They don't know who Sir Mix-A-Lot is.

An inescapable fact of life in South Africa is that they used to do Apartheid here.  It's inescapable in that pretty much everywhere you look, there are traces, vestiges, that it left.  Some of these are straightforward, and are to be expected.  Others are much more subtle...

Case in point: they don't know who Sir Mix-A-Lot is.

I'm going to repeat that, for emphasis:
They don't know who Sir Mix-A-Lot is.

Let me break this down.  Sir Mix-A-Lot was a one-hit...not so much wonder, as...well, see for yourself:

Baby Got Back is, while perhaps not the best song of all time, certainly deserving of mention – if for no other reason than the hilarity of it.  It also happens to be one of my all-time favorite karaoke songs.  Because it's awesome.  But I digress.

Mix-A-Lot's sole hit was a song about how much he likes butts.  Which, one must concede, is certainly a rather high degree, by any standard.  But included in this are (if recollection serves) mentions of how he likes white girls butts too, and about how even white guys have to admit that they like black girls' butts too and must therefore exclaim accordingly.

So what on earth does this have to do with Apartheid?  One of the things that came along with it, that gets a lot less attention than the grotesque human rights abuses, is the extensive censorship that the Nationalist government enforced.  I can only imagine that an explicit song explicitly supporting inter-racial booty-motivated relationships would have been tossed straight into the 'banned' bin, without even being listened to first.  So, while I think of America as this weird thing, quasi-imperialistically pumping out cultural stuff and blasting it to the far corners of the earth, things like this would never have made it here to SA.

Okay, now here's where my youthful ignorance of classic hip-hop has led me astray, and where the argument falls apart accordingly.  Baby Got Back was in fact released in 1992, it turns out – two years after the last apartheid laws were officially repealed [EDIT: said one wikipedia page.  Not sure if I've got my apartheid dates right...].  So maybe the fact that no one here seems to know this particular aged hip-hopper has nothing whatsoever to do with censorship.  Maybe I just have a non-representative sample (okay, that's certain, not a maybe).  Still, if the song were from the 80s, that's definitely how it would've played out.  So while I think of apartheid as being this terrible institutionalized racism thing, it's really not just that.  It didn't just disenfranchise millions of people and shape race relations for the terrible for half a century.  It shaped everything.  It had a huge impact even on music, and TV (and/or the lack thereof), books, other list-worthy items – everything.
The vastness of that is something I'm still struggling to wrap my head around.

And that's the longest way I can envision of telling you that Lunga's karaoke kit is, sadly, devoid of this classic.  And why I don't think I could even ask him to add it.