The Jerusalema Challenge: The Challenge of Joy
I’m not a particular fan of social media challenges, whether as a participant or a spectator, and I think I last participated in a line dance at a wedding five or six years ago. So when I first came across the Jerusalema Challenge on Instagram in mid-August, a line-dance based social media challenge, I almost scrolled right by it: I only clicked on the video because it initially looked like one of the African fashion accounts I am more usually interested in. The challenge is named for a South African pop song by an artist named Master KG; it was first released in November 2019, and went viral a few months later in early 2020. By June 2020 a remix had been released featuring Burna Boy, an international Afrobeats superstar who most recently collaborated with Beyoncé on her video album Black is King, and folks all over the world began filming themselves doing the #JerusalemaChallenge, a line dance whose basic choreography spans only eight bars, and can thus be filmed in segments of nearly any length. A 15-second Instagram Reels video will last about one repetition, a one-minute Tik Tok video a little over four. On YouTube, most of the videos span the song’s length — a shade over four minutes — but I’ve seen #JerusalemaChallenge compilation videos as long as 12 minutes.
Most striking about these videos, especially against the backdrop of the ongoing global pandemic…
