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A Brief History of South African Popular MusicAuthor(s): Christopher BallantineSource: Popular Music, Vol. 8, No. 3, African Music (Oct., 1989), pp. 305-310Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/931280 .

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MiddleEight 305A brief history of South AfricanpopularmusicChristopherBallantineNo-one could have foreseen it and, with hindsight, it looks like the intrusion of animpudent gatecrasher.The sudden, unheralded arrivalof South Africanpopularmusicat, orverynear,the centreof the internationalarena s surelythe singlemoststartlingevent in the recenthistoryof popularmusic. The massive Human RightsNow Concertin Abidjanon 9 October1988,partof the world series organised byAmnestyInternational,made the pointonceagain.Thefeaturedsuperstars, n whatwas one of the largest popularmusic events everstagedin Africa, ncludednot onlythe likes of BruceSpringsteenand Sting, but also the South Africanband JohnnyCleggand Savuka.One thinks of other recentexamples.At the Nelson Mandelabirthdayconcertat Wembley in June 1988, South Africanmusicians, such as Amampondo or theageingMahlathiniand the MahotellaQueens, were as much of a draw as WhitneyHouston and DireStraits:an astonishingturnaround or a musicalculturethat, notlong ago, was little known outside the sub-continent.And the BishopTutu PeaceConcert,scheduledto takeplacein LosAngeles (butfinallypostponed),was tohavebeen the biggest line-up of South African musiciansever to appearon an interna-tionalplatform.Yet,despite theunprecedented nternationalexposureof SouthAfricanmusic,despite the record-breakinguccess of Gracelandandthe world tour thatfollowed),despitethe awardofaGrammy oLadysmithBlackMambazoandthe factthat music

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Figure . The elebratedahatolla ueenswatchopbassgroanerMahlathiniance ombaqanga-SouthAfricanownshipmusicpopularrom he ate1960sonwards.PhotographyFransSchellekens

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306 MiddleEightlovers on several continents now try to persuade their tongues to deliver the clicks ingenre names like mbaqangaand isicathamiya,a knowledge of what this music is, orwas, or means, remains elusive.

What, then, are some of the features central to a first understanding of SouthAfrican popular music? If there is one fundamental concept, it is that this music is afusion - vital, creative, ever-changing - of traditional styles with imported ones,wrought by people of colour out of the long, bitter experience of colonisation andexploitation. The colonisers brought not only guns (for the heathen flesh) and bibles(for the soul), but - with equal pride - the trappings of an entire culture, including itsleisure activities. In nineteenth-century South Africa (to go back no further thanthis), one of the most important of these turned out to be the minstrel show. Recordssuggest that white minstrels wearing 'blackface' were performing in Cape Town asearly as 1848. More famous American troupes (including the celebrated ChristyMinstrels) disembarked at Durban and Cape Town in the 1860s, and blackfaceminstrelsy - abetted no doubt by its inherently racist overtones - quickly becamemassively popular among white audiences.Blacks encountered the genre from the start, and, like American blacks, soontried to capture it for their own ends. By 1880, at least one African minstrel troupewas performing in Durban, and by the turn of the century the fashion hadpenetrated even to remote rural areas, where Africans formed troupes with nameslike the Pirate Coons or the Yellow Coons. By then, however, black Americanminstrels were intoning spirituals, and singing of the 'O Happy Days' to come whenpeople will have 'Turned Back Pharoah's Army, Hal-el-u!'. Several such groups,now calling themselves 'jubilee' singers, visited South Africa during the 1890s andleft a legacy that reverberated deeply in the consciousness of Africans. Most famousof the visitors - and most beloved of local black audiences - were Orpheus McAdooand the Virginia Jubilee Singers, who toured nationally and made no fewer than sixvisits to Durban and Natal alone.McAdoo - as a model of what 'Africans in America' could achieve - was a hero.Immediately African choirs sprang up, modelling themselves on his group. Import-ant in their repertoire were spirituals: those songs (as the Durban newspaper IlangaLaseNatal was later to put it) that hope for the 'brotherhood of man' and for the daywhen 'every man will be free'.If the realisation of these hopes was continually to be deferred, Africanscontinued at least to create cultural practices in which such aspirations couldconstantly be rekindled; and some of these, at least, continued also to resonate withthe memory of nineteenth-century minstrelsy. From the late 1920s, for instance,workers in the coal-mining districts of the Natal midlands began forging anextraordinary performance style, vibrantly alive with echoes of Americanminstrelsy, spirituals, missionary hymnody, Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood tapdance (admired by black workers since the early films of Fred Astaire), as well asZulu traditional idioms. Most widely called mbubel 'lion'), after the title of a 1939 hitrecord in the style, this is the genre that has recently captured international attentionthrough the work of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.Mbube or isicathamiyaas it is often also called - is inseparable from the historyand struggles of the Zulu-speaking working class. Often it has been frankly political- not only because of its lyrics, but also by virtue of its links to workers' organisa-tions. Most recently, for instance - until the state clamped down on gatherings ofthis kind - mbubechoirs regularly sang at mass rallies organised by the gigantic

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Middle Eight 307Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). But the fertile seeding groundof mbube urvives, wherever Zulu migrant workers are thrown together in hostels inindustrial centres: and its robust and ravishing products are still proudly displayed -as they have been for decades - in weekly all-night competitions in dingy hostels ortownship halls. Ladysmith Black Mambazo is simply the most famous of theseproducts. Or perhaps not so simply: for at least in part they owe their fame to thegovernment-controlled South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), who sincethe 1960s have been enthusiastic about broadcasting their recordings because theirlyrics tend to be metaphorical and religious, rather than overtly critical.MarabiMbubeis arguably the most important purely vocal style to have emerged in SouthAfrica this century. But by no later than the first World War, an original instrumentalmusic of perhaps even greater significance - and ultimately fargreater renown - wasbeing perfected in the black city ghettoes, especially those in Johannesburg. Thatstyle was marabi:the "hot", highly rhythmic, repetitive, single-themed dance tunes... largely the illiterate improvisations of the musicians of the day', as eminentjazzman and journalist Todd Matshikiza later described it. The most famous of itsvenues were the shebeens (the illegal backroom or backyard liquor dens, wherevarious kinds of homebrew were sold), and the weekend-long slumyard parties.Primarily a keyboard, banjo or guitar style, marabi was based on a cyclicharmonic pattern, much as the blues was. The comparison is apt: though not directlyrelated to the blues, marabiwas as seminal to South African popular music as theblues was to American. (The cyclical nature of each, incidentally, betrays roots deepin traditional African musics.) Some of the melodies superimposed on theseendlessly repeating patterns became legendary; sometimes lyrics were invented aswell and, in some instances, these contained political commentary or protest.For almost everyone not condemned to life in the ghetto, marabi and itssubculture was evil: associated with illegality, police raids, sex and a desperatelyimpoverished working class, it was vilified as a corrupting menace. It is no surprise,then, that not a single one of the many early marabimusicians was ever recorded.(This is just one of the numerous tragedies of a recording industry which has untilvery recently been exclusively in white hands, and which has always been geared torapid capital accumulation.) In the absence of recordings of early marabi,it is thefading memories of a few survivors - musicians, or those who watched, danced orlistened - that have become crucially important. The most illustrious marabimusi-cians of the era before and after 1920 are all dead; Ntebejaana, or Boet Gashe, or Toto,or Highbricks, or Nine Fingers, for example, can no longer tell their own story. Theywould not, anyway, have dreamt that anybody in the 1980s would be interested.American influences on black city culture - present of course long before the1920s - found new outlets during and after the 1920s: notably through the sale ofgramophones, American-made records and American films. By the late 1920s andearly 1930s, black dance bands started to appear, modelling themselves directly onAmerican prototypes. Soon there was a profusion of such bands; and they playednot only American (or American-inspired) swing numbers, but also - and moresignificantly - their own marabi-based pieces in swing style. It is this unique andprodigious genre that later came to be known as 'township jazz' or mbaqanga.Symbols of what black people could achieve in a white-dominated world, swing

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308 Middle Eightbands flourished and played to capacity crowds in ramshackle township hallsaround the country. The best of them - the Jazz Maniacs, the Merry Blackbirds, theRhythm Kings, the Jazz Revellers, the Harlem Swingsters - achieved unprecedentedfame.So began a time of astonishing innovation. Not only South African swing; notonly mbaqanga; ut also kwela, the extraordinary marabi-derivedpennywhistle musicof the streets, produced by the children of the black slums in creative imitation oftheir favourite jazzmen; and, no less remarkable, the multitude of jazz-based vocalgroups. These vocal groups, who have names like the Manhattan Brothers, or theAfrican Inkspots, begin by doing superb imitations of American groups such as theInkspots or the Mills Brothers, learnt precisely from recordings and translated intothe vernacular. But soon they too are producing their own original compositions,either in the American style, or - more significantly - in a new, close-harmonytownship style based on marabi,or on the songs of migrant workers or even ontraditional songs.The legislation of the 1950s, and the official violence that implemented it, putsome of the final touches to the consolidation of the apartheid state. Most serious forthe future of urban black music was the Group Areas Act of 1950, in consequence ofwhich all remaining racially mixed neighbourhoods were to be separated throughthe forced removal of entire black communities - often uprooted from the centres ofcities and relocated on the peripheries. The destruction of these vibrant communitieswas a major factor in bringing the era of the large dance orchestras to an end by thelate 1950s. For a while, smaller groups survived. With as much energy as before,these smaller groups worked once again in two somewhat different directions. Theone direction - towards America - looked now primarily to the virtuoso bebop styleof Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. The other direction was once again towardsthe fertile indigenous soil of marabi.And as had always happened in the past, bothtendencies made efforts to overlap, to find points of convergence, to understandtheir importance to each other. Many of the exiled South African musicians whocurrently enjoy major international reputations - such as Abdullah Ibrahim (DollarBrand), Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Chris McGregor, and Dudu Pukwana -served their apprenticeship here: in this era, and in this confluence.

1960 was a decisive year: the unleashing of a period of unprecedented staterepression, and politically and culturally the end of an epoch. It is the year of theSharpeville massacre, the outright and permanent banning of the major populardemocratic movements, and police arrests on a massive scale. It is also the year inwhich the SABC established a divisive, ethnically-based radio service for blacks,with seven full-time ethnic services: musically their bias was towards traditional,neo-traditional and religious music; the record companies followed suit. In the newblack townships, suitable performing venues were virtually non-existent.And so the exodus of jazz musicians for Europe and the United States began;most never returned. Those that remained had to find some way of adapting to thenew situation. But those that could not adapt simply packed away their instrumentsfor ever. As if to symbolise the new musical order, Mahlathini - one of its firstcommercial products - appeared in animal skins, and sang of the virtues of triballife.Music had become ideology.It is important to understand that one of the reasons why jazz was suppressedwas that it aspired to (among other things) musical and social equality: it wasprecisely that musical idiom in which and through which urban blacks were proving

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Middle Eight 309to themselves and to the world that they were the equals of whites (without in theprocess abandoning valued aspects of their black culture or of their history aswesternising blacks). At the very moment that the white and racist South Africanstate was devising an ideology and a programme for fragmenting black SouthAfricans, for turning them against each other by reinforcing and artificially cultivat-ing tribal and racial differences, black jazz musicians and audiences were insistingnot only on their necessary unity as blacks and as South Africans, but also on theirstatus as fully-fledged and equal members of the international society of humanbeings. By adopting jazz, urban black South Africans were proudly and self-consciously identifying themselves as actors on the international stage of worldhistory.But the identification went further. For jazz was not only international: it wasalso, and very significantly, the discourse closest to an international musicalvernacular of the oppressed. Moreover, it was a discourse with explicit and historicroots in the continent of Africa, and it had been cultivated by people of colour - byformer Africans - in the United States, under conditions of explosive capitalistdevelopment. The parallels with South Africa were obvious.For a genuine politics of opposition, as much as for a culture of resistance, thenext two decades were the aftermath of massive defeat and a slow rebuilding.Musically, few artists managed to open up any creative space within the rigid,anodyne, formula-bound styles fostered by the SABC's black radio stations. Afri-cans who remembered the previous era coined a term for the bouncy new popularmusic, mass-produced by the studios with the help of able but guileless musiciansfrom the countryside: derogatorally, they called it msakazo('broadcast').When a virile, oppositional popular culture finally began to reappear, it did soonly because of the re-emergence - on a devastating scale - of black working-classand community politics. The conjuncture of two events in 1983 symbolises thisrevival. In April in Cape Town, a mass rally attended by representatives of some 400organisations from around the country launched the United Democratic Front(UDF). In Johannesburg a few months later, at an historic, sold-out concert, a bigband of old African jazz musicians - many of whom had not played publicly fortwenty years - gave their inaugural performance under the name of the African JazzPioneers. At one level, both events were rituals of regeneration: the release ofenergies and processes that had been stifled for two decades.Certainly, things did not look the same afterward. Within months, the statefound itself having to contain a pre-revolutionary uprising; and in other forums ofstruggle and solidarity, 1950s-style township jazz bands and mbube hoirs shared thestage with the speech-makers at huge COSATU and UDF rallies. Today this strivingfor an authentic South African culture has a momentum which even an endemicState of Emergency has been unable to still. New performing venues have sprung upin the major cities: through these pass musical groups of breathtaking originality,offering syncretic styles of a range, depth and variety never before heard on theSouth African stage.Bands such as Sakhile, Sabenza, Johnny Clegg's Savuka, Bayete, and theJazzanians (an extraordinary band of music students at Natal University) as well ascountless others, many of them less well known, play music in which the blendmight be mbaqangawith traditional Nguni song; or Cape Coloured klopse dioms withbebop; or marabi with electronic rock; or Zulu guitar style with Cape Malayghommaliedjies; r endless other permutations. It is what these integrations discover,

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310 MiddleEightand make possible, that is exciting and important; like their audiences, the bands arewholly non-racial, rejecting in their behaviour and commitment centuries of racialand class dichotomy. For them, this music is an alchemy that is helping, in its way, tocorrode the old social order and to liberate the new.And one of its most astonishing features is that the power of this alchemy is feltbeyond the frontiers of apartheid society - by countless thousands of music loversacross the world. It is not enough to say that the crowds who flock to stadiums inLondon, Paris or New York to hear this music do so simplybecause they support thestruggle for social justice in South Africa. The immediacy and intensity of theiremotional response suggests rather that they have taken this music for their own:that the struggle and the hope it signifies, resonates with their own struggles andhopes.For the majority of South Africans, the promise is that the future will bedifferent, and better - and their music celebrates this. For the masses of people in theadvanced capitalist societies of Europe and North America, the promise is that thefuture will be the same, or perhaps even a little worse - a view confirmed by theirpopular music, now more sterile, and more 'sightless', than it has been at any timesince probably the early 1950s. To the millions rendered voiceless (and 'sightless') bythe long rule of Thatcher, Reagan and the new Right, South African music speaks, orrather sings: of what has been forgotten or repressed, of what it means to hope thatthe suffering will have an end, of how it really feels to think seriously and joyously offreedom and of equality and of a just and humane social order.Endnote1 The song became a worldwide hit for The Tokensin 1961 as 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'.