To familiarize yourself with what seems to be turning into  the Encyclopedia Britannica of Die Antwoord’s self-inflicted path to self-derestriction, get up to speed over here.

In an in article in Dazed at the end of 2016, Ninja was quoted as saying this about their planned feature length film:

“We actually started writing it before Die Antwoord, so, it’s been in the background for all of our ideas, which have all come from this film. It’s a South African gangster film that has African ninjas in it. Everything in the film is fictitious, like a regular movie, but it’s hard and raw, and everything has some parallel to our lives, so it’s got a surreal connection to everything.”

Well, they finally got around to filming that movie back in 2018 between August and November of  2018 and Nov 2018. Code named Jou Ma Se Poes (Your Mother’s Cunt) during production, the yet to be released feature film, 2*Die Blom van Sokwana*7, was directed by Ninja from Die Antwoord. Unsurprisingly the film stars real life gangsters from the Cape Flats in the Western Cape Province – one of the most violent and dangerous places in South Africa. The 2 and the 7 from the movie’s title is of course ‘n shout-out to the notorious 27 numbers prison gang and indicative of Ninja’s obsession to be part of the gang culture and the appropriation thereof. Back in 2013 Die Antwoord released the music video for Cookie Thumper, with the following information:

YO-LANDI VI$$ER is a cute young ORPHAN GIRL who has a big crush on a bad-ass GANGSTER BOY called ANIES.
ANIES has just got out of PRISON. INSIDE prison ANIES runs with the notorious NUMBERS gangs.

OUTSIDE prison ANIES runs with the UGLY AMERICAN street gang.
YO-LANDI thinks about ANIES day and night, hoping he will come visit her soon.
Sure it’s fun to fuck with the DARK SIDE.
But careful what you wish for…YOU MIGHT JUST GET IT!

The punchline of the Cookie Thumper music video is that Yo-Landi gets fucked in the ass by gangster Anies (real name André Gideon) who she was dating in real life around 2013.  Anies is a real gangster. He really did belong to gangs both inside (26 and 27 gangs) and outside of prison (The Real Americans). Y0-Landi Visser (Anri Du Toit) plays the role of “a cute” under age orphan in the music video. In real life, Yo-Landi was adopted. As explained by Ninja himself, you will find that whatever Die Antwoord produces, it almost always has some parallel to their real lives. In the credits of Cookie Thumper, Yo-Landi’s friend gets a shout out: “And to Kimpossible for you know what girl Xxx”. The “you know what” that Yo-Landi refers to, is Kim (real name, Kim Roberts) organizing access and introductions to gang members.

We’ll get back to Anies, the gangs and the feature film in a bit…Let’s first look at a section of the lyrics for the song, Raging Zef Boner (2014) which was released a few months after around the same time when Ninja lured Zheani over to South Africa from Australia and abused her:

Yo booty booty booty
Woah! big fat boobies!
Send a pic of my dick back.
Do chicks really dig that?
Duh!

This one chick, pretty little blonde chick
Small bitch, mad bunny, a honey not a dumb chick
A fun chick, ‘fuck phone sex baby I’m sick!
Stop fuckin around get your arse over here come quick!’
‘I loved you ninjie but you’re really far away’
Next day little baby getting on a plane
I got mad motherfuckin expensive taste
I pulled a bitch all expenses paid

It is part of a repetitive pattern of abuse where art imitates real life for Die Antwoord, dating back to more than a decade (almost their entire DA career). You can read up over here on how Die Antwoord also groomed their adopted son, Tokkie for violence and subsequently used a horrible real life event in which Tokkie stabbed his older biological brother, Adri, to create their violent music video for Please Don’t Take Me 4 a Poes. When the truth surfaced around the actual stabbing on which the video was based, Die Antwoord removed the music video from their YouTube channel.
Another music video glorifying prison gangs and gangsterism followed in the form of Baita Jou Sabela around the same time. Growing up privileged in an upmarket Northern, predominantly white English suburb in Johannesburg, Ninja can barely speak Afrikaans, let alone  ‘sabela’, which was originally developed inside national prisons as a means of communication within gangs, primarily The Numbers Gang. Ninja is so obsessed with The Numbers gangs, that even when he fired one of their babysitters in a string of abusive, gaslighting messages over the phone (while they were on tour overseas), the main concern was the safety of Pollsmoor Prison documents, a study witch details how these gangs function, which they had to return. All this, not only part of Ninja’s research for his gangster movie, but also to appropriate South African prison gang culture. To get a better understanding of The Numbers Gangs in South African prisons, you should perhaps watch Raphael Rowe’s episode on The Number Gangs Prison on Netflix or Ross Kemp’s documentary  on Pollsmoor Prison and The Numbers Gang:

By the way, the babysitters had to look after Die Antwoord’s adopted children (Tokkie and Meisie) while Die Antwoord were touring overseas, most probably violating the majority of conditions set out in the adoption papers, simply by not being there, let alone nurture them. Quite the opposite.
So let’s get back to the gangster movie which was shot during the last quarter of 2018. Remember, the movie was wrapped more or less four months before Zheani came forward in March 2019 talking about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Ninja. A few more people came forward after this, more ugly things floated to the surface. Even more people people wanted to come forward but feared at the very least, ridicule. Before this, Die Antwood was going on about their usual business – fucking people over for their own benefit, appropriating whatever they can for their art and stomping over everything and everyone (including the children they adopted), leaving destruction in their wake. They had this massive secret big budget movie and they had tours planned, presumably to cover their financial responsible share of this movie they had just made. It is rumored that the South African Government partly funded this movie, which is not unusual at all, but more thoughts on that later. Roughly four months after the movie wrapped, karma knocked on the door in the forms of Zheani and eventually Covid-19 and it fucked them hard – not necessarily putting an end to Ninja and Yo-Landi’s abusive rampage, but just forcing them to hide in the shadows from  everyone. The reasonable man started to become aware of who Ninja & Yo-Landi truly were…
As to the content and what you could expect in the movie, consider the following notes that have surfaced from existing scripts over the last decade (Zef TV, Zef, South African Ninja) etc. There are some parallels to their real lives as well:

• Although he changed his name to Ninja, his parents still refer to him as Jannie which REALLY pisses him off. (In real life, Waddy insists that his family address him as Ninja)
• Ninja and Yo-Landi’s father, Gerrit Visser, is a priest.
• Yo-landi’s mother, Ester Visser, is a psycho house wife who takes copious amounts of prescription pills all the time.
• Yo-landi has a little fling with a day labour called G-Boy who is painting the Visser’s house
• Ninja and Yo-landi are actually brother and sister. One thing led to another and Ninja ended up having sex with Yo-landi. (Incest seems to be a super important theme to Ninja)
• She fell pregnant
• The Visser family kept this incident totally secret, to avoid any scandal with the church and she got an abortion.
• Ninja’s penis also has to feature in each version of the script and specific mention is made to the tattoo on his penis (a photo which he loves to send around.  As an example: numerous people working on the filmset of the movie Chappie, confirmed this.)
• There is a kidnapping of Yo-Landi for a R1m ransom.
• Stockholm syndrome. Obviously Yo-Landi has to have sex with and fall in love with her captor in every version of Ninja’s scripts. It seems like a very important theme to him.
• Ninja blows up an ATM to get ransom money
• Gangsters called Ugly Boyz feature in the movie (based on the real life gang and starring real life gang members from The Ugly Americans)
• Gangsters tripped out on drugs seems to be another theme.
• Ninja gets to be the big hero in every ending, no matter the methods or consequences.

But it is just a movie, right?

Lets get back to Anies and his part in the movie. Apart from playing the lead role, Ninja is  also the writer and director of his feature film, 2*Die Blom van Sokwana*7. Ninja cast Anies as the main antagonist, and evil gang leader, Vesatjie, opposite himself. It must have been shortly after wrapping up filming when Anies appeared in a 2019 episode of the documentary series, ‘No-Go Zones: The World’s Toughest Places. The episode titled Ghost Town, documents gangster life in Rocklands, Mitchells Plain in Cape Town and  follows members of The Ugly Americans gang around. Anies is part of The Ugly Americans Gang and flippantly talks about how he is a self-confessed murderer. In the documentary he is referred to as a “killing machine” and basically a walking billboard for Die Antwoord and 100% associates with while representing gangs at the same time: wearing his “I survived Die Blom van Sokwana” t-shirt, sporting some bullet holes, blood, Die Antwoord’s logo and the 27 gang’s insignia on the sleeve as part of the design. This t-shirt was most probably a gift from Ninja himself in an attempt to win favor with The Numbers Gang and stay in their good books:
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Ben Jay Crossman (Die Antwoord’s former secret artist, who you should  be familiar with by now), spoke to a person with some insight and who was present during the filming of the movie, back in 2018. According to this person, a cast member (presumably one of the many gangsters that were cast in the movie) killed a fellow ‘actor’ and the first person that was called following this incident, was Ninja who wanted nothing to do with it, and blocked them. He also alleges that Ninja hyped up the cast to be more viscous and more “murderous”. He goes on to say that the gangsters hired for the film were on drugs and causing shit all the time. Apparently Ninja was hyping up another rapper/cast member (who wasn’t a gang member at all) so much that he ended up becoming a gangster because of this movie. The cast for the movie was made up of real life gangsters, The Americans, which is featured in the documentary above and of which “killing machine”, Annies,  was part.  Apart from a little bit of money, they were allegedly paid in drugs for starring in the movie – tik and buttons (meth) – as much as they needed. He goes on to say that there is a scene in the movie where an ATM gets blown up (which seems to line up with at least one of the scripts or storylines out there) and that this fake money ended up in circulation in the streets and was found  in a shop in Mitchel’s Plain.
He continues to say that after the movie wrapped up filming, the gangsters were drunk on power  and the hyped up attitude from the movie set, spilled over to life in the streets.  Some of the cast members started to fight among each other because of payment discrepancies,  resulting in “two or three deaths”. In a separate incident, possibly not related to the movie (but not totally excluding the possibility), Anies also inevitably got killed a few months later. Die Antwoord didn’t even acknowledge his death, let alone attend to his funeral. What does that tell you?

The voice notes sent to Ben Jay Crossman was used to put together the below YouTube video and shown to the person in question prior to making it public. The person subsequently requested to remove their voice from the video entirely, understandably due to safety concerns and dear of intimidation and the video was left with subtitles in stead. We however, spoke to more than one person (who also wanted to remain anonymous) who confirmed that Ninja ruled with an iron fist over each department of the production. Some of them were wondering why the movie hasn’t been released yet and suspected that it might have something to do with “the gangsters causing shit” and “things happening”.  More than 130 people worked on this production.

In 2020 Ninja and Yo-Landi made a cringe video  and published it to Die Antwoord’s Facebook page. They flew up to Johannesburg from Cape Town to their Parkhurst home to give their adopted son, Tokkie R5000 ($325) to basically get the fuck out of their lives forever after they’ve used him for their art and discarded him. Truth is, they had to fly to Johannesburg to wrap up the sale of their Parkhurst home because they needed money to settle huge outstanding bills connected to the property, so it was just pure convenience to quickly film a “hey look, fans, Die Antwoord cares!”-video while they were there. According to Tokkie, Ninja threatened him off-camera after this farce of a “reunion” was filmed. Ben Jay Crossman recently did an extensive interview with Tokkie, so you can find out what went down during the years while Tokkie and his sister, Meisie, were Die Antwoord’s adopted children. He indicated that the video will soon be uploaded to his YouTube channel.

In 2020, Die Antwoord unsuccessfully attempted  to sue their record label, BMG for $1m in ‘damages’ after they were dropped due to a straight forward breach of contract. So not only did they not get a $1m windfall which they were bargaining on, but they probably had to pay their fancy lawyers a bunch of money too, for fighting a case they were never going to win in the first place. Die Antwoord is also mentioned in the leaked Panama papers from 2015, where offshore accounts linked with the infamous Mosseca Fonseca firm were set up, most likely for tax evasion. It seems that the duo was running out of cash from 2018 onwards, having spent stupid amounts of money on a new album, various music videos and their feature film. As mentioned earlier, the South African Government (the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition) does help with funding of around 35% of film and TV productions from time to time, depending on certain contractual conditions and obligations, for  example, the applicant must demonstrate that they adhere to an industry specific Code of Professional Standards that includes sexual harassment and health and safety protocols. Perhaps the DTIC did not assist with funding the production of 2*Die Blom van Sokwana*7. It would kind of be weird for the South African government  to  spend money to a project that glorifies gangsterism for a laugh, but hey, they’ve done far more stranger things in the past. Perhaps Die Antwoord managed to get  investors from da overseas who are eagerly waiting to see what their money bought them…

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