Arthur's Kwaito Awards

There were media reports recently that Arthur Mofokate will be bringing us ‘Kwaito Awards’. It all seemed sudden and all of us in the Kwaito fraternity, well maybe not all of us, were excited for about a millisecond. Then we realized that there was no nomination process, nor did we have any nominees to speak of, no categories, no date and no venue. I think the idea that anyone in the creative arts should be recognized by their peers for the good work they have done, is a great idea. Kwaito could use a bit of recognition right now; in fact Kwaito could use anything right now.


I do not believe however that Kwaito does not have enough recognized names in it the moment to have a full length awards ceremony; maybe that is why Arthur suggested that the awards could also include House and Hip Hop. I think mixing genres is a crap idea, why bother calling them the Kwaito awards then? Kwaito needs to be built from the ground up, like Hip Hop did, so that should we decide to honor people in the genre; then we have enough recognized producers, artists, albums, DJ’s, Collaborations etc. There is a hand full of well known Kwaito artists at the moment such as Professor, L’vovo and Big Nuz. To make matters worse these artists have been questioned as to whether they are truly Kwaito artists or guys who just lace catchy lyrics on top of House beats.

I hope that we in fact do have the Kwaito awards, but they should be properly planned and the process should be transparent, as transparent as anything can be in this country. In fact I hope anyone, especially those that benefited the most from Kwaito such as Arthur, put their hand up and do something to help the genre. Big up to Arthur for planting the seed, all that’s left now is the follow through.