Saudi’s Make You Proud is a lesson about choices

Soweto-born rapper Saudi takes the viewer on an intimate journey through his life, which harks back to the words of American poet Robert Frost in the first stanza of his poem The Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth …

The opening sequence of ‘Make You Proud’ shows the celebrated township of Soweto from a bridge overlooking the artful Orlando Towers. The viewer is given a sense of the context from which Saudi is telling his story. The video cuts to a scene where a group of men are conversing while they wait for Saudi to roll a joint. He looks dejected as his ‘friends’ speak at him, aggressively, presumably giving him advice.

An indoor scene follows where the present-day Saudi is in a room watching his former self being castigated by his mother. He raps: “I’ve done some things that made me ashamed of myself / I’ve seen things that desensitised me to death / Where I’m from what doesn’t kill you can traumatise you to death.”

After his mother’s scathing lecture, he runs outside where he is confronted with the sight of the men from the joint scene. He stands there debating whether to join them or not. He is presented with a choice. The viewer is left in suspense about what happens next.

The next scene presents wisdom of the elders – a deviation from his bad behaviour. Saudi is sitting in the kitchen with his grandmother, who is a nurse. She encourages him to pursue his dream after dropping out of school. However – in an unwise move – he says his grandmother doesn’t mind him drinking “lean”, a concoction of cough medicine with soda that is popular among hip hop heads who drink it to be ‘lit’. Lean is basically a distant relative of nyaope (a mix of marijuana, heroin and ARVs). Why would your own grandmother, a medical nurse, let you get away with drinking cough mixture? What does it tell you about South African nurses?

The video jumps back to a young Saudi standing on the pavement with his eyes on his friends and hands on his knees. The camera shows his feet as he steps onto the street to join his buddies, taking the viewer back to where the video began. This is pivotal because it shows the exact moment he chooses a life of substance abuse.

Saudi’s experiences portray the everyday reality faced by young men who don’t have the means or the will to escape the poor township. The hand they’re dealt often leads to bad, or worse, choices.

But the path Saudi chose led him to fame. And to reflect on the choice, he made this song. His story can be summed up by the last stanza of The Road Not Taken:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Artist: Saudi
Song: Make You Proud
Label, Year: Ambitiouz Entertainment, 2018