Kid Tini explores backdoor abortions in Cinga

The Department of Social Development, during the Abortion and Reproductive Justice Conference in 2018, estimated that about 260 000 illegal abortions take place each year, not because abortion is illegal in South Africa but as a result of a grossly neglected system that can't take care of women's reproductive health.

Rapper Kid Tini's ‘Cinga' takes viewers on a short yet graphic journey into teenage pregnancy, backdoor abortions, pimps, prostitutes, drugs, alcohol abuse, bullying and suicide. The video tells the story of schoolgirl who falls pregnant. Her boyfriend, played by Kid Tini, is unhappy, confused and unwilling to take on the responsibility of fatherhood. This renders his girlfriend, who represents the countless schoolchildren who fall pregnant in South Africa, alone in a situation that requires a sober approach and support from family and mature friends. Instead, she opts to solve her stigmatised conundrum by nipping a few hundred rand from her parents and going into the belly of a depraved CBD to get a backdoor abortion. While walking the decaying backstreets with her equally unexperienced girlfriend, the girls are confronted by almost parodic representations of South Africa's socio-economic ills: scantily dressed prostitutes, young drunks, addicts. And then there's quite literally a backdoor that leads to an illegal abortion clinic.

If you take a Zizekian approach to film analysis, you might think that the downtrodden characters of the streets represent the demons whirling frantically in the pregnant girl's mind – they are a prognostic illustration of what's to come if she takes another step towards the centre of this, her, hell. But this might be a bit of a stretch if you consider the lack of subtlety employed in the video, which verges on the gory for unknown reasons. In film, it is not what you show that has the most powerful effect, but rather allusions to horrific themes that the viewer's imagination can amplify without the need for pornographic bareness.

The abortion, of course, goes wrong. As the 'doctor' performs the procedure in an unsterilised den, the friend, a helpless bystander representing the viewer's inability to break through the screen to pull innocence out of the clutches of imminent disaster, notifies Kid Tini's character to come to the rescue. He's too late and proceeds to hang himself with a USB cord right then and there.

This unnecessary element takes the whole story too far. If the idea was to cram all social challenges into a single music video, and to have all the boxes ticked with the addition of a suicide to an already tragic narrative, then this one quite simply misses the mark.

Writers need to learn when to hold back before the whole thing crumbles into exaggerated melodrama. The device of suicide, akin to the ending of Tommy Wiseau's serendipitous masterpiece The Room, widely regarded as the worst film of all time, is artistic narcissism at its best. (‘Cinga' actually starts with two hanging feet, which effectively gives away the ending. Here most of the final suicide sequence could have ended with a simple gaze towards the USB cable, which is enough for the audience to put two and two together.)

That Kid Tini has to kill himself to take centre stage as a reminder that he is after all the main brand of the video trivialises almost everything else leading up to the act, most notably the botched abortion and death of an innocent. Even references to Romeo and Juliet don't really work here. If Kid Tini wants to tackle the issues hobbling young people in South Africa, he should try a longer format to fit all he wants to say, such as a short film, or work with one issue at a time. Still, kudos to the rapper for going where most young mainstream artists won't dare tread.

Artist: Kid Tini 
Video: Cinga 
Label, Year: Ambitiouz Entertainment, 2019