14 | TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
culture
One afternoon this summer on a hotel
rooftop, the rapper Sho Madjozi was
twirling one of her candy-pink plaits and
talking through her signature style.
These bright extensions were inspired
by the decorative “Fulani” cornrows she
had seen girls wearing in Senegal, she
said. Her take on them has since become
so popular, she added, that in South Afri-
ca, where she’s from, they’re called
Madjozi braids.
“You can ask for them in a hair salon,”
Madjozi said, with casual self-assur-
ance. “They’ll know what you’re talking
about.”
Madjozi, 27, whose real name is Maya
Wegerif, is one of South Africa’s biggest
breakthrough stars. She was in Bar-
celona in July to perform at Sónar, one of
several dance music-focused European
festivals she played in the past 12
months, along with CTM in Berlin and
Unsound in Krakow, Poland.
She performed at the Global Citizen
Festival last year, sharing a bill with Be-
yoncé and Ed Sheeran, and won Best
New International Act at the BET
Awards in New York last month. This
month, she performed in Warm Up, the
respected concert series in the New
York City borough of Queens that spot-
lights rising international artists.
Madjozi is a new kind of global pop
star, much like the Spanish flamenco-
pop innovator Rosalía: She pays
homage to her heritage while updating
it for the moment, cutting across conti-
nents and genres.
Born in a village in Limpopo Province,
north of Johannesburg, Madjozi spent
her formative years mostly outside
South Africa: Her father worked for an
international development nonprofit,
and his work took the family to Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania. After high school,
Madjozi attended college in Massachu-
setts.
This globe-trotting youth exposed her
to cultural influences from around Afri-
ca and the world. Yet it’s the Tsonga her-
itage of her birthplace that she is best
known for celebrating.
The Tsonga are a distinct ethnic group
with their own language and culture,
and many Tsonga people in South Africa
arrived as refugees from Mozambique
in the 19th century, Madjozi said. They
faced discrimination and xenophobia
that still persists, she said.
Being Tsonga “wasn’t cool,” Madjozi
said, and she wanted to change that.
One of her signature looks involves a
“xibelani” skirt, which is worn by
Tsonga women for dancing. (Madjozi
pairs hers with Nike Air Max sneakers.)
Her lyrics mix it up, too. She mostly
raps in a combination of Xitsonga, the
language of the Tsonga people, and Eng-
lish. Her bubblegum-bright party track
“Huku” is in Swahili, a language Madjozi
learned to speak fluently in Tanzania.
These multilingual flows unfold over a
style of music known as gqom, a shad-
owy strain of house that began bubbling
out of townships in Durban, South Afri-
ca, in the early 2010s.
To untutored ears, gqom can sound
gritty, with its apocalyptic sirens and
ribcage-rattling bass. In Europe and the
United States, Madjozi said, the style is
often “perceived as being alternative or
experimental.” But in South Africa, she
added, “Gqom is the biggest sound.
Gqom is the pop of South Africa.”
Recently, American hip-hop heavy-weights seem to have recognized
gqom’s combination of rough-hewed au-
thenticity and commercial potential.
Kendrick Lamar’s soundtrack for the
superhero movie “Black Panther” fea-
tures gqom beats, and Beyoncé’s new
“Lion King” album brings in South Afri-
can gqom musicians on the track “My
Power.”Madjozi hasn’t had her Hollywood
moment yet, but her songs are among
gqom’s most accessible examples. On
her debut album, “Limpopo Champions
League,” released in December 2018,
she put the genre’s beats into a typical
“verse, chorus, verse,” pop song struc-
ture, she said.
It may sound obvious at first, but Hel-en Herimbi, a music journalist based in
Johannesburg, said that this approach
was radical because “gqom typically
features vocalists who use minimal
lyrics or chants.” Madjozi, she added,
“ushered in an evolution of the sound, by
including entire rap verses.”
Madjozi was a poet before she was a
rapper: You can see one of her spoken-
word pieces, “Why You Talk So White?,”
on YouTube. Recorded at a poetry slam
while she was studying creative writing
and African studies at Mount Holyoke
College, “Why You Talk So White?” was
an early indication of Madjozi’s smart,
incisive takes on the nuances of race.
Madjozi said that being a poet helped
her “understand rhythm” and made her
“very technical” about her lyrical flow.
“You can like my flows without under-
standing what I’m saying,” she added.
Alex Okosi, an executive vice presi-
dent of the TV channel that hosts the
BET Awards, said that “language is be-
coming less and less relevant” in pop
music.
“Fans are choosing to enjoy the art-
istry, sound and creativity of music re-
gardless of its origin,” Mr. Okosi said.
“Sho’s ability to weave African storytell-
ing into her music delivers songs that
resonate.”Madjozi said her early songs and po-
ems were “about asserting my inde-
pendence as a young black woman in
South Africa, and being rebellious.”
“It was big for a woman to be talking
about boys, about alcohol, about party-
ing,” she said, “because Tsonga culture
tends to be a little bit conservative.”
Her focus has turned to pointing out
South Africa’s “glaring problems,” she
said, adding: “The inequality within
that place is unignorable.”
Again, her image is an important part
of that narrative. She said she wanted to
appear fun, positive and empowering,
presenting an image of what a young Af-
rican woman might be like if she “didn’t
come from a place that had been sub-
jected to colonialism and apartheid.”
Part of doing that is regularly wearing
the traditional Tsonga garb, onstage and
off, Madjozi said.
“You’ll wear your traditional attire at
weddings,” she explained. “There’s even
a day called ‘heritage day’ where people
will wear their traditional attire to work.
I just said, ‘I want to wear it every day.’
“My question was always: ‘Who are
we then the rest of the time if we’re only
ourselves on specific occasions?’”
Most black South Africans, Madjozi
said, “learn to put away your Afri-
canness.” Those who move to the city
from a rural area often feel like they
have “to take off” their ethnic identity,
she said.
“The lucky thing,” she added, was
that “I learned to never take it off.”Sho Madjozi’s mixed-up, pan-African rap
BARCELONA, SPAIN
The South African singer
honors her heritage by
updating it for the moment
BY KATE HUTCHINSON
Sho Madjozi in Barcelona, Spain, last
month. Left, at the Global Citizen Festival
last year, where she shared a bill with
Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran.EDU BAYER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
MICHELLY RALL/GETTY IMAGES, VIA GLOBAL CITIZEN FESTIVAL: MANDELA 100
She is a new kind of global star,
like the Spanish flamenco-pop
innovator Rosalía, who cuts
across continents and genres.
Toward the end of Jonathan Coe’s
“Middle England,” a character muses
on a question that has been central to
the novel but implicit up to that point,
which is “what a writer should or
shouldn’t be doing at a time like this.”
A time like this being now — the mael-
strom of Brexit/Trump/climate
change/identity debates/social media
— and the choices for a writer coming
down to looking away or diving in.
Coe dives in, which is not surprising.
His many novels, most of them lightly
humorous and deeply humane affairs,
have often grappled with the effect of
politics inside families and inside Eng-
land. But there’s usually been at least a
few years, if not decades, between
history’s unfolding and Coe’s use of it
as raw material. “Middle England”
ends in the dizzying present.
The novel opens in 2010, and we
quickly meet a daunting roster of
characters. First up is Benjamin Trot-
ter, whose mother, Sheila, has just died
of liver cancer. Benjamin, 50, is quietly
ducking away after the funeral recep-
tion alongside his dad, Colin, a former
car-factory employee who had been
married to Sheila for 55 years.
Benjamin’s sister, Lois, and her
daughter, Sophie, a 27-year-old art
history lecturer, soon enter the scene.
Lois is still traumatized by a bombing
she witnessed in Birmingham in the
1970s, which killed her boyfriend.
(Several of the central characters here
appeared in two of Coe’s previous
novels, “The Rotters’ Club” and “The
Closed Circle.” “Middle England” can
easily be read on its own, though start-
ing with “The Rotters’ Club,” a very
good book, would be worthwhile.)
Crucially there’s also Doug Ander-
ton, a left-leaning journalist and a
friend of Benjamin’s since childhood.
Doug has semiregular off-the-record
meetings at a cafe with Nigel Ives, who
works in Prime Minister David Camer-
on’s communications office.
As late as March 2016, Nigel is
telling Doug that he thinks Brexit and
the election of Donald Trump are “fan-
tastical” propositions that don’t de-
serve serious rebuttal, even as he
helps push things forward for the
Leave-or-Remain referendum. He
wonders why leaving wouldn’t be
called Brixit, but also says, “It’s not
going to happen, so we don’t need a
word for it.”
Doug, who is living in a multimillion-
dollar home in Chelsea (the money’s
not from journalism, naturally), justifi-
ably fears that he’s losing touch with
the common man. He’s certainly out of
step with his teenage daughter, Corian-
der, whose “views on racism, inequal-
ity and identity politics were utterly
uncompromising.” She makes clearthat she considers her father “at best a
deluded, out-of-touch, middle-of-the-
road social democrat, at worst a feeble
sellout whose political compromises
actually formed a far greater barrier to
social justice than anything the Tory
Party could come up with.”
Coriander’s mother, Francesca, is
glad that her daughter at least cares
about the world, but Doug asks, “Does
she, though? Sometimes I think she’s
just addicted to getting outraged on
other people’s behalf.” And that very
quality soon gets Sophie, the art his-
tory lecturer, in a lot of potential trou-
ble, linking the novel’s two central
families in a campus controversy.
That is but a sliver of the cast and
the plotting. The most pertinent infor-
mation about the characters is their
ages, and how their generational re-
flexes create political tensions among
them.
Benjamin’s dad, Colin, has voted
Conservative in every election since- “I don’t think I heard a word of
English spoken on the way here,” Colin
complains after arriving at a restau-
rant in London. His granddaughter
realizes that “the thing he was com-
plaining about was the very thing she
most liked about this city.” Another
character’s mother quotes from an
infamous anti-immigration speech, and
is suspicious of the Lithuanian woman
who cleans her house.
Politics are thorny in the novel, but
Coe still makes space for playful hu-
mor. He imagines an award-winning
writer named Lionel Hampshire,
whose latest novel, a failure with the
critics, is a feminist science fiction tale
called “Fallopia.” He describes a pro-
fessor of European history who spe-
cializes “in the role played by flax in
Britain’s trade deals with the Baltic in
the early 17th century, a subject on
which he had so far written four
books.”
Sometimes Coe is a bit more wacky
than he’s been in the past. (See: a pair
of feuding children’s party clowns who
perform under the names Baron Brain-
box and Doctor Daredevil.) But on the
whole, his touch retains its delicacy.
Creating this of-the-moment milieu
requires some believable set pieces,and Coe is good at them: In one, we
see Birmingham during the London
Riots of 2011. In another, various char-
acters in different locales watch the
opening of the 2012 Olympics on televi-
sion — the ceremony in which Queen
Elizabeth II and Daniel Craig appeared
in a sketch together.
Sohan, a friend of Sophie’s whose
parents are Sri Lankan, becomes ob-
sessed with representations of English-
ness after he sees the ceremony. He
eventually thinks that the country’s
essence may have been most “power-
fully expressed” by Tolkien when he
“created the Shire and populated its
pastoral idyll with doughty, insular
hobbits, prone to somnolence and
complacence when left to their own
devices but fierce when roused.”
“Middle England,” which hews most
closely to the perspectives of Benjamin
and Doug, two men more or less at
Coe’s stage of life, can certainly be
read with pleasure as a novel about
middle age — needing to take care of
one’s parents, befuddled by one’s chil-
dren, increasingly curating one’s own
memories and regrets. But its ambi-
tions to encapsulate the political mo-
ment are obvious, and central to any
assessment of it.
There is a minor character who
embraces a theory that the white races
of Europe are “being subjected to a
gradual genocide.” He is quickly and
roundly condemned. Several charac-
ters rail against “absurd political cor-
rectness.” There’s parsing of pronouns
and microaggressions and white privi-lege and preferential hiring policies.
Late in the novel, someone is assaulted
in public for speaking a language other
than English. There are fruitful
thoughts about borderless cosmopoli-
tanism and whether appealing to na-
tionalism for political gain is a fire that
can be controlled.
A couple of plot points are engi-
neered to warn against oversensitivity
on the left, but mostly Coe’s politics
appear to be the amiable centrist kind
that are now routinely roasted on
Twitter.
When Coe recounts the murder of
the Parliament member Jo Cox, we get
a sense of the chilling delirium that’s
been unleashed in recent years. But
elsewhere, the novel’s primary charac-
ters learn lessons and bridge gaps, and
many of them arrive at more-or-less-
happy endings. They are pieces on a
chess board designed much like the
smart-crowd-pleasing novels of Jona-
than Franzen and Ian McEwan.
But novels about the Way We Live
Now aspire to recreate the feeling of
their times, the vibe, as well as the
details. And Coe — to his credit, in
many ways — doesn’t feellike our
particular Now. If his novels are any-
thing to go by, he is wry, compassion-
ate, curious and forgiving.
“Middle England” contains great
charms, but its very construction and
tradition can also make it feel discord-
ant for the moment it hopes to capture;
at times it seems like a wrought-iron
street lamp trying to represent a bon-
fire.Traditional novel for a disjointed age
BOOK REVIEW
Middle England
By Jonathan Coe. 429 pp. Alfred
A. Knopf. $27.95.
BY JOHN WILLIAMS
Jonathan Coe.