We all love being privy to a back story.

It's a Saturday night and we're all chilling together in Senzo's lounge. Smoking, drinking, and talking. They say I'm being anti-social because I'm on my laptop instead of hanging with them. They know what I'm doing, and that I'm supposed to be doing it to help the band, but they still try to pry me away and give me a double southern comfort and lime on the rocks. How could I say no to that?!

I'd like to tell you more about Kwaito's background. I didn't know much about it myself until I actually started engaging with it for Light Hour. Kwaito led a post-apartheid township subculture into the mainstream. Funny enough, Afrikaans, being "the language of the oppressor", was often drawn into Isicamtho vocab, reshaped and used in a related or new context. Isicamtho was and still is, the language spoken by the people of Soweto at the time. When House music started getting popular, people from the ghetto called it Kwaito after the Akrikaans word "Kwaai," to be angry. In this context they saw it as tracks that were hot, that "they were kicking." The most popular and well-known Kwaito artist Arthur Mafokate describes the relationship between Kwaito and gangsterism as music revolving around ghetto life.

In a time when South Africa was transforming, Kwaito took shape in townships in Soweto at the same time when Nelson Mandela took office as the first democratically elected president of South Africa.

The subsequent removal of political and economic sanctions greatly transformed the South African music industry forever.