Culture Craze
Watch: Tyla’s ‘heeey ha ah!’ brings SA flavour to crowd control
Tyla just proved that megastardom hasn’t touched her Joburg-meets-Durban roots. In a clip doing the rounds from her A*Pop livestream, the singer paused mid-performance.
Spotting trouble brewing in the crowd, she let out a ‘Heeeeey ha. ah!’ so unmistakably South African that Mzansi collectively lost it.
Ever the professional, she followed it up with, ‘I love you guys, but ‘ya’ll’ have to go, please,’ proving the accent might have slipped out, but the manners never do.
The comments section turned into a linguistics lesson. Marlize Ford wrote, ‘the coloured in me hearing ‘heyyyyy ha.a.’ Nolan Jonathan added some context, noting accents vary widely across coloured communities in South Africa and pegging Tyla’s outburst as distinctly Durban/Pietermaritzburg.
Chenade Cloete summed up the mood best: ‘can take the girl out of south africa but can’t take the south africa out of the girl’. Others just enjoyed the theatre. Random Videos joked ‘Auntie Tyla,’ while Lu reckoned the ‘heyi’ was missing its natural follow-up, ‘wena.’
Take a look:
@cool_cutz0 Tyla had to bring back her original accent after some people tried to start trouble during her “A*Pop” album realest special livestream 😭👀 #tyla #funny #clips #viral #fyp ♬ original sound – cool_cutz0
Beyond the laughs, it’s a familiar scene to anyone who’s worked a crowd. Crowd control experts stress that resolving conflicts quickly and calmly preserves the atmosphere of an event rather than disrupting it and Tyla’s instinctive, no-nonsense intervention did exactly that.
Whatever the ‘trouble’ was, it stood no chance against an accent that clearly still runs the show.
