“cr azy white men” 235about the significance of their skin color and the associations that come
along with it. Paradoxically, they need to highlight and downplay their
difference at the same time.
Mzungu Kichaa and W hite Nigerian reference their skin color in their
stage names. At first, Mzungu Kichaa had a tough time accepting his nom
de scène. In an interview with Imani Sanga (2011: 199), he reports how Juma
Nature, one of Tanzania’s Bongo flava “superstars,” began calling him
“crazy white man” in a playful manner: “At the beginning, I didn’t want the
name because in my life I did not want to be called Mzungu. I didn’t want
to be segregated. You know how it is when they call you Mzungu while
you don’t feel to be one!” Nevertheless, Mzungu Kichaa chose to use the
nickname, initially given him in 1999, as his proper stage name when he
released his first solo album in 2009. In this sense, his situation is compa-
rable to W hite Nigerian’s. Even though the racial reference in their stage
names is articulated somewhat tongue in cheek, their noms de scène still
allow the musicians to capitalize on their epidermal difference and thus
to establish their appearance as a constitutive part of their public image.
It is perhaps significant that the German-Namibian EES does not ex-
hibit his difference like the two others do. Neither does his stage name
contain any reference whatsoever to the color of his skin, nor does he
play with the discrepancy of being white and acting black. Of the three
artists, he makes the least use of an African language in his songs. Instead,
quite a number of his songs are written in German or its Namibian vari-
ant, formerly called Südwesterdeutsch and now popularized by Eric Sell
(n.d.) as “Nam-släng.” It seems that EES is about the normalization of
German-Namibians as a kind of Namibian ethnicity, which can be read
as a reverberation of a larger discourse among white settler communities
in southern Africa, where being white and African is not necessarily seen
as a contradiction.
The three musicians perform sameness—the flipside of difference—in
several registers. The most obvious is language. By singing in local lan-
guages, such as Swahili and Hausa, or in local variants of English, like
Nigerian pidgin, difference is undone. EES, as already mentioned, is more
limited in his use of African languages. Quite frequently, though, he uses
phrases or words from African languages as hook lines. Examples are his
songs “Mahambeko,” which is “blessing” in the Oshiwambo language,