History

South Africa’s varied racial demographic has no doubt contributed heavily to its unique musical heritage. However, long before colonists and foreign laborers arrived and began contributing their own sonic cultural elements to the mix, South Africa’s unique geography and climate had already somewhat predetermined its most fundamental musical traditions – the predominantly foliage-scarce and arid landscape of the region significantly limited materials for instruments, such that indigenous music began rooted in choral music. This contrasts sharply with the predominantly equatorial, tropical and vegetation-rich nature of the Western and Central African countries, where instrumental accompaniment played fundamental roles in musical heritage, and perhaps even facilitated the assimilation of Cuban rhythmic elements into East and Central music (which did not become nearly as well-ingrained in South African music culture).

Pre-colonial South Africa experienced an influx of African tribes that were not originally native to South Africa, but were rather forcibly relocated to the region as a consequence of the slave trade. Many of these immigrant groups, for example, the Khoikhoi and Bantu-speaking Africans such as the Xhosa and Tswana, brought traditional instruments with them that later became assimilated into South African music culture ¹.  Since these instruments were brought over and incorporated so long ago into Zulu and Sotho musical traditions, they are often now (in a somewhat misleading sense) considered ‘traditional’ South African instruments. Western instruments like the concertina, guitar, autoharp and harmonica were ‘traditionalized’ in the same way. These instruments and the music produced with them are often referred to as being ‘neo-traditional,’ denoting a combination of traditional styles or idioms performed with non-traditional instruments. The colonial-era introduction and assimilation of instruments, combined with South Africa’s fundamentally choral music traditions, had a few major impacts on South Africa’s ensuing musical trajectory. This might have helped drive the call and response style of singing that is seen in arguably every bona fide South African musical form; particularly a leader-and-chorus format with overlapping voice parts that never enter or exit at the same point. The choral foundation underlying South Africa’s musical heritage may have also facilitated South Africa’s eventual gravitation towards jazz, as the overlapping and polyrhythmic nature of this singing style bears remarkable similarity to American jazz music of the same era. Second, it meant that even after western and non-western instruments became fully ingrained in South African musical traditions, the legacy of a vocal music tradition meant that instruments (for example the Sotho lesiba and setolotolo or Zulu ugubhu) were often re-purposed to simulate vocal melodies – for example, to replace the chorus part in a the call and response format. Lastly, some argue that the absence of traditional drum parts in South African music led to an increased affinity for imported African-American styles (funk, hip hop) over the Cuban styles that were more popular in other African countries at the time  ^2,3.    

South African colonialism began in 1652 with the establishment of Cape Town, which was also the first major cultural hub for non-white South Africans. The Kimberley minefield (in the Northern Cape) was constructed shortly thereafter, later to become another significant mecca for cultural and racial mixing among laborers who relocated to South Africa (whether forcibly due to the slave trade, or voluntarily in pursuit of increased economic opportunities).

Cape Town’s history is extremely relevant to South Africa’s musical heritage for a few different reasons. The Dutch East India Company was responsible for importing slave labor from Java, Malaya, the Malabar coast of India, Madagascar, West Africa and Mozambique, indirectly facilitating a significant cultural exchange between slaves of varied African, East Indian and Indonesian descent. The perception of musical ability as a ‘valuable’ slave asset among slave traders and prospective buyers also indirectly helped encourage musical aptitude among the South African labor force.  Some of the first types of South African syncretic music developed in Cape Town, when Cape Town Khoikoi people used instruments brought to the region by East Indian slaves to play combinations of Khoi and European folk melodies, thereby also assimilating indigenous African, East Indian and European musical elements into one style. European missionaries also exerted a considerable effect when they introduced and encouraged pastoral-style singing in missionary school curriculums.

Some of the instruments introduced and assimilated in this period included:

• • The Ramkie, based on a Portuguese instrument and brought to South Africa by slaves from the Malabar region of India in the late 1700s. The ramkie was then so thoroughly assimilated into South African culture that it is now considered an indigenous South African instrument. It also led to several derivative instruments, such as the Zulu igcjongwe  ¹.
    
  • The Seaweed trumpet,
  • The t’guthe,
  • The velviool
  • The khais (khoikhoi drum)
  • The umtshingo, which played a predecessor role to the pennywhistle  ⁴.

Assimilation of these instruments, along with the cultural blending of the early working class populations of Zulu, Khoikkhoi, Sotho, Malay, Indonesian, East Indian, African and European heritage led to the creation of several musical performance styles, including:

• • Picnic songs of Cape Afrikaners¹
  • Ghommaliedjies (“drum songs”) of the Malay  ¹
  • Tickey draai (Afrikaans for ‘turn on a tickey’), Tickey draai guitar rhythms were popular in shebeens  ⁵
  • Vastrap (Afrikaans for ‘firm step’)  ⁵    
  • Auriture, which was sung poetry of Sotho migrant workers who sang as they trekked over 200 miles from Lesotho to the diamond fields  ⁵
  • Dithoko, or praise poetry ⁵ – or dithoko tsa makolwane (‘young men’s praises)
  • Focho (‘disorder’) – Sotho migrant neo-traditional music ⁶ played on concertina, guitar with vocals

South Africa’s period of industrialization began with the discovery of gold, in turn facilitating some of the most important developments to drive South African music culture in the following decades. These included, but are not limited to: the founding of Johannesburg and Sophiatown, the South African government’s prohibition policy, the appearance of the slumyards and shebeens, and inevitably, the emergence of organized crime. Important technological developments would also permanently change the way people produced and consumed music, though it was really the social and economic climate of this period that would dictate the future of South Africa’s urban music culture. Rapid growth and opportunities for independent wealth accumulation – though of course, afforded mainly to the whites – also meant a quickly widening income disparity and clear separation of social classes, as well as opportunities for organized crime to proliferate.

The Witwatersrand Goldfields (‘The Rand’) was the site of the 1886 gold rush that would preclude the founding of Johannesburg. The emergence of major urban and residential areas produced an imminent need for government-funded public health policies; though the only strategy the government seemed to employ in the name of ‘public health’ was corralling non-white people into municipal housing projects away from white residential areas  ⁷. Civilian pressure to address these ‘public health issues,’ which stemmed more from widespread fear amongst urban-dwelling whites of black people breaking free of their subordinate social status, rather than actual regard for social well-being, led to legislation that forced black South Africans to live in government-monitored housing, made it illegal for whites to provide housing to any black peoples other than indentured laborers (a law neither consistently enforced nor monitored, such that white property holders would just rent spaces to black people at exorbitantly high rates), and laid out a 9 pm curfew for all black Africans living in the city limits. The combination of these legislative measures led to slumyards becoming the predominant meccas of black South African culture, particularly as more and more white and Indian investors and real-estate owners discovered the potential for hefty profit margins in the slumyard development business  ⁷. Music and dance quickly became important outlets for the mine workers and their families inhabiting the slumyards, particularly as the swelling influx of foreign labor resulted in heightened ethnic diversity and polarization within these communities  ⁷.

Just a decade following the first major gold rush, in 1897, Herbert Tobianksy acquired a section of land 4.5 miles west of Johannesburg that he would name ‘Sophiatown’ (after his wife), which was soon to become the largest mecca for cultural development in South Africa in the course of its brief 63-year-lifespan. Originally founded as a private residential development for low-income white people, Sophiatown’s distance from Johannesburg and proximity to a sewage treatment center made it an undesirable prospect for white buyers and tenants, whose collective disinterest led to an abrupt drop in property values. By 1910, Sophiatown lots were being sold freely to anyone who was willing to pay, in turn attracting a significant number of black and mixed race tenants. The potential for freehold ownership quickly set Sophiatown apart from the neighboring Johannesburg slumyards because it afforded non-white South Africans the opportunity to own property and have a semblance of the suburban middle-class life that was afforded so easily to whites.

Over the course of the next two decades, Sophiatown’s population continue to swell to over double its intended residential capacity, ensuring that Sophiatown would inevitably develop the same problematic living conditions that plagued the Johannesburg slumyards and other government-controlled housing developments. Despite its inadequate living conditions and related challenges, Sophiatown came to represent something else for its mixed race occupants – black South Africans preferred freehold locations like Sophiatown because of the perceived sense of permanence and stability they offered in the face of economic and social challenges (despite that whites still in fact still owned over ¾ of Sophiatown property). The cultural renaissance of Sophiatown is often compared to the Harlem Renaissance in NY of the 1920s because of the quantity and quality of musical genres and icons it fostered.

While Johannesburg and Sophiatown were still in early stages of urban development, South African government authorities noticed and attempted to address an increasing trend in alcohol abuse among mine and industrial workers. It was not really surprising that many of these workers turned to alcohol as a form of release, given the horrifically stressful conditions they experienced working in dangerous, often unregulated industrial sites, as well at home in the slumyards. Instead of addressing the actual root of the alcoholism epidemic, government authorities instead wholly blamed alcohol for compromising worker productivity and promoting violence and petty crime. Not unlike the United States Volstead Act (which legalized alcohol prohibition), South Africa’s government decision to pass the 1897 Liquor Act was intended to bolster productivity amongst mine workers, only to have the counter effect of encouraging black market trading and the proliferation of organized crime. Ultimately, The Liquor Act arguably only worsened the alcoholism epidemic that plagued mine laborers by forcing them to turn to illicit sources for alcohol. Since liquor was faster and cheaper to produce than beer, illegal alcohol tended to take the form of higher-alcohol content liquor rather than beer, in turn only causing more addiction problems and alcohol-attributed accidents and violence.

Organized crime, manifested as networks of gangs predominantly comprised of township-inhabiting youth, provided a gateway for achieving self-identity and representation in an urban environment that otherwise denied any effective opportunity for individualized political expression and organization. Gang membership, despite its obvious negative social ramifications, arguably provided an avenue for heightened self-worth in the age of ‘Black Peril’ in South Africa. For example, gangs like the Ninevites (also known as the ‘Allrighters’) and the Amalaita (an offshoot gang) had their own songs, often musically inspired by pennywhistle and drum music of the Scottish military bands  ⁷.

The realities of prohibition and slumyard living conditions ultimately instigated the spawning of a new and culturally significant piece of social architecture: the shebeen. Shebeens (thought to have been named by Irish Cape Town police) were essentially Illegal black drinking houses first popularized in Cape Town in the early 1900s. Mixed-race and Xhosa peoples picked up the concept and brought it to Transvaal, where women (‘shebeen queens’) were majorly responsible for making shebeens into major social and cultural hubs. As the trend caught on, these shebeen queens would often hire musicians to play, including mineworkers and contract laborers who played African neo-traditional and Afrikaans folk music. Attendees and performers included peoples of Zulu, Tswana, Pedi, Sotho, Xhosa and Tsonga descent  ⁸.

The explosion of the American film and recording industries between the 1920s and 1930s quickly bled into other countries, South Africa among them. Specifically, the presence of African-Americans in popular American film, music and live performance exports provided a relatable proxy for black South Africans working in the entertainment industry, as American cultural exports were consistently lauded by all levels of South African social strata. Furthermore, perceptions of white Americans embracing black swing music in the states seemed to condone and encourage white South African appreciation for black South African music  ⁹.

Beginning in the 1920s, British record companies began taking an interest in recording and distributing South African indigenous music styles. Field recordings of indigenous South African music were the first types of gramophone recordings to become popular (particularly among migrant workers), followed by recordings of Africans sent to record in London prior to the establishment of Gallo, the first South African recording studio. The transition to studio recording over field recording practices quickly began affecting the style of music being recorded – producers began encouraging additions to music that made it more marketable as dance music, which often meant adding backing instruments and percussion to acapella tunes. The first popular music produced in a South African recording studio was by T. Makala, a Sotho concertina player – his high record sales were likely a reflection of the predominantly Sotho demographic that dominated the Johannesburg mine workforce at this time. Producers also often encouraged studio musicians to create superficial ‘Africanized’ versions of American tunes that could be marketed to a western audience, partly because record companies were mostly ignorant of the rich, genuinely African music culture permeating the local slumyards and shebeens. One of the unfortunate consequences of the emergence of a South African commercial recording industry, which was of course run by whites, was the establishment of the practice of co-opting black musical culture (by paying black performers to record their own traditionally-inspired music, then claiming the copyright) and selling it back to its true cultural originators and owners at staggering profits ¹⁰.

Initially, musicians weren’t enthusiastic about the idea of making records, since they could actually make more money for their time performing in live venues, and venues still preferred hiring live musicians that could easily outplay the duration of a record. Even if they weren’t initially excited about the economic potential of making records, musicians found another lucractice avenue through buying and learning to play tunes from imported records, as there was more perceived upward mobility potential in the ability to reproduce American music than in performing indigenous music types. As such, it became increasingly common for South African bands to play American vaudeville, jazz and swing numbers ¹⁰. In the 1940s, when the 1946 American musicians strike led to a sharp drop off in American record imports, musicians suddenly had an opportunity to take their place by recreating South African ‘versions’ of popular American songs ¹¹.

Industrialization-era instruments and technology:

• • The Pennywhistle, or German metal flageolet, took on a connotation as a favorite instrument for young township boys, due to its low cost and similarity to the umtshingo that many were already accustomed to playing ⁴.
  • Phonographic (cylinder-based) recordings played an important role as aural transmission tools for makwaya choirs. They also aided individual choirs in expanding their repertoires, since they were often cheaper and faster to use as teaching tools compared to sheet music ¹².
  • Gramophone (disk-based) recordings became important cultural transmission tools as early as 1912, initially for British imported recordings and later (between WWI and II) for importing African-American styles of music – imports of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie were all popular. Possession of gramophone players and record collections carried an elite social status connotation among inner city South Africans ¹⁰.
  • The transition from field to studio recording of South African music had important consequences for the way people produced, performed and consumed music, though it also led to its own set of problems concerning issues of co-opting and the nature of creator vs copyright rights.
  • Guitars, banjos, tambourines, bones were introduced by mixed race musicians (‘crooners’) from the Cape Town and Kimberley regions, who performed in the shebeens and helped pioneer marabi ⁸.

Industrialization-era syncretic genres:

• • Makwaya
  • Ingoma busuku, or ‘ikomik’ – (Zulu for ‘night music’), an important precursor to isicathamiya Ingoma busuku choirs still compete in Durban and Johannesburg today.
  • Isicathamiya
  • Pennywhistle marching music associated with inner-city gangs.
  • Marabi, which was played in shebeen “marabi parties” and didn’t appear on records until the 1940s due to its associated negative social connotation ¹⁰. Marabi was one of the first fusion genres of South African music popularized in the Johannesburg shebeens in the 1920s, and would pave the way for African i.e. ‘township’ jazz
  • Tula n’divile, which was a combination of Xhosa folk melodies and American ragtime played on the keyboard in shebeens. Xhosa folk melodies played on keyboard in a style called Tula n’divile, popularized in the shebeens  
  • Famo songs – urban Sotho dancing by women that had kind of a striptease nature to it, but represented / evolved into a something much more complex. Like marabi parties, famo parties would take place at Shebeens
  • African jive – pioneered by Dorothy Masuka who is known for re-popularizing a more traditionally African style of singing (include some kind of comparison of “Khauleza” to “Tlhapi Ke Noga”) ¹¹.

Apartheid (Afrikaans for ‘apartness’ – insert hover tag with definition from Olwage 2008 Intro p2) refers to a period of National Party government-enforced separation of racial groups in South Africa, spearheaded with the alleged pretense of fostering cultural development amongst racial groups by preventing ethnic and cultural dilution. Though the concept of apartheid was based on a pre-existing ideology that had permeated white South African society for generations, the formal indoctrination of South African apartheid is historically associated with the ascension of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party to office in 1948. National Party affiliated government officials would then go on to formally validate racist apartheid ideologies by legalizing segregation on a national level. The African National Congress (ANC) was formed in 1912 and became the formal voice of resistance against apartheid, mainly by means of peaceful protest and boycott campaigns, with Nelson Mandela being one of the main actors on the ANC frontline  ^13,14.

A comprehensive list of apartheid legislation is as follows:

• • Amendment to The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949)
    
  • Amendment to The Immorality Act (1950)
    • This law made it a criminal offense for a white person to have any sexual relations with a person of a different race.
  • The Population Registration Act (1950)
    • This law required all citizens to be registered as black, white or coloured.
  • The Suppression of Communism Act (1950)
    • This law banned the South African Communist Party as well as any other party the government chose to label as ‘communist’. It allowed the government to ban any ‘communist’ simply by naming them. It made membership in the SACP punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment. The South African minister of justice, R.F. Swart, drafted the law.
  • The Group Areas Act ( 27 April 1950)
    • This law partitioned the country into different areas, with different areas being allocated to different racial groups. This law represented the very heart of apartheid because it was the basis upon which political and social separation was to be constructed.
  • Bantu Authorities Act (1951)
    • This law created separate government structures for black people.
  • Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act (1951)
    • This law allowed the government to demolish black shackland slums.
  • Native Building Workers Act and Native Services Levy (1951)
    • This law forced white employers to pay for the construction of proper housing for black workers recognized as legal residents in ‘white’ cities.
  • The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953)
    • This law prohibited people of different races from using the same public amenities, such as drinking fountains, restrooms, and so on.
  • The Bantu Education Act (1953)
    • This law brought all black schooling under government control, effectively ending mission-run schools.
  • Bantu Urban Areas Act (1954)
    • This law curtailed black migration to the cities.
  • The Mines and Work Act (1956)
    • This law formalized racial discrimination in employment.
  • The Promotion of Black Self-Government Act (1958)
    • This law set up separate territorial governments in the ‘homelands’, designated lands for black people where they could have a vote. The aim was that these homelands or ‘ bantustans’ would eventually become independent of South Africa. In practice, the South African government exercised a strong influence over these separate states even after some of them became ‘independent’.
  • Bantu Investment Corporation Act (1959)
    • This law set up a mechanism to transfer capital to the homelands in order to create jobs there.
  • The Extension of University Education Act (1959)
    • This law created separate universities for blacks, coloureds and indians.
  • Physical Planning and Utilization of Resources Act (1967)
    • This law allowed the government to stop industrial development in ‘white’ cites and redirect such development to homeland border areas. The aim was to speed up the relocation of blacks to the homelands by relocating jobs to homeland areas.
  • Black Homeland Citizenship Act (1970)
    • This law changed the status of the inhabitants of the ‘homelands’ so that they were no longer citizens of South Africa. The aim was to ensure whites became the demographic majority within ‘white’ South Africa.
  • The Afrikaans Medium Decree (1974)
    • This law required the use of Afrikaans and English on a fifty-fifty basis in high schools outside the homelands.

Though this entire body of legislation had wide-sweeping adverse effects on South Africa’s non-white population, the 1953 Separate Amenities Act (which designated separate public amenities for non-whites, for example – beaches, buses, schools) and the 1950 Group Areas Act (which assigned separated residential areas for ethnic groups) had some of the immediate and drastic consequences by forcing the relocation of hundreds of thousands of non-white South Africans, and by obliterating any of the remaining rights that were afforded prior to apartheid’s inception. The Separate Amenities Act had the effect of suddenly and wholly confining black and mixed-race peoples to designated areas that were consistently inferior in terms of quality, accessibility, and sanitation; these designated areas often lacked electricity or plumbing, while facilities such as hospitals and schools were understaffed and underfunded. Pass laws dictating how individuals were allowed to travel within and around city areas were tightened even further, and non-whites were forced to carry identifying documents at all times. Blacks could only live in the cities if they had special permissions by way of an employer, and their direct relatives were not granted the same permissions, meaning that families were frequently separated ¹³.

The ‘homeland system’ put into legislation by way of the Group Areas Act essentially stripped blacks of their South African citizenship by instead, confusingly, making them citizens of ‘homelands’ designated by the NP government. This led to the majority of South Africa’s population – as over 80% of the country’s population was black at this time – being forced to live in about 13% of South Africa’s total land area, which was further broken down into the fragments of land known as  the ‘homelands.’ Once the homelands were formally given independence from South Africa (include homelands map), blacks were officially considered citizens of their respective homelands (not South Africa) and had to carry passports indicating such. This allowed whites to, for this period, have definitive rule over the nation of South Africa, despite occupying a considerable minority of the country’s total population.  

Apartheid obviously had numerous effects on how South Africans engaged in music culture. Under the new National Party regime, street performers were routinely harassed and often arrested for creating ‘public disturbances,’ putting an end to the lively urban music culture that had previously spawned so many local music genres. A combination of other segregation laws together made it logistically impossible for black people to attend concerts, and for black musicians to perform in most music venues. The combination of these new protocols sufficiently destroyed the potential for the open appreciation of and participation in kwela culture by the 1960s, which had been gaining momentum among the South African and international markets prior to its suppression ¹⁵.

Sophiatown continued to flourish before and into the apartheid era, as the opportunity for property ownership and a more settled lifestyle continued to attract a growing middle class of black South Africans. Though Sophiatown was home to many African academics and other professionals who helped curate Sophiatown’s symbolic connotation of South African upper-middle-class mobility, it was arguably the fringe culture created by Sophiatown’s non-mainstream intellectuals, artists, gangsters and shebeen queens that helped establish the district as a cultural powerhouse ¹¹. Sophiatown was also strongly characterized by its youth culture, as township youth were consistently fascinated by American culture and fashion trends, and African-American cultural exports in particular  ². Unfortunately, the eventual government-ordered destruction of Sophiatown, when combined with the passing of legislation that made it illegal for Africans to perform at venues serving liquor, effectively decimated South African big-band jazz and swing culture ¹⁶. In the 1955 Western Areas Removal Scheme, police forcibly removed thousands of people from Sophiatown to Meadowlands, which would later become part of Soweto. Sophiatown was physically destroyed not long after, and a whites-only residential area was constructed in its place ^13,16.

The destruction of Sophiatown in 1960 foretold an even darker turn for the apartheid period, when new legislation (under Hendrick Verwoerd’s new leadership of the NP) would further diminish non-white South African rights to their arguably lowest point in South African history. One of these changes was a movement to “de-skill” the black South-African population, which involved discouraging the education of black people beyond what was necessary to prepare them for manual labor jobs, making it difficult or impossible for them to receive educations in the arts. The National Party led government also continued its efforts to suppress black performance culture by shutting down venues, instructing police to harass performers in transit, etc, which resulted in the loss of all legal venues for black music, dance and theatre by 1970 ¹⁷. Legislation was also systematically implemented to further physically, economically and culturally alienate ethnic groups from one another, and to legalize the government ability to forcibly remove non-whites from desirable areas. Non-whites were removed and forced into municipally-controlled townships, like Soweto, that were architected by way of the strategic absence of amenities, gathering centers, lease-only residences and separate sub-divisions for different ethnic groups, that attempted to prevent riots and made it difficult to residents to develop a sense of belonging to their environment; or in other words, designed to prevent the development of another Sophiatown ¹⁸. This also effectively eliminated opportunities for developments of any open form of street culture from which genres like penny whistle kwela had developed, though people still found ways to engage in music and dance in shebeens, small backyard parties and workers’ quarters and hostels.

In the 1970s – with the exception of Jamaican reggae, which was especially popular in South Africa because of its frequent social-advocacy and consciousness themed lyrical subject matter – the most popular music in South Africa among the urban black population came from the United States ¹⁹. As a result of the oppressive tactics of the NP set into force in the 1960s, the 1970s in South Africa were arguably one of the bleakest periods for African musical innovation, particularly when compared to the decades immediately prior and after. The 1980s, by comparison, were a period of great social shift and ramping up of township music culture. This decade – the era of bubblegum – created newly important role for producers as the appearance of the first South African talented vocalists like Brenda Fassie and demand for the new drum-machine fueled style of dance music, combined with the potential for lucrative commercial success as more people were buying music than ever, produced a greater need than ever for producers who could deliver smash hit albums by finding and matching up talent ²⁰.

Broadcasting was first made available to African audiences in 1941. The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) by the 1950s was airing programs themed around particular African languages and musical styles, which helped to educate the population at large with regards to regional African musical styles. The SABC was also responsible for helping the development of township jazz, which was a fusion of kwela and American-influenced ‘traditional’ jazz  ¹⁶. The establishment of cinemas and performance halls that didn’t serve liquor (as opposed to bars and clubs) in the mid 1900s also had a huge effect in validating Black African performance culture by creating spaces where Africans could once again perform and enjoy music, particularly jazz ¹¹.  

Radio censorship laws, particularly beginning in the 1960s, played a significant role in shaping musical culture of the apartheid era ¹⁹. Anything containing sexual or explicit content, as well as any references to black African life or politics, was censored to the extent that most artists and producers learned to pre-censor their music prior to releasing it, since radio sponsorship was crucial to a successful music career for any performing musician. This was the case even for ostensibly black TV and radio channels like Radio Bantu, which was actually a government-regulated, pro-apartheid radio outlet (i.e. the South African Broadcasting Corporation was the NP-controlled media outlet that hosted Radio Bantu).  Some have made the argument that the apartheid regime actually in some ways fueled the creation and consumption of music in this period, in that its reliance on radio (Radio bantu, for example) to further the apartheid tenet of “separate development” actually promoted each language group to have its own representative radio station and further develop their cultures. However, Radio bantu programming was also rife with thinly-guised tools of government sponsored brainwashing intended to essentially keep black people out of the cities. Interestingly, since instrumental music was less likely to invoke censorship concerns, jazz music as a recording medium was relatively unaffected by apartheid’s increased musical scrutiny, though the various legal impediments to black participation in South African performance culture and studio access made up the difference. Despite its consequences for airtime, many black South African bands continued to produce records with politically and socially charged content, and fortunately the success of a multitude of small African-owned record shops succeeded in distributing these records at high volumes even without airplay ¹⁹.   

Apartheid-era instruments and technology:

• • Multitrack recording devices allowed engineers to record and mix separate tracks for different instruments as well as vocalists on a song, as well as allowing for multiple takes of performances – as opposed to having to overdub recording sessions, record everything simultaneously and to record everything as one-take performances. This meant that different instruments could be recorded and treated differently, and just allowed for an overall improvement in flexibility and quality when it came to recording in the studio. Recording consoles used in commercial studios quickly went from four track to sixteen and then 24-track as South Africa recording studios scrambled to stay ahead of their competitors when it came to having the most desirable recording technology in the late 1960s and 1970s ²¹. By the end of the 1980s, 64 track recorders were in regular use  ²².
  • The subsequent advent of digital audio innovations completely changed the way people produced and consumed music in the late 1980s and 1990s. Prior to digital recording technology, musicians and producers were forced to record in commercial studios to gain access to expensive analog recording equipment, which was their only option ²¹. Digital technology in the form of fancy, automation-capable digital consoles (ex: SSL4048 G Series Console ~ 1991) ²³ for analog multitrack counterparts, had the effect of both improving the quality and efficiency of recording (even before computers were used in recording) as well as making the ability to record accessible to wider audience, since digital technology required less equipment, took up less space, and could even be cheaper not including those factors. With the advent of digital technology came a new gray area whereby producers now had the option to pay a lot less money, but only perhaps a marginal loss in quality that wouldn’t necessarily compromise airplay potential. This led to a proliferation of small DIY project studios, which were still largely white owned but offered more competitive usage fees than their commercial grade counterparts ²¹.
  • Keyboard synthesizers were important in developing the mbaqanga sound in the 1970s, especially the synth bass part, as well as bubblegum in the 1980s, which was even more reliant on a keyboard sound.
  • Drum machines such as the Linn drum 1000 i.e. LM-I  ²⁴.

Apartheid-era syncretic genres:

• • Tsaba tsaba was a dance rhythm popular in the 1940s that combined African melody and rhythm with American swing and jitterbug and even some Latin American rumba and conga. Helped bridge a gap of mainstream acceptance between marabi and African jazz  ²⁵.
  • Zulu maskanda guitar – a Zulu solo guitar tradition. Maskanda began with ukuvamba (‘vamp’), was popularized in the 1940s. An acoustic tradition at its heart – a type of Zulu folk music – usually played solo on a guitar, sometimes with violin or concertina accompaniment. It is based on the transcription Zulu gourd bow and choral songs to guitar. Maskanda songs are always initiated with the intela izihlabo, or a flashy run up and down the scale, setting the tonal backdrop for the rest of the song ²⁶.
  • Pennywhistle kwela and their associated dance parties were a major past-time occupation for young South Africans living in Johannesburg in the 1950s. Pennywhistle was associated with the patha patha dance style, immortalized by Miriam Makeba’s classic song of the same name. Initially an improvised music associate with young urban street culture, kwela quickly found its way into recording studios and was one of the first South African genres to gain popularity amongst both a black and white local audience as well as abroad, particularly in the UK ¹⁵.    
  • Township jazz emerged as a result of jazz began to replace kwela as the dominant popular music culture of South Africa, beginning with a transitory kwela-jazz style that took formation as studio kwela recordings began to utilize heavier backing groups with classically trained jazz musicians in the 1950s. This kwela-jazz style, initially referred to as ‘majuba’ African jazz, eventually producing township jazz as a localized/’Africanized’ derivative of imported American jazz associated with classically trained musicians, which was a conglomerate of African melodies, marabi, American jazz, and Zulu dance-influenced rhythms  ²⁷.   
  • Bubblegum is a blanket term for a type of keyboard-based township pop music that emerged in the 1980s in response to international pop influences of the era, but more importantly, a progression from fusion styles of township funk, disco and rock that carried over from the 60s.

The abolition of apartheid legislation took place incrementally over roughly a decade, beginning in 1986 with the repeal of the dreaded ‘pass laws,’ followed by the 1989 repeal of the Separate Amenities Act. The following year, President F.W. de Klerk formally unbanned the African National Congress (ANC), Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and the South African Communist Party (SACP), and Nelson Mandela was released following a 27-year long incarceration period ²⁷. The remaining laws defining the apartheid legislative regime were subsequently repealed in 1991; these notably included the Group Areas Act, the Population Registration Act, and the Land Act ²⁸. The first democratic elections took place in 1994, leading to an ANC majority win, and Nelson Mandela was formally sworn in as president. As such, South Africa’s era of apartheid control is typically concluded in 1994, though technically all of the relevant apartheid-constituting legislation was already retired by that time.

The positive effects of apartheid law abolishment were, of course, numerous and substantial. From the outset, the already well-established and thriving (thanks in part to the commercial successes of bubblegum and kwaito music) black South African music scene experienced a “renewed wave of eclectic innovation and experimentation” ²⁹. Many former and current icons of South Africa’s music and theater scenes returned from either forced or voluntary exile following the repeal of apartheid, helping to inspire a new enthusiasm for creative musical expression in the township scenes ²⁸. Additionally, artists from other African countries began flocking to South Africa to participate in the newly invigorated local music scene. South Africa also experienced a spiked interest in music festival culture, perhaps in response to black entertainment culture’s release from internalized exile in covert shebeen and stokvel parties, back to the streets and other shared urban spaces (Lucia/Scherzinger p320) ²⁹.

Despite the obvious positive consequences of apartheid’s repeal and various proactive political and social overhaul initiatives, South Africa did not suddenly become an easier place to live for its lower-economic status demographic, which – following multiple generations of apartheid oppression leading to substantial economic opportunity inequity – was predominantly black. In other words – the abolition of apartheid didn’t suddenly make the poor any less poor, nor did it grant economic stability to the large fraction of the population that had been forcibly relocated to the townships. Ironically, many young, black South Africans, who had resisted the apartheid-controlled, propaganda-infused educational protocols and instead stood by the mantra of “liberation before education,” were left in a position of insufficient education and economic means to prosper under the new government led by Nelson Mandela ³⁰. One seemingly unshakeable consequence of decades of government-sponsored racial oppression and economic stifling is that South Africa incurred one of the greatest income disparities by race of any country in the world, even to this day (according to a 2018 World Bank report). To put this into perspective, people at the lowest end of South Africa earn wages of less than $50 a month, while the top ten percent of the population are making more than their U.S. or European counterparts working in similar occupations. This also means that the lower earning 60 percent of South Africa’s population owns seven percent of the country’s assets, while the top one percent owns over 70 percent  (McGill Wiki, World Bank report) ^13,31.  

Another problematic facet of post-apartheid reality was the lack of government resource allocation to the arts or cultural development – instead, the new government directed funds towards sporting event ceremonies and tourism industry development  ²⁷. This only compounded the logistical and social obstacles faced by black artists and musicians when it came to securing paying gigs at venues, finding lucrative opportunities to record and distribute their work, and gaining outlets for exposure and self-promotion in the post-apartheid years  ²⁸. The conglomerate of these realities ultimately culminated in the environment that staged a new era for black South Africans, and a generation of disenfranchised youth that felt neither an allegiance to the government nor to their parent’s generation.  

Considering that the National-Party controlled government exerted a considerable censoring presence on the South African film and music industries, one of the most direct (and positive) consequences for post-apartheid South African music was the removal of apartheid censorship scrutiny and propaganda tactics. On the most general level, this meant that the SABC lost its monopoly over radio and TV broadcasting, which in turn became fully commercialized industries. As a result, programming for radio and television were no longer forcibly determined or differentiated by race or ‘tribal grouping.’ Additionally, a SABC ‘local content quota’ helped steer local interest away from the omnipresent American pop scene and back to homegrown South African styles ³². The repeal of stringent media censorship and cultural boycotting tactics also meant that South Africans were suddenly permitted unfettered access to the global music community, which was significant in the pre-Internet era wherein individualized access to music and film could still be effectively dictated by trade lockdowns ²⁷.  

As the music industry was practically desegregated and allowed to follow a free-market model of growth, regional recording and distribution companies began to experience some of the same issues of globalization and overall decline in revenue encountered in other major media industries around the world, beginning in the late 1990s. Though independent South African labels had begun to emerge and proliferate, major South African record companies persisted as either subsidiaries of Warner or Sony, or as companies owned by ‘national investment giants’ (ex: Gallo) ³³. However, one indirect benefit of post-apartheid government investment in infrastructure has been an overall increase in connectivity among the national population, which has attracted interest from major streaming video and music services interested in branching out to African countries. As such, in 2013, South Africa became the first African country to publicly launch Spotify. By 2015, about half of South Africa’s population had demonstrable access to mobile phones and internet, and overall smartphone and tablet usage has been increasing rapidly ever since – it is even speculated that increased, affordable access to digital music purchased on mobile devices might help curtail piracy problems, as users can choose to prioritize legitimized access to their music (via legal streaming services) over its ownership (which is more likely to incentivize piracy).  

While post-apartheid social and political overhaul initiatives made immediate initial progress in advancing the quality of life for South African citizens, overall progress seems to have unfortunately slowed in the last decade. In fact, the poverty rate has actually begun to reverse its initial descent, and is now slowly but steadily increasing (from 16.5% to 18.9% between 2010 and 2014 – no current statistics seem to be available) ³⁴. Between 2008 and 2018, the unemployment rate also swelled from 21.5% to nearly 28.0% . As of 2015, just under half (49.2%) of South Africa’s adult population were living below the upper-bound poverty line ³⁵.

The music industry, from a financial standpoint, still faces challenges with regards to expanding development of the digital music sector, which has clearly accelerated to the dominant disseminating force of music production and consumption elsewhere in the world. Limited connectivity, due to technical (low bandwidth accessibility) and socioeconomic (such as high data costs) barriers, have prevented streaming music technology from taking a stronghold among the low to middle class population. As a result, much of the population still gains access to music by way of pirated CDs  ³⁶.

Despite these less-than-optimistic social and economic figures, the overall quality and magnitude of South Africa’s creative and cultural capital appears to be flourishing just as much as ever.  South African pop music continues to invade the global market, and icons of South African music seem to be accruing an increasing presence among Africa’s continental roster. South African culture has also experienced greater global interest and representation – for example, the 2018 blockbuster Black Panther featured a number of South African cultural tokens, manifested in use of isiXhosa dialogue, Basotho blankets, Zulu headdresses, and various South African musical contributions. Staying in the spirit of South Africa’s history of unrelenting syncretic music genesis, local musicians and producers continue to innovate novel genre-defying sounds embodying a combination of vertical (across generations) and horizontal (globally-spanning) influences. A forecast for expansion in the digital and streaming music industries, by way of increased revenue (projected annual growth rate of 5.2%) and user connectivity (projected to rise from 14.6% in 2019 to 14.8% in 2023) seems to confirm an optimistic future for South Africa’s music industry, both in terms of local consumption and exports abroad ³⁷.

Bynoe, Yvonne. 2002. “Getting Real About Global Hip Hop.” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 3:1: 77-84. Print. ³⁰

Coplan, David. In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre, 2nd Edition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Print. p14-6 ¹, 20-4 ⁵, 35 ⁶, 74-80 ⁷, 113-6 ⁸, 140 ¹², 144-6 ⁹, 161-6 ¹⁰, 172-4 ¹¹, 177 ², 183 ²⁵, 191 ⁴, 195 ¹⁵, 198 ²⁷, 200-3 ¹⁶, 226 ¹⁷, 235 ¹⁸, 238-9 ²⁶, 249-51 ¹⁹, 296 ²⁰ , 340-3 ²⁸, 363 ³², 359 ³³

Manuel, Peter. Popular Musics of 8the Non-Western World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Print. p.107 ³

Martin, Denis-Constant. Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa. Cape Town: African Minds, 2013. Print. p.267-8 ²⁷

Meintjes, Louise. Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Print. p.77-9 ²¹, 82 ²³, 124 ²², 127 ²⁴

Scherzinger, Martin. “The Globalisation of South African Art Music” In Cristine Lucia (Ed.), The World of South African Music. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005. Print. ²⁹

McGill Wiki: History of South Africa in the apartheid era ¹³

A History of Apartheid in South Africa ¹⁴

IFPI: South Africa: A market with great long-term potential ³⁶

Stats SA ³⁵

The World Bank Report: Overcoming Poverty and Inequality in South Africa ³¹

The World Bank, Poverty & Equity Data Portal: South Africa ³⁴

Statista: Digital Music in South Africa ³⁷