AKA - A vile betrayal.

The night of Friday the 10^th of February, 2023, was not only different. It was the height of a media maelstrom about the brutal murder of one of South Africa’s most distinguished hip-hop artists, AKA, who was gunned down at close range outside an eatery in Durban’s busy Florida Road. He was with his friend and celebrity chef Tebello ‘Tibz’ Motsoane, who was also murdered in the same way.

In order to set the tone, let me appeal to Edward Said’s In Representations of the Intellectual, wherein Said claims that always “the intellectual is beset and remorselessly challenged by the problem of loyalty. All of us without exception belong to some sort of national, religious or ethnic community: no one, no matter the volume of protestations, is above the organic ties that bind the individual to family, community, and of course nationality.” Now, no matter how generous I want to be, I cannot accuse ALL entertainment industry practitioners as intellectuals in the way Said imagines, but I can accuse them all of being human. If I’m correct that they’re all human, then the problem of loyalty cannot escape them. Even if they might be consumed by “hate” and “beef” and stuff, and even if they might be “jealous” of each other, they still belong to an industry of creative humans who need each other to keep things going.

Why, then, have we not seen impassioned outrage from industry practitioners at the callous murder of an undeniable cultural treasure such as AKA? Why have musicians not taken to the streets to demand action? By this I don’t mean violent protest such as what occurred a few years ago in Chile. But why have musicians stopped so quickly to demand action on their powerful social media platforms? Where are the peaceful marches to the police? Where are the #JusticeForAKA concerts? It’s been a month now since the murder. Where is the activism? Could the thunderous silence by musicians – a trait that’s not common in their trade, bespeak an anxiety, a fear?

Why have we not seen key industry bodies such as SAMRO and RISA, even the NAC, uniting to express outrage, acting together to demand action by the police to arrest the people who killed such an important member of the industry? I have not read articles by prominent leaders in the industry – the SONYs and Universals of this world, lamenting the safety of industry players. Why is that?

This silence about AKA’s death, and the deaths of others ahead of him, is traumatic. It’s a breach, a violation.

AKA’s butchery devastated many young people in South Africa and elsewhere. It affected everyone with access to social media or Spotify or the tabloids. He was loved, no doubt, even though he was denied an official provincial funeral, as if he was not a patriot who was so obviously distinguished.

It seems irrelevant to a great part of the South African music industry that all of us who are human beings capable of thought ought to be “challenged by the problem of loyalty.” A great part of the South African music industry is actually an institution peopled by the heartless, the ones who are determined to move on as quickly as their murdered colleague is buried, even if there does not seem to be any movement about the arrest of the assailants.

Granted, creatives are naturally competitive. I don’t expect them to “love” one another. All of the self-respecting among them want to be better than their previous selves in order to be the best in the industry. So competition – beef, hate, whatever, is unavoidable. But when a peer is killed in cold blood, it is remarkable that the industry does not literally pause to meaningfully condemn the murder and demand swift action by the authorities.

Many will remember AKA as an illustrious artist, but some, like me, will also remember him as a man who was betrayed by an industry he gave so much to. I write books, and I find it scary that it is possible that I care more for my fictitious characters than the entertainment industry practitioners care for each other.

Many of AKA’s colleagues should feel ashamed of themselves. Like AKA and DJ Sumbody and Lucky Dube and others, tomorrow it will be another artist, and then another, and yet another, and soon no child will aspire to be an artist.

A great part of the South African music industry, in its silence, has performed its lack of commitment to compassion. Their silence is a performance of a special heartlessness. Their silence is a parable of betrayal, a betrayal so chilling it performs a hostile critique of our cultural space. Just like AKA’s murder itself, the horror of the silence of his peers is a cruelty that we do not yet know how to measure.

Perhaps the cruelty should not be that shocking, because the Russian great, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, has already betokened that ‘people speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.’