When I asked him about the significance of this representation, Mzungu Kichaa seemed
a bit embarrassed. He laughed and admitted that he had produced the video clip himself and
almost forgot about it. He said he was inspired by a popular rumor that he is a person with
albinism, which was circulated among the people of Mwanza. In fact, the commentary on his
video clip, Jitolee! is marked by recurring questions about his skin color: “Is he albino?” asks
one user trying to make sense of Mzungu Kichaa’s impressive command of Kiswahili. “No, he
is a mzungu,” replies another.
This and all other comments on White Nigerian’s clips can be traced at http://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=ONS8yDx4C3I.
This and all other quotes in this passage can be traced at http://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=Zjs3JgMMbAw.
18.Lekgoa is the Sotho term for “white person.” As a stage name, Lekgoa was used by a cer-
tain Francois Henning, a Boer, who released two Kwaito cds in 1999 and 2001, and returned
in the latter half of the 2000s with the new stage name Snotkop, performing pop and rock
with Afrikaans lyrics. His all-white music videos reveal the kind of audience he seeks to ad-
dress. In an interview given in 2011, he is quoted as saying: “I am the voice of SA’s Afrikaner-
Youth” (Angula 2011).
In Das perfekte Dinner (The perfect dinner; vox 2011), EES prepared an “African” dish
for the other guests on the show. On Mieten, kaufen, wohnen (To rent, to buy, to live; vox
2013), he inspected several apartments with a real estate agent, as he was supposedly looking
for a new domicile. On the game show Rette die Million! (Save the million! zdf 2012), in
which he took part with a friend, he won 275,000 euro, and on the Millionärswahl (Million-
aire’s poll; sat1 2014), a talent show that earned its winner one million euros, EES was among
the finalists, coming in fifth. Each of these shows gave him the chance to promote himself
through interviews and clips about his personal background and music. On Millionärswahl,
he also performed live, together with his dancers, who were flown in from Namibia.
Facebook’s “people talking about this” score indicates a page’s interaction rate. The
score is the total of all users who have been active during the prior seven days, whereby each
user is counted only once, even if he or she has been active more than once. Also, the nomen-
clature is somehow misleading because all sorts of user activities make up the score—not
only the posting of texts or images but also activities such as “likes” (of the whole page or of
individual posts but not of individual commentaries).
EES has a considerable number of likes from India (22.9 percent) and Serbia (10.8
percent), which puzzles me, as only very few users from these countries ever took part in
the activities on his page (and the few that I could find did so only through “likes” and never
through commentaries). So far, the most active writers of commentaries on EES’s page are
from Namibia, followed by users from Germany. If we exclude India’s and Serbia’s “likes”
from the total number, the distribution is more similar to those of the other two musicians.
