African Ice: Avant Car Guard’s Bling-bling

Bling-bling presents a certain paradox in its journeys between Africa and the American hip-hop community where it becomes a marker of success. Bling communicates that an artist has attained a degree of wealth and power, signifying that they have “made it” in America so to speak. However, this image ignores the politics of the production of bling in Africa. American rapper Ludacris’ video “Pimpin’ all Over the World,” presents one such paradox. Shot in the resorts of Durban, South Africa, Ludacris is wearing a t-shirt bearing the image of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey while taking women through the city’s tourist markets. Waving large piles of money to the camera and adorned with jewelry, Ludacris and collaborator Bobby Valentino present themselves as part of a successful American black culture returning to its roots in South Africa. The image of Garvey (who ­promoted African repatriation) contrasts with Ludacris and Valentino’s money representing the American self-made success story. Largely ­ignoring the dichotomies in class that the resort town presents, the video is blind to the underdeveloped “townships” located on the pe-ripheries of South Africa’s major cities and the class disparities involved in the manufacturing of the jewelry that is at the core of the South African economy and draped around the rappers’ necks. 

South Africa’s mining industry holds 80% of the world’s platinum, 41% of its gold and South African multinational corporation De Beers (founded by colonial industrialist Cecil Rhodes) produces more diamonds than any other corporation in the world.¹ 1 - Stats as of 2007, see: www.southafrica.info/business/economy/sectors/mining.htm. Subsequently, the bling purchased by the rapper goes back into large capitalist conglomerates held by a small elite in Africa and Western business concerns. Mining’s impact on the economy and ecology of South Africa is a theme addressed by a number of artists. South African animator William Kentridge highlights the fact that gold transformed and defined the physical terrain of his native Johannesburg. Alongside of an interrogation of race and violence that occurred in the landscape outside of Johannesburg in Mine (1991) and Felix in Exile (1994), he highlights the fact that the hills that surround the city were formed by mining and were later reexcavated to extract more gold from them. Subsequently, mining creates the presence and disappearance of the physical landscape in Johannesburg. Kentridge renders the landscape with open pits, blasted for mining, and pylons rising up to demarcate property lines; it is a tarnished and sooty terrain scarred by the mining industry’s interventions. In South Africa the narrative of social space is bound by this mining of precious materials for jewelry.² 2 - Okwui Enwezor, “Truth and Responsibility: A Conversation with William Kentridge,” Parkett, 54 (1998): 165-66.