When we were young (circa 1970) our first glimpse of alternative American youth culture came in the form of Freak Brothers comics. The names of this screwball trio of shabby grassheads were Freewheelin’ Franklin, Fat Freddy and Phineas Phreak. They didn’t do much with their lives apart from being “establishment-hating, drug-using, draft-dodging hippies”, to quote the authoritative website toonopedia.com.
The Freak Brothers were, of course, banned in apartheid South Africa. So we kept them hidden away — under beds, behind shelves and under floorboards with other great anti-establishment works. To us the Freak Brothers were literally, to use the jargon, “underground”.
Three decades later it’s apparent that the legacy left to the youth by the pioneering comic artists Jack Jackson, Fred Todd and Dave Moriarty is alive and well and living in Cape Town. This month sees the release of two well-produced books devoted to South African youth culture. In essence they speak from an alternative point of view, but in trade terms they are distinctly mainstream.
Joe Daly’s saga of the Red Monkey: The Leaking Cello Case (SL/Double Storey Books) is presented like many comic annuals that grace festive season shelves worldwide. It is hardback, glossy and its colours are rich. Tintin meets the Freak Brothers in the Cape of Good Dope.
The lead character, Dave, a professional illustrator, is your average Mother City hippy. He’s got oriental jewellery, a goatee and — surprise, surprise! — monkey feet. Dave can scale buildings and trees and is a prime candidate for investigating sinister plots happening on Cape Town’s streets. Daly has laid the ground for what could in our environment become a standard comic work.
And how much like Cape Town it is. The characters spend their lives in a sophisticated, new age version of hell. Monkey-footed Dave lives in decaying art deco splendour, dodging his underachieving dagga-smoking white buddies who are always out to loan a buck. They share an intense suspicion of foreigners. Ultimately an unscrupulous South American wildlife-smuggler is overcome by Dave’s best buddy’s didgeridoo.
Driving his trendy convertible through Cape Town city, Dave reflects on his life: “I’m currently slaving as a freelance graphic artist, but my dream is to create a successful comic book series and be able to get out of the rat race … and possibly society in general.”
While fictitious Dave is dreaming his way to a waterside A-frame in Knysna, real South African youth are more immersed in socio-political debates than ever before. That’s if recent writing is anything to go by.
Alternative impresario Justin Nurse’s Laugh it Off Annual: South African Youth Culture (Double Storey/Laugh It Off Media) is devoid of the hedonism one associates with rock, house and hip-hop. Nurse is at the helm of a caring, anti-global bunch of do-gooders — the offspring of rebels like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein (who reports about Cancun in the book).
Nurse begins his annual of youth perspective with a rundown of his own 2003 run-in with the law. If you want to find out how Laugh It Off lost its right to distribute its Black Labour T-shirt parodying Black Label beer, it is published here. “Under apartheid, black men in South Africa were an exploited workforce … After work miners were encouraged to spend their earnings drinking in the white mine-owners’ taverns … It is this self-same dynamic that SAB is profiting from today.”
While Nurse sticks his neck right out, poet Kgafela oa Magogodi puts his foot in it. His short story Tâ Sol in Beership Major is an unabashed observation of the anarchic lives of pop musicians, culminating in a male-on-male rape. It’s ugly and unsettling and communicates something of the author’s fear of gay sex. As an antidote, however, there is some positively effeminate HIV/Aids activism from Pieter-Dirk Uys.
While Karen Zoid maintains her status as Afrikaans music’s major prophetess, our journalists are far from blinded by visiting stars. Cape columnist Evan Milton writes a critique of touring hip-hoppers, concluding: “Bush go home … and take Ja Rule with you.”
In the Laugh It Off Annual it is, however, the political commentators who come up trumps. With optimism the Financial Mail’s senior editor Stuart Theobald advises young people, “don’t go disappearing into greener pastures. The economic environment is as good as anywhere in the world.”
And arms trade researcher Raymond Steenkamp observes wryly: “Next time the TV shows riot police in Harare dispersing and arresting non-violent protesters we should keep an eye out for the Proudly South African stickers.”
Interspersed among the anti-Bush rhetoric and the “useful” instruction about how to get two women into bed, there are trademark Laugh It Off adaptations of some of the country’s major corporate campaigns. These have been adapted as satire of top politicians.
The Laugh It Off Annual is a breath of fresh air, free from the official agendas of funding agents. It is not a contradiction to say that what we are witnessing with these publications is the maturing of youth culture itself.