming the tournament’s joint top goal scorer, we danced in the streets, in the bars, and without fail, every time Shibobo came on, we simply lost our minds.  Benni scored four goals against Namibia and a brace against DR Congo on the way to the final.  He could do no wrong.

Eventually, South Africa lost to Egypt 2-1 in the finals.  But by that point, Benni was already positioned to be the next president of South Africa.  The memories of the 1998 African Cup of Nations are still fresh in my memory.  I’ll never forget the mesmerizing performance of South Africa’s stars from Benni McCarthy to Bolton’s Mark Fish and Leeds United’s Lucas Radebe (and to a lesser extent Manchester United’s Quinton Fortune).  But these events were nothing without Shibobo, the soundtrack to my memories.

Check out the video for TKZee’s Shibobo featuring Benni below.   Benni does his thing towards the end.

If 2010 World Cup Committee Chair Danny Jordaan can’t get Manny Pacquiao to do an official World Cup song, he should get Benni McCarthy to reconnect with TKZee to do a remake of Shibobo.  It’s time to revitalize Benni’s musical career.