Then on “Mortal Man,” Butterfly’s tremendous closing track, Kendrick—over a jazz-inflected blend of mid-tempo drums and muffled orchestration—ponders his legacy in relation to Mandela’s, wondering if he’ll be remembered as a hero or cast as a villain. Here, Kendrick raps: “How many leaders you said you needed then left ’em for dead? / Is it Moses, is it Huey Newton or Detroit Red?” Mandela himself had seen the euphoria of his release and presidential run dissipate by the mid-1990s. While he brought equal voting rights to South Africa (a huge political shift for the country), life didn’t change dramatically for black citizens after that. Some chastised him for being too nice to the same white people who, historically, had made life insufferable for black people there. He was charming and deeply charismatic, but also economically conservative. “Mandela, and the things that he stood for, aren’t necessarily lauded by young South Africans,” Professor Barnes recalls. “They saw the compromises that he made have not led enough people to feel like their lives have improved.”
“Mortal Man” delves into the kind of survivor’s guilt that Kendrick experienced at the time. On one end, he was beginning to realize his worth, but he couldn’t help but question the authenticity of the love being received. Perhaps he hadn’t done enough work to warrant this widespread adoration. Kendrick did everything with Compton in mind, and toward the end of the track, he concludes his album-long poem by making direct ties between L.A. gang culture and systemic racism in South Africa: “While my loved ones [were] fighting a continuous war back in the city, I was entering a new one, a war that was based on Apartheid and discrimination. Made me want to go back to the city and tell the homies what I learned.” For him, the fight between red and blue was no longer important; black was the most essential color.
He made that message explicitly clear on “The Blacker the Berry,” an aggressive album cut near Butterfly’s end. The South African dissension he referenced, between Zulu and Xhosa tribes, reminded him of “Compton Crip gangs that live next door / Beefin’ with Pirus, only death settle the score.” While these young men killed each other over property they didn’t own, there was a common enemy on the horizon that was perceived to be an even bigger threat than it had been in years past. South African citizens had been known to take bold steps toward their collective freedom; he thought it was time for black men in Compton to do the same.
Yugen Blakrok, a South African rapper who—in 2018—was chosen by Kendrick to appear on the soundtrack of the blockbuster film Black Panther, remembers the palpable buzz surrounding Kendrick’s visit to the Motherland in 2014. Where other U.S. musicians typically visited Africa and took from its culture, using its sound and fashion to line their own pockets, Kendrick actually gave back to the community—praising it in interviews and on his music. He didn’t whisper the wonders of South Africa; he shouted them loudly. “You started noticing things,” Blakrok recalls, “like when he started growing his hair out.… Black people, we’re not the minority out here, we’re the majority. It’s just different how we wear our hair and our clothes. It’s different from what I think is going down in the States.” South Africa gave Kendrick the freedom to be himself, to be untethered to the nuanced cultural restrictions of America. According to Mark “Sounwave” Spears, a longtime Kendrick collaborator, something clicked for Kendrick when he went to South Africa, and once he returned home, the rapper scrapped two to three albums’ worth of material to create the expansive sonic opus that is Butterfly.
In South Africa, Kendrick saw black faces—joyous and resilient black faces—all fighting to navigate their own circumstances. The country was just twenty years removed from the end of apartheid and still segregated, with much of its black African population living in urban townships outside Johannesburg, Kempton Park, Durban, and Germiston. Still, Blakrok says, there’s comfort in knowing that black people outnumber other races. “There’s a different type of power, a physical power,” she asserts. “They know they can’t fuck with us physically.” Blakrok likens Kendrick’s visit to that of a humanitarian, and his presence in the region lit a fire beneath some of the rappers there. He was, and still is, a lyricist first and foremost, and for an MC with that level of technical prowess to thrive meant like-minded artists could succeed the same way. “It just showed there was a more open acceptance of that kind of hip-hop, whereas before, it was always pushed to the underground,” Blakrok says. “It established a trend of listening to rap that’s a little more left of center.” “He was the amazing artist with a Dr. Dre budget,” says the rapper Reason, who opened for Kendrick at Johannesburg Stadium in February 2014. “You could feel it. This guy’s not just big, he’s not just famous, he can actually rap. People were moved when he came through.”
Reason recalls the business savvy that Kendrick brought with him. He remembers the so-called “ego walk”—or the long runway that extends from the stage into the crowd—that allowed musicians to perform closer to the audience. It was a way to better connect with the people, thus offering a more intimate show. “Nobody could use the ego walk except for Kendrick,” Reason asserts, “and if anybody used it, they were not going to perform.” Some resented Kendrick for that. “Others were arguing, ‘Why is this guy gonna build a big ego walk, and he’s the only one who’s allowed to use it? You know this is our country, why can’t we use it as well?’ ” Turns out the answer was simple: “It was always spun around to say, ‘You didn’t ask for it. He did.’ ”
The disagreement encouraged local musicians to take those minor details seriously, and
