Yolandi - Film & Theater Personalities, Timeline and Childhood

While Yo-Landi Visser was interested in music as a child, she hardly understood rap, and never even thought of a career in music. After she was sent to the city of Pretoria to attend school, she met and befriended a guy named Markus, who was a musician. He was very good at making electronic music on fruity loops. He would often record her voice to mix the sound into his tracks. After listening to those tracks, she became interested in creating music. However, she still had very little knowledge of how to move forward with a career in music. She met Watkin Tudor Jones, a.k.a. Ninja, after she moved to Cape Town, when her studies were over. She shared with him the songs she had made with Markus, following which he became interested in using her voice and invited her to join his rap group. From there, the two went on to record a number songs and released many albums together.

Yo-Landi Visser used to hate to be told what she should do, even by her parents, and never adhered to the accepted social norms. Her rebellious nature later reflected into her music, and made her an unlikely pop-culture icon. After she met Ninja, he not only encouraged her, but also trained her to rap. According to him, she had the attitude to bring in a change into the rap industry. Indeed, she broke almost all the accepted conventions in the industry in her way to success. Along with Ninja, she popularized the genre Zef rap-rave, an Afrikaans style hip-hop music drawing strongly from the UK rave and grime culture. In 2008, they formed the group 'Die Antwoord', along with producer DJ Hi-Tek (Justin de Nobrega). In 2009, in an attempt to reflect her inner feelings on to her outer image, she asked Ninja to cut off the sides of her hair and then bleached her hair and eyebrows white. She did this to establish herself proudly as an outsider. The next year, she overturned the Lolita archetype with her cyberpunk schoolgirl look in “Enter the Ninja” music video, which went viral and brought the group to the forefront.

In 2010, Yo-Landi Visser had rejected the lead role in David Fincher's adaptation of ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ to focus on music. She even made Ninja refuse the lead role in Neill Blomkamp's ‘Elysium’. In 2012, they also rejected Lady Gaga's offer to open for her show. However, in 2015, the South African director Blomkamp again approached them to feature in the movie ‘Chappie’. He wrote the characters based on their musical persona and convinced them to appear as themselves. It was later revealed that they were considering a TV show about their Zef lives.

Yo-Landi Visser was born as Anri du Toit on 1st December 1984, in Port Alfred, a small town on the East coast of South Africa. When she was a baby, she was adopted by a "cute little Afrikaans family", and never met her birth parents. Her father was a priest and her mother was a homemaker. Growing up within a conservative Afrikaans society, she became very rebellious as a child, often getting into fistfights. When she was 16 years old, she was sent to a boarding school in Pretoria. After her school was over, she moved to Cape Town and met Ninja, who helped her set her career goals. She later became romantically involved with Ninja, and had a daughter named Sixteen Jones. They never married and later separated, but still remain close. Her daughter, who debuted at the age of seven on the music video of "I Fink U Freeky", is also a singer and songwriter, and is part of a band. She later adopted a street-kid named Tokkie.

She chose Yo-Landi as her rap name because it is one of the most common Afrikaans names ever, and she liked the sound of 'YO' in the name.