{UAH} Stop twerking, get dancing, life is short - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
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Stop twerking, get dancing, life is short - Comment
In August the Kenyan blog TheGatunduPrince published an interesting list of "East Africa 30 most watched videos on YouTube."
How shall we put this? Ugandans, according to TheGatunduPrince's list, seem to be East African kings of music video.
The most viewed video was, wait for it, "Willi Willi Dance Pati Didi Rico Rynz" by Uganda's DJ Din. At that point it had garnered 24,203,751 hits, numbers that once seemed impossible for an East African video, and was the preserve of the Nigerian offerings on YouTube.
The next Ugandan offering was "Ghetto Kids Dancing Sitya Loss." At that point, it had 4,702,278 views. "Sitya Loss" is a hit song by Ugandan musician Eddy Kenzo. He was perched at number 5 on TheGatunduPrince's list.
It is quite revealing what the differences between Kenyan, Uganda, and Tanzanian videos tell about the respective cultures, but it would also be a little too controversial, so we will leave it for now.
I had not heard of "Sitya Loss" and learnt of it from the most unlikely source; a tweet by Hans Rosling, the Swedish doctor, academician and public speaker. You cannot visit Rosling's Gapminder site and not come away convinced that he is a true genius.
So when he tweeted that life was not all about data and weighty global issues, but also the fun stuff like Ugandan kids dancing "Sitya Loss," I checked it out.
As of October 9, the official "Ghetto Kids Dancing Sitya Loss" video was inching toward 6 million views. And it has inspired several spin-offs, including a Sitya Loss dance tutorial.
And "Willi Willi Dance Pati Didi Rico Rynz"? It has grown marginally from August. One explanation could be the very reason it is successful — it is most definitely not for family viewing, so it is not about to get the endorsement of eminent figures like Rosling.
It is naughty, raunchy, and even dirty. That it has been viewed so many times, is not surprising, in much the same way as Nicky Minaj's "Anaconda" that, after a few weeks on YouTube, has been eyed nearly 240 million times. As the Daily Beast put it, the Minaj video is "too much booty for one man to handle."
Of TheGatunduPrince's top 30, "Ghetto Kids Dancing Sitya Loss" is the only one with dusty children, or folks who are not wearing false hair, lipstick, high shoes, glittering clothes, or sporting a stylish haircut.
Which suggests that its popularity is a good thing: It says that while our baser selves are seduced by over-sexualised twerking — there is a part of us to which the simplicity, free spirit, and "innocence" of "Ghetto Kids Dancing Sitya Loss" appeals.
Why? There is an expression that the good people at the Society for International Development like to use to describe what happens when Africans are faced with overwhelming uncertainty. We tend "to return to the womb," they say.
"Sitya Loss" (I don't fear loss) is partly autobiographical. Musician Kenzo lost his mother when he was five. He sings that life is short so we should make the best of it, and how we shouldn't be imprisoned by our past.
Yet the video to the song works probably because it takes listeners back to a less complicated past. To the womb.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter: @cobbo3
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