Hadeda

The Kiffness, the project of Cape Town musician David Scott, built a following online by taking everyday South African absurdities and spinning them into songs. 'Hadeda', released in December 2018, is one of the purest examples: a track whose entire subject is the hadeda ibis, a large grey-brown bird famous across southern Africa for a shriek so loud and so early that it functions as an unwanted communal alarm clock. The joke of the song is that it treats this nuisance bird like a rap villain who 'don't give a' anything.

The opening lines set up the gag with mock confusion: is it a goose, is it a duck. The answer arrives with the bird's actual call stitched into the hook, which does the comedic work a lyric could not. From the first bar, the song commits to a bit, and the bit is that the hadeda is unbothered, unapologetic, and loud by nature. The phrase 'flying through the air, without any care' is deliberately childlike, almost nursery-rhyme simple, which plays against the swagger of the chorus.

That chorus, 'going hard, going hard, hard like a hadeda', borrows the vocabulary of hype music, the kind of chant you would expect over trap drums about a rapper's work ethic or a nightclub's energy. Transplanting it onto a bird is the whole joke, but it also works as an actual chant. The repetition is not lazy writing; it is the song leaning into its function as a singalong. By the end, the hook is stacked four times in a row, which is how a novelty track earns its replay value.

The second verse is where the song's local specificity sharpens. 'It's 5 in the morning everybody's asleep' is not a hypothetical. Anyone who has lived in a South African suburb with jacaranda trees and open lawns knows the exact scenario being described: pre-dawn silence broken by a bird that sounds, to the uninitiated, like something being murdered on the roof. The line about being 'all out of luck' if you wanted to sleep in reads less like comic exaggeration and more like reportage. The hadeda, in the song's framing, is not malicious. It simply does what it does, which is also what makes it funny.

A very South African kind of joke

The Kiffness has made a career of this register, songs that are legible as humour to anyone but carry an extra layer for South African listeners who recognise the reference. 'Hadeda' predates the viral cat-duet videos (Alugalug Cat and others) that would later make the project internationally famous, but it uses the same formula: take a sound everyone already knows, build a hook around it, and let the audio do most of the comedy. The hadeda's call is effectively the song's lead vocal; everything the human singer does is scaffolding.

It is worth noting what the song is not doing. There is no commentary on urban wildlife, no metaphor about resilience or persistence, no deeper reading waiting to be unlocked. The track is sincere in its silliness. If there is a thematic point at all, it is affection: the hadeda is annoying, yes, but it is also ours, and the song is a kind of grudging local pride dressed as mockery.

Why it stuck

Novelty songs usually have a short half-life, but 'Hadeda' has quietly held on in South Africa because the referent has not gone anywhere. As long as the birds keep shrieking at dawn, the joke keeps landing. It also travels well as a short clip, which suits the way The Kiffness built its audience. The song is less a composition to sit with than a shared gag you send to a friend who has just been woken up at five in the morning by something that sounds like it is dying on their roof.