Next Stop Soweto
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- Bio: Johannesburg in the 1960s and ’70s was nobody’s baby; a harsh and unlovely mining and manufacturing town chugging defiantly along under the weight of a system of colonial racial ... (more)
- Bio: Johannesburg in the 1960s and ’70s was nobody’s baby; a harsh and unlovely mining and manufacturing town chugging defiantly along under the weight of a system of colonial racial segregation, fearsomely updated for a fully industrial age. Times weren’t good for most African city folk, and none felt the squeeze of legal restrictions more than musicians and other performing artists. The white minority government did not like, indeed even feared Johannesburg’s African jazz and ‘jive’, a style of American-influenced black culture set to music that was thought too worldly-wise for workers whose real homes were meant to be country farms, not urban ghettos. The early 1960s saw the terrible massacre of pass protestors at Sharpeville, the banning of black political organisations, and the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. Segregation was reinforced by harsh new laws that, among other things, banned black live music and dance from the city centres and placed the very profession of ‘musician’ or ‘actor’ outside the law for black people. Many of the best talents –Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela for example – fled into exile, while others went underground and emerged only to catch what sessional work they could on radio or recordings.
Meantime the engine of the city roared on, fuelled by the seemingly endless supply of black workers fleeing the landlessness and poverty of the countryside. It was these displaced peasants who built the cities of South Africa during the 19th century, and it was also they who kept creative performance culture alive and kicking during the darkest decades of apartheid. The story of Johannesburg’s black music and dance, indeed of the city itself (the true character of every great metropolis is the gift of its artists, whether home grown or imported) is largely that of its migrant workers. You will hear some of them on this compilation and, as is fitting, it is both a tribute to and an expression of their innovative adaptation to the times.
Before formal apartheid was imposed in the 1950s, things had not always been that bad. From the time when gold was discovered on the site that became Johannesburg, African workers from all over southern Africa had flocked to its mines and later its factories to earn the money that colonial taxes and modern consumer goods demanded. By the 1920s and ’30s, the churches, schools, clubs, drinking houses, parties, and dance halls of the black residential ‘locations’ (as they were called) were producing a new generation of performance professionals. These versatile musicians absorbed almost everything, played for almost everyone, and gave birth to an authentically South African urban soundscape. As Mtutuzeli Matshoba wrote of his visits to Zulu factory workers’ hostels in the 1970s in his short story, ‘To Kill a Man’s Pride’:
I discovered that song was the only solace of those lonely people. At least two days a week they sang traditional choral music … with the conscientiousness of a stage group rehearsing for a fete … Some of the songs were performed with graceful dances, so elegantly carried out that I wondered where they could all have learnt the same paces. When they sang, it was from the core of their souls, their eyes glazed with memories of where they had first swung those lyrics; and interruptions were not tolerated … After an evening of invigorating talk and untainted African traditional song I went away feeling as if I had found treasure in a graveyard.
Elements were assimilated from every available performance tradition into a single urban African musical style, called marabi. South African black popular music was then, as it is now, a fusion of local and imported styles, and it was this hybrid called marabi that was to give birth to that unique national sound later known as African ‘jive’. Emerging from the unlicensed taverns called shebeens, marabi was much more than just a musical style. As composer and music writer Todd Matshikiza recalled, ‘… marabi was more than the hot, highly rhythmic repetitious single-themed dance tunes of the later 20s ... marabi is also the name of an epoch.’
The 1920s and 1930s were the era of ‘concert and dance’ in black Johannesburg. Due to curfew regulations and lack of transport, concerts had to carry on until dawn. Though shebeens seldom afforded enough space for a concert, black promoters could hire one of the eight halls in Johannesburg available to Africans. While American musical influences were important, the performers appropriated them and incorporated indigenous elements, forging a distinctively South African jazz. As Walter Nhlapo wrote: ‘In spite of the trials and tribulations, segregation, oppression and poverty … efforts are continually made to make life sweet and brilliant’. At these shows, tireless pianists accompanied singers and stage dancers from 8 p.m. to midnight and then played for marabi dancing until 4 a.m. Some featured a style of marabi called ndunduma, and were attended mostly by recent arrivals from the country. The term ndunduma means ‘mine dumps’ in Zulu, and symbolised the totality of Johannesburg’s culture to people from Natal. Ndunduma marabi appealed to an audience that considered traditional music too uncivilised and rural for the town. Yet they were still unfamiliar with Western or black American musical culture, and a strong sense of Zulu identity permeated their growing awareness of themselves as working-class Africans. They wanted music that was recognisably Zulu as well as ‘modern’ (westernised) enough to support their urbanising self-image. As Herbert Dhlomo wrote:
…what naturally talented players the ragtime and the Ndunduma concerts had! Vampers … who improvised many ‘hot’ original dance and singing numbers at the spur of the moment, and who play or accompany any piece after hearing the melody once, and do so on any key … Like the tribal bards of old [they] created beauty they knew not and flung it back unrecorded to the elements which gave it birth.
While their elders were learning to swing on the piano and saxophone, the youngsters were doing the same on inexpensive 7 hole brass recorders called pennywhistles. Their music, a blend of local melodies and American swing, was played on the streets for coins but soon attracted the attention of the recording industry, where it emerged as kwela. During the 1950s pennywhistle kwela music and dance parties were a major recreational activity, spurred on by the recordings of Little Lemmy Mabaso’s Alex Junior Bright Boys and Spokes Mashiyane’s Big Five. Kwela soon developed from an improvisational ‘street music’ to a staple of the South African recording industry – the first distinctively South African style to achieve international recognition, Kwela was not an ‘ethnic’ music in the linguistic or regional sense, and its universal appeal was a big promotional advantage with the record companies, who advertised it as music ‘for all nations’. By the end of the ‘kwela craze’ around 1958, the style had become truly an international as well as inter-ethnic ‘ambassador’ for South Africa.
By 1960 the races could no longer entertain one another publicly. Among the most symbolic and indeed heart-breaking applications of this policy was the expulsion of Spokes Mashiyane and his pennywhistlers from Zoo Lake, where white and black teenagers jived together under the shadow of disapproving authorities. Just as the removals of the twenties and thirties had helped kill marabi, the destruction of ‘black spots’ like African freehold suburb of Sophiatown, the removals to Soweto, and the loss of white audiences destroyed kwela and to some extent even big-band jazz. As an epilogue, kwela still basks in the glow of nostalgia for Sophiatown as an urban roots music. The tremendously popular interracial pop band, Mango Groove, was fundamentally a kwela band that brought together black and white streams of memory, recalling in the troubled 1980s the hopeful struggles that had been so brutally crushed in the 1950s and 1960s. The late ‘Big Voice Jack’ Lerole, also managed to revive the pennywhistle and enjoyed a second career with it, touring the country and abroad in the 1990s. As South African international jazz drummer Louis Moholo told me, in one very real sense, South African black city music will always be kwela music.
The authorities were moving to re-structure the relationship between the creators, disseminators, and consumers of black music along both social and stylistic lines. International forms were to be discouraged. Black vocalists were not to sing in English. With the entire working black population of the cities now conceived as labour migrants, their ethnic language musics were mobilised by the authorities to fill the public space for black performance culture. By the 1960s the worldy influence of America had been largely removed from the African stage and studio, and taken refuge in private record collections, shebeens, and house parties in the townships. Another style, more suited to the migrant labour image that the authorities held to for Africans in the cities arose, distributed by the recording companies and the new broadcasting system called ‘Radio Bantu’. This system was made up of seven new stations, each broadcasting in one of the local African languages and featuring ‘ethnic’ music. While the white broadcasting programmers did not approve of American-influenced music, the listeners were not about to settle for rural acoustic sounds or tedious Christian choirs.
Innovative artists and record producers at the studios came up with a stunningly successful solution. First, they returned to the styles of acoustic African popular music, and the close harmony singing groups, such as Miriam Makeba’s Skylarks, that had provided the early stars in the catalogues of Gallo, Troubadour and other local recording outfits. Then they electrified the instruments, combined the sexes, and added a bouncy township (8/8) beat. The result was called mbaqanga (Zulu: ‘steamed mealie bread’), a term borrowed from the local jazz scene, where it referred to the common people’s music, and so the popular source of the musicians’ ‘daily bread’. The original mbaqanga, referring the indigenous urban ‘Sophiatown’ jazz sound derived from marabi , is represented on this compilation by Reggie Msomi’s ‘Soul Chakari’ and ‘Iza Wena’ by Happy Africa. Blends of the jazz and ‘electric-traditional’ styles of mbaqanga are represented here by Elison Themba’s ‘Emuva’ and the Tempo Allstars’ ‘Take Off’.
This new urban neo-traditional music enjoyed immediate success. The cities were indeed home to increasing numbers of labour migrants, driven from their homes by landlessness, low-wage farm labour and unemployment, and they loved the cultural reverberations of mbaqanga. For them, a new generation of black music producers at the recording companies created a style of the genre specifically called simanje-manje (Zulu: ‘now-now’). This new music, pioneered by Joyce Mogatusi’s Dark City Sisters, coached by Jack Lerole, showed less American influence. It employed a simplified version of traditional part structure, set rural songs to urban rhythms, and was played at a rapid tempo by back-up groups of three reeds plus electric bass, guitar, and drum set.
Searching the mines, hostels, and even the rural areas, producers discovered some outstanding talents whose music could be processed into the new style. These included Simon ‘Mahlathini’ Nkabinde, who developed his remarkable sense of rhythm and phrasing as well as his talents as a composer and choreographer as the leader of a group of traditional wedding singers during the 1950s. Influenced by Jack Lerole’s deep lead vocals, Mahlathini developed his ‘groaning’ bass ‘goat voice’and sang in praise of rural, traditionalistic values. The goat voice had roots in the male voice part singing of southern Bantu peoples, in which the foregrounding of the deep bass part is a fundamental, universal quality. At Gallo, producer Rupert Bopape helped make Mahlathini famous. Soon every simanje-manje group had to have its male ‘groaner’, leading a female quartet derived from the ‘close harmony’ groups of the fifties, with solos sung in the ‘groaning’ style. Mahlathini performed in traditional animal skins as well as in Western costume, and with the help of his female group, the Mahotella Queens (named after Bopape’s studio label), innovated new stage dance routines based on rural folk choreography and urban jive. This was music for people who were urbanising but not westernising, as well as for migrants and even rural listeners influenced by urban culture.
The new mbaqanga sold well in both urban and rural South Africa and in other countries of southern and central Africa. Performers such as Mahlathini, who died in 1997, enjoyed enormous prestige among urban workers who maintained strong links with the rural areas. Mahlathini sang nostalgically of the moral superiority and social security of a re-collected ‘traditional’ society, and reminded audiences of their roots in a rural landscape of the imagination. In the midst of urban hardship and insecurity, this musical glorification of African traditions appealed strongly to landless labourers. The commercial success of this music was based in part on the new social and demographic realities of urban African communities. As rural people continued their townward migration, the old locations of the Western Areas and Eastern Native Township were destroyed, and the people redistributed in the vast, anomic rental townships of Soweto.
Most of the musical shows were sponsored by recording companies displaying their top recording artists. During the 1960s and 1970s, the staple of these ever-popular shows were the mbaqanga umqashiyo (a dance form) song-and-dance groups like Mahlathini and his Queens backed by the Makhona Tshole Band, the all-male Abafana base Qhudeni (‘Rooster Boys’; named after Gallo Records’ company symbol, the rooster – gallo in Italian), and many others. The mqashiyo mbaqanga shows were directed at migrants and partly urbanised industrial and domestic workers who retained ties to rural culture and took little interest in the American influenced soul, pop, and jazz; music more popular among fully urbanised Sowetans.
Even if singers, dancers and musicians presented themselves at the studio as a unit, they were most often regrouped according to the producer’s concepts of sound, style, and presentation. New groups were given copies of recent mbaqanga hits to imitate, and rehearsed for a year before they could go on tour: a source of income often more important than record sales. These producers genuinely produced, listening widely and often creating tunes and arrangements for the musicians to play. Each had musical ideas of their own and their system, always paternalistic, served to organise the profession so that the performers could at least survive within it.
Groups tended to be multi-ethnic, reflecting the blending of various local African musical traditions in the urban areas over past decades, as well as producers’ efforts to find musical ‘common denominators’ among the diverse audience. Vocalists were kept as a unit for all performances. Instrumentalists, on the other hand, were used independently according to the demands of a particular recording or live show. The months of practice that went into the most polished acts encouraged producers to keep groups together, particularly once they became popular and recognisable to the public. No such group integrity was necessary for recordings, of course. Stars like Mahlathini made considerable amounts of money (even if they squandered it) and could also afford to resist interference from studio producers by switching companies or setting up production arrangements of their own
In their ’70s heyday, mbaqanga shows generally had several segments, proceeding from the most traditional in music, dance, and costume towards the more westernised. Most arousing for the audience was the correspondence between body movement, gesture, melody, and rhythm. Steps and movements were taken from both traditional and township dances, and in a manner at once forceful, humorous and erotic, made visual the bounce and drive of mbaqanga’s contrasting melodic lines and rhythms. Most shows included a variety of performers and soul and rock styles as well as mbaqanga. Many had a stand-up comic as master of ceremonies, and musical segments were separated by comic skits. The routines emphasised overtly physical, even acrobatic satire of snobbish educated Africans, police, township hipsters, the war between the sexes, and other familiar characters and themes. Explicit satire of government policy or whites was carefully excluded, though during the period of unrest in 1976–7, songs using words like ‘power’ or ‘freedom’ were often greeted by raised-fist salutes and shouts of amandla eyethu (‘power is ours’) from the audience.
A related style that has outlasted mbaqanga is the rather more ‘traditional’ electrified Zulu guitar band music called maskanda (from Afrikaans: musikant, maskander: musician) , represented on this compilation by the Melotone Sisters and Amaqola Band’s ‘I Sivenoe’. The early mode of performance, called ukuvamba, (‘vamp’) which involved only the strumming of a few basic chords, was first widely popularised in the 1940s. In the 1950s John Bhengu appeared in Durban and began winning street guitar competitions with his innovative ‘picking’ (ukupika) style. What Bhengu most famously (along with others like him) managed to do was first to take existing items from the folk repertoire and to adapt them to the guitar, and second to create new songs and a new style based on the transposition of indigenous Zulu gourd bow (ugubhu; umakhweyana) songs and choral dance songs. On a visit to Johannesburg in the early 1950s, John Bhengu met the Troubador Records producer Cuthbert Mathumba, and the result was his first recording, ‘Ilanga Libalela’ (‘The Blazing Sun’). In the late 1960s he moved over to Trutone and then GRC under famous simanje-manje producer Hamilton Nzimande, who took Bhengu’s austerely authentic style and backed it up with a full mbaqanga band and three male dancers in traditional dress for live concerts. The result was immediately popular and Bhengu became famous under his stage name ‘Phuzhushukela’. The amplified instrumentation provided Phuzhushukela’s music with compelling, danceable rhythms and improved its appeal to African working-class audiences.
The Soweto Uprising of 1976–1977 inflamed black townships throughout South Africa (except in conservative Natal) and inaugurated what might loosely be called ‘the period of permanent rebellion’. The youth of the townships, inspired by the Soweto Students’ Representative Council, had laid down their lives to ensure that the future would not be over before it began, and that the country would never be the same again. Among the effects of the Uprising was a shift away from the entertaining but ersatz ‘traditionalism ‘ of simanje-manje towards the live-wire contemporary dynamism of township youth culture. The popularity of the groaners and their girl quartets faded forever in South Africa. Music fans as well as musicians in any case often lacked transport or were afraid to travel to night-time performances. White or multi-racial venues where black artists could perform were few and safe transport home in the early hours difficult to organise. By the time the smoke cleared in the early 1990s, the durable Mahlathini and his Queens appeared once again upon the scene with a sackful of new music, some of which appeared on their driving, multifaceted new simanjemanje CD. From Paris to Soweto (1990). While their tours of North America and Europe drew enraptured audiences, sales of their CDs did not keep pace, and they never experienced a revival again in South Africa. But mbaqanga lives once again on this superb compilation, a tribute to the resilient creativity of black South African musicians attempting to provide the best of times during the worst of times. Listen and enjoy.
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The Mahotella Queens - Wozani Mahipi
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From the album:
Next Stop... Soweto Vol. 2
