POP CULTURE SOUTH AFRICA

KWAITO

JUKSKEI

-New musical voice for the urban youth of S.A.

-Like hip hop, kwaito is not just music. It's an expression of a way of life. It is street style as lifestyle. Music reflects life in the townships.

-Just as many of the influences on hip hop come from the streets of New York and California, it's a mixture of all that 1990s South African youth grew up on: SA disco, hip hop, R&B, Ragga, and a heavy, heavy dose of American and British house music.

-A game in which the player throws a wooden pin - known in Afrikaans as a skei - at a peg in the ground.

-Dates back to 1734, and grew out of bored transport riders passing the time by planting a stick in the ground and seeing who could hit it from a distance with one of the pins from the oxen yokes.

-During the apartheid era the game was closely associated with the cultural identity drive of the government and actively revived and encouraged by Afrikaner nationalists.

NGUNI CATTLE

-For hundreds of years, the well-being of the herds of these most beautiful cattle and the Zulu people have been so closely connected that cattle have become a part of the people's spiritual and aesthetic lives. This has given rise to a poetic and complex naming practice.

POP CULTURE SOUTH AFRICA

JUKSKEI!

PALEONTOLOGY

-San Paintings Drakensberg Mountains

Now monument to San Bushmen hunter-gatherers who lived there from the Stone Age until the 19th Century

FESTIVALS

-The regions of Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Kromdraai, known as South Africa's "Cradle of Humankind", has one of the world's richest concentrations of hominid fossils, evidence of human evolution over the last 3.5-million years.

-The remains of ancient forms of animals, plants and hominids - our early ancestors and their relatives - are captured in a bed of dolomite deposited 2.5-billion years ago. Although other sites in south and east Africa have similar remains, the Cradle has produced more than 950 hominid fossil specimens.

-Sites in the area supply crucial information about members of one of the oldest hominids, the australopithecines - two-footed, small-brained primates that appeared about 5-million years ago.

-S.A. has a festival for every event, place, art, food, drink, and agricultural commodity.

-Ficksburg Cherry Festival, the National Arts Festival, mud-and-dust music festivals, mud-and-manure farm shows, the Lambert's Bay Kreeffees (crayfish festival), Hantam Vleisfees (meat festival).

-The Prickly Pear Festival in Uitenhage offers traditional food such as potjiekos, home-made jam, braais and bunnychow.

-Philippolis Witblits Festival celebrates a proud local tradition - witblits (Afrikaans for "white lightning") is South African moonshine.

-Every year, southern right whales travel thousands of miles to the Cape south coast to mate and calve in the bays. To celebrate the season the villagers of Hermanus put on a major festival which includes the best land-based whale watching in the world.

MBUBE

-Solomon Linda received 10 shillings for this song he wrote in 1939

Corné and Twakkie

-Which went on to inspire at least 160 covers, including this one:

QUAGGA

WINE

-On 12 August 1883 the last living quagga died at the Amsterdam zoo, and the world believed this unusual type of zebra had become extinct.

-Quagga lived in the Karoo and southern Free State, unlike regular zebras, was striped on the front half of its body only, colored a creamy light brown on its upper parts and whitish on its belly and legs.

-For the last 20 years a team of South Africans have been working to bring the beast back from the dead

-The vineyards of the Western Cape have been producing wine since the 17th century, with perhaps the most famous estate, Groot Constantia, established in 1685. Members of the British royal house, Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Philippe of France, Frederick II of Prussia, the Lords Seventeen of the VOC, governors, admirals and captains love the Constantia label and treated their special guests to it.

-South Africa now has 100,200 hectares under vines for wine production, with the annual harvest some 600-million liters. The country produces 3,1% of the world's wine and ranks as number nine in overall volume production.

DANCE

-Dance has become prominent mean to expressing new freedoms in post-apartheid S.A.

HANDICRAFTS AND INDIGENOUS ART

Archeology

-Wide range of craft work styles: tribal designs, Afro-French wirework, wood carvings, world-class pottery and bronze casting, stained glass, basket weaving, clay and stone sculpting, paper from elephant dung and ornaments made from waste

TSOTSI

EARTH- VREDEFORT DOME

-Mapungubwe, Limpopo

-One of richest archaeological sites in S.A.

-S.A.'s "Lost City of Gold"- Center for gold and ivory trade with East Africa, China, India 1200-1650. Rediscovered in 1932, hidden from public view until very recently.

-Now World Heritage site.

-Two billion years ago a meteorite bigger than Table Mountain hit the earth 100km southwest of Johannesburg, causing a 1 000-megaton blast that vaporized 70 cubic kilometers of rock and may have changed the earth's climate to make multicellular life possible.

The resulting crater, known as the Vredefort Dome, is the oldest and largest clearly visible meteorite impact site in the world. Although now considerably eroded, the original crater was probably 250 to 300 kilometres in diameter.

-Also a Unesco World Heritage Site

-Tsotsi is the first South African film to win an Oscar, and has put the country's movie industry in the spotlight, vindicating the government's multimillion-rand strategy to increase the volume of local films and market South Africa as a film-making country.

-Based on acclaimed playwright Athol Fugard's only novel, Tsotsi - the word means "thug" or "hoodlum" - tells the story of a violent young street criminal who finds redemption after he inadvertently abducts a baby during a car hijacking.

design by Dóri Sirály for Prezi

ZULU

More Corne and Twakkie...

-Zulu people are South Africa's largest population group, with isiZulu the most common home language. They also have the country's largest monarchy, headed by King Goodwill Zwelathini, and a rich culture going back centuries. Shaka, who ruled the Zulu in the 19th century, is possibly their most famous leader, an almost mythical figure and the stuff of legend.