In TownshIp TonIghT!

In Township Tonight!

In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre Second Edition

David Coplan

First published by Ravan Press in 1985 This second edition first published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2007

10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +2711 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za © David Coplan, 1985, 2007 All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-77009-390-4 Cover design by xx Set in Adobe Garamond 10.5/14pt Printed by Paarl Print, Cape Town Job No. 000468 See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za

To the South Africans: Ke le roka

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Contents Acknowledgements A note on terminology

XX XX

1 Introduction: In township last night 2 City life and performing arts in nineteenth-century South Africa 3 Black Johannesburg, 1900–1920 4 Black performance culture between the world wars: the ‘rank and file’ 5 Black performance culture between the world wars: the ‘situations’ 6 Sophiatown: culture and community, 1940–1960 7 Township music and musicians, 1960–1980 8 Twenty years of black theatre: the struggle for black city culture 9 The darkness and the dawn: black popular music since 1980 10 Jazz and other (con)fusions since 1990 11 Out of the townships tonight: emerging South African theatre 12 Conclusion: In township tomorrow night

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Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Glossary Index

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Acknowledgements This new and I hope improved rewrite of In Township Tonight! owes a great deal to a great many, but I am going to be quick about it. Who to thank? Well I could thank all the performers, writers, composers, arrangers, choreographers, producers, studio engineers, broadcasters, and industry mavens who spoke to me and assisted me in countless ways but that seems rather too little. As one of the elders in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart replies when the hero Okonkwo asks the elder how he can thank him, ‘Kill me your firstborn son.’ To which Okonkwo deadpans, ‘That would not be enough’. But there are a few people, places, and things that must needs be singled out. For pennies from heaven and then some: the National Arts Council and especially Anriette Choorn; the University of the Witwatersrand and our Director of Research, Iain Burns; the late lamented Dennis Shore. Tiny Siluma and Patrick Dooms: alter egos, soldiers in the cause, entertainers par excellence, typically unique sons of our soil. Mike Martin of Jacana Media and T. David Brent of the University of Chicago Press. My esteemed colleagues Robert Edgar, Lara Allen, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Veit Arlt, Remy Bazenguissa, Colin Miller, Rob Amato, Malcolm Purkey, Gei Zantzinger, Rolf Solberg. My family. And most of all the soul of our beloved country, still crying out with creative genius.

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A note on terminology Vernacular, colloquial, official and analytical terms play a major role in this study, and must be carefully defined. The first group of terms includes labels for sociocultural categories and ‘population groups’, as they are known in South Africa. Such terms have no necessary objective value. They are used here as they are still used, with some variation, by South Africans of all categories themselves. ‘African’, for example, refers only to native speakers of Bantu or Khoisan languages who are of reputedly complete African Negro or Khoisan ancestry. There is then, in popular parlance, no such thing as an African of European, Asian, or Eurafrican ancestry. Racially based, negative terms such as ‘Native’, ‘Bantu’, and ‘Kaffir’ are never used to refer to Africans descriptively, but appear only in quotations and historical context. ‘Khoisan’ refers to indigenes of Khoikhoi and San origins. The pejorative terms ‘Hottentot’ (for Khoikhoi) and ‘Bushman’ (for San) are used only in historical quotations or context. The term ‘coloured’ (so-called) refers to persons of mixed ancestry. The South African ‘Malays’, descendants of East Indian and Malabari slaves imported during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the Dutch East India Company, constitute a separate Islamic East Indian segment within the coloured community. The term ‘Malays’ refers only to them, while ‘coloured’ may refer to any person of mixed racial heritage. ‘Black’ indicates a person either African or coloured viewed as a single category. In official usage, South Africans of Indian descent are also categorised as ‘black’ – in the sense that they are ‘other than white’. ‘Other than European’ (colloquially, ‘Non-European’) refers to South Africans who are not of complete European ancestry. ‘White’ indicates persons of exclusive European ancestry. The term ‘European’, a synonym for white in South African usage, appears only rarely, to avoid confusion between South African whites and present or past natives of Europe. A second set of terms is employed in the analysis of African society, and they refer to levels of socio-economic status and quality of urbanisation. Thus the ‘elite’ are the xi

highest African urban social stratum, specifically those who were entitled to carry an exemption certificate instead of an ordinary pass before the 1950s. Elite Africans, prior to 1953, were in general those educated at mission schools and employed in the professions and other skilled occupations. Since no urban African group could at that time conceivably be labelled ‘upper-class’, ‘elite’ is used interchangeably with ‘middle class’ and ‘petty bourgeois’, terms corresponding to the values, education and occupations they may have shared with white middle-class counterparts. ‘Working class’ designates unskilled or semi-skilled persons or spouses of persons ordinarily employed within the formal, white-controlled economic sector. ‘Lower class’, as distinct from ‘working class’, refers to members of the lowest economic and social stratum of black society, who may be unemployed or occupied in the non-official, informal sectors of the economy, and whose urban status was not recognised by white authorities. ‘Proletarian’ refers to those who have lost access to land, livestock, capital, or other material means of production, and are compelled to make a living either by selling their labour in the commercial economy, providing services to those who do, or by forms of parasitism such as crime. Hence this term includes working-class and lower-class people taken together. ‘Migrant’ applies first of all to persons leaving rural areas to work in industrial and mining areas. In a more specific sense it refers to urban workers who return after a period, or habitually, to homes in the countryside. A third group of terms aids in the analysis of cultural products and processes. They function primarily in the classification of performance styles and patterns of development, and their applications may overlap. ‘Urban music’, for example, includes any style developed in a city and in response to urban residence, being of the city and not merely in it. ‘Traditional’, an appallingly imprecise but nonetheless indispensable term, refers to performances, held anywhere, of forms created in a rural area with no perceptible Western influence, or on occasion to forms perceived (by members of the culture) as entirely indigenous. ‘Neo-traditional’ music is traditional in idiom and style but transformed by the urban context or by changes in performance rules and occasions, or performed on Western instruments. ‘Syncretic’ is the acculturative blending of performance materials and practices from two or more cultural traditions, producing qualitatively new forms. ‘Modern’ refers to syncretic styles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A fourth and final group encompasses vernacular and colloquial terms from South African languages. When writing in these languages, the terms for them and for the native speakers of them use a system of prefixes corresponding to the noun classes of southern Bantu languages. These include IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana, XiTsonga, TshiVenda, SiSwati, IsiNdebele, Afrikaans, and English. Similarly, there are prefixes denoting singular and plural. For purposes of consistency and in keeping with their usage in English, this text will dispense with these prefixes for Nguni languages, and xii

use ‘Zulu’ for IsiZulu (the language), AmaZulu (the people), and anything pertaining to them; ‘Xhosa’ instead of IsiXhosa and AmaXhosa; and so forth. Even though English usage normally retains the prefixes for the Sotho language family, peoples, and anything associated with them, for consistency the text will employ ‘Sotho’, ‘Tswana’, and ‘Pedi’. Many terms from South African languages are given brief definition when they are used in the text, and for reference there is a glossary at the end of the book.

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South Africa: provinces, major cities and ethnic groups xiv

The Witwatersrand area xv

The districts and townships of Johannesburg in 1930 xvi

1 Introduction: In township last night In looking over the original text of this narrative with an eye to producing a new one after nearly half a lifetime involved with South Africa, I am struck not only by the perhaps forgivable naiveté and less forgivable arrogance, but also by the passion for discovery, documentation, and celebration in the young American ethnomusicologist who wrote it. At the time I thought it essential both to tell the previously neglected story of black performance in South Africa and to inspire future storytellers in the subject community to tell it more fully, more authentically.1 Yet thirty years later there seems just as pressing a need for me to reconsider, reflect upon, and retell the story. But I do so now in a double voice. The first is the original, for what it is worth, with all the hue and cry of its place and time: the Soweto Uprising of 1976–7. The second is the voice of the same but different observer today, re-instructing both his readers and himself from the vantage point of a future, at that time unimagined, but now demanding its own narration. For one thing, there is the unique drama of South Africa’s struggle for non-racial democracy and, that achieved, for the very soul of the society in the post-apartheid period. In all this theatrical sturm und drang, performing artists have played and still play a crucial role, because it falls to them both to express and to embody, literally and figuratively, the soul that is the subject of such vital contestation. This effort I dedicate to my adopted compatriots, who have always given me the undeserved acceptance of ‘a son of the soil’. When I first visited Johannesburg in 1975, I ‘discovered’ a suppressed and largely un-narrated performance culture as rich as any, including that of African-America by which it had been powerfully influenced and with which it may be fascinatingly compared. At that time there was not a single serious (or even unserious) book-length Introduction 

study of the generations of black urban performers, with the exception of SABC music programming director Yvonne Huskisson’s patronising, choir-focused Bantu Composers of Southern Africa.2 It was never my purpose, however, even thirty years ago, to document all who played and recorded with whom and where, or to mention all whose contribution was honourable. It was to tell a story, and for that I had to have a theme: black city music and theatre, and their role in the imagination and achievement of freedom. In the context of an increasingly violent social conflict in South Africa, some colleagues questioned the appropriateness of an account of African performing arts in the cities of that crying but beloved country. Weighed against apartheid, the contribution of musicians, composers, dancers, dramatists, comedians, actors, producers and impresarios to the quality of life in the black community might have appeared trivial, if not in fact a diversion of energy from the central task of self-liberation. Living amidst the homes, churches, schools, taverns, mine compounds, servants’ quarters, concert halls, recording studios, and streets of black South Africa, however, convinced me that performing artists gave the struggle for black self-determination a remarkable, possibly indispensable, cultural vitality. Since the time of clergymen-composers Tiyo Soga and John Knox Bokwe more than a century ago, black nationalists have combined political, spiritual, and cultural leadership, and recognised the importance of this aspect of black identity. This book, then, is both a record of and a small contribution to the efforts of black South Africans to gain control of their cultural practices, products and representations, and to use them to regain autonomy in their individual and national lives.3 Back in 1975, when I undertook a short survey of black performance activity in Johannesburg at the request of filmmaker Gei Zantzinger (who died in 2007) and ethnomusicologist Andrew Tracey, I spent my time among musicians, talent scouts, producers, theatrical directors and actors, journalists, managers, social workers, educators, shebeen patrons, students, and eccentric hangers-on like myself. Trying to assemble the outlines of stylistic interconnection and variety, I found myself drawn deeper into the complex creative world humming beneath the surface of the everyday recreations of urban Africans. Perhaps the only significant result of this first experience was a commitment to comprehend some of its richness through further study. A thorough exploration would provide a record of the cultural history of black South Africans and inform the world outside of the dimensions of their achievements. It would also increase the understanding of black social experience under racial capitalism; how and why they came to the cities, where they created new institutions, communities, and cultural forms in the struggle for urban survival. Lastly, I knew I was in for a cracking good time. Given the horrors of the repression practised so brutally (if not all that effectively) by the Afrikaner nationalist regime, this statement may seem worse  In Township Tonight

than fatuous. But there it is. When black acquaintances would ask, in all seriousness, whether I liked South Africa, I was compelled to answer ‘yes’. Well, who could resist a place where people of all races carousing all night was considered a political victory; and playing illegally, as it was then, with an African band (Malombo Jazz) in an African township hall, produced not a single police report from the dozens of informers who must have been present. The gun against the drum, and the drum won: that was heart-thumping fun. In between times, I soldiered on trying to narrate the missing history needed to appreciate the ancestors, to build a bridge between contemporary performers and the resources of the past, as well as explain how performing artists had created the cultural landscape in which black South Africans were now living and indeed dying. In this new South Africa and century my situation is quite different. As the difficulty of narrating the explosion of new and newly re-discovered music and theatre in South Africa has increased since then, so has my confidence in doing it decreased. Of course I’ve had help in losing this confidence. Some established artists who welcomed the chance to get their message out and stories told in the days of isolation now doubt that people like myself, who appear to be making (however modest) a living commenting on their efforts, are still needed. Shouldn’t an ‘insider’ rather be telling this tale? And is there even such a thing any longer as ‘black’ music or theatre? In these better times South African artists are often national or even international celebrities who perceive little need of a greying academic interlocutor. Younger performers often want to know how spending time talking to me will help to market their latest CD or upcoming performance tour. Nevertheless, that extraordinary South African graciousness and respect for age have largely prevailed, and I have been the beneficiary, this time around, of some truly remarkable and thought-provoking conversations. Fortunately for me, and for the continuing documentation and understanding of South African culture, a great many thoughtful artists did indeed give generously of their time, knowledge, and insights, and to them I am truly grateful. I have also seen and heard a host of astonishing, uplifting performances. Then too, my access to the more recent, superb writings of a number of colleagues, students, journalists, archivists, fans, and aficionados like myself has enriched this new edition far beyond what was possible when I struggled to pull together the fragmentary materials out of which I composed the first. The account of the achievements of urban Africans must be viewed, of course, in relation to the obstacles they have faced. Culture is not simply a broadly shared system of knowledge and its products. It is also the voices of a community, and urban black South Africans were eager, like people elsewhere, to have their voices heard. An oppressed people, they wanted their complex humanity acknowledged, their hard-won successes admired, their failings understood. When I first returned to Johannesburg on 16 June 1976, its African ghettos of Soweto (Southwest Townships) had exploded Introduction 

in rage and fire. Violent political protests that eventually claimed hundreds of lives in townships throughout South Africa had broken out, immediately over an issue of cultural autonomy: the resistance of schoolchildren to instruction in Afrikaans, the parochial language of the oppressor. Regular visits to the townships were difficult, and all outdoor gatherings there, including performance events, were temporarily forbidden. Despite these obstacles, I was reluctant to abandon my project or to leave South Africa at such a time. Black friends argued that going home would be both wasteful and cowardly: things, they said, were just getting interesting. For the next year I moved about Johannesburg and other cities, observing and participating in performances and other public and private events, attending rehearsals, recording sessions, plays, clubs, and concerts, interviewing past and present members of the performance community, digging into archival materials in local languages with the help of my research associates; trying to place contemporary black performance culture in the context of the historical processes and social forces that had shaped it. My collection of hundreds of commercial, library and field recordings representing musical styles from the 1930s to the present was of enormous value, particularly when used to evoke comment by critical listeners or compared with one another and with live performances. My field recordings included current urban music and historical styles recreated by older musicians. They also contained stylistic transformations popular among performers in the rural areas where older styles have not simply remained alive but change and grow. Involvement in performance occasions helped me to understand the application of cultural principles of performance and composition. My appearances as a percussionist with Malombo, the internationally travelled Afro-expressionist duo of Philip Thabane and Gabriel Thobejane, gave me invaluable insight into relationships among performers, other participants, audiences, and performances. All these involvements together composed a social world surrounding the immediate arena of artistic development. The book that resulted was about black experience over the course of South African industrialisation, cultural transformation in a racial caste system, and how the forms and processes of change were embodied in performance culture. I tried to illuminate the mutual influence of both internal and external factors that guided style and innovation in performance, and to give a humanistic tone to the portrayal of the impact of larger social and cultural forces. For performers as for the rest of us, as South African playwright Athol Fugard points out, politics is personal. And so studies of popular culture provide as well an important means of understanding the experience, attitudes, and reactions of the vast numbers of otherwise inarticulate people, those who vitally affect the course of urban development but who do not read or write about it. By such means the book provides a perspective on cultural patterns associated with  In Township Tonight

the changing forms of particular communities. Moreover, it tells a story of resistance and attainment whose drama is inherently worth recounting. Although David Rycroft might be said to have begun the study of South Africa’s urban African music – by largely condemning it – back in 1958, it seems almost half a century later to remain in its childhood, even though the beginnings of these art forms can be traced back more than three centuries.4 Some lack of interest in these forms may be explained by the widespread perception which Rycroft at first shared: that they are not authentically African but rather the diluted, commercial, ‘inauthentic’ stepchildren of British and American cultural colonisation.5 This perception is mistaken on two counts. First, much of the Western popular music so influential in Africa has grown luxuriantly in the Americas from African roots. Among urban black South Africans, the sustained appeal of black American performance styles derives not only from similarities in song structure but also from the comparable experience of the two peoples under white domination. Artists search out varying combinations of elements from indigenous, other African, and New World African forms as a way of inserting local currents into global stylistic streams, multiplying the estuaries of contemporary cultural identity. More sceptically, Paul Simon and other American musicians may be accused (wrongly or rightly)6 of exploiting African artists and traditions but not of betraying their Western cultural identity, while African artists are somehow always guilty of self-depreciation and abandonment of their precious heritage whenever they work with music or musicians from outside Africa, or indeed even with foreign Old or New World African artists and sounds.7 Performances or works are African not because they display a preponderance of ‘indigenous’ elements, but because Africans have chosen to perform them. Having made this radical assertion, it is important to identify and distinguish local historical elements, forms and processes from imported ones in the volatile creative mix that defines South African performance culture.8 That analysis is essential to our coming to understand the meaning of performances and the choices made by producers and artists in their attempts not only to satisfy and entertain but also to lead an audience to identify themselves through performance. African artists compose and select performance materials from diverse sources so they can express, celebrate, and comment upon their experience, needs, and aspirations. Thus they provide their audiences with modes of self-recognition in a world of insecurity, uncertainty, and change. Urban performing arts therefore represent not the disintegration but the creation of a culture: part of a search for autonomy in an environment in which people have little control over anything except a culturally guided sense of collective humanity and individual self. Performance expression, like other cultural forms, does not derive solely from the minds of creative individuals. It emerges as an aspect of social action and resonates with emotion and meaning among members of communities inscribed in social ideology and practice. If black South Introduction 

Africans have infused vitality into city culture and strategically defended its autonomy, it is because in their segregated neighbourhoods they managed, often tenuously, to develop newly imagined yet historically rooted arrangements for social order and strategies for survival. Careful attention must then be given to the role performing arts have played in urban social dynamics as well as cultural self-transformation, and the effects of this involvement on performance itself. Understanding performance as a form of agency that is both instance and expression of social action helps in understanding how successive cycles and re-cycles of style arise out of the way South African history is culturally experienced. At the risk of imposing misplaced specificities, boundaries, and labels on creative trends, the narrative mobilises this tested-by-time concept of style to give a sense of materiality to this embeddedness. So the exploration of the role of performing arts in cultural identity centres on the organisation of expressive features into styles whose qualities are labelled, recognised and indeed debated by their participants. The style of a performance is itself an index of meaning, established collectively over time by artists and their audiences.9 As a category of performance, a style represents a distinctive system of meaningful forms or method of treating characteristic elements, organised around the expressive purposes and outlook of its practitioners. Dance scholar Anya Royce has defined style simply as ‘the whole complex of features that people rely on to mark their identity ... composed of symbols, forms, and underlying value orientations’.10 More complexly, it is my intention, following Roland Barthes and Dick Hebdige, ‘to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace them out as “maps of meaning” that obscurely re-present the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or conceal’.11 It’s a serious business, the interpretation of style. So a given performance need not fall within just one stylistic category; nor do practitioners necessarily agree on the elements that belong to a style, or to which performance a particular stylistic label applies. Styles provide a foundation, a vocabulary of forms, activities and occasions that constitute and express social and cultural processes. Participants may apply a range of meanings to stylistic metaphors, yet there is a core of association and feeling that unites form and meaning in a shared identity. This unity in variation promotes cultural patterning and social organisation in developing urban communities. People attracted to specific performances need agree only on the appropriateness of the action, not on its meaning.12 In the original work, the social history of South Africa’s black performing arts is therefore recounted as the emergence, development, associations, and relationships of styles. Since then, twenty-five years on, the wealth of changes and changed understanding of South Africa and its landscape of creative processes has made the danger of this blunt and oversimplified calculus clangingly evident. And it adduces even less adequately in the theatre, African language television, contemporary choreography, and film – arts  In Township Tonight

and media that did not exist in pre-colonial society, but have been infused with African qualities and transformed by African practitioners following their importation to serve the expressive requirements of the European settler population. The roles of these performance media in establishing and elaborating an urban black culture have not been, for all that, any less important. Even the phrase ‘performing arts’ may itself require explanation. I use it because it best reflects the nature of black expression in South Africa, which cannot be divided realistically into Western categories of music, dance, or drama, let alone the mixing of all these domains in the new electronic media. These categories not only are foreign to Africa but also fail to recognise the close integration of song, lyric, tone, rhythm, movement, rhetoric, visual and plastic arts and drama in African performance. I use the term ‘performance culture’ as well, to represent a crucial conjunction between performance and everything that immediately supports it – a social crossroads of performers, participants, styles, categories, materials, and occasions of performance. What we are looking at is a whole complex of different resources, experiences, motivations, and actions belonging to the full range of people involved in performance. This book was originally organised by social category and history, because ‘modern’ developments in black performing arts appeared directly related to the long-term process of racialised class formation in South Africa. As historical conflicts and communities of interest emerged and changed the relationships and destinies of people, performance culture became an instrument of identity, competition, and self-transformation. The contact with and unequal assimilation into South Africa’s colonial political economy of various groups therefore became a powerful and unavoidable underlying theme. Of course, in the brave new post-apartheid period ‘the pure forms go crazy’, in James Clifford’s inimitable words.13 South Africa emerged from its cultural isolation in the 1990s like a miner from a shaft, blinking in the sun. The curtain having fallen rather unexpectedly on both ‘resistance arts’ and on shows for captive audiences and captive artists alike, black South African performers were breathing the heavenly air of freedom with the terra firma of apartheid experience, doleful but familiar, swept from underneath their feet. How they have responded to the new reality of pure crazy possibility is the subject of the newly written final chapters of this book. Looking back on it today, I can see both folly and fondness in the original, and enough value not to worry about it over much. Inaccuracies, where I, or more often others, have since discovered and clarified them, are to the degree possible corrected. Personalities, stories, and styles given too little attention are revisited in greater detail. Colleagues and comrades who have since contributed so significantly to our knowledge of this once hidden history are cited with appreciation and gratitude. So to begin again with the beginnings, we first explore the roots of a distinctively South African performance culture in the early relations among Europeans, those they Introduction 

held in slavery and servitude, and Khoisan peoples in the Western Cape. Rapidly then, we trek to nineteenth-century Kimberley, where Africans were exposed to performance traditions from all over the subcontinent and the world beyond. Some brought their rural culture to life in the diamond camps. Others, mission-school educated, became a black elite and adopted European and Afro-American culture to their social needs. A third group of people, a proletarian majority among the permanent black townsmen, lived by their wits in the shadows and shanties of the mushrooming, segregated locations, creating hybrid styles of cultural survival that permanently shaped black music and drama. Kimberley set the pattern for black city culture and social life as well, and in Chapter 3 we see the dramatic development of these patterns in the industrial and human explosion that was early Johannesburg. There the creation of new communities was both helped by and reflected in the emergence of new performance styles. Professional black performers, itinerant artistic entrepreneurs of the mining camps, shantytowns, and railway depots of industrialising South Africa began to take their place as permanent residents of the growing urban locations. Cultural resources flowed into the Golden City from all over southern Africa and abroad. Mission-school graduates, migrant workers and every type of refugee, male and female, from the landlessness and economic devastation of the farming districts and ‘native reserves’, blended their styles together and sent new urban influences to transform the performance cultures of the countryside. By the 1920s and 1930s, the churches, schools, clubs, drinking houses, parties, and dance halls of the black locations were producing a new generation of performance professionals. Versatile musicians absorbed almost everything, played for almost everyone, and gave birth to an authentically South African ‘jazz’ from a basis very different from the blues. Singers, dancers, and comic actors drew on African-American vaudeville to create the beginnings of a new popular musical theatre on the African variety stage. Class formation, with the associated symbols of status and cultural identity, layered on to finely tuned distinctions of black ethnic and regional affiliation in a segregated society, made the relationships between performers and audiences, styles and occasions increasingly complex. Chapters 4 and 5 attempt to sort out the lines of opposition and interconnection in the black city-culture of the interwar period by dealing in turn with associations between performance and social identity and class. Chapter 6 brings it all together with the story of legendary Sophiatown, the leading centre of black South African cultural and political life during the 1940s and 1950s. More than any other community, Sophiatown embodied the aspirations of black urbanites while offering tenuous but ultimately more than sufficient conditions for their achievement. Its destruction epitomised the nature of apartheid and remains one  In Township Tonight

of the darkest chapters in South Africa’s modern social history. Chapters 7 and 8 bring us up to the early 1980s with accounts of the new music and theatre of the previous two decades; tied up, of course with the rapid growth of government townships like Soweto, repressive legislation, and black political awareness. The Soweto Uprising of 1976–7 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. Equally important, the whole world was watching. The internal result was an unaccustomed sense of pride and a stiffening of the backbone of resistance in the townships, in the black universities, and in the mines and factories. The external effect was a broadening and strengthening of economic and political sanctions on apartheid as the world finally turned against the white government and the taste of the Afrikaner nationalists’ hard-won power turned to ashes in their mouths. The shooting and the burning and the assassination, torture and repression led to an uneasy quiet until the early 1980s, as the resistance movement sought to absorb the enormity of what had happened and to find new and broader ways of organising the freedom struggle. By the end of 1982, despite severe legal restrictions, black mineworkers had formed the militant National Union of Mineworkers, followed by the broad unification of anti-apartheid civil organisations in the United Democratic Front in 1983, and the formation of the Congress of South African Trade Unions in 1985. On the musical side, as shown in Chapter 9, the aftermath of the Uprising was repressive indeed, with large public gatherings either forbidden or closely monitored by izimpimpi, police informers. I remember them all too well from my appearances with Malombo at township community centres. 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. If I had charged the musicians and actors who showed up after midnight at my Yeoville, Johannesburg flat after dodging the police, I would have made my rent. The year 1982 saw something of a turning point with the establishment of the South African Musicians’ Association, which worked both to organise musicians and protect their professional rights, and to provide a responsible, representative liaison between musicians and the organised anti-apartheid movement both inside and outside South Africa. Also in 1982, the grassroots arts organisation MEDU organised the Culture and Resistance arts festival and symposium over the border in Gaborone, Botswana. This provided a rare occasion for musicians in exile (both Jonas Gwangwa and Hugh Masekela were living in Gaborone at the time) Introduction 

and at home to meet and both perform and debate issues together. Just as important were the fierce discussions among performers and activists over the role of the arts in advancing the political struggle. Phrases like ‘cultural workers’ and ‘culture is a weapon of the Struggle’ became accepted political discourse through this event. The forces of repression were not insensible to the potential of free association and activism in the neighbouring states. A series of murderous cross-border raids included an attack on Gaborone in 1985 in which arts activists were targeted and killed. This meant that the MEDU conference could not be repeated, and that the likes of Masekela and Gwangwa could not remain in Botswana or other ‘front line states’. In 1987, however, the landmark gathering ‘Culture in Another South Africa’ was held in Amsterdam, bringing artists and cultural activists together from all over, foreseeing the day when they would practise their crafts at home in freedom.14 At the same time, musicians were privately unhappy that activists should automatically assume control over their artistic activity and expect free performances at political events when apartheid stifled them professionally at home and the boycott forbade them to work abroad.15 The consequence was a kind of double or complementary repression, by apartheid and its system of cultural production on one side, and by the well-meaning censors of the Movement’s ‘Cultural Desk’ on the other. Let it be said as well that most musicians supported the boycott, as they believed there could be no free artistic exchange under such oppressive conditions and they suspected the motives of those who agreed to play in South Africa.16 Travel in the other direction was not possible for them, unless, like the ‘African musical’ Ipi Tombi (1976), it was something the regime approved of. Artistically, relative isolation did facilitate interesting developments in local musical genres and local appropriations of international rock, soul, jazz and fusion. Many of these are considered in Chapter 10, which takes my own singular passion, South African jazz, as its text. The interface between black performance culture and consciousness in South Africa today is complex and often ambiguous. Like performers, authors apply their craft according to their particular talents. Young Moses Khumalo, who killed himself in 2006, was not deterred from developing his own unique South African-flavoured jazz trumpet style, however much he may have been in awe of his illustrious predecessors on the instrument. I neither want, nor am I capable of providing a compendium of black South African performances and performers, and indeed neither edition contains a discography. No aficionado’s or archivist’s friend am I. Not every important artist, viewpoint, or stylistic trend could be covered; rather key personalities and movements are placed within their social context in a way that enables outsiders to get a feel for them and South Africans to recognise them. What I do provide then is a story of black South Africa’s performing arts, and like all useful stories, it has a theme, if not a moral. This theme is the relations between social and cultural creativity, between performers 10 In Township Tonight

and their total local contexts amidst the peculiar South African rules and states of play. As an illustration, the emergence of a new black theatre in the African townships in the 1960s is especially significant. Its raucous, excessive energy and originality appear to prove that qualities of performance are as important as social authenticity and meaningful content in the effectiveness of cultural communication. This theatre demonstrated that it is not simply the power of the tale but the fresh and artful nature of the telling that turns performance into transformation. What united all the personalities, materials, styles, audiences, ideas, and aims at work in this theatre is that the best of it was popular in the best sense – arising out of the community it served and organic to the lives and concerns of those of all races who produced and supported it. Most crucially, it provided a critical interpretation of political conditions that could be heard in no other popular forum in South Africa. In giving the expression of common concerns such emotional force, this theatre gave a voice to the voiceless and a sense of psychic community to the alienated. Chapter 11 takes up the story and the problematic of ‘black’ theatre once again, in the transforming context of its incomplete, uneven deracialisation since the early 1980s. Whatever uncertainties and ambiguities beset South African theatre in the post-apartheid transition, in the new millennium it is rapidly regaining its relevance, urgency and creative energy, making it once more a force to be reckoned with in South Africa’s continuing crisis of self-transformation. And so with all that has changed, as much in urban performance studies and ethnomusicology as in South African city performance culture itself, the final chapter is an almost entirely new attempt to reflect upon what it all means. Indeed ‘it’ in this case includes the last thirty-two years of my own life, including my efforts to properly earn the description indoda yo ’mhlaba lo, ‘son of the soil’. More important, this book is a tribute to the cultural and spiritual vitality of black South Africans, who humanised a wasteland of oppression and neglect, and produced a rich expression of both the conditions and aspirations of their lives. Notes 1 Zuluboy Molefe, A Common Hunger to Sing, Johannesburg, 2003. 2 Yvonne Huskisson, The Bantu Composers of Southern Africa, Johannesburg, 1969. 3 Bhekizizwe Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals: African Theatre and the Unmaking of Colonial Marginality, Trenton, NJ, 2000. 4 D. K. Rycroft, ‘The new “town” music of Southern Africa’, Recorded Folk Music 1 (Sept/Oct 1958). 5 Rycroft’s later writings on the subject display a more appreciative understanding of how indigenous forms were adapted to performance on western instruments. See ‘Evidence of stylistic continuity in Zulu “town” music’, in Essays for a Humanist, New York, 1977. 6 Paul Simon’s Graceland album, which employed South African artists Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Hugh Masekela, Ray Phiri, and Bakhiti Khumalo, received such criticism, and was in addition condemned for violating the ‘cultural boycott’ of South Africa in 1984. Simon had his strong defenders as well, including the musicians involved. See Louise Introduction 11

Meintjes, ‘Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the mediation of musical meaning’, Ethnomusicology 34, 1 (Winter 1990), pp. 37–73, as well as Charles Hamm, Putting Popular Music in Its Place, Cambridge, 1995. 7F  or a discussion of this issue, see Timothy Taylor’s superb Global Pop, New York, 1997. 8 See Muff Andersson, Music in the Mix: The Story of South African Popular Music, Johannesburg, 1981. 9 Michael Etherton, The Development of African Drama, London, 1982, p. 36. 10 Anya P. Royce, The Anthropology of Dance, Bloomington, 1977, p. 157. 11 Dick Hebdige, Subcultures: The Meaning of Style, London, 1979, p.18. 12 James Femandez, ‘The mission of metaphor in expressive culture’, Current Anthropology 15, 2 (1974), p. 132. 13 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, p. 1. 14 Willem Campschreur and Joost Divendal, Culture in Another South Africa, London, 1989. 15 Gwen Ansell, Soweto Blues, London, 2004, pp. 182–3. 16 Ibid., pp. 191.

2 City life and performing arts in nineteenth-century South Africa The first local centre to influence the development of urban black performing arts, Cape Town, was founded in 1652 as a supply station for the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope. King John II of Portugal had chosen this name as a more ‘attractive’ option than the mariners’ ‘Cape of Storms’ in the fifteenth century. Cape Town was eventually to become not only a famous port of call known cheerily as the ‘Tavern of the Seas’ but also the ‘Mother City’ of South Africa. Already living there were the pastoral branch of the Khoisan known by the Dutch as ‘Hottentots’, from a German word for stuttering that referred to the many plosive clicks in their language.1 Bantu-speaking Africans would not arrive until 1830, when a small community of Xhosa-speakers was brought from the Eastern Cape to work on the docks.2 The colonists from Holland, Germany and France, who later became known by the Creole term ‘Africanders’ (from Dutch: Africans) attempted to lure or coerce as many Khoikhoi as possible into their service. These pastoral nomads had no previous experience of regulated manual labour, however, and they resisted the harsh system of virtual serfdom imposed by the Europeans. The despoliation and dispossession of the Khoikhoi, and the limited success in turning them into a reliable subject labour force had two immediate social consequences. First, there sprang up an urban Khoikhoi underclass, composed of ‘servants’, strandlopers (beachcombers), and odd-jobbers who earned money by various informal means, including musical accompaniment for dancing by Capetonians and travellers of all races. Second, the Company imported slave labour from Java, Malaya, the Malabar Coast of India, Madagascar, West Africa, and Mozambique. Working together on farms or as tradesmen’s apprentices in the Cape, Khoikhoi and immigrant Early Performing Arts 13

slaves intermixed and soon formed a single category in the minds of the colonists.3 Mixing with whites as well, this diverse population – distinguished legally perhaps more than racially from the European ‘free burghers’ – formed the basis of the socalled coloured community, which over the past three centuries has made important, distinctive contributions to South African popular culture, especially musical styles. One of the first such contributions was in the form of the ramkie,4 a three- or four(later six-) stringed guitar based on Portuguese models and brought to South Africa by Malabar slaves in the early part of the eighteenth century.5 A century later the traveller Moodie described the instrument as constructed on the same principle as a guitar, by stretching six strings along a flat piece of thin board, with the half of a calabash at one end, over which a piece of dried skin is strained, on which the bridge is placed. It is played after the manner of the guitar; and in the hands of skilful performers makes no contemptible music. The instrument has great compass, as the performer can produce the octaves by touching the strings lightly with the chin.6

This last observation is both intriguing and significant, as this use of the chin was an entirely indigenous Khoi technique, used on their own single-stringed instruments. In 2000, the Nama Khoi folk-guitar virtuoso Hennie Coetzee delighted audiences during David Kramer’s Karoo Kitaar Blues show in Cape Town by sounding the strings on the neck with a teaspoon held in his (false!) teeth while moving his chin.7 In any event, the ramkie rapidly became a favourite with Cape Khoikhoi, who played on it the first blendings of Khoi and European folk melodies, tunes that still lie strewn in the basement of black South African music,8 and passed the instrument on to the San and the Tswana and Sotho. Other instruments included a Khoikhoi drum (khais;9 Dutch, rommelpot) and an imitation of the European bugle made of kelp and called the ‘sea-weed trumpet’. All three accompanied slave–Khoi dances modelled after the entertainments of the European masters.10 European folk instruments and their local, indigenous refashionings spread rapidly to Khoikhoi on European farms throughout the western and southern Cape. Very popular was an adaptation of the violin, the t’guthe, first described by Sparrman in the late eighteenth century11 and on which Burchell’s servant Speelman (Dutch: musician) in 1811 ‘fiddled away a dance, in so lively a manner, that my men and myself were all in the highest degree delighted’.12 The instrument was used to play both neo-traditional,13 syncretic,14 and European folk styles of dance and song. Rural Dutch and later Afrikaans-speaking (Boer) folk musicians participated in these musical innovations by sharing with their coloured neighbours the velviool, made by stretching a steenbok skin over a wooden frame.15 It was on such instruments that Euro-Khoi 14 In Township Tonight

A Sotho playing the ‘mamokhorong’, or single-stringed violin, fashioned on the European model

syncretic music was first played in the hearing of Bantu-speaking Africans, including Xhosa and Tswana. Burchell recalls the skill of his Nama servant, Gert, in playing versions of European country dances upon the velviool, and how quickly the Batlhapin (Tswana), among whom they were travelling, learned to reproduce its tunes in vocal chorus.16 A number of other local African instruments fashioned on European models such as the Sotho mamokhorong or sekgankure, a one-string violin with the resonator perched over the shoulder, or the igcjongwe, a Zulu ramkie, have developed along very different musical lines from the originals. Playing techniques for performing traditional and syncretic styles on them have become standardised, and several types described in nineteenth-century accounts are still in use.17 Music was among the most highly valued trades practised by slave artisans in early Cape Town. Some slaves ‘sold for a higher price than others and if a good cook or musician, the seller was sure of an enhanced value’.18 Almost all country estates kept slaves who played in orchestras, some with as many as thirty musicians.19 The Dutch governor possessed his own slave orchestra as early as 1676, and most of the music at public functions was performed by slaves. At weekends the colonists visited Cape Early Performing Arts 15

Town’s taverns to hear ‘violins, flutes, hautboys, trumpets, harps and other instruments’ played by slaves whose owners had bought them specially for their musical skills.20 The ‘Malays’ (actually predominantly Javanese and Bengali) brought musical skills to South Africa, contributing the romantic liederen (ballads) they had learned from Dutch colonials, as well as the indigenous music of the East Indies, to the flavourful soundscape of the Cape.21 The Malays adopted Afrikaans, the local variant of the Dutch handelstaal (trade language), as their own, and Kirby remarks, ‘Along with their language they have also lost their music and have adopted the simple strains which they heard from the lips of their masters, clothing them in an idiom, both vocal and instrumental, which is characteristic of themselves and which they have returned to the white man in the form of folksong and simple dance measures, now regarded as typical of South Africa.’22 The word ‘lost’ must be qualified since the vocal idiom of the South African Malay community still contains accentuated ornamental cadences of several notes sung to one syllable of text (melisma) and other features directly traceable to traditional Malay music. During the eighteenth century, sailors, soldiers, and travellers of many nations joined the resident population in bringing a stimulating flow of creative influences and cash to Cape Town’s popular performance culture. As a result, a class of semi-professional musicians who were able to earn considerable sums for both themselves and their masters and employers emerged among the coloured slaves and freemen. Europeans of doubtful qualification were often hired to teach instrumental performance to slaves, ‘though neither master nor pupils knew a single note, playing instead entirely by ear’.23 Slave bands on rural farms rarely had any formal instruction. Performing in settings ranging from country dances and official balls to the racially mixed seaside taverns and dancehall canteens, coloured musicians took the lead in creating a popular western Cape performance culture. This culture developed over a period of about 250 years during which segregation of the races was customary and class-oriented rather than legalistic. Based on Afrikaans, it was common to whites as well as coloureds. Both the ‘picnic songs’ of the Cape Afrikaners and the ghommaliedjies (drum songs) of the Malay, for example, appear to have developed simultaneously and are ‘in spirit so similar and intertwined that it would be unreasonable to designate any particular one as specifically of Malay or of Afrikaans origin’.24 Soon after their takeover of the Cape in 1795 (they withdrew in 1803, only to return in 1806), the British began to contribute to local performance culture. English country dances became popular with whites at the Cape, and slaves enjoyed performing them at ‘rainbow balls’ modelled on the social occasions of the wealthier masters. An early visitor noted that the slave women at these affairs displayed ‘much taste and even elegance in their dress, nor are their dances wild, irregular, or unaccompanied with 16 In Township Tonight

proper music’.25 In 1834 the illustrator Charles Bell attended a European dance at the Castle in Cape Town, where black men dressed in British uniforms and playing Western instruments provided the music.26 Military marching bands also made a strong impression, and coloured bands paraded in the streets during the traditional New Year’s festivities as early as 1823. This aspect of British influence led to the development of two traditions of coloured social dancing. The first was the relatively high-status dress ball or ‘social’. The second was a more popular Anglo-Afrikaans style of ‘square dancing’ (‘squares’), distantly related in form to that which developed from Scots-Irish sources in North America, and still performed in coloured communities today. No list of influences on popular music in the Cape can omit what is perhaps the most significant of all, the hymns of the Moravian, Nonconformist, Catholic, Dutch Reformed and other mission churches that ministered to and formed staunch Christian communities among coloured people. The influence of the churches on black music generally and on a great many of South Africa’s most renowned musicians over the decades is essential to whatever qualities define the country’s music as distinctively South African. In the case of coloured musicians from the Cape, the hymnody that began to work its way into the soul of communal as well as congregational singing three centuries ago can be heard today in the Cape jazz of such luminaries as Abdullah Ibrahim, Robbie Jensen, Hotep Galeta, and the late Basil Coetzee. Itinerant Cape coloured musicians brought their western Cape performance styles to towns in other parts of the country in the second half of the nineteenth century. The major centre of cultural contact between coloureds and Africans in that period was Kimberley, where both groups participated in the beginnings of South Africa’s mineral and industrial revolution. In 1867, great quantities of diamonds were discovered at Kimberley, located in the northern Cape, on the border with the Orange Free State. Within months a city of tents arose, housing thousands of diggers from as far away as California, all eager to scratch a quick fortune from the famous ‘blue ground’. They found that luck and a plentiful supply of manual labour were required. The subsequent conditions of black settlement greatly influenced the performance culture that arose there. Sotho, Xhosa, and other local people reeling from the onslaught of colonial invasion, hemmed in on diminished tribal lands by the Europeans, or unsettled by the aftermath of the expansion of the Zulu kingdom and other regional conflicts, as well as migrants from all over the subcontinent, responded to the blandishments of labour recruiters and arrived in numbers that eventually reached 25 000.27 Cattle disease, land scarcity, and colonial taxation intensified the economic motivation of the mineworkers. Most important was the desire for European goods, especially the guns with which African leaders were preparing for decisive struggles with the white colonisers.28 An American mining engineer, Gardner Williams, recalled the situation in the 1870s: Early Performing Arts 17

Then the white camps were lively, humming social resorts abounding with good food and tempting drink, where black men were welcome and well protected … some of this swarm could be persuaded to remain at the mines for a year or more and work quite steadily but most drifted away as soon as they were able to get their coveted guns and powder pouches.29

On the edge of the European encampment ‘were scattered the huts of wood and dirty canvas or mud-plastered stones, where the native Blacks huddled together’.30 The majority of these were local Tswana, northern and southern Sotho, and labour conscripts from Portuguese Mozambique. For the most part, they performed their own traditional music and dance in their leisure hours and avoided the risks and expense of the rowdy canteens of the mining camp. As British financial interests consolidated their hold over the diamond fields, Kimberley began to take on the appearance of a permanent town. With this came a policy of fiercely suppressive racial discrimination and control of the black workforce and population. African mineworkers, wherever they came from, now lived in close contact with one another, and cultural exchange among them intensified. Africans had begun to participate in labour migration and to experience urban life in the towns of the Cape and Natal as early as the 1830s. But the size, diversity, and rapid expansion of Kimberley, along with the labour conditions of mining in the late nineteenth century, set a pattern for later African urbanisation. Many black people who found their way to Kimberley, and these included literate graduates of mission schools, either did not have or soon lost any intention of returning to their ancestral homes. Their desire to establish themselves permanently in Kimberley came into direct conflict with the aggressive racial prejudice of white colonists and with a segregationist policy based on the notion of South African towns as white preserves. For black workers in early Kimberley, the absorption of some aspects of Western culture was part of a struggle for urban status. From the early 1870s, Kimberley was divided into two administrative sections: the Crown Estate, under direct control of the colonial government, and the London Estate, owned by a private corporation. The Crown Estate was controlled and nearly all Africans lived either on their employer’s property or in official, segregated locations such as those near the suburb of Beaconsfield. The London Estate owners, however, resisted the ‘proclamation’ of black locations and rented to anyone willing to pay the inflated prices. Fortune-seekers of all races crowded into areas such as Newsome where everyone from African squatters and poor whites, to Chinese, Malays, and African salaried and civil service employees lived openly together, though the great majority of residents were black.

18 In Township Tonight

Here the coloured ‘Cape Boys’, exempted at first from the pass restrictions suffered by Africans, Khoi, and San people, formed well-organised and powerful criminal gangs who made certain areas off limits to the colonial police.31 White employers continually complained about desertion and the shortage of African labour. Two-thirds of all Africans who arrived for work in the years before the establishment of controlled labour compounds in 1887 deserted within a week of entering employment.32 Deserters, estimated at 8 000 by 1877, were absorbed into the London Estate, where they often made a livelihood from horse-trading and from stolen diamonds. Illicit diamondbuying (IDB) rapidly produced a flourishing counter-economy in Kimberley; by the 1880s it was reputed to involve fully fifty per cent of the city’s residents.33 African shop assistants worked for themselves as well as for whites in the illegal diamond traffic, and the cooperative involvement of people of all races in the trade gave thousands of blacks both economic opportunity and covert social power since they could easily betray their white employers to the police if they chose.34 Although few black men brought wives to the diamond fields, the camps attracted thousands of African, coloured, and Khoisan women. While women also participated in illicit diamond-buying, most important were the commercial brewing and domestic and sexual services that they provided men. These activities created an economic base for independent women’s lives and have set the pattern for their urban enterprises ever since. The women’s presence and activities alarmed local white authorities, because they helped to solidify unwanted urban black communities and reinforced the unhealthy social conditions at the diamond fields. Entertainment was much sought after among members of this disorganised community, but then as now, the life of the ‘honky-tonk’ (early ragtime) woman was no easy business. African evangelist Gwayi Tyamzashe recalled Kimberley in 1874: On my first arrival at the New Rush I observed that nearly every evening was devoted to private and public amusements … The evenings resounded with the noise of the concert, the circus, and all sorts of dances from one end of the camp to the other. The life then of both Coloured and Whites was so rough that I thought the place only good for those who were resolved to sell their souls for silver, gold, and precious stones, or for those who were determined to barter their lives for the pleasures of a time.35

In Kimberley, Africans were exposed to a wide variety of new musical influences. Many of the young white diggers held musical evenings frequented by black workers where the whites played guitar, concertina, banjo, cornet, violin, and even piano.36 Others came to the fields with Khoisan servants who improvised new dance tunes on home-made violins.37 American prospectors brought their honky-tonk piano styles to

Early Performing Arts 19

the canteens, and ‘Even American Negroes arrived in the dust-tortured village in the veld, the advance guard of a fairly substantial number now living at the Cape; and the simple-minded black from the kraal was immensely impressed by the sophisticated dress of his brother from the far side of the Atlantic’.38 Among the most famous of these African-American ‘brothers’ was Orpheus ‘Bill’ McAdoo, whose light-opera music hall ‘minstrel’ troupe, the Virginia Jubilee Singers toured from the Cape up to Kimberley and made an outstanding impression on townsfolk of all races. The career of this troupe has been documented in brilliant, thoughtful detail by Veit Erlmann.39 Yet among all the varied strains it was the coloureds, arriving from the Cape with traditions of professional musicianship extending back more than two hundred years, who most strongly influenced early African urban music and dance. In Kimberley, coloured artisans, drivers, and servants played their blends of Khoikhoi, Malay, European, and American popular music on the violin or guitar for anyone disposed to listen and willing to offer a coin. Xhosa choral composer Ben Tyamzashe first heard the violin played by Malays in Kimberley, and recalled ‘exuberant music and vibrant rhythms emanating from gambling dens, saloons and dance halls’, as well as Malay singing from the mosques of the city during the 1890s.40 It was here also that coloured guitarists perfected the Cape style called tickey draai (Afrikaans: ‘turn on a tickey’, a threepenny coin), played for a dance in which one couple swings at the centre of the ring while the other dancers clap hands to a rapid rhythm, based on the Afrikaans vastrap (‘firm step’) folk dance. Coloured performers brought tickey draai playing and dancing to other towns in the eastern Cape, Orange Free State, and Transvaal, where it attained great popularity among Africans. Although they rarely socialised as equals, diggers and labourers of all races enjoyed Cape Afrikaans folk tunes such as ‘Jannie met die Hoepel Been’ (‘Bandy-legged Jannie’). The majority of professional coloured musicians, all of whom were men, belonged to a broader social category known as oorlams. The meanings of this term reveal a good deal about the place of black performers on the fringes of colonial society and their role in promoting cultural exchange. During the early years of Dutch settlement at the Cape, the term oorlams, derived from Malay, first referred to hard-drinking, veteran sailors of the Dutch navy and merchant fleet who raised havoc but spent welcome cash in the local taverns. Later it came to be applied to the tough, experienced Dutch colonials brought from the East Indies, as distinct from their more sober, baar (raw, unknowing) counterparts fresh from Holland.41 Soon, the term came to refer to Khoisan servants who had learned Dutch and acquired a worldly knowledge of the ways of Europeans. It was not simply their understandable fondness for drink and dance, but their shrewd manipulation of those in authority that characterised Khoisan oorlams. Nama Khoi used it as a name for themselves, reputedly because they 20 In Township Tonight

delighted in the adeptness of their stratagems, and joked that many drinks make a person (perhaps too) clever. To this day, visitors to South Africa may remark upon the general social and on occasion even legal acceptance of drunkenness as an excuse or at least mitigating explanation for anti-social behaviour. The Afrikaner farmers believed that oorlaamse Khoisan or Tswana were more useful – they spoke Afrikaans and had adopted much of its culture – but also more deceptive and disingenuous than baar kaffirs (‘raw’, rural Africans). It was of course part of the settler’s racial ideology to complain that knowledge of Europeans’ languages and life ways ‘spoiled’ not only their servants but all people of colour. By the early nineteenth century, many white farmers had an African oorlamse kaffir or oorlamse fong (African old hand, well-trained ‘boy’) as a foreman or personal retainer. The notion of oorlamse skepsel (‘clever rascal’) remained among these farmers, who had to rely upon such men to mediate in their relations with their African labourers or to carry out personal business despite their adherence to a discourse in which no black person could ever be entirely trusted. Among Africans, oorlams came to refer to those who had become ‘westernised’ through Afrikaans and work experience in Afrikaner farms and towns, rather than through involvement with English-speaking settlers or missionaries. The first association of this term with musical activity stems from the role of Khoikhoi and coloured musicians in the annual Christmas festivities of eighteenth-century Cape Town, the ‘oorlams time’, when many merchantmen were in port. Later, players of the oorlamsramkie earned themselves an unflattering reputation in upcountry districts: ‘Of the ramkie the Bloemhof men stated that it belonged to those Hottentots [Khoisan] who had lost their own language and had adopted Dutch, and this is indirectly confirmed by the Griqualand Korana for they also disown it and call it the instrument of the ondervelders [lowlanders].’42 In Kimberley, coloured oorlams musicians acted as ‘cultural brokers’ – skilled intermediaries who worked musical influences from indigenous and imported sources into new styles and performed for a wide variety of audiences. These entertainers tended to be recent arrivals, some from the Cape, who floated on the surface but had little social anchorage either among the long-settled, highly structured rural coloured communities called Griqua, or the urbanised church-oriented, wage-earning, westernised middle class.43 Among these performers were a number of African men, particularly Cape or Natal Nguni (Mfengu, Xhosa, Zulu, Bhaca) from Cape Town or the towns of the eastern Cape and Natal. Familiar with or quick to learn tickey draai, vastrap, and other coloured styles, they created new variants by blending in traditional African melodies. To differentiate them from the highly westernised African graduates of Cape mission schools, they were known as ‘dressed people’ (Xhosa: abantu abayi esontweni), implying a superficial adoption of European culture, a limited command of Afrikaans or English, lack of Early Performing Arts 21

interest in Christianity, and an individualised, opportunistic social outlook.44 Like their coloured fellows, they favoured the portable trade-store concertina, guitar, and violin, and displayed a flair for keyboard instruments. The music of these entertainers of the emergent African working-class became one of the most important sources of coloured and Afrikaans influence on the development of African popular music. The ‘dressed people’, also called abaphakathi (‘those in the middle’), occupied an insecure position between mission-school Africans and non-Christian traditionalists in African society as a whole. Their ranks were swelled by those migrants who elected to abandon their rural traditional communities for a permanent life in the town. The abaphakathi and oorlams formed the core of an emerging urban black working class that constituted the majority of Kimberley’s total population by the 1880s.45 Residence at Kimberley or an expedient contact with a mission station was often sufficient to disengage Africans from the traditional rural community. They became acquainted with the value of the material trappings of European life but did not fully adopt the social and moral patterns and restraints of their adopted culture. In particular, they had to contend with the whites’ resentment and fear of Africans who tried to stake their own diamond claims and who spoke English and wore trousers. Advancing segregation was defended on the grounds that blacks were primitive and barbarous. In reality, their continuing westernisation was perceived as a threat to whites, who pushed Africans to the towns and then resisted African urbanisation as a permanent process. As one astonished English visitor to Kimberley in the 1880s recounted, ‘We are told that here, at Johannesburg, or at Barberton the Natives actually dress for dinner! What is the world coming to?’46 Neither mission-school nor traditional Africans liked these shape-shifting opportunists who, seeming neither fish nor fowl, appeared unrestrained by any recognised code of morality, social behaviour, or cultural values – European or African. Traditionalists called them Makgomocha (Tswana), or Amakumsha, Amakurumsha (Zulu–Xhosa), meaning literally ‘speakers of foreign languages’, but implying deceivers, cheats, or turncoats who used their command of European speech and manners to exploit those less westernised than themselves.47 African mission-school graduates regarded them as immoral, combining the worst of African and European social traits. They shuddered to think that whites rarely differentiated between themselves and these ‘impostors’, but regarded all Africans in European clothing as criminals. When the racist letter writer ‘T. O’C.’ complained in the press, ‘Obviously full-blooded Kaffirs, recognisable as such despite the glories of stand-up collars and evil-odoured manillas’ were allowed to attend brigade band concerts and other public entertainments, ‘A Native’ answered that faults attributed to the ‘innocent Kaffir’ were really ‘the evil doing of the Kaapenaar’ (lower-class coloured or African from the Cape).48 Even so, it was those Africans most skilled at moving with social aplomb across 22 In Township Tonight

categorical boundaries who had the greatest opportunity for social contact with coloureds and whites. Many were important cultural innovators, including urban popular musicians. The background, behaviour and social role of these musicians contributed to their deviant image among many Africans. This image has remained rooted in popular consciousness over the decades, and has been in part responsible for the continuing uncertain or ‘liminal’ status of professional performers, despite public appreciation of their talents. It is really only since the end of apartheid in 1991 (not 1994) that the black public has begun to take an unequivocal pride in its popular performers as artists and cultural icons, and to differentiate among them on the basis of both public and private qualities of personal character. I cite this date because although the pass laws had been abandoned in 1986, and it took until 1994 to negotiate the country’s first non-racial democratic elections, all the Acts that constituted the legal structure of racial segregation, discrimination and oppression were repealed in 1991. Late nineteenth-century Kimberley spawned an urban working class with its own performance styles, and transformed the music and dance of migrant workers, with consequences for urban as well as rural performance culture. The rural migrants’ experience in Kimberley expanded their awareness of the larger world in which they were being forced to participate. The challenges and hardships they faced deeply affected their images of self and concepts of manhood. These changes reflected in their verbal art, including the poetry of song, an important medium for the expression of social identity. Men from ‘Basutoland’ (Lesotho) were among the first and most numerous group of black workers to arrive in Kimberley.49 Desperate to purchase guns, Sotho men walked more than 200 miles from Lesotho to the diamond fields. During these dangerous journeys, or during leisure hours on the mines, Sotho miners adapted elements from the range of Sotho performance genres. They created a new, imaginative vehicle for the expression of their experience and its collective as well as personal significance. I became aware of this rhythmic verbal art form in the years when I was not allowed in South Africa (1977–90). During this time I spent extended periods in Lesotho and came to appreciate and study the ‘auriture’, the sung poetry, of Sotho migrant workers.50 Workers from other southern Bantu language communities developed their own variants of poetic song for similar purposes. They incorporated new domains of experience into well-established forms of creativity, and used old artistic materials in the development of new aural popular styles. This recycling of images, metaphors, and genres has facilitated in preserving popular conceptions of history through performance within local speech communities without the need for written documentation. On the walk to the diamond fields, groups of young migrants used Sotho song and spoken art to beguile the time, boost their courage, and seek a common understanding of the changes in Sotho life, of which they were both the subjects and the instruments. The importance of music not only to self-delectation, but also to surviving physical Early Performing Arts 23

hardships and keeping up one’s spirits on the journey, is expressed in a well-known folk story about the concertina or ‘squash-box’. According to this account, the German (actually Czech) or Italian concertina was first adopted by Sotho men as a means of producing the choral ground and responses to their own solo poetic singing when out walking the country. On the long migrations, often in rain or winter cold, the concertina was played close to the chest under the characteristic Sotho woollen blanket, pumping out warmth as well as musical accompaniment to the migrant’s rhythmic strides and lyric vocal passages. On such marches and at the diamond fields they created sefela (pl. difela) tsa ditsamaya-naha (‘songs of the adventurers’) a partly narrative, partly lyrical genre of sung poetry. The importance of Kimberley in the emergence of the sefela genre is reflected in contemporary poets’ references to the immoral, diamond-rush atmosphere of the city’s early years that still symbolises the migrants’ perspective on urban life: ... What do I say to you, gamblers (veteran poets)? I speak this way: You know, I speak of Kimberley; I speak of Sodom ... (Majara Majara)

The primary formal inspiration for these migrants’ songs was the various genres of dithoko or praise poetry. These included the praises of chiefs, military heroes, initiates into manhood, genealogies and subclans, animals both wild and domestic, one’s home village, and the extraordinary doings of ordinary men, including oneself. The term ‘praises’, a literal translation from the southern African languages that historically and politically foregrounded them, may seem misleading in that the praise poems provide for socialised competition, and may involve criticism as well as eulogy. But if we consider that it is transcendently the institutions and values of leadership that are ‘praised’ through the example of the heroic person, the term achieves its full, appropriate reference.51 Through praising the hero, the texts explore what leadership and heroism are. Praise poems are both a reflection upon and a dimension of influence and power, and a historical record of personal prestige that persists even after death.52 Indeed, labour migrancy appears early in the high-status genre of praises of Sotho chiefs, as in the following verse from the praises of Chief Joel Molapo, composed in the late nineteenth century: Migrants who migrate to the Whites, You don’t migrate to cattle [wealth], you migrate to a sjambok,53 You migrate to the hide of the sleeper in the water!

24 In Township Tonight

Growing up in the villages and later even in the ‘camps’ or border towns established by the British, young men developed skills in verbal composition and dramatic performance by reciting their own praises at the mophato : the secluded bush lodge where they were circumcised and promoted to manhood. These dithoko tsa makolwane (young men’s praises) consist, even today, of imaginary representations of the challenges of adult life. They express both images of a new identity and the capacity to meet the expectations of their communities.54 The following is an example I recorded in the village of HaRanteme in south-western Lesotho in 1988, part of the only translated and documented collection of texts of this genre in existence. Initiate’s praise:55 Re tsamaile thota hole kea tsamaea Thobalitse e lutse sefubeng Khomo tsa ntumella ka feta Ke thola Pepenare Lesopha K’hempe makhooeng e ngoe O ka ba oa sebetsa oa fufuleloa O ke ke oa bona lekhooa le ts’eha Khooa le ts’eha ha mochini o chaha Mochini o chaha ka litleleme

Rantole I have left for the veld; I am going Thobalitse is sitting on the chest The cattle allowed me to go through I Lesopha found Wepener There is only one camp at the mines You can work until you sweat You will never see a white man laughing The White man laughs only at knock-off time [When] The machine stops at the mine shaft …

Choral refrain: Re tsamaile thota ueee Hele banna re tsamaile Re tsamaile thota ueee Ka nqena le ka nqena Mona hare, thota uele banna Re tsamaile thota ueee … Basotho re haile mabalane Thota uele banna, re tsamaile Basotho ba re ke mahoabali Mona hare, ka nqena, mona hare Thota uele banna, re tsamaile….

We have travelled the wilderness ueee! Hey! men, we have travelled We have travelled the wilderness ueee! This side and this side Here in the middle, the flat high ground, men! We have travelled the wilderness ueee! …Basotho we live in the urban area The open spaces oh men! we have travelled Basotho call it a rough, bare places in the field In the middle, on this side, here in the middle Oh men, the open spaces we have travelled

Initiate’s praise: Ha ke fihla ka mona ka lefikeng Ke fumane mafika a bua Le motho oa Lesia

When I arrived here at the rock I found the rocks speaking A man even ran away from it Early Performing Arts 25

Ke moo thaba eo e ea oa Ke fumane Rampokana a shoele Choral refrain: Re qobile mathata Mafutsana re phela ka ho sokola Re qobile mathata Bo-mme le bontate, re qobile mathata

Now that mountain is falling down I found Rampokana dead …

We have avoided the difficulties We the poverty-stricken survive through hard work We have avoided the difficulties Mothers and fathers we have avoided the difficulties

Initiate’s praise: The women of this village are cruel Basali ba sehlooho ba motse ona They said Baisi will not be circumcised Ba itse Baisi a ke ke a bolla Here he is today, he is a man Ke enoa ka jeno, ke monna O lisa likhomo bosiu litlotse He looks after the cattle at night when they slip out to the fields O pepa le bana ho ea lingakeng He even carries children on his back to see the doctor He digs trenches behind the houses O chepa liforo ka mora matlo When others are sitting here at the kraals Ha ba lutse masakeng mona There he is (herding) at the precipice; he falls Ke eo selomong oa uela Call his relatives to come and identify him Bitsang ba habo ba tlo motseba Ha re ka bona ba se ba motsibile If only they could recognise him You are merciful O Mohau You are merciful, God (our) father O mohau ntate Molimo O mohau o mohau o mohau Jehova You are merciful, you are merciful, you are merciful, Jehovah Death is eating the men of Sephokong Lefu la ja banna ba sephokong It even ate chief Sekara Le jele ibile le morena Sekera What kind of death is this, men?56 Lefu lena ke le joang banna? Le nka bacha le siea ba khale It takes the youth and leaves the elderly It is better if it can leave me Ho betere le mpe le tlohele Ke mpe ke phele ‘na ngoana batho So that I the poor child can live Ka moso ke tle ke e makhooeng…. So as to be able to go to the mines in future …

In composing difela, the migrants developed the potential of forms such as dithoko for interpreting and ordering their relationships to family, community, work, and fellow workers. Difela help to resolve the contradictions between village and mine as domains of experience, relating self-image to social values in the total environment. As mining 26 In Township Tonight

replaced the challenges of earlier times, migrants sought poetic self-definition as modern heroes, men who descend into the sweltering darkness of the earth to test their strength against backbreaking labour, deafening machines, and the chance of injury or death. In the following passage, the sefela performer Majara Majara uses images taken directly from work underground to tie together diverse environments of Sotho migrant life. Here, he recounts an underground explosion after which his team is sent down the still dangerous mineshaft in a desperate effort to recover the bodies, living or dead, of his fellow workers: Likomponeng tsena, khale ke I have worked a long time at these compounds li sebetsa... I’m like a charge that remained in ... Ke ka holo e setseng ... sekoereng, the oreface (unexploded), Look, it stopped the drillboy from Bona, e hanne mochini-boi, knocking off; o chaise; I slashed the drill boy’s head Mochini-boi, ke o pomme hlooho I have slashed the drillguide’s hand Sepannere, ke se pomme letsoho It’s then that the drillguide started Ke moo sepannere se neng se qala ho omana: to scold: ‘You, charge-setter; you, timberboy, ‘Uena, pekenene, Uena thimba-boi, Shut off the water, stop the steam; Koala metsi, u koale limoko; These cables have burned us; Thapo tsena li se li re chesitse; Men’s blood is mixed with stones ...’ Mali a batho a kopane le majoe...’ ... Virginia, Tikoe River at the thorn trees; ... Firijinia, Tikoe maokeng; Mount Machai fell down, people, Thab’Machai ea heleha, batho, It’s where a hundred men died; Ke moo ho shoeleng lekholo a batho; It’s I who remained, a cannibal-man. Ho setse na, lelimo la motho I remained, alone among that tribe Ke setse ke le moleketsana ke (of corpses); le mong; I was pulling corpses from under Ke ne ke hula litopo tlas’a rocks; mafika; People’s children they rotted, Bana ba batho ba bolile they stank, ba nkha, They already swarm with Ba se bile le ba nyeunya maggots l itsenyane. Please leave these mine stories Che litaba tsa mokoti le mpe le li tlohele.... Early Performing Arts 27

Difela clearly help to release work-related stress, and a sense of elated pride in the ability to do ‘men’s work’ is evident in these wry self-praises. Pleased as they are to be alive at the end of a working day, difela composers also express the insecurity and emotional suffering of men who toil for a pittance in the face of death, far from home and subject to the harsh authority of mine captains, shift bosses, and team leaders. The role of these compositions in expressing their deepest feelings, tempered by the ironic manner of delivery, is recognised by the miners in their choice of the term sefela. Sefela can mean simply ‘a song’ in Sotho, but the word has strong emotional connotations. In other contexts, it specifically refers to Christian hymns by virtue of their emotional value for African converts. With the institutionalisation of migrant labour as the principal means by which young men earn the money for bohali (bride wealth), livestock, and other necessities, a period of service at the mines became the expected sequel to, or even the replacement for, initiation as the rite of passage into male adulthood for peasant Sotho.57 Young men earn the respect of potential wives by ‘facing the white man’s machines’, and the adventure and manly comradeship of a period in the mines and urban locations are almost as important in establishing a sense of adulthood as the earnings they bring back home. Contract labour is often compared with military campaigning, since it involves discipline, the hardships of barracks life, uncertainty, violence, and danger in hostile territory. Young men praise their genealogies and villages, assert their toughness and courage, and formulate their concepts of ideal personality in difela recitations during their hours of leisure from the mines. Back at home, they entertain and instruct their younger brothers in the nature of manhood and the art of sefela through poetic accounts of their exploits. In this way, many youngsters learn difela before they go to the mines. The transmission of memorable stanzas from one generation of migrants to the next has preserved some texts and they have become part of the general corpus of Sotho verbal art. Young migrants make a virtue of the necessity of going to the mines, but the migratory labour system and the external forces which control it rob them of autonomy. Despite the hardships, it is only after years of labour that they can think of acquiring the houses, livestock, and other capital assets that bring status and security at home. In anthropologist Colin Murray’s famous contradiction, once the migrant has established a household, he must leave his family behind if it is to survive.58 Sometimes called dikwata (sing. kwata ; from English, ‘squad’ (gang) or possibly ‘squatter’; ‘rude, uncivilised’) in Lesotho, they bring the rough speech and behaviour of the mines and urban areas to their home towns and rural villages. Unable to identify with their place of work, they may feel alienated as well from the families who spend their earnings but do not share their experience. Among the many themes in sefela, the one through which composers most often assert their unique character and status is that of poetic excellence itself. Ultimately, the aesthetic values of sefela are the measure of a performer’s prestige among his peers. Sefela 28 In Township Tonight

is a competitive art, and today prizes are still awarded for imaginativeness, evocative metaphor, originality, and a smoothly flowing rhythmical delivery in contests on the mines. All this is directed towards realising oneself through the cultural interpretation of experience: the facts of life and history, the nature of being, events, and things. Many difela recount, in the context of the mines, the envy and fear other composers feel towards the poetic reputation of the performer: The miracles that I once did. I then went to Matlatsane (Klerksdorp). I came into the compound. I found men who are good poets; people known for their talk. These men because they knew me, they went to the induna of the compound. ‘Chief, know we have come to tell you, this boy is Lethetsa of Malimatle His home is at Koro-Koro yonder. This person you should not hire. If you can hire him we’ll go, the compound we can jump over.’ To show that they slandered me, they said, ‘He rapes, he steals, he is a witch, He loves the wives of the indunas …’

The sefela singer combines a number of purposes in evoking a landscape of personal memory at once lifelike and larger than life. One purpose is to spin out a kind of poetic and artistic autobiography, establishing an identity and social status as a proper Sotho: not just a nameless mineworker, but a man of culture and agriculture. Another is to make some sense, through the layering of chronological images, of the desperate, disparate history of the Sotho people, who lost much of their kingdom but saved their mountain nation. A third purpose is to somehow retain continuity between a country boyhood spent a mile high under a mountain sun and a mine manhood spent a mile deep under a mountain of rock. A fourth is to define what poetry and its mastery are in Sotho by performing it; to prove cultural knowledge by displaying it. A fifth is to somehow connect or unify all these dimensions of experience and expression into a comprehensible social landscape and sense of the self. Finally, the primary goal of sefela, and of migrancy itself in a sense, is self-transformation: heroic redefinition as a person capable of coping with the alien industrial world of the mine in the service of social values identified with Sotho: Early Performing Arts 29

‘Why are you sad Lethetsa of Malimatle?’ ‘I am going into the wilderness of the Republic [South Africa], There where people live through hard work.’ She said, ‘What makes you go to the devilish place?’ I said, ‘Your relatives disgust me girl, they want cattle for your bohali [bride wealth].’ She then insulted her parents, ‘Don’t go to the mine yonder, My fathers are mad, I am surprised.’ I, Mokoena, kept quiet and left. I left home at night When the cocks were crowing Further crowing the first cocks. The second ones crowed while I was on the way. The third ones when I was passing Phuthiatsana [River]. I entered Maseru at the town yonder, When the sun touched the mountains. B. A. Maseru; Mejametalana.59 Men, at 7 in the morning I was hired. Then at 8 cows were milked. At 9 schools were in At 10, poor me, I was taken to the doctor. It was ‘Mokose’, my companions. He put a metal on the chest here, I breathed twice, he was satisfied. ‘All right! child of Malimatle; There is nothing, my brother; Go and drive them at the mines yonder.’ Masimphane is a man, he works.60

Sotho sefela is a good example of how shared interpretations as well as specific conditions of labour define a situation such as migrancy through a set of values and collective images. Difela are created from traditional resources in the crucible of migrant labour. They reveal how people struggling to deal with social and economic coercion will carve out a sphere of personal autonomy within which they may truly act. The reinterpretation of new challenges through the reworking of existing cultural models is essential to social survival. Autonomy is also partly psychological and cultural. It requires the positive reassertion of one’s own human value, through forms like sefela, in opposition to identity as a mere labour unit within South Africa’s political economy. 30 In Township Tonight

If the environment of sefela is unmistakably modern, it must still represent modernity in a specifically African form. This recognition that global modernity is everywhere expressed through local cultural forms is one of the most important and intriguing discoveries in cultural studies, and something that sefela remains a vital example of today. The current chapter of this story is perhaps the most difficult to tell, because as I observed many years ago, the one thing that is worse for Sotho working men than a job as a mine migrant is the inability to find one. By the end of the 1980s, the number of Sotho workers on the South African mines had reached 125 000. With the 1990s, however, came a decline in the gold mining industry that has reduced those numbers by half, with the greatest losses in the less-skilled categories. Today, there are less than 60 000 Sotho employed directly by the mining companies, with possibly 12 000 more employed by independent labour contractors with drastically reduced pay and benefits. For each job lost, a family threatened by dire poverty is forced to find new ways of providing for its members in a regional economy that is shedding jobs in every industrial sector. The effects of the enforced shift to what economists politely call ‘alternative livelihoods’ on Sotho workers’ sung poetry are unclear. It is, however, certain that difela are still widely performed among those many thousands of Sotho men who work in the gold, coal, platinum, and rare metals mines of South Africa, and as well in new contexts attached to their current difficulties. So a Sotho migrant named Mopheme sang the following sefela for us in 1998 while waiting fruitlessly in Thabong township in the Free State Province, outside a private ‘advice centre’ that had promised to collect his severance pay for him from the mines: Greetings to the Mothers and Fathers Greetings, my parents I am not poetic, I am not speaking from a distance [from imagination] I talk out of a broken heart, a broken heart as I miss my homeland, Lesotho. For [Lesotho Prime Minister] Mokhehle and [South African President] Mandela are peaceful rulers, not dictators. Let me repeat my verses, for they are my poetic licence Basotho, lend me your ears and receive my poetic verses. We are here at Thabong, Listen what I am about to say: I am a country-travelling man. To you the Basotho, We came to Thabong next to Muthusi As the white man [Coplan] watches, my brothers ... my friends Let me say this: Early Performing Arts 31

The reason that makes me talk hurts me too much. I would not have came to Thabong, Thabong next to Muthusi; I was attracted and called by Dlamini [advice centre manager] To come and collect my money [severance payout], Evil money, Such money I have not seen. Even my father died without getting it. Wait and see that this money is evil. My friends, I see the money hiding by the graveside [of ] People who died years ago, my friends, my countrymen. What I see is the world coming to an end …

Mopheme and dozens of other laid-off workers had been waiting for weeks for their money in a squalid section of the township informally known as ‘Las Vegas’, a good name for a place where the desperate try their luck in vain. As the singer suspects, this mythical money is likely to bring more harm than good, because it leads the unemployed to waste their time and meagre resources in frustrated hope rather than get on with the search for new opportunities. But let us return to our central theme, and its earlier foundations. After the De Beers Company, founded by Cecil Rhodes and Barney Barnato, completed its takeover of Kimberley diamond operations in 1887, it consolidated the harsh system of ‘closed compounds’: overcrowded, unhealthy, and dilapidated labour camps designed to control workers’ movements and reduce the illicit diamond and liquor trades.61 Further restrictions regulated the coming and going of African contract workers as the basis of the migrant labour system, and the distinction between migrant and townsman became fundamental to the structure of urban African society. Performance styles such as oral poetry and dance-songs both expressed and created class consciousness and psychic resistance to such controls, which materialised in the African strikes against low wages and poor compound rules and conditions in 1890.62 In August 1892, migrant workers struck again on the gold mines of the East Rand, and eight died in the hail of police bullets that constituted the management’s response. The Africans working in the mines, brickyards, coalfields, and municipal services of Kimberley, all of whom lived under the closed compound system during the 1890s, spent their Sundays in traditional group dancing.63 Sometimes they played traditional instruments including Pedi (northern Sotho) or Bamalete (Tswana) dinaka (dithlaka) reed-pipe ensembles; the southern Sotho lesiba (a single-string instrument mouthresonated by a feather quill) used in rural pastures to entertain and direct cattle; and the Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi and Sotho–Tswana one-string gourd-resonated percussion bows, the umakhweyana, ugubhu, uhadi, ligubu, and thomo (sekgapa, segwana).64 32 In Township Tonight

The acknowledged leaders in early mine dancing were the Chopi from Mozambique, who based their vigorous, complex dances on the music of timbila (wooden xylophone) ensembles. Though only a few instruments were available at first, these ensembles eventually included between twenty and thirty players on xylophones of three sizes. They produced a rhythmically organised set of melodically independent parts, polyphonically accompanying the vocal alternation of soloist and chorus and supporting and directing the synchronised movements of the dancers.65 In the companion to their two superb musicological films of timbila orchestras, Andrew Tracey and Gei Zantzinger provide a brief description of the music these orchestras play as accompaniment for a large corps de danse of Chopi gold-mine workers. To briefly paraphrase: The performance is under the direction of the orchestra leader, who keeps close visual and musical contact with the dance leader, and both keep in touch with their team members by visual and auditory signals. The form on which the tune is based ‘repeats’ (always with some variation) cyclically after a fixed number of beats. A tune (ndando) or melodic movement is actually a body of ideas with its own musical qualities that a performer may assemble as his imagination dictates, limited by the need to collaborate with and support the other players and the dancers. To coordinate such a large ensemble, the beginning of each cycle is audibly marked, following the leader’s solo introduction, and various signals and cues are used to coordinate beginnings, endings, and orchestral calls and responses. The harmonic system varies, but normally employs a ‘root progression’ of polyphonic chords based on the tonic and the note above. Rattles keep up a steady ‘reference beat’, which the xylophonists play against by dividing this beat into smaller units. Xylophone rhythms are built up on the basis of these units, synchronised by the players’ auditory awareness of the reference beat, which is also the dancers’ point of coordination. From a distance one may hear a single combined tune, intimately wrapped around the vocal melody. Close up, one rather hears a swarming mass of cross rhythms and melodies as each player follows his own intuitive line … 66

Here is an old song lyric for the vocal part: The Sky thundered. Tell each other and your wives to come and listen to the mdano [selection] This mdano is for calling the English [mine bosses], the whites to come with their children [from Johannesburg] He has come, the ‘chief ’, our Sidodwane Come, our child, and listen to the mdano Sidodwane, you see, is [only] a chief ’s runner Early Performing Arts 33

Majaju [the colonial tax collector], you see, has become rich, He is growing a hump [like a fat bull]. 67

Apart from the traditional dancing imported from the rural homelands and performed on Sunday afternoons, music and dance among migrants was highly personal and stylistically varied. Influenced by coloured–Khoi, white, or African musicians, Sotho miners, for example, played the guitar or concertina in place of traditional solo instruments as accompaniment to the individualised singing and dancing of their friends. Nevertheless, in preference to ‘Vat Jou Goed en Trek, Ferreira’ (‘Take Your Gear and Trek, Ferreira’), and other Afrikaans dance tunes, they played music constructed according to pre-colonial Sotho principles.68 Here we can take the opportunity to review the structures and values – the ‘theory’ – fundamental to pre-colonial musics of southern Africa as they were and still are employed today, using them as a baseline in the historical analysis of urban stylistic change. Ethno-historical evidence shows stylistic and textual continuity in traditional music; its fundamental principles have not changed and have continued to operate in examples recorded over the past half-century. This persistence suggests their existence before that time. These principles apply equally to the structure of vocal and instrumental performance and, with some variation, to all the indigenous African musical cultures of the region. Whenever we hear music that has the distinctive character and feel of black South Africa, we can be sure that these principles and the aesthetic and modes of organisation they underlie are somewhere at work. Unlike Central and West Africa, communal music in the South was basically vocal, without drumming or other instrumental accompaniment, though solo performance often involved instruments, with or without voice. Communal vocal music always involved dancing or gestures or work movements by the singers themselves. There were at least two voice parts in antiphonal, leader-and-chorus relationship to each other, and the parts frequently overlapped, producing polyphony.69 An essential feature was that the two basic parts never entered or ended simultaneously. Additional countermelodies were often added, and the leading part was frequently varied through extemporisation.70 With single-stringed mouth-resonated instruments such as the Sotho lesiba and setolotolo, vocal melody could be simulated through the selective resonation of harmonics.71 On gourd-resonated musical bows such as the Zulu ugubhu,72 vocal chorus parts could be simulated, against which the player could sing an antiphonal leader’s part, and choral music was often composed in this way.73 So interrelated are instrumental and vocal traditions that it is uncertain which is more basic to traditional musical development. Kirby, a musical evolutionist, argued nearly half a century ago that pentatonic multipart structures in traditional South African choral music derived from the harmonics of stretched strings in instrumental 34 In Township Tonight

playing.74 Today, however, most ethnomusicologists would agree with Rycroft that the use of instruments among the Zulu and other Bantu-speaking South Africans is an indirect extension of the principles of vocal music.75 Sotho migrants produced neo-traditional music with the concertina, guitar, and voice through the polyphonic movement of parallel fourths and fifths within the structure of the Western ‘three chord’ (tonic-dominant-subdominant) system. Retired miners can recall this music, called focho (disorder), being played in Johannesburg as early as the decades preceding the First World War. The guitar and concertina, along with the autoharp, harmonica, and violin, were available in mine compound stores and rural trade stores long before that. These instruments became popular with Africans in part because they could achieve, as Rycroft put it, ‘an expression of indigenous principles which in some cases can be more effectively realised through these new media than could be done on the traditional instruments they have replaced’.76 The Sotho, for example, have favoured the concertina because it allows the performer to play two or three voice parts fully and at far greater volume than is possible with indigenous instruments. At the same time the players or the dancers are able to sing their own accompanying melodies. The sound of the concertina has a dense nature that resembles the broad sonority of a Sotho male voice chorus. It also enabled players to set the ostinato to a lively African or coloured-Afrikaans urban dance rhythm. Furthermore, since it did not require the use of the mouth or lungs, it was uniquely suited, as our story of the concertina under the migrant’s blanket illustrates, to self-accompaniment when circumstances did not allow for the customary communal music making. So did many a solitary migrant in the disused corners of concrete mining hostels recreate the supporting, full-bodied chorus of his absent village age-mates on his sonorous squash box. In the city in any case, rural traditional instruments had strongly negative associations and were quickly abandoned. True lovers of the haunting, evocative hues and tonalities of the indigenous one-string bows and reed pipes will nevertheless find this development regrettable. In the process of cultural transformation, ‘progress’ may bring as much loss as gain. As the performances of the late Princess Constance Magogo on the Zulu ugubhu and Madonsini on the Xhosa utiyane or umrubhe demonstrate so movingly, there is more to African music than mere complexity and familiarity of pitch and timbre. There is the sound of another, genuine home-grown life that does not echo the clangour of the mines, factories, and urban streets. This is the value that Afro-rock innovator Johnny Clegg recaptured in his own performances on the utiyane, that Cape Town jazz maestro Pops Mohamed seeks in playing Khoisan stringed instruments, and that multi-styled, multi-talented musicians’ musician Sipho Mabuse provides by including a master lesiba performer, Ntate Thabang, in his band.77 The development of ‘neo-traditional’ music occurred in the concertina compositions played by men of all African language communities. Veit Erlmann, drawing on the Early Performing Arts 35

musical ethnography of Johnny Clegg, explains how the instrument finally caught on with rural/migrant Zulu musicians during the First World War when the Italian ‘Bastari’ (Zulu: ibastari ) model became available. According to Clegg, the two most popular styles, isiChunu and isiNdwedwe (named after their districts of origin in Natal), both derived their structure from indigenous instruments played primarily by females. Transferred to the concertina, this women’s traditional instrumental music was appropriated by men, and made its way to the back streets and workers’ compounds of Durban and other towns.78 There, a category of specialists was employed to open the instrument and bend the sounding-reeds to produce the penta- and hexatonic scales of Zulu song. Denigrated by the Zulu Christian elite as ‘Satan’s handles’ (izihambo zika Satan), the ikhostini ultimately attained a kind of respectable traditionality in rural areas, and was not unknown as an accompaniment to communal singing at Christian weddings.79 Among Zulu migrants, the concertina was joined by the guitar and violin, and played in neo-traditional style with tunings adjusted to indigenous Zulu scales. The simple strumming (ukuvamba) and straight bowing styles of these instruments in the early days were intended as accompaniment to rural/migrant male dance competitions.80 By mid-century, however, neo-traditional stylings had advanced toward the superbly complex, multi-part picking techniques played by today’s Zulu maskandi guitar virtuosos. Many miners carried Western folk instruments back to the countryside as a prestigious emblem of urban experience. Migrants enjoyed performing their new dances and instrumental music while at home, intensifying urban influence on rural performance culture. These ‘trade-store’ instruments achieved such wide distribution among Africans, who in most other ways had not adopted Western culture or religion, that by the early 1900s guitars, concertinas, autoharps, and harmonicas came to be considered fully ‘traditional’ – part of the ‘tribal’ or ‘heathen’ musical heritage. This explains why African Christians began to avoid them. Conversely, while romanticists (like myself!) argue that melodic lines and polyrhythms are less clearly articulated and tonal contrasts less subtle on Western instruments, the identification of these instruments with urban culture and status, and their flexibility for creating and performing syncretic styles and for providing lively music for city dances, made their adoption inevitable. Furthermore, Sotho musicians are highly conscious of the contrasting properties of various instruments. They point out that their favourite instrument today, the piano-accordion (Sotho: koriana), not only provides a larger sound but also allows for greater melodic and tonal variety and solo improvisation than does the concertina, and is almost as portable. Xhosa-speaking Mpondo miners were present in large numbers in Kimberley, where they adapted their young male initiates’ (amakwenkwe) dances to the space and time restrictions of compound recreation as organised by the management. Like the 36 In Township Tonight

Sotho, they developed an affinity for the concertina. New concertina dances integrated rhythms and steps developed by migrants in urban areas into a framework of traditional dances and spread throughout the Cape African reserves.81 With few indigenous instrumental traditions of their own (Xhosa men played no drums, for example), Cape migrants were most strongly influenced by the music that their ‘dressed’ fellow Xhosaspeakers were making in the city’s canteens and dance halls. Mpondo players depended more on European and Cape coloured folk rhythms and melodies than the Sotho. Nevertheless, the latter were by no means immune to Afrikaans vastrap rhythms, Cape melodies, and the ‘three chord vamp’ that have since become characteristic of black music in South Africa. Both citified performers and labour migrants transformed and combined traditional and foreign musical materials in response to changed conditions and expressive needs. Western instruments not only provided new means and possibilities for the elaboration of traditional music principles, but also offered a medium for the creation of new musical forms and practices as part of the process of developing urban African cultural models through performance. During the later 1800s, Xhosa musicians predominated in the urban dance halls and mission schools, where they led the development of African hymnody, secular choral music, and Westernised social dancing. Because of the nearness of the Xhosa-speaking chiefdoms to the expanding European settlement of the eastern Cape, these peoples experienced military defeat, missionisation, and wage labour beginning in the early 1800s. In addition, cosmopolitan Cape Town and the growing towns of the eastern Cape gave Xhosa-speakers a head start in the process of westernisation that eventually affected all black South Africans to some degree. Many Cape Africans who travelled to the diamond and gold fields already possessed an acculturated background that enabled them to assume a special position of leadership among urbanising Africans. Mission life and Christian education greatly influenced the adjustment of this class of black people to city life. The social background of early Cape Nguni immigrants to Kimberley and Johannesburg illustrates the impact of European missionisation on African performance culture. Believing that the wholesale conversion of entire clans and nations was necessary to stamp out ‘heathen’ customs and ideas, missionaries were dismayed to discover that Christianity had little appeal for people firmly located in strong traditional communities.82 Forced to accept such individual converts as they could find, evangelists came to view the destruction of African cultural institutions, especially in the eastern Cape and Transkei, as necessary to their success. The irony of this attitude was not lost on some missionaries; the Reverend Mr Barret reported in 1871 that among Africans, ‘the only people inclined to be Christians are those who despair of their own nation ever becoming anything by itself ’.83 By this time, mission communities were well established throughout the eastern Cape and Transkei, swollen by members of homeless Nguni-speaking clans pushed into Early Performing Arts 37

Xhosa country by European expansionism from the southwest and African military adventurism from the east, beginning in the 1820s. Chief among these were the Mfengu or Fingos, an amalgam of refugees rather than a distinct group, who initially look refuge among the Gcaleka and other powerful Xhosa clans. The missionaries’ offer of free land and cattle attracted many refugees into communities that became a buffer and a source of ‘native levies’ for the British in their struggle against powerful independent African chieftaincies as far north as the Vaal River. In the far south, a group of Mfengu workers founded the African community in Cape Town when the colonial government settled them there in the 1830s.84 Missionary efforts in the Cape and the Transkei concentrated on education. The intention was to produce African teachers and evangelists who would serve the expanding mission field and also teach ‘useful arts’ of printing and building. This training of disciples would then actively spread the gospel along with European cultural values. Joined by solitary wandering blacks from other areas and a variety of outcasts from local Xhosa communities, the Mfengu converts paid for their economic and social security with compulsory participation in an alien way of life, isolated from the surrounding traditional communities. Establishing their own courts, mission churches penalised participation in ‘revolting’ traditional communal dances, beer drinks, feasts, and ‘other customs inconsistent with Christianity’, which were their only means of maintaining social contact and reciprocal obligations with non-Christian kinsmen.85 Expulsion from the stations for such participation was frequent, and some who could not accept the restrictions left voluntarily. Those who remained soon found out that their sacrifices were not without rewards. Africans taken from the ranks of refugees, the disinherited, and marginals of various kinds could rise to leadership positions of considerable influence in Christian communities. In a way the effect of this ‘last shall be first’ reversal of fortune can still be seen. Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and among the most influential Christian leaders in the world, is of Mfengu descent. The relationship of mission stations to the colonial administration led to further changes in the role of the African Christians in Cape society as a whole. In addition to material gains, collaboration with the colonial power led them to adopt Western productive methods and ideas. With the help of missionaries and white employers, the converts became the core of an emerging class of prosperous small-scale farmers. The missionary ideal was to reconstruct African society in ways that would secure it to the British colonial economy, an ideal shared by the British Governor, George Grey, during the 1850s and 1860s.86 The development of Kimberley led to the accelerated growth of already prosperous centres in the eastern Cape, such as Queenstown and Kingwilliamstown. Located close to newly established ‘native reserves’, these towns involved thousands of Africans in the money economy of transport riding, small 38 In Township Tonight

trades, railway construction, and wool and leather industries. Between 1870 and 1890, independent African Christian farmers became an influential, economically significant social group. African society in the Cape was already beginning to develop patterns of social stratification based on the degree of westernisation and urbanisation.87 These patterns, which have retained much of their original outline ever since (it was this eastern Cape black elite that provided the initial core of African nationalist leadership), derive from the socio-economic consequences of Cape Nguni missionisation, which made mission stations islands of acculturation in a traditional sea, and led to the opposition of traditional (‘red’) and Christian, educated (‘school’) categories of Xhosa-speakers, in the eastern Cape and throughout South Africa.88 As sources of social disruption and change, new wealth, and technological change, mission stations presented a challenge to the already weakened pre-colonial Xhosa societies. Non-Christians feared church communities as ‘the abode of witches’, an impression reinforced by the frequency with which people accused of witchcraft fled to them for refuge.89 Yet, with their power and their resources diminishing, the chiefs were losing followers to the missionaries, who appeared willing to help Africans cope successfully with new social realities. To be fair, of course, many missionaries (black as well as white), sincere in their humanistic beliefs, practised the Christian charity and upliftment they preached, and earned the lasting praise of the increasingly impoverished and dispossessed communities to which they ministered. Increasingly insecure Cape Africans had to choose between the reduced but familiar parameters of pre-colonial society and the expanding but uncertain opportunities offered within the rapidly expanding colonial sphere. Neither option proved very rewarding. Pastoral Xhosa who had lost much of their land to the whites were often forced to supplement their subsistence economy with temporary wage labour. Westernising Africans found that once the military threat to white settlements from traditional chiefdoms was gone, only the missionaries retained any interest in helping to create an African middle class. The colonists preferred tractable, traditionalist ‘red’ Xhosas and denied ‘mission boys’ the opportunities for which they had become prepared. White farmers and businessmen considered themselves entitled to African labour and felt threatened by Africans who worked independently in agriculture and trade. The settlers’ efforts to eliminate black competition and obtain labour by forcing independent African peasants into tenant, migrant and wage labour were greatly aided by the droughts and wars of the late nineteenth century. From 1890 to 1913 (the year of the infamous Land Act), the colonial state itself intervened to further the goals of the settlers and undermine African self-sufficiency in the Cape.90 In response, the emerging Cape African middle class placed its hopes for increased social mobility on education rather than on economic enterprise.91 In the sixty years following the establishment of the first Presbyterian mission at Lovedale in 1824, no fewer than Early Performing Arts 39

fourteen missionary educational institutions were founded in the Cape and Transkei to keep pace with the demand.92 Culture follows power. With the foundations of indigenous institutions undermined, and supports of pre-colonial society removed, mission Africans of the nineteenth century focused their drive for advancement on becoming ‘civilised’: on proving themselves worthy of equal participation with whites in the power structure of the Cape Colony. Those who chose westernisation were immediately made aware of their social distance from whites, and for them, acculturation became part of the struggle for recognition and legal rights. The role of performance in this struggle influenced the complex transformation of African expressive culture and introduced a powerful dynamism into the processes of stylistic development. Such development was driven by participants’ attempts to use performance to articulate their identities, aspirations and interpretations of experience: to gain some cognitive grasp and direction of a life spinning out of their control. Cape Africans who had been exposed to mission education regarded westernisation as an indispensable cultural strategy for retaining or re-establishing fields of agency within colonial society. The role of acculturation in the quest for some form of colonial ‘citizenship’ led mission Africans to distance themselves socially from other Africans, and to adopt local features of European culture in line with the positive expressive as well as practical value they so rapidly acquired. Having outlined the changing spheres of political relations that restructured the terms of cultural creativity, we can return to a description of the forms and principles of performance with which African performers in various social fields were working. As with neighbouring peoples, highly organised unaccompanied dance-song is the basis of indigenous Nguni (Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi) and Sotho–Tswana music.93 Indeed the Sotho word for music, mmino, is derived from the verb ho bina, ‘to sing’. Occasions for dance-song include virtually every event of social significance, such as ceremonies for newborn children, puberty and age-grade initiations, hunting, courting, ancestral sacrifices, weddings, travel, training and preparation for battle, and laying the dead to rest.94 Group distinctiveness and competition as well as solidarity are manifested and reinforced through dance-songs at times when the gain, transition, or loss of its members is celebrated or mourned. Important structural features of Nguni songs include the staggered entry of at least two voice parts (one solo, one choral) in a calland-response relation to one another. Frequent overlapping produces an intentional polyphony, and the staggered entry and ending points of the parts remain fixed in relation to each other through numerous cyclical repetitions, which rule out complete collective cadences.95 The fundamental principle is not movement among harmonic chords or their tonal elements, but among polyphonic bass ‘root progressions’ created by the relations among layered voices or lines of melody. Further, since southern 40 In Township Tonight

Bantu languages incorporate systems of semantic tone – the pitch sequence of syllables determines their meaning – melodic progression varies with lyrical composition in a synergy of sound and sense I have elsewhere termed ‘auriture’.96 Most missionaries were culturally unequipped to recognise or appreciate the subtle complex organisation underlying the alien, random-seeming simplicities of indigenous song. Moreover, their concern was to eradicate music associated with pagan dancing, beer drinking, and ritual. They adopted nothing from indigenous culture in their African hymns except the vernacular language. As a more perceptive and sympathetic missionary put it, ‘much of the early hymn-making for the Christian church in Africa was an unhappy yoking of British and American tunes to badly translated chunks of unidiomatic vernacular prose, clipped into the right number of syllables to fit a line’.97 While part-singing is common to both African and European music, ‘European hymnody is constructed on a four-part basis in which a dominating melodic line prescribes harmonization. This is totally at variance with the Bantu technique of harmonization in which a melody is freely embellished and intensified by adding voice parts … Our major-minor concept, tonality, and modulation were equally foreign to the Bantu.’98 The separation of African converts from the non-Christian community, combined with the discontinuities between African and European musical systems, led to the compartmentalisation of African church and indigenous musical idioms. Other musical and social and political factors, however, worked towards breaking down this isolation and producing vibrant new traditions of syncretic choral music in southern Africa. Among the musical factors were the elaborateness of group vocal traditions, and more especially, the established tradition of singing in parts. Sympathetic but naively ethnocentric nineteenth-century observers commented frequently upon the importance of part structure in both traditional and Christian African choral music. Holden said of traditional vocalists that ‘although they have no scientific rules by which to conduct their singing processes, yet they are not ignorant of parts’.99 William Scully was more perceptive: ‘Many of the Native songs and chants are very intricate compositions, in which the different parts are adjusted to each other with ingenious nicety. … such part songs are probably extremely old, and have reached their present development very gradually.’100 ‘When they become Christian, and are taught the rules of music and singing,’ Holden continued, ‘their performances are of the very first order in vocal song. They have a fine ear for music, keep the most exact time, and take their parts with unvarying correctness.’101 Scully, too, remarked, ‘The mission-trained Native … picks up part music with strange facility.’102 Forbidden to perform the dances and dance-songs that had been indispensable to organised social interaction in the traditional community, mission Africans channelled their desire for musical socialising into Christian congregational singing. The violation of the proper tone–tune relationship and the introduction of patterns of European Early Performing Arts 41

accentuation that altered syllabic stress in Xhosa song were ‘at first bitterly resented by thoughtful converts … but in time became accepted by their successors’.103 Their education promised to raise them to the position of an African elite, so nineteenthcentury converts were reluctant to voice their objections to the ‘continual violence … done to the language in almost every celebration of Zion’s songs’.104 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, a small but influential group of mission cultural leaders began to question the wisdom of abandoning the heritage they shared with all Africans – now seen, thanks to colonial racism, as a unitary category; a ‘people’ – in favour of a poorly integrated westernism whose benefits were doubtful in the context of South African white supremacy. Typical of this leadership was the Reverend Tiyo Soga, educated at Lovedale and in Scotland; the first African to be ordained a minister of the Presbyterian Church in South Africa. Though the hymns he composed in the late 1850s employed Scottish church melodies, his collections of Xhosa fables, legends, praise songs, genealogies, and customs did much to prevent oral traditions from going unrecorded.105 Writing with a new awareness born of Western education, Soga and his successor, the Reverend William Gqoba, began to reassess the value of the Christian way of life for Africans. In articles and lengthy poetic dialogues published in the Lovedale paper Isigidimi sama Xhosa (‘Xhosa Messenger’; at that time translated as Kaffir Express), which he edited from 1884 to 1888, Gqoba debated the question of whether, like Esau, the Christian African had traded the birthright of his cultural heritage for a Western pottage of unattainable status, lifestyle, and broken promises. Certainly conversion was not bringing skilled jobs, good wages, or social acceptance; the laws enforcing racial discrimination applied equally to Christian and traditional Africans.106 Other writers for the paper emphasised the discrepancy between Christian teachings and white behaviour and pleaded for a new nationalistic solidarity among blacks. By the 1880s, many mission-school Africans were beginning to believe that a satisfying self-image could not be built entirely on adopted European models. They looked instead for a distinctively African concept of civilisation. With political, social, and economic mobility so sharply restricted, cultural attainment, including performance, became a major means of proving that a new African culture, clearly separate from the ‘barbaric’ and ‘heathen’ past, could develop. Syncretic African choral music became a vital resource in the African Christian process of autonomous cultural self-reformulation. Among the many Xhosa Christians who tried their hand at musical composition in the later nineteenth century, John Knox Bokwe of Lovedale is by far the outstanding figure. Bokwe was disturbed by the way in which European hymnody destroyed not only the poetic beauty but also the intelligibility of Xhosa. He attempted in some of his works to combine traditional melody, proper tone–tune 42 In Township Tonight

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III Give your love to Africa! they are brothers all, Who, by sin and slavery, long were held in thrall. Let the white man love the black; and, when time is past, In our Father’s home above all shall meet at last. Chorus — Tell the love of Jesus, &c. IV Give support to Africa! has not British gold Been the gain of tears and blood, when the slaves were sold? Let us send the Gospel back, since for all their need, Those whom Jesus Christ makes free, shall be free indeed. Chorus — Tell the love of Jesus, &c. 44 In Township Tonight

relationships, and Xhosa patterns of accentuation with four-part harmony and the use of diatonic triads.107 Though this effort caused ‘linguistic distortions in other directions’,108 his hymns were the first good Xhosa verse set to music.109 Most important, Bokwe’s works contained African as well as Christian musical features. A pioneer in the field of secular as well as religious African choral composition, he became the first Xhosa musician to acquire fame, as church and school choirs begged Lovedale Press for copies of his songs. Under the influence of men such as Soga and Gqoba, Bokwe came to recognise the ministry as the most powerful platform for expressing African social aspirations. In 1892, at the age of thirty-seven, he went to Scotland for training as a Presbyterian minister. There he performed his own compositions in a series of highly successful private recitals that helped raise funds for the Free Church of Scotland in South Africa and aroused sympathy for the plight of African Christians in the Cape Colony. Among the original works he performed was the political hymn, ‘Plea for Africa’ (with music in the style of Scottish hymnody and lyrics by an unidentified ‘Glasgow Lady’). Bokwe gave powerful musical support to the cultural nationalism of mission intellectuals, but he was not the first Xhosa musician to compose in the service of African Christianity. In 1816 a minor Ngqika Xhosa chief named Ntsikana Gaba experienced a revelation and converted to Christianity, on his own inspiration, legend has it, but he may have been in contact with the Reverend J. Williams of the London Missionary Society’s Kat River station. An inspired singer, dancer, diviner, and charismatic religious leader, Ntsikana became the first known ‘Bantu prophet’, gathering about him a strong personal following that included the father of Tiyo Soga and the grandparents of John Bokwe. Ntsikana learned to read, and his followers gave up traditional dance and body decoration and were the first Cape Africans to promote literacy among their own people.110 Ntsikana’s movement involved a restructuring of traditional Xhosa religion rather than a radical break with it. His spiritual conversion reflected the need to fuse Xhosa belief with Christianity in order to construct a worldview that could accommodate military defeat and colonisation by Europeans. Through the efforts of his followers, Christianity came to be viewed by many Xhosa as an African religion brought by Ntsikana, not by missionaries.111 Before his death in 1821, Ntsikana composed hymns for the call to prayer and congregational singing, and four of these have survived despite African unfamiliarity with any form of musical notation at that time. Professor David Dargie claims that Ntsikana’s ‘Great Hymn’ was written down in 1822, but does not say by whom.112 After his passing, Ntsikana’s congregation moved to Tyhume near Alice, soon to see the founding of Lovedale College for Africans and the children of white missionaries. Oral transmission, rather than written transcription, kept Ntsikana’s hymns alive Early Performing Arts 45

among Xhosa for most of the nineteenth century. Ntsikana’s ‘Ulo Tixo Mkulu’ (‘Thou Great God’) was published in Isigidimi sama Xhosa in 1876. To this hymn were added three more of Ntsikana’s songs, transcribed by Bokwe in 1884 and published in 1914 in his biography of Ntsikana.113 He wrote them all in the simplified Curwin tonic solfa system of notation introduced into South Africa by a London missionary, Christopher Birkett, at Fort Beaufort in 1855.114 One of these songs is pentatonic and three are hexatonic; all voices have parallel movement, and the melodies are recognisably Xhosa. The interest of mission Xhosa in Ntsikana’s religious ideas and practices was part of their effort to balance the relative value of traditional and Western culture for a new Christian African society. Ntsikana’s influence is far from forgotten. As Professor David Dargie notes: ‘Ntsikana’s hymn has long had a very special significance as a national song to the Xhosa people. In 1909 Ntsikana was chosen by a meeting of the Xhosa nation as a national hero – even before great chiefs such as Sarhili, Hintsa, Sandile’.115 Few other composers used traditional African features in their hymns, and transmission through aural tradition has resulted in interesting stylistic variations in the way the hymn is performed in various communities. While Ntsikana’s hymns can be found in the hymnals of a wide variety of Xhosa churches, today Xhosa generally consider them traditional songs. Tonic solfa notation was rapidly becoming the basis of musical education among African choirs in the last half of the nineteenth century. This tended to enforce conformity to European hymnody. Unfortunately, tonic solfa had no way of indicating modulation or key shifts within a piece, and so cannot be used to teach written music played on Western instruments. Africans who wished to learn piano or organ had to learn staff notation from European and coloured music masters in the educational centres of the eastern Cape and Transkei. Nevertheless, the very sketchiness of tonic solfa gave it some flexibility. With so much room for interpretation, African melodies, part structures, and performance practices inevitably crept into African choral singing, especially in the hymns of African churches that seceded from European missions. The first independent movement was the Xhosa nationalist Nehemiah Tile’s Thembu Church, begun in 1884.116 Converts who left the mission stations to set up Christian farm communities of their own revitalised traditional musical practices as part of their new style of African communal life.117 Although European hymnals were popular with African congregations, sheet music was hard to come by. Many songs were transmitted aurally at choir concerts and competitions and rehearsed without the aid of written scores. This method of learning was very much in keeping with pre-colonial modes of transmission, which relied upon the imitation of concrete musical activities perceived as a gestalt, a complex whole rather than abstract principles or distinctive elements or parts. The late 46 In Township Tonight

Ulo Tixo omkulu, ngosezulwini; He, is the Great God, Who is in heaven. Thou art Thou, Shield of truth. Ungu Wena-wena Kaka lenyaniso. Thou art Thou, Stronghold of truth. Ungu Wena-wena Nqaba yenyaniso. Thou art Thou, Thicket of truth. Ungu Wena-wena HIati lenyaniso. Ungu Wena-wen ‘uhlel’enyangwaneni. Thou art Thou Who dwellest in the highest. Ulo dal’ ubom, wadala pezulu. He, Who created life (below), created (life) above. Lo Mdal’ owadala wadala izulu. That Creator Who created, created heaven. Lo Menzi wenkwenkwezi noZilimela; This maker of the stars, and the Pleiades. A star flashed forth, it was telling us. Yabinza inkwenkwezi, isixelela. Lo Menzi wemfaman’ uzenza ngabom? The Maker of the blind, does He not make them of purpose? The trumpet sounded, it has called us. Lateta ixilongo lisibizile. As for His chase He hunteth, for souls. Ulonqin’ izingela imipefumlo. Ulohlanganis’ imihiamb’ eyalanayo. He, Who amalgamates flocks rejecting each other. He, the Leader, Who has led us Ulomkokeli wasikokela tina. He, Whose great mantle, we do put it on. Ulengub’ inkul’ esiyambata tina. Those hands of Thine they are wounded. Ozandia Zako zinamanxeba Wena. Early Performing Arts 47

Onyawo Zako zinamanxeba Wena. Ugazi Lako limrolo yinina? Ugazi Lako lipalalele tina. Lemali enkulu-na siyibizile? Lomzi Wako-na-na siwubizile?

Those feet of Thine, they are wounded. Thy blood, why is it streaming? Thy blood, it was shed for us. This great price, have we called for it? This home of Thine, have we called for it?

Translated into English, the exclamation ‘Sele!’ is accepted as equivalent to ‘Ahoy!’ while the chiming of ‘A-hom’ is a softer imitation of ‘Ding-dong’. The words of ‘Ntsikana’s Bell’ may be thus rendered: Verse 1

48 In Township Tonight

Sele! Sele! Ahom, ahom, ahom! Come hearken, come hearken the Word of the Lord. Ahom, ahom, ahom, ahom, ahom.

Sotho composer Woodruff Buti recalled school concerts before the turn of the century that presented traditional African songs in Western choral style, along with African hymns and popular British and American songs of the day. When Christian Xhosa and Mfengu came to Kimberley and Johannesburg during the late nineteenth century, they brought with them not only European sacred and secular songs, but also materials and procedures for creating a distinctively African choral music. The English settlers in the Cape made an enduring contribution to Cape Nguni musical culture in the form of the church organ and the small harmonium, essential pieces of colonial parlour furniture in the Victorian era. Westernised Africans, in their desire for conspicuous symbols of civilisation, often gave the harmonium priority over other European domestic ‘necessities’. In Xhosa Christian homes, musical evenings took the place of traditional beer-drinks. In the childhood home of composer Ben Tyamzashe, the harmonium accompanied traditional songs sung in the diatonic scale, such as ‘Watsh’uhomyayi’ and ‘Abafan’ bas’ Engqushwa’, as well as English songs and Xhosa hymns.118 The tradition of keyboard playing remains strong among Cape Africans, and in the field of jazz and popular music. Cape pianists are still regarded as the most technically skilled. Missionaries organised Christian brass bands among nearly all the African peoples of South Africa, and the Cape Africans may have produced some of the best-trained players.119 Independent African bands sprang up in Transvaal towns, but bands in the Cape and Transkei were almost always attached to missions where their members acquired musical literacy and a European repertoire. Brass band music among the Xhosa must be considered among the products of British influence, along with hymns, Victorian ‘salon’ music and popular song, all of which Cape Africans brought to Kimberley and Johannesburg. Mission Africans, mostly Cape Nguni, created an urban identity and social order in Kimberley during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Based primarily on the model of the upper level of British colonial society, African middle-class society combined nationalism with Victorian values. One of the most important contributors to this model of African Christian civilisation was the performance culture of black America, transmitted directly by visiting black American performers or indirectly by Cape coloureds and whites. By the later nineteenth century, coloured performers had been drawing upon international folk and popular music for two centuries. They were greatly impressed by the music and dance styles of the black North American and West Indian sailors, adventurers and minstrel troupes who displayed their talents in Cape Town.120 In America, stage minstrelsy began with white performers who wore blackface makeup and caricatured the culture of slaves and free African-Americans.121 The publication of a number of minstrel songs, including Thomas Rice’s classic, ‘Jim Crow’ (c. 1828), by the Cape Town weekly Die Verzamelaar (‘The Collector’) helped to popularise Early Performing Arts 49

them in the Colony. In 1848, a troupe called Joe Brown’s Band of Brothers became, according to R. W. Murray, ‘the first band of vocalists who gave South Africa a taste for nigger part singing’.122 In the same year, white South Africans who had recently seen performances in London of the ‘refined’ American company, the Ethiopian Serenaders, began a local company of the same name.123 In 1862, the white performers of the Harvey-Leslie Christy Minstrels, who combined lively dancing and earthy humour with concert pieces and sentimental ballads, toured South Africa to such acclaim that minstrelsy became a permanent part of the country’s entertainment for the rest of the century.124 While local oral tradition has it that it was the street minstrel marches of the African-American Dante Brothers performed during Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations in Cape Town in 1887 that led to the origination of the famous Cape Coon Carnival, the Christy Minstrels must rather be credited as the original influence for this tradition.125 For many years, Malay serenaders had strolled about Cape Town in the evening singing Afrikaans love songs.126 Both white and non-Malay coloured amateur performers added to this tradition by singing ‘Christy minstrel’ songs in the streets during the latter half of the century.127 The degree to which black people were aware of or took interest in these performers is uncertain. Local white amateur minstrel troupes did spring up in towns throughout the country, and it seems that the rattling bones (Tswana: marapo ; Zulu: amathambo) used as rhythm instruments by both rural and early urban Africans were taken from the minstrels.128 It was African-American minstrels, however, who had the greatest influence on black South Africans at the end of the nineteenth century, in particular on coloured people and the nascent African middle class. From the mid-1870s, black American minstrelsy had taken a different direction from that of white blackface performers. With the international success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who performed spirituals in a Western classical style, black minstrel shows increasingly featured black religious music of the southern United States. The word ‘jubilee’, significant in the Bible as the year when slaves were to be freed (Leviticus 25:10), began to appear in the names of black troupes, both minstrel and non-minstrel. Those companies performing sacred concerts rather than minstrel shows, such as the Louisiana Jubilee Singers, played minstrel favourites such as ‘Carve Dat Possum’ and Stephen Foster songs. James Bland, the greatest of all black minstrel songwriters, also composed many spirituals. By the 1880s, spirituals were used to open and close most black minstrel shows, and the successful Georgia Minstrels made spirituals and ‘plantation’ culture a fixture of nearly all forms of black stage performance.129 Queen Victoria’s fiftieth jubilee brought both local and visiting minstrel-style troupes into the streets of Cape Town, but it was rather the tours of McAdoo’s Virginia Jubilee Singers that brought contemporary African-American light opera, ragtime, and early ‘vaudeville’ (as distinct from ‘minstrel’) performance styles to South 50 In Township Tonight

Africa.130 In 1889, Orpheus M. McAdoo, who had attended Hampton Institute in Virginia, drew together some performers from Frederick Loudin’s famous Fisk Jubilee Singers, of which McAdoo had been an original member, to form the Virginia Jubilee Singers.131 Between 1890 and 1898, the troupe toured South Africa four separate times, coinciding with the emergence of a worldwide interest in black musical stage entertainment. From France to Australia to South Africa, African-American singers, dancers, and comedians, as well as white Americans in blackface, were marketing this new genre of popular culture. The Virginia Jubilee Singers performed harmonic, four-part singing based on a repertoire of spirituals and songs of uplift.132 Although the form of singing that the Jubilee Singers introduced was new to South Africa, it contained elements of call-and-response and rhythmic patterns that could be musically mapped onto indigenous African tunes. Their shows had concert party songs, AfricanAmerican folksongs, spirituals, instrumental music, ‘Grand Opera’, juggling, jokes and comic sketches, solo dancing, and cakewalks. Their performances appealed to whites as well as blacks, who could attend the same shows at that time, and inspired a good deal of local imitation.133 McAdoo’s company made a lasting impression on all racial groups in South Africa, and several of the company’s members settled permanently in the country. Apparently the discrimination they experienced seemed no worse than late nineteenth-century segregation in the United States, or perhaps, like so many Americans, they could not end their peculiar love affair with South Africa. Along with McAdoo’s company, the Hampton Jubilee Singers visited the country as well in 1890.134 McAdoo’s last controversial tour overlapped with the beginning of the Boer War, the arrival of an influx of black and white American Protestant missionaries, and the stirring of a heightened sense of political consciousness among South Africa’s emerging black elite of clerks, teachers, and professionals. The cultural persona and ‘up (very far!) from slavery’ narrative of self-improvement and race pride of the Virginia Jubilee Singers echoed the social aspirations of this social stratum, some of whom, including African journalist and politician John Tengo Jabavu, attended Orpheus McAdoo’s early performances in the eastern Cape. McAdoo’s troupe caused civil unrest when he housed them at whites-only hotels, making a claim for honorary European status and challenging South African racial conventions.135 In Cape Town, thousands of working-class coloured men joined performance clubs in the wake of McAdoo’s visits. Beginning around that time, these clubs organised parades through the streets of the city every New Year in the famous Cape Coon Carnival, dressed as blackface minstrels and singing American Negro songs and Afrikaans moppies (comic songs) to the accompaniment of Khoi-style ghomma drums, whistles, guitars, tambourines, and banjos. Highly competitive, these clubs still reflect their mixed coloured–Afrikaans–Malay–American heritage in costume and song. Club names – Fabulous Orange Plantation Minstrels, Meadow Cottonfield Jazz Singers – Early Performing Arts 51

illustrate how century-old images of black American entertainment styles have become a permanent part of working-class coloured performance culture. Though the churchoriented, middle-class coloured people would not march with the ‘coon’ clubs, they had certainly flocked to the polished concert performances of McAdoo’s male quartets and soloists at Cape Town’s music halls, such as the old Darling Street Opera House. African-American influence spread and deepened among black South Africans as Cape coloured artisans, teachers, farmers, and labourers headed north and east in the wake of white settlers in the 1800s. The coloureds brought with them their western Cape culture and, later, new traditions of minstrel and variety entertainment. In the growing towns of the Cape, Transkei, Basutoland, Orange Free State, and Natal, coloured performers entertained Africans with their string bands, ‘coon’ vocal groups, and variety routines, usually at entertainments called ‘socials’. Cape mission schools such as Lovedale and Healdtown (where Nelson Mandela was to attend) had many coloured as well as African students. Zonnebloem and a few other schools in Cape Town enrolled white children as well. In these schools, African students began to form their own groups of ‘coons’: smartly dressed vocal quartets and string bands that became a fixture of student variety concerts. Their repertoire favoured black American and English songs plus African choral compositions and arrangements of traditional tunes. Afrikaans songs and instrumental accompaniments were regarded as provincial and ‘uncultured’ by educated Africans, for whom the term ‘coons’ became synonymous with African-Americanised choral and variety performers in evening dress. The same conditions of economic depression, cattle disease, drought, and legal discrimination that led struggling African commercial farmers and tradesmen to invest in schooling for their children drove many educated Xhosa and Mfengu in search of new opportunities.136 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Kimberley was the ‘focal point for the ambitions and aspirations of hundreds of Africans ... who shared common ideas, values, and experiences as a result of education at the hands of Christian missionaries’.137 Most of these people, who came from Cape schools or local institutions such as Kimberley’s Lyndhurst Road Methodist School, worked as teachers, clerks, or civil servants in the colonial administration. Seeking incorporation into colonial society, they became westernised in the hope that equality before the law, and other principles of British imperial rule, would protect them from the oppressive racial policies advocated by local Afrikaner and British settlers. Helping to build values and social cohesion among Kimberley’s African mission graduates was a busy social life based in churches, clubs, and other associations. Organisations created a sense of class and community among middle-class Africans and gave aid and acceptance to new arrivals. Most prominent was the South Africans Improvement Society, created to cultivate the public use of English among Africans by sponsoring readings, lectures, displays of elocution, and debates among members.138 52 In Township Tonight

Tied to one another in so many ways, Kimberley’s middle-class Africans often intermarried without regard to ethnic or regional background. So was Tswana- (and Dutch- and English-) speaking Sol Plaatje, later the first secretary general of the African National Congress, able to win the hand of the daughter of Xhosa civil servant and socialite Isaiah Bud-Mbelle. The city became a centre of cultural mixture among the core of an emerging national African elite.139 Music became a bond of interest and association and a means of expressing social aspiration. Concerts by mission-trained performers were highlights of elite African social life. Almost every school prize-giving, organisation meeting, or other occasion included musical entertainment. Music was a potent force in the shaping of African middle-class identity, and it featured a blend of African, African-American, and European influences. Apart from church hymns, westernised African choral songs, and English secular choir pieces, the most important musical influence was McAdoo’s Virginia Jubilee Singers. Among those who resigned from the troupe to reside in Kimberley was the black American pianist Will P. Thompson. With Isaiah Bud-Mbelle, he organised and performed in several amateur minstrel companies composed of local middle-class coloureds and Africans. One of these companies, the Diamond Minstrels, performed ‘the comic songs and “wheezes” of Bones and Thambo, Stephen Foster songs, and “The Laughing Coon,”’ accompanied by piano, banjo, and other instruments, in honour of Queen Victoria’s seventy-fifth birthday.140 Another informal group, the Balmoral Amateur Minstrels, included local white performers in addition to Thompson, Africans and coloureds.141 Ordinary performances by educated Africans already featured minstrel material. A concert in Kimberley in July 1892 offered James Bland’s ‘Oh Dem Golden Slippers!’ along with English songs, dramatic sketches, an ‘acting dance’, and a comic musical comment on the growing division between permanently urbanised and migrant Africans, ‘The Crackpot in the City’.142 The most prestigious and enduring musical organisation was the Philharmonic Society, which involved Thompson as pianist, BudMbelle as musical director, and a number of members who had won medals for singing at the Kimberley Exhibition in 1892. At their debut in March 1897, they performed a mixed choral programme that reveals their desire for a cultural identity that was at once ‘civilised’ (British), internationally black, and African. Their repertoire included:143 ‘uloTixo Mkulu’ (‘Thou Great God’: Ntsikana) ‘Kaffir Wedding Song’ (Bokwe) ‘Matabili War Song’ ‘Africa’s Tears’ (William Kawa) ‘Bushman Chorus’ – ‘Qar Qa Ba Sonxha’ Early Performing Arts 53

‘Bells Bells Bells’ ‘Close the Shutters, Willie’s Dead’ ‘Part songs’ ‘A mixed quartet’ ‘Pickin’ on de Harp’ (Bland) ‘God Save the Queen’

The African-American companies also created a sense of commercial possibility for African performers. Modelling their company on McAdoo’s, two white South Africans, Jason Balmer and Lillian Dark, organised an ‘African Native Choir’ from students at Kimberley and Lovedale which toured Britain early in 1892.144 The quality of performance was apparently extremely high, but personal quarrels and financial disagreements between the white promoters and African performers broke up the company with considerable financial loss to everyone concerned. Unlike the Diamond Minstrels, the choir divided their programme between British-style secular items and African songs arranged for fourpart Western harmony. Likewise, they performed partly in Western formal evening dress and partly in indigenous African ‘native’ costume of the period. While missionaries back in South Africa were scandalised by the use of indigenous fashion, British audiences and commentators (then as now) had serious difficulty deciding whether they preferred their visiting Africans ‘civilised’ or ‘uncivilised’. They were in any case explicitly disturbed by the multi-layered, ambiguous cultural politics ingenuously expressed by this mixing of dress codes. The performers themselves, of course, took nothing but easy confidence and pride in this sartorial code-switching.145 Although James Stewart, headmaster of Lovedale, described the choir as ‘a heartless swindle, perpetrated at the black man’s expense’,146 in 1893 Balmer had no difficulty in recruiting a number of original and new members for another tour of Britain that was eventually extended to Canada and the United States.147 Financial and personal problems again interfered, but North American audiences were delighted. The group drew attention to the cultural achievements and educational ambitions of black South African Christians, and elicited sympathy for the performers. When the choir became destitute in the American Midwest, the black American Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) offered educational opportunities, and eight members eventually earned Bachelor degrees at Wilberforce and Lincoln universities.148 The African Native Choir, the first international venture involving black South African performing artists, set an unfortunate precedent of financial and interpersonal difficulties during overseas tours, that has plagued their successors to this day. Nevertheless, the tour was both culturally and politically significant: it brought black South Africans into direct contact with concepts of education and racial progress held by blacks in the United States, and it increased the influence of black America on the 54 In Township Tonight

early urban African culture of South Africa. Among the most important independent sources of this influence was the black American missionary effort in South Africa. A major initial impulse resulted from the contact between the African Methodist Episcopal Church and independent African clergymen, established by African Native Choir member Charlotte Manye (later Maxeke) during and after her tour to the United States. African-American Baptists founded a mission in Cape Town in the mid-1890s. A few years later two Xhosa ministers, Mangena Makone and James Dwane, who had seceded from the Wesleyan Methodists in 1894 over the exclusion of black clergy from the decision-making councils of their white colleagues and who were influenced by letters from Charlotte Manye in America, sought affiliation with the AME Church. In 1898 the Church’s leader, Bishop H. M. Turner, visited South Africa, where he ordained 65 local ministers to serve a membership already approaching 10 000. Dissatisfied with his status of ‘assistant bishop’, Dwane travelled in 1899 to the United States, where he requested autonomy for the South African Methodist Episcopal Church, but without success. He returned to South Africa in 1900 and founded the ‘Order of Ethiopia’. Both the AME Church and Dwane’s Order were important in the subsequent growth of what was known as the ‘Ethiopian Movement’ in South Africa.149 This movement addressed the problems and needs, both political and spiritual, of black Christians as opposed to white, and grew rapidly by absorbing disaffected members of European missionary churches in many of the towns. Whites were quick to accuse the ‘Ethiopian preachers’ of anti-white racialism, subversion, and responsibility for the political unrest among Africans in Natal that culminated in the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906.150 While these charges cannot be proved, the AME Church’s philosophy of African spiritual and material self-reliance, and even the very existence of a large, well-organised all-black church with transatlantic ties, appeared ‘subversive’ to South African whites. Most fundamentally, the pan-Africanist AME was the church of the educated African townspeople, whose broadened horizons led them to a strong identification with the struggles of the ‘American Negro’.151 In 1897, the AME Church established Wilberforce Institute, the ‘South African Tuskegee’, at Evaton near Johannesburg. There, African students were exposed to spirituals, nationalist conceptions of black solidarity and the strategies for racial progress proposed by the black American leader Booker T. Washington.152 Influenced by the ideals of men such as Washington and his American-educated South African counterpart John Dube, mission-school Africans felt a deep sense of frustration when confronted with the social and economic circumstances of African life in Kimberley and Johannesburg at the turn of the century. In 1886, not long after diamond operations had stabilised at Kimberley under De Beers monopoly, the largest gold discovery in history occurred on the Witwatersrand Early Performing Arts 55

in the southern Transvaal. Once again, African labourers from rural communities as far north as Lake Tanganyika streamed in for work. White fortune-seekers, mining personnel, and financiers from all over the world joined the rush. The Europeans needed skilled artisans, literate Bantu-speaking sub-managerial personnel, and domestic servants. New opportunities for African teachers and clergy also attracted those educated at Christian mission schools from as far away as Cape Town and Nyasaland to Johannesburg, the new city of the Rand. While it had been intended that they would use their education to lead their traditional countrymen to civilisation, the mission-educated Africans found little call for their skills in rural areas.153 Most initially chose to teach, but low wages and social isolation led to frequent moves. Many came to the cities in search of an income adequate to a ‘respectable’ westernised African way of life.154 Christianity, westernisation, and urbanisation were thus closely interrelated for ‘school’ Africans, who formed a relatively large portion of the African community in early Johannesburg. The Transvaal Census of 1904 reports that 25 per cent of the city’s permanent African population of 24 348 was fully literate, much more than the national percentage for Africans. Their numbers, prestige, and knowledge of the dominant European culture made community leaders of those who could boast a mission-school education. Yet life in the ‘Golden City’ fell dismally short of their expectations. Although they were among those entitled to bring their families to town, segregation often forced them to live in conditions of degradation, squalor and disease far worse than anything imagined in the days before the whites brought the ‘blessings of civilisation’. The very people who sold them clothes and sent them to school condemned them for dressing ‘foolishly’ (above their station) and for competing with whites for skilled employment. Even the missions expected them to accept perpetual childhood rather than Christian brotherhood, especially in the directing of church affairs.155 Their traditional fellows regarded them as traitors and tools of the Europeans, and local whites cried, ‘Education spoils the Kaffir’.156 Their suffering is reflected in the ‘melancholy strain’ of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ (‘God Bless Africa’), certainly the most significant and famous song ever to issue from the African continent. In 1897, Enoch M. Sontonga, a teacher at a Methodist mission school in Nancefield, Johannesburg, composed ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ as part of a repertoire of songs prepared for the students in his school.157 Sontonga was a Thembu Xhosa of the Mpinga clan, born near Uitenhage in the eastern Cape in 1873 and trained at Lovedale. He wrote the opening stanza of the song in Xhosa, and the song was first performed publicly in 1899 at the ordination ceremony of the Reverend M. Boweni, the first Tsonga to become a clergyman in the Methodist or indeed any mission church. In Johannesburg, Sontonga married Diana Mgqibisa and had a son. A photographer, choirmaster and lay preacher for the church of Reverend P. J. Mzimba, 56 In Township Tonight

Sontonga wrote the first verse and chorus of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ when he was twenty-four, and later the same year, he composed the music. Sontonga’s choir sang the song around Johannesburg and Natal, and other choirs followed them. Seven years after Sontonga’s death in 1905, on 8 January 1912, after the closing prayer at the first meeting of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC, later the ANC), it was sung by the Ohlange Institute Choir under Reuben T. Caluza. Sol Plaatje, a founding member of the ANC, and a writer, recorded the song in London in 1923. In 1925, when the organisation changed its name to the ANC, it also adopted the song as its official anthem, to be sung at the close of all their meetings. In 1927, renowned Xhosa poet Samuel E. Mqhayi added seven more verses. In the same year the song was published in a local newspaper, and was later included in the Presbyterian Xhosa hymn book as well as a Xhosa poetry book for schools. ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ is the national anthem of Tanzania and Zambia and is also sung in Zimbabwe and Namibia. Before her death in 1929, Sontonga’s wife, Diana, sold the rights to the song for a sixpence. The original song reflects patterns of both Methodist hymnody and African praise singing, and we cannot know whether, in the common practice of African composers, Sontonga might have been inspired by an existing folk melody. Nevertheless, he took the step of combining a generic Methodist harmony with an African blessing. As the late John Blacking put it, ‘the appropriation of the triads and cadences of European hymn tunes expressed the new relationships and values of urban groups, who expected fuller participation in the social and political life into which they had been drawn economically’.158 Further, the invocation of the Holy Spirit (Moya) combines a fundamental Protestantism with African traditions of ritual cleansing. Such spiritual as well as musical symbiosis enhanced the song’s profound appeal across a variety of religious and secular settings and communities. After the ANC adopted it officially, the hymn accompanied and galvanised the organisation’s victories and struggles as it travelled across borders into exile. The cast of the all-black musical play King Kong sang the anthem at Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport upon their departure for London in 1960. Yet as late as 1969 the apartheid government, having already banned the song, was still trying somehow to deny its political status. Yvonne Huskisson, then director of music programming for the SABC’s ‘Bantu Radio’ services, added a note to her entry for Sontonga in her biographical survey of black composers saying, ‘An abortive attempt was made by the African National Congress, using NKOSI SIKELEL’ IAFRIKA to close their meetings, to insinuate that the ordinary Bantu singing this anthem [!] were doing so in support of their organisation, its aims and policies.’159 Perish the thought indeed. The expansion of the AME Church locally also coincided with the Virginia Jubilee Singers’ tours of South Africa. The church welcomed McAdoo’s presence as a valuable contact with the United States and as a source of liturgical reinvigoration. Simon Sinamela, who had toured with the African Native Choir and studied in the United Early Performing Arts 57

States, formed a group called the African Jubilee Singers who performed in South Africa and abroad. Erlmann reports that Sinamela produced a series of hymns, including ‘Kgoshi Sekukuni’, that combined African-American spirituals with local forms of oratory and praise poetry.160 The result was a novel form of syncretic music that influenced the wider-educated black audience. Both the musical form and the content of jubilee-style songs conveyed messages of spiritual and social protest masked under religious decorum and solemnity. AME Bishop Henry Turner’s tour of South Africa provided further exposure for this nascent liturgical music, which both fascinated and repelled South African authorities, who moved to censor AME activities in the Cape Colony, Transvaal, and Orange Free State. It is likely that Sontonga was involved in the AME Church’s movement for social justice in British South Africa. The sense of lament reflects not only social and economic oppression but also the religious, racial, and political conflicts between white Lovedale missionaries and the AME clergy that had already surfaced when ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ was first performed in 1899. Lamentable too was this widely popular composer’s untimely death in 1905 at the age of only thirty-two. He was buried in Braamfontein cemetery, Johannesburg, in a numbered grave recorded merely as the resting place of ‘a kaffir’. Just after President Mandela’s election in 1994, archival research identified the grave precisely, and it was declared a national monument on Heritage Day, 24 September 1996. ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ has been published officially in Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, English, and Afrikaans. Sontonga’s original song was a plea for help and blessing in an oppressive environment. As a member of South Africa’s ‘suppressed’ black elite at the turn of the twentieth century, he sought to give hope and dignity to his students. Melancholy and ‘unswinging’ it may be, yet so powerfully does the song communicate both the composer’s social discontent and his desire to reverently synthesise Christian and indigenous musical and cultural traditions. More than any other piece of expressive culture, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ has come to symbolise the struggle for African unity and liberation in South Africa, becoming over a century of resistance a musical embodiment of the thirst for freedom. Yet the song’s popularity extends beyond the borders of South Africa and the confines of the liberation struggle that it so actively animated. Constructed in the form of a blessing, the hymn offers a message of unity and uplift and an exhortation to act morally and spiritually on behalf of the African continent. Choirs performed it to celebrate the ANC’s victories and trials as it travelled across borders into exile, and the organisation made various uses of the song for mobilisation and fundraising. Throughout the anti-apartheid struggle, ANC choirs toured and recorded ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ in Sweden, the United States, and Great Britain to promulgate its political cause. As migrant labourers moved into South Africa from other colonies and territories, they encountered the anthem as a song of protest and took it home with them. The ambiguous stylistic voice of the song, now religious, 58 In Township Tonight

Here is the full Sontonga–Mqhayi text:

Nkosi Sikelel’ i-Afrika Enoch Sontonga-Samuel E. Mqhayi Version 1. Nkosi, sikelel’ i-Afrika Maluphakanyisw’ uphondo lwayo; Yizwa imithandazo yethu

God Bless Africa Original Lovedale English Translation

Lord, bless Africa May her horn rise high up Hear Thou our prayers and bless us.

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Chorus: Yihla Moya, yihla Moya Yihla Moya Oyingcwele:

Descend O Spirit, Descend, O Holy Spirit

2. Sikelela iNkosi zetu; Zimkumbule umDali wazo; Zimoyike zezimhlouele, Azisikelele.

Bless our chiefs May they remember their Creator. Fear Him and revere Him, That He may bless them.

3. Sikelel’ amadol’ esizwe, Sikelela kwa nomlisela Ulitwal’ ilizwe ngomonde, Uwusikilele. 4. Sikelel’ amakosikazi; Nawo onk’amanenekazi; Pakamisa wonk’umtinjana Uwusikilele 5. Sikelela abafundisi Bemvaba zonke zelilizwe; Ubatwese ngoMoya Wako Ubasikelele.

Bless the public men, Bless also the youth That they may carry the land with patience and that Thou may bless them.

60 In Township Tonight

Bless the wives And also all young women; Lift up all the young girls And bless them. Bless the ministers of all the churches of this land; Endue them with Thy Spirit And bless them.

6. Sikelel’ ulimo nemfuyo; Gzota zonk’indlala nezifo; Zalisa ilizwe nempilo Ulisikelele 7. Sikelel’ amalinga etu Awomanyana nokuzaka, Awemfundo nemvisiswano Uwasikele. 8. Nkosi Sikelel, i-Afrika; Cima bonk’ ubugwenza bayo Neziggito, Nezono zayo Uwazikelele.

Bless agriculture and stock raising Banish all famine and diseases; Fill the land with good health and bless it. Bless our efforts of union and self-uplift, Of education and mutual understanding And bless them. Lord, bless Africa Blot out all its wickedness And its transgressions and sins, And bless us.

now beseeching, now aspirational, now political, allowed it to be appropriated and translated by official organisations such as the Lovedale Institute while becoming a song of protest for resistance movements and independent churches. Originally composed for school children, it was adopted by political and religious leaders across the continent, occupying a unique cultural space in the landscape of memory. The anthem is a preamble that solemnises all kinds of dramatic public events. In Sontonga and Mqhayi’s version of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, Africa is blessed, and its leaders – then colonial, since revolutionary, now democratic – are held accountable to transcendent goals that go beyond those of the state. This call for justice and redemption is present in both the political and more strictly religious sentiments of the song, and its ‘blessing’ links religion to politics as a source of transcendent morality. Since its composition, translations have appeared in many local and foreign languages, including Afrikaans, and a number of southern African countries have adopted the song as their national anthem. During the liberation struggle of the 1980s, American bassist Charlie Haden and his Liberation Orchestra issued a jazz version on their album Dream Makers, and the white End Conscription Campaign used the version sampled by Bright Blue on their song ‘Weeping’. In 1997 a combined Xhosa–Sotho version, coupled awkwardly to the old anthem of white South Africa, ‘Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’ (‘The Voice of South Africa’), in Afrikaans and English became South Africa’s new national anthem. Not long thereafter, the sexy township group Boom Shaka rocked the seemingly unrockable and produced a catchy, bootyshaking kwaito version that made the old hymn instantly relevant to hedonistic urban black youth. In 2003, saxophone virtuoso Zim Ngqawana composed an abstract piece called ‘Anthem’ that cites ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ at length but does not ring changes on Early Performing Arts 61

its melody or basic structure. Here is the song in its present guise as the South African national anthem: Verse 1: Xhosa Nkosi, sikelel’ i-Afrika Maluphanyisw’ uphondo lwayo Yizwa imithandazo yethu Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapho lwayo

Lord, bless Africa May her horn rise high up Hear Thou our prayers God bless us, we her children

Verse 2: Sesotho Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso O fedise dintwa le matshwenyeho O se boloke, o se boloke setjhaba sa heso Setjhaba sa South Afrika – South Afrika

God protect our nation End wars and tribulations Oh protect, oh protect our nation The nation of South Africa

Verse 3: Afrikaans Uit die blou van onse hemel Uit die diepte van ons see Oor ons ewige gebergtes Waar die kranse antwoord gee…

Out of the blue of our heaven Out of the depths of our sea Over our everlasting mountains Where the echoing bluffs resound …

Verse 4: English (translated loosely from Afrikaans) … Sounds the call to come together And united we shall stand Let us live and strive for freedom In South Africa our land

We might just note before leaving the subject that this conglomerate version omits the African feature of a chorus interposing between the verses (Yihla Moya, yihla Moya), sometimes nevertheless included by African ensembles and audience members in actual performance. The Sotho verse, entirely new and not derived in any way from Sontonga or Mqhayi’s Xhosa verses, was added to promote African unity by the ANC, and necessarily changes the melody due to differences in semantic tone. The Afrikaans verse from ‘Die Stem’, which trumpets group ownership of the land, the seas, and the heaven above, is not completed in that language but is rather half translated into English as something of an afterthought. The point of the anthem, after all, was to promote unity, inclusiveness, and reconciliation, and to demonstrate publicly that the linguistic engine of the Afrikaner state has become the caboose of South African national identity. As for the English, of course they can never be other than English, 62 In Township Tonight

but it is their imperialising language that is given the only mentions of unity (two) and freedom (one) in the entire bricolage of an anthem. To take up once again the thread of our story a century ago, we might note that, to some extent, African Christians had contributed to their sad situation. Many had applauded the destruction of traditional political structures and the abandonment of traditional culture. They had thought that conversion and westernisation would bring them power over their own people and acceptance into the mainstream of political and economic life. The reality of African life in Johannesburg was for them a bitter disillusionment. Most of the European missions followed their rural converts to the Rand gold fields and opened churches for African Christian townspeople during the 1890s.161 Others, however, such as Albert Baker’s South African Compounds and Interior Mission, were attracted to the mine compounds, where there were ‘more than 100 000 of the young manhood of all the tribes of South Africa gathered in groups of from 3 to 5 thousand, and all accessible to the Gospel.’162 Some missions made good use of music in their evangelising efforts. Methodists formed a band of African preachers who ‘made their entrance singing, shouting, and moving to the rhythm of their song and went around the compound inviting men to their service. The miners, attracted to this animated group, followed and stayed to hear what they had to say.’163 A greater musical influence was the Salvation Army, which began working among Africans in 1890 using brass bands, tambourines, and singing brigades in both the city streets and mine compounds.164 A visitor to Johannesburg in 1893 recalled that on Sunday afternoons in the Fordsburg location, ‘the Salvation Army and other religious bodies held services for the Natives, who regularly gathered in large numbers. The wonderful singing was quite a feature of these meetings.’165 For the gold miners, conditions were similar to those experienced at Kimberley, though they did not live under a rigid, ‘closed’ compound system. Compounds did become gradually more like labour prison camps after 1903, as part of an effort to control desertion, organisation, and resistance among the miners; but from 1887 to the First World War there was relative freedom of movement regulated by a ‘pass’ system. The trading interests who sold food and goods to the workers succeeded in keeping the compounds from ever being entirely closed.166 Until after the First World War, the manpower requirements of gold mining on the Rand greatly exceeded the supply. Mining companies were reluctant to compete for African labour by the logical but less profitable means of higher wages. They argued that more money only ‘spoiled’ the workers, leading them to loaf or to return to their homes when economic necessity was not strong enough to keep them on the job. The mine owners also justified low wages by pointing to their provision of food and housing while workers were at the mines. The companies’ solution to the shortage was to import more than half the underground labour force from Mozambique. These Portuguese East Africans were Early Performing Arts 63

indentured on rigid contracts for periods of service averaging eighteen months. Unfamiliar with the urban environment, and far from their homes, they were more compliant with the harsh discipline of the mines and more likely to spend their earnings locally than workers from South Africa. These ‘foreign natives’ (as oxymoronic mine management called them) were often gang-pressed into service by the Portuguese, who had signed a profitable agreement with the mine owners and the Transvaal government to recruit black workers for the mines, and worked for roughly half the £3 or £4 per month paid to local miners in the mid-1890s.167 The Mozambicans suffered terribly and often died from the combined effects of exhausting labour and winter cold.168 Despite their numbers, only a few drifted into the shantytowns and slum locations surrounding the mines to become members of the Rand’s permanent workforce. The companies were under pressure from the colonial government to recruit locally and they disliked the constant need to train short-term recruits. Efficiency suffered from the perpetual inexperience of the workers. As a result, mine management did nothing to discourage more experienced, urbanised workers from building shantytowns all along the gold reef. Taking an active hand, the mine owners recommended to the Industrial Commission in 1897 that the Transvaal government create large ‘family locations’ for mineworkers, but the idea was flatly rejected. Following the Boer War, the British Transvaal administration began to knock down the unauthorised mine locations. The companies then built their own single men’s barracks for underground miners and provided family housing locations for some clerks and surface workers only.169 Although they soon met the fate suffered by all African settlements near white residential areas, the workers’ shantytowns constituted Johannesburg’s first African communities. In these ‘unauthorised’ and unsupervised shanties, long-term patterns of urban African working-class social organisation, the liquor trade, prostitution, and organised criminal groups first became established.170 Along with the racially mixed slums – Newclare, Brickfields, Ferreira’s Camp, Malay Camp/Vrededorp, and Fordsburg – on the city’s fringes, and the servants’ quarters in Europeans’ backyards, they sheltered the nucleus of what was to be sub-Saharan Africa’s largest permanent African urban population. One account lists the African mine workforce at 97 800 in 1899.171 Some of these joined the 30 000 Africans employed as rickshaw-boys, drivers, domestics, artisans, teachers, and clerks in taking up permanent residence. In 1900 the permanent African population of the Rand was estimated at 42 000, compared with 50 000 whites.172 Significant numbers of South African-born miners remained in the city and became part of a stable urban proletariat. Much has been made by whites of the tendency of coloured people to avoid Africans socially, but this was hardly possible in the early days on the Rand. Stringent Transvaal 64 In Township Tonight

government regulations forced coloureds, like Africans, to carry passes and forbade them to own property in the towns.173 In the informal mixing and legal equality of British colonial Cape Town, they had a limited franchise and British citizenship. Coloureds in Johannesburg, however, were forced to wear metal badges, as were Africans, as proof that they were employed.174 In 1897 a government committee laid out Malay Camp in Vrededorp, otherwise occupied by poor Afrikaners, as a coloured location; but like Ferreira’s Camp, it soon became a shantytown with Africans, Asians, coloureds, and poor whites crowded in tightly together. Conditions were especially difficult for coloureds, few of whom were single, temporary migrants; most often they arrived as family groups. Yet for coloureds the social advantages of living in Cape Town as opposed to Johannesburg were more apparent than real. Cape segregation may have been more by socio-economic class than by colour, but the majority of ‘Cape Boys’ in Johannesburg in the 1890s were ‘artisans of the humblest classes’, who never enjoyed much social mobility in either city.175 Amid the racialism, overcrowding, and squalor faced by all the black people of Johannesburg, the family basis of coloured social life helped to give the locations a growing sense of community. Coloured social recreation was an important focus of community life and important for the development of African working-class culture in the city. The coloureds, Xhosa, and Sotho who lived outside the mine compounds were soon joined by Zulu from Natal and the recently defeated Zulu kingdom. Refusing to work underground, they came to dominate the relatively well-paid field of domestic service. They had, after all, a strong tradition of sending young boys along on military campaign as baggage carriers (izinDibi) to veteran Zulu soldiers, and extensive experience as ‘houseboys’ among the colonial British of Natal. Some stayed only a short while, but those who decided to remain permanently began to rebel against conditions in the suburban backyard shacks. Most of them insisted upon having Sundays and a few hours of every afternoon off. Others joined together to rent houses or rooms in ‘slumyards’ in Doornfontein, Ophirton, or Jeppe. After long hours of isolation among whites, they sought entertainment in the new locations where drinking, gambling, sex, and, of course, music and dancing were regular weekend activities. As contemporary Zulu pop stylist Johnny Clegg describes so movingly, these Zulu male servants, then as now, used any convenient backlot, inner courtyard, or neglected space to hold traditional dance team competitions. Based on country district of origin, these teams maintained and productively enacted cultural identity for men living for long lonely months amidst the alienation and devaluation of their deeply held sense of Zulu manhood.176 Tuning their favourite instrument, the guitar, to their traditional five- and six-note scales, Zulu and Ndebele domestic workers often played at location entertainments, Early Performing Arts 65

or performed in the streets. They strummed a simple three-chord accompaniment to traditional songs or picked up the Afrikaans-influenced styles of the Cape coloured and Xhosa. Miners who had settled in the city made rural dances a part of competitive recreation in the locations as well as on the mines. As in Kimberley, miners played tradestore instruments as they strolled in the dusty streets. Their music became an important resource for developing inter-ethnic urban African styles. Social life already featured public dances; A. A. Khumalo, the noted Zulu composer who died in 1966, recalled playing his concertina for dances in Johannesburg in 1898 for a guinea per night.177 The 1890s also saw the birth of organised outlaw resistance in Johannesburg. Jan Note, a former Zulu domestic, organised a secret society of Zulu proletarians called the Ninevites, ostensibly to protect Africans by force ‘because it is a town without law’.178 Beginning by administering beatings to white employers who cheated Africans out of their wages or mistreated them on the mines, they soon became a fearsome paramilitary gang that preyed violently on blacks and whites alike. These gangs moved to Durban as part of the general flight from Johannesburg during the Boer War (1899–1902). They wore ‘distinctive wide-bottomed trousers of many colours’ and paraded through the streets playing music that was ‘generally a strange combination of complicated Dutch, English, and Native tunes’ on the mouth organ, an instrument with which they were associated.179 Ninevite and other African ‘underworld’ organisations were a significant feature of lower-class urbanisation in early twentieth-century Johannesburg. Entertainment provided for Johannesburg’s white community must also be included among the musical influences on urbanising Africans. Very few Africans could have had access to the rowdy English music hall and comic opera performances at the Empire, Globe, Royal, and Standard theatres.180 Yet the 118 unsegregated canteens, many located in the poorest and most racially mixed sections, featured music for drinking and dancing of the ‘honky-tonk’ variety already encountered in Kimberley. Also in evidence were ‘continental bands consisting of any number of performers, who played very sweetly about the streets and took up hat collections’.181 In addition, British and local military brass and fife and drum bands, such as the Wanderers Military Band, played outdoor concerts of light classical and march music at the Wanderers and other parks as early as 1890. The nineteenth century saw the beginning of a number of fundamental processes in the urbanisation of African performing arts in South Africa. History made available to Africans a range of performance resources under specific conditions of contact. Performance styles represented contrasting cultural models, and the relations between their bearers were the basis for reinterpreting and selecting materials in composition. Colonialism, the missions, proletarian work experience, urbanisation, and racial segregation all shaped the development of new kinds of African communities. African response to these forces led to the integration of ethnic ties into a system of social 66 In Township Tonight

categories based on class. Social life reflected efforts to create new institutions on the one hand, and to keep them flexible on the other. The continuing tension between order and disorder was essential to African adaptation. Performance provided an important cultural dimension to adaptation and institutional change. As cultural communication, performance linked rural and urban areas and spanned all racial and social categories. Indigenous and foreign styles interpenetrated according to the needs of specific groups of Africans for new forms of expression. These needs were related to African strategies for survival and advancement within colonial society. Black performers and conditions of performance were part of the process of adaptation and so were shaped by it. To understand how different kinds of performers recombined various cultural resources to entertain their neighbours, express common aspirations, interpret social experience, and earn a living, we must describe the quality of African life in the Johannesburg locations in the early twentieth century. Notes 1 Some scholars and descendants of the Khoikhoi today prefer the spelling Khoekhoe. 2 Cultural sensitivity in the labelling of group identity must be balanced with an intuitive flow of narrative style. Proper form in the naming of Bantu-speaking peoples requires that inflective noun class prefixes precede roots according to the conventions of each language and its accepted orthography. So in their own languages one must write AmaXhosa, AmaZulu, Basotho, Batswana, and so forth for groups, IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi and so on for languages. In English, I have let the prefixes go and simply said Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Pedi, Tswana, Swazi, Tsonga/Shangaan, Venda, Ndebele. 3 Richard Elphick, ‘The Cape Khoi and the First Phase of South African Race Relations’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1972, p. 298. See also Mohamed Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community, Athens and Cape Town, 2005, pp. 25–9. 4 P. R. Kirby, The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa, Johannesburg, 1965 edn, orig. 1934, p. 249. 5 Ibid., p. 250. 6 J. W. D. Moodie, Ten Years in South Africa, London, 1835, pp. 224–6, cited in ibid., p. 252. 7 See Liza Key’s documentary film on the production of this show, Karoo Kitaar Blues, Key Productions, 2000. 8 See Kirby, Musical Instruments, plates 72 and 73, and pp. 254– 5. 9 Ibid., plate 6. 10 Ibid., pp. 14–19, 82–4, plate 71b. 11 Cited in ibid., p. 246. 12 Thomas Burchell, Travels in the Interior of South Africa, London, 1822, p. 499, cited in Kirby, Musical Instruments, p. 247. 13 As I have defined the term, following John Collins, ‘neo-traditional’ refers to entirely indigenous forms performed in new colonial and urban contexts. See David B. Coplan, ‘Come to my town, Cape Coast’ in Bruno Nettl (ed.), Eight Urban Musical Cultures: Tradition and Change, Urbana, 1978, pp. 96–114. Early Performing Arts 67

14 ‘Syncretic’, a fine old term originated by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, refers to the blending of musical materials and forms from two or more cultures, resulting in a new form that is more than the sum of its diverse parts. I find this term preferable to the more contemporary substitute ‘hybrid’, which lacks the fluidity of both original and blended traditions suggested by ‘syncretic’. 15 Kirby, Musical instruments, pp. 246–8. 16 W. Burchell, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, vol. 2, London, 1822, pp. 205, 310, 421. 17 R  ycroft, ‘Evidence of stylistic continuity’, pp. 219–20. 18 C  . G. Botha, General History and Social Life of the Cape of Good Hope, Cape Town, 1962 edn, p. 296. 19 Victor de Kock, Those in Bondage, London, 1950, pp. 94–5. 20 Ibid., p. 9. 21 The term ‘Malay’ has come to refer to ‘coloured’ South Africans of Indonesian Islamic origin generally, even though relatively few of their ancestors came from the Malay Peninsula. 22 P. R. Kirby, ‘The use of European musical techniques by the non-European peoples of South Africa’, Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 1959, p. 39. 23 De Kock, Those in Bondage, p. 94. 24 Music, SA Information Service [1975]. 25 De Kock, Those in Bondage, pp. 93–94. 26 Kirby, Musical Instruments, p. 254. 27 M. Wilson and D. Perrot (eds.), Outlook on a Century: South Africa 1870–1970, Lovedale, 1973, p. 298. 28 King Sekhukhune of the Pedi, Letsie of the Sotho, Montshiwa of the western Tswana, and several Xhosa chiefs all encouraged their men to go to the diamond fields and return with guns and ammunition in preparation for armed conflict with settler and colonial forces. Cecil Rhodes happily sold rifles to the African workers as the condition of obtaining their indispensable labour power. 29 Gardner Williams, The Diamond Mines of South Africa, New York, 1902, p. 189. 30 Ibid., p. 219. 31 ‘San’, the current politically acceptable term for the aboriginal foragers turned colonial underclass and up until recently known as ‘Bushmen’, were very numerous in the Kimberley area and in the northern Cape generally. They and the Khoi spoke closely related languages and were differentiated principally by the latter’s adaptation to cattlekeeping, although this difference was quite fluid and unreliable. While today Khoi and San are busy reviving their aboriginal identities and are at great pains to differentiate themselves from one another, the generally inclusive term used in South Africa today in government and other public institutions, ‘Khoisan’, would appear to be sufficiently adequate and practical. 32 Rob Turrell, ‘Kimberley: labour and compounds, 1871–1888’, in S. Marks and R. Rathbone (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa, London, 1982. 33 Ibid. 34 W. T. E., IDB or the Adventures of Solomon Dams, London, 1887, p. 217. 35 Turrell, ‘Kimberley’. 36 Wilson and Perrot, Outlook on a Century, p. 19. 37 John Angove, In the Early Days: Pioneer Life on the South African Diamond Fields, Kimberley, 1910. 68 In Township Tonight

38 Eric Rosenthal, The Stars and Stripes in Africa, London, 1938, p. 170. 39 See Veit Erlmann, ‘A feeling of prejudice: Orpheus M. McAdoo and the Virginia Jubilee Singers in South Africa, 1890–1989’ in African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance, Chicago, 1991, pp. 21–53. 40 Dierdre Hansen, The Life and Work of Benjamin Tyamzashe, a Contemporary Xhosa Composer, Grahamstown, 1968, pp. 6, 16. 41 De Kock, Those in Bondage, p. 89. 42 J. Englebrecht, The Korana, Cape Town, 1936, p. 170. 43 ‘Griqua’, taken from a Cape Khoi group called the Grigriqua or Chirigriqua who were partly their ancestors, was the more indigenous and socially polite name that Christian coloured people previously or otherwise known as ‘Bastards’ adopted under missionary influence in the early nineteenth century. See M. Legassick, ‘The Sotho–Tswana and the Missionaries’, 1690–1840, Ph.D., UCLA, 1969, pp. 194–5. 44 P. Mayer (ed.), Black Villagers in an Industrial Society, Cape Town, 1980, p. 67. 45 Turrell, ‘Kimberley’. 46 Kenneth Bellairs, A Trip to Johannesburg and Back: the Witwatersrand Gold Fields, London, 1889, p. 22. 47 S. M. Guma, The Form, Content, and Technique of Traditional Literature in Southern Sotho, Pretoria, 1967, p. 140. S. M. Molema, The Bantu Past and Present, Edinburgh, 1920, p. 319. 48 Diamond Fields Advertiser, 14 March 1896. 49 ‘Basuto’ and ‘Basutoland’ was the colonial name for the people and country united by King Moshoeshoe in the nineteenth century. Their own name for their land was Lesotho, a term restored to the Sotho upon independence from Britain in 1965. See T. E. Maloka, Basotho and the Mines: A Social History of Labour Migrancy in Lesotho and South Africa, c.1890–1940, Dakar and Oxford, 2004 50 I have coined the term ‘auriture’ to refer to verbal arts created in musical performance, overcoming, I would suggest, the contradictions evident in the old-fashioned usage ‘oral literature’, and bringing to the foreground the essential musical character of such texts that is missing both from ‘oral literature’ and its now more popular successor, ‘orature’. See D. B. Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants, Chicago, 1994, pp. 8–10. 51 D. B. Coplan, ‘Eloquent knowledge: Lesotho migrants’ songs and the anthropology of experience’, American Ethnologist 14, 3 (1987), pp. 413–33. 52 Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise Poem, Charlottesville, VA, 1990. p. 198; Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, London, 1970, pp. 141–2. 53 The sjambok is a South African whip modelled on the British ‘cat-o’-nine-tails’ and made of the hide of the hippopotamus, the ‘sleeper in the water’. It was used in the early days to control black workers in the mines. M. Damane and P. Sanders, Sotho Praise Poem, London, 1974, p. 204. 54 Charles Adams, ‘Ethnography of Basotho Evaluative Behavior in the Cognitive Domain Lipapadi (Games)’, Ph.D., Indiana University, 1974, pp. 120, 136; Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals, pp. 110–17; D. B. Coplan, Lyrics of the Basotho Migrants, Madison, Wisconsin, 1995. pp. 159–74. 55 Linguists will note that in the following passage I have used the Sotho orthography of Lesotho, where ‘d’ is written with an ‘l’ before an ‘i’ or a ‘u’, and where ‘y’ is replaced by ‘e’ before an ‘a’, and ‘w’ by an ‘o’ or ‘u’ before an ‘a’ or ‘e’. Early Performing Arts 69

56 The young initiate is referring here to the hardships and dangers, not of the mines, but of rural life. 57 Like other African societies, the Sotho seal the marriage bond, sanction the transfer of the bride’s productive and reproductive capacities from her father’s household to that of her husband, and legitimate the couple’s children by the formal gift of cattle from the groom to the bride’s father. 58 Colin Murray, Families Divided, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 171–2. 59 Until 1986, ‘BA’ was the prefix attached to all licence plate numbers of vehicles registered in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. Mejametalana is the name of the dam on the northern outskirts of Maseru. 60 Seeiso Mapele, ‘Lifela’, BA Honours thesis, University of Lesotho, 1976, pp. 23–5. 61 David Welsh, ‘The growth of the towns’, in M. Wilson and L. Thompson (eds.), The Oxford History of South Africa, vol. 2, Oxford, 1971, p. 180. 62 Williams, Diamond Mines, p. 261. 63 Ellen Hellmann, ‘The native in the towns’, in I. Schapera, (ed.), The Bantu-Speaking Tribes of South Africa, London, 1937. 64 Kirby, Musical Instruments, plates 54–6. 65 Ibid., pp. 60–6; Hugh Tracy, Lalela Zulu, Johannesburg, 1948. 66 Andrew Tracey and Gei Zantzinger, A Companion to the Films Mgodo wa Mbanguzi and Mgodo wa Mkandeni, Grahamstown, 1976, pp. 8–9. 67 Ibid., p. 20. 68 Kirby, Musical Instruments, pp. 257–8. 69 Ibid., p. 76. 70 David Rycroft, ‘Nguni vocal polyphony’, Journal of the International Folk Music Council 19 (1967), pp. 88–103. 71 Kirby, Musical Instruments, plate 228, pp. 181f. 72 Ibid., plate 55. 73 Rycroft, ‘Evidence of stylistic continuity’, pp. 225–8. 74 P. R. Kirby, ‘The recognition and practical use of the harmonics of stretched strings by the Bantu of South Africa’, Bantu Studies, 6 (1932), p. 35. 75 Rycroft, ‘Evidence of stylistic continuity’, p. 221. 76 Ibid. 77 Featured on the recording, Township Child, Johannesburg, Gallo Africa, 1996. 78 Erlmann, African Stars, p. 75. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., p. 76. 81 M. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, London, 1936, p. 357. 83 B  . B. Keller, ‘The Origins of Modernism and Conservatism among Cape Nguni’, Ph.D., University of California, 1970, p. 254. 83 Colin Bundy, ‘African Peasants and Economic Change in South Africa, 1870–1913’, Ph.D., University of Oxford, 1976, p. 65. 84 S. Judges and C. Saunders, ‘The beginnings of an African community in Cape Town’, South African Outlook, August 1976. 85 Keller, Origins of Modernism, p. 60. 86 Bundy, ‘African Peasants’, p. 65. 87 Ibid., pp. 100–6, 137. 88 The cleavage between African traditional and Christian sections of both rural and urban communities became a gulf that represented one of the most significant social oppositions 70 In Township Tonight

in black society right up until the 1960s. Philip Mayer, in his famous study, Townsmen or Tribesmen, London, 1961, adopted local usage in labelling the two categories ‘red’ (after the mixture of fat and ochre with which traditionalists smeared themselves), and ‘school’ (after the cultural transformation that occurred among Christian Africans who attended mission schools). 89 Keller, Origins of Modernism, pp. 82, 89. 90 The Natives Land Act of 1913, among the first and most important legislative attacks upon independent African communities of the new Union of South Africa, declared approximately 87 per cent of South Africa’s land the exclusive preserve of whites. 91 Bundy, ‘African Peasants’, pp. 148–96. 92 Keller, Origins of Modernism, pp. 228–9. 93 South African Bantu languages are roughly divided into two main streams or sub-families, the ‘Nguni’ group (Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi), and the Tswana–Sotho group (Setswana, Sesotho, Sepedi). These sub-families are quite different from each other, but are to a great extent mutually understandable within themselves. There are many dialectical variations. Other languages are to varying degrees a blend of the two large groups, such as Tsonga (Shangaan) and SiNdebele (not to be confused with the IsiNdebele of Zimbabwe, a dialect of Zulu), or different from either group, such as Venda, which is more closely related to the Shona of Zimbabwe. 94 There are relatively few song forms that are not accompanied by rhythmically orchestrated patterns of movement, and quite often it is the dance that gives the name to its associated song type. 95 Rycroft, ‘Nguni vocal polyphony’, pp. 88f. 96 Coplan, Time of Cannibals, pp. 8–10. 97 Alexander Sandilands, 120 Negro Spirituals, Lesotho, 1951, p. 3. 98 Hansen, Life and Work of Benjamin Tyamzashe, p. 2. 99 W. C. Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, London, 1866, p. 272. 100 W. C. Scully, By Veldt and Kopje, London, 1907, p. 285. 101 Holden, Past and Future, p. 273. 102 Scully, By Veldt and Kopje, p. 285. 103 Kirby, ‘The use of European musical techniques’, p. 38. 104 C. Birkett, quoted in A. M. Jones, African Hymnody in Christian Worship, Gwelo, 1976, p. 17. 105 J. H. Soga, The Ama-Xhosa: Life and Customs, Lovedale, 1931. 106 Albert Gérard, Four African Literatures, Berkeley, 1971, pp. 37–9. 107 J. K. Bokwe, Amaculo ase Lovedale, Lovedale, 1884. 108 Kirby, ‘The use of European musical techniques’, p. 38. 109 Gérard, Four African Literatures, p. 43. 110 Ibid., p. 27. 111 J. B. Pieres, ‘Nxele, Ntsikana, and the origins of the Xhosa religious reaction’, Journal of African History 20, 1 (1979), pp. 60–1. 112 David Dargie, Xhosa Music, Cape Town, 1988, p. 106; Janet Hodgson, Ntsikana’s Great Hymn: A Xhosa Expression of Christianity in the Early 19th Century, Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1980. 113 Ibid.; J. K. Bokwe, Ntsikana: The Story of an African Convert, Lovedale, 1914. 114 Jones, African Hymnody, p. 17. 115 Dargie, Xhosa Music, p. 106. 116 B. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, London, 1961 edn, orig. 1948, p. 38. Early Performing Arts 71

117 B. Hutchinson, ‘Some social consequences of 19th century missionary activity among the South African Bantu’, Africa 27, 2 (April 1957), p. 168. 118 Hansen, Life and Work of Benjamin Tyamzashe, p. 8. 119 Imvo Zabantsundu, 29 November 1893. 120 Harry Dean and Sterling North, Umbala, London, 1929, p. 125. 121 Alain Locke, The Negro and His Music, New York, 1969 edn, orig. 1936. 122 R. W. Murray, South African Reminiscences, Cape Town, 1894, p. 207. 123 Robert Toll, Blacking Up, New York, 1974, p. 37. 124 Denis-Constant Martin, Coon Carnival, Cape Town, 1999, pp. 81–6. 125 Ibid. 126 P. W. Laidler, A Tavern of the Seas, Cape Town, n.d., pp. 173–4. 127 Jan Bouws, ‘Minstrels, too, seem to go on forever’, Die Burger, November 1966, p. 12 (trans. G. Stone). 128 Kirby, Musical Instruments, pp. 10 –11. 129 Toll, Blacking Up, pp. 235–44. 130 Martin, Coon Carnival, p. 87; John Lovell, Black Song: The Forge and the Flame, New York, 1972, p. 415. 131 Veit Erlmann, Nightsong: Performance, Power, and Practice in South Africa, Chicago, 1996, pp. 24–7; Martin, Coon Carnival, pp. 85–9. 132 Martin, Coon Carnival, p. 87. 133 Diamond Fields Advertiser, 29 June 1895; 29 April 1898. 134 Chris Ballantine, Marabi Nights, Johannesburg, 1993, p. 22. 135 Erlmann, Nightsong, p. 42. 136 Bundy, ‘African Peasants’, pp. 151–65. 137 Brian Willan, ‘An African in Kimberley: Sol T. Plaatje, 1894–1898’ in Marks and Rathbone, Industrialisation and Social Change, p. 249. 138 Diamond Fields Advertiser, 23 August 1895. 139 Willan, ‘An African in Kimberley’. 140 Diamond Fields Advertiser, 12 May 1893. 141 Diamond Fields Advertiser, 10 March 1896. 142 Imvo Zabantsundu, 14 July 1892. 143 D  iamond Fields Advertiser, 13 March 1897. For a righteous treatment of the choir’s tour to Britain, see Veit Erlmann, ‘Spectatorial lust: the African Choir in England’ in Bernth Lindfors (ed.), Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, Indiana and Cape Town, 1999, pp. 107–34. 144 Imvo Zabantsundu, 17 March 1892. 145 Erlmann, ‘Spectatorial lust’, pp. 127–8. 146 James Stewart, Lovedale, South Africa, Edinburgh, 1894, p. 70. 147 Diamond Fields Advertiser, 12 May 1893. 148 R. Hunt Davis, ‘The Black American educational component in African responses to colonialism in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 2, 1 (January 1978), p. 69. 149 G. B. A. Gerdener, Recent Developments in the South African Mission Field, Cape Town, 1958, p. 112; James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa, New York, 1995. 150 J. D. Stewart, A History of the Zulu Rebellion, 1906, London, 1913, pp. 97– 8. 151 Ilanga lase Natal, 15 July 1904. 72 In Township Tonight

152 Bishop L. J. Coppin, Observations of Persons and Things in South Africa, 1900–1904, 1904. 153 A.Vilakazi, Zulu Transformations, Pietermaritzburg, 1965, p. 139. 154 Keller, Origins of Modernism, pp. 234– 9. 155 Ilanga lase Natal, 18 March 1904. 156 Molema, Bantu Past and Present, p. 312. 157 The following section is based on David B. Coplan and Professor Bennetta Jules-Rosette, ‘“Nkosi Sikelel’ i-Afrika”: from independent spirit to political mobilization’, Paper presented to the African Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 7 December 2002. My gratitude to Professor Jules-Rosette for her excellent research and collaboration. See also D. D. T. Jabavu, ‘The origin of Nkosi Sikelel’ i-Afrika’, Nada 26 (1949), pp. 56–88. 158 Quoted in Erlmann, African Stars, p. 198. 159 Huskisson, Bantu Composers, p. 273. 160 Erlmann, Nightsong, p. 49. 161 Gerdener, South African Mission Field, p. 110. 162 Albert W. Baker, Grace Triumphant, Glasgow, 1939, pp. 101–2. 163 Donald Vysie, The Wesleyan Methodist Church in the Transvaal, 1823–1902, Grahamstown, 1969, p. 132. 164 Gerdener, South African Mission Field, p. 49. 165 Alice Rails, Glory Which Is Yours: A Tribute to Pioneer Ancestors, Pietermaritzburg, 1949, p. 171. 166 Sean Moroney, ‘The development of the compound as a mechanism of worker control, 1900–1912’, Witwatersrand History Workshop, Johannesburg, 1978, pp. 1, 16. 167 A. H. Duminy and W. R. Guest, FitzPatrick: South African Politician: Selected Papers 1888–1906, Johannesburg, 1976, pp. 405, 490. 168 T. K. Macnamara, ‘The development of a recruitment infrastructure: labour migration routes to the Witwatersrand gold mines and compound accommodation, 1889–1912’, Witwatersrand History Workshop, Johannesburg, 1978, p. 21. 169 Ibid., p. 24. 170 Sean Moroney, ‘Mine married quarters: the differential stabilisation of the Witwatersrand workforce, 1900–1920’ in Marks and Rathbone, Industrialisation and Social Change. 171 W. Bleloch, The New South Africa: Its Value and Development, London, 1902, p. 228. 172 James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, New York, 1900, p. 316. 173 J. S. Marais, ‘The imposing of European control’ in Schapera, Bantu-Speaking Tribes, p. 275. 174 Duminy and Guest, FitzPatrick. 175 Transvaal Leader, 30 December 1908; Adhikari, Not White Enough; Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice, 1875–1902, Cambridge, 1995. 176 David B. Coplan, ‘A terrible commitment: balancing the tribes in South African national culture’ in George Marcus (ed.), Perilous States, Chicago, 1993, pp. 317–19. 177 A. A. Khumalo, Interview with David Rycroft, December 1964. 178 C. van Onselen, ‘The witches of suburbia: domestic service on the Witwatersrand, 1890– 1914’, Witwatersrand History Workshop, Johannesburg, 1978, p. 56. 179 Ibid., p. 57 180 Hedley Chilvers, Johannesburg out of the Crucible, New York, 1929, pp. 173–86. 181 Rails, Glory Which Is Yours, p. 177. Early Performing Arts 73

3 Black Johannesburg, 1900–1920 Africans sought work in the Witwatersrand goldfields after the end of the Boer War in 1902 primarily for economic reasons. Population pressure, rural economic collapse, taxation, and increasing involvement in the money economy intensified the need for cash. Nevertheless, the earlier experience of mine labour in Kimberley and a growing awareness of the even more inhuman conditions on the Rand kept thousands of black South Africans away. Of the more than 85 000 mineworkers listed by the Transvaal Chamber of Mines in 1904, only about 19 000 came from South Africa.1 In the Transvaal, black workers were at the mercy of unscrupulous recruiters, mining interests dependent on cheap labour, and a neglectful British administration that was little better than the Afrikaner government that had preceded it. It took a mortality rate of ten per cent among miners to move the government to legislate better compound conditions in the Coloured Labourers Health Ordinance of 1905.2 In addition, new arrivals were unprepared for the largely unstructured proximity of so many people; and even those with experience of city life in the Cape or Natal found it difficult to orient themselves in the racial, ethnic, and socio-economic whirlpool of the Gold Reef. Even those who endured hardships in anticipation of returning to the relative security of rural homes suffered from severe stress due to the lack of organised community, family, and recreational life on the Rand. Under such conditions, cultural practices that are unreflectively taken for granted in rural districts become part of the self-conscious domain of ‘custom’ and ‘tradition’ that so vitally redefines self and other, ‘us’ and ‘them’, in the urban mélange. As J. Clyde Mitchell demonstrated in his classic account of the kalela dance on the Zambian Copperbelt, in such circumstances music and dance provide a means to display, to transform, indeed to celebrate cultural identities in suppressed multi-ethnic communities.3 As Mtutuzeli Matshoba wrote of his visits to Zulu factory workers’ hostels in the 1970s in ‘To Kill a Man’s Pride’: 74 In Township Tonight

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.4

More perilously, the workers’ need for release and redress was expressed most readily in drinking, militaristic dancing, and faction fighting between ethnic groups and antagonistic rural clans. Ironically, many labour migrants became part of Johannesburg’s permanent urban underclass, never returning home as they had planned and promised, simply as a result of alcoholism. Lionel Phillips recalled that in early Johannesburg, Terribly nefarious practices were rife. The drink curse was a scourge, and the government did nothing to check it or keep order over the weekends, when indescribable orgies of drunkenness occurred. The disorders were so appalling that on Sundays one hardly dared walk along the Reef. The Natives fell an easy prey to the vile stuff, and on Mondays a few had been killed and quite a considerable number were disabled in body and prostrated by the strain of the combats and the poison they had imbibed, so that work could proceed only at half speed.5

The Transvaal government’s Liquor Act of 1896 imposed total prohibition on Africans, but this only increased the problem. It ensured high profits for illicit sales and forbade traditional grain beers (Sotho: joala) that were relatively nutritious and only mildly alcoholic. Sorghum beer took several days to brew and had to be consumed in relatively large quantities for an intoxicating effect. Its production was not practical under conditions where liquor had to be made illegally. As in so many regions where colonisation brought industrial labour, traditional libations no longer satisfied the many workers looking for a more powerful antidote to their harsh, unfamiliar and restricted existence. Instead, the government-sponsored distillery at Pretoria and the Portuguese in Mozambique provided cheap brandy, which was mixed with beer and chemicals to produce a variety of near-lethal preparations sold in the black ‘locations’ or smuggled into the mine compounds. An early visitor observed that the African miners amuse themselves at times by dancing, especially after having managed to get hold of the vile concoction representing whiskey which … is rapidly ruining fine races and is mainly composed of tobacco juice and ‘blue stone’ (sulphate of copper). The effect of Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 75

this deadly mixture on even a Native’s stomach and head can be imagined. Their dance is a strange, incomprehensible one, especially under the above conditions.6

Despite the genuine concern of some financial and civic leaders and the regular police raids on brewing operations in the black locations, the liquor traffic proved uncontrollable. There is in fact little evidence that government or private employers ever made any serious effort to stop it. Injuries and Monday morning hangovers may have meant a significant loss in man-hours and efficiency (absenteeism on Monday mornings has remained a conspicuous feature of the South African labour force ever since), but as a writer for Imvo Zabantsundu (‘Black People’s Opinion’) pointed out, the fondness for liquor was the main factor in keeping some Africans on the Rand long enough to become competent miners, though some might become ‘staggering drunkards’ as well.7 The Transvaal government, for all its pious prohibitions, knew that most of the brandy distilled under government monopoly was going to Africans. White farmers found an outlet for their surplus produce at the state distillery, and government officials profited directly from the traffic through fees and bribery.8 The mining interests themselves took a share of the huge profits from illicit liquor consumed by their own workers.9 Moreover, drunkenness and the quarrelling that it ignited hampered African efforts to organise resistance to bad conditions on the mines. Perhaps the most extreme, if diabolically logical, extension of this policy was articulated by a white contributor to the Johannesburg Star.10 By the force of some obscure social law … the African black is able ... to accommodate himself to any known social environment ... In South Africa, legislation as a general rule has been directed towards prohibition laws, ignoring the plain teaching of experience that in alcohol is to be found the only influence which may be trusted to sap the fund of seemingly infinite vitality, which will overcome civilization, if civilization does not overcome it.

Women played a key role in the liquor trade and in the organisation of African social life in early Johannesburg, despite their limited numbers. As late as 1911, census figures showed that women comprised no more than five per cent of the African population of the Rand.11 Traditional communities discouraged women from following the men to the notorious urban areas. Local whites, fearing the rapid growth of the urban African population and the disintegration of rural tribal authority, hired only educated ‘mission girls’ as domestics and generally preferred male African ‘houseboys’.12 However, service industries involving the supply of beer, liquor, dagga (marijuana), sex, and general entertainment to blacks, provided profitable opportunities for black 76 In Township Tonight

and even poor white women. The official figures undoubtedly omitted a significant number of females who evaded the census. Migrants might choose merely to exist in the city, relying on groups of kin and ‘homeboys’ (Zulu: amakhaya) for aid and comfort while away from home. Those who fell permanently into the rhythm of urban life were forced to survive on their own or to create new identities, relationships, and communities where they were allowed to live. Residential and social alternatives were few for blacks, who worked for whites but were not allowed to be their neighbours or fellow citizens. Pass laws were in effect from 1896,13 together with a host of other restrictions. By 1910 ‘the natives ... are already kept in their places with a rigour that would surprise you. One result is that they have no footing in the public life of the community outside certain menial forms of labour … “The Nigger” ... is not tolerated, except, so to speak, as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water.’14 Central government, municipal, and private interests were in conflict over African residential policy, but the guiding principle, if there was one, seems to have been that of ‘sanitation’.15 Public services and residential planning during the 1890s in Johannesburg were the responsibility of public health authorities, whose influence remained strong within the City Council created after the Boer War. From the outset they were less concerned with providing adequate housing, sanitation, or amenities in areas occupied by non-whites than with keeping the physical and social ‘infections’ of these areas from the whites. Interracial contact, it was believed, would contaminate ‘white civilisation’ in South Africa, give non-whites social and political ambitions inconsistent with their subordinate status, and expose undesirable aspects of urban white society to blacks, who might then lose proper respect for whites. Public health policy was intended not so much to provide genuine sanitation as to create a segregationist cordon sanitaire around black residential areas. Municipal regulations, beginning in 1908, forbade whites to rent or give accommodation to blacks other than their servants, required blacks to live in municipal locations, and established a 9 p.m. curfew for Africans in the city. Because of conflicts of interest among whites, some of whom benefited from the struggle of blacks to get unsupervised housing close to their work, the regulations could not be consistently applied. The result was innercity residential areas accommodating a permanent African population.16 While the government was busy knocking down the shanties surrounding the mines, a number of originally white areas were taken over by blacks or a racially mixed population of urban poor. After an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1904, authorities burned down Brickfields (Newtown). Africans were re-housed in Nancefield– Klipspruit, the major municipal location until the establishment of Western Native Township in 1918. Built next to a municipal sewage farm twelve miles from the city, lacking services and subject to white supervision, the Klipspruit location housed Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 77

only 3 000 Africans by 1915. Housing shortages forced the City Council to issue permits allowing employers to house blacks in private compounds. By 1912, 10 000 such permits had been granted, mostly to slumlords who filled formerly spacious backyards with mazes of corrugated iron rooms rented to blacks at exorbitant rates.17 The Parks and Estates Committee took note of the situation: ‘in every warehouse, foundry, or factory within the centre of Johannesburg there is to be found today a native compound’.18 These unofficial or unauthorised African living areas were known in Johannesburg as ‘slumyards’. Other areas west and south of the city centre, originally laid out by the government for poor white or Asian and coloured occupation, soon housed hundreds of Africans as white or Indian landlords took advantage of the enormous profits to be made from slum rents and the liquor trade. Everywhere on the fringes of the city, except in the wealthy residential north, commercial real-estate interests discovered that slumyards brought in more revenue than any other kind of investment. Public alarm over living conditions, disease, and crime in these areas provoked considerable journalistic comment.19 While some newspapers sympathetically reported the squalor, overcrowding, and outrageous rents, others merely revealed the white fear of miscegenation and condemned the social mixing in the slums: These are yards like rabbit-warrens, from which lead a labyrinth of passages, the haunt of the criminal, the passless Native, the loafer. There are yards where Indians, Malays, White, Coloured, and Kaffir people are herding promiscuously. There are houses, once dwellings of better class of white-folk, now let out to the dregs of a mixed population. I shall not forget going upstairs in a house in Marshall Street, and finding a black man, white woman, a sheep, and a goat, all living together in the top room. Nor the yard in that choice quarter known as Malay Camp, where I found a group of young Native girls lying dead drunk in the morning after an orgie on methylated spirits and opium mixed, obtained from a Chinese store.20

For demographic, economic, and social reasons, African culture in Johannesburg before 1924 was a product of the slumyards and adjacent slum locations. Blocked by white residents’ groups who complained of a health menace whenever a site for a new location was proposed, the City Council compounded the problem by strenuously opposing the growth of African freehold suburbs. By 1921, the African population of the three freehold areas within four miles of the city officially totalled only 2 643.21 The slumyards, in contrast, housed at least 20 000 by 1919, and twice that number by 1927. Whites in general wanted Africans to be continually available for urban labour without acquiring any of the characteristics or aspirations common to members of Western industrial societies. Housing regulations and pass laws, however, were 78 In Township Tonight

ineffective in the face of economic and social conditions that drew people to the Rand in ever greater numbers. Specifically responsible for this townward migration was the Native Land Act of 1913, dispossessing tens of thousands of people and hundreds of settled communities, and confining African land ownership to reserves covering only one-seventh of the country. While migration to new areas had always been a feature of African settlement, this kind of enforced dispossession was something devastatingly different. The Union government seemed determined to sever historical African roots in the land and to pull them up wherever they had grown anew, insisting they be replanted only in the small, unproductive patches that came to be known in the 1960s with cruel irony as the ‘homelands’. Effectively homeless, thousands of Africans made new homes in the urban locations. This kind of destructive social engineering aroused intense resentment among Africans, particularly Christians, who had invested much of their new financial resources in land during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Africans outside the reserves and unwilling to return had to choose between serfdom on European farms and labour in the mines or urban industries. To many, the cities seemed to offer the best and most varied possibilities. White resistance only intensified the strain and dislocation of African urbanisation; it could not prevent it. Internally, the diversity of the African population, combined with migrancy, insecurity, and racial oppression, retarded the growth of stable social institutions and values. Though strategies of adaptation differed according to cultural ecology and social perceptions of class, there was little economic stratification – there was not a world of difference between what Africans were paid for the various jobs they might secure, and conflicts in social interests among black people were more apparent than real. Common residence and disabilities to some extent also submerged class differences in the general struggle for survival. Then too, police harassment and living conditions inhibited social and political organisation. Still, Africans created genuine communities in the face of bitterly alienating conditions, based on established practices of social cooperation, reciprocity, personal relationships, and family ties, though their structure was necessarily weak. The conflict between African urbanisation and white resistance created an environment in which social integration and disintegration coexisted in a precarious balance. In a system that denied social identity as well as power to Africans, crime became as effective a medium of protest and self-assertion as political organisation.22 It would not be until 1994 that crime became simply crime and not as well a socially condoned form of resistance, and even now criminals justify their acts as their only alternative to desperate poverty. This notion goes back to early Johannesburg, when the compounds, courts, and prisons reduced worker mobility and helped to create an African labour force with little respect for the law. Among the most influential organisations that grew out of the proletarian society of the slumyards early in the Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 79

century were criminal gangs, such as the Ninevites mentioned in Chapter 2. By 1912, this gang had 1 000 members operating from numerous headquarters in the mine compounds, hostels, prisons, and slumyards. They organised burglaries, robbery, prostitution, gambling, illicit liquor and dagga smuggling throughout the southern Transvaal. They immobilised the black police (nongqai, lit. crow) and physically punished both whites and blacks found abusing African workers or collaborating in the system of oppression. Other Ninevite-style organisations, which remained strong in the prisons until the mid-1930s, inspired the emerging African labour movement with their methods. The most significant offshoot of the Ninevites was Johannesburg’s first organised group of ‘juvenile delinquents’. The Amalaita took their name from the way in which Zulu native police pronounced ‘Allrighters’, a term for the Ninevites. They were mostly young Pedi who joined together to resist the pass laws. Primarily children of Christian families, they imitated the Scottish military bands that played regularly in the city’s parks; they drilled to commands in English and marched to the music of harmonicas and penny whistles (cheap metal recorders) on Sunday afternoons.23 By 1908, their membership and activities were changing in response to the commanding social issue of the day, the ‘Black Peril’. The Black Peril controversy ostensibly centred on the rising crime rate among blacks.24 In particular, whites feared sexual assaults on their women, so many of whom spent their days in close contact with male African domestic servants. It prompted the replacement of houseboys with cheaper and more submissive Zulu and Tswana females, available because of drought and depression in the countryside. This caused white women to fear sexual competition from female servants, so an alternative was found in the employment of young Pedi and Tswana boys from the northern Transvaal. With no support from destitute rural families, these ‘piccanins’, as the new houseboys were called, struggled to stay in town and to reduce the hardships of low wages, unemployment, and Black Peril by whites. Virtually taking over the Amalaita, they changed the gang language from English to Pedi. Combining European military ranking with rural Pedi patterns of organisation, particularly age-set groupings, they founded a genuine urban youth movement that included female members. Most gangs composed their own songs, such as ‘Ngoma wa Amalaita’ (‘Dance of the Amalaita’). The Scottish military bands continued to inspire the penny whistle and drum music that accompanied their parades, the boys’ uniforms, and the short accordion-pleated tartan skirts called ‘Scots rokkies’ worn by female members.25 Many Amalaita had become young adults by the end of the First World War and formed fighting teams that battled against each other in the location streets at weekends. In the prisons, Amalaita organised the much-feared Scotlanders gang and challenged the dominance of the Ninevites. Overall, the Amalaita helped to pull the 80 In Township Tonight

isolated, suffering young domestic workers together in a heartless city in hard times. Gang membership provided purpose and dignity, transforming the domestics’ selfimage from one of menials serving white females into leaders in an urban workers’ army, an autonomous organisation able to resist oppression by collective force. As a by-product, the Amalaita bands’ introduction of the penny whistle to the locations contributed to the development of distinctive urban African musical styles. Many African brass and reed players developed their musical skills on this simple but versatile metal flageolet, and while its popularity peaked in the kwela pennywhistle jazz era of the 1950s,26 it remained a favourite with township youngsters up until the end of the 1970s. During the 1920s and 1930s, youthful pennywhistle bandsmen performed at many kinds of urban social occasions. The resilient new patterns of social organisation, criminal and otherwise, were based in part on the distinction between migrants and permanent townsmen. Performing the roughest, most menial and worst-paid tasks in the mines and domestic and municipal services, the migrants were at the bottom, but to some extent outside, of the status system of urban African society. Migrancy was and still is perceived as a threat to the aspirations of townsmen. Urbanites rejected any behaviour they considered ihlati (Xhosa: uncivilised, provincial) and resented white unwillingness to make any social or legal distinctions between migrants and themselves. For their part, whites tended to deny African townsmen’s claims to ‘civilised’ (European) status. On the contrary, they preferred the ‘natural dignity’ (docility) of the traditional African. The migrants threatened the political goals and economic security of the townsmen as well as their social identity. Migrants were reluctant to participate in urban labour organisations or to campaign for African rights in the cities, and they were willing to work for lower wages and to endure poorer living conditions than were permanent residents. Migrants isolated themselves from urban society by remaining in homeboy networks, yet the scale and diversity of the urban environment enabled them to join in town-centred activities if they chose without necessarily endangering ties to the country. As a consequence, migrants and their performing arts were significantly affected by urban residence whether or not they became urbanites. To begin with, conditions in the mine compounds themselves influenced the way in which traditional male dancing was organised and performed. Looking for recreational alternatives to drinking and faction fighting, compound managers organised regular dance competitions according to rules more appropriate to a European school or military parade ground than to the aesthetic of rural African regimental dance rivalry. For example, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association ran annual trophy competitions for Portuguese East African miners in Johannesburg. Team dances were ‘conducted in strict accordance with a carefully prepared code of rules and regulations’.27 Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 81

So the white judges based their decisions on: 1 the rendering of the music; 2 the general appearance of the dancers; 3 the precision of movement of the dancers; 4 the regularity of the dancing line. That these European aesthetic criteria bore no relation to rural indigenous African ones did not trouble those awarding these prizes, nor did it lessen the prestige of the winners among their fellow competitors. Rivalries for land use and other resources between rural communities and clans were transplanted to the urban setting, and teams of Nyembane, Chopi, and Tsonga (Shangaans) from Mozambique expressed in performance competitions the inter-group tensions produced by common residence and labour in the mines. According to its translator, a Shangaan team song performed in 1928 proclaimed: We hear a rumour that our song-maker and leader, Nkuna, is getting old and cannot make any more songs. Sabue says this. Sabue has gone to Booysens now; They might as well have sent an owl there for all he’ll teach them. They are shedding tears of envy in all the other compounds when they hear the great variety of songs we have. We hear heaps of songs here, But at No 14 Shaft they are crying out for them.28

Witchcraft accusations, an aspect of long-standing group performance rivalries, also appeared among the miners. Songs containing such accusations also displayed a recognition of new power realities: We are nearly being killed by all the machinations of the wizards. We know who they are, But we are afraid to mention their names, because the biggest of the lot is the white man who keeps the gate.

Mozambicans also became well known in the compounds for their traditions of theatrical display, which integrated music, dance, mime, acrobatics and verbal expression. As early as 1586, Friar João dos Santos recorded in his journal after visiting a Chopi royal court that ‘The King … has another class of kaffir who are called marombes, which means the same as jester, and who sang, shouted praises, told jokes, and performed acrobatics’.29 This ancient tradition appeared in the mines. In the early 82 In Township Tonight

1900s, dance competitions usually featured a marombe in a European top hat, tail coat, shirt, and trousers worn very much awry, who performed acrobatic and mimetic turns and regaled the crowd with jokes and comic praises. Many of these displays involved humour drawn from the immediate environment. Mine comedians performed not only satires on local European behaviour but also energetic parodies of the ordinarily highly serious practice of trance-divination, with costumes out of a ‘ragshop’ in place of the traditional skins.30 Acrobatic satires by Ndau workers from northern Mozambique made fun of mine personalities including the white doctor, mine captain, or shift boss. The Xhosa, Sotho, and others from South Africa drew on equally vigorous traditions of mimetic dance, poetic expression, musical and gestural narrative, all of which contributed to the development of a popular urban African theatre. In 1921, members of Johannesburg’s Parks and Estates Committee visiting Western Native Township were greeted by A kaffir playing a sort of one-string banjo, made of a piece of hollowed bark and what looked like a paraffin [kerosene] tin. In excellent English, he went through a little scene depicting a ‘boy’s’ arrest for not having a pass, the plea being that he was an African in his own country, and did not need one. This, however, did not avail him, the magistrate’s remarks being cleverly, if a little too forcibly, portrayed to the tum tum of the banjo aforesaid.31

Among Zulu migrants, traditional dance forms have been affected by their participation in domestic, industrial, and mine labour. As with the Mozambicans, the close contact of separate Zulu clans in the workers’ hostels intensified the competition so vital to male dancing in traditional society. As they asserted their social status and group identity, homeboy dance teams began to develop new dances with more clearly defined aesthetic requirements. City competition encouraged stylistic innovation and consensus on the quality of performances, and reputations rose or fell on the basis of achievements in the dance arena. In Durban, workers developed new dances in traditional idiom like isikhuze, isicathulo, isibhaca, umzanzi, and ingoma, and performed country dances such as ndhlamu in the industrial yards.32 Commercial employers co-opted workers’ dance competitions, providing uniforms, colours, banners, transport, and time off for rehearsal – all to heighten the loyalty and morale of the workforce. This system of company teams and white judges and performance standards continued into the 1980s and powerfully influenced the aesthetic of Zulu men’s dancing for more than half a century. Even today, dance teams are as much a part of the structure of homeboy institutions in the hostels as burial societies, savings circles, and drinking clubs. Talented composers called Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 83

amagoso become team leaders, and with their amaphini, or assistants, they join with the elders in the hostels in exercising authority over the homeboy group. Competitive dancing is conceived directly in terms of military metaphors. Currently, members of teams performing the popular isishayameni (among beaters) dance are called amasoja (English: soldiers).They compose songs called ‘bullets’ to fire at rival teams.33 Interestingly, the majority of creative innovators in competitive dance and song were not the more traditional Zulu migrants, but amagxagxa (‘vagrants’), marginal people who, like the Xhosa abaphakathi (‘middle ones’), were neither traditional nor Christian, but somewhere in between. It was they who brought dance steps from other ethnic groups and from the urban locations into Zulu male dancing in the hostels. Similarly, they blended Zulu traditional dance music with the Izingottia zomtshado, the Zulu Wesleyan Methodist hymns used at both rural and urban weddings, to create some interesting syncretic dance team songs. Those who found the competition too fierce devised ways to place psychic distance between themselves and the intense, winnertake-all atmosphere of the dancing ground. Out of the mix of cultural influences came a form of self-parody and dance humour called ukukomika (English: comic) described by Erlmann as ‘a migrants’ dance form that fused parody of white military drill with ingoma choreography’.34 Ukukomika soon linked up with an important new style of vocal performance that first appeared during the First World War under the name ingoma busuku (Zulu: ‘night music’). It has since gone through many transformations under different names and remains popular today as isicathamiya (Zulu: ‘a stalking approach’). Some years after this book was first written, Veit Erlmann, then lecturing in music at the University of Natal in Durban, took up my call to investigate the many styles so briefly mentioned here in genuine detail. The result is his massive, superb study of isicathamiya, Nightsong.35 Readers interested in this music, indeed anyone who has thrilled to the elegantly structured, heaven-meant harmonies of the leading exponents of the form, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, should consult this work. Informants give varying explanations of the emergence of the original form. Some referred to ingoma busuku as ikomik. The late Bongi Mthethwa of the then Zululand University’s music department explained that the importance of Wesleyan Methodist hymns in African Christian musical life led to their adaptation to a range of secular contexts. One result was a light-hearted form of Zulu Christian popular song called mbholoho, and then the more serious and formal style of ingoma busuku. Several musicians pointed out that, as its name suggests, it was performed at night, and associated with the concerts (ikhonsathi) of westernised choirs rather than with traditional musical occasions. Mthethwa also claims that the unique isicathamiya dance style was influenced by the popular Charleston from America during the 1930s, and was called ukureka (English: rag; ragtime).36 84 In Township Tonight

Stylistic categories are not written in stone, of course, and depend very much upon what they mean and how they are used situationally in discourse and practice. They are most useful, perhaps, in revealing important distinctions in the minds of participants, and in distinguishing one emergent form from another. Given the variety of urban experience, distinctions of style do not always operate on the same logical level or apply to the entire community of listeners. Their application is often dependent on context. The most important aspect of ingoma busuku, then, is the relationship between the structure and content of performance and the identity and aspirations of its participants. The ingoma busuku male choral style became most popular with Zulu and Swazi industrial and domestic workers from the rural areas. Though they had little Western education, many had enjoyed mission-school concerts in Natal. In Durban, Johannesburg, and other cities they joined social groups who had their own notions of ‘modern’ cultural expression. No longer wishing to be considered rural or traditional people, they were most interested in performances that embodied their self-image as both properly Zulu and voluntarily townsmen. Borrowing from the culture of the African school people, they worked vocal music drawn from traditional social, political, and military life into their own version of middle-class choir competitions. The immediate model for ingoma busuku appears to have been the singing competitions at rural or small-town weddings. In colonial times these became perhaps the most important single focus of group social interaction in Zulu society. The two extended family groups or local sub-clans attached to the bride and the groom competed against each other in performing well-known or newly composed songs and dances, often after weeks of rehearsal. The two groups, soon to be in-laws, expressed their identity in opposition to each other most strongly in singing their Ihubo Lesizwe, a kind of anthem for the group. It commanded great respect and was accompanied by powerful pointing movements (ukukhomba). The Zulu do not classify these movements as dance, though they are integrated into many recognised dances.37 Also in the background of ingoma busuku is the competitive singing of regimental anthems (amahubo amabutho), accompanied by a slow, forceful, synchronised dancing equivalent in purpose to a European military drill. A. T. Bryant witnessed a first fruits ceremony in Zululand during the 1920s at which two regiments performed: The two choirs thenceforth sang together, each its own part, with different words and different tunes, and yet all so tastefully blended together as to create perfectly harmonious, albeit exotic, music. As they sang they all danced together, assuming simultaneously, in perfect unity and much barbaric grace, identically the same poses of body and movement of limbs, shields, and sticks, as to present a combination of harmonious sound and rhythmic action most graceful at once to ear and eye . . .38 Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 85

(English translation by Fatima Dike) We are children of Africa We cry for our land Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho unite We are mad over the Land Act A terrible law that allows sojourners 86 In Township Tonight

To deny us our land Crying that we the people Should pay to get our land back We cry for the children of our fathers Who roam around the world without a home Even in the land of their forefathers

Zulu and Swazi workers transferred these traditions of competitive song and movement to location hall stages. As many as thirty male choirs would compete with old or newly composed traditional songs, and prizes ranged from a goat or a bicycle to a large part of the gate receipts. Isicathamiya (as ingoma busuku is now universally known) choirs still compete today in Durban and Johannesburg, where dance routines unique to each song are known as istep. The words of the songs are linked to the melody and the movements of the step dancing. Keeping the torso immobile helps the dancers to sing more powerfully, hence the physical impression of the synchronised group as stalking in their approach.39 Ingoma busuku participants at first included people of varying degrees of urbanisation and westernisation, and the style itself could be varied accordingly. There was no strict dichotomy between migrants and townsmen or traditionalists and Christians in Johannesburg despite popular categorisation. Many migrants and urban proletarians fell into a third, intermediate category and came together in ingoma busuku competitions and other performance events. Since the Second World War social sectors and categories have hardened, and isicathamiya is performed almost exclusively by people that may be considered urban, but not Western, in culture. The varied African approaches to urbanisation stemmed from differences in background, attitudes, and experience of European culture. Middle-class African culture is a good illustration of the relationship between various rural and urban strategies. Until the 1990s, the formation of social classes among black South Africans was retarded by the impact of racial oppression. There was further damage done to the social status of more wealthy urban black people by the popular perception, quite justified in many cases, that such advancement was a reward for collaboration with the system of segregation. Generally, however, middle-class and working-class identity was more a matter of culture pattern, social aspiration, and self-perception than income or position in South Africa’s racialised political economy. Culturally, Africans made social distinctions among themselves based on educational level and the degree to which they deliberately pursued westernisation. Yet even here, differences were more a matter of emphasis than opposition. In different ways, both middle-class and working-class Africans responded energetically to the dehumanisation of the South African system by adapting traditional social forms, principles, and practices to urban needs.40 As mission school graduates left for the cities and missions built schools in the urban areas, middle-class life became increasingly town-centred.41 During the early twentieth century, an emerging African elite culture and society established links between the rural church schools and the urban middle class. Together, rural and urban school culture influenced the aspirations and identities of all urban Africans. Perceptions of social class have gradually come to compete successfully with ethnic and regional background in structuring urban African society and in determining Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 87

the membership of associations and social networks. The balance between them is weighted situationally, influenced by competition for resources and the effective operation of overlapping social networks. The contribution of the Natal Zulu elite to early twentieth-century urban culture, for example, illustrates both the relationship of class to culture and historical experience, and the importance of rural–urban ties. Though the secretary of the American Mission Board observed in 1880 that the number of missions in Natal was proportionately ‘greater than in any other community on the globe two or three times over’,42 evangelisation had met with little success. In the Zulu kingdom itself, Zulu kings considered conversion an act of treason, classified Christian Zulu as non-Zulu, and cut them off from the traditional community. Missionary efforts there long remained at a standstill. In neighbouring Natal, a British crown colony, missionaries were more successful, but not among members of strong, long-settled communities. Though landed Africans were politically fragmented, they strongly resisted conversion. Mission stations attracted instead oorlams black people: coloureds, Khoisan, and homeless Africans in need of land, refuge, or work. As early as 1856, the Anglican station at Ladysmith was ‘notorious as the haunt of bad (i.e. dispossessed) characters representing all races’.43 Despite their isolation, Natal mission residents prospered from the benefits of free land and education. Recognising the value of permanent legal tenure in colonial society, African Christians sought to buy land for cash-cropping in Natal as early as 1855, often as members of Christian collectives. The best example of such a collective is Edendale, established as a Wesleyan Methodist station by W. C. Holden near Pietermaritzburg in 1847. Residents added three farms to their freeholdings by 1865 and soon became an economically independent religious community. Etherington says that ‘the cooperation which the Edendale men displayed demonstrates vividly the way in which common goals, intermarriages, and the special, shared experience of mission station life welded men and women of widely varying backgrounds into one people’.44 Ethnic divisions within such communities were further weakened through the efforts of missionaries who preached the equality of all African tribes and individuals under God. But colonial attitudes and British policy did not favour Africans becoming substantial property owners, professionals, or economic competitors of whites. Greatly outnumbered by Africans, whites in Natal developed a strong racial consciousness. So in contrast to the Cape policy of ‘subordinate assimilation’, they aimed to direct African social change ‘along its own lines’.45 Created by Secretary for Native Affairs Theophilus Shepstone, Natal native policy in the 1870s is now widely recognised as the original model for the philosophy and practice of apartheid in South Africa. Shepstone promoted settler interests by means of British concepts of ‘indirect rule’. He used taxes and legal means to restrain African enterprise, confine African land ownership to specified rural ‘locations’ or reserves, and in contrast to George Grey in 88 In Township Tonight

the Cape, attempted to reconstruct traditional political structures artificially where they had broken down.46 Missions in Natal established colour bars in worship and church organisation. Despite promises to train Africans for the ministry, schools such as the Adams and Inanda seminaries of the American Board (Congregationalist) never offered advancement beyond secondary education. As taxes and high rents drove Africans out of commercial farming and into transport driving and itinerant trading, the amakholwa (believers), as African Christians were called, became increasingly bitter about white resistance to their advancement in every field. Yet, because British Imperial guarantees of equality before the law remained their only hope, the amakholwa strove to anglicise and for the most part remained loyal to Britain through the First World War and even beyond. As early as the 1890s, however, such loyalty was already being tempered by movements towards cultural reassertion, specifically an African (Zulu) nationalism inspired by educational, political, and religious movements in black America. For the Natal Christian elite, the Ethiopianism associated with the AME Church and other African-American missions represented racial progress through independent control of church affairs and the solidarity of Africans under a common religious ideology. Denied access to higher education in South Africa, graduates of mission schools enrolled in American colleges, where they gained first-hand knowledge of African-American political ideas. Returning home, many continued with African-American church work while others took steps to interpret the black American experience and relate it practically to the needs of their own people. A leader in both the educational and political fields was the Reverend John Dube, the son of a chief of the Qadi Zulu clan whose family had fled to the American Congregationalist mission at Inanda when King Mpande had him killed. Offers of land and refuge helped christianise the Qadi as a whole, and Dube emerged as a Christian leader firmly based in a cohesive local community. Dube studied at Tuskegee and other American schools during 1887–92 and 1897–9. In 1901, he established an independent school for liberal and industrial education modelled on Tuskegee at Ohlange, near Inanda. Dube and other black South African Christians were attracted by the emphasis on self-help in the ideas of Tuskegee’s founder, Booker Washington, and viewed education as the key to advancement. As Hunt Davis explains, ‘Ohlange was an example of Africans adopting black American educational concepts and techniques to further African self-sufficiency, not for the purpose of ultimate incorporation into the white dominated society but for the restoration of African nationhood’.47 Contact with African-America thus fostered a racial self-respect that became a basis for nonviolent struggle against a society determined to crush African aspirations. Political activism on the part of Dube and others resulted in the creation of the Natal branch of the South African Native National Congress in 1912 and the subsequent emergence of the Zulu cultural organisation Inkatha Yesizwe.48 Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 89

In Natal, then as now, amakholwa African nationalism contained a strong admixture of Zulu ethnic pride. Socially, their Christianity alienated them from the surrounding traditional communities, and historically they had played an active role in the Natal Native Contingent in the British destruction of the Zulu state in 1879. Most of them came from Nguni clans not strictly part of the Zulu empire. Nevertheless, Natal Christians identified with the glory of the Zulu past. They referred to themselves as Zulu and attempted to create a national culture based on an adaptive blend of Zulu, African-American, and European elements. The work of the most important composer of Zulu choral and other popular songs of the early twentieth century, Reuben T. Caluza, can only be understood against the background of this cultural nationalism. Caluza, one of the most important figures in the emergence of modern Zulu music and a cultural icon among the African elite of his day, had had almost nothing written about him until this book first appeared in 1986. Such inattention to the creative genius of black South Africa, which in Caluza’s case received prominent recognition in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States and Britain as well as in Durban and Johannesburg, is in part what compelled me to write this narrative in the first place. Since then Veit Erlmann, who carried out extensive research into Zulu choral music during the 1980s, has written a superb chapter on Caluza and his times in his 1991 collection African Stars: Studies in South African Popular Music.49 The following account is heavily indebted to Erlmann’s thoughtful, detailed study. Born in 1895 in the village of Siyamu near Pietermaritzburg, Caluza was the greatgrandson of one of the original converts who arrived at EdendaIe with the Reverend Mr Allison in the late 1840s. Caluza came from a family that was notably musical even by Edendale’s high standards, and his grandfather, John, was renowned for his ability to read staff notation and conduct a choir. Edendale musician Saul Msane organised the Zulu Choir that, inspired by Orpheus McAdoo, toured to Britain in 1892. The tour ended abruptly, however, when promoters instructed the choir to perform partly in traditional Zulu costume under the entirely misleading and humiliating banner ‘From the Wilds to Westminster’. To such staunch Christians, this was not an acceptable mode of self-presentation in London. Reuben began his professional career as a student at Ohlange Institute in 1908. The school was already in financial trouble, and Caluza’s extraordinary musical and entrepreneurial talents, quickly recognised, proved indispensable. By 1910 his Royal Singers, a boys’ choir performing hymns, Negro spirituals, ‘ragtime’ (at that time more music hall ‘barbershop quartet’ than syncopated or Scott Joplin), and traditional Zulu songs arranged for choral performance were winning major student choir competitions in Natal. An important aspect of life in the Edendale area was the communal performance of so many different traditional, migrant, urban, and Christian musical forms. Caluza 90 In Township Tonight

saw new urban-influenced styles of rural dancing such as umqhuqhumbela, isicathulo, nomchichimbwe, and indlamu that were popular in independent African Christian communities in Natal, and the youngster was exceptional in his ready, unprejudiced acceptance of anything he heard. Recognising the potential of the ‘Scottish’ African street bands, for example, Caluza organised a fife and drum ensemble and took over the brass band that the Reverend John Dube had equipped with instruments from America. In June 1911 his penny whistlers earned the considerable sum of £8 10s marching in the streets of Ndwedwe, Natal.50 Upon graduation in 1912 Caluza was appointed a teacher at Ohlange and took over the Institute’s choir. Their fund-raising tours to centres such as Durban, Bloemfontein, and Johannesburg – where they popularised Sontonga’s ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ and other African songs among black Christians – became a major source of income. Among his many distinguished alumni was Albert Luthuli, president of the African National Congress from 1952 to 1967, who entered Ohlange in 1914. In the 1920s, before he entered politics, Luthuli was a distinguished choir conductor at Adams College, Amanzimtoti.51 In 1913 black Christian society was shaken to its very roots by the Native Land Act, which legally dispossessed the majority of African title-holders. So at seventeen, Caluza published his first song, ‘Silusapho Lwase Afrika’ or ‘iLand Act’, later recorded on His Masters Voice (GU 11). Given the importance of the issue, the African National Congress adopted it as its anthem until it was superseded by the more general appeal of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’. ‘iLand Act’ protested the injustice of the Land Act of 1913. The greatest foreign influence on Caluza’s music apart from European and mission brass bands and choral music was American vaudeville ‘ragtime’. The first decade of the twentieth century saw the spread of American popular culture among missionschool Africans throughout South Africa. A musical survival of minstrelsy, ‘coon songs’ (early ragtime from Tin Pan Alley) became available in printed albums and even on gramophone recordings. In 1902, ex-slave George Johnson’s coon song ‘The Original Haw Haw Man’ sold well in Central and southern Africa. In Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a Major Cyril Fosset reported ‘the new box of laugh records arrived today and perfectly eased what might have been a tricky situation with the Natives. They seem to prefer these to the Reverend’s piano recitals of Gilbert and Sullivan.’52 Despite their crude, racist caricatures of Negroes, the appeal of coon songs for both American and South African black people ‘was not in what they said, but in the rhythm and swing in which they said it’.53 At a Christmas concert in the Christian community of Groutville, Natal (Albert Luthuli’s home), in 1907, pieces performed by the local choir included ‘Under the Willow’, ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ and ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’. These alternated with the playing of gramophone recordings that Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 91

included ‘My Crude Sue’, ‘An Evening with Minstrels’, and ‘I’se Gwine Back to Dixie’. This last song was also performed live by the choir.54 School concerts and travelling choirs popularised early ragtime. As early as 1904, the Inanda Native Singers, organised by Dube, were performing coon songs like ‘Who Stole My Chicken Away’, ‘Happy Pickaninnies, Oh!’ and other turn-of-the-century songs in English.55 Coloured musicians also popularised American-style string bands, and groups of African schoolboys soon joined them in playing for young people’s dances. One dance at New Scotland, Natal, on 3 March 1910, featured an ensemble of two guitars, a mandolin and a concertina.56 Many choirs preferred American or English tunes to traditional songs, which they associated with the ‘primitive’ and ‘heathen’ cultural past. As the late John Blacking put it, ‘the appropriation of the triads and cadences of European hymn tunes “expressed the new relationships and values of urban groups, who expected fuller participation in the social and political life into which they had been drawn economically.”’57 Above all, however, they desired modern African compositions, with lyrics in local languages. Works by Bokwe, Tyamzashe, and Caluza helped fill this need in Xhosa and Zulu, and with the growth of nationalist sentiment, African compositions such as ‘Umuntu Ontsundu Makabe Munye’ (‘Black People Unite’) became concert standards.58 For the first quarter of the century, amakwaya (choir) music other than hymns (amaculo) was thus divided into three distinct categories by Zulu participants: Amaculo eMusic (British and African popular choral and light classical songs), Amaculo esiZulu (traditional songs arranged for choir), and Amaculo eRagtime (American popular songs and local pieces in ragtime style). Amakwaya concerts helped to build middle-class pride and a national African culture. Admiration for black America was especially strong among early black nationalists and black racial identity and westernisation became sources of political unity. However, nationalist leaders were at once attracted to British and American models and troubled by the need to access foreign sources to create an African national culture. More materially, the African elite wished to display their loyalty to Zulu royalty and ‘tradition’. This expression of ethnic solidarity was a means to mask their cultural and economic ascendance over the dispossessed multitude . So the first recordings released especially for the Durban African market included royal praise poems, traditional lore, rural Zulu and comic songs, and songs commenting on monarchical politics in the colonial context.59 Such conflicts permeated the political and cultural atmosphere at the outset of Caluza’s career, and his songs and stage performances became a key element in strategies to overcome this contradiction. Thus his compositions promoted both nostalgia for the old ways and the social value of amakholwa Christian morality and westernisation. This ideological double jeu mobilised Zulu tradition as a strategy for an 92 In Township Tonight

alternative, ‘African’ modernisation.60 The harmonisation of monarchical pastoralism and industrial modernity may seem unachievable until we recognise its rendition again today in the political ideology of Zulu Christian nationalism embodied in Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (the term ‘Inkatha’ is common to both the early and late twentieth-century movements) and indeed the ANC leadership’s notion of ‘African Renaissance’ at century’s end. Caluza’s role as a ‘cultural broker’ in this process, providing successful performative embodiments of such a complex and previously contradictory harmonisation, was to bring him great approbation and fame, if not fortune. In the towns, ragtime companies and individual performers – with tailcoats, boaters, bow ties, and canes – offered both ragtime songs and black vaudeville entertainment. Still dedicated to Ohlange, Caluza created a professional stage ensemble for the paying African mass audience. Caluza was a talented organist and pianist, but unlike many formally trained African choir leaders, he had a remarkable talent for absorbing diverse musical influences and combining them in an original manner, and he was eager to arrange traditional Zulu songs for amakwaya. In achieving regional and national popularity, Caluza combined the infectious rhythm and melody of piano ragtime with socially relevant, topical Zulu lyrics, indigenous part-singing, and a mission-school style of music and movement known as the ‘action song’ (ukutamba ; Zulu: file dancing with uniform movements under the control of a conductor).61 The orchestration of synchronised rhythmic movement and vocal harmony in action songs at African school concerts can be traced back to indigenous performance traditions. Among the peoples of southern Africa, military chants, folk narratives, and praise singing all coordinate movement, words, and music into an integrated, dramatically expressive whole. As Sotho dancers explained to Charles Adams, ‘the sound of a beautiful song agrees with the rhythm and steps of the feet. The beauty of the song is not its words but what is seen with the eyes.’62 In the mission schools in the late nineteenth century, interpretative movement was one solution to the difficulty of getting African students to stand still while singing. White missionaries often forbade converts to perform either ‘heathen’ traditional dances or ‘immoral’ European social dances. Thus the kinds of restrictions on dancing that produced the ‘ring shout’ among Christian black Americans may underlie the South African action song. In the 1930s, action songs were very popular with choirs in the eastern Cape, and at concerts: ‘as the night advances the girls who began with stiff gestures are swinging about the floor doing something as near a dance as the eye of teacher and parson will permit’.63 Among the Zulu, choral performance of the serious amahubo anthems traditionally involved movements that, with missionary blessings, could be combined with those of British school action songs and singing games, creating new patterns suited to the physical expression of westernised African choral Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 93

performance. Caluza added to these forms African-American stage movement taken from the minstrels and ragtime companies. This enabled him to transform the action song into a professional African musical variety tradition that smoothly integrated Zulu song, piano ragtime, and interpretative, synchronised step dancing. Caluza’s performance style greatly influenced isicathamiya, and it may have been because of him that the term ukureka, which referred both to the performance of ragtime music and to the choreographed movements of the singers, was also applied to isicathamiya. Caluza had greater popularity and influence among all classes of urban Africans than with more westernised African choir conductors such as A. J. Mthethwa of the prestigious Zulu Union Choir.64 His success was due not only to his ability to combine African tradition with the most popular ‘international’ black music of the day, but also to his versatility, which allowed him to appeal to a variety of audiences during the 1920s. Caluza used penny whistle, string, and brass bands, pianos, quartets, choirs, coon troupes, and concert parties to entertain anyone with the price of admission. On one occasion his choir performed for elegantly dressed African domestic servants at the Inchcape Hall, Johannesburg. Shortly afterwards, at the working-class Nobadula Hall in Benoni, ‘shots and daggers flared during a concert partly led by R. T. Caluza’.65 From 1918 Caluza also introduced stage costumes and ‘dramatisation’ of his songs, an innovation that established him as South Africa’s leading entertainer (black or white).66 At this time Caluza attended Mariannhill College for further studies, and was influenced by Father Bernard Huss and his short dramatic scenes performed by students. So Caluza wrote song-skits such as Isangoma (‘Traditional Diviner’) (HMV GU 73), in which the performers impersonated a sangoma while singing the song. Such dramatisations were not unknown in indigenous Zulu performance, but in this case Caluza had invented a new genre of aural literature. This was ‘modern’ Zulu stage storysong, entirely different from the old folk praises and songs, with many contemporary Zulu usages rather than rural–historical references and stylisations. Finally, he brought comedy into the staid atmosphere of African stage performance. Caluza had a great sense of humour and, in addition to ‘laughing songs’ and ukukomika, even produced his own version of Harry Lauder burlesque skits such as ‘The Man They Left Behind’ (1920). These innovations can be said to form the beginnings of a modern African variety show tradition in South Africa, and Caluza had a major influence on the emergence and style of variety troupes such as the Africans Own Entertainers.67 As a cultural entrepreneur, Caluza transformed the entire ikhonsathi scene to become a popular entertainer and to move away from music hall and emusic to ragtime and more indigenous four-part songs. By 1930 Caluza was composing and performing real American-style piano ragtime songs in Zulu. By that time white South African cultural watchdogs had become suspicious of ragtime, viewing it as a musical expression of 94 In Township Tonight

anti-white or black nationalist sentiment, and Dube even advised against playing it.68 No wonder Caluza politely refused this advice. Yet by the mid-1920s, middle-class Africans too were beginning to disapprove of ragtime and to dissociate Caluza from a style they regarded as suited to the taste of the lower orders of his urban audience. As ragtime became ‘popular’ and was adopted by the urban proletariat, African middle-class parents showed concern for the moral effect of such music on their children in the schools. A reader complained in Umteteli wa Bantu ‘that drunkards and the youth have been driven mad with Ragtime in Johannesburg and other towns’.69 Ilanga editor R. R. R. Dhlomo wanted Caluza’s music ‘sung in high and low places’. When the people in the low places transformed it to suit their own taste, however, he complained Rand Africans were ‘so fed up with the so-called modern Ragtime and comic pieces’ and the keyboard playing in the slumyard canteens, that the Christmas concert of the Caluza Choir would make them feel ‘like people given a taste of fresh air after a suffocating ordeal’.70 The undisputed popularity of Caluza’s compositions among African choirs throughout the country was largely due to the topicality of his lyrics. Between 1917 and the mid-1920s, ‘Caluza composed a series of songs that reflected the precarious position of Durban’s black intelligentsia caught between self-conscious urbanism and rural nostalgia, and hemmed in between white hegemony and black popular opposition’.71 Songs like ‘Ingoduso’ (‘The Fiancè’) warned young men about the dangers of Johannesburg, urging them to avoid drink and crime and not to abandon their families at home. ‘Influenza’ (see Appendix A) commemorated the ‘Great Flu’ of 1918 in which tens of thousands of Africans died. Other songs reflected on the complex, contentious relations between various social categories of African in-migrants to the mushrooming urban areas. So Caluza satirised the country bumpkin in ‘uBhatata’ (‘Sweet Potatoes’) (HMV GU 71), yet equally the city slicker or dandy who no longer visits home and forgets his relatives in ‘In Town’ (HMV GU 43) and ‘uBungca’ (‘Oxford Bags’) (HMV GU 1). The young migrant seduced away from tradition by urban fashion and superficiality is admonished in ‘Abaqhafi’ (‘Gangsters’) (HMV GU 44)72, while the drinkers at the beer halls get a scolding in ‘Kwa Madala’ (HMV GU 62). Caluza criticised not only what he considered false values and trends in African urban society but also protested against compulsory de-verminisation (dipping!) of black work-seekers in 1923 in ‘Idiphu eThekwini’ (‘The Dipping in Durban’) (HMV GU41). ‘Sixotshwa Emsebenzi’ (HMV GU 23) criticised the job reservation and deprofessionalisation enforced by the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924. As Erlmann rightly observes, Caluza’s songs provided a musical dimension to the leadership role of the Zulu nationalist intelligentsia.73 Ephraim Kuluse, a graduate of Ohlange who attended some of the Caluza choir’s earliest performances, recalled that audiences were amazed by the different forms Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 95

of music, words, and movement so harmoniously brought together. Achieving the integration of various modes of expression in a westernised idiom appeared remarkable, and expanded Africans’ sense of the possibilities of applying African performance principles to Western instruments and materials. Caluza orchestrated African worksongs like ‘Awuthi Nyikithi’ for choral performance, and many original compositions, like ‘Umaconsana’, used call-and-response, staggered entry of parts, melodic themes carried in the bass line, lyric influence on melodic contour and rhythm, and other features of indigenous vocal music.74 The Ohlange Christmas concerts in Johannesburg that began in 1917 not only fulfilled but also redefined the cultural aspirations of middle-class Africans, and had a permanent effect upon concert and stage entertainments of all kinds. Journalist R. R. R. Dhlomo, writing of ‘these songs which have regenerated many a soul – songs which have rekindled anew our zealous patriotic aspirations’, looked forward to the publication of Caluza’s works: ‘When these songs are sold everywhere, when they are sung in high and low places – then, not only will Caluza triumph, but every blackman, who claims to have any welfare of his race at heart.’75 In 1928, Caluza did publish a collection of his songs, Amagama Ohlanga LakwaZulu, with Lovedale Press. Urban Africans needed attractive new settings for socialising and for elaborating cultural categories and a sense of personal and group identity. An important basis of coming together for a variety of groups was common taste in entertainment. Performances helped to develop social rules and relationships, and provided cultural expression of common social aspirations. Middle-class Africans organised performances for church, school, and club activities, or simply for prestige, sociability, and profit. Gradually, urban social identity came to be realised through membership in community organisations and personal networks based on class rather than on kinship or regional origin, especially among the middle class. Churches drew their members from all ethnic groups, focusing on education, class identity, and marriage rather than blood ties. In place of traditional social institutions, churches served as welfare associations and eased integration into the urban environment. To violate church moral and social codes was to reject the responsibilities of the community of membership, equal in significance to breaking kinship obligations in traditional society. Predictably, church organisation also helped middle-class Africans become leaders of secular voluntary associations based on Western models. Church schools in Johannesburg established African boy- and girl-scout troops (‘Pathfinders’ and ‘Wayfarers’) in 1918.76 Youth clubs, athletic teams, cooperative societies and cultural associations proliferated. Two years earlier, a writer for Ilanga lase Natal reported the existence of more than forty clubs in Johannesburg for adult African men alone.77 Among the most popular recreational occasions sponsored by voluntary associations were the tea-meeting and the evening concert. The term ‘tea-meeting’ originated with 96 In Township Tonight

the church-oriented social affairs of British settlers in the eastern Cape. In the Cape Standard for 11 January 1866, a white observer praised an African church choir in Graaff-Reinet. Arguing that whites should not scorn African choir singing since it made Christianity more attractive, he noted that while all attending were not converts, they all enjoyed the ‘tea-meeting’. During the last third of the nineteenth century, both rural and ‘urban church communities held tea-meetings on Saturday nights, sponsored in rotation by individual members of the church women’s group (manyano). Liquor was not served. A novel method of raising funds was added to the entertainment through ‘auctions’. People enjoyed themselves and competed for recognition by bidding for tea and cakes or to hear their friends perform specific hymns, popular songs, or variety turns. All-night tea-meetings were popular among Cape Africans at the turn of the century, taking ‘the place of the European ball with the Natives’, and replacing the musical beer-drinks of traditional society.78 Though no objections were raised at first, government officials and missionaries were disturbed by the expansion of ‘tea-meetings’ to cover a variety of African entertainments in the towns. In the 1880s, missionaries had suppressed the intonjane celebrations that traditionally concluded Xhosa female puberty rites despite African pleas that ‘what the piano and violin are to the Englishmen, the intonjane dances are to us’.79 Soon magistrates were complaining of ‘brandy parties’ and ‘immoral night meetings’ held to celebrate African marriages, or secret occasions where ‘women danced half-naked before men’.80 In 1900, the Reverend Mr Hargreaves reported that young converts were causing trouble by ‘introducing night tea-parties under the pretence of helping church funds’.81 In Johannesburg, many Xhosa and Mfengu school graduates from the Cape and Transkei worked for the mines as clerks (omabhalane). As intermediaries, the omabhalane had some power and prestige in the mines, and their enjoyment of teameetings soon spread to migrants and urban proletarians as well. Portuguese East African and Rhodesian miners, for example, held their own itimitin (tea-meeting) with beer, traditional instruments, guitars, concertinas and urbanised traditional dancing. Xhosa miners, mostly surface workers who considered themselves an elite, enjoyed imitating the coloured and African ‘coons’. Westernised African choral music, coon groups, and ragtime helped transform the school concert and the tea-meeting into profitable evening entertainments. Though an instrumentalist might be hired for dancing afterwards, concert performers were almost all amateurs: choirs, quartets, and soloists who offered part songs, dances, comic routines and variety turns. Curfew restrictions and lack of transport tended to make these entertainments all-night affairs for neighbourhood people. Until the late 1920s these concerts were a centre of neighbourhood city social life. Community Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 97

organisations created a system of links between residential areas. A sponsoring school, church or club often provided a ‘featured’ choir and invited their counterparts from other neighbourhoods. Profits might go to a sponsoring institution, organisation, or prominent local family; but attendance was open to urban Africans of every language group, occupation, income, and educational level. Open admission made status competition a major feature of these occasions and worked to the sponsors’ benefit. The admission fee of one shilling usually brought in far less money than the auctioning. Competitive bidding proceeded as follows: the master of ceremonies would introduce the featured group, and someone would offer a sixpence or shilling to hear a particular song. In response, another patron would offer more to hear a different piece or to bring on another set of performers altogether. Journalist H. I. E. Dhlomo recalled: As would be expected, this procedure led to all kinds of novel situations. For the sake of revenue the promoters encouraged it in every way possible... The members of the audience regarded it from different points of view. Those who loved music or were too poor to take part in the ‘buying’ got fed up when the thing was carried too far (although they agreed that without these oft-exciting interludes there would have been a surfeit of music and the concerts would be unbearably dull). Some regarded it as a means of making donations to the organisers (who kept a strict watch as to who contributed and who did not). Others saw in it a chance of displaying their ‘wealth’. These were either ‘Romeos’ trying to win some ‘Juliet’s’ hand, or Agamemnons and Ajaxes actually trying to disgrace the opposing Hectors and Parises. Still others were either secret agents trying to build up the reputation of their favourite choir, or fifth-columnists sabotaging the work of the groups they did not like... The audience had to wait patiently during the long intervals occasioned by these ‘battles’… As the choirs sang, members of the audience went up to the stage and gave money or gifts to the performers whose voices, faces, or style of performance they admired... Buying people to sing was not confined to the performers. One was free to call upon any member of the audience to sing or make a speech. Certain spectators liked this and considered it an honour. The shy, sensitive or untalented ones disliked it. As it was taboo to refuse to act when called upon, the latter could only save themselves from the ordeal by buying themselves off... At the same time young firebrands were making love in and outside the hall. But this was not easy, for the parents kept a strict watch over the movements of the young, and only the favoured ones were given chances... As would be expected, now and again, fights took place inside or outside the hall. The first were the more dangerous as they often developed into a melee as men who tried to protect their loved ones invariably got themselves involved in the fight. And worse, some fool would blow out the lights, and in the darkness pandemonium reigned: the 98 In Township Tonight

cries of women and children, men hitting out with anything within their reach, bottles and sticks whizzing in the air, and the furniture wrecked. In spite of these occasional outbursts, these concerts were more or less dignified communal affairs...82

Amateur school and evening concerts became crucial to stylistic development in popular African performing arts. Ragtime and jazz song and dance were favourites at these occasions and soon found their way into the emerging working-class culture of the cities, which made its own contribution to the stage. Schools picked up new urban-influenced rural dances, even though missionaries forbade them. One such dance, isicathulo (shoe), was adopted by students in Durban; from there it spread to dock workers who produced spectacular rhythmic effects by slapping and pounding their rubber wellington boots in performance. All this rhythm made it popular with mine and municipal labourers elsewhere, especially Johannesburg. There it became the ‘gumboot’ dance, divided into a series of routines and accompanied by a rhythm guitar. Some performers claim that the dance was used as a signalling or message code underground, where the slapping of gumboots would echo long distances through the tunnels. By 1919, gumboot had filtered back into school concerts. It soon became a standard feature of urban African variety entertainment, and a setting for satirising characters and scenes drawn from African work life.83 Concluding the musical career of Reuben Caluza leads one overseas to some of the great cultural capitals of the English-speaking world, and back again to the foundations of the recording industry in South Africa. Once again we are indebted to Veit Erlmann for the outlines of his story.84 Caluza travelled to London in 1930 to record for HMV with his Double Quartet, made up almost entirely of Ohlange students. The ensemble recorded 150 songs, of which 44 were Caluza’s own, the rest a variety of black folk pieces in various South African languages. These sold remarkably well, and innumerable groups sang and even re-recorded Caluza’s songs themselves. Local black press and even the giant of African-American letters, W. E. B. Du Bois, praised Caluza in Crisis (New York) for gaining respect for Africans both in South Africa and abroad. Typical of the time, Caluza received only a very modest sum in fees and royalties for his pioneering work. The success of these recordings did at least lead to a bursary for him to study at Hampton Institute in the United States. There he had a serious encounter with AfricanAmerican music, and met cultural icons Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes. Caluza toured the country with his ‘African Quartet’, and performed for President Roosevelt. Caluza graduated from Hampton in 1934 and, extending his intellectual reach yet further, spent a year at Columbia University, where he worked for the founding father of anthropology in America, Franz Boas, on Zulu folktales. Later he assisted scholars at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in the study of Zulu artefacts, Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 99

folklore, and ethnography. In 1936, at the age of forty, he returned to South Africa as head of music at Adams College. By this time, African traditions, including those of performance, were beginning at last to breathe free of the suffocation enforced by the missionaries and gain new, more respectful attention from white as well as black public cultural authorities. Witwatersrand University Professor of Music P. R. Kirby published in 1934 his monumental Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa, a work that has remained an indispensable resource for musical scholars despite its evolutionary perspective. Meanwhile, radio pioneer and traditional music specialist for the newly formed Gallo Record Company, Hugh Tracey, was busy recording indigenous African music throughout British territories in the subcontinent. Part of the background of such attention was white paternalist fears that rural dispossession and labour migrancy were eroding cultural difference and creating a potentially dangerous class of rootless, ‘de-culturated’, politicised urban Africans. Western music, Kirby and Tracey argued, was not good for the Bantu. Mobilising tradition in an entirely different way, Reuben Caluza and an organisation called the Zulu Society transformed and re-invented traditional performance to retain cultural continuity with Zulu working people while creating an urban industrial nationalism. At Adams, Caluza taught four-part arrangements of Zulu ‘traditional’ songs and Negro spirituals, appeared on Hugh Tracey’s Durban Zulu radio programmes, and attempted unsuccessfully to raise funds for a Tracey-style field research project on Zulu song. Along with Negro spirituals, minstrel songs made a comeback, and muchloved Stephen Foster classics such as ‘Oh Susannah’ were recorded in local African languages. But by then American pop and jazz were taking over in South Africa, and Caluza was becoming old-fashioned. Even though American popular ballads and swing jazz were rapidly displacing the music of Caluza and his generation, jazz musicians such as John Mavimbela and his Rhythm Kings in Johannesburg saw the value of Caluza’s songs for creating an indigenous jazz and recorded ‘Ematawini’ and some of his other old songs. Caluza became a businessman and lived on until 1969. His village of Siyamu, renamed KwaCaluza, is today part of the peri-urban shantytowns of Pietermaritzburg. Caluza shared with other mission-educated Africans unhappiness about the way working-class acculturation was occurring amidst the poverty, overcrowding, and oppression of the slums. The self-styled abakhulumeli (Zulu: spokesmen) of the middle class regarded themselves as an elite cultural vanguard that ought to direct change among their more ‘backward’ brethren. Africans proletarians largely ignored or resented these attitudes. In the struggle to establish their own cultural identity and patterns of city life, they adopted and modified whatever values and materials best answered their own dilemmas. As a result, beginning in the early 1920s, middle-class urban social life became increasingly separate from that of the working class. 100 In Township Tonight

Working-class Africans reacted against racial discrimination and their lack of influence in church affairs even more strongly than mission-educated people. Their resentment gave rise to countless independent or separatist church movements. Middle-class separatists called ‘Ethiopianists’ were in general too intent upon cultural westernisation and incorporation within the dominant society to create a strong church-based opposition movement. The Zulu Congregational Church, for example, which was founded following a quarrel with the American Board of Missions in Natal over leadership, ordination, and property in 1896, reunited with the mother church in 1898 in response to concessions offered by the white missionaries.85 African proletarians took far more seriously the separatist slogan ‘Africa for the Africans’, popularised in South Africa by Nehemiah Tile’s Thembu Church and American missionary Joseph Booth’s African Christian Union. Such movements became a focus for resistance to white domination following the destruction of independent traditional political authority. In the cities, separatist Christianity provided both an ideological and social foundation for working-class African cultural and political self-assertion. Ethiopianist ideas appealed strongly to urban workers and inspired widespread labour unrest in the second decade of the twentieth century. In Natal, Ethiopianist preachers were accused of fomenting rebellion, especially the violent one led by Bambatha in 1906.86 Though there is no proof of their participation, whites denounced the AME Church and African clergy in general for sedition. In fact, the revolt drew little support from mission graduates. The inability of Ethiopianism either to bring about meaningful change or to fulfil Africans’ need for healing and spirit possession, led to the emergence of ‘Zionism’, a proletarian movement for religious and cultural rebirth. In Zionism, African ‘prophets’ combined aspects of traditional African and Christian ritual, belief, and organisation. Not only urban workers, but also large numbers of rural Africans were attracted to Christianity for the first time through Zionist churches and their programme for a new indigenous African culture. Separatist Christianity promoted both change and continuity. It offered a new framework for supportive social relations, in defence against the size, diversity and impersonality of the wider human environment. Church membership provided a strong sense of identity and exclusiveness, outlets for leadership abilities, and a moral foundation for social cooperation. Religious separatism also led to important innovations in performance culture and in African hymnody in particular. AfroAmerican missionaries were involved in these movements from the 1880s; and the musical spiritualism of black Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal ritual greatly influenced African Zionists. One example is the Xhosa prophet Enoch Mgijima, originally a convert of the black American Church of God and Saints of Christ. His hymnbook features a blend of mission hymnody and the African-American spirituals Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 101

and other religious music of the Baptists.87 His squatter community of ‘Israelites’ were the victims of the notorious Bulhoek Massacre of 1921, in which Mgijima and several hundred of his followers were ruthlessly shot down by Cape police. Perhaps the most important figure in the early re-Africanisation of religious song in South Africa was Isaiah Shembe, a traditional inyanga (healer) who founded his large and powerful Nazarite sect in 1911, five years after his conversion into the African Native Baptist Church.88 Shembe’s spiritual and political philosophy has been described at length by several writers.89 All point to the famous, best-selling Nazarite hymnbook Izi Hlabelelo zama Nazaretha as evidence that Shembe was a self-styled Zulu Moses, Christ, and Creator all in one. In the years following the massive dispossessions of the 1913 Land Act, Shembe gained strength from his image as redeemer of the Zulu nation. His identity as Messiah is clearly described in Hymn no. 34, which ends: Verse: In no wise art thou least Among the princes of Judah For out of thee Prophets shall come forth Who will save The City of Ohlange Chorus: So it is also today On the hilltops of Ohlange [holy place of the Nazarites]

Nationalistic as well as messianic, Shembe’s religion was not so much an African Christianity as a revitalisation of Zulu traditional belief and practice through the infusion of Christian elements. One story has it that before Shembe founded his own church, he once preached a sermon at the Harrismith Methodist Church in traditional animal skins.90 Although the hymnbook was only published in 1940, almost all the hymns date from between 1910 and 1930. Composed without notation, many of the hymns were based on European models but performed in African style, transforming them into something Zulu by the use of traditional musical devices. Shembe also developed new communal dances in traditional style as a means of praising God and attracting followers, and syncretising spirituality and celebration. These were accompanied by the isigubu, a Zulu version of the European marching bass drum, and by hymns that ‘are in their whole structure nothing but Zulu dancing songs’.91 Many of the hymns have an African call-and-response pattern, with the prophet singing the verse and the congregation responding with the chorus. So traditional is the Shembe movement that many Zionist churches do not consider them Christian enough to be called Zionists.92 Singing and dancing are the 102 In Township Tonight

corporate expression of Nazarite faith, and compose the only form of public worship at church festivals. Reflecting Shembe’s proletarian and quasi-military orientation, young men’s dance groups are called AmaScotch (after the Scottish regiments stationed in Durban during the First World War) and their costumes consist of boots, pith helmets, white smocks over black pleated kilts, green ties with Nazarite symbols, traditional fighting sticks, and small cowhide shields. Shembe’s early hymns may be the first original Zulu compositions influenced by Christian hymnody, and in retrospect, modern Zulu song can be regarded as beginning with two nationalist composers with contrasting backgrounds, Caluza and Shembe, whose centres of operation, Ohlange and Ekuphakameni, were next to one another. Equally significant for the development of urban African music was the secular use of musical styles, ensembles and occasions usually associated with European missions and independent churches in the Transvaal. North of the Witwatersrand, warfare among African states, unending struggles with the Afrikaner settlers over land, and the whites’ need for labourers and servants fostered settled African communities in towns like Pretoria and Rustenburg by the late 1860s. These communities were composed mostly of Tswana and Pedi and other northern Sotho. Their contribution to modern African performance culture grew out of their response to European intrusion, Christianity and urban life. Fighting raged in the central and northern Transvaal from the Matabele invasion in the 1820s to the end of the Boer War in 1902. Only the intrepid German evangelists of the Hermannsburg and Berlin Lutheran churches made serious missionary efforts there in the last half of the nineteenth century. Like the British, German missionaries introduced brass bands into Africa. Even in Europe in the 1880s, ‘youths of the slums were being organised into Christian “armies” and “brigades” and marching to the sound of the fife and drum band’.93 In South Africa, missionaries thought bands would encourage ‘civilisation’ and social discipline as well as attract new converts. By 1895 mission stations in every province had brass bands, but the special German interest in marching brass had the greatest effect on Africans in the Transvaal. The reasons for this emphasis are both musical and historical. As with other instrumental traditions, wind instruments in South Africa originated with the Khoi. A band of Khoi played ‘four or five flutes together, in harmony’ for Vasco da Gama when he landed at Mossel Bay on 2 December 1497.94 Among Bantu-speakers, only the people of the pre-contact Transvaal – the Tsonga, Venda, and much more numerous Pedi and Tswana – copied the Khoi reed-flute ensembles and adapted their performance to their own musical traditions. The Pedi, for example, patterned their dinaka flutes on the Venda motaba, taken originally from the Korana Khoi. The Pedi did not adopt the heptatonic scale or songs of the Venda, however, but performed their own pentatonic melodies on the flutes. Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 103

In the colonial situation, Pedi and Tswana people regarded brass instruments as attractive and superior modern replacements for their reeds and drums. The traditional foundation of their interest in brass was expressed to me by a retired Salvation Army bandmaster, Brig. Ramhlala, who stated simply, ‘To blow and beat the drum; that is our way!’95 In contrast to the Pedi and Tswana urban communities, the large settlement (khaya khulu) of Xhosa workers in Rustenburg produced not a single known brass band or brass instrumentalist. In addition to reed-flutes, Pedi–Tswana signal horns (phalaphala) gave way to the bugle and the trumpet. The musical development of African brass bands in the Transvaal reflected the differing responses to missionisation by Tswana and Pedi. The Pedi twice created powerful empires during the nineteenth century. Even after the British destroyed their state in 1879, they continued to pose a threat to white control, and resisted missionisation. Berlin missionaries stepped up their efforts after the Pedi defeat, but the area remained in turmoil. Within a decade they lost their converts to the separatist Lutheran Pedi Church founded by the Africanised white missionary, the Reverend J. Winter. The Pedi Church resisted westernisation and blended Pedi religious traditions into their practice of Christianity. In contrast, the Tswana were divided into several chiefdoms, dispersed by war, and had little national power. They saw more advantage in the protection offered by missionaries. Though their interest in Christianity was more socio-political than religious,96 the Tswana were among the most missionised people in South Africa. Tswana brass bands tended to be attached to European missionary institutions, where many players became musically literate and mastered Western sacred and secular tunes. Eventually, Tswana traditional communities and Zionist churches also created entertainment and cultural self-respect from the music of brass ensembles. Whites did not always share this enthusiasm. Chief Magato procured European instruments, uniforms, and instructors, only to have his performers cruelly ignored by President Paul Kruger when they attempted to play for him during their visit to Pretoria in 1885.97 Other leaders organised reed-pipe ensembles into Western-style bands, with a Western instrument or two added for heightened effect. Petitioning for more land in the Waterberg district, Chief Hans Mosibi exhibited his ‘military band’ for government officials in Pretoria on 3 June 1891, ‘and raised much amusement by the quaint music, which was played in excellent time on primitive reed instruments, resembling clarionettes, with bagpipe drone’.98 Government policy in the Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State before the Boer War virtually forbade Africans to buy land in the countryside. It did, however, allow African freehold areas and municipal locations in the towns. After the Boer defeat, the British administration did little to change this, and urban 104 In Township Tonight

African communities were well established in the towns by 1910. Lutheran missions, the Salvation Army, and numerous separatist churches all had large congregations in Transvaal towns. Band performance was a major attraction for membership. A concert promoter, Thabo Job, commented: ‘The only place you could get a musical education free of charge was in the Salvation Army. Also the Lutheran church: they’d teach you, even violin. Any guy in the Salvation Army knew his instrument. The Lutherans had a violin in church ...’99 Unlike the European missions, the separatists encouraged dancing as part of religious ceremonial. They developed special steps based on traditional dance and European military drill for church band parades. Brass bands and even small string orchestras rapidly became part of African social life beyond church-sponsored events in the urban locations. They played for private and public entertainments, and brought vitality to community affairs. As the locations grew, so did the opportunities for paid performance and the number of experienced players. These new opportunities and common neighbourhood residence brought working-class Tswana and Pedi musicians together in bands outside the church. Distinctions based on musical literacy and institutional membership were not important. The career of Modikwe’s Band from Rustenburg reflects the involvement of African brass bands in early location social life.100 Though Modikwe came from Rustenburg, he received formal training in the Salvation Army Native Band in Johannesburg. By 1911, after three years of annoying church restrictions on drinking and smoking, he took advantage of the new market for his musical skills. Returning to his home town, he recruited a mixed band of Tswana and northern Sotho players, some of whom could read tonic solfa. By simple notational charts and by ear, the band learned a varied repertoire of European and African songs. Often, a member would sing a traditional song or a new composition in traditional form to the others, who found the notes on their instruments by ear and harmonised their parts according to African rather than Western principles. Following the practice of the Zionist bands, Modikwe’s men also recreated European hymn melodies and marches in the African polyphonic idiom and set them to syncopated urban African rhythms. These bands infused European melodies and march rhythms with African rhythmic contrast, counter-melodies, and solo ornamentation. American and South African brass band music are not very similar to each other on the surface, due to differences in musical culture between the black peoples of the two countries. In the next chapter we will consider one such crucial difference: that black South African jazz is grounded in indigenous southern Bantu rhythmic and strophic forms and not in the blues. Even so, the manner in which musical resources and different performance skills were blended indicates similarities of musical process between black American and black Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 105

South African brass bands of the early twentieth century. Similarities in the social conditions and functions of performance may have underlain this comparability of cultural process. Like black American bands, Modikwe’s band earned considerable sums performing at weddings, funerals, public holidays, private parties, official receptions, voluntary associations, or just marching in the streets of the black neighbourhoods. The versatility of their performance was comparable with that of black American bands, whose business cards advertised music for all occasions. Both black American and black South African bands sometimes broadened their repertoire through reading, but actual performing was done by ear. This freed their music from set arrangements and allowed it to serve any number of purposes.101 The prestige of black American culture during that period is again reflected in black South Africans’ use of the term ‘ragtime’ to describe the music of bands like Modikwe’s, although its rhythms were very different from those of its American namesake. A good deal can be learned from examining the sources of black American influence on both middle-class and working-class African culture, and from comparing social experience, European influence and cultural process among black Americans and black South Africans. Important themes in the social development of urban African performance culture can be seen more clearly in considering the contribution of popular performers to Johannesburg’s shebeen society. Notes 1 Transvaal Census, 1904, p. 406. 2 Alan Jeeves, ‘The control of migrant labour on the South African goldfields in the era of Kruger and Milner’, Journal of Southern African Studies 2, 1 (October 1975). 3 J. Clyde Mitchell, The Kalela Dance, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers 27, 1956. 4 Mtutuzeli Matshoba, ‘To kill a man’s pride’ in M. Mutloatse (ed.), Forced Landing, Johannesburg, 1980, p. 123. 5 Lionel Phillips, Some Reminiscences, London, 1925, p. 127. 6 Sir Harold Tangye, In New South Africa: Travels in the Transvaal and Rhodesia, London, 1896, p. 95. 7 Imvo Zabantsundu, 5 December 1894. See also Paul La Hausse, Brewers, Beerhalls, and Boycotts: A History of Liquor in South Africa, Johannesburg, 1988; Charles H. Ambler, Alcohol and Disorder in Precolonial Africa, Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University, 1987. 8 W. Bleloch, The New South Africa: Its Value and Development, London, 1902, p. 232. 9 Charles van Onselen, ‘Randlords and rotgut’, Paper presented to the I.C.S., Seminar on African History, University of London, 1975. 10 The Star, Johannesburg, quoted in Imvo Zabantsundu, 4 June 1891. 11 W. C. Scully, The Ridge of White Waters, London, 1912, p. 226. 12 William P. Taylor, African Treasures, London, 1931, p. 234. 13 Van Onselen, ‘The witches of suburbia’, p. 36. 14 New Nation 1, 5 (1910). 15 The attitude of municipal authorities in Johannesburg in this respect was similar to that in other towns, for example East London. See D. H. Reader, The Black Man’s Portion, Cape 106 In Township Tonight

Town, 1961, p. 10. 16. Maynard Swanson, ‘The sanitation syndrome: bubonic plague and urban native policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–09’, in William Beinart and Saul Dubow (eds.), Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa, London, 1995, pp. 25–42. 17 Andre Proctor, ‘Class struggle, segregation, and the city: a history of Sophiatown, 1905– 1940’ in B. Bozzoli (ed.), Labour, Townships, and Protest, Johannesburg, 1979, p. 52. 18 Minutes of the Johannesburg City Council, January/June, 1912. 19 Transvaal Leader, 1 March 1910. 20 Ibid., 6 February 1915. 21 Western Areas Survey, 1950, p. 26. 22 Proctor, ‘Class struggle, segregation, and the city’, pp. 80–1. 23 Rand Daily Mail, 8 September 1908. 24 Ibid., 9 September 1908. 25 I bid., 11 September 1908. For the Bapedi, see Peter Delius, The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Transvaal, Johannesburg, 1983. 26 Lara V. Allen, ‘Pennywhistle Kwela: A Musical, Historical and Sociopolitical Analysis’, MA, University of Natal, Durban, 1993. 27 Umteteli wa Bantu, 1 October 1921. 28 University of the Witwatersrand, Africa Day Programme, 21 October 1928. 29 G. M. Theal (ed.), Records of South Africa, vol. 8, Cape Town, 1901, p. 202. 30 Alice Balfour, Twelve Hundred Miles in a Waggon, London, 1895, p. 63. 31 The Star, Johannesburg, 13 December 1921. 32 D. K. Rycroft, ‘Stylistic evidence in Nguni song’ in K. Wachsman (ed.), Music and History in Africa, Evanston, 1971, p. 216; J. Clegg, ‘Towards an understanding of African dance: the Zulu isishameni style’, in Papers Presented at the Second Symposium on Ethnomusicology, Grahamstown: ILAM, 1982, p. 10. 33 Clegg, ‘African Dance’; P. F. Larlham, ‘Black Performance in South Africa’, Ph.D., New York University, 1981, pp. 112–14. 34 Veit Erlmann, ‘“An African star”: Reuben T. Caluza and early popular music in South Africa’ in African Stars: Studies in South African Popular Music, Chicago, 1991, p. 141. See also D. K. Rycroft, ‘A royal account of music in Zulu life, with translation, annotation, and musical transcription’, Bulletin of SOAS, University of London, 37, 2 (1975), p. 389, n.81. 35 Erlmann. Nightsong. 36 Bongi Mthethwa, ‘Zulu folk song: history, nature, and classroom potential’, BA, University of Natal, 1979, p. 16. 37 Rycroft, ‘A royal account of music in Zulu life’, p. 389. 38 A. T. Bryant, The Zulu People as They Were before the Whiteman Came, Pietermaritzburg, 1949, pp. 517–18. 39 Larlham, ‘Black Performance in South Africa’, pp. 121–2. 40 Proctor, ‘Class struggle, segregation and the city’, p. 8. 41 K. Sole, Class, continuity, and change in black South African literature, 1948–1960’, Paper for the Witwatersrand History Workshop, Johannesburg, 1978, p. 8. 42 N. A. Etherington, ‘The Rise of the Kholwa in Southeast Africa: African Christian Communities in Natal, Pondoland, and Zululand, 1835–1880’, Ph.D., Yale University, 1971, p. 7. 43 Ibid., p. 234. 44 Ibid., p. 244. 45 Marais, ‘Imposing of European control’, p. 342. Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 107

46 Ibid., pp. 343–4. 47 R. Hunt Davis, ‘The black American educational component in African responses to colonialism in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 2, 1 (1978), p. 76. 48 The word inkatha, used by the organisation’s successor today, the Inkatha Freedom Party, is difficult to translate. In ordinary life it refers to a head girdle used to brace a heavy load on the back against the forehead. The inkatha used here refers to the sacred fibre coil woven in part from the bodily excrescences of deceased Zulu kings. 49 Erlmann, ‘An African Star’, pp. 112–55. 50 Ilanga lase Natal, 23 June 1911. 51 Mary Benson, Chief Albert Luthuli of South Africa, London, 1963, pp. 6–7. 52 Quoted in Ian Whitcolm, After the Ball, Baltimore, 1974, p. 98. 53 Locke, The Negro and His Music, p. 59. 54 Ilanga lase Natal, 24 January 1908. 55 Ibid., 3 June 1904, 3 February 1905. 56 Ibid., 25 March 1910. 57 Cited in Erlmann, ‘An African Star’, p. 121. 58 Ilanga lase Natal, 2 and 3 March 1906. 59 Erlmann, ‘An African Star’, p. 74. 60 Ibid., pp. 137. 61 C. M. Doke and B. Vilakazi, Zulu–English Dictionary, Johannesburg, 1958. 62 Adams, ‘Ethnography of Basotho Evaluative Behavior’, p. 241. 63 Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, p. 374. 64 Erlmann, ‘An African Star’, p. 126. 65 Todd Matshikiza, Drum, August 1957. 66 Erlmann, ‘An African Star’, pp. 140–1. 67 Ibid., p. 142. 68 Ibid., p. 127. 69 Umteteli wa Bantu, 12 August 1922 and 26 August 1922 (trans. W. Silgee). 70 Ilanga lase Natal, 5 October 1923. 71 Erlmann, ‘An African Star’, p. 127. 72 Ibid., p. 128. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., pp. 128–31. 75. Ibid., p. 134. 76 Khabi Mngoma, ‘The correlation of folk and art music among African composers’, in Papers Presented at the Second Symposium on Ethnomusicology, Grahamstown: ILAM, 1982, pp. 65–6. 77 Ilanga lase Natal, 15 February 1924. 78 W. C. Scully, Daniel Venanda, Cape Town, 1923, p. 62. 79 W. Mills, ‘The Role of the Clergy in the Reorientation of Xhosa Society to the Plural Society in the Cape Colony, 1850–1915’, Ph.D., UCLA, 1975, p. 73. 80 Scully, Daniel Venanda, p. 81. 81 Mills, ‘Role of the Clergy’, p. 75. 82 Ilanga lase Natal, 20 June 1953. 83 Harry Bloom, King Kong, London, 1961, p. 61; Ilanga lase Natal, 18 April 1919. 84 Erlmann, ‘An African Star’, pp. 144–53. 85 Alan Lea, The Native Separatist Church Movement in South Africa, Cape Town, 1925, p. 36. 86 J. D. Stuart, A History of the Zulu Rebellion, 1906, London, 1913, pp.97–8. 108 In Township Tonight

87 Robert Edgar, Because They Chose the Plan of God, Johannesburg, 1986. 88 B. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets of South Africa. London, 1961, pp. 110f. 89 Ibid., pp. 281f.; Gérard, Four African Literatures, pp. 184f. See also Elizabeth Gunner, The Man of Heaven and the Beautiful Ones of God: Writings from Ibandla lamaNazaretha, a South African Church, Leiden, 2002; Carol A. Muller, Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women’s Performance in South Africa, Chicago, 1999; Carol A. Muller, South African Music: A Century of Transformation, Santa Barbara, CA, 2004. 90 Larlham, Black Performance in South Africa, p. 90. 91 Sundkler, Bantu Prophets, p. 195. 92 Bengt Sundkler, Zulu Zion, London, 1976, p. 161. 93 T. O. Ranger, Dance and Society in East Africa, London, 1975, p. 12. 94 Arthur Morelet, Journal du voyage de Vasco da Gama en 1497, Lyons, 1864. 95 Brig. S. Ramhlala, interview, 25 May 1977. 96 B. A. Pauw, ‘Patterns of christianization among the Tswana and Xhosa-speaking peoples’ in G. Dieterlen and M. Fortes (eds.), African Systems of Thought, London, 1965; Paul Stuart Landau, The Realm of the Word : Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom, Portsmouth, NH, Cape Town and London, 1995. 97 D. M. Wilson, Behind the Scenes in the Transvaal, London, 1901, pp. 91–2. 98 Standard and Diggers News, 4 June 1891. 99 Thabo Job, interview, August 1978. 100 Brig. S. Ramhlala, interview, 25 May 1977. 101 Ortiz Walton, Music: Black, White, and Blue, New York, 1972, p. 58; N. Hentoff and N. Shapiro, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, New York, 1955, pp. 16, 19.

Black Johannesburg to the Twenties 109

4 Black performance culture between the world wars: the ‘rank and file’ During the 1920s and 1930s, the dispossession of thousands of rural black families and the rapid growth of industry led to a massive expansion of urban African communities in South Africa. The 1921 census reported a growth of 14 per cent in Johannesburg’s permanent African population between 1911 and 1921, but from 1921 to 1936 the increase was close to 100 per cent.1 The official 1936 total of 229 122 did not count the ‘93 000 Natives in Johannesburg and on the Reef who live by their wits, sleep with their friends at night, and are not included in the census’.2 Many of these were women, who had virtually no role in the formal economy outside domestic service. Housing and other facilities in African areas were severely strained. Whites’ fears of being overwhelmed by ‘detribalised Natives’ intensified conflicts of interest within white society and resulted in an unstable, inconsistent and unenforceable ‘native policy’. Commercial and other local investment interests opposed housing Africans in the inner city, white workers feared job and wage competition, and the mining industry combated African unionisation. Together they resisted further urbanisation of African labour. Against these pressures, industrial firms and some international investors preferred a stable, dependent, locally residing labour force, and slumlords used their influence to protect profits from African rentals. The official response to African urbanisation was the Natives Urban Areas Act of 1923. Under consideration as early as 1912, the final bill was a good deal more restrictive than previous versions. On paper it represented a victory for those who felt ‘The Native should be allowed to enter the urban areas when he is willing to minister to the needs of the White man, and should 110 In Township Tonight

depart therefrom when he ceases so to minister’3 – known as the Stallard Doctrine Unable to make Africans depart and unwilling to recognise their permanence by providing for their welfare, the government made urban segregation more rigid. African freehold rights were reduced to unguaranteed leasehold, although those who already owned property in designated areas were exempted. African housing became the responsibility of employers and the municipalities, whose primary source of funds for its construction consisted of the small amount of revenue collected from Africans themselves. Resettlement was also hindered by the stipulation that Africans could be evicted from ‘proclaimed’ areas only after enough hostels and locations had been built to rehouse them.4 The lack of money and land for such locations, together with resistance from slum rental interests such as the New Doornfontein Stand Owners’ Association, delayed mass evictions until the mid-1930s.5 In any case, the Urban Areas Act did nothing to retard the growth of an urban black working class. What the Act did create was a legal basis for harassment, instability, neglect, and denial of basic rights. These, in turn, increased African misery and resentment. Their response varied according to social class, but they shared a common desire for economic betterment and urban residence, and for recognition as permanent townspeople. The struggle centred on the creation of a viable urban African self-image and social structure. The result was a system of relationships that drew on values and institutions taken from both the industrial environment and African communal life, and shaped urban working-class society and culture. Living conditions for Africans near the centre of Johannesburg grew steadily worse as services declined and the crowding increased. A report on slumyards from the early 1930s said, ‘There are an average of 64 square feet per inhabitant, a space of 8 feet by 8 feet, for living rooms, yards, and space to hang out washing to dry.’6 Yet Africans clung tenaciously to their slumyards and restricted freehold locations. One reason was the relative freedom, born of neglect, to organise their society and pattern their culture as they saw fit. Regulations requiring fences, single entrances, and entry permits for municipal locations were not enforced, but Africans lost mobility and self-direction in community affairs if they moved to Western Native Township or Nancefield. Economic considerations strengthened African attachment to the slumyards even more. Not only were the slumyards much closer to places of employment, stores, and other urban amenities, but they were also centres for the preparation and sale of liquor and beer, laundering, and other informal but essential home industries. The average wages of African male workers could not support a family in an urban area. Women helped out with work that allowed them to keep house and look after their children. These earnings were especially important in combating the efforts of local authorities to restrict urban African enterprise. Five years before the Performance Culture Between the Wars 111

Urban Areas Act, in 1918, a Johannesburg ordinance prohibited Africans from trading ‘except in a recognised location’, and ordered them to give up all the ‘tea-houses, cafés, restaurants, hotels, boarding houses, butcher shops, kaffir eating houses, bake houses, shops, factories for the manufacture of food and drink, theatres, bioscopes, music halls, billiard saloons, pawnbrokers, cycle dealers, and slaughterhouses’ they had been running elsewhere.7 This kind of repression reflects a systematic policy of de-skilling and de-capacitation imposed upon black South Africans in colonial society that goes back to the attacks upon Christian mission schools in the mid-nineteenth century. In its institutionalised form, this policy came to form part of the tragic legacy of apartheid which, to paraphrase Karl Marx, still lies like a nightmare upon the minds of working South Africans, however impatiently their leaders wish to supersede it. Yet remarkably for this narrative, as we shall clearly see, music and stage performance formed a domain where this effort to prevent black people from acquiring modern skills failed, and technical skill and creative talent flourished in the teeth of the harshest restrictions. But let us first take a moment to consider the economic base for such cultural development: the liquor trade. In traditional southern African societies, beer is an economic and social currency as well as a nourishing food.8 It is used to thank, reward, reconcile, ritually cleanse, honour, entertain, and generally bind people together. In the urban areas, these traditional forms of sociability remained strong among the working class. Women were obliged by custom to brew beer for their husbands regardless of legal prohibition. Women soon discovered that beer, and often stronger brews, could be sold at a profit to people their menfolk brought to the home or even to complete strangers. In addition, there was a large though necessarily undocumented number of single women who provided liquor, sex and other recreational services to men in order to earn a living on their own. Between 1921 and 1951 there was a 500 per cent increase in the female population of South African cities, an indication that the black urban communities were becoming more stable and settled. But not all of these new women joined families as they are understood in Western society. The beer trade, prostitution, and other enterprises, required a certain freedom of action, and women may not always have considered a husband an immediate advantage. Households of all kinds depended upon the beer trade to survive.9 The most common arrangement was known as vat-en-sit (Afrikaans: take and settle; Zulu: mahlanesane), an informal living arrangement without bride wealth that preserved the mobility of individuals while still pooling their financial and physical resources.10 Their central location and lack of direct supervision made the slumyards the focus of black recreational life. Pleading for the establishment of a municipal social centre for Africans, the Reverend F. W. Bridgman complained: ‘these slum districts constitute the rendezvous for all classes of Natives, including house servants, male and female. In fact the yards have perforce become the Native pleasure 112 In Township Tonight

resort during holiday and leisure hours.’11 It was in this insecure set of conditions that, based on the liquor trade, there developed what might be called a ‘shebeen society’. Like other urban traditions including professional musicianship, the institution later known as the shebeen dates back to the slaves of Dutch colonial times. As early as 1667, the commander at the Cape lamented that ‘Some of the residents are not ashamed and do not hesitate not only to sell all kinds of strong drink to the Company’s slaves, and those of private individuals, but even give them a place in their houses where they can drink’.12 The word ‘shebeen’ itself seems also to have originated in Cape Town in the early twentieth century among immigrant Irish members of the city’s police force.13 These constables named the illegal black drinking houses shebeens. Coloured and Xhosaspeaking people brought the term to the Transvaal, where female entrepreneurs developed the shebeen into a centre of urban African social life. The liquor trade became highly competitive in the slumyards. Women who made it a full-time occupation became ‘shebeen queens’ – relatively wealthy, established personalities with considerable influence in neighbourhood affairs and even with the police. They quickly discovered how to attract and keep a large, regular clientele. They could vary their products to suit individual tastes, offering traditional maize and sorghum beer, noxious chemical mixtures such as babaton (named after the Transvaal mining ‘camp’ of Barberton); isikomfana, isihimiyane, skokiaan, and isikilimikwiki (kill me quick), and commercial European liquors.14 Musical performance, essential to social drinking in traditional society, was another important attraction. To stimulate business, shebeens featured regular weekend parties where enormous quantities of liquor fuelled enthusiasm for continuous music and dancing.15 At first the entertainment was provided by the customers themselves, but by the 1920s hostesses began to hire musicians. Miners and contract workers who strolled about the locations playing African neo-traditional, Afro-Western, and Afrikaans folk music on guitars, concertinas, and violins were among the first to come in off the streets into the shebeens. Zulu, Tswana and Pedi municipal, commercial and domestic workers crowded the slumyards, and Sotho, Xhosa, and Tsonga (Chankane)16 miners joined them at weekends. Along with their friends the liquor brewers, some were able to escape regular employment with whites through their musicianship, a form of resistance to economic coercion in itself. Pioneering Zulu anthropologist Absolom Vilakazi called these musicians abaqhafi, ‘cultural driftwood’ tossed up by the impact of secular Western culture and the industrial environment upon Zulu society.17 The abaqhafi, made famous among the Zulu in songs by Reuben Caluza like ‘Ingoduso’ and the like-named ‘Abaqhafi’, were a demi-monde version of the Xhosa abaphakathi, neither traditional, Christian, nor school-educated.18 They cared little for the traditions of either Zulu or European culture and held the social values of neither. A Performance Culture Between the Wars 113

set of individuals rather than a social group, they often took their dress and manner from the American gangster and Wild West films shown at black cinemas in the 1920s, which featured the musical contributions of piano players or singing, guitartoting cowboys. The abaqhafi (sing. umqhafi) strengthened the link between paid musicianship, shebeen society, and life on the margin of society. Their popular image is reflected in the dictionary definition of umqhafi, ‘uncouth fellow; heavy drinker’.19 They popularised the constantly expanding corpus of Zulu wedding, walking and courting songs in Johannesburg. Zulu guitarists and violinists often teamed up to play for shebeen dances. Their occasional rivals were Mozambican Tsonga who drew on the folk instrumental music of the colonial Portuguese and also gained a reputation as skilled street guitarists. Increasingly, shebeen customers demanded urban ‘modern’ forms of cultural entertainment that expressed the quality and permanence of their city way of life. In response, a new class of semi-professional shebeen musicians arose. They came from every region, black ethnic group, and type of community in South Africa, but most had spent much of their lives in towns. Their status as professionals, as people able to support themselves solely through their playing, was threatened by laws that forced them into non-musical ‘day jobs’. Pass regulations recognised musicians only if they belonged to officially registered bands, which in practice meant those with white sponsorship or management. Others had to present proof of some other regular employment or lose their right to remain in the urban area.20 Performing at night required special night passes, and performers could be arrested if found without them during the frequent raids on inner-city ‘native’ dance halls.21 In the 1920s, these musicians assimilated elements from every available performance tradition into a single urban African musical style, called marabi. As Christopher Ballantine has documented in his gem-like Marabi Nights, South African urban 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 urban black sound later known as African or township jazz.22 The emergence of jazz in South Africa is an example of what the old-fashioned anthropologists used to call ‘convergent evolution’: a unified form that results – in this case due to the gravitational pull of American jazz – from two relatively different initial sets of cultural conditions and materials. So South African jazz, unlike the American idiom, is not based on the blues. Marabi, like all African neo-traditional music, resembles the blues in its grounding in an endlessly repeated chord sequence. Marabi was thus the historical and functional counterpart to the blues, and both are rooted deeply in indigenous African musical theory. The basic marabi cycle was four measures, I–IV–I6/4–V, based on repeating harmonic segments or ‘root progressions’ (see Appendix C). Melodies could come from almost any direction, from indigenous 114 In Township Tonight

African song to hymns, African-American music or simply popular songs like ‘Yes We Have No Bananas’ (1923), with a marabi rhythm pumping underneath, accented by shakers made of tin cans filled with small stones. But as Christopher Ballantine explains in his review of ‘Sponono’ (‘Sweetheart’), recorded in 1932 by the Amanzimtoti Players (HMV GU 130; Track 11, cassette companion to Marabi Nights): ‘in the blues the fundamental chords are strung together in a rather different way, leading to a longer internal structure with different emphases; and marabi makes no use of “bluenote” pitch-inflections. As a result the two styles sound entirely distinct, despite their common origins in the cyclical patterns typical of indigenous African musics.’23 The development of marabi was strongly influenced by the social and economic conditions of working-class life. A kind of symbiotic relationship developed between musicians and entertainment sponsors, and helped create a new culture for an urbanising mass audience. Growing out of shebeen society, marabi was much more than just a musical style. As music it had a distinctive rhythm and a blend of African polyphonic principles, restructured within the framework of the Western ‘three-chord’ harmonic system. As a dance it placed few limits on variation and interpretation by individuals or couples, though the emphasis was definitely on carpe diem pleasure and sexuality. As a social occasion it was a convivial, neighbourhood gathering for drinking, dancing, coupling, friendship and other forms of interaction. Finally, marabi also meant a category of people with low social status and a reputation for immorality, identified by their regular attendance at marabi parties (Zulu: emarabini ). For this reason marabi, along with its cousin, American jazz, was vilified as a music of criminality by both the white authorities and members of the black elite.24 The origins of the word marabi are unclear, but its meaning provides some clues. A possible source is ho raba raba (Sotho: to fly around), an apt description of the wildly individualistic styles of marabi dancers. Some Africans identify the word with Marabastad, the boisterous Pretoria location where African domestic workers lived as early as 1880.25 Mabille and Dieterlen’s Southern Sotho Dictionary defines marabi as the plural of lerabi, slang for ‘lawless person; gangster’.26 Veteran local observers of the music scene agreed that whatever its origins as a term, marabi was a product of the Johannesburg slumyards, and could not have come out of the small, mostly North Sotho location of Marabastad. The logic of this argument demonstrates the social as well as musical nature of marabi. A few even suggested that the term might have something to do with the train junctions in west downtown Johannesburg, called morabarabeng after morabaraba, the Sotho game of draughts whose board features many crossing lines. Certainly this is an apt association for a music whose creation involved so many criss-crossing cultural influences, forms and styles. Marabi music drew heavily on the syncretic forms that preceded it, many of which were developed in the city by specific ethnic groups. Gradually, common social Performance Culture Between the Wars 115

experience and class identification helped combine these forms into the common denominator of marabi, though marabi itself continued to encompass variants based on particular ethnic traditions. As a term, marabi reflects the ways urban Africans socially categorised their emerging culture. Among the early contributors to marabi were Cape coloured musicians, known in Johannesburg as ‘crooners’ or die oorlamse mense van Vrededorp (the oorlams – coloured Afrikaner – people of Vrededorp, a racially mixed area). They carried with them the popular performance traditions of Cape Town and Kimberley and provided a source of Cape Afrikaans and black American influence on urban African workingclass music. They played banjos, guitars, tambourines, and bones at slumyard parties or played Cape ghommaliedjies in ‘coon carnival’-style parades in Vrededorp at New Year celebrations.27 In the shebeens, coloured performers were best known for vastrap rhythms and the tickey draai guitar style, an early Afro-Afrikaans dance music in 2/4 time whose signature boomp ba-boomp vamp with the accent on the second beat was ubiquitous in the towns. Quick to join the coloureds were Xhosa musicians drawn from among the ‘dressed people’, many of whom had come to Johannesburg to take up the more desirable surface work on the mines. Dan Twala recalls the Xhosa: ‘When they came to the mines, they came with this coon thing ... you see they had their own way of coming together in a crowd like the coons do, marching up and down. They were the most popular people, really; their costumes were a bit brighter and they had a sense of showbiz, being performers, and all that.’28 Many African musicians had learned to play Afrikaans styles such as vastrap while serving in Afrikaner households in the countryside. They enjoyed playing tickey draai, adding African melody to Afrikaans rhythms and chord progressions. Tickey draai was first played on guitar but by the mid-1920s small coloured–Xhosa string and concertina bands were also performing it for private African parties called ‘socials’. This music survived long enough to be recorded and can be heard on ‘Okay Dance’ (Gallotone GB 949), made around 1940 by the Vincent Steza Dance Band. Gramophone recordings, albums printed in tonic solfa, local white and coloured bands, and even a few American players all helped to popularise ragtime and early jazz in the Cape after the First World War. Queenstown, for example, was known as ‘Little Jazz Town’ because ragtime song and dance companies such as the Darktown Negroes and ‘dixieland’ jazz bands such as Meekly ‘Fingers’ Matshikiza’s (father of jazz pianist, composer, and music writer Todd Matshikiza) Big Four entertained whites and middleclass Africans at ‘soirées’. The music of South African dixieland bands was preserved on record, including ‘Madala’ and ‘Mkize’ (Gallotone GE 942) by Gumede’s Swing Band. Musically unlettered pedal organists in the shebeens were also influenced by ragtime and jazz. They mixed these imported styles with African musical elements according to the three-chord system, and many earned an independent living travelling around the 116 In Township Tonight

townships of the country performing for the new urban African working class. Typical of the versatile, itinerant musician of the 1920s was Boet Gashe, described by Todd Matshikiza as a ‘well known jazz organist’ in Queenstown. Queenstown was well situated for Gashe because trains carrying miners from Johannesburg stopped there overnight. ‘Full of jazz and women’, the miners found both in the ‘booze houses’ where Gashe played music called itswari (soirée), consisting of ‘three chords repeating themselves over for four to six hours’.29 Admission was threepence, beer was sixpence per tin, women were friendly, and for a shilling a man could take his favourite partner to a room behind a curtain. Meanwhile Gashe ... was bent over his organ in one corner, thumping the rhythm from the pedals with his feet, which were also feeding the organ with air; choking the organ with persistent chords in the left hand, and improvising for an effective melody with his right hand. He would call in the aid of a matchstick to hold down a harmonic note, usually the tonic (doh) or the dominant (soh) both of which persist in African music, and you get a delirious effect of perpetual motion ... perpetual motion in a musty hole where a man makes friends without restraint.30

In Johannesburg, Xhosa folk melodies played on the keyboard in this manner were known in the shebeens as tula n’divile, from the words of a famous location song. Dan Twala recalls: Tula n’divile became the name of a location, Western Native Township. We who worked in town, we used to come out there for the shows, which were part of the African life, away from the white surroundings ... You saw that from house to house, where there was drinks or parties, you could hear the piano playing tula n’divile. It was not as polished as marabi; it was really an advertisement, to say, ‘Come this way!’ From the Xhosas came tula n’divile, meaning, ‘You keep quiet, you haven’t heard what I’ve heard, I’ll tell you!’ Everybody was trying to be original, and come with his own little style. They want you to buy drinks at their sort of timitin there, and I say all right, I can sing song, and I put half a crown on the table, and I ask you to come and sing. It was ... just to augment the funds of the people holding the party, or just to provide money for refreshments.31

Musical competition and innovation were promoted by shebeen owners who were aware that attractive women, lively dancers, and paying customers followed the most popular musicians. As Gashe and the other renowned pianomen – including among others Edward Sililo, Zuluboy Cele, Fingers Matshikiza, and ‘Highbreaks’ (see Appendix C) – brilliantly demonstrated, the relatively inexpensive pedal organ was best suited for making dance music in the cramped shebeens, and marabi reached its Performance Culture Between the Wars 117

height as a keyboard style. In a Doornfontein slumyard in 1933, the sociologist Ellen Hellmann noted that ‘one woman is the proud possessor of a second-hand organ which is, however, more valuable as an economic than a cultural asset as its melodious strains serve to attract beer customers to this room’.32 The situation described by Twala was not unlike that of Harlem in the 1920s where pianists were kept busy playing in tiny cabarets and honky-tonks of the black community and for its innumerable social affairs, particularly the ‘rent parties’. In Harlem ... the only way many Blacks could cope with ... the excessive rents ... was to give parties where ‘guests’ were invited to contribute ... It was the job of the pianist to draw people in – into the barroom or cafe or the apartment itself – and the vitality and vigour of his playing was his drawing card.33

One did not have to read music to play marabi – some said it actually helped one’s ear if you couldn’t – while some ingenious performers managed to teach themselves some aspects of formal musicianship from printed sources.34 In both America and South Africa, even those few who could read music often learned and performed by ear. This practice ‘seemed to stimulate rather than deter them in the production of a novel style of piano music’.35 Several musicians emphasised the role of Xhosa instrumentalists in linking coloured–Afrikaans, black American and local African styles, or as jazzman Wilson ‘King Force’ Silgee put it, ‘Tickey draai plus tula n’divile equals marabi’.36 In Johannesburg, the most famous of these innovators was Tebetjana (Sotho: Little Xhosa), who began his career in Vrededorp playing guitar and kazoo with the strolling groups of coloured crooners. By the end of the 1920s he had become a full-time musician and a favourite with the shebeen queens of Prospect Township. In 1932 his composition ‘UTebetjana Ufana Ne’mfene’ (‘Tebetjana Resembles a Baboon’)37 made him so famous in the slumyards and locations that his name became synonymous with the marabi genre. Like the brass bandsmen, keyboard artists often became professionals, indispensable to the social and economic life of the slumyards. Shebeen musicians appealed to a broad mass of working-class people from every ethnic and regional background, whose only tie was their common experience of urban life conditioned by racial oppression. To please them, musicians had to assimilate elements from a variety of musical traditions into a flexible, characteristically urban style. The famous Gashe moved in the 1920s to Johannesburg, where, like other Xhosa musicians, he was soon in general demand for his versatility on the keyboard. He became a ‘house organist’ in Newclare location, playing for the Sotho version of the marabi party, the famo dance. In The Wanderers Ezekiel Mphahlele recalls that as a small boy he heard the sound of drums coming from a place where Sotho men and women were holding famo.38 The area was called Seteketekeng (Place of Staggering), 118 In Township Tonight

a part of Newclare where Sotho migrants who had drifted into permanent urban residence had been settling since the turn of the century. In Lesotho, a miner may be called koata (English: ‘squatter’; ‘from an urban area, uncouth, a ruffian’) if he returns acting and talking like a rough man of the urban streets. This term originated early in the century, and famo dances were associated with a particular category of koata, the sebono morao (buttocks behind) – one who intends never to return home and thus ‘shows only his ass to Lesotho’.39 For shebeen dancing, most Sotho migrants preferred neo-traditional styles such as focho (disorder) played on the concertina and a home-made drum. Those who were urbanising, however, used to have pedal organs … even in the ordinary tribal dances, week-ends, they used to end up their dancing with some sophisticated instrument. Just to show they have developed, and making their steps a bit more citified, but singing the same songs, and only playing it on the organ, because you know how they can orchestrate it the instrumental way, but it’s the same song, the same dance.40

House organists like Gashe took Sotho songs and turned them into marabi. Even the industrial version of the Sotho moropa drum used for focho, made from a twenty-litre tar can covered with a rubber tyre inner-tube and topped by a row of jangling bottle caps (manyenenyene) on a wire, became standard marabi percussion. At the same time, urban Sotho dancing and praise singing acquired a new feature, the dancing of individual women for a male audience. According to numerous eyewitnesses, the famo (from ho re famo : to open nostrils; to raise garments, displaying the genitals) was almost defiantly suggestive.41 Women made shaking and thrusting movements with their shoulders, hips and bosoms while lifting their flared skirts in an effort, perhaps, to ‘show their derrière to Lesotho’. The characteristic backward thrust of the bottom is still known as oa fecha (English: to fetch) in Lesotho and South Africa, and refers to the use of this fetching movement to capture the husbands and boyfriends of other women. The dancers wore no underwear but instead ‘had painted rings around the whole area of their sex, a ring they called “stoplight.”’42 The dancing was determinedly wild and accompanied by marabi played on a pedal organ. Men, dancing alongside or seated against the walls, chose the women they wanted and took them into the back for love-making.43 Apart from the dance, the term famo refers to the lengthy recitative songs performed by the women which served a purpose parallel to the male likoata’s praise songs, the lifela. The women often addressed their famo songs to the men. Usually, they began with the salutation A oelele ngoana moshanyana! (Hey, boy child!), followed by a series of rhetorical metaphors and challenges expressing the singer’s tragic fate. Often she Performance Culture Between the Wars 119

expressed bitter feelings about specific people and situations, while praising her own character and physical attractions in blunt language. Former or current famo singers performed these spontaneous compositions for the tape recorder with considerable bravado, and can be seen belting them out in the film Songs of the Adventurers (Constant Spring Productions, 1986) that Gei Zantzinger and I made about the folk performance of Sotho migrants. Since the 1950s, many have appeared on record, and in Lesotho migrant women such as Malitaba and Puseletso Seema have become famous for their famo songs.44 The following text, ‘Famo Ngoanana’ (Famo, Young Girl!) was issued on Gallotone (GB 2021), probably in the early 1950s, by Mamapetle Makara koa Famong. The record attempts to recreate the structure of a live performance. Statements by the singer alternate with responses from members of her group in the twelve-syllable lines characteristic of sefela and other Sotho poetic forms. Famo, Ngoanana

Famo, Young Girl!

A oelele ngoana moshanyana Heholimi le ka be le na le tulo Mor’a molimo e moholo ke mang Hela oa. mantlha oa matsibolo Satane Mohla a qalang h ntsoa motsana Hela ana fuwa sekoti sa lihele. Hela ke eo ba mo tsoere ka toropong.

Aoelele the manchild! Heaven should have a place Who is the eldest son of God? Oh, the first and the first born is Satan At first he was allotted a small village (then) He was given the pit of hell Oh, there he is, caught up in town.

A le thipa a le selepe sa hae, Hela a le kobong tsa lefu a feletse. Hela khomo li besua ka mollo, Satane Ha li le tala li ka u hlatsisa. Nkoko poli ea se roala moqhaka.

On him are a knife and an axe, Oh, he is in full funeral dress. Oh, the cattle are burned with fire, Satan If they are raw, they make you vomit. Nkoko is a goat that wears a moqhaka [married woman’s headband].

Bua ngoanan’a heso, famo! famo! Ha ke etsa joalo ke etsa motho. Nkoko poli ea se roala moqhaka. Ele mahlapa e ka u poqa Hela, u ea tholoa ke manong selemo.

Speak, girl of my parents’ home, famo! famo! When I do this [movement imitating intercourse] I am making a human being. Nkoko is a goat that wears a moqhaka. She swears and may disappoint you Oh, so that you may be picked up by vultures at ploughing time

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Famola bo ngoanana, iketle Do the famo, young girl, Take it easy, young girl thope ngoanyana You are travelled U tsamaile U lahlehile ... You are lost to your people, [i.e., Why hold back?] … … Ngoanana ose ke ua botsa lihlapi ditsoa-metsing di meno a bohale (repeat) Bua Makhobane, ke utloa u nkhopotsa hulee. Bua ngoanana heso U buile Makhobane, U bue. U tsamaile ngoana Mosotho U qenehetse eng

… Girl, don’t ask the water animals Water animals have sharp teeth Say more, Makhobane [the soloist] I feel you remind me of my country. Say more, my home girl You have said [a lot] Makhobane Say more. You have travelled, Sotho baby Don’t hold back anything.

Ke be ke hopole Mathakane. Ke be ke hopole mae ea Ntutu. Mali-matsebe-tseba oa Matikane, isoa kae? Tsoane-betere Mamohatlana Hela Tsoane-betere ngoana Moselane. Morena ha u tebela matekatse, U se ka siea Mamokhahlana. Litsietsi hali makatse mosali. Hela Malitsietsi mae ea Khobane. Ke tihile pelo ngoana Mosotho. Ke tihile pelo, ke hotse bohase. Ke hotse ke bo kakatlela bophelo.

Sometimes I long for Mathakane I long for the daughter of my paternal aunt. Sometimes I long for the mother of Ntutu. Mali-matsebe-tsebe of Matikane Matikane, where is Matsebetsebe taken to? Tsoane-betere Mamohatlana Oh, Tsoane-betere child of Moselane, Chief! When you get rid of prostitutes, Don’t leave out Mamokhahlana. Troubles are no surprise to a woman, Oh, Malitsietsi, the mother of Khobane [the soloist]. My heart is tough, (I) the Mosotho child. My heart is tough, I grew up an orphan. I grew up under hardships of life …

(Transcription and translation by Joachim Ntebele and David Coplan)

‘The singer rhetorically upbraids her chorus of male listeners, treasured sons of Lesotho who have traded their home villages for the ‘pit of hell’. ‘Caught up in town’, the men go about heavily armed, only to be sickened and destroyed by deceitful women. The chorus approve her stance, urging her to hold back nothing. For her own part, she affirms her sexuality, mourns the loss of her own home and family, and maintains the Performance Culture Between the Wars 121

toughness of her heart in the face of misfortune. The entire performance, delivered in a high-pitched, forceful declamatory rhythm, turns a personal statement into an expression of existential reality for her community of listeners. Famo may appear to be nothing more than the emotional response of demoralised African proletarians to a predatory social environment. Yet it reaffirms an underlying sense of community and a system of social values retained from rural life. Though famo provided a setting for the practice of illegal trades, it also permitted cathartic moral comment on common problems. The experience of Adelina, a woman who attended famo in Vereeniging, Kroonstad, and other towns during the 1950s, is a case in point. Asked if money were her primary motivation for attending famo, she replied: No, it was a form of entertainment. At that time I associated with people whose manners were rough, wild. When I was deeply depressed and worried, in order to express myself and feel contented, like a Christian would open a page in a bible, with me I went to the shebeen to sing these things. I had gone (to town) to visit my husband and I found him but we separated. I suffered a lot because of that. So I had to go to these places and get some joy out of life and unburden myself. Others came for similar reasons, and to share their feelings with others … they were just like me. … The men came and spent their weekends there. They were from the mines, or working in town. They were likoata, and even MaRussia would come to visit from Benoni. The men … carried sticks and axes; some who were well experienced even carried pistols. They had a regular musician, playing the pedal organ.45

The MaRussia of whom Adelina spoke were notorious Sotho ‘blanket’ gangsters who often held their own famo parties at which the men, in order of their rank within the gang hierarchy, took their pick among the women. They first arose, under no generic name, during the late 1920s as vigilantes organised to fight migrants of other ethnic groups, city gangs, and ultimately the police. By the late 1940s, they transformed themselves into the fierce MaRussia (a name derived from the newsreels depicting British fears of Stalin’s post-war Soviet Russia), who preyed unhindered on location residents for several decades. Although their power declined with the mass expulsion of undocumented Lesotho migrants, male and female, in 1963, groups calling themselves ‘Russians’ remain active on the Rand even today.46 The shebeens, with their marabi and famo parties, clearly played an important role in the struggle between the forces of order and disorder in the African locations. Adelina herself found more than solace at the famo dances in the locations. She learned the basics of the shebeen trade there, including the preparation of sepabale masenke (hold on to the fences) and other noxious liquors, and made her living as a shebeen queen in the towns of South Africa. 122 In Township Tonight

In the 1920s and 1930s, brass bands played at every kind of public social occasion in the Johannesburg locations. Unable to march or perform on street corners in the crowded inner-city slumyards, they played on Sundays in racially mixed areas such as Vrededorp and Fordsburg, and in suburban locations like Sophiatown, Alexandra, and Western Native Township. Individual players sometimes earned extra money performing in slumyard shebeens, but the major role of independent brass bands in working-class African society during the 1920s and 1930s was to support women’s associations known as stokvel.47 The term stokvel appears to derive from the rotating cattle auctions or ‘stock fairs’ of English settlers in the eastern Cape during the nineteenth century.48 Cattle had been the equivalent of money in pre-colonial South African societies, serving, like cash, as a standard of value, a store of wealth, and a medium of exchange. Beyond such material functions, cattle bound families, generations, communities and polities together, in rural white as well as black society. Cape Africans brought the stokvel to Johannesburg, where the word came to refer to small rotating credit associations based on African principles of social and economic cooperation. It is significant that a pattern of working-class social organisation in which traditional forms of reciprocity and redistribution were harmonised with the demands of the commercial economy should have taken its inspiration from European customs relating to the exchange of cattle. Stokvels were and are credit rings in which each member contributes a set amount each week in anticipation of receiving the combined contributions of all the other members at regular intervals. Commonly, each member in her turn uses the lump sum she receives to finance a stokvel party, at which other members and guests pay admission and buy food and liquor and even musical entertainment. Profits go to the hostess of the week. The principle of mutual assistance that underlay much economic effort in rural African communities in South Africa was the mainspring of the stokvel in the new urban locations.49 The only protection against default was regular personal contact among members, limited in most cases to six women from the same neighbourhood. The scale of organisation could be expanded by cooperation between groups, involving rounds of mutual contributions by clubs and attendance at one another’s functions. The ‘stokvel community’ created by these club networks50 spanned the Witwatersrand. In Johannesburg’s African locations, Tswana rather than Xhosa people were most active in creating stokvel networks, though it soon spread to members of all black ethnic groups. Still vigorous in the late 1970s, it has become rather more diffuse, individualised and single-event oriented in recent years. In 2004 a rather good ‘situation comedy’ called Stokvel, developed by veteran comedian Joe Mafela, aired on the South African television’s Channel 2. In the traditional pastoral societies of southern Africa, individuals and families Performance Culture Between the Wars 123

could sponsor cooperative work parties through beer drinking. Those who helped others could expect to receive both beer and assistance in their turn. In the slumyards, social cooperation revolved around the beer trade, and was institutionalised in the stokvel. Women made sure to hold their marabi parties on different days, brewed beer and cared for the children of friends who were ill or in jail, and helped each other out by selling food or taking admission.51 Tswana women used the traditional principles of regimental and ‘ward’ organisation in forming their simpato (stokvel ) to give their weekly parties a special character. They treated their urban neighbourhoods like the wards in the capital towns of Tswana chieftaincies.52 Individual stokvel clubs banded together on the basis of traditional regimental loyalties signified by distinctive club names such as the Transvaalians or Black Lions.53 While church-going women preferred occasions sponsored by their manyano Christian sisterhoods, the line between stokvel and manyano must have been rather thin in some cases. Wilson Silgee recalled that his father, a minister and band conductor in the 1920s and 1930s, enjoyed performing brass band marabi for stokvels as well as hymns and marches for weddings and other Christian social occasions.54 Certainly, the uniforms worn by stokvel members on parade were inspired by the black skirts and white blouses of the manyano.55 Christian forms of community organisation along with Tswana institutions may therefore have influenced the development of stokvel among the urban Tswana. On Sunday afternoons, stokvel members marched to the party in uniform, singing Tswana regimental and initiation songs, popular urban songs, and Christian hymns. Accompanying them would be an ensemble of from five to twelve players like Modikwe’s or the Bakgatla Brass Band, dressed in blue European military coats with brass buttons. This reflected the important role played by British and German missionary bands as well as the Native Military Corps in African instrumental tuition.56 Working-class bands such as Modikwe’s and Jeremiah Nlatseng’s Mokgoro Band in Bloemfontein even played for the early vaudeville concerts. Marches, hymns, jazz: they played anything from anywhere everywhere, developing the instrumental skills that laid the foundations of the great African jazz bands of succeeding decades. Edward Sililo, onetime marabi pianoman in Doornfontein, played trumpet with such bands until he was good enough to join the celebrated Jazz Maniacs.57 Like the tula n’divile organ music, the stokvel parade was an advertisement,58 drawing casual passers-by along to the party in a dusty cloud of colour, music, and marching, dancing feet. The uniforms and parade music also expressed and reinforced the regimental identity of the association and its members, people united in aid of their families. At the hostess’s residence, the band usually performed briefly while the party got under way. Later a keyboard musician accompanied singing by participants and played marabi. A conspicuous feature was the bidding for refreshments, performers and musical items – a practice 124 In Township Tonight

which was directly taken from the popular tea-meetings and community concerts. Stokvel mobilised values and motivations familiar from rural society in the service of urban social and economic goals and helped to reconstruct those values on a more flexible basis.59 Traditionally, personal prestige and the political leverage created by relative wealth had been the most important incentive for productive activity beyond the necessary minimum. In the towns, social status depended upon Western education, occupation, urbanisation, and wealth. Migrants, workers and mission-school graduates were squeezed together in a depressed field of social competition from which there was no upward escape. Under these conditions, conspicuous consumption and the public display of wealth became a means of gaining prestige and status, which the stokvel clubs were able to exploit. Working-class women found the tea-meeting pattern of voluntary attendance financially unreliable, so they organised the stokvel according to a system of formal reciprocity. Rewards were based on the degree of a member’s investment, so that if a woman contributed liberally to the club and her husband spent freely at parties, they became popular and did well when she held her own party. Such participation built prestige and a reputation for generosity, reliability and community-mindedness. Club hostesses also added music, making it more profitable and entertaining through the bidding custom. The social byplay and competition for status involved in bidding furnished more entertainment than the refreshments and music it was supposed to pay for.60 In this way, status competition helped to redistribute money within the community and to promote cooperation on behalf of planned savings. Similarly, stokvel regained for beer something of its traditional function by integrating its sale into a pervasive pattern of urban social organisation, recreation, and exchange. The initial contributions and bidding were intended more to keep up the supply of party refreshments and music than to make a profit for the sponsors. In addition to mutual aid and welfare services, economic redistribution, and socially controlled modes of self-promotion, stokvel advanced cultural urbanisation and the transition from a rural to an urban identity. Stokvel marabi parties offered a setting where musicians provided aspiring urbanites with a means of self-expression and a new working-class culture. So the communicative aspect of these occasions was just as important as their social and economic aspects. Just as the religious manyano and the secular stokvel influenced each other, the link between self-help and entertainment blurred the distinction between stokvel and shebeen. After the initial rounds of bidding, a stokvel often turned into a marabi dance no different from those in shebeens. Stokvel members willing to risk arrest and to put up with the commotion used their experience to become successful shebeen operators. Shebeen owners even formed stokvels among themselves, and as Abrahams recalls: ‘Stokveld [was] the trade union of the women who dealt in illicit liquor. ... often a Performance Culture Between the Wars 125

well-known ‘skokiaan queen’ was sent to prison without the option of a fine. In such cases the stokveld helped with the home and children till the member came out of jail.’61 Stokvel and mohodisana, a type of credit ring that functioned without the parties, frequently expanded their functions to include those of provident and burial societies. Similarly, regular shebeen customers contributed whenever one of their number or a well-known yard resident suffered a death in the family.62 The liquor trade itself, with its organisational consequences, provided the economic foundations of social and cultural change. Drinking served more to circulate wealth among urban black people than to create it, although migrant workers did bring some outside revenue to urban shebeens. Yet at least this money remained within the community rather than going to white liquor distributors or the government.63 Brewing and the relationships centred upon it represented survival for many women and their children in Johannesburg. When the central government pressed the city to monopolise the production and sale of beer in the locations in 1937, working-class Africans organised a boycott of the municipal beer halls in support of the liquor trade and shebeen society.64 Stokvel band parades were often broken up as well by the police, who claimed that disorderly conduct routinely followed when competing bands of inebriated performers and followers encountered each other in the location streets. Christopher Ballantine recounts one episode in 1932 when an entire eighteen-piece band was arrested in the streets of Vrededorp, and marched playing their hearts out to the charge office.65 For ordinary African workers, entertainments sponsored by their educated brethren were something of a model of city culture, and they in turn had an influence on marabi. The 1920s and 1930s were the era of ‘concert and dance’ among fully urbanised Africans of all social classes. 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 most of the eight halls in Johannesburg available to Africans.66 During the 1920s, choirs or ragtime–vaudeville companies like the Darktown Negroes, African Darkies, and the Versatile Seven, successors to the old minstrel troupes, performed for the first four or five hours of the evening, followed by several hours of dancing to a band playing marabi in the style of the American swing orchestras. The vocal troupes were accompanied by the dance band. While American musical influences were important, the performers appropriated them and incorporated indigenous elements, forging from these diverse sources what would become a distinctively South African mbaqanga jazz.67 As Walter Nhlapo wrote, with customary passion and insight: ‘In spite of the trials and tribulations, segregation, oppression and poverty … efforts are continually made to make life sweet and brilliant.’68 At working-class concerts and dances, tireless pianists like Solomon ‘Zuluboy’ Cele 126 In Township Tonight

accompanied singers and stage dancers from 8 p.m. to midnight and then played for marabi dancing until 4 a.m. Some were concerts featuring a style of marabi called ndunduma, which became a name for this kind of affair, attended mostly by recent arrivals from the country who wanted to be ‘town boys’, and came to acquire some urban culture. The ndunduma style of marabi assimilated rural Zulu drum and dance rhythms, just as tula n’divile had done with those of the Xhosa. The term ndunduma means ‘mine dumps’ in Zulu and symbolised the totality of Johannesburg’s culture to people from Natal. The ndunduma concerts and dances were the favourite of the udliwe i’ntaba, people ‘eaten by the hills’, those who, like their Sotho counterparts, called machepa, left for the gold reef on contract work and never returned.69 During the early part of the evening, choirs dressed in long suit jackets competed in performing ingoma busuku. During the latter half, the pianist provided dance music that blended the ingoma busuku melodies into the structure of marabi. Caluza’s impact on both the ingoma busuku choirs and the marabi players helped bring this blending about. Always on the lookout for popular material, Caluza himself recorded Tebetjana’s ‘UTebetjana Ufana Ne’mfene’ hit marabi (HMV 4284). His influence was so important that the Durban saxophonist Dalton Khanyile was moved to remark, ‘the pianomen were the bridge between Caluza and marabi … marabi is ndunduma, Caluzafied’.70 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. Mission-educated critics such as H. I. E. Dhlomo referred to ndunduma functions as ‘night clubs of the lowest order … attended by degenerate young elements, the newly arrived country bumpkins, and the morbidly curious’.71 Despite this attitude, Dhlomo wrote one of the few accounts of how keyboard players were able to combine Zulu musical materials with ragtime to produce marabi : And yet 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.72

Dhlomo’s enthusiastic description reflects the role of ‘aural transmission’ in the development of marabi. Ndunduma concerts are a good example of how musicians interacted with their audiences in the process of cultural urbanisation. We are fortunate Performance Culture Between the Wars 127

that this transitional style was not completely ‘flung back unrecorded’. An example entitled ‘Indunduma’ survives on a piano and vocal recording by the Ngcobo Choir (Regal GR9-WEA808) in the archives of the British Broadcasting Corporation. A full-scale musical transcription and analysis is necessary in order to demonstrate exactly how this flexible style could incorporate musical resources from so many cultures. For those readers with some knowledge of transcription, a detailed analysis of a classic marabi, ‘Highbreaks’ (named after one of the style’s most renowned pianomen), is provided in Appendix C. In brief, marabi songs reflect traditional principles as well as Western influences in their tonality, part structure, and characteristic rhythmic sense of ‘perpetual motion’. As a term, marabi covers a variety of syncretic forms that have in common only segmental repetition – ‘a predisposition for the merciless two or three chord vamp’, as Rycroft put it– and a characteristic rhythm derived from ragtime and traditional Nguni wedding dances.73 In the hands of less westernised performers such as the Zulu guitarists, marabi drew more heavily upon traditional melody and part structure but displayed very little in the way of melodic or rhythmic variation. The evidence indicates that there was little free or ‘jazz’ solo improvisation in marabi. Working-class shebeen and dance hall patrons in the marabi era retained the traditional southern African preference for melodic repetition, which was in any case well suited to continuous dancing. Peter Macontela vividly illuminates the process: Then they take the very same song they come with from their birth places in rural areas, and sing them in the tune of what is in Jo’burg now ... They can sing the very same old tune in a jive form: in a beat that one can jive. Piano can come in, and drums, and be backed. But the very same guy who is in the farms can still get the lyrics, [he] can identify the song as the song which used to be slow on drums in the rural [areas]. But now once these guys come in Jo’burg, the very same songs, they put them into rhythm and they are backed up – that’s marabi.74

Marabi compositions had titles but often no recognised words, and participants were free to make up lyrics to suit the melody as they wished, helping to spread the melodies across ethnic lines. Like ‘UTebetjana Ufana Ne’mfene’, some of these songs became widely known. Dikobe recalls the following:75 U ndiyeshilani sithando-sami U ndishiye e zweni lobu khoboka Mina nawe sidibeni emarabini U ndisheyelani sithando-sami (trans. David Coplan)

128 In Township Tonight

Why do you abandon me, my love You abandon me in this land of slavery You and I met at the marabi dance Why do you abandon me, my love

Other marabi songs, such as ‘iPickup Van’ achieved general distribution because of their commentary on urban experience or expression of political protest: There comes the big van All over the country They call in the pick-up There, there is the big van ‘Where’s your pass?’ ‘Where’s your tax?’ 76 Marabi’s multi-ethnic character was evident also in its dancing, performed alone or with a partner in any manner inspired by the infectious marabi rhythm. Many people drew their movements from rural dances of the period such as ukuxhentso, in which several people danced together but each with his or her own solo, without any common pattern. Recorded evidence also indicates that marabi in turn influenced the music of dances back in the country. Unlike traditional dances or the gumboot and ingoma dances of migrant workers, marabi had no official steps. As Sotho famo marabi dancers told Adams, ‘Each person sings and dances the thing the way he likes ... they are not together.’77 Marabi is difficult to analyse stylistically because the term refers as much to a social situation and a cultural outlook as to a complex of musical features. During the interwar years, marabi served as both a setting and a symbolic expression of the birth of an urban community among the African working class. Though marabi retained traditional musical practices and elements, its ultimate form reflected the desire of largely unschooled and un-westernised urban Africans to modernise by absorbing new cultural elements within a familiar structure. African efforts to apply this cognitive familiarity to urban recreation led to the development of a pervasive marabi culture. As 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.’78 The authorities’ campaign against liquor was in practice also a war against music, which played smoke to liquor’s fire. As the Natives Urban Areas Act began clearing black people out of the newly proclaimed ‘white’ inner city, marabi culture was also driven out, and by the mid-1930s the death of black communities in Prospect Township and Doornfontein helped to kill marabi.79 As the slumyards came under the shadow of removal, the focus of African community life shifted to the freehold and municipal suburban locations in the western areas of Johannesburg. There the shebeens found a new home, and the old concerts, driven from the city’s darkened dance halls, became part of location variety shows and backyard parties. A marabi party usually took place in a square yard, bordered on all four sides by the backs of location houses, with a Performance Culture Between the Wars 129

temporary roof of canvas sacking. Beer, food, and marabi dancing entertained the neighbours for as long as the weekend or the refreshments lasted. The musicians were not professionals but local residents playing battered organs, kazoos, shakers, banjos, guitars, string bass, drums, or perhaps a few instruments acquired from a brass band. They were paid in liquor or, as location slang had it, ‘petrol’ to keep the marabi machine humming. By the 1930s, some of these neighbourhood bands had become widely known. They competed with each other at location dance halls in devising new variations on such marabi standards as ‘Tamatie Saus’. Marabi also invaded other social occasions. For weddings, young people customarily formed choirs and composed special songs in traditional idiom, much as they had at rural celebrations. Soon they too were composing songs in the marabi style, and an amateur choral marabi developed that blended more traditional wedding songs into the marabi repertoire. Sotho people, for example, transformed their Wa sala wena (‘We are leaving you behind; i.e., at your husband’s home’) wedding songs into marabi played on the concertina or accordion. Working-class Africans developed a secular urban culture of their own based upon marabi, which much distressed the westernising middle class. The better-educated regarded marabi as a threat to African community life and to the ‘civilised’ status on which their claims to social and political rights were based. Middle-class black children who ran off to hear the music at neighbourhood parties were sternly warned that hellfire awaited marabi patrons. Influential Africans in the locations did what they could to stifle stokvel and marabi parties. The minutes of the (African) Advisory Board at the new township of Orlando outside Johannesburg resolved on 14 April 1933, that ‘all night entertainments be not allowed in private houses – that is entertainments that are conducted for money – by reason of disorder, rowdiness, and being a nuisance to neighbours. There are other evils noticeable in connection with these functions, which evils are not for the social welfare of the community or in the interests of good order.’ Mission-school Africans considered marabi a misguided attempt at westernisation that combined the worst customs of Africa and Europe rather than the best. The journalist ‘Musicus’ pleaded, ‘The problem of African music must be solved by Africans. The “marabi” dances and concerts and the terrible “jazz” music banged and wailed out of the doors of foul-smelling so-called halls are far from representing real African taste. They create wrong impressions.’80 Underlying this attitude was the struggle by wage-earners for social mobility in a depressed social field. Packed into locations that were strongholds of informal enterprise, they resented the ‘easy money’ made by shebeen operators as much as the immorality and disruption shebeens were said to cause. Though the African ‘rank and file’ clearly had their own notions of what constituted ‘real African taste’, white and black middle-class accusations of a raucous, sex-charged, sometimes violent atmosphere at the halls had of course some basis in fact.81 Wherever in the world independent agricultural people are 130 In Township Tonight

deprived of their means of livelihood and sent packing from their lands as industrial migrants to work under the harsh regimes of racialised capitalism, destructive forms of sociability take hold. Among other things, black youngsters acquired a taste for liquor and casual liaisons at marabi dances. Many working-class people, concerned with the preservation of family life in the slumyards and locations, condemned marabi as vigorously as did mission-school people. In Dikobe’s novel The Marabi Dance, Mrs Mabongo warns her daughter, a popular marabi singer, that ‘Marabi is for women who don’t care to live with men, and don’t want to have children. When they get children they kill them at birth and go again to marabi and look like girls who have never had children.’82 Like the shebeens, marabi occasions were a focus of the continuing struggle for order in urban African society. They were in many ways centres of community life that gave working-class people some sense of social coherence. Yet they were easily disrupted by a new type of social predator, the Blue Nines. These were gangs of youths born and raised in the ethnic mixture of the Johannesburg slums. They spoke the Afrikaansbased blend of African and European languages known as mensetaal or flytaal (literally: people’s tongue; clever language), later known as tsotsitaal (gangster talk). Indigenous languages became mixed and semantically shallow in the cities, and mensetaal was the only dialect or language that many gang members could speak fluently. Blue Nines had a great love for marabi dances, and Dashiki drummer Lefifi Tladi once described marabi to me as a kind of musical mensetaal.83 In contrast to the Amalaita, who worked regularly and maintained family ties, Blue Nines typically lived entirely by robbery and were alienated from African society beyond their own gangs. Fond of liquor, marijuana, and flashy clothing, Blue Nines were feared by other Africans for their crime and violence and because they were essentially beyond social control. The gangs were simply another destructive force with which the urban African community had to contend. During the 1920s and 1930s, working-class Africans in Johannesburg experienced severe hardships intensified by white resistance to their urbanisation. As we have seen, the involvement of performance in the African struggle for autonomy in Johannesburg was affected by social and economic pressures, opposing tendencies towards order and disorder, and complex dynamics between class and culture. The development of class identification among urban Africans was complicated not only by ethnic and regional differences but also by contradictions within the black community and South African society as a whole. Class differentiation in the cities was hindered by racial discrimination, which promoted class levelling and common interests across social boundaries. These opposing movements were clearly reflected in urban African performing arts.84 To understand most fully the relationship of class and culture in black music and theatre in the cities, we should take a look at the styles associated with the upper level of urban African society. Performance Culture Between the Wars 131

Notes 1 Native Laws (Fagan) Commission Report, Union Government 28/1948. 2 City Councillor A. Immink, quoted in E. Roux, Time Longer than Rope, London, 1949, p. 278. 3 Transvaal Local Government (Stallard) Commission, 1922. 4 Proctor, ‘Class struggle, segregation and the city’, pp. 54–7. 5 A. W. Stadler, ‘Birds in the cornfields: squatter movements in Johannesburg’, in Bozzoli, Labour, Townships and Protest, p. 26. 6 John Burger, The Blackman’s Burden, London, 1943, p. 87. 7 Rand Daily Mail, 6 May 1918. 8E  . Krige, ‘The social significance of beer among the Balobedu’, Bantu Studies 7, 6 (1932), pp. 347–56. 9 Ellen Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Study of an Urban Native Slumyard, Cape Town, 1948, pp. 41–3. 10 E. Koch, ‘Town and countryside in the Transvaal: capitalist penetration and popular response’, Paper for the Witwatersrand History Workshop, Johannesburg, 1981, p. 15. 11 The Star, Johannesburg, 21 June 1920. 12 Laidler, Tavern of the Oceans, p. 40. 13 C. C. Saunders, ‘The creation of Ndabeni: urban segregation, social control, and African resistance’, Paper for the Witwatersrand History Workshop, Johannesburg, 1978, p. 16. 14 Alternatively, it may have been named after the empty cans of ‘Barberton’ tobacco snuff that served as perfect serving vessels for home-made concoctions in workers’ shebeens. 15 Hellmann, Rooiyard, pp. 7–10. 16 In addition to these two alternative forms, Tsonga from Mozambique call themselves ‘AmaTsonga’ or Batsonga. Mine management in those days would have called these men ‘foreign natives’. 17 Vilakazi, Zulu Transformations, pp. 76–7. 18 Lovedale Tonic Solfa Leaflet 2C; HMV GU 1 and HMV GU 44. 19 C. M. Doke, D. M. Malcolm, and J. M. Sikana, Dictionary of the Zulu Language, Johannesburg, 1971, p. 258. 20 M. Dikobe, The Marabi Dance, London, 1973, p. 81. 21 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 68. 22 Ibid., p. 4. 23 Ibid., pp. 93–4. 24 Ibid., p. 6. 25 H. Junod, Pretoria (1855–1955), Pretoria, 1955, p. 76. 26 A. Mabille and H. Dieterlen, South Sotho–English Dictionary, Morija, Lesotho, 1950, p. 319. 27 Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom, New York, 1970, p. 120. 28 Dan Twala, interview, 17 March 1977. 29 Rycroft, ‘The new “town” music of southern Africa’, p. 55. 30 Todd Matshikiza, Drum, June 1957. 31 Dan Twala, interview, 17 March 1977. 32 Hellmann, Rooiyard, p. 10. 33 Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans, New York, 1971, pp. 404–5. 34 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 30. 35 Southern, Music of Black Americans, p. 313. 36 Wilson Silgee, interview, 16 September 1976. 132 In Township Tonight

37 Todd Matshikiza, Drum, June 1957. 38 E. Mphahlele, The Wanderers, London, 1971, p. 45. 39 Joachim Ntebele, interview, 28 July 1978. 40 Dan Twala, interview, 17 March 1977. 41 Adams, ‘Ethnography of Basotho Evaluative Behavior’, p. 151. 42 Mphahlele, The Wanderers, p. 45. 43 Can Themba, Drum, March 1958. 44 See my study of this genre, In the Time of Cannibals, chapters 6 and 7. 45 Adelina M., interview June 1978 (trans. M. K. Malefane). 46 See Gary Kynoch, We are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999, Athens, Ohio, 2005. 47 Hilda Kuper and Sara Kaplan, ‘Voluntary associations in an urban township’, African Studies, 3 December 1944. 48 Brian du Toit, ‘Cooperative institutions and culture change in South Africa’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 4 (1969), p. 283. 49 Ibid., p. 279. 50 Kuper and Kaplan, ‘Voluntary associations’, pp. 179–80. 51 Hellmann, Rooiyard, p. 46; ‘The importance of beer brewing in an urban native yard’, Bantu Studies 8 (1934). 52 I. Schapera, The Tswana, London, 1953, pp. 40ff. 53 Kuper and Kaplan, ‘Voluntary associations’, p. 180. 54 Wilson Silgee, interview, 16 September 1976. 55 Kuper and Kaplan, ‘Voluntary associations’, p. 183; Bantu World, 17 September 1932. 56 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, pp. 30–3. 57 Ibid., p.13. 58 Kuper and Kaplan, ‘Voluntary associations’, p. 182. 59 Clifford Geertz, ‘The rotating credit association: a middle rung in development’ in I. Wallerstein (ed.), Social Change: The Colonial Situation, New York, 1966, p. 438. 60 Du Toit, ‘Cooperative institutions’, pp. 280–1. 61 Abrahams, Tell Freedom, pp. 110–11. 62 Dikobe, Marabi Dance, p. 7. 63 Timothy Couzens, ‘The social ethos of black writing in South Africa, 1920–1950’, Paper presented to the I.A.S., University of the Witwatersrand, September 1976, p.5. 64 Proctor, ‘Class struggle, segregation and the city’, p. 83. 65 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 27. 66 Ray Phillips, The Bantu in the City, Johannesburg, 1938, p. 293. 67 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, pp. 6, 38. 68 Bantu World, Johannesburg, 15 February 1936, cited in ibid. p. 12. 69 Ilanga lase Natal, 20 June 1953. 70 Dalton Khanyile, interview, August 1978. 71 Ilanga lase Natal, 20 June 1953. 72 Ibid. 73 D. K. Rycroft, ‘Melodic imports and exports: a by-product of recording in South Africa’, Bulletin of the British Institute of Recorded Sound, 1956, p. 20. 74 Peter Macontela, cited in Allen, ‘Pennywhistle Kwela’, p. 12. 75 Dikobe, Marabi Dance, p. 44. 76 Tracey, Lalela Zulu, p. 55. 77 Adams, ‘Ethnography of Basotho’, p. 51. Performance Culture Between the Wars 133

78 Todd Matshikiza, Drum, December 1951. 79 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, pp. 65–6. 80 Umteteli wa Bantu, 11 November 1933. 81 The Star, Johannesburg, 13 December 1928: ‘Mr. E. Nathan, on behalf of Peter Nothow, a native, applied for a licence for the African Hall, 45 van Beek St. ... Sgt. Tyier ... said that on Friday there was an entertainment at the hall. Thirty-three natives were arrested in the vicinity without passes, or being drunk, or being in possession of liquor. The performance was still going on at two a.m. on Saturday. There was no European in charge. He found Europeans dancing with natives. There were several rooms which were known liquor dens. The hall sometimes kept open till four a.m., and there had been prosecutions for dancing on Sundays. ... The licence was granted with a warning to the applicant.’ 82 Dikobe, Marabi Dance, p. 79. 83 Lefifi Tladi, interview, June 1975. 84 Robert Edgar’s edited version of Ralph Bunche’s diary of his excursion through South Africa in 1937 contains many interesting anecdotes of his encounters with club and township music. See Robert Edgar (ed.), An African American in South Africa, Athens and Johannesburg, 1992.

134 In Township Tonight

5 Black performance culture between the world wars: the ‘situations’ The difficulties facing the African middle class during the inter-war years were as daunting as those troubling other Africans. The Urban Areas Act frustrated their hopes of winning a recognised place in South African society as a whole. Outside the cities the Natives Land Act blocked their investment in rural real estate over 87 per cent of South Africa’s territory. Africans educated at church schools found themselves excluded from positions for which their education had equipped them. Rejected by the majority of whites, who considered them insubordinate, over-wise and anomalous – social matter out of place – they were likewise resented by lower-class Africans for their self-conscious superiority and perceived imitation of whites. By the 1920s, these people had become a ‘repressed elite’.1 They carried the pass exemption certificate issued to ‘civilised Natives’ that, of course, had to be shown to police on demand like an ordinary pass. Still, middle-class Africans emphasised their importance to the country’s expanding industrial economy. Encouraged by missionary teaching and the liberal movement, represented by the Joint Council of Europeans and Africans, they continued to struggle for social recognition and achievement based on Western criteria. Using the schools, cultural and sports clubs, the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu, the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, and a variety of other institutions, white liberals intervened in slumyard culture to prevent any alliance between middle-class and workingclass Africans.2 Culture and entertainment were among the principal means by which white liberals co-opted the African middle class, softening the harshness of segregation and convincing them that advancement could come through westernisation.3 Performance Culture Between the Wars 135

Though sensitive to the ‘primitive’ image of traditional Africans, the black middle class had created an identity strong enough not to feel directly threatened by rural ‘traditional’ performance culture. To the contrary, the music of those whom educated Africans had long regarded as ‘heathen’ returned to favour in the 1930s as African cultural nationalism gained strength from the political intransigence of whites. For educators like Reuben Caluza, Hamilton Masiza, Mark Radebe, and Tsonga composer Daniel Marivate, this was a nationalist project, based on the idea that ‘for music to be truly national … it must be based on the idiom of the people. Those most valuable achievements in musical history have been essentially national in spirit.’4 Since teachers and clerks often earned no more than drivers and labourers, however, their status had to depend on Western education and the exclusiveness it gave to the occupations for which it was needed. Those who overcame the obstacles to become professionals were at the top of the African social scale. Doctors and lawyers gained prestige not only from their calling and substantial, independent income, but also from their work as politicians, writers and cultural leaders. Education helped them gain the ear of sympathetic whites, reduced their sense of cultural inferiority, and reinforced their claims for racial equality or at least advancement. It provided the tools to compete in a world run by whites and to create shared values, patterns of behaviour, and a sense of social responsibility among the national African middle class.5 Christian schooling also served as a basis for relationships and institutions that supported the achievement of common goals. Continually reinvigorated by new graduates from around the country, they created isidolobha, the culture of towns,6 based on the ideal of a cohesive Afro-European way of life.7 An African academic, Professor Z. K. Matthews, wrote in 1935 that the ‘synthesis of Western and Native conceptions ... is being most successfully worked in the family life of educated Natives’. He recognised the importance of education as an integrating force, but also appreciated the many traditions that had been adapted to urban life, including ‘the competitive dancing and singing which has replaced the old mock fights’.8 Performance culture was to contribute to the realisation of elite ideals, and the formation of a tangible collective self-image. The performing arts also both constituted and portrayed the nature of urban black South African society, and as sociologist Ellen Hellmann discovered, ‘the kaleidoscopic succession of concerts, meetings, and dances in location community halls provides a valuable index of the direction, scope, and importance of communal activities’.9 The power of the white community made acculturation, in practice anglicisation, attractive (as culture always speaks to power), and churches and schools became centres of elite African cultural development. Yet despite urbanisation, continuity with rural cultural traditions continued to provide a resource for African adaptation to the caste system of colour. Educated Africans drew on their pre-colonial past for elements of 136 In Township Tonight

moral community, social control, and cultural coherence, combining them with similar elements from the dominant society. The task of creating a viable Afro-Western culture was complicated too by the attitudes of local whites. Integrationist white liberals helped to shape middle-class African expectations, but as paternalistic cultural organisers and educators, they were incapable of judging African performances by any but familiar Western criteria. Such judgements inhibited the development of a relevant, creative modern African aesthetic, and intensified middle-class Africans’ worries over black cultural inferiority. The missionaries’ condemnation of traditional culture had a profound, enduring effect upon the consciousness of educated Africans, who continued the fruitless struggle to win social and political concessions on the basis of their attainment of ‘civilisation’. Ironically, it was the white segregationists who most clearly shared educated Africans’ recognition of the potential for equality and power that lay in westernisation. Segregationists spoke enthusiastically of the beauty and value of African traditions. Meanwhile, they used government policy to rigidify the remnants of African political organisation to engineer and justify the perpetual separation, exclusion, and subordination of Africans.10 Cultural leaders among ‘school’ Africans then tried to create a ‘Bantu National Music’ that avoided both the slavish imitation of Europe and the artificial revival of tradition.11 However committed they might have been to localism in music as a means to reduce class antagonism in the cultural sphere, the elite cultural nationalists had an investment in placing as much social distance as possible between themselves and the marabi culture of the slums. So they joined the white authorities in vilifying marabi as a music of criminality12 and a threat to Christian bourgeois morality, leading black women down the road to drunkenness, desertion, and loose virtue through its temptations.13 Jazz, which was associated with both low morality and high, ‘international’ cultural prestige, was loved and reviled at the same time. This ambivalence demonstrates importantly as well that there was in practice no straightforward correspondence between class and culture in black urban life, partly because right up until the 1990s everyone lived together in the same locations. Then too, common oppression, and the desire of the political elite to ‘align downwards’ led them to publicly emphasise racial solidarity rather than class advancement.14 Yet at the same time the black elite, concerned about the political effects of the ‘uncivilised’ social practices of urban black workers, needed to separate itself from the black urban underclass as well as from rural peasants. For this, performance culture provided a powerful tool. As a vocal group of the period called the Flying Birds sang: We were sent by our parents To search for our father’s child The Black Middle Class 137

In eGoli ... We said, ‘Where is he? Where has he gone?’ They said: ‘Here he is at the marabi.’ We found him jiving and jumping – The big resounding organ was playing. It was said to us: ‘This is marabi, this is marabi.’15

So the elite believed that a powerful mission school performance culture was necessary as a defence against the ‘debased’ ragtime, marabi, and African jazz so popular among all classes of westernising Africans. Efforts to create a national culture resulted in voluntary associations modelled on the South Africans Improvement Society of Kimberley in the 1890s. Most prominent among these were the ‘Gamma Sigma’ clubs, begun in 1918 in Doornfontein with the help of an American missionary, Ray Phillips. By 1938 they involved 5 000 educated Africans on the Witwatersrand in lectures, discussions, and debates on social and political issues as well as concerts, dances, and other forms of ‘respectable’ recreation. The clubs created links between Africans and white liberals, and helped divide Africans along class lines. As Ray Phillips pointed out, ‘Whoever captures the leisure time of the people gets the people ... a people’s character is moulded by the kind of investment made of their free time.’16 Phillips shows a remarkable sociological understanding of what differentiated urban Africans from one another: not so much their (often lacking) choice of work, as their choice of play. Social work to help the less educated was also emphasised, and missionaries like the Reverend F. W. Bridgman argued that since ‘for weal and woe Johannesburg has become unwittingly the greatest educative agency among the Native people’, something must be done to steer their acculturation along bourgeois lines.17 The interest of capital in a cooperative African workforce enabled the missionaries to mobilise the liberal white community to provide funds for ‘a great cultural centre for Native life’, and in 1924 the Bantu Men’s Social Centre (BMSC) was built in Eloff Street Extension, Johannesburg.18 The patriarchal bias of this name was no accident, as neither the male black elite nor their white sponsors could envision an inner-city social centre for ‘Bantu’ women, notwithstanding that such women were just as keen to patronise its activities as were men. The BMSC, managed by African men under the direction of an executive committee of both whites and blacks, did in fact become a central institution of African society in the city. It provided educational, athletic, and performance activities for all classes of Africans. Of these activities, the most prestigious, culturally representative, and successful was the annual Eisteddfod. It is uncertain when this ancient Welsh term for a bardic and choral festival was first applied to African school choir competitions in South Africa, though it was current from the early twentieth century.19 By the 1920s 138 In Township Tonight

African teachers had founded adult choirs in most of the towns. In 1931, the pianist and conductor Mark Radebe of Johannesburg and the composer Hamilton Masiza of Kimberley founded the South African Bantu Board of Music (SABBM) to organise provincial Eisteddfodau among teachers’ choirs. The first Eisteddfodau took place in Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg late in 1931. They had two official aims: ‘To preserve and develop the individuality of Native music, and, concurrently, to encourage the finer refinements of European music.’ Further, the constitution of the SABBM pledged the organisation to: 1 awaken interest in musical talent 2 promote interest in African music 3 discover how to use music for the glory of God and the amelioration of social and cultural conditions 4 establish a Bantu Academy of Music 5 research and collect Bantu folk music 6 encourage and publish Bantu composers 7 hold concerts for funds, publicity, study, and appreciation.20

In 1934 the Transvaal Eisteddfod became a national event, and renowned choirs and soloists poured into Johannesburg for several days of competitions at the BMSC. People from all over South Africa met there, discussed national and community issues, formed new personal and organisational links, argued over political strategy, and developed resources for an elite national culture. The Eisteddfod became a setting for middle-class African interaction and sharpened the definition and consciousness of their class identity. Seeking to provide liquor-free recreation for the urban African workforce, white members of the executive committee arranged for an Eisteddfod programme more inclusive than African members might have wished, allowing nearly all types of Africans to compete. In addition to competitions in English and African classical songs, folk songs, and hymns performed by choirs, there were male, female and mixed quartets, solo and band instrumentalists, institutional brass bands, and even performers on traditional African instruments. The literary section included vernacular and English recitations, written collections of African folksongs, poems, short stories, essays, dramatic pieces, and song lyrics. Dance events were open to teams of miners performing a range of ethnic styles and to westernised urbanites doing the waltz, foxtrot, and quickstep.21 Working-class ingoma busuku choirs and anything associated with marabi culture, however, were excluded. The self-contradictory objective of the elite was somehow to preserve traditional performance culture without its ‘backward’ material and social context. The educated The Black Middle Class 139

African solution to this problem of how to draw upon the resources of traditional performing arts without abandoning ‘civilisation’ was to ‘modernise’ traditional song. They performed it with classically trained choirs in four-part harmony or blended African melodic and polyphonic features into the Western choral idiom. African composers and conductors had been evolving a syncretic choral tradition since the late nineteenth century, though not in the ways approved by educators like Masiza and Radebe. The tonic solfa system, which for half a century remained the basis of modern African composition, is not entirely suitable for notating African music.22 Its indications for tempo, modulation and complex rhythms are awkward and inconvenient, and its simple harmonic scheme makes it difficult to accurately represent African melody and polyphony. Conversely, these same inherent limitations made it unsuitable for learning how to play orchestral instruments or to read or compose arrangements for jazz. Nevertheless, its very simplicity provided a structure for the popular re-Africanisation of modern choral music. As early as 1917, a disgruntled contributor to Ilanga lase Natal 23 complained that the standard of secular urban choirs had fallen because ‘the only conductors remaining are those who fail to read music and “sing out of their heads,”’ misleading people into thinking that ‘the proper way to sing is to shout’. What this critic is referring to is the practice among African choirmasters, derived from indigenous communal song, of leading rather than conducting their performers. As one experienced Johannesburg choir teacher, Lucas Makhema, explained, the four-part structure of African choral singing is based on relative, rather than absolute, pitch.24 The conductor sings one part, usually the bass, loud enough to be heard over the combined voices of the choir members, each of whom finds his or her part in harmonic relation to the bass line and the parts of others around them. The traditional African preference for parallel movement at perfect intervals and the melodic alternation of fundamentals a whole tone apart is often freely expressed in this way.25 Because the tonic solfa system uses letters rather than note symbols and gives no visual indication of melodic direction, leaders find it difficult to teach melody and lyrics at the same time.26 A common solution has been to ‘shout’ the melody in the manner of traditional cantors until all have found and learned their parts, and only then to use the written score to introduce the lyrics. Aural transmission was a key element in developing South African choral music and in broadening the repertoires of individual choirs. Tonic solfa sheet music has always been scarce and relatively expensive in South Africa. Most often, conductors acquired new material by attending Eisteddfodau and other major competitions, where they would memorise or quickly sketch out in tonic solfa the most appealing selections, and then teach them without a score. Sometimes they used phonograph recordings by local choirs to transmit new pieces aurally.27 In general, African choirs have had a lot of latitude for musical interpretation. 140 In Township Tonight

All this is not to ignore the dedication of the many conductors who trained their choirs to perform the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah (chosen for its lack of modulation) or local classical compositions such as Masiza’s cantata ‘Emnqamlezweni’ (‘At the Cross’) in thoroughly Western fashion. Masiza and Radebe were caught between pride in their cultural nationalism and their feelings of cultural inferiority. They praised recording companies for preserving ‘this folk music which is our most treasured cultural inheritance’ and ‘a basic idiom thoroughly competent to express our national psychology’.28 In practice, though, when elements of African polyphony or performance practice crept in, they treated it as a failure to assimilate ‘civilisation’ and as an example of retarded cultural development. They also viewed miners’ traditional dancing as part of the government’s attempt to portray Africans as primitives unworthy of equal rights. An African contributor argued in the Bantu World, ‘ There is no objection to war dances, provided they are staged by the enlightened Bantu. When they are staged by the uncivilised, it is a sign of retrogression, because finding his performance so patronised, he has no inducement to progress.’29 Given their sensitivity to dominant white attitudes and the political consequences of allowing them to stereotype Africans unchallenged, it is understandable that the black educated elite of that time measured African musical performance by Western aesthetic criteria. But as the ‘New African’ movement would soon demonstrate, such assimilationism was short-sighted and contradictory. Cultural nationalism would only be subverted by measuring Africans by the cultural standards of the colonisers. Some admitted that the paucity of musical instruction in African schools ruled out Western standards, at least temporarily.30 But those at the higher end of the black social scale were unwilling to abandon the ruling standards, and so missed the opportunity for cultural self-discovery and to secure their place as cultural pace-setters for the wider urban community. Despite such ambivalence, a small number of educated African composers continued in the tradition of Ntsikana and Bokwe, producing a genuinely AfroWestern amakwaya literature based on tonic solfa. Composers came from various regions of the country, but significantly, none of the best known arose from an urban background. Benjamin Tyamzashe, Joshua P. Mohapeloa, R. T. Caluza, and others all made use of both the traditional music of their rural homes and their training in school choirs. As a group, they had a permanent influence upon the development of African choral composition in southern Africa. Mohapeloa’s career serves as a particularly good example. J. P. Mohapeloa (1908–82) grew up in rural Lesotho (then British Basutoland), where he spent many musical evenings around the family organ with his devoutly Christian parents. He was a standout at school choir competitions and became a choir leader at the age of ten. Inspired by local composers, including Joachim Sase The Black Middle Class 141

and Woodruff Buti, he began composing songs during a youthful convalescence from tuberculosis. Mohapeloa explained to me that these were either ‘school songs’ on the European model or attempts to transcribe and arrange in four parts the folk music of Sotho villages.31 Though literate in tonic solfa, he was only partly familiar with the Western harmonic principles on which it is based. In 1935, the Morija Sesotho Book Depot (Lesotho) published his first collection of thirty-two compositions, which were an immediate success with African choirs throughout South Africa. Many of the songs, such as ‘U Ea Kae?’ (‘Where Are You Going?’), use purely traditional melodic themes, arranged according to his own concepts of Western three-chord harmony. Indigenous southern African vocal music is, we recall, cyclical in structure, and its solo–chorus part relationships prevent the use of collective cadence. In ‘U Ea Kae?’, therefore, Mohapeloa attached a formal concluding cadential phrase in three-chord hymnodic harmony in order to make the whole ‘beautiful’ in Western aesthetic terms.32 Work songs transformed by literate composers soon achieved a new popularity as expressions of African nationalist political consciousness and cultural identity. An album issued by the ANC Cultural Workers in the early 1980s, ‘Amandla’ (A Disc BS800718), features a rousing version of ‘U Ea Kae?’ (see Appendix B). Here are the lyrics, rendered in English: Gird your loins, Let’s go to Taung (the lion’s place) to Moletsane’s To witness the threshing of the wheat The young boys take their sticks and strike to their satisfaction Where are you going? How could you come unprepared to the place of the Lion, Moletsane? We brought our tools (fighting sticks – we are ready) Hom ... Hom ...

Another song, ‘Chabana sa Khomo’ (see Appendix B), is divided into three parts: the first in traditional polyphony, the second adding Western ornamentation in the solo tenor part, and the third changing to a different traditional melodic theme and rhythm, taken from a work song to accompany the scraping of a cow-hide for clothing. The title of the published collection is Meloli le Lithallere tsa Afrika (1935), ‘African Melody in Extemporary Harmonisation’, by which Mohapeloa intended to emphasise that Africans can ‘harmonise’ aurally, without forethought. African and white music 142 In Township Tonight

educators recognised that Mohapeloa’s songs realised their notion of a ‘Bantu national music’. They suggested that he ‘improve’ his abilities by undertaking formal training in Western music. In 1938 he took a scholarship to study under none other than Professor P. R. Kirby at the University of the Witwatersrand. To earn extra money, Mohapeloa organised a touring Sotho choir called the African Traditional Choristers, and in 1939 he published a second volume of Meloli le Lithallere tsa Afrika. Despite Kirby’s scholarly immersion in indigenous African music, Mohapeloa was rather taught to absorb the rules of Western composition. Mohapeloa tried to ‘correct’ his previous work accordingly; but the revisions were never as pleasing to his audience as the originals. Even so, his four years of study permanently affected his musical outlook, and he spent the next four decades consciously attempting to ‘compose something that is African without being unmusical’.33 He was unable to make an independent living from choral music in Johannesburg without imitating the dominant figure of Caluza, ‘whose music was all ragtime,’ said Mohapeloa ironically, ‘and I thought I could do something better than that.’ So Mohapeloa returned to Lesotho and became a layout and proofreading specialist in tonic solfa for his Lesotho publisher, the Morija Sesotho Book Depot. The job did not enable him to promote the sale of his compositions as he had hoped, but it did in time make him something of an expert in the use of tonic solfa to notate African music. With this knowledge, Mohapeloa was able to write highly complex pieces in tonic solfa despite its limitations. They combine African and Western harmonic principles, represent durational values as small as a 1/32 note, and use African compound rhythmic structures based on the simultaneous sense of duple and triple time. Unfortunately, African choirs are rarely able to perform them at sight, and he was often asked why he no longer wrote songs like those in his first collection. The third volume of Meloli le Lithallere tsa Afrika, published in 1947, has never been as popular as the other two. In his more recent songs, many of which were published in a new volume, Meluluetsa, in 1976, Mohapeloa has consciously attempted to fuse Western and African principles of composition.34 Whether these works will succeed with African choirs remains to be seen; but his continuing effort to recreate a cultural tradition, from which his audience has long been alienated, by clothing it in more acceptable Western dress illustrates the dilemma of the modern African composer. Many African proletarians regarded the Bantu Men’s Social Centre as the ‘high hat club of the Whiteman’s good boys’, yet it strongly influenced urban African culture in general because its prestigious leaders took seriously their pledge to use performing arts to promote African unity and improve social conditions.35 Most events were open to everyone, and the BMSC de-emphasised ethnic identity and ‘tribalism’ among Johannesburg Africans.36 Even the term ‘Eisteddfod’ was significant. Africans familiar with its original meaning knew these festivals had helped maintain Welsh national The Black Middle Class 143

identity; – events where ‘the laws of Welsh Bards and Minstrel-councillors were recited’.37 Songs made popular at Eisteddfodau around the country included Tyamzashe’s ‘Ivoti’, which urged Africans to fight the revocation of their voting rights in the Cape, and Mohapeloa’s ‘U Ea Kae?’, still a symbol of African preparedness for self-defence.38 Perhaps most enduring has been Masiza’s ‘Vukani Mawethu’ (‘Awake My People’), in which the composer scolds his people for being the ‘footstool’ (isenabo) of all nations, lacking trust in one another and the initiative to improve their situation. Banned in the 1950s, this song reappeared in public in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1961. During the Soweto uprisings of 1976, SABC music presenter Thulasizwe Nkabinde played the song over Zulu Radio under the title ‘Vukani’ and narrowly avoided dismissal.39 Elite African assurances that the Eisteddfodau would ‘help abolish the marabi menace’ proved hollow.40 Marabi was too important to working-class life in the city, while ragtime and jazz were an even greater problem because of their popularity among the middle class itself. They served far better as musical expressions of an urban African self-image than did Anglo-African classical amakwaya. The rapid development of the recording and cinema industries during the 1920s and 1930s brought American performance culture to many countries, including South Africa.41 The role of African-Americans in popular music, dance, and variety stage entertainment had a special appeal for black South Africans. The racial disabilities of black Americans appeared similar to their own, and they followed whatever progress was made in overcoming them. ANC secretary general, author, and cultural leader Sol Plaatje and other black South Africans visited America during this period, reinforcing respect for black American political and cultural leaders such as Marcus Garvey, and inducing a hunger for equal accomplishments.42 Mariannhill teacher S. V. H. Mdhluli argued in 1933: The Negroes on the other side of the Atlantic have made a gigantic progress; all the same we are making a steady advance to the same goal … They have shown among other things that this much debated ‘arrested development’ is practically unknown among the Negroes. For our intelligence we have been relegated to the lowest rung of the ladder of progress. That wave of pessimism can be averted only by imitating the American Negroes.43

Like the leaders of the African-American Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s,44 the African elite hoped that achievements in the artistic and intellectual fields would help to break down the colour bar.45 African music educators hoped that the Eisteddfodau would replace the old ragtime and ‘coon’ song competitions46 and promote the classical and African-American 144 In Township Tonight

religious music performed by Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson, in preference to jazz. The association of jazz with urban working-class culture in America, and its growing popularity in Johannesburg’s rowdy African dance halls, troubled elite critics such as Mark Radebe, who wrote as ‘Musicus’: The old jazz of the screeching jazz maniac will not torture its victims much longer ... King Jazz is dying. His syncopating, brothel-born, war fattened, noise drunk is now in a stage of hectic decline ... It is, however, true that jazz is a perversion of some of the remarkable syncopating rhythms to be found in the Native music of many races. The Negroes, we are told, contributed some, but it is a libel upon our brethren to lay the crime of jazz upon them.47 But apprehensions about the growth of interest in jazz at the expense of amakwaya were well founded. The traditions of black American minstrelsy and vaudeville continued to influence African touring companies through the early decades of the twentieth century, and recordings encouraged imitation of black American performers.48 By the 1930s, popular stage traditions of black America were already well established in that universal training ground of middle-class performers, the school concert. Many African school teachers, who had little in the way of formal musical training themselves, were more interested in the enthusiastic participation of students and the pleasure of parents than in ‘Bantu national music’. Concerts featured African part-songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, spirituals, comic songs and sketches, action songs, tap dancing (umqhuqhumbelo), and especially vocal quartets performing ragtime and jazz. Elite critics like R. R. R. Dhlomo were appalled: This jazzing craze or madness has its victims in its octopus-like grasp. It emanates from the misguided teacher, who apparently thinks jazz is the most up to date music his children should be taught. ... I once visited a certain school … and was treated to what was considered the latest selections in music by the school children. The words of the first song were these: ‘Thine eyes – dear love speak of paradise.’ Another song … was this: ‘Tell her in the twilight,’ and ‘I want to be happy, etc.’ These songs were sung in precisely the same way as a music comedy company renders its songs in a theatre with suggestive movements and passionate expressions which are hand in glove with jazz music.49

Dhlomo was, of course, the same writer who had previously found so much value for African cultural nationalism in the work of Caluza, much of which is unmistakably ragtime and therefore akin to jazz. Perhaps the most respected African academic of all, Professor B. W. Vilakazi of the University of the Witwatersrand, came up against The Black Middle Class 145

this contradiction in an article ‘African Music – Where Is It?’: ‘There is no name in music libraries for purely Caluza music, but for lack of an apt word we call it jazz. Jazz music is somewhat inferior to the sort of music found in Caluza’s compositions ...’50 The profound ambivalence felt by elite Africans toward jazz and ragtime was deepened by the white liberal idea that black political spokesmen could best advance their cause by learning European culture, including music. But by the 1930s this attitude was changing as white Americans took up swing and the great black bands of the era became internationally popular. The orchestras of the aptly named Paul Whiteman and other white band leaders, along with Duke Ellington and the great black swing ensembles, made jazz appear cosmopolitan and refined. The Merry Blackbirds quickly followed their example, and the effect even rubbed off on Caluza, whose Double Quartet now got to indulge their love for real syncopated ragtime.51 The repertoire of the best bands was at this time largely American, as local black performers strove to prove they could be just as accomplished and worthy of recognition as their trans-Atlantic counterparts. Jazz became a fashionable subculture, looking to Harlem for inspiration, and African-American performers were proudly claimed as children of Africa. Literate musicians such as the Merry Blackbirds and Rhythm Kings could learn the arrangements from sheet music, but all the bands worked tirelessly to imitate imported swing records such as Woody Herman’s ‘Woodchopper’s Ball’ exactly.52 These efforts reflect the difficulties faced and strategies employed by black jazz performers in obtaining technical skills. Most players were self-taught in one manner or another, and while tonic solfa ‘piano leaflets’ and books were available, ‘playing by ear’ was the most common method.53 It is vitally important to point out, however, that they seldom did this alone and without the assistance of sympathetic musical friends and relations. The artistic biographies of black instrumentalists, then as now, are filled with stories of how music-loving and playing parents, uncles, neighbours, community show promoters or performers recognised budding talent and fervent desire in some young future star, and gave of their time and talents without payment. While white teachers were generally too expensive, it is remarkable how many players managed to receive at least some formal lessons from them. Jazz Maniacs’ saxophonist Wilson Silgee had an occasional white piano teacher, and their pianist Jacob Moeketsi had attended Healdtown Academy where he studied classical piano. The band itself hired a white tutor to attend rehearsals once a week. Others with formal training included pianist Sol Klaaste, violinist Peter Rezant, and Marjorie Pretorius – the first vocalist (male or female) with both the Jazz Maniacs and the Merry Blackbirds. Among the vaudevillians too, Johanna Phahlane, leader of Bloemfontein’s Merry Makers, made sure her troupe was instructed in vocal music and stage movement by white female performers from the National Theatre in advance of their tours to the Transvaal. De Pitch Black Follies also had several formally 146 In Township Tonight

trained members, and while they were working with the Darktown Strutters, Koppie Masoleng passed on his tap and Latin American dance lessons from whites to his fellows in the troupe. There were as well some distinguished black teachers, including Caluza, Merry Blackbirds’ pianist Emily Motsieloa, and the American wife of John Dube’s nephew Frederick Dube, Marie. Wilfred Sentso started his own School of Modern Piano Syncopation in 1937 in Johannesburg after leaving choir conducting at Wilberforce. The School taught many musical styles and instruments as well as stage dance, and had a dynamic impact on the concert and dance world on the Reef.54 Among the elite, it was fondly hoped that performing arts, in the absence of other fields of self-expression, might play an important social and even political role by proving that blacks could indeed master the cultural repertoire of whites at a professional level. When the Darktown Strutters played to halls packed by both black and white audiences, and made a strong impression on the private white entertainment circuit, the effort to persuade whites to liberalise the colour bar appeared more likely to succeed. While these hopes were disappointed, the parallel attempt to raise the consciousness of black people as potential full citizens of the modern world was greatly advanced.55 As Ballantine has shown, musicians also performed in direct support of more radical political groups and agendas. In 1927, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) engaged a coloured group, the Merry Mascots, and a variety of jazz bands for meetings, marches, and rallies in Durban and Johannesburg. Dances used to raise funds, and in 1928 Rayner’s Big Six played for the Communist Party in Johannesburg’s African Hall. Other bands such as Sonny’s Jazz Revellers, the Merry Blackbirds, the Jazz Maniacs, the Rhythm Kings, and Synco Fans played for the trade unions and the ANC, sometimes for free. While only a few musicians were members of such organisations, since it was bad for one’s career to be known to be political, even non-political professionals like Peter Rezant enjoyed playing at these functions as the audiences were a kind of elite and appreciated ‘high-toned’ music.56 Although rarely performed at the elite-sponsored Eisteddfodau, black American vaudeville and jazz were turning school community concerts into the cradle of professional black show business in South Africa, exemplified by the all-night concert and dance shows. Sol Plaatje and the Reverend Ray Phillips visited the United States in the 1920s and brought back films for black audiences. During the 1920s, Johannesburg Africans could get an idea of how American show people dressed and acted from films shown at the BMSC or the Good Hope and Small Street commercial ‘bioscopes’. At the latter, black musicians accompanied the silent pictures, using sheet music sent along from America.46 From the 1930s, commercial cinemas screened the popular Hollywood dance musicals featuring performers such as Fred Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers, and professional dancers such as Koppie Masoleng of the Darktown Strutters carefully studied their steps. Among the elite bands like Peter Rezant’s Merry Blackbirds, The Black Middle Class 147

Sun Valley Serenade and Orchestra Wives, featuring the Glenn Miller Orchestra, made a tremendous impression.57 School concert groups spent much time learning to imitate recordings of British and American popular songs. Many groups stayed together after leaving school, forming what in South Africa were still known as ‘minstrel companies’ – more properly vaudeville – of four to seven vocalists and dancers backed by a pianist. Among the most popular of the early troupes were the Versatile Seven, the Mad Boys, the Africans’ Own Entertainers, and the Midnight Follies. Stage costume was formal: tailcoats, white tie, striped trousers, and black shoes, or perhaps brightly coloured sashes, straw hats, white pants, and blazers. Costumes were changed two or three times a night, often to suit the demands of stage choreography. The African Darkies and Gay Arrawaras in particular were known for vigorous dancing and ‘strutting songs’ that combined the movement of action songs, ingoma busuku, and ragtime.58 Most selections were ragtime and jazz in English, jazz arrangements of African-American spirituals (Zulu: itshimama), or translations of American songs sung without regard for the tonal structure of African languages. Concerts were held at halls near the centre of town, usually from 8 pm to midnight. Dancing would follow until 4 a.m., but if the show was held at a cinema, the concert began after the film at 11 p.m. Troupes were hired by independent promoters, who charged 2s 6d admission and made more money through the bidding system. So popular were these entertainments that each performer was paid 15 to 30 shillings per show at a time when few Africans earned more than 80 shillings per month through regular employment. As a result, many troupes were at least semi-professional; and the most renowned, like the Africans’ Own Entertainers, made a living entirely from performing. Several groups, such as Griffiths Motsieloa’s Hiver Hyvas, widened their audience by touring, and by 1930 almost every major town had at least one stage company of its own. Following the tradition of mixed voice choirs like those of Caluza and William Mseleku, women also joined vaudeville companies. By the 1930s there were a few all-female groups, including Queenstown’s Gay Glamour Girls, led by Meekly ‘Fingertips’ Matshikiza’s sister, Jane Matshikiza.59 The enthusiastic entry of female performers gave women an image, entirely new, except for nursing and teaching, as independent professionals and money makers, and made a life in show business an acceptable path for women. The relative liberality of Sotho and Tswana society towards women’s participation in the public sphere led to the appearance of female musicians and troupes in small as well as large towns throughout the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Motsieloa’s De Pitch Black Follies had as many as thirty girls, and were given competition by all-girl troupes such as the Broadway Babies, Ginger Girls, Harlem Crazy Steppers, Dangerous Blue Girls, and the Hot Sparks featuring Peggy Bhengu, 148 In Township Tonight

‘the best girl tapper on the stage of dusky Johannesburg’.60 Marjorie Pretorius and Babsy Oliphant became headliners with Nimrod Makhanya’s Bantu Glee Singers, and the era of African female star power and glamour had begun. Among the most remarkable women in the field was vaudevillian actress and ANC member Johanna ‘Giddy’ Phahlane, who wrote regularly in Johannesburg’s Bantu World newspaper between 1936 and 1938, promoting women’s talents and right to display them, and even their right to participate in political and public life in entertainingly aggressive terms.61 Most recordings of the period came to South Africa not from America but from England, where black American Broadway composer J. Turner Layton and lyricist Gordon Johnstone made a series of records for Columbia in 1928 and 1929. Such Layton and Johnstone favourites as ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’ (Col.-E 4916) became enormously popular in South Africa and were models for local ‘minstrel’ singers. Silent films popularised show dancing, and with sound films tap dancing became a virtual craze in South Africa. Jacob ‘King Jeff ’ Disimelo of the Diamond Horseshoes and other dancers achieved national reputations among blacks by patterning themselves upon American tap-dancing stars of the period. The most famous troupe, the Darktown Strutters of Johannesburg, combined the songs of Layton and Johnstone with ‘step dancing’ and the tap inventions of Koppie Masoleng. Other regular features of minstrel entertainment were comedy routines and dramatic sketches, performed by the entire company or by a ‘stand-up’ specialist in comic mime like the Darktown Strutters’ Ndaba ‘Big Boy’ Majola.62 Many dramatic sketches presented typical scenes and characters from location life, portrayed comically or seriously. Comedy was preferred, and the reality of location conditions inspired an urban African tragicomedy on the variety stage that later contributed much to the working-class musical ‘township theatre’ of the 1960s and 1970s. In the mission schools, short dramatic pieces had been part of school concerts since the 1870s.63 Unfortunately, most teachers ignored the improvisational mime and dramatic recitation of izibongo and izinganekwane (praise poetry and storytelling) just as they did traditional music and dance. These dramatic traditions had to remain latent in African school performance culture until they reappeared on the urban stage in the late 1920s. In fairness, not all missionaries were so ethnocentric, and a few made valuable contributions to the development of modern African theatre. In 1920, Father Bernard Huss, of the Trappist Catholic school at Mariannhill, began translating English plays and sections of the Bible into Zulu. He also adapted Zulu folktales and history for staging by his students.64 Two of his short plays were printed in Native Teachers’ Journal in 1921, but they give little impression of the performances, which depended as much upon student improvisation as on a script. Huss’s ideas proved popular at other schools, and influenced the commercial stage. Caluza, who studied for a time at Mariannhill,65 seems to have tried his hand at every The Black Middle Class 149

medium, and presented a ‘dramatic work treating the life of a sangoma’ as part of a tour by his choir in 1920–1.66 In 1927, a teacher at Adams College named Esau Mthethwa, nephew of choirmaster A. J. Mthethwa, used some of Huss’s techniques in successfully bringing African dramatic forms and themes to the popular stage. His student company, Mthethwa’s Lucky Stars, taken over by his younger brother Isaac after his death in 1933, presented scenes from traditional life – the preparation and drinking of beer, courting practices, village gatherings, hunting, witchcraft, and divination – as well as scenes from the lives of Zulu kings.67 Woven into these scenes were displays of traditional dancing and traditional songs sung in the amakwaya style by school-trained vocalists. Musical instruments included traditional strung bows in addition to the guitar and concertina. Scenes of contemporary life focused on the movement from country to town, allowing for both westernised music and the step dances of traditional weddings, ingoma busuku choirs and school concerts. Mthethwa’s Lucky Stars became semi-professional during the 1930s, working regular day jobs in Durban and performing at workers’ hostels, middle-class concerts, schools and town halls evenings and weekends. Although presented entirely in Zulu, their colourful and carefully rehearsed displays of folk culture proved as popular with white audiences as with black. Rather than imitate European drama or narrative themes, they emphasised traditional social values and cultural patterns. Scripts were generally discarded in favour of a series of standard scenes always renewed and enlivened by spontaneous improvisation in theatrics, dance, dialogue, poetry, and song.68 While distinguished author and critic Herbert Dhlomo dismissed the Lucky Stars’ ‘exotic crudities’ (see below), Albert Gérard maintains that Zulu-speaking audiences ‘perceived finer shades of relevant ethical significance, and relished the skilful dramatisation of a doublebarrelled purpose in each play’.69 Meanwhile, Mthethwa’s Lucky Stars were becoming a favourite in a series of highly successful professional tours. White audiences enjoyed the Lucky Stars for their entertaining and accessible display of African exoticism within a Western format. Urban black people, on the other hand, responded with great nostalgia for a lost, almost mythical way of life. The Lucky Stars presented dramatisations of an idealised cohesive, culturally integrated society with clearly defined values, all the more appealing to blacks for its remoteness from the insecurity, alienation, powerlessness, and exploitation of city life. In contrast, the study of English drama by elite writers led to the creation of sterile, imitative plays bearing little relationship to African theatrical expression. As with music and dance, elite playwrights viewed folk drama as a resource for a modern literary drama. Yet early full-length plays, like G. B. Sinxo’s Imfene KaDebeza and Herbert Dhlomo’s The Girl Who Killed to Save (1935) – despite their basis in African folk narrative and history – are entirely Western in structure.70 150 In Township Tonight

Dhlomo, among the first of the African literati to write about drama, clearly reveals the contradictions as well as the self-conscious cultural philosophy of his class. In an article in Bantu World, Dhlomo wrote: Modern drama is not a mere emotional entertainment. It is a source of ideas, a cultural and educational factor, an agency for propaganda, a social institution, and above all, it is literature. What part will the new African play in modern drama? On its physical side, he can contribute strong fast rhythm, speedy action, expressive vigorous gesture and movement, powerful dramatic speech – no small contribution when modern plays drag so tediously. … We want African playwrights who will dramatize and expand a philosophy of African History. We want dramatic representation of African Serfdom, Oppression, Exploitation and Metamorphosis. … The African dramatist has an important part to fill. … He can expose evil and corruption and not suffer libel as newspaper men may – and do; he can guide, and preach to his people as preachers cannot do. To do this he must be an artist before a propagandist; a philosopher before a reformer; a psychologist before a patriot; be true to his African ‘self and not be a prey to exotic crudities’. 71

In 1932, Dhlomo and others formed the Bantu Dramatic Society at the BMSC. In the absence of playwrights of the kind described above, they presented Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer on 5 May 1933. In succeeding years they put on Nongqawuse, a historical play in Xhosa by Mary Waters, a white missionary, , and Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. These productions were well received by a limited African and white audience at the BMSC, but none was self-supporting. Elite theatre stagnated because its creators looked to Europe even when trying to develop self-consciously African forms.72 During the late 1930s, Dhlomo worked to preserve traditional art forms by incorporating African themes and performance techniques into European drama with his play Chaka.73 A ragtime violinist, he also collaborated with Caluza and choreographer A. P. Khutlang to produce a musical drama about another founder of a nineteenth-century African kingdom, Moshoeshoe, in 1939.74 These plays were presented in English, but we have no script or record of their content at present, though Gérard claims the essays Dhlomo published in 1939 are ‘undoubtedly all fragments of the same work’.75 The Lucky Stars’ influence on black vaudeville companies was far more successful in introducing African values, themes and presentational style into urban theatre. A good example is a concert given by the Africans’ Own Entertainers in June 1936 at the BMSC. Along with the usual jazz vocals, tap dancing, ‘Negro plantation songs’ (African-American folksongs) and comic sketches, they performed an abakweta (Xhosa male initiation) scene, Zulu wedding demonstration, and Hlubi love tragedy’.76 Toko The Black Middle Class 151

Khampepe’s Bantu Revue Follies took this trend the furthest – performing in African dress, even when playing the piano. Singing in African languages and the selection of compositions by African composers became the norm. The vaudeville troupes, of course, went beyond the Lucky Stars in drawing on the folk culture of several ethnic groups. The anti-political dimension of such mission-influenced, ‘return to the homelands’ Africanism, however pridefully intended, bothered some observers. The citified critic Walter Nhlapo, for example, perceptively and rightly urged the use of the drama of everyday African life to create an original African theatre: ‘We have, for instance, the drama of [police] pick-ups, the life in the zoo-like locations, the hooliganism and the like, subjects which are full of passion, of sorrow, of strife. We have scores upon scores of daily acts that deserve dramatisation and are passed over.’77 The year 1936 was an important one in the development of black city music and theatre, as groups gathered to perform at Johannesburg’s British Empire Exhibition, commemorating the fiftieth birthday of the city. Migrant mine dancers, ingoma busuku choirs, jazz orchestras, vaudeville companies, and massed church choirs all appeared. The Lucky Stars made such an impression that promoter Bertha Slosberg organised a London tour for the following year. The troupe was refused passports, however, and the Lucky Stars remained in Durban.78 A more important result of the Exhibition was the cultural stimulation and crossfertilisation that it brought to professional African show business. The most polished of the vaudeville companies, the Darktown Strutters, featured the comic mime Petrus Qwabe, who had come from the Lucky Stars to replace Ndaba Majola in 1934. The Merry Blackbirds, South Africa’s most elite swing orchestra, received some professional coaching there from Teddy Joyce’s Band, on tour from England. In 1937, elocutionist, actor, and promoter Griffiths Motsieloa, a former Kimberley teacher who had studied elocution in London, becoming the city’s ‘favourite Bantu actor’, brought the Darktown Strutters and the Merry Blackbirds together for a history-making ‘concert party’ tour of towns throughout South Africa.79 In much the same way that modern black American performance culture had been introduced to small towns in the United States by touring professionals in the 1920s, this tour gave many Africans in small towns their first contact with the elite of Johannesburg’s black entertainment world.80 The Queenstown saxophonist William ‘Sax-O-Wills’ Mbali wrote the following account of the Strutters–Blackbirds appearance in his community on 21 April 1937.81 They have a treasure in Mr. Petrus Qwabe, the ‘Zulu King of Laughter and Mirth’. He brought the house down with laughter when he rendered his comedy farce ‘Umfundisi’ (Reverend) … Mr. J. J. Masoleng – South Africa’s Stephen Fetchat – as he is styled, piquant, delightful and nimble, has all the snap and sparkle of a great tap-dancer … Let me add as a 152 In Township Tonight

footnote that the local orchestra will benefit through the visit of the ‘Merry Blackbirds’, and will make use of whatever tips they received from these Artists.

As a result of this tour, Motsieloa expanded his variety troupe beyond the old ‘minstrel’ format and renamed it De Pitch Black Follies. It was the first of the many large mixed companies that, backed by jazz orchestras, dominated African professional entertainment during the 1940s and 1950s. Although De Pitch Black Follies did not present full-length plays, they did have a major effect on urban African popular musical drama. Within a dramatic or comedy sketch, they combined the cultural and historical material of the Lucky Stars with the vaudeville tradition of tragicomic scenes from urban location life. Backed by the Merry Blackbirds Orchestra, their ‘Grand Vaudeville’ performance in Johannesburg in 1938 included ‘Primitive Africa’, ‘Recitation’, ‘I Qaqa’ (a song about a beetle), ‘Xhosa poet’, ‘Ntsikana’s Vision’, ‘Tribal Dance’, hymns by J. K. Bokwe and Tiyo Soga, a ‘Sesotho Song and Dance’, a (military) ‘Recruiting Sketch’, a shebeen-skokiaan queen sketch, an Afrikaans medley, ‘Die Oorlams Mense van Vrededorp’, and jazz song and dance.82 African audiences often became actively involved, shouting their reactions from their seats or moving to the stage to give money to a character with whose situation or point of view they sympathised. Their versatile repertoire was an important aspect of De Pitch Black Follies’ success since they were the first African stage company performing modern Western material to appear regularly before white and black audiences. By virtue of its versatility, the ‘concert and dance’ format came to dominate middleclass African entertainment between the world wars. Vaudeville performances, choir competitions, institutional functions, official receptions, and meetings of political and other organisations were followed by a few hours of dancing to the music of jazz orchestras. Middle-class Africans avoided the rough dance halls where pianists or rhythm trios pounded out early marabi for knife- and liquor-toting customers.83 But, of course, working-class people, many of whom sought to master a more cosmopolitan cultural repertoire as an expression of urban citizenship, also attended ‘concert and dance’. And so the harmony quartets and big bands such as the Jazz Maniacs and the Merry Blackbirds, harmonising the parts by ear, began to work up orchestrations of marabi to please a wider range of listeners and dancers.84 As the Merry Blackbirds’ leader Peter Rezant put it: ‘You couldn’t avoid that at that time, you see. Everything had that twist into marabi. Because it was the marabi era …’85 Played by jazz orchestra, marabi found its place in the hearts of African audiences who wouldn’t have been caught dead at a marabi party in a shebeen or dance hall. It was the exchange of influences between indigenous urban styles of marabi and American jazz that led to the birth of an authentic home-grown jazz that was all South Africa’s own. As marabi in its ‘classic’ form died away with the clearing of the inner-city locations, The Black Middle Class 153

jazz became the most popular dance music in South African as well as in American and European cities. Middle-class Africans, despite their misgivings, soon responded too, since jazz had international prestige as well as African roots that could be harmonised with indigenous culture. The missionaries had failed to stifle the interest of westernised Africans in recreational dancing, which had been basic to social relations in traditional life. The solution was to give up ‘heathen’ traditional dances and adopt the social dances of middle-class whites. This process of cultural substitution proceeded rapidly at rural mission schools and especially in the cities, where the appropriate dance music was readily available. Elite educators were concerned about this trend, which they associated with marabi culture and the more frivolous aspects of European civilisation. R. R. R. Dhlomo complained in 1927: ‘At present all that is considered of special interest by our enlightened people is dancing week in and week out. … “On with the dance” is their slogan. Why? Most of these people are fed up of jazz and because there is no other form of excitement or entertainment they resort to dancing themselves mad.’86 Middle-class Africans were tiring of amakwaya and other ‘sit-down’ concerts, despite the availability of a volume of Caluza’s songs, Amagama Ohlanga LakwaZulu (‘Zulu Songs from Ohlange’, 1928) and other important developments in African choral music. The Euro-American ‘dance craze’ had struck urban South Africa. Professor Z. K. Matthews recalled that interest in choral singing declined in schools beginning in the mid-1920s because students and teachers were too busy dancing.87 Even the perennial favourite, Caluza, had to add a dance band to his choir to continue attracting Johannesburg audiences. During the 1920s, the concert-and-dance pattern held for both working-class and middle-class African entertainment. Conflicting forces of class formation and social levelling caused a struggle for status that affected performance. Both classes participated together in many cultural events, and jazz dances featured ‘a curious mixture of costumes and styles of dancing’.88 As Ballantine has also explained, the relationship between social class and culture in South Africa’s black locations was not straightforward but complex and ambivalent. This was partly because black people from every walk of life, region, and degree of citification lived together in the locations.89 In black dance, the most popular arena for expressing these dynamic relations was ballroom, which became an important field of social competition. The leading ballroom dancers were Africans in domestic and restaurant service. A few, particularly women, were mission school graduates; but the majority had little or no formal education at all. On the other hand, a knowledge of Western culture was of great value in domestic service, and many domestic workers became highly self-educated.90 Most of them lived in the white suburbs where they were forced to conform to European expectations and isolated from African community life. Their interest in ballroom dancing was part of a 154 In Township Tonight

struggle for status through the competitive display of symbols of westernisation, such as dress, social comportment and cultural skills such as dancing. Although Zulu people had dominated domestic service since the founding of Johannesburg, the 1920s brought competition from thousands of African men arriving from Nyasaland (Malawi) and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). These well-dressed makirimane (English: clean men), as the Zulu contemptuously called them, were among the most enthusiastic patrons of concerts and dances. Having come without their women, they flocked to concert parties like Caluza’s, where they used outright gifts and generous bidding to win the favours of female performers. They were also expert ballroom dancers and readily found partners at the Inchcape Hall’s Ritz Palais de Danse in the city and the Undermoon Hall in Sophiatown. The Inchcape management found it necessary to schedule separate nights for local and foreign male domestics, and some dance clubs made ethnic identity a qualification for membership.91 Apart from these few concessions to economic and social competition, though, there is little evidence of what was then called ‘tribalism’ in ballroom dancing. The dance clubs provided a prestigious setting also for competitive westernisation. Dressed in elegant evening wear, members paid as much as a guinea (21 shillings) to enter dance championships. Judges were almost always white and demonstrations by professional white dancers often began the programme. The overall rejection of Africans by whites led to an emphasis on status competition over cultural achievement. Leadership in the clubs was an important source of upward mobility within African society. Cultural organisations like the Gamma Sigma clubs often became merely sponsors of ballroom dance, beauty, and ‘best dressed’ contests. In this context, one can easily credit Brandel-Syrier’s story that when the Communist Party took over leadership of African cultural clubs in Germiston in the 1950s, it had to focus exclusively on ballroom dancing to please the membership.92 Certainly, cultural organising among middle-class Africans became increasingly contentious. Even the National Eisteddfod went into a lengthy decline after the resignation of Mark Radebe in the mid-1930s. Because opportunities for recognition and leadership were so restricted, arrangements for the Eisteddfod suffered from the constant self-promotion and infighting among the committee members. Meanwhile, the dancers needed music, and coloured players, with their centuries-old dance orchestra traditions, were the first to form Western-style dance bands. In Johannesburg, band members varied widely in background and formal training. Those without education drew upon Cape Afrikaans folk culture and the African-American influenced ‘Coon Carnival’ clubs, who paraded every New Year in Malay Camp, Vrededorp, and other mixed/coloured neighbourhoods in Johannesburg.93 For stokvel parties and public dances, they performed music of Cape coloured social dances, for example vastrap, tickey draai, set-part, guma, and squares. Those with more schooling and familiarity The Black Middle Class 155

with British white society played the two-step, waltz, foxtrot, ragtime and dixieland. Expanded professional opportunities brought the various types of coloured musicians together in the early 1920s. Professionalism encouraged them to improve their technical skills. One such band, the Merry Mascots, featured saxophone, banjo, drums, violin and piano, and played a mixture of coloured–Afrikaans and American dance styles for all kinds of black social occasions. With no comparable ensembles among Africans, they were regularly engaged to back up African ragtime ‘minstrel’ companies and to play for the dancing that followed. As the ‘dance craze’ developed, coloured bands like Rayner’s Big Six and Sonny Groenewald’s Jazz Revellers (successors to the Merry Mascots) learned American dance music in response to growing African demands. By the late 1920s, African pianists, brass bandsmen, and other players were finally moved to form their own small dance bands and take advantage of this new professional music market. The first such African bands seem to have appeared simultaneously both in Johannesburg and in smaller regional towns where missionary and British colonial influences were strong. In Mafeking (today corrected to Mafikeng), Tswana musicians formed the elite Empire Follies dance orchestra in 1928, ‘when Mafeking was dance crazy’.94 Appearing in Johannesburg, they challenged the monopoly of the coloured bands and inspired the formation of middle-class African bands in the city.95 In Queenstown, African performers had for years played for whites, especially the Jewish community, with their love for black American variety entertainment. Pianist Meekly ‘Fingertips’ Matshikiza’s Big Four were succeeded by William Mbali’s Blue Rhythm Syncopators, who acquired a national reputation. The eastern Cape contributed so many talented instrumentalists and vocalists to the Johannesburg African entertainment world that Xhosa became something of a lingua franca among its musicians. In Johannesburg, the first professional African dance band was not an elite, ‘fancy dress’ ensemble but a versatile, if unschooled, group called the Japanese Express. They played everything from marabi and tickey draai to ragtime, jazz, quickstep and foxtrot. Led by George ‘Makalman’ Boswell on violin, the group copied its instrumentation from the coloured bands and included piano, drums, trombone/trumpet, and banjo/ guitar. Beginning in 1929, the Japanese Express played at marabi halls, weddings, and functions of middle-class cultural associations such as the Doornfontein Ladies Civic Society with equal success, making ‘sufficient money to enable members to live decently’.96 By the early 1930s, middle-class African performers and promoters such as Griffiths Motsieloa wanted more literate and westernised alternatives to the coloured bands than the Japanese Express. Under Motsieloa’s direction, his wife Emily, a pianist from Cradock, joined with J. C. P. Mavimbela, Peter Rezant and others to form the Merry Blackbirds Dance Orchestra. They were an immediate success. With the addition of 156 In Township Tonight

Salvation Army-trained trumpeters Steve Monkoe and Enoch Matunjwa in 1934, the band became a full-scale swing ensemble modelled on Glenn Miller’s orchestra. The Merry Blackbirds preferred to play American ragtime and jazz orchestrations for white and racially mixed audiences. They also backed vaudeville companies and played for the full range of social and organisational functions of middle-class African society. Unlike the many urban musicians who sang anything anywhere for their supper, members of the Merry Blackbirds were teachers, clerks, social workers, and were active in the BMSC and other middle-class institutions. Peter Rezant proudly told me that in contrast to the Japanese Express, the Merry Blackbirds of the 1930s were not professional musicians but had regular daytime jobs.97 Good music readers, they avoided African musical influences – when audiences permitted – and achieved the highest social status of any black band. The steady growth of interest in American dance music led to the formation of numerous African jazz dance bands. Just below the Merry Blackbirds in status were the Rhythm Kings, begun in 1935 by the Blackbirds’ John Mavimbela and drummer Dan Twala at the BMSC’s Bantu Sports Club. According to Twala, Mavimbela left the Merry Blackbirds because he didn’t want to ‘play only white music and all that; ballroom and high class’.98 The Rhythm Kings sought ways to Africanise jazz and bring it to a wider local audience, experimenting with band arrangements of the tonic solfa ragtime songs of Caluza, whose concert party they sometimes backed. They also tried songs by Mohapeloa, Tyamzashe, and other composers plus African work songs like the famous ‘Tshotsholoza’. Like the Merry Blackbirds, the Rhythm Kings were helped by white bandsmen and improved their reading skills by accompanying silent films at the local cinemas. The Rhythm Kings were soon in great demand, and began touring smaller towns along the Rand. Playing for concert-and-dance at the ‘country halls’, the band learned African songs from local performers, and quickly arranged them for performance at later shows. Local audiences danced and shouted their approval at finding something of their own music jumping in the latest jazz. The most versatile and professional band was the Jazz Maniacs, founded in 1935 by Solomon ‘Zuluboy’ Cele, who had been a marabi pianist since the age of fifteen. Cele had ragtime and jazz experience from backing vaudeville companies like the African Sonnyboys and Erie Lads. According to Matshikiza, this training had given him a desire ‘to paint marabi tones on a broader canvas and bigger scales’,99 and to Africanise big band jazz.100 Cele may have learned to read music with the help of fellow band members Jacob Medumo and Wilson Silgee, or used the common method of comparing tunes already known by ear with the written score. The Jazz Maniacs began with only four members, who gradually gave up their daytime jobs as the band’s engagements increased. By the 1940s, the band had thirteen players, including Zuluboy on piano, Silgee and Medumo on sax, ‘Big’ Vy Nkosi on trombone, The Black Middle Class 157

David Mtimkulu and Ernest Mochumi on trumpets, Victor Hamilton on guitar, Jacob Lepere on bass and several others. Like the Merry Blackbirds and Rhythm Kings, the Jazz Maniacs benefited from their reputation for reliability and sober habits. They also became a stylistic force in South African jazz, blending American swing with marabi and other urban African influences. Another important innovator was the freelance pianist Sullivan Mphahlele. Though a slow reader, Mphahlele was a truly gifted jazz improviser, well known for his mastery of the stride piano style of American virtuoso Fats Waller. He could play every popular style and helped to introduce the improvised solo to the African jazz band. Like Cele, Mphahlele personified the professional musician – a marginal, compulsively social, colourful personality who played both culture hero and misunderstood genius – an image born in the mythology of black American show business. For several years he posed as an African-American musician in Cape Town. Though each of the established bands had a definite social status, the broad demand for their services among all classes of urban Africans brought varied social categories and levels of performance culture into continual contact with each other. Interest in American jazz helped to bridge the social gap between marabi culture and the vaudeville variety concerts at a time when urban African society was rapidly diversifying, new arrivals from all over rubbing shoulders with the growing communities of permanent city people. Despite status competition, black American performance helped to unify urban African culture. Because it was Western but not white, it provided a model for culture change more closely related to African heritage and better adapted to the reality of segregation. So the more ‘elite’ performance culture that developed in Johannesburg and in rural schools and small towns exerted a powerful influence on working-class choral as well as popular music. Choir concerts appealed to people who rejected marabi and wanted to create a cohesive, morally governed urban community based on family and neighbourhood ties. Working-class people had neither the background nor the resources to build on the mission-school model of African society. As a rule, they retained strong links to rural kin, partly as a hedge against the insecurity of urban life. These vital links were also a source of deeply rooted social values and practices useful in small-scale, neighbourhood social life in the cities.101 By the 1930s, the ingoma busuku style of urbanising migrants was changing under the impact of city life. It still retained the competitive traditions of rural Zulu society, but increasingly assimilated them to middle-class performance culture. Let me once again refer those interested in a more detailed, complete account of this stylistic tradition to Veit Erlmann’s African Stars: Studies in South African Popular Music, and Nightsong: Performance, Power, and Practice in South Africa.102 Caluza influenced choirs that had some Western schooling, and groups like Malcolm Zwane’s Newcastle Humming Bees won ingoma busuku competitions in Johannesburg by mastering a 158 In Township Tonight

number of his songs. Composer William Mseleku’s Royal Amanzimtoti Entertainers went beyond even Caluza in blending ragtime with the melodies of traditional Zulu song.103 Solomon Linda and his Evening Birds were the most innovative of all ingoma busuku groups. Their early recordings, ‘Woza Lapha Sithandwa Sami’ and ‘Sehla Senyuka’ (HMV JP28) represent the most equal, integrated blend of American ragtime and Zulu traditional melody, vocal quality and part structure. Riaan Malan, in his exposé on the tragicomedy of Linda’s (and South Africa’s) greatest hit song, ‘Mbube’, notes that Linda, born in 1909, received some education as well as musical influences in the McAdoo minstrel tradition at Gordon Memorial School in his home district of Msinga in Zululand.104 And so a touch of ragtime syncopation worked its way into the Zulu wedding songs Solomon and his friends sang on weekends to earn a bit of cash. Moving with his homeboys from Natal to the migrant hostels of Johannesburg, Linda made a wise choice of employment as a packer at the Gallo Recording Company pressing plant in Roodepoort, which provided a platform for the Evening Birds’ rise to stardom.105 The choir, now called the Evening Birds and already popular on the workers’ hostel circuit, came to the attention of Griffiths Motsieloa and Hugh Tracey at Gallo as a potential seller among the urban Zulu working-class, and soon they were in the studio. Tracey told me that one afternoon in 1939 the group was set to record three double-sided disks, but only had five songs in hand. Stepping outside, the group took an old Msinga district wedding song and composed new words about Solomon’s killing of a lion cub as a young herdboy, with the title ‘Mbube’ (Lion). Malan continues: The first take was a dud, as was the second. Exasperated, Motsieloa looked into the corridor, dragooned a pianist, guitarist and banjo player, and tried again … ‘ Mbube’ wasn’t the most remarkable tune, but there was something terribly compelling about the underlying chant, a dense meshing of low male voices above which Solomon yodelled and howled for two exhilarating minutes, occasionally making it up as he went along. The third take was the great one, but it achieved immortality only in its dying seconds, when Solly took a deep breath, opened his mouth and improvised the melody that the world now associates with these words: In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.106

With the swinging vamp rhythm of the city added to its down-home Zulu vocal qualities, the greatest South African hit of all time was quickly born (Gallo GE829), even if it would be twenty-two years before the English lyrics were added in America. The original recording sold more than 100 000 copies in South Africa and remained in Gallo’s catalogue for twenty years.107 While the song helped to build Gallo into the largest recording company in Africa, Linda received just under £5 flat fee for his The Black Middle Class 159

composer’s rights. So popular was the recording that the ingoma busuku style soon became generally known as mbube instead, and it retained this name until the rise of its more polished successor, isicathamiya (‘a stalking approach’), referring to the synchronised step-dance routines of the performers, in the 1970s. The famous story of the song’s controversial later re-appropriations and transformations, and the vast revenues it generated seemingly for everyone concerned except Linda, must wait for the next chapter. Ingoma busuku groups upgraded and standardised their stage costumes with identical blazers, wide-legged, narrow-bottomed trousers known as ‘Oxford bags’, and rubbersoled canvas tackies. By 1938, the most successful groups like Linda’s had changed to suits, hats and black shoes. This approach helped to raise the social profile of mbube and spread its popularity among a wider, more urbanised African audience. Linda’s group continued to perform until 1948, their innovations blending the indigenous emphasis on strong bass vocalisation with Zulu marabi rhythms and the typical I–IV– I6/4–V7 urban African chord sequence. In the mouths of the Evening Birds and their many competitors, the style appealed across the class spectrum, melodised a growing African cultural nationalism, created nostalgia for a lost society, and fused urban and rural cultural values.108 The Zulu, with their cultural pride and positive valuation of rural traditions, dominated mbube, but it was not theirs alone. Listeners from Nyasaland and the Rhodesias (now Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia) patronised the Evening Birds’ concerts as well as ballroom dances. Minstrel tap dancer and singer Koppie Masoleng enjoyed performing informally with mbube groups although he was a middle-class Sotho vaudevillian ragtimer. As Dan Twala recalls, ‘The Sothos used to sing in these choirs, Sothos who could hardly speak Zulu clearly, but they’d join; they didn’t have separate nights. And the Zulu were the people who were trying very hard to sing the Sotho songs as part of their programme. But of course this was because they used to be in love with the Free State [Sotho] girls …’109 As a form of working-class choral music, ingoma busuku entered into the cultural politics of the African labour movement. The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) was established in 1919 in Cape Town by Clements Kadalie, a Nyasa waiter. It soon moved its headquarters to Johannesburg and became the most powerful black labour organisation in the country. The ICU concentrated on improving agricultural and industrial working conditions, but was never officially recognised. By 1932 internal dissension and the government’s repressive use of the Riotous Assemblies Act had weakened it, but it had an enduring effect on racial and class consciousness among African working people. Meetings at the ICU hall on Market Street usually included performances by volunteer choirs. The Natal branch had a social club with its own official choir and brass band, which played an important part in protest 160 In Township Tonight

marches.110 At a Johannesburg meeting in 1929, Margery Perham noted that, as in the case of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, ‘hymns are mixed with an agitation which is full of dangers’.111 Some hymns were sung as originally written, but others were given new lyrics expressing support for the ICU and its leaders. Songs of general political protest like Masiza’s ‘Vukani Mawethu’ were also popular with union choirs. The Sotho composer S. Mutla of Bloemfontein wrote many songs in the ingoma busuku style with lyrics promoting the ICU, and most of these choirs could be categorised as ingoma busuku ensembles. According to union organiser Solomon Crutse, ‘The groups had a certain Africanism in their set-up … because the suffering of the African was common, and the ICU had as its goal to alleviate the suffering of the African, therefore the African music and the ICU went together.’112 One problem for the ICU was how to bring together the middle-class leadership and their increasingly working-class membership, get them to recognise their common disabilities and interests, and cooperate to achieve common goals. In an effort to help, the Merry Blackbirds and other middle-class musicians performed with ICU groups like Makatshwa’s Choir. Together they expressed the need for a broader social identification among urban Africans. The ICU’s use of music also expressed the more generalised urban African drive toward full inclusion and equal recognition in modern industrial society. Hymn music in particular emphasised claims to ‘civilised’ status and its associated benefits. The systematic substitution of new words promoting ICU principles and goals revealed an intention to solve worldly problems by social means. They gained support by retaining something of the emotional and spiritual fervour associated with African Christian congregational song. The use of new songs in ingoma busuku style represents a significant manipulation of ‘traditional’ African culture for purposes of positive self-identification and unity in a modern political context. Among the gramophone recordings that expressed this message and widened their distribution among Africans was the Evening Birds’ ‘Mayibuye iAfrika’ (‘Come Back Africa’) (Gallo 3040), a title that soon became the unifying universal slogan of the ANC.113 In the 1920s and 1930s, gramophone recordings and films became important for urban African performing arts. As we have seen,114 recordings were available from Britain even before the First World War, and some members of an African political delegation to London recorded African songs there as early as 1912.115 Imported recordings were so popular with school choirs and minstrel companies that some educators complained that gramophones were retarding the growth of African musical literacy and promoting foreign musical styles at the expense of ‘African National Culture’.116 African-American styles became well established in urban African entertainment during the inter-war period. East London’s Gipsy Melody Makers popularised a Xhosa translation of ‘When My Sugar Walks down the Street’; the youthful Manhattan Brothers of Pimville location (Johannesburg) imitated the Mills Brothers; and the The Black Middle Class 161

Merry Blackbirds played the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Jordan, and Sy Oliver from written orchestrations. This form of voluntary acculturation was generated largely by the communications media rather than by direct contact between different cultures or peoples. By the mid-1920s British recording companies sensed the potential of the African market. In 1925, Zonophone began a small series of records by educated visiting black South Africans and experimented with portable recording equipment on the Rand gold mines. Nationalist political leaders H. Selby Msimang and Sol Plaatje recorded African folksongs and hymns, including ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, and migrants performed rural folk music.117 Soon Pathé, HMV, Columbia, and Polydor had all established branch offices in Johannesburg, and Brunswick and Decca were selling foreign recordings through Gallo.118 Gramophones and the collection of records became items of status among urban African musicians and audiences. Companies were pleased to discover that Africans would buy everything produced for them, though humorous musical folk stories in African languages were especially popular. In 1929, British broadcaster Hugh Tracey, then based in Durban, who was to play a crucial role in the collection, dissemination, and serious study of indigenous southern African music until his death in 1977, made a pioneering field recording expedition to Mozambique and Rhodesia. The results sold well and for a time advanced the cause of field work in African music. African music educators were also pleased. Mark Radebe praised record companies like the newly formed Gallo for preserving the African musical heritage from total ‘hybridisation’, and for providing an ‘eternal source of ideas and inspiration’ for African classical composers.119 With the success of ‘Native’ recordings, companies sent Africans to record in London, since there were as yet no studios as such in South Africa. As we recall, in 1930 Reuben Caluza and a group of performers recorded more than 120 selections there for HMV. These were of three types: ‘records specially for the “raw” Native, for the partially civilised, and for the educated Native’, and they included many of Caluza’s own compositions.120 In South Africa they sold as well as the popular imported recordings by black Americans and contributed greatly to Caluza’s influence on local performers. In the same year, Griffiths Motsieloa and the Shangaan (Tsonga) choral composer Daniel Marivate each made London recordings for Decca.121 In 1932 Gallo set up the first recording studio in Johannesburg, and the other companies quickly followed suit. In 1935, HMV had a ‘Native’ catalogue of 366 discs with sales totalling 86 436.122 With local studios, the companies took advantage of the popularity of indigenous recordings among migrant workers. Though these workers did not consider music a potential profession, competition for prestige among song composers and instrumentalists was extended to recording. A stream of migrant 162 In Township Tonight

instrumentalists presented themselves at the studios and made one or two recordings each, more to be lionised by their peers than for the fee of a few shillings. The studios affected the style and pattern of migrant music-making. Producers preferred instrumental accompaniment for vocal music, to add rhythm so that records could be sold as dance music. As a result, the purely vocal music of ingoma busuku was often recorded with a guitar or even banjo accompaniment not used in live performances. Given the emphasis on individual as opposed to group competition, many migrant musicians regarded recording as a chance to build their personal reputations among a wider public audience. Zulu migrants began to interpolate self-praises between the verses of their recorded guitar songs, despite the tradition that Zulu poets ought not to praise themselves.123 Producers may also have encouraged these innovations for the sake of novelty. In any case the temptation to depart from tradition and engage in a little self-promotion must have been strong in the social isolation of the studio. Interestingly, Gallo archivist Rob Allingham discovered that, in the 1930s, a Sotho concertina player known as ‘T. Makala’ became the first really popular neo-traditional recording artist, and his records sold well for over twenty years. This market may have reflected the very large numbers of Sotho migrants who worked in the mines near Johannesburg. Another form popular with Sotho mineworkers was sefela, a form of poetic recitation that was not associated with instrumental performance. Some experienced sefela performers in Lesotho in 1984 professed surprise when I played them recordings of Sotho musicians who played the concertina and simultaneously recited sefela, though such discs have been available for more than forty years. Recording may have encouraged the combination of poetry and instrumental playing. Professional shebeen accordion player Adrian Lekgopa of Hlotse, Lesotho, explained to me that the melody of the accordion often suggested words to his listeners and so aided extemporaneous sefela and famo composition.124 Companies hired some players as permanent staff, and when they could think of no more tunes to record, they were given a four-bar segment of an American song to play over and over in the African manner. This practice has continued until today and has strongly affected urban African popular music directed at the migrant audience.125 The record companies were eager to meet the demand for music by African performers but were generally unfamiliar with the wealth and diversity of local musical styles. They drew their talent from the mines and the Johannesburg Eisteddfod during the early 1930s, and tended to rely on mission-school Africans like Mark Radebe for advice about what to record. Radebe himself made a number of recordings for Columbia and created opportunities for other middle-class performers. In 1938 Griffiths Motsieloa became Gallo’s first African talent scout. These men ignored the marabi music of shebeen society, which they considered degraded and unworthy of preservation, and the great exponents of the style were rarely The Black Middle Class 163

recorded. Marabi did not appear on records until the 1940s, when it had been blended with swing by the jazz bands and worked its way into the concertina and guitar songs of the migrants. When selecting tracks to illustrate his study Marabi Nights in 1993, Ballantine had to be satisfied with vaudeville, jazz and swing orchestrations of marabi classics in the absence of recordings in the original style. Muff Andersson suggests that the emphasis on rural styles, whether traditional, migrant, or mission school, reflected the white South African view of Africans as ‘temporary sojourners’ in the cities.126 In retrospect, it appears that the record companies suffered more from ignorance of the size, sophistication, and commitment of urban African communities than from any conscious desire to advance homeland identification among them. In the case of Hugh Tracey, his view that indigenous pre-colonial music was both superior and more worthy of dissemination and development than urban popular hybrids (not an insupportable view in itself ) led him to concentrate on ‘traditional’ music. He even suggested that the municipality build dance arenas in the locations so that Africans in the urban areas could, like mine workers in the mine compounds, perform rural dances. On the other hand, many marabi pianists and jazz bands thought that recordings might enable competitors to steal their music. Furthermore, studios wanted to record their best tunes for as little as ten shillings per side, though they could earn a lot more as regular shebeen or dance hall performers. Musicians preferred not to compete with themselves by making records, and most shebeen owners preferred a live musician who would play continuously for as many as eight hours to the short, fragile and comparatively expensive discs. The growth of the South African music industry had important cultural consequences for urban African communities. By distributing imported music, the companies offered Africans a ready-made, deceptively attractive solution to the dilemma of urban cultural identity. As musical specialisation increased, musicians increased their status by turning away from indigenous popular music and acquiring the ability to reproduce imported styles. The Jazz Maniacs made the first marabi jazz recording, Zuluboy Cele’s ‘Izikhalo Zika Z-Boy’ (Better XU 9-a) in 1939. By then, however, American swing had already replaced marabi. The death of marabi was a symptom of a more pervasive attack upon the urban African community and working-class culture under the terms of the Urban Areas Act. During the 1930s, new housing and other amenities for Africans were made available, largely through profits made from Africans by the municipal beerhalls, and one after the other the slumyards were torn down. The social conditions for marabi’s vibrant life still existed in the suburban locations, but in the new municipal townships the beer trade and its associated activities were almost eliminated. The beer halls appropriated the resources of working-class culture, vat-en-sit came under negative regulation through housing provision favouring formal marital relations, and 164 In Township Tonight

the system of mutual assistance temporarily fell apart. People no longer knew their neighbours, and the physically squalid but socially supportive neighbourhoods were replaced by drab, separate rows of township ‘matchbox’ houses without amenities or communal spirit.127 The Empire Exhibition and the growth of local recording gave black performing artists an international orientation, away from the urban community culture from which they had come. Noting the success of black American performers, a writer for Umteteli wa Bantu praised the Eisteddfodau, which had produced several African recording artists and might ‘one day discover a talent capable of stirring the world’.128 African jazz bands played the songs of Duke Ellington or Glenn Miller and dreamed of leaving the locations for London. Yet the only ensemble approached to do so in the 1930s, Mthethwa’s Lucky Stars, were chosen precisely because of their indigenous African material. Such ironies were the result of contradictions in middle-class culture during the inter-war period. The fundamental source of these contradictions was the racial politics of South Africa. Discrimination encouraged both westernisation and the creation of a distinctive African cultural identity as strategies for social advancement. Middleclass Africans regarded command of Western culture and dissociation from both the ‘primitive’ traditions of the past and the proletarian marabi of the present as essential to their progress. The whites’ rejection of their demands on racial grounds, however, exposed the need for African unity across class as well as ethnic boundaries. Middle-class cultural leaders attempted to resolve this dilemma by creating a model African national culture for all classes of African townsmen; what in the coming decade would become known as the ‘New African’. Performance activity played an important role in effecting the necessary synthesis. The social cohesiveness of the middle class helped African educators to act as cultural interpreters. Yet a nagging sense of inferiority continued to undermine their cultural nationalism. Their ambivalence is easy to understand, since it was now clear that the African elite were the victims as well as the beneficiaries of missionisation, a situation represented musically in the dilemma of composers like Mohapeloa. African popular performers and black American styles provided the most workable solutions to the dilemmas of urban African culture. In the hands of ensembles like Caluza’s Double Quartet and Solomon Linda’s Evening Birds, black American popular music and dance reinvigorated both middle-class and working-class forms of choral music and stage choreography. Bands and troupes like the Japanese Express, Rhythm Kings, Merry Blackbirds, and Darktown Strutters made jazz at once an instrument of class formation and a means of cultural communication and participation among different classes. The more versatile groups, such as the Jazz Maniacs, combined African and black American sounds and laid the foundations of distinctively South The Black Middle Class 165

African styles of jazz music and dance, styles that would become the music of the ‘New African’.129 Yet the popularity of black American styles created new problems, made more difficult by the growing involvement of the commercial media in urban African performing arts. The contradiction involved in basing the expression of urban African identity on the assimilation of black American models became apparent as performers reoriented themselves towards a multi-racial and international audience beginning in the late 1930s. Performers who wished to appeal to the large African workingclass audience had to draw upon indigenous performance culture. Nevertheless, the internationalism of African jazz became part of a struggle against cultural isolation and segregation and expressed the aspirations of the majority of urban Africans. The social status of professional performers therefore rose during the 1930s, a trend that continued until the 1960s. The development of local recording meant that the African community had to compete with the white media industry for their performers. White companies could now buy African performance culture from the musicians and sell it back at a profit to the communities from which it came. In the process, African cultural autonomy was further threatened because record producers influenced the actual composition, manner of performance, and stylistic development of the music. American popular culture and the entertainment media profoundly affected urban African performing arts during succeeding decades, but the thread of indigenous, independent cultural development was never lost. All these trends are evident in the culture of what was South Africa’s most vital and autonomous urban community, Sophiatown. Notes 1 Couzens, ‘Social ethos of black writing’. 2 Koch, ‘Town and countryside in the Transvaal’, p. 20. 3 Timothy Couzens, ‘Moralizing leisure time: the transatlantic connection and black Johannesburg, 1918–1936’, in Marks and Rathbone, Industrialisation and Social Change, pp. 314–15. 4 Mark Radebe, ‘Bantu national music’, Umteteli wa Bantu, 9 July 1932, cited in Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 24. 5 Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, p. 476. 6 Jordan Ngubane, ‘South Africa’s race crisis: a conflict of minds’ in H. Adam (ed.), South Africa: Sociological Perspectives, London, 1971, p. 10. 7 J. C. de Ridder, The Personality of the Urban African in South Africa, London, 1961, p. 168. 8 Z. K. Matthews, ‘The tribal spirit among educated South Africans’, Man 35, 26 (1935), p. 27. 9 E. Hellmann, ‘The native and the towns’, in Schapera, Bantu-Speaking Tribes, p. 437. 10 Ngubane, ‘South Africa’s race crisis’, p. 19; Bantu World, 27 April 1935. 11 Umteteli wa Bantu, 9 July 1932. 12 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 6. 13 Ibid., pp. 82–3. 166 In Township Tonight

14 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 15 Hugh Tracey’s transcription of ‘Sasithunye Abazali’ (‘We Were Sent by Our Parents’), quoted in Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 79. 16 Ray Phillips, The Bantu in the City, p. 38. 17 The Star, Johannesburg, 21 June 1920. 18 Phillips, Bantu in the City, p. 303. 19 S. Lekhela, interview, 12 December 1978. 20 Umteteli wa Bantu, 6 June 1931. 21 Ibid., 10 September, 1932. 22 H. Weman, African Music and the Church in Africa, Uppsala, 1960, p. 119; Rycroft, ‘The new “town” music’, p. 56. 23 Ilanga lase Natal, 12 January 1917. 24 Lucas Makhema, interview, 15 April 1978. 25 Kirby, ‘Recognition and practical use’, pp. 45–6. 26 Weman, African Music and the Church, pp. 118–19. 27 Ilanga lase Natal, 8 February 1929. 28 Bantu World, 21 October 1933. 29 Ibid., 16 April 1932. 30 Umteteli wa Bantu, 6 June 1931. 31 J. P. Mohapeloa, interview, 2 January 1977. 32 Mohapeloa, interview, 10 July 1978. 33 Mohapeloa, interview, 2 January 1977. 34 J. P. Mohapeloa, Meluluetsa, Cape Town, 1976. 35 Phillips, Bantu in the City, p. 303. 36 Hellmann, ‘The native in the towns’, p. 431. 37 Bantu World, 15 December 1934. 38 James S. Coko, The Reminiscences of James Scott Coko, a Grahamstown Resident, Grahamstown, 1973, p. 188. 39 Thulasizwe Nkabinde, interview, 30 October 2003. 40 Umteteli wa Bantu, 11 November 1933. 41 Whitcolm, After the Ball, p. 124. 42 Brian Willan, ‘In aid of the most oppressed Negroes of the world: Sol T. Plaatje’s visit to North America, 1920–1922’, Paper presented to the conference Afro-American Interactions with South Africa, Howard University, 28–29 March 1979. 43 S. V. H. Mdhluli, The Development of the African, Mariannhill, 1933, pp. 48–9. 44 N. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, New York, 1971, pp. 5, 27. 45 Bantu World, 25 November 1933. 46 Ibid., 13 October 1934. 47 Umteteli wa Bantu, 11 February 1933. 48 Ilanga lase Natal, 2 July 1915. 49 Ibid., 5 August 1927. 50 Ibid., 10 February 1933. 51 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, pp. 80–6. 52 Ibid., pp. 13–15. 53 Ibid., p. 19. 54 Ibid., pp. 33–37. 55 Ibid., pp. 40–1. 56 Ibid., pp. 20–1. The Black Middle Class 167

57 Umteteli wa Bantu, 20 October 1920. 58 Bantu World, 7 August 1948. 59 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 47. 60 Ibid., pp. 49, 55. 61 Drum, May 1952. 62 Bantu World, 16 April 1932. 63 Anthony Graham-White, The Drama of Black Africa, New York, 1974, p. 66. 64 Ibid., pp. 64–6. 65 Erlmann, African Stars, p. 140. 66 Ibid., p. 141; Ilanga lase Natal, 31 December 1920. 67 Erlmann, African Stars, p. 77. 68 Gérard, Four African Literatures, pp. 195–7. 69 Herbert Dhlomo and Albert Gérard both cited in Erlmann, African Stars, pp. 77–8. 70 Gérard, Four African Literatures, pp. 70–9. 71 Bantu World, 21 October 1933. 72 Graham-White, Drama of Black Africa, p. 89. 73 Gérard, Four African Literatures, p. 233. 74 Bantu World, 6 May 1939. 75 Gérard, Four African Literatures, p. 233. 76 Bantu World, 13 June 1936. 77 Bantu World, 22 February, 1941, cited in Ballantine, Marabi Nights, 1993, p. 59. 78 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, 1993, p. 70; Erlmann, African Stars, 1991, p. 77. For a description of an appearance of the Lucky Stars on stage, see Bertha Slosberg, Pagan Tapestry, London, 1940, pp. 204–6. 79 Erlmann, African Stars, p. 143. 80 Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, pp. 63–4. 81 Bantu World, 8 May 1931. 82 Ibid., 12 February 1938. 83 Bantu World, 18 June 1932; 5 January and 28 May 1935. 84 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 29. 85 Ibid. 86 Ilanga lase Natal, 5 August 1927. 87 Monica Wilson, personal communication, April 1977. 88 Margery Perham, An African Apprenticeship, London, 1974, p. 46. 89 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, pp. 11–12. 90 Van Onselen, ‘Witches of suburbia’. 91 Hellmann, ‘The native in the towns’, pp. 431f; Phillips, Bantu in the City, p. 293. 92 M. Brandel-Syrier, Reeftown Elite, London, 1971, p. 50. 93 Abrahams, Tell Freedom, pp. 119–21. 94 Bantu World, 14 May 1932. 95 Ibid., 16 April 1932. 96 Ibid., 30 April 1932. 97 Peter Rezant, interview, 14 August 1976. 98 Dan Twala, interview, 17 March 1977. 99 Todd Matshikiza, Drum, July 1957. 100 For classic examples, listen to Zuluboy and his Jazz Maniacs (Gallo Better XU 9, Johannesburg, 1939), ‘Izikalo Zika Z-Boy’ and ‘Tsaba Tsaba’, the only recordings the band made with Zuluboy Cele, who also composed them. See Tracks 24 and 25 of the 168 In Township Tonight

cassette accompanying Christopher Ballantine’s Marabi Nights, and pp. 100–101 101 Hellmann, Rooiyard. 102 Erlmann, African Stars and Nightsong. 103 See ‘Izizwe Ezimnyama’ (HMV GU 108) and ‘UmBoshongo’ (HMV GU 81) and sheet music published in 1934 by Orient Music Salon, Durban (Killie Campbell Library, Durban). 104 Riaan Malan, ‘Where does the lion sleep tonight?’ Rolling Stone, 25 May 2000. 105 Erlmann, African Stars, pp. 166–7. 106 Malan, ‘Where does the lion sleep’. 107 Ibid., p. 167; Hugh Tracey, personal communication, 10 July 1975; Rob Allingham, Celebrating 75 Years of Music: Gallo 1926–2001, booklet accompanying commemorative CD set, 2001, p. 6. 108 Erlmann, African Stars, p. 167. 109 Dan Twala, interview, 17 March 1977. 110 Minutes of Evidence, Native Riots Commission, Durban, July 1929. For songs in the ICU, see Helen Bradford, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924-1930, New Haven, 1987, pp. 125–9. 111 Perham, African Apprenticeship, p. 132. 112 Solomon Crutse, interview, 26 July 1978. 113 Erlmann, African Stars, p. 171. See also ‘Wangishaya Ubaba’ and ‘Nase Mdubane’ by Makatshwa’s Choir with the Merry Blackbirds (Singer GE 143). 114 Ilanga lase Natal, 24 January 1908. 115 Brian Willan, personal communication, March 1979. 116 Ilanga lase Natal, 11 December 1926 and 8 February 1929. 117 Umteteli wa Bantu, 13 June and 5 September 1925. 118 Y. Huskisson, ‘Record industry in South Africa’, Progressus 25 (Nov 1978), p. 4. 119 Bantu World, 21 October 1933. 120 R. T. Caluza, ‘Zulu choir in London’, Southern Workman, November 1930, pp. 521–2. 121 Bantu World, 21 October 1933. 122 Phillips, Bantu in the City, p. 299. 123 D. K. Rycroft, quoted in Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, London, 1970, p. 144. 124 Adrian Lekgopa, interview, 30 June 1978. 125 Andrew Tracey, quoted in Muff Andersson, Music in the Mix: The Story of South African Popular Music, Johannesburg, 1981, pp. 21ff. 126 Ibid., p. 39. 127 Koch, ‘Town and countryside in the Transvaal’, pp. 27–8. 128 Umteteli wa Bantu, 11 December 1932. 129 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 23.

The Black Middle Class 169

6 Sophiatown: culture and community, 1940–1960

In 1897, an investor named Herbert Tobiansky bought 237 acres of land four and a half miles west of the centre of Johannesburg. After failing to sell it to the government as a ‘coloured location’, Tobiansky planned a private leasehold township for lowincome whites and named it after his wife, Sophia. But Sophiatown’s distance from the city, poor drainage, and proximity to the municipal sewage depository at Newlands made it difficult to attract tenants and buyers. By 1910, lots were being sold without discrimination, creating a racially mixed area that became increasingly black. The extension of unrestricted purchase to the adjacent areas of Martindale and Newclare in 1912 and the City Council’s establishment in 1918 of Western Native Township (WNT) on the Newlands site further discouraged white residence. These Western Areas, as they were collectively called, soon constituted the largest suburban black residential area in South Africa.1 The government specifically exempted Sophiatown from the ownership restrictions of the Urban Areas Act but did not designate it a recognised location, so that municipal services did not keep pace with the expanding population. Despite the Act, Johannesburg’s industries needed labour. The government did nothing to inhibit the flow of African families to the city, and the African population increased from 229 122 to 384 628 between 1936 and 1946.2 As the slumyards were cleared, their residents fled to freehold areas. The population of Sophiatown, a freehold location, rose from 12 000 in 1928 to 28 500 in 1937, very near planned capacity. By the time it was destroyed twenty years later, it harboured more than 70 000. Though Sophiatown was also ‘proclaimed’ (marked for removal) in 1934, the government was not prepared to 170 In Township Tonight

absorb the cost of housing its residents or the thousands swelling the permanent urban workforce. More important, black people preferred the freehold areas. As Sophiatown grew, houses stood vacant in municipal locations like Western Native Township, and workers’ hostels reported many openings. Though it shared the social and economic problems of the slumyards and municipal locations, Sophiatown offered a greater sense of permanence and self-direction. The refusal of Africans to move to the municipal locations was partly a political protest ‘against the authorities trying to rob them further of the alternative life and value systems they had created for themselves in the yards’.3 Ownership or at least long-term occupation of real estate gave Sophiatown a sense of community, with institutions and a social identity that served as a defence against the dehumanisation of the labour system. Sophiatown’s autonomy was more self-perceived than actual, since it existed at the tolerance of the government, and whites in fact owned or controlled nearly 77 per cent of its total area.4 Sophiatown’s economy afforded few sources of capital accumulation. A few house owners established themselves in retail, service, real estate, trades, and even the professions; but many residents could profit only from crime and the liquor trade. To some extent, middle-class and working-class Africans developed different organisational patterns and outlooks on city life. The performing arts reflected these differences and highlight for us a range of issues central to the relationship between performance culture and the urban African community. These include the problem of cultural autonomy: who would guide and control the lines of creative development in urban black music and theatre? The dominant, educated black elite? Popular taste, desire, and identity among the working black majority? White governmental or commercial agents? Then there was the need to build an urban social order and sense of security in black communities perpetually threatened by the disorder born of mass urban migration and racial discrimination: a tenuous effort to establish social accountability, institutions, and settings for the creation of community in a segregated context. For performers themselves there were both the opportunities and dangers involved in playing the cultural broker – their mediating role in the ‘argument of images’5 that defined black identities, their position in the over-riding context of social conflict and accommodation, and their ambiguous relationships to their audience as they attempted to secure their status and expand their potential as professionals. The brief sixty-year lifespan of Sophiatown illuminates such issues both because of what it was and what it symbolised as an organic community that allowed a freedom of action, association, and expression available only in freehold areas. Located not far from the heart of South Africa’s industrial and financial capital, Sophiatown set the The Black Middle Class 171

pace, giving urban African culture its pulse, rhythm, and style during the 1940s and 1950s. Noisy and dramatic, its untarred, potholed streets ran by the communal water taps and toilets and the rectangular jumble of yards walled in with brick, wood, and iron. A new synthesis of urban African culture sprang up here, shouting for recognition. Materially poor but intensely social; crime-ridden and violent but neighbourly and self-protective; proud, bursting with music and literature, swaggering with personality, simmering with intellectual and political militance, Sophiatown was a slum of dreams, a battleground of the heart in the war for the city’s and even the country’s suppressed black soul. Sophiatown produced leaders in many fields, enough to create a ‘Sophiatown Renaissance’ comparable to New York’s Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Africans in other cities looked to Sophiatown for inspiration, and the location became a symbol as well as a partial realisation of their aspirations. The role of performance in the social world of Sophiatown was, of course, conditioned by the relations between the urban African community and the white power structure. The social atmosphere of Sophiatown was more settled and secure than the transient desperation of the slumyards. Opportunities for property ownership, family and neighbourhood life, and relative freedom from government interference attracted the growing middle class. African professionals like Dr A. B. Xuma, MD, president of the African National Congress from 1940 to 1949, built impressive houses there and made the suburb both a symbol and a centre of efforts to gain entrance to the dominant society. Indeed the district itself was multi-racial, and its white, Asian, and coloured residents and shop owners were generally accepted as members of the community. Shebeen society, primarily a working-class institution, flourished among all of Sophiatown’s varied population. Some drinking houses – Aunt Babe’s, The House on Telegraph Hill, The 39 Steps, The Back of the Moon – became genuine nightclubs where the elite of the African business, sporting, entertainment, and underworlds came to talk, listen, and dance to recordings of the latest American jazz. Yet the Sophiatown Renaissance was defined as public culture more by people who earned their living outside the community’s mainstream: the writers, intellectuals, musicians, gangsters, sportsmen and shebeen queens who created a fringe culture, largely centred around these legendary watering-hole ‘salons’. Due to the power and distribution of the new black print media, this fringe culture took centre stage and came to define not only Sophiatown, but also urban African life more generally in the period. Apart from the shebeens, there were frequent backyard parties organised around a wedding, celebration, or spontaneous get-together. These yards were similar to the old slumyards, and house owners rented out rows of shacks built around the edges of their own backyards. Tenant families lived in one room, cooked in the open, and 172 In Township Tonight

shared a common tap. Here neighbourhood musicians entertained, often imitating popular foreign and local performers in the hope of one day appearing on concert and dance-hall stages themselves. Community life integrated indigenous African reciprocity (as the Sotho would say, ka Sesotho) with the cash economy (ka Sekhooa ; ‘of the whites’). The drinking patterns of the shebeen were generalised as well among the stokvels and also the middle-class voluntary associations. Attendance was obligatory at weddings, funerals, and birth receptions, where refreshments were purchased and contributions collected. Westernising Africans who sought to change the pattern were not understood, and attempts to eliminate the charge for refreshments, for example, turned the parties into gate-crashing mêlées.6 Frequently, middle-class sponsors hired established bands and vocal groups for their parties and fund-raisers. The musicians’ professional competence, behaviour, and appearance reflected and helped to define new urban cultural ideals. Professional musicians preferred American ‘international’ performance styles and strained to pull the urban African public along with them, with only partial success. Their increasing mastery of orchestral jazz gave African listeners a sense of connection with a kind of mythic world black community, and expressed modem African identity through the smooth blend of technical brilliance and African musical resources. Recordings became a widespread source of entertainment and status for urban African households. Imports were scarce during the 1940s due to the war and the 1946 American musicians’ strike for better recording rights. Local performers were encouraged to fill the gap with their own versions of American hits in the hope of capturing a greater share of the record market. American and British magazines and musical entrepreneur Wilfred Sentso’s local publication African Sunrise kept African jazz enthusiasts informed about overseas musical trends and personalities. They could see and hear black performers like Lena Home, Bill Robinson, Cab Calloway and Ethel Waters in films such as Stormy Weather, Cabin in the Sky, and Black Velvet. These productions electrified the cultural atmosphere of black Johannesburg and permanently influenced local speech, dress, and stage shows. Impressed by these films, the top bands brought to the Sophiatown stage the first female vocalists to front major African orchestras. In the late 1930s, the Merry Blackbirds (already under the musical direction of Griffiths Motsieloa’s pianist wife, Emily) and their vaudeville troupe De Pitch Black Follies featured Marjorie Pretorius, known as South Africa’s Ella Fitzgerald for her faithful renditions of American jazz standards. Later they showcased Snowy Radebe at the microphone, while the Jazz Maniacs countered with Emily Kwenane, whose singing career lasted nearly two decades, providing a bridge between forties vaudeville and fifties jazz.7 The role of female ‘songbirds’, as they were always called, in the artistic development and commercial Sophiatown 173

advancement of African jazz, as well as in the national image of Sophiatown culture during the 1950s is hard to overestimate. Lara Allen’s research sets a new standard in this field and I would refer interested readers to this work while offering only a few observations to alert us to its importance.8 The flight of the songbirds into the heady upper atmosphere of urban black performance culture, where they became national icons, effectively begins with Dolly Rathebe’s appearance at just nineteen years of age in Jim Comes to Joburg in 1949. Her scandalous photo shoot for Drum’s German photographer Jürgen Schadeberg on top of a mine dump (Johannesburg’s nearest setting to a beach) in a bikini in 1952 did nothing to reduce her fame or celebrity appeal. Known for her sultry, sensual stage renditions of African jazz compositions and African cover versions of American jazz favourites (in local languages) such as ‘Into Yam’ (‘My Thing’) sung in a smoky contralto, Dolly was Sophiatown’s most glamorous star. She toured with the African Inkspots, Harlem Swingsters, and Manhattan Stars, and by the early fifties her popularity exceeded that of the bands and male vocal quartets she fronted. Rathebe (her married name) did not come from an elite background, and her celebration of Sophiatown’s African–black American hybrid culture and shebeen society helped define this urban space as a social location in its own right. Black popular culture was no longer the unstable, residual social category that so worried both the white regime, with its apartheid definitions of ‘traditional’ Africans, and the African elite, with its controlling concepts of cultural ‘respectability’. Vital to this innovation was the emergence of the cinemas and community halls that provided for performance rather than liquor as the primary commercial attraction, and gave women performers the social space to professionalise.9 From 1954, Dolly found a prominent place in the cast of Alf Herbert’s African Jazz and Variety, and one might say that her loyalty to him was a tribute to the positive relationship that existed, on balance, between Herbert and his performers. Dolly later retired to Port Elizabeth, then moved to Cape Town and finally back home to Pretoria. Starting in 1988 with Mapantsula she had a brief renaissance as an actress, appearing in seven films. In the 1990s she returned to the stage singing with the Elite Swingsters band and then with some of the old fifties songbirds. Dolly Rathebe died on 16 September 2004. As singer Mara Louw put it in Sophiatown tsotsitaal: Is nie weer Dolly, my broer [Dolly is no more] (‘It’s not alright, my brother!’).10 Back in the 1950s, Dolly was joined in the constellation of black show business by Bulawayo’s young Dorothy Masuka, the first woman to achieve stardom principally as a recording artist, although she appeared with numerous bands, vocal groups and stage companies in her illustrious career. Dorothy differed from Dolly in that her style was not Sophiatown African jazz but ‘African jive’,11 combining flavours of blues 174 In Township Tonight

and swing jazz with Rhodesia’s marabi-based, skokiaan-flavoured style of tsaba-tsaba, African traditional (Zulu/Matabele) melodies and rhythms, and original lyrics in local languages that sang the realities of African life. Her first release, ‘Hamba Nontsokolo’, with the Golden Rhythm Crooners on Troubadour in 1953, became one of the greatest hits of the 1950s and launched ‘Masuka music’ as a dominant style of vocal jive. Dorothy was just eighteen.12 Along with contemporaries such as male pennywhistle kwela instrumentalist Spokes Mashiyane, Dorothy re-oriented vocal music towards a more local, African musical direction. She was followed by such well-known songbirds as Mabel Mafuya, Susan Gabashane, and of course the illustrious Miriam Makeba and her own songbirds, the Skylarks. The careers of the songbirds also reveal a good deal about the connections between urban popular music and politics in the turbulent 1950s. The African elite’s accommodative outlook was replaced in the 1940s by a more militant, massbased African nationalist ideology, embodied in the ANC Youth League, founded in 1944, whose leadership included the dynamic Nelson R. Mandela. The Youth League promoted the New Africanist movement that influenced cultural critics such as Walter Nhlapo and H. I. E. Dhlomo. These ‘New Africans’ argued that African artists, musicians and writers should stop emulating European culture and use their education and expertise to develop new African national cultural forms based on elements drawn from indigenous cultures. Dhlomo defined the New African as ‘detribalised, sophisticated, socially-progressive and hard-hitting’.13 Yet in many ways Allen is correct when she argues that in the field of music, the female vocal stars were more effective political representatives of this new Africanism, both through the lyrics they sang and the on- and off-stage personae they embodied, than their male counterparts. As Allen points out, women musicians’ power and efficacy as icons occurred at the intersection between the politics of race, class and gender. Their status as glamorous celebrities defied apartheid notions of the role of black women in town as domestic servants, and they became a focus for racial pride.14 In addition to their leadership in this politics of images, many of their songs featured an explicit political rhetoric. This was after all the time of the Defiance Campaign, the Freedom Charter, the Women’s March against passes, the Alexandra Bus Boycott, and the Treason Trial – some of the most important watersheds in the transformation of the African National Congress into a liberation movement. Vocal jive had the advantage of lyrics, most often in local languages, that could refer to current events and address issues of common concern, reflecting realities of township life and allowing township dwellers to recognise their own experiences, interests and priorities. At Troubadour Records, where Dorothy Masuka and a host of other female stars recorded, producer and newshound Cuthbert Mathumba encouraged compositions that drew upon the topical political issues of the Sophiatown 175

day. In the 1950s atmosphere of government suppression and mass politicisation of black people, these songs had tremendous commercial appeal. It is one of the ironies of capitalist cultural production that business will act against its own long-term political interests and certainly those of the state if there is audience demand and short-term money to be made. So in 1956 Troubadour allowed Dorothy Masuka, who epitomised this trend, to record songs such as ‘Chief Luthuli’, in praise of ANC president Albert Luthuli, and ‘Dr Malan’, a song critical of the Prime Minister, which sold well until it was banned. In 1960, her tribute to the hero of Congolese independence, ‘Lumumba’, forced her to flee South Africa, to which she did not return for thirty years.15 Based in the allusive, referential traditions of African oral poetry, vocal jive lyrics did not venture into explicit commentary, explanation or narration. The relatively simple statement of the topic was enough to speak volumes to the local audience, ambiguously concealing as well as revealing layers of meaning to a knowing audience. The multi-vocal, emblematic quality of the words allowed for multiple interpretation, so that political valence could be at once denied in the face of the censors and powerfully affirmed in the ears of the black public. The destruction of Sophiatown and the removal of its people to Meadowlands and other new parts of Soweto provided (sub-) texts for a number of such songs, the most famous of which was ‘Meadowlands’, composed in 1955 by Troubadour ‘talent scout’ Strike Vilakazi and sung unforgettably by songbird Nancy Jacobs. Relying on a direct, unannotated translation, the government believed the song supported their removals programme. Black record buyers, however, thought the opposite, and ‘Meadowlands’ became a protest anthem against the Sophiatown removals.16 Other examples include the Skylarks’ ‘Lets Pack and Go’ and ‘Sophiatown Is Gone’. Once in exile, the Skylarks’ Miriam Makeba left no doubt as to how the songbirds and indeed all black Johannesburg felt about the enforcement of the Group Areas Act in her stirring testimony before the United Nations in 1963. As Allen observes, ‘Sophiatown culture’ represented a racy alternative space in urban black life, and women musicians were central agents in the imagining and creating of this new hybrid identity: The songbirds merged the familiar with fantasy; they embodied the space between what people were and what they wanted to be through the creative and selective appropriation of cultures. Dorothy was the western princess with the jungle in her voice; she looked like a film star but sounded like Africa. Dolly looked and sounded like an African jazz queen, but she remained firmly of the township streets.17

In Sophiatown’s wider youth-oriented culture, the dominant element was an obsession with the United States in general, and African-American achievements in particular. 176 In Township Tonight

The Chevrolet convertible, driven by elegant gangsters, became one of its dominant symbols, and not inappropriately so, as gangsters exercised physical control over the streets and expressive control over fashion, performance, and other trends in popular culture. The leading gangs sported names such as the Americans, Green Arrows, Vultures, Spoilers, and Berliners taken from the American popular media. African men readily adopted ‘zoot suits’ and American slang, and English-speaking Sophiatown residents proudly referred to their community as ‘Little Harlem’. A contributor to Inkundla ya Bantu (‘Bantu Forum’) criticised the adoption of European culture as a movement away from an ‘Africa that is ours, into an “Africa” that is of the White man’s making’. Arguing that ‘we deny our music the opportunity to speak to the outside world in its own language’, he praised not only indigenous music but also African-American spirituals: ‘They speak to the world in a language evolved by Africa in a foreign environment … they make the world understand the things we stand for ... We want not to be Europeanised Africans but civilised Africans.’18 As a critic for Ilanga lase Natal had put it more than two decades before, ‘there breathes hope and faith in the ultimate justice and brotherhood of man. The cadences of sorrow invariably turn to joy, and the message is ever manifest that … every man will be free.’19 As Allen observes, the hybridities of jazz reconciled the cultural contradictions of the post-war period: it was home-grown but cosmopolitan; indigenous but not ethnically divisive; black but urban and not impoverished or parochial; rooted in American English but infected by vernacular rhythm and slang.20 Nor were cultural politics the only reason why urban Africans appropriated American music and dance. Jazz became part of South Africa’s urban black music because its cosmopolitan transformations were sourced in the performance principles of African music. As John Storm Roberts puts it: South African music … tends towards rhythmic complexity of singing voices over a regular beat; its polyrhythms come from the voices, which vary their accentuation relative to the basic rhythm. This is remarkably like jazz, especially in the 1930s and 1940s music of Count Basie and others, who riffed and soloed against a rock-solid four-four beat.21

Studies of trans-Atlantic cultural relations or cultural processes among black peoples have yet to provide us with an explanation of this ‘remarkable’ similarity. Debate over this intriguing issue, though, can still benefit from some informed speculation. While few of the slaves imported to North America originated in southern Africa, there is a consistency in the structural principles of indigenous music throughout subSophiatown 177

Saharan Africa, and we can recognise continuities between traditional South African and African-derived music of the New World.22 This does not explain, of course, why American jazz and the religious and secular forms that shaped it have found more acceptance in South Africa than in any other country in Africa or the world. One reason may be the comparable socio-historical experience of the two peoples. Both black Americans and black South Africans have undergone lengthy, mostly Protestant and British missionisation. Both were subordinated to developing industrial economies created and controlled by north-western Europeans. In the United States, the mixing of African ethnic populations and the severe restrictions on the practice of African cultural traditions produced a syncretism that strongly emphasised vocal music and inexpensive, portable Western solo instruments. In South Africa, group vocal music was by far the most highly developed indigenous musical tradition. Mission congregational and choir singing reinforced this emphasis and it continued in urban secular performance culture. Africans who came into contact with whites on the large farms and in growing towns rather than on mission stations modified their traditional vocal styles, and abandoned their instruments in favour of European harmonicas, violins, and guitars (which were also favourites with unschooled black Americans). On the mission stations, Africans had to shed their pre-Christian cultural practices almost as completely as did black American slaves, though the proximity of traditional communities kept them in touch with the sources of indigenous culture. They scorned trade-store instruments but created strong new traditions of Afro-Christian vocal music and introduced brass and keyboard instruments. African-American religious vocal music was directly influencing South Africans by the 1880s, a process made easier by the tonic solfa notation system used to teach black Christians in both countries. During the early twentieth century, thousands of black people in the United States and South Africa migrated from rural areas to the expanding cities. There, both groups experienced similar conditions: overcrowding, poverty, segregation, personal harassment, economic exploitation. These conditions accompanied parallel processes of class formation within American and South African black urban communities. Together, these forces set the stage for the emergence of performance styles that served comparable expressive needs. With all the similarities there are, of course, at least as many differences. Unlike black Americans, Africans constituted the vast majority of the population and retained their own languages, cultural forms (admittedly also hybridised), and communities, enduring the peculiar ‘two-world’ system of migratory labour. Yet the two worlds were part of the same socio-economic system, and the similarities of experience have been reinforced by the mass distribution in South Africa of black American performance 178 In Township Tonight

culture. This culture attracted Africans trying to adapt positively to their own urban environment, and the international recognition given black American performers made the temptation to copy them, rather than develop problematic African models, almost irresistible. Only a few African jazz musicians of the 1940s brought anything identifiably South African to their playing of American swing. The reason was partly the identification of traditional music with the rural present and tribal past. Begun by the missionaries, this negative association grew until the 1950s, when the government’s policy of forcing Africans to ‘develop along their own lines’ entrenched the attitude for the next twenty years. Perhaps another reason was a lack of arranging skills, making the literate musicians dependent on foreign arrangements. Deep in the philosophy of African performance was also the emphasis on exact reproduction of existing forms as a means of acquiring cultural knowledge coupled with traditions of solo improvisation. The reputation of African bandsmen rested equally on their ability to replicate American arrangements and to create original solos. The urban African schools promoted black American models of cultural modernisation. As in some areas of West Africa, teachers were among the most enthusiastic transmitters of American popular performance traditions.23 They encouraged record collecting and used their limited formal training to help student ensembles master the latest American jazz vocals. Close-harmony groups like the Boston Stars performed regularly in the schools. At semi-annual school concerts, student performers imitated the most popular local African singers, dancers and theatrical comedians, most of whom had begun their careers in the same setting. Promoters and professional entertainers searched for talent at these concerts, and many young prizewinners went directly to the professional stage. All this is not to ignore the importance of school choir music, which was valued as a high-status cultural activity and as a source of prestige. Education gave the elite the means to dominate African politics, the media and the arts, as well as control of the written record. Their sense of ‘modern’ African cultural self-definition was embodied to an important extent in the performing arts and the formation of clubs and societies, including Griffiths Motsieloa’s Bantu Dramatic and Operatic Society, the Johannesburg Bantu Music Festival, and the African Music Society.24 The hub of elite social life in Johannesburg, of course, was the Bantu Men’s Social Centre (BMSC). The Transvaal African Teachers’ Association and other organisations ran major competitions, and choir singing was by far the most popular performance idiom among urban Africans. This popularity can be traced back to the choral music-making and dancing involved in social competition between groups in traditional society. Sophiatown 179

Many professional performers retained close links with their communities, and performed in support of local associations including sports clubs, which sponsored social functions, concerts, and dances. Ernest Mohlomi’s teacher–student vocal group, LoSix, top-selling recording artists, regularly appeared on behalf of Eastern Native Township’s Eastern Brothers Football Club, to which they all belonged. Despite criticism from those who thought school concerts should emphasise ‘classical’ music, parents were delighted with their children’s ability to sing and tap dance in the manner of popular American performers.25 For school Africans, there was a clear association of African-American performance culture with urban cultural autonomy, and even the Eisteddfodau were not immune. The winners of the 1940 Transvaal Eisteddfod promptly formed an ‘African Minstrels’ troupe, aimed at developing African talent, staging ‘all-African shows by Africans’, and ‘elevating the standard of music and stage performances’. The troupe proposed to specialise in ‘African numbers composed by Africans, exclusive novelty numbers, musical comedies, old classical jazz songs, allround minstrel choruses … and vaudeville reviews’.26 The schools continued to train young performers and disseminate new forms integrating music, dance, and drama. In addition to close-harmony quartets and song and dance routines, many schools sponsored student theatrical productions. The Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work offered teacher training courses in theatrical direction and introduced drama into African youth clubs sponsored by the City Council. Despite the efforts of the BMSC’s Bantu Dramatic Society, only a tiny westernised elite were interested in written ‘literary’ drama during the 1940s. Most urban Africans held the traditional preference for verbal expression linked to music, dance, and dramatic action.27 The cultural diversity that produced first minstrelsy and later vaudeville in New York also accounted in part for the continued development of concert-and-dance variety entertainment in black Johannesburg.28 Urban schools were ethnically mixed, and so were the performance ensembles they organised. From their ranks came a number of professional variety companies backed by professional dance bands. Concerts included American songs and stage dancing, along with improvised sketches satirising local personalities and situations. These short dramatic pieces drew on traditions of mimetic characterisation in African storytelling. Many had explicit cultural politics, like De Pitch Black Follies concert Africa in 1940 that featured fourteen items based on ‘humorous impersonifications’, followed by dramatisation of ‘the march of progress amongst Africans’, and ending with the moral ‘unity in diversity of Bantudom’.29 Along with the Manhattan Brothers, Gay Gaieties, and Synco Fans, the Follies were among the most widely recognised stage companies. The founder and manager of the Synco Fans, Wilfred Sentso, tried to keep all phases of performance production 180 In Township Tonight

in African hands. In the mid-1930s, Sentso founded a performance school in Johannesburg, the Wilfred Sentso School of Modern Piano Syncopation, where many musical styles and instruments as well as stage dance were taught, making a huge impact on the world of ‘concert and dance’.30 By 1938 the school had produced the Synco Fans variety troupe, backed by the Synco Beats band. Over the next twenty-three years, some of black Johannesburg’s most talented performers, including bandleader, composer and saxophonist Mackay Davashe, were associated with one or other of Sentso’s many ensembles. Sentso himself was the first African to compose and publish a foxtrot, ‘Synco Cap Fascination’, in 1939. The Synco Fans reached their height in 1947, when Sentso leased the Grand Theatre, Vrededorp, for an entire week of variety shows. After that, both internal and external forces began to transform the professional lives of performers from the city’s African community. As long as they played within the African community, the performers’ approximation of black American models seemed good enough. Inevitably, though, they began to compete more actively with imported recordings for the African market and struggled against their isolation and restricted opportunities by seeking a wider national and international audience. Comparison with their American counterparts and the choice of an imported cultural solution to problems of modernisation became serious issues, and revealed contradictions that have troubled cosmopolitan Africans ever since. The Second World War dramatically increased an ‘international’ consciousness among urban African performers. Bands such as the Jazz Maniacs, Merry Blackbirds, and Synco Down Beats played regularly at European nightclubs in Johannesburg, and one white observer enthused that an engagement by De Pitch Black Follies had ‘done more for your people during these two weeks than many politicians have done for years’.31 H. I. E. Dhlomo wrote rather too hopefully that ‘art can, is and will continue to play a great part in solving our problems’.32 Perhaps it was less a matter of appealing for rescue to liberal whites than the struggle of artists sucked down by the swamp of racism to fill their lungs with fresh cultural air. Then, just as today, the appeal to black performers of mastering modernity, albeit within an intolerably unjust system of cultural production, was also to succeed professionally and to make some real money. Wilfred Sentso dreamed of the ‘millions’ he believed were made by black American performers. While the advent of broadcasting for Africans helped to expose the music, the studios paid only £4 4s for two sides of a 78, including the rights.33 The military hired a number of the best African jazz bands to perform for black units of the Allied forces, and their shows also attracted many whites. Wilson Silgee led a group drawn mostly from the Jazz Maniacs, and their reception among the armed forces audience was so enthusiastic that he acquired a permanent new stage name, ‘King Force’. De Pitch Black Follies and Merry Blackbirds Sophiatown 181

starred in a Liberty Cavalcade for black American sailors in Cape Town in 1944. Blackbirds’ leader Peter Rezant commented, ‘To play for them was thrilling. They appreciated the music, understood it and whirled merrily, bringing out what Harlem, Chicago … have created and given the world in the form of rug cutting.’34 In 1943, a company of African variety performers formed the Jabulani Concert Party. While entertaining Allied troops in North Africa, they met American musicians, including members of the Glenn Miller Orchestra. A white officer, Lieutenant Ike Brooks, put together a large variety company from the South African Native Military Corps that pioneered black entertainment for mass white audiences. Like most other white entertainment entrepreneurs at that time, Brooks seems to have been unaware of the professionalism of African performers. His company included veteran horn players Elliot ‘Bob’ Twala and David Platter of the Swing Revellers, dancers Richard ‘Schoolboy’ Majola of the United Bantu Artists and Simon Sekgapane of the Darktown Strutters, and some members of the Jabulani Concert Party. Brooks insisted that he and other whites trained the entire ensemble of African ‘raw talent’ from scratch, however.35 Called Zonk!, the company left the army following the war and made a series of professional tours of South Africa. The Zonk! show was enormously successful with both black and white urban audiences. It drew on stage entertainment traditions that had been developing, unknown to Brooks, from the days of the community ‘bidding’ concerts of the 1920s. The show included such American items as ‘September in the Rain’, vernacular translations of ‘Copper-Coloured Girl’, bands of young pennywhistlers, and original African jazz compositions by pianist Sam Maile backed by a fully literate jazz orchestra. Schoolboy Majola was spectacular in isicathulo, miners’ gumboot dancing. He also teamed with saxophonist Skip Phahlane to create ‘Dockyard Dancing’, a knockdown fight portrayed entirely through acrobatic tap dancing. Though all the performers were permanent urbanites, the influence of Mthethwa’s Lucky Stars on African variety was clear in the musical-dramatic scenes of traditional village life and Zulu soldiers preparing for battle. To his amazement, Brooks discovered that most of his performers were equally talented as musicians, dancers, and comic actors; Majola could even tap dance while playing the trumpet. The white press reviewed Zonk! very favourably, demonstrating the potential of professional African performers to command a wider, possibly even international audience. Some thoughtful Africans were worried, however. H. I. E. Dhlomo commented: ‘After seeing the Nu-Zonk revue many Europeans were amazed at so much latent African talent … On the African side there have been some heart searchings – Why do we neglect our talent? Why cannot we combine into strong companies? Why cannot we organise and efficiently manage ourselves? Why must 182 In Township Tonight

there always be a European behind us?’36 It was a complaint others would repeat. Although Sentso and Griffiths Motsieloa continued to organise and manage African stage companies, South African conditions favoured white producers like Brooks. They could command greater organisational and financial resources and stand between performers and the mass of segregationist legal restrictions that inhibited interracial contact and independent African enterprise. After the Zonk! company disbanded, the members returned to performing more or less exclusively for the African township audience. The company can still be seen in the film version of Zonk! produced by Brooks in the late 1940s.37 While African stage variety concerts and jazz (‘jive’) dances continued to attract working-class as well as middle-class patrons, the majority of urban Africans were less westernised than their school-trained entertainers, some of whom, like the Merry Blackbirds, depended on the patronage of white audiences. The sort of urbanites who had once flocked to marabi parties admired American jazz and clothing styles as symbols of international urban black culture. But they still demanded music that was recognisably their own and expressed the ethnic variety of location society. For working-class Africans, Sophiatown represented a struggle for things more basic than inclusion in the wider society: a fight for survival amid high rents, poverty, overcrowding, wage slavery, victimisation, and police harassment. Patterns of workingclass life that had evolved in the inner-city slumyards were more fully developed and integrated into the new social environment of Sophiatown. Living conditions were little better in Sophiatown, but there Africans had their own regular streets and neighbourhoods rather than the haphazard industrial backyards of the city fringes. The communal water taps, toilets and shower houses of Sophiatown, though unsanitary and inadequate, are remembered today as casual meeting places where the better-off and educated mixed with their humbler neighbours.38 Though subject to intense pressures, family life, friendship networks and neighbourhood recreation became social defences against a hostile city. In contrast to the slumyards’ transience and lack of social cooperation, Africans in Sophiatown developed a strong community identity. Entertainment played its part, and ‘more than anything else it was the backyard shebeens and dance parties that gave expression to this new proletarian identity’.39 Anyone in search of a party had only to follow the sounds of musical uproar to the crowds of people dancing in the backyards or the street. By the 1940s, the latest popular working-class dance music combined African melody and rhythm with American swing, jitterbug and even Latin American rumba and conga. Developed by black South African bandsmen, the new style was built on a dance rhythm called tsaba-tsaba, which played a transitional role between marabi and ‘African jazz’. Played in duple time, its rhythm, with a fast quaver beat on the bass drum, was not Sophiatown 183

originally akin to swing, but showed the influence of African migrants’ dances such as Afrikaans vastrap and Sotho focho.40 Tsaba-tsaba did display local echoes of AfricanAmerican features as well, including rushed second and fourth beats, the freedom to accent any of the four beats, and a poly-rhythmic sense of two beats against three. After 1939, when the Jazz Maniacs released Zuluboy Cele’s hit ‘Tsaba Tsaba’ (Gallo Better XU 9), the style was strongly influenced by the jitterbug and dances like the Big Apple from urban America. Allen suggests that the term tsaba-tsaba might even refer to the finger-wagging seen in ‘hi-di-ho’ black dance routines performed by stars like Cab Calloway in American movies.40 Still, the tsaba-tsaba rhythm was quite distinct from marabi, and while it enjoyed the higher technical and social status of big band arrangements and performance, it was different from African jazz in that it was not influenced originally by American swing.41 Tsaba-tsaba was the dance for working-class Africans at a time when American jitterbug, locally known as ‘jive’, and large dance orchestras dominated the dance halls. Dance competitions were as gymnastic as the displays at Harlem’s Roseland Ballroom. In contrast to marabi, tsaba-tsaba called for recognised movements: ‘A male and a female danced towards each other, shaking the knees in what is sometimes described as a “rubber-legged” style; pelvic movement was also emphasised in addition to footwork. Just before the couple made contact a shout of the word “Tsaba! ” was given and they danced backwards to their starting points.’42 To some extent, standardising the steps of urban dances reflected the growing crystallisation of African social structure in the Western Areas. Former residents generally agreed that the new music had originated with the migrants at all-night parties in Newclare, just south of Sophiatown. The rhythm of tsaba-tsaba does appear to closely resemble the neo-traditional focho style of Sotho migrants. By the Second World War, neighbourhood Sophiatown bands like Chico’s and professional musicians like Zuluboy Cele had combined the Sotho concertina dance rhythms with melodies from various local and foreign sources to create tsaba-tsaba dance music. Popular jazz saxophonist of the 1950s, Ntemi Piliso, cites ‘Tamatie Sous’, in which the Harlem Swingsters used a Cape tickey draai melody over a swing beat to create one of the big jive dance hits of the 1940s, as a tsaba-tsaba.43 Songs like ‘Tamatie Sous’ succeeded because they met the demand of the working-class black audience for a more danceable local jazz sound. Simultaneously, Ace Buya’s Modernaires and other jazz vocal groups were shifting from translations of American songs into Xhosa to compositions of their own based on tsaba-tsaba. Their purpose was not only to please the working-class audience but also to develop ‘music of African origin [that] would find its place side by side with imported dance music’.44 Buya, the Woody Woodpeckers’ Victor Ndlazilwana, and other singers 184 In Township Tonight

Sophiatown 185

recorded work songs of urban Xhosa-speaking migrants and arranged traditional songs for close-harmony jazz. A number of bands and stage troupes were hired to perform on the mines, where fruitful stylistic exchange took place between urban musicians and a more rural-oriented audience. The LoSix, who lived among miners in Eastern Native Township, blended costumes, melodies, rhythms, and dance steps from the mines into their stage shows and jazz recordings, often juxtaposing traditional music and jazz within the same song. Todd Matshikiza reviewed LoSix’s popular ‘Tikoloshe’ (Gallotone GB 2041): ‘It is a good, modern harmonised music with words that catch on from the very start. Then suddenly you are forced to stop plumb dead in the middle of the chorus because a witchdoctor’s drum and solemn prophecies in true style … change the entire modern number into a delightful, humorous, eloquent piece of traditional work.’45 Tsaba-tsaba was associated with the rough social atmosphere of the occasions where it was most often played. Middle-class musicians and jazz fans, despite their developing cultural awareness, were ambivalent towards it. The literate professionals who specialised in American swing generally considered themselves superior to the tsaba-tsaba audience that provided their most regular source of income. The musicians invented the phrase ‘Ke tsaba-tsaba’ to refer to a woman of questionable character or morals. Walter Nhlapo, musical journalist and talent scout for Gallo records, disagreed. He urged performers and audiences of his own class to understand that it was the ongoing process of creative syncretism rather than the imitation of American performers that held the key to the development of an authentic and internationally recognised urban music and dance: Everybody spoke of Tsaba-Tsaba. … There were no radios to broadcast it all over; but everybody sang it. There were no printed copies of it, but some dance bands played it; it had the spirit of Africa in it. … Regardless of torrents of scathing abuse, it swept the country. ... In bioscopes we’ve seen Harlem dance the Big Apple, the Shag, and Africa’s creation, La Conga . . . and these dances have not been recipients of abuse as Tsaba-Tsaba. … Europeans measure our development and progress not by our imitative powers but by originality. … A friend or not it [Tsaba] is an indispensable part of our musical and dance culture.46

Nhlapo viewed class division as an obstacle to African creativity, and wondered why tsaba-tsaba and other township styles could not be ‘polished and given to the world as the La Conga from Africa?’47 His suggestion was prophetic. In 1947, August Musururgwa and his Band of the Cold Storage Commission of Southern Rhodesia recorded the 186 In Township Tonight

classic tsaba dance tune, ‘Skokiaan’, as the Bulawayo Sweet Rhythm Band (Gallo GB11 52.T). It soon became an international success, eventually topped the American Hit Parade as ‘Happy Africa’ in 1954, and was published as sheet music in seventeen countries.48 The song is a more advanced, contrapuntal, and jazzy development of tsaba, and illustrates the contribution of Rhodesian musicians to later styles including African jazz and kwela.49 Other indigenous African working-class forms eventually gained international audiences as well. As townward migration increased, many Zulu and Swazi migrants decided to remain permanently in the city or at least to participate in urban society. They expressed their new urban identity in ingoma busuku competitions.50 During the 1940s, the competing groups were known as ‘bombing’ choirs, because their choral shouts were intended to sound like wartime aircraft shown in cinema newsreels.51 Bombing was an urban but non-Western form, and examples survive on recordings of the period. Weekend choir competitions played a role in the urbanisation of participants, but they competed only to impress each other and not middle-class townsmen, so the effect was to intensify traditional patterns of male group rivalry.52 Adding fuel was the African beer sold at KwaMagaba Ngejubane (Sip and Fly), located across from the Polly Street Art Centre where performances took place. No African was allowed to adjudicate for fear he might be related to someone in a choir or conceal some other unsuspected bias. The solution was to accost a white man coming from a tavern, sober or not, and offer him two pounds to decide the contest, a practice which continues in choral competitions today. No one could talk to the judge. At 4 a.m. he called out a number, and the choir to which it had been assigned was the undisputed winner.53 Rather than risk fierce argument and even violence, competitors preferred a white man’s uninformed, arbitrary but impartial judgement; a feature of urban life universally familiar to Africans. Today, the same tradition of searching the midnight streets for a stranger willing to serve as judge continues, but black rather than white night owls are now the rule. The various forms of ingoma busuku reflected degrees of cultural urbanisation, in which working-class men ‘progressed’ from bombing to ingoma busuku quartets influenced by amakwaya, ragtime, and Afrikaans folk music. Some groups, like Malcolm Zwane’s Kings of Harmony, eventually became the equals of the missionschool ragtime choirs. Here we might well return to the cautionary tale of Solomon Linda and ‘Mbube’. As Riaan Malan tells the story, in 1949 Gallo sent the original Evening Birds’ recording of ‘Mbube’ along in a box of local hits to Decca Records in New York.54 Then, as now unfortunately, the major labels were not interested in releasing South African music in America, but folk-music authority and collector Alan Lomax, working at Decca at Sophiatown 187

the time, thought folksinger Pete Seeger might be interested. Linda’s soaring falsetto, set off by the deep bass chant of uyimbube, uyimbube, fascinated Seeger, who heard uyimbube as wimoweh, and so it was taught to his band, the Weavers. In 1951 the Weavers recorded the song with the Gordon Jenkins orchestra and ‘Wimoweh’ became what would be the Weavers’ only genuine hit. As the song was as yet un-copyrighted in the United States, and Gallo was just an unknown label from a distant country, the non-existent ‘Paul Campbell’ was listed as the composer of ‘Wimoweh’ on Decca (27928). Still, Gallo copyrighted the song in 1952, and Decca were planning to send the royalties to Gallo, but Seeger knew Linda would get nothing. Making contact with Linda through a Johannesburg lawyer, Seeger sent him a $1 000 check, and instructed his publisher to do the same with all future payments.55 This was the only royalty agreement ever made for one of Linda’s songs, and his family received more money over the years as a result of Seeger’s generosity in this case than Linda made in his entire career. Versions differ as to whether Gallo lost its rights to the song in the United States through poor contractual bargaining or outright theft by the American sub-publishers, Howie Richmond and Albert Brackman of TRO. In 1961 the song achieved the incarnation in which it is most familiar to listeners the world over when it was recorded by the soft rock band the Tokens. Malan continues: They wanted to revamp the song, give it some intelligible lyrics and a contemporary feel. They sent for songwriter George David Weiss, who … dismantled the song, excised all the hollering and screaming, and put the rest back together in a new way. The chant remained unchanged, but the melody – Solomon Linda’s miracle melody – moved to centre stage, becoming the tune itself, to which the new words were sung: ‘In the jungle, the mighty jungle’ and so on.56

RCA released the song as ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, listed as a Weiss/Peretti/Creatore composition, a process they repeated for the Tokens four months later with Miriam Makeba’s famous ‘Click Song’. But unlike the un-copyrighted ‘Click Song’, ‘Mbube/ The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ was still owned by TRO, and Weiss and RCA had to make a fast deal returning the publishing rights to their cronies Richmond and Brackman. ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ was a huge hit for the Tokens, and over the past forty years has been covered and reworked by almost everyone one could think of and many one cannot, in countries throughout the world. In a court case in 1991, TRO tried to win the song back from Weiss and his partners, but the arbitrators awarded the rights to Weiss, with the proviso that ‘ten percent of writers’ performance royalties’ be paid to Linda’s family in Soweto. Since then, Weiss has never kept traceable track of royalties 188 In Township Tonight

earned, and Linda’s heirs, according to Malan, had by 2000 received only $12 000. In the 1990s, although the song had been heard in at least nine previous films, Disney used the song in the blockbuster Lion King, and the film’s musical director, the South African Lebo M, had the arrogance to list himself as the composer. Rob Allingham, archivist at Gallo, estimates the earnings of all the versions of the song at over $50 million. Unlike Lebo M, Weiss might be said to deserve the lion’s share of the money, because he wrote the Tokens’ version and the famous new twelve English words. But as Malan observes, ‘“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was a reworking of “Wimoweh”, which was a copy of “Mbube”. Solomon Linda was buried under several layers of poprock stylings, but you could still see him beneath the new song’s slick surface, like a mastodon entombed in a block of clear ice.’57 In September 2004, TRO/Folkways agreed through negotiation to pay any forthcoming royalties from the ‘Wimoweh’ version of the song to Linda’s family. In the same month, the South African High Court ruled that the Linda family could proceed with their case to obtain royalties for ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ based on an application to attach Disney Corporation’s trademarks in South Africa for $1.5 million. On 16 February 2006, South African courts finally found in favour of Linda’s descendants in their suit against Disney, ordering the company to pay them a significant portion of the song’s royalties. The lion surely sleeps more contentedly tonight. Back in Sophiatown, street music – a part of Johannesburg’s popular culture since before the turn of the century – remained a focus of communal sociability. Special occasions brought some of the best mission-trained Tswana and Pedi brass bands down from Rustenburg, and no Christian location wedding was complete without a sparkling uniformed ensemble leading the procession from the church to the reception. If two bands crossed paths in the streets, competitions often resulted, each band listening politely to the other. Untrained Pedi groups from Sophiatown bought instruments second hand and imitated the Rustenburgers, collecting coins from onlookers or accompanying a stokvel parade. When two such bands met, they tried to blow each other off the street. Captain Marcus Roe of the Native Military Corps trained and led an African brass band during the 1930s, and during the 1940s and 1950s the City Engineer’s and Non-European Affairs Departments formed their own African bands to perform at hostels, parks, beer halls and other public places. Here we might turn to another landmark development in the international history of black popular music and African jazz in South Africa, pennywhistle kwela. In 1993, Lara Allen, presently lecturing in music at the Wits School of the Arts in Johannesburg, completed a master’s thesis on kwela at the University of Natal, which remains the most complete and definitive work on this classic style.58 I have incorporated important aspects of Allen’s contribution into my own original account in what follows. Sophiatown 189

The pennywhistle arrived in South Africa with British troops during the Boer War, and the colourful Scottish units immediately produced spin-offs in the African ‘scottishes’ whistle bands in the Transvaal. During the 1920s the fife and drum bands of Scottish immigrants to South Africa, who practised regularly at Johannesburg’s Union Grounds, also inspired township youngsters. As Pretoria and Johannesburg’s locations grew rapidly on the back of industrial expansion, African boys took up the inexpensive six-hole German metal flageolet or ‘pennywhistle’ and home-made drums and marched the streets in Scottish dress. African Boy Scouts’ (Pathfinder) drum and bugle bands added to the colourful parades, including Sophiatown’s Phalanzani Scots Band, with thirty-five pennywhistlers and two drummers, dressed in Scout hats, kilts, tartan sashes, and neckerchiefs.59 Another band, the Alexandra Highlanders (Scots) from Alexandra Township, an important freehold black township near Johannesburg even larger than Sophiatown, included the young Aaron ‘Big Voice Jack’ Lerole, Ntemi Piliso, and Willard Cele, all of whom later became musical luminaries. During the 1930s and 1940s, these ‘Scottish’ or ‘MacGregor’ pennywhistle bands paraded the location streets at weekends. They enjoyed the playing, the public attention, and the coins thrown by passers-by. If money were the primary object of a performance, they invaded the ‘white’ city and suburbs, where takings were considerably better. Many could play the latest jazz hits from America perfectly. Most MacGregor bands continued in the tradition of the Ninevite and Amalaita street bands. In other contexts, many of these youngsters would have been called Blue Nines, for most urban Africans regarded the bands as cover organisations for gangs of school dropouts who drank liquor and smoked dagga. Veteran saxophonist Ntemi Piliso remarked, ‘These boys were muggers at night but sat around during the day playing pennywhistles and looking innocent.’60 Certainly, many kwela song titles and lyrics referred to the ‘nice time’ settings of stokvel and shebeen where the young performers earned a living and learned the musical trade. Yet the bands included many better-off, school-going youngsters as well as overworked juvenile domestic servants, and none of the future stars of kwela recording was ever associated with gangsterism or street crime. These pennywhistlers especially enjoyed the excitement of playing for stokvel parades of ‘MacGregor women’, who dressed in smart uniforms of tartan skirts and white gloves. Sometimes the women played drums and trumpets (not pennywhistles) themselves. Father Trevor Huddleston wrote of the street parades of these female ‘Sophiatown Scottish’: ‘Behind them will come the spectators, not marching in step but dancing with complete abandon, and surrounding them, as always when there’s a sight, a crowd of children dancing too, and singing as they dance.’61 The MacGregors became established in other South African cities as well. They are mentioned in Wilson and Mafeje’s study of Cape Town’s Langa Township, where proletarian young men 190 In Township Tonight

are categorically known as the ooMac. Street bands of coloured ‘coons’ also inspired younger township boys, who took up street performance as young as ten years old, and formed a different kind of pennywhistle band that also contributed to the development of township music.62 The pennywhistle’s history as the favoured instrument of young urban African boys is based firmly in pre-colonial antecedents. As early as 1812, the traveller William Burchell witnessed a performance of Tswana reed pipes (lithlaka) when exploring the western Transvaal. He returned the favour by playing the European flute for the Tswana musicians: ‘The attention with which they listened to the flute, evinces that more varied music affords them pleasure, and renders it probable that he who should put into their hands the flageolet and teach them to play a few simple airs, or to combine together into one instrument, an octave of their reed pipes, would long be remembered among them.’63 Unknown to Burchell, the neighbouring Zulu must already have possessed such a flageolet, called the umtshingo. It spread to the Tswana during the Ndebele invasion in the late 1820s and is found among the Sotho, Swazi, Xhosa, and other South African people.64 The Alexandra boys such as Lemmy Mabaso, Barney Rachabane, Elias and Jack Lerole, and Spokes Mashiyane arrived on the pennywhistle band scene as juvenile domestic servants from the northern Sotho communities in the Transvaal which possessed highly developed indigenous wind ensembles. Others such as Reggie Msomi, Allen Kwela and Ben Nkosi were born or spent periods of their childhood in rural areas where they herded cattle and made their own umtshingo, later carrying to Johannesburg these reed flute traditions of Zululand. Although it lacks fingerholes, the umtshingo can produce a complete scale of partials 4 to 12 of a harmonic series, sounded by varying the wind pressure and by opening and stopping the end of the tube with a finger. The umtshingo was closely identified with young herdboys, who used the instrument to call their cattle or signal other boys. In the cities, the low cost (5 to 8 shillings), durability, and expanded technical possibilities of the six-hole pennywhistle made it a natural successor to the umtshingo, and because it was regarded as the instrument of ‘herdboys’ and ‘street urchins’, it had initially very low prestige.65 At stokvels during the early 1940s, the juvenile musicians added a home-made guitar (isiginci ), milk-tin rattles, and a one-string bass with a wooden ‘tea-box’ resonator to one or more pennywhistles. Unlike the MacGregors, who copied Scottish marches, they imitated the popular local and American swing jazz orchestras. The standard kwela pennywhistle was made of brass or nickel-plated steel by Hohner in Bb or the longer version in G, or C. There was no thumbhole at the back, and it could produce two octaves (the higher one by over-blowing) in one key only. A knife was used to cut a slit in the centre underside of the fipple, creating a V-shaped air hole (there was no plastic mouthpiece on kwela flutes) to add volume Sophiatown 191

and power. In performance the whistle was rotated in the mouth forty-five degrees and partly covered with the upper lip, head tilted to the left. This provided more airflow for added richness and power, and flattened the instrument so that Bb became A. In addition to the two octaves, young Africans developed a fingering system that allowed them to produce ‘glides, blue-notes and chromatic passing notes in a combined technique of fingering and blowing which goes beyond the factory-tuned seven-note diatonic scale’.66 Brought up on marabi and the clarinet of Americans like Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman and local reed men such as Zakes Nkosi, they developed an authentic, highly vocal style of jazz improvisation within African urban music. Drawing from available materials in much the same way as the shebeen musicians did, they extended marabi, tsaba-tsaba and other styles that were the basis of local ‘African’ jazz styles in new directions. A blend of indigenous and imported musical elements into a unified form based on African principles: this was kwela. The difference, as Lara Allen explains, was in the instrumentation of pennywhistle, guitar, and ‘tea-box’ bass, the swing rhythm, and the characteristic melody motifs and their two-part repeated structure in kwela.67 The famous pennywhistler Spokes Mashiyane’s version of the old marabi song ‘Sponono’ is a good example of a marabi melody swung to a kwela rhythm, an important way station to ‘African jazz’.68 During the 1950s pennywhistle music and dance parties were a major recreational activity of young urban Africans, spurred on by the recordings of Little Lemmy Mabaso’s Alex Junior Bright Boys and Spokes Mashiyane’s Big Five. Like other popular musical styles too, it generated a distinctive dance form – patha patha (touch touch) – later made world famous by Miriam Makeba’s recording of the song of the same name. This was an individualised, cheerfully sexy form of jive dancing for young people in which partners alternately touched each other all over the body with their hands, in time with the rhythm. The dancers often shouted the word ‘kwela’ (Zulu: ‘climb on’, ‘get up’) as an inducement to others to join in. It appears, however, that the term was not clearly or widely associated with the music itself until the release of the recording ‘Tom Hark’ (Columbia YE164) by Elias Lerole and his Zig-Zag Flutes in 1956. The record begins with a short scene spoken in the Afrikaans-based urban African slang dialect, flytaal. A gang of street-corner gamblers pack up their dice and pull out their innocent-looking pennywhistles at the sight of a police van. One shouts ‘Daar kom die kwela-kwela’ – the African name for these large pick-up vans, but ‘loaded’ as well with the double meaning of ‘hey, get up, Africa’. Some Africans argued that it was local whites, who by 1956 were buying pennywhistle recordings also, rather than Africans, who first picked out the word ‘kwela’ from ‘Tom Hark’ and used it as a general term for the music. 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 192 In Township Tonight

international recognition. The influence of the recording industry was evident in kwela street performance, as pennywhistlers walked about the streets playing requests for ‘a tickey [three pence] per record’. They identified song tempos as ‘78’ or ‘82’ from the rpm of commercial discs, and ended their street ‘records’ with a fade-out.69 Donald Swanson’s 1950 film, The Magic Garden, one of the first to use African actors – Dolly Rathebe again appeared – and a location setting, featured popular street pennywhistler Willard Cele playing his own compositions in an Alexandra street. Later released as ‘Pennywhistle Blues’ and ‘Pennywhistle Boogie’ (Gallotone GE1123), they were highly popular with African audiences, but when the more marabi-based melodies of kwela appeared, these pennywhistle versions of American jazz standards disappeared into obscurity along with Cele himself. Recognition by the entertainment media greatly increased the respectability of pennywhistle music among many urban Africans, who now began to regard it as an authentic expression of their urban culture rather than as an indolent pastime of juvenile delinquents.70 The young kwela musicians had suffered from the low reputation of the pennywhistle, and worked hard to gain some respect for their instrument. Their older competitors, the jazzmen, saw kwela players as jumped-up country boys playing foolish imitations, worse even than the ‘backward’ migrant workers, whose neo-traditional styles at least had obvious and deep rural roots. The New Africanist journalists like Walter Nhlapo, however, emphasised the connection between the pennywhistle and rural reed-pipes, and so promoted the idea of the pennywhistle as an African instrument, just as the acoustic guitar and concertina had become ‘traditional’ for the migrants. Ultimately, though, it was its international status that saved kwela from elite black condemnation. In the wake of overseas success, black nationalist solidarity triumphed over class cultural division, and the elite put aside their chagrin to applaud the kwela boys. From this perspective, kwela with its roots in marabi was African but not rural or tribalist: in reality, it was pure Joburg. Such a perspective was in part a response to the influence of pan-Africanist independence movements in Africa, such as Kwame Nkrumah’s in Ghana. The white government uniformly repressed black social aspirations, yet at the same time needed to undermine the solidarity that was rapidly emerging in response, and so turned to the promotion of an urban tribalism that the black elite virulently rejected. The marabi tradition in the form of kwela was part of their answer to the government’s policy of cultural balkanisation in the 1950s. After all, kwela was not an ‘ethnic’ music in the linguistic or regional sense, and indeed 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. For whites, kwela was a first exposure to township culture. White teenagers, Sophiatown 193

boeremusiek fans, even politicians, responded in diverse ways to it, and best of all, dancers could jitterbug and lindy hop to it. For young liberal whites, it represented a mild form of rebellion, associated with rock ’n’ roll, providing the illusion of a softening of the racial boundary and taking (for them) the hard edges off apartheid. Its overt sexuality had an amusingly unsettling effect upon the Afrikaner establishment, like the blue jeans that the white police associated with ‘communists’.71 In turn, not only kwela musicians but also black urban youth liked rock ’n’ roll and played rock numbers. Then as now, the latest American styles influenced the ‘creative appropriations’ of the townships.72 Among Afrikaans musicians, the famous accordion maestro Nico Carstens recorded several numbers with ‘kwela’ or ‘quela ’ in the title. Carstens and his fellows saw the kwela rhythm as a variant of Cape vastrap, and the association with the idea of fun and entertainment remains, as the current Afrikaans-language variety programme on SABC, called Kwêla, illustrates. The connection enabled Jack Lerole to earn a little money playing boeremusiek on pennywhistles at Afrikaans functions in Johannesburg. Like marabi and tsaba-tsaba, kwela had picked up some rhythms and melodic motifs from boeremusiek and Cape coloured ghommaliedjies, most audible in the vastrap of banjo backing parts. In the realm of musical politics, kwela performers also responded to the Defiance Campaign and the Freedom Charter, the Alexandra Bus Boycott, the Treason Trial, and other landmarks of resistance during the period. Kwela bands like Spokes Mashiyane and his Big Five played at fund-raisers for the trialists, while a group called the Alex Casbahs issued a recording called ‘Azikwelwa’ (‘We Shall Not Ride’), a tribute to the bus boycott. The lyrics are in Zulu, except for ‘They [buses] are not ridden’ (in Sotho), and in English they read: When you walk down Louis Botha [Avenue], you see wonders. Shoes are worn out. People are taking their jackets off. It is hot, and people are walking on foot to work. There are no buses, no motor cars. We shall not ride! They [buses] are not ridden! They [buses] are not ridden! We shall not ride! 73

The kwela era came to an end as the National Party became secure in its arrogance and determination to extend apartheid to its absurd conclusion. Police now harassed street performers for ‘public disturbance’, while pass laws and regulations on liquor, group areas, and ‘separate amenities’ made travelling and playing at night nearly impossible. Pennywhistlers arrested on the street for ‘disrupting traffic’ often had to 194 In Township Tonight

play for the police to secure their release, and ‘musician’ was not a recognised profession. Even the record companies who built their black catalogues on kwela and African jazz were unwilling to pay the 45 shillings per month to register their musicians with the Labour Bureau. The white musicians’ union refused membership to blacks and complained of unfair competition from them at white venues. Outside a few facilities such as the Wits University Great Hall, performance spaces in the city itself were now either off limits to black performers or hosted only segregated events. By 1960 the races could no longer entertain one another publicly, and even coloured and Indian performers were forbidden to play for blacks. 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 and the Immorality Act. Spokes even had to refuse employment teaching white youngsters the pennywhistle. Just as the removals of the 1920s and 1930s had helped kill marabi, the destruction of ‘black spots’ like Sophiatown, the removals to Soweto, and the sequestration of white audiences destroyed kwela and to some extent even big-band jazz. In this setting, politics and music mixed in an atmosphere of general social resistance and submerged desires for freedom. Kwela was simply a part of black life, and black life in Johannesburg was, as African-American poet Langston Hughes put it, a dream deferred. While few musicians were prepared to risk formal political activism, groups like Ntemi Piliso’s Alexandra All-Star Band overtly supported and played for the ANC, while Spokes and his Big Five did benefits for the Treason trialists. And whenever there was an event of moment involving blacks, musicians sang about it on record, with the collaboration of the record companies, who found that topical issues enhanced sales. Jack Lerole commented, referring to the spoken introductions regularly featured on kwela recordings: ‘Not to say we were protesting, but we are reminding them of our day by day life … I have seen lots of sad things happening around me. I compose music that fits in that situation, but I don’t say – I’m just protesting silently but in music.’74 Allen was told that even the patha patha dance doubled as a sexually satiric mime of police frisking.75 Meanwhile, across town on ‘easy street’ the white Liberal Party author Alan Paton championed kwela and black culture for political reasons, and invited the pennywhistlers to perform at their social affairs as an implicit means of shaming the government. Simply by virtue of crossing the colour bar and the international boundary, kwela had political effect in defiance of apartheid. And it was the pennywhistle bands, rather than the large swing orchestras and jazz vocalists, who were the first urban African recording artists to become widely popular among whites as well as blacks. The success of ‘Tom Hark’ in the United Kingdom (Columbia DB4109), where it was used as the Sophiatown 195

theme for a TV series called The Killing Stones and its jazz orchestration by clarinettist Ted Heath, greatly enhanced the popularity of kwela in South Africa.76 Media distribution, both at home and abroad, strongly affected the success and later development of kwela. African talent scouts Cuthbert Mathumba of Troubadour Records and Walter Nhlapo of Gallo brought young pennywhistle virtuosos such as Elias and Jack Lerole and Spokes Mashiyane into the studios, where they made some of the best-selling records in the history of the local industry. Kwela recordings soared in popularity with maestro Spokes Mashiyane’s first releases, ‘Ace Blues’, ‘Kwela Spokes’ and a pennywhistle ‘Skokiaan’ in 1954. This ‘pennywhistle craze’ was further fuelled by infectiously danceable numbers by Jerry Ndhlovu (‘Jerrypenny Flute’ on the BB Label), Lemmy’s Alex Junior Bright Boys, and Ben Nkosi’s Solven Whistlers. Musically, kwela consisted of a rhythmic ostinato chord sequence or vamp, usually C–F–C–G7 on string bass and guitar – the guitar vamp is a definitive feature of kwela – backed by a standard drum set in place of shakers. Above this was a strong repetitive melodic line played by several pennywhistles. This line was divided into the typically African (and African-American) ‘call-and-response’ (antiphonal) two-phrase, fourbar sequence, and derived ultimately from the phrase structure of traditional gourd bow songs.77 An excellent example of this melodic structure is Jack Lerole’s ‘Lion Killer’. Above the two parts played by the rhythm section and pennywhistles, a solo pennywhistle improvises a third part, following the part structure of traditional vocal music. Along with the lively rhythm, it was these solos that caught the ears of both the South African and international audiences, and made kwela a success. As Allen explains,78 kwela is different from African jazz primarily in the use of the pennywhistle and its peculiar instrumental capabilities. As she puts it, ‘Structurally, kwela music consists of the repetition of a short harmonic cycle over which a series of melodies, usually the length of the cycle, are repeated and varied’.79 The variation of short melodic motifs is more important than harmonic movement, and a common pattern is two motifs alternating with solo passages. Another pattern featured a solo played throughout, over the backing of a pennywhistle chorus contributing ostinato riffs, as in the famous ‘Tom Hark’. The harmonic progression, like that of tsaba-tsaba, is still in the marabi tradition. The composer of kwela is the one who creates the melodic motifs, not the improvised solos. Percival Kirby noted that the pennywhistle made the tempered seven-tone scale popular and familiar to urban Africans, and helped to retire the five-tone scales of indigenous pre-colonial musics, even though pennywhistle players Africanised the timbres and tones.80 Foreign recordings of all sorts, of course, had this effect as well, but not so much among rural-oriented migrant workers like the neo-traditional Zulu guitarists, who did not discard their traditional scales. The distinctive kwela rhythm (on guitar) is 196 In Township Tonight

swung, unlike marabi, producing what Roberts calls a ‘lilting shuffle’.81 So while there is little local rhythm in kwela, ‘loose syncopation comes easily to people whose folksong background is one in which natural word-rhythms colour the phrasing’.82 The pennywhistle was perhaps an ideal instrument on which to build the foundations of an indigenous South African jazz. Despite its relatively low volume and thinness of tone in comparison to the clarinet, the pennywhistle’s very simplicity of construction allowed for a tonal flexibility and vocal quality that were harder to produce on more tonally stable Western band instruments. Players like Jack Lerole eventually had to switch to the saxophone to remain in the professional music business after kwela’s popularity declined. Yet they continued to prefer the pennywhistle because, as Lerole explained, ‘I could master it; I could make it talk any sound I wanted.’83 Since the African jazzmen were the original heroes and the big bands the models of the young pennywhistle groups, it was inevitable that kwela and African jazz would begin to merge as their exponents met in the recording studio. After all, African jazz was still marabi : endlessly repeated, cyclical two- and four-bar chord progressions and improvised solos dancing over American swing. African jazz is Americanised African music, not Africanised American music, no matter how the performers might have seen it. This is the jazz – purists still dispute whether it is strictly jazz – made worldfamous by Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa in America starting in the 1960s. This African jazz was suppressed and driven into exile because it was a music of equality and cosmopolitanism, black unity, and not ‘tribalism’. Then too, jazz was the music of oppressed black Americans, and South African exponents were quick to express the parallel.84 Politically, African jazz was in the mass audience tradition, shadowing the emergence of the ANC as mass-based political organisation in the early 1950s. Localised jazz also validated the black consciousness that was promoted to overcome class division among blacks at a time of rapid expansion of African urban working class and the trade unions. ‘New Africanism’ advocated pride in and incorporation of indigenous features in black urban performance, and African jazz provided an ideal example of an alternative ‘African’ modernity.85 During the 1950s, studios used professional jazz musicians to back the pennywhistlers, adding saxophone and piano to kwela instrumentation. Though they preferred to play American music, many jazzmen admired the inventive virtuosity of the pennywhistle soloists. Kwela was recognised as the basis of a local style that could compete commercially with imported music. Musically illiterate jazz players who had performed marabi on the pennywhistle as youngsters readily adapted to the new style, creating a kwela-jazz in which the pennywhistle was replaced by the saxophone. On guitar, Alan Kwela played a more jazzy, swing kwela guitar on ‘Year 1962 Blues’. As the era of street kwela ended, jazz instrumentation began to dominate in the Sophiatown 197

studio. This changed the musical relations of production, with heavier studio backing groups and better-trained, more versatile white professionals now the norm. After all, the faces of the white studio players didn’t have to appear on record sleeves. Overseas audiences had taken only a passing interest in the pennywhistle. For urban Africans, this reinforced its ultimate classification as a child’s instrument. Even the great Spokes Mashiyane began to use jazzmen like Dugmore Silinga in the studio, ultimately discarding his beloved pennywhistle for the saxophone (New Sounds of Africa) (Fiesta FLP 1358-B). In actual fact, the new jazz-kwela style was already crystallising by 1950. Innovators included Ntemi Piliso and his Alexandra All-Star Band as well as the Jazz Maniacs, whose popular recording ‘Majuba’, promoted by a Todd Matshikiza review, gave a generic name to the style. By 1954 even the pennywhistlers were described as performing in ‘majuba tempo’.86 In the domain of cultural politics, kwela, even more than African jazz, put urban black culture on the global as well as local map, proclaiming that black workers arriving in town were there to stay. This was a sound that helped create as well as secure an urban identity – one perpetually in flux because the system repressed the black elite and forced common cause with the workers and the poor. This was musical politics in its most profound counter-hegemonic sense. With the help of Spokes Mashiyane and his comrades, as well as international exposure, musical assertions of creative humanity were used to advance political consciousness. Kwela too was a hopeful rhythm amidst the hell of the 1950s, and part of the Sophiatown ‘Kofifi’ spirit, even if jazz was played on the location’s gramophones far more often than kwela or migrants’ music. After all, Africa is, audibly, the common root of them all. Kwela represented both individual aspiration and black communality, it was African yet citified, South African and African-American. Created in the location streets for the world at large, it was, as Ntemi Piliso called it, an African answer to the blues.87 Even as the kwela era ended and Sophiatown was bulldozed into memory, kwela was still performed on stage with Ike Brooks’s Zonk! and Alf Herbert’s African Jazz and Variety shows. The Union of Southern African Artists included Ben Nkosi, Barney Rachabane, and Spokes Mashiyane in their Township Jazz and In Township Tonight! shows. Their production Dorkay Jazz in 1958 featured Lemmy Mabaso and the Alex Junior Bright Boys along with Miriam Makeba and the Jazz Dazzlers, an appearance that led to their inclusion in the King Kong musical tour to London in 1960. Jack Lerole toured Europe with a troupe in their wake in 1962–3. Just as important, kwela remained popular in neighbouring African countries long after it died out in South Africa, inspiring renowned exponents such as Malawi’s Donald Kachamba.88 As an epilogue, kwela still basks in the glow of nostalgia for Sophiatown as an 198 In Township Tonight

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. Currently, black ‘Afro-pop’ ensemble Mafikizolo plays this role, recycling kwela melodies, but without the old-fashioned pennywhistle. The late ‘Big Voice Jack’ Lerole, however, did manage 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. Given the role of the entertainment media in the spectacular success of kwela, it would be worthwhile to consider the history of broadcasting for Africans in South Africa. Though black audiences had been listening to white municipal radio stations since the 1920s, broadcasting for Africans only began in 1941 in Durban with a five-minute report of war news in Zulu by King Edward Masinga. This service was extended to Johannesburg and the eastern Cape, increased to fifteen and then thirtyfive minutes, and made available to migrant workers through ground-line rediffusion hook-ups to their hostels. Masinga, a talented writer, introduced African radio drama with the help of the broadcaster and ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey. The first play was Masinga’s musical script of a Zulu folktale, Chief Above and Chief Below (1939), with original songs by the author in traditional idiom. Tracey was a purist, dedicated to rescuing traditional forms from imported and urban musical influences. Musical dramas based on folk sources and rural settings enabled him to insert traditional music into urban radio programming. The plays proved popular, especially among the migrant hostel dwellers. For more urbanised listeners, the Gay Gaieties’ leader J. P. Tutu composed a number of musical plays in Zulu for the Johannesburg studio of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). City musical forms dominated the SABC programmes while the rediffusion hookups emphasised neo-traditional and syncretic styles popular with non-literate workers. Tracey recalled that at first Zulu hostel residents complained about items from other African ethnic groups on ‘their’ service.89 By the late 1940s, however, they admitted enjoying the variety, a reflection of African workers’ increasing ethnic tolerance. The SABC had a regular programme on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, from 9.45 to 10.20 a.m. Its wide variety of African musical styles did not entirely please any sector of the Johannesburg audience. As the only African programme, however, it was extremely popular. Rediffusion was also supposed to help remedy the lack of recreational amenities in the townships, and while it broadcast a good deal of government propaganda, it did feature a lot of music, however much ‘Bantu’ oriented. Rediffusion and the Sophiatown 199

SABC programmes also increased cultural communication, exposing urban Africans to traditional music and migrants to African ‘township jazz’. Radio dramas of all kinds enjoyed general popularity. Following his election to the International Mark Twain Society for his adaptations of Shakespeare in 1953, Masinga’s Zulu translations of King Lear and The Tempest were serialised over SABC.90 By the early 1950s the SABC was presenting different African languages and musical styles on separate days. Once a week, jazz pianist-composer Gideon Nxumalo entertained urban Africans with his regular feature, This Is Bantu Jazz. Nxumalo was principally responsible for the wide distribution of a new term for majuba African jazz, mbaqanga. This term, coined by Jazz Maniacs’ trumpeter Michael Xaba, originally referred in Zulu to a kind of traditional steamed maize bread. Among musicians, it meant that the music was both the Africans’ own, the homely cultural sustenance of the townships, and the popular working-class source of the musicians’ ‘daily bread’. In the music of the Maniacs and the Harlem Swingsters, this blend of African melody, Zulu ndlamu dance rhythms, marabi, and jazz became the classic, unmistakable form South Africans still know and love, called ‘township jazz’. Meanwhile, a simplified version of the style appeared known as msakazo, a less complimentary term meaning ‘broadcast’, and intended as a criticism of musical programming for Africans. The record companies, taking advantage of the commercial possibilities of radio, processed or ‘mass-produced’ the music in the studios, pursuing a common denominator of urban African taste. In 1952, a commercial company installed a rediffusion service in Soweto’s Orlando township, even though residents objected that Orlando needed lights, schools, paved streets and adequate housing more than rediffusion.91 The ANC feared (rightly) that radio would become an instrument of government propaganda. Others attacked it as a ‘back-to-the-kraal, apartheid and never-never-land service’ that used African languages (rather than English) and migrant and msakazo music in a ‘develop-along-your-own-lines pattern’.92 The coordinated expansion of radio and recording studios for Africans increasingly swallowed up the performers. African journalists decried white exploitation and urged greater community support for artists.93 In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, political and social pressures pushed professional African artists into the arms of white entrepreneurs. As early as the Second World War, a few African bands performed unofficially at white nightclubs in Johannesburg. In 1942, white musicians who feared cut-rate African competition managed to get the Jazz Maniacs expelled from the Paradise Nightclub, claiming that the band were not members of the fledgling white musicians’ union. Offering to join the union and pay dues, the Maniacs found themselves barred from the union also.94 One white band even tried to steal the Jazz Maniacs’ name and 200 In Township Tonight

sued the black band over it, saying they would ‘spoil’ the name, since they were not musically literate – a false charge. The Maniacs proved their competence in an open-air competition and it was ruled they could keep their name.95 African bands did continue to find work at white clubs until the late 1950s, but their position remained tenuous and insecure. In the meantime, the population of Johannesburg continued to grow. Whites agitated for the removal of the Western Areas and other so-called ‘black spots’ located in the path of white expansion. In 1945 yet another amendment to the Urban Areas Act greatly increased the pressure on urban African society by strengthening influx control regulations. Professional performance without white supervision was not considered ‘gainful employment’, and artists suffered along with the unemployed from the rigid application of the pass laws. Most important, these pressures led to a major expansion of criminal activity in the African areas. General socio-legal insecurity among urban Africans had by the late 1940s produced a new anti-social type, the tsotsi. Tsotsis were originally young, city-bred African ‘confidence men’ able to speak some English and Afrikaans and to manipulate the white system. Aided by female counterparts called noasisas (‘watchers’)96, the tsotsis initially relied more upon their wits than violence to plunder the white economy. The term ‘tsotsi’ itself was an urban African pronunciation of ‘zoot suit’, a symbol of urban sophistication drawn from American popular culture, with its ready money and flashy clothes. Tsotsis were part of the ethnically mixed society of the locations. Among themselves they spoke the Afrikaans dialect flytaal or mensetaal, which by the late 1940s had become known more widely as tsotsitaal. Borrowing heavily from American slang, Johannesburg tsotsitaal was eventually spoken by most urban workers; and became the language of African working-class culture. As conditions worsened, tsotsis turned to robbery, mugging and other violent crimes. Meanwhile, the label broadened to include all urban criminals except for the gangs of migrants such as the marashea or MaRussia (Russians) and Amalaita. The tsotsis were successors to the infamous Blue Nines. During the 1950s, the tsotsis developed into a well-organised counter-society of urban gangs who adopted fashions pictured in Esquire magazine and copied the style of American cinema gangsters like Richard Widmark in Street with No Name. Their ethos was best expressed in Willard Motley’s locally popular American crime novel Knock on Any Door: ‘Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse’.97 Major gangs such as the Americans, Berliners, Koreans, and Green Arrows marked out territories over which they tried to exercise general control. The Americans controlled much of the criminal activity in Sophiatown, and their encounters with rival gangs such as the Spoilers of Pimville often ended in bloodshed. Alexandra Township’s dreaded Sophiatown 201

Msomi gang began as vigilantes ‘protecting’ the community, but quickly turned into a paramilitary criminal administration, holding public executions in the streets of the location. The Sophiatown gangs were among the most culturally sophisticated, and integrated themselves into the socio-economic life of their community. Working-class urbanites lived with violence and even romanticised the gangs. They saw them as leaders of their own ‘shebeen society’, culture heroes courageous and clever enough to become wealthy at the expense of whites. The gangsters and tsotsis themselves greatly admired professional jazz musicians, who expressed their urban lifestyle. Gang leaders often controlled local cinemas and concert halls, where they sponsored shows. Bands counted specific gangs among their local followings, and certain venues became the ‘strongholds’ of particular bands. The Jig Club in Western Native Township, for example, was hospitable only to the Jazz Maniacs and Harlem Swingsters; it was a courageous group of players who consented to perform there in their stead. Top bands like the Maniacs and Swingsters, and vocal groups like the Manhattan Brothers and African Inkspots, were considered great rivals, and their appearance on the same bill could cause a near riot. As might be expected, criminal involvement damaged professional performance. Gangs that supported one band often tried to suppress others, and many shows turned into violent confrontations as tsotsis attacking the musicians were met by others rising to their defence.98 Gangsters often pressed their friendship on popular musicians as a means of enhancing their own prestige. Zuluboy Cele, murdered in 1944, was only one of numerous performers who suffered from involvement with gangsters. Female vocalists were particularly vulnerable. Miriam Makeba recalled in a 1962 interview ‘the nights when thugs would invade dance halls and “claim” them as girlfriends for the greater glory of appearing in public with them’.99 While Makeba was never actually kidnapped, other nationally popular performers such as Dolly Rathebe, Thoko Thomo, and Susan Gabashane were all victims of kidnapping or assault during the early 1950s. Indeed, it was after a stabbing by a jealous fan that Dolly Rathebe retired at the height of her career and moved from Sophiatown to Port Elizabeth in the eastern Cape. Ordinary working-class and middle-class concert-goers began to stay away out of fear of knife-wielding tsotsis. Major shows regularly failed to make a profit, and musicians went unpaid when tsotsis chased dance-hall patrons or forced bands to play at knife point until 6 a.m. The Merry Blackbirds, who preferred inner-city venues and often played for white audiences anyway, vowed never again to play in the black areas. While violence was destroying concerts and dances in the locations, the police made it increasingly more difficult for Africans to use concert halls in the city centre. The destruction by fire of the Ritz Palais de Danse, Inchcape Hall, in November 1951, 202 In Township Tonight

both hastened and symbolised the decline of the independent African entertainment world. Apart from the BMSC and white clubs, well-supervised venues were no longer easy to find. This situation prompted many bands to undertake extended tours of towns around the country; but pass regulations, organisational problems, entertainment taxes, and travel expenses limited their chances of success. Combined with inevitable personality conflicts and strains on home life, these difficulties made tours a threat to group loyalty. Many bands disintegrated on the road and never re-formed. The decline of large dance orchestras in America in the 1950s helped to produce a similar trend in South Africa. More directly responsible for the death of South Africa’s big bands, however, were the destruction of the Western Areas and regulations forbidding Africans to appear at venues where liquor was served. As Sophiatown and its dance halls were destroyed, musicians were shut out of the inner-city clubs and halls, and jazz was gradually deprived of its multi-racial audience. At the root of these difficulties was the government’s relentless effort to destabilise urban African society and to deny Africans any hope of permanent identification with the urban environment. In 1948, the National Party took control of Parliament and set about institutionalising and systematising the racial segregation and stratification of South African society. The Group Areas Act of 1950 enforced residential segregation, shifting large numbers of black people into separate living areas. The Western Areas Resettlement Act of 1953 signalled the end of African hopes for social recognition. Sophiatown was to be destroyed and its residents moved to the new government townships of Soweto, there to be divided according to language group. Johannesburg Africans put up stiff cultural resistance to this policy. Despite the disruptions, the 1950s were a period of great activity and achievement in black music and theatre. Jive dancers competed aggressively at a multitude of venues every weekend. The constant changing of band names and personnel actually reflected the splitting and shuffling of band members to cover multiple bookings.100 Saxophonist Zakes Nkosi’s City Jazz Nine was originally formed by some members of the Jazz Maniacs who wanted to play for afternoon stokvel parties in the locations, and they later recorded on their own. Internal quarrels in the bands centred more on money, authority and professional reliability than on antagonism between rival artists. Disregarding the dangers, large numbers of followers travelled twenty or thirty miles to hear their favourite bands at outlying townships. Recordings had not dampened enthusiasm for live music; on the contrary, fans often attended concerts hoping to hear a favourite band perform its latest release. Bands acquired their devoted followings primarily by showing off their creative virtuosity. While the Manhattan Brothers were a Pimville troupe and the Jazz Maniacs Sophiatown 203

a Sophiatown band, every location had its own favourite soloist or ‘hero’ on each of the solo instruments. Jazz skills brought prestige, solo improvisation was encouraged, and widespread musical literacy helped bands to bridge the social gap between their different audiences. In the early hours of the morning, musicians would put away their written orchestrations of tunes like Count Basie’s ‘One O’Clock Jump’ and ‘Bring It Back Home’ with African jazz (mbaqanga) and hot solo choruses. These torrid displays gained the bands and players their ranks of loyal followers. Audiences based their judgements on local compositions with African musical features, displaying their approval with fierce excitement. These late-night ‘do or die’ sessions also helped forge marabi, kwela, and American jazz into mbaqanga, the people’s own jazz, an expression and celebration of their new cultural identity. The 1950s were the heyday of passive resistance and anti-pass campaigns, and each had its special protest songs.101 Despite censorship, musicians and African broadcasters used recordings to spread the message and inspiration of protest, and heartened the resistance. The successful Alexandra Bus Boycott of 1957 inspired ‘Azikwelwa’ (‘We Shall Not Ride’), banned by the SABC, and broadcaster Joseph Makhema was dismissed for playing Masiza’s ‘Vukani Mawethu’ (‘Awake My People’) over the radio. The Sophiatown removals, begun in February 1955, were bitterly protested in the Sun Valley Sisters’ ‘Bye Bye Sophiatown’, and ‘Asibadali’ (‘We Aren’t Paying’; that is, rent in the municipal townships) (RCA 74042). Residents sang Strike Vilakazi’s ‘Meadowlands’ as government trucks hauled their belongings away to Meadowlands in Soweto.102 Meanwhile, performers continued to use song lyrics to comment upon social issues and behaviour within the urban African community itself, a tradition established by Reuben Caluza with his recordings for HMV in 1930. Their targets were the location police (for example, ‘Black List’ by the Three Fools, BB1014), tsotsis, prostitution, and physical and social conditions in the African areas. The performers’ expression of an urban African cultural identity and values contributed to united political action.103 Public performances became occasions for expressing political solidarity. At the 1949 Durban première of the first commercial film about urban Africans, Jim Comes to Joburg, its star, Dolly Rathebe, was greeted by a crowd shouting the ANC Defiance Campaign slogan, ‘Mayibuye iAfrika’ (‘Come Back, Africa!’).104 While performers to some degree maintained their role as interpreters, spokesmen, and representatives of their community, apartheid and internal social disruption were threatening to rob urban Africans of their remaining professional and, by extension, cultural autonomy. During the 1950s, both working-class and middle-class performers had to rely increasingly upon white producers and management for the advancement 204 In Township Tonight

of their careers in live performance as well as recording and broadcasting. Most professional musicians admired American jazz, but only a few acquired the reading skills necessary to perform imported orchestrations. At the same time, local record sales rose when the kwela pennywhistlers brought their urban African transformations of popular American styles to the studios. Turning kwela into mbaqanga, top bands needed no musical literacy to produce best-selling recordings such as ‘Baby Come Duze’ by former pennywhistler Ntemi Piliso’s Alexandra All-Star Band. Yet without royalty agreements (and as today’s musicians can tell you, often even with them), recording alone could not provide an adequate income. Musicians had either to take non-performance employment or to depend on intermittent studio freelancing as sidemen. When royalty and copyright conventions did appear in South Africa in the late 1950s (about a decade after they became the industry norm in the United States), then, as now, they benefited recording companies rather than performers. Like African labourers, musicians could neither join white unions nor form their own collective bargaining agencies and were thus at a serious disadvantage in dealing with the white entertainment industry. Record companies often refused to pay royalties, citing technicalities or alleged contract violations, as was the case with ‘Baby Come Duze’. A case in point is that of Spokes Mashiyane, pennywhistler turned mbaqanga saxophonist, and one of the first African musicians to become widely known among whites. Though his recordings made the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars for Trutone, his flat fees for each one ranged from the equivalent of seven to fifty dollars. He could not earn a living through recording, so he performed at white parties and public occasions, helped by white management.105 When he pressed his demand for royalties, he was assaulted by thugs. Finally, the fledgling Union of Southern African Artists helped, and Mashiyane’s income soared because of the royalty provisions in his new contract with Gallo in 1958. More important for the development of urban African music was the new studio production system. Earlier, in the late 1930s, performers had accused Griffiths Motsieloa, the Gallo talent scout, of exploiting them economically. But there was no question of interference with their music-making, either from him or from his successor, Walter Nhlapo, who was respected among musicians for his fairness and concern for their welfare. Then in the early 1950s, Troubador Records hired Cuthbert Mathumba as talent scout/producer, and within six years they commanded 85 per cent of African record sales. Mathumba’s system resembled that of the black producer Clarence Williams in America, who used a stable of salaried musicians to mass-produce dozens of popular blues and jazz recordings during the 1920s.106 Mathumba shifted his musicians around in different recording combinations. Using a standard musical formula, he produced numerous msakazo (‘broadcast’ jazz) recordings popular with urban working-class Sophiatown 205

Africans. Troubador and other companies bought rights to the names of popular bands, so that troublesome members could easily be replaced.107 For the migrants, Mathumba hired neo-traditional players such as the later legendary John Bengu (‘Phuzhushukela’), and urbanised their style by backing them with studio sidemen. Mathumba had little use for the literate Sophiatown jazzmen. The jazz audience, declining in an age of American ‘bop’ and ‘cool’ in any case, preferred imported recordings. Skilled professional jazz players and singers had three alternatives. They could leave the studios and the professional music world, adapt to the mbaqanga trend in popular music, or seek a wider multi-racial and international audience. Many retired, especially members of stage song-and-dance companies who had depended so greatly on swing orchestral music and live performance. Those who remained in the studios were told to stick close to super-hits like ‘Pola Rapopo’ (‘Sit Down Old Man’), a monotonous, formulaic msakazo released by Kenneth Mangala in 1955 (Troubador AFC30). In response, jazzmen combined msakazo with jazz improvisation, much as they had formerly done in the dance halls. They created an authentic and complex mbaqanga or Africanised jazz that appealed broadly to all classes of Africans. Among these recording units were ‘King Force’ Silgee’s Jazz Maniacs Quintet (‘Tickey Line’) (Gallotone GB1992); the King Cole Basics (‘Umdudo’) (Gallotone AJ3); and Mackay Davashe’s famous Shantytown Sextet, with alto virtuoso Kippie Moeketsi, Jacob Lepere, (bass), Norman Martin, (drums), General Duze, (guitar), Boycie Gwele, (piano), and Mackay himself on tenor (‘Msakazo’) (Gallotone GB1955). Female vocal groups also took part in the studio-sponsored indigenisation of jazz. The vocal jive ensemble the Quad Sisters, formed by songbird Thandi Mpambani Klaasens in mid-1952, was the first women’s close-harmony group to make recordings (with Strike Vilakazi at Trutone) and develop a high profile. Thandi, accompanied by Sol Klaaste on piano, did all the musical arrangements and was largely responsible for repertoire and translations of cover versions. Although they also performed and recorded their own compositions, the Quad Sisters became most famous for their vernacular (mostly Xhosa) versions of popular American songs such as ‘Ndizula Nomhlaba’ (XU 204).108 Miriam Makeba, who became an international star after calypso star Harry Belafonte promoted her, following her arrival in New York in 1961, first built her local reputation with mbaqanga as lead singer with the Manhattan Brothers, with whom she recorded such lasting favourites as ‘Ntyilo Ntyilo’ and ‘Lakutshona Ilanga’, and later with her own female quartet, the Skylarks (‘Lalani Bantwana’) (Gallo-New Sound GB2999). The Skylarks included three other great talents: the future international sensation Letta Mbulu, Abigail Kubheka, and Mary Rabotapi. To fill the vacuum created by the decline of the independent African concert industry, the record companies hired black cinemas and some of the remaining location 206 In Township Tonight

halls to present their stable of performers. With their superior authority and resources, the companies could provide security for their performers and reduce the potential for violence by keeping audiences seated throughout the show. Along with the elegant suits and tuxedos worn by the Manhattan Brothers and Jazz Maniacs, groups like LoSix performed part of their shows in traditional African costume to entertain less urbanised audiences. Between 1949 and 1957, African jazz vocalists were able to increase their popularity by appearing in local films that dealt with urban African life. Though shown exclusively in black cinemas, all the films depicted Africans from a romanticised liberal white point of view. The single exception was Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back Africa (1957), which portrayed not only the reality of Sophiatown, but also the desperate plight of black workers in South African cities, and was promptly banned. The other films, such as Song of Africa (1953), presented an image of urban Africans as simple-hearted, dogged and irrepressible in the face of hardship which certainly falsified their experience. Even so, Africans were pleased to see their communities and performers represented in this prestigious medium.109 The sense of glamour and excitement that pervaded the Johannesburg black entertainment world in the 1950s was largely created by African journalists like Todd Matshikiza, Walter Nhlapo, Can Themba, Stan Motjuwadi, Casey Motsisi, Henry Nxumalo, Mike Phahlane and others writing for Drum, Bantu World, Zonk! and the Golden City Post. Their evocative and penetrating commentary on the Johannesburg cultural scene helped give black communities a dynamic, resilient self-image and a positive sense of achievement despite the government’s tightening stranglehold on everything they valued. Without these writers, no coherent, authentic account of Sophiatown’s culture would be possible. August 1949, for example, saw the appearance of Zonk!, the pioneer pictorial magazine aimed at an urban African readership. Fortuitously coinciding with the release of Jim Comes to Joburg, the film was featured and female lead Dolly Rathebe’s photograph appeared on the cover, making her South Africa’s first African cover-girl. And so a prominent place for women as well as men in music was established in the pictorial press from the start.110 As Allen puts it, ‘Music held an important place in Sophiatown culture and musicians, like sports stars, were considered leading personalities. The extensive coverage enjoyed by musicians in the pictorial press illustrates their role in the creation and fulfilment of the new urban cultural myth.’111 If this identity was mythical, it was at the same time born of powerful aspirations and desires as well as evident contradictions. The Sophiatown Renaissance man and woman were local and African but also cosmopolitan; indigenous but not ethnically divided; inheritors of black rural tradition but urban, well-heeled, and sophisticated. For better or worse, English – mixed with tsotsitaal – was the language of this renaissance, but as Sophiatown 207

unique talents like Casey Motsisi and Todd Matshikiza brassily showed, it was English in Sophiatown’s own style. Matshikiza, who was at once a composer, pianist, and social as well as musical critic, provided perhaps the most telling example of this prose style, as he broke all the rules of syntax to give his columns the pace and lilt of African jazz. ‘He wrote as he spoke,’ commented his editor at Drum, Anthony Sampson, ‘in a brisk tempo with rhythm in every sentence. He attacked the typewriter like a piano. Our readers loved “Matshikese,” as we called it, which was the way they talked and thought, beating in time with the jazz within them.’ Of course this was word-jazz with an American accent, reflecting Sophiatown’s obsession with America, and in particular African-America.112 Here is a sample: Don’t let this picture fool you. It is the sombre, dolorous and docile portrait of a lively living bubbling brook of a hep cat, Mabel Mafuya. The jazzingest twenty-four inch waist I’ve seen in a recording studio. And what can you get in a wiggly waggly twentyfour inch waist that heps and jives and dashes behind partition to rehearse the next verse in the middle of the recording session? Lots. You get her Troubadour AFC 353 that paints the grim grime of a miner’s life in jumping tones.113

Major changes were brought about in the 1950s by actors within the white cultural industries, who placed themselves in a mediating position between both black and white audiences and black performing artists. Their interposition not only was commercially motivated, but also represented a kind of cultural frontline for liberal politics. Starting in the 1930s with Bertha Slosberg’s show ‘An African Entertainment’, starring the Merry Blackbirds, as well as her unsuccessful efforts to take Mthethwa’s Lucky Stars to London, such promoters operated in both amateur and professional performance fields. While their efforts may have seemed politically ambiguous amid the increasing oppression of apartheid, not all efforts by whites were negative, and until the 1960s possibilities for fruitful interracial cooperation still existed. Reflecting the ongoing concern of liberal whites for urban African social welfare, the bandmaster Marcus Roe and other officials of the Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department began the Johannesburg Bantu Music Festival (JBMF) in 1947. With an impressive list of elite African cultural leaders among its committee members, the festival sought to take over and revitalise the old Eisteddfodau of the Transvaal African Teachers’ Association. Its official aims were: 1 to encourage a love of music and promote talent among the African people; 2 to raise the standard of performance and sense of appreciation; 3 to introduce to Johannesburg audiences the best African and European music.114 208 In Township Tonight

Beginning with six prominent choirs competing under the supervision of choirmaster Lucas Makhema, the JBMF gradually enlarged the programme to eighty-four separate sections. The interracial committee agreed to expand the programme beyond ‘serious’ choral music and include other kinds of performance, including miners’ dancing, ingoma busuku, jazz, brass bands, ballroom dancing, and drama. In the beginning, the JBMF served a genuine need and provided the kind of cultural outlet that urban black South Africans wanted. Hundreds of choirs and other ensembles poured into Johannesburg for the festival, which became the most important national black cultural event of the year, with the winners’ concert held in the City Hall. The key to its initial success was the good will and good relationships between white civic officials and leading blacks. As time went on, restrictive and petty apartheid regulations poisoned the atmosphere and made attempts at interracial cooperation frustrating and sordid. The fate of the JBMF is a good example of how South Africa’s larger tragedy has stunted and embittered its culture as well as its spirit and national health.115 After a few years, working-class Africans began to see the festival as an affair for the ‘whites’ good boys’ of the BMSC, a place where ‘the whites tell us how to perform our music’.116 Certainly, raising ‘the standard of performance’ meant encouraging conformity to European criteria in ballroom and even in African traditional dancing. Middle-class cultural leaders like Khabi Mngoma, a classical musician, music educator, and community arts activist involved in the festival, complained that programme and artistic decisions were indeed made by whites, albeit with good intentions. In frustration, Mngoma and author Ezekiel Mphahlele formed the Syndicate of African Artists, an African community-based performing arts group dedicated to African classical music and literary drama in Soweto. Harassed by police and government from the start, the Syndicate turned to political agitation. Mngoma appealed to urban Africans: ‘We are beginning to create a cultural front in our struggle towards self-determination and we rely on you to help.’117 Their magazine of cultural opinion, Voice of Africa, was banned in 1952, and Syndicate members were brought to court for subversion. Still, the organisation was perhaps the first formal urban cultural movement actively promoting the cultural identity and socio-political aspirations of Johannesburg’s blacks. The Syndicate sponsored concerts by South Africa’s black Western classical musicians and political plays such as Lucas Nkosi’s Now I Know. When possible, they paid their performers in an effort to counteract the patronising taint of amateurism attached to the trophies awarded by the JBMF to mine dancers and classical pianists alike. By 1954, the JBMF’s artistic co-ordinator, Lucas Makhema, saw that whites were replacing blacks in the NEAD and left to become a choirmaster in Bulawayo ‘before I was booted out’.118 Until 1956, the JBMF remained a major cultural event for the African middle class. It commissioned such works as Todd Matshikiza’s Xhosa cantata, Sophiatown 209

Uxolo, for 200 voices and a seventy-piece African brass band. In that year, however, resentment over the shoddy arrangements for segregated concerts for blacks by foreign classical artists including Dame Margot Fonteyn, Yehudi Menuhin, La Scala Opera, and the London Symphony Orchestra poisoned the spirit of the festival. Middleclass Africans, sharing the general bitterness over the destruction of Sophiatown, lost interest in the festival, which they now regarded as an attempt to divert Africans’ attention from their real problems. Professional African jazz musicians understandably disliked both the white artistic management, misguided if well-meaning, and the ethos of amateurism at the JBMF. The jazz band and instrumental soloist competitions at the festival in 1950 drew no entrants, and by 1953 the jazz category was dropped altogether. Jazz players had little interest in rehearsing a ‘set piece’ in pursuit of a trophy when recordings and jive performances in the white-controlled entertainment field paid real money. It was as if the organisers were not aware that professional black show business existed. Indeed, in a sense this misconception was tragically prophetic. As Separate Amenities regulations came into force, professional opportunities for black performers were dwindling, and permits to perform at white nightclubs, private parties and university concerts became harder to obtain. The reality of that era was that the urban black stage, just as in the United States, still required multiple or multi-racial audiences to sustain it. This was not in principle a bad thing, except in the minds of the ruling white supremacists. Even so, a few concert troupes, including the Synco Fans and Gay Gaieties, kept stage variety traditions alive. In 1951, Eric Nomvete’s Foundation Follies visited Johannesburg from East London. Sponsored by the National War Memorial Health Foundation, they were the first professional African company to perform at the City Hall in Johannesburg. The single most important influence on the development of black South African musical stage work during the 1950s, as Allen rightly argues, was the establishment of a new audience – white South Africans.119 The new audience augmented the influence of commerce and politics on stage performance, and changed the ways in which the stage operated as a site both for the expression and mediation of identity, and for the enactment and contestation of power relations. In 1952, a white show promoter and horse-racing ‘enthusiast’ named Alfred Herbert organised his first African Jazz and Variety show at Johannesburg’s Windmill Theatre, presenting some of the city’s best black performers before white audiences. The promise of regular pay and exposure to a wider audience attracted the professionals, particularly since Herbert allowed them to organise their own programme, based on the established African stage company format. The show was highly successful, in large part because Herbert took on the best acts and did not interfere with their styles and 210 In Township Tonight

choices in performance. Like Ike Brooks, Herbert himself was a product of the South African Anglo-Jewish music hall tradition. He began to take a more sophisticated directorial approach, tailoring succeeding shows to the tastes of his liberal white and largely Jewish audience. By 1956, African Jazz and Variety was featuring Dolly Rathebe singing in Yiddish. The show’s programmes for the late 1950s read like a roster of the most famous names in black Johannesburg show business, and featured performers were paid £35 a week. As a producer, Herbert was popular with his performers, even though his propensity for gambling away the profits at the racetrack meant they might not be paid, and on a few occasions he abandoned them to their own devices when tours to Central and East Africa or others parts of southern Africa ran into financial trouble. Nevertheless, his efforts to maintain their personal as well as professional lives on an even keel and the lack of other performance opportunities kept some superb performers with his outfit until the mid-1960s. Herbert’s later directorial influence on the development of urban African performing arts and on the relation of professional performers to the African community was more significantly harmful than his financial carelessness. Under pressure to please a dwindling white public, African Jazz and Variety became more a burlesque than a showcase for urban African professional artistry. In 1959, the show included a rural pastiche written by Herbert entitled ‘Kraal Tone Poem’, presenting ‘the songs, the dances, the life and the laughter from the home of jazz, the Kraal’.120 Though billed as an ‘original vernacular ethnic’ show, its central feature was ‘sexy dancing [by] a crowd of snappy-looking African lovelies clad in leopard-skin bikinis’.121. Herbert described his 1961 show, Drums of Africa, as showing off ‘the sexulating rawness and glamour of some of the most beautiful non-European women’.122 Among the most famous of these eye-catching routines was Ruth Hlela’s self-choreographed ‘snake dance’, an instant sensation, later given a delicious new flavour by Dottie Tiyo. None of these talents, of course, was shown to blacks. After so many years of fruitful collaboration, black performers could sadly no longer address the cultural preferences and aspirations of black city people under Herbert’s direction. Perhaps it may be said it was not entirely his fault. Professional artists who wanted to reach out beyond their local audience, however, had few alternatives. Only a white employer could easily get performance permits and the vital ‘musicians’ pass’ entitling performers to ‘go to any town under the European promoter, who is held responsible for their activities’.123 Performers were caught between the recording studios and the promoters in an apartheid society where show business was governed by the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act. Walter Nhlapo advised that ‘unless music lovers band together and offer employment to musicians in the form of concerts and record clubs, commercialism will kill music as we know it’.124 Sophiatown 211

Sophiatown’s culturally self-conscious, American-oriented elite had taken steps to support local jazz by forming the Sophiatown Modern Jazz Club in 1955. By that time, the bebop styles of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were a powerful influence on local musicians. A number of innovative groups were playing the new jazz, including Mackay Davashe’s Shantytown Sextet, and trumpeter Elijah Nkonyane’s Elijah Rhythm Kings. During the next two years, led by jazz enthusiast Cameron ‘Pinocchio’ Mokgaleng, the Modern Jazz Club sponsored a series of well-organised Sunday ‘jam sessions’ at the Odin Cinema, Sophiatown. After the initial session, ‘Jazz at the Odin’ involved white as well as black musicians. The series was a milestone for jazz and creative interaction across racial lines in South African music. This new music was not well understood by the urban African population as a whole. Yet the prestige of jazz and of black American performance culture drew in the most urbanised people of Sophiatown. To appreciate jazz was a mark of urban sophistication and social status, even among tsotsis and gangsters; and by the late 1950s a genuine appreciation of the new styles had taken hold. By then, however, the Modern Jazz Club was dying along with Sophiatown. Forced to leave Johannesburg because of pass regulations, Pinocchio Mokgaleng fled into bitter exile in Britain. The Odin Cinema was Sophiatown’s answer to the elite BMSC, not only showing the latest African-American musical films, but also hosting mass political meetings, and providing a platform for a range of musical styles from swing and African jazz to classical concerts, vaudeville and variety shows. The Odin institution that was to play the greatest part in nurturing the development of young musicians was the talent competitions held every Tuesday night. Songbirds Dolly Rathebe and Thandi Klaasens initially honed their skills on the Odin stage. It was not an easy place to start, for the Odin quickly acquired a reputation for the most demanding and rowdy audiences on the Reef. Describing a talent night, Bantu World reported: Popular turns were given a tumultuous ovation. The women danced up and down in their seats, the men flung their hats into the air. Spontaneous, deafening applause broke out all over the house. Pennies rattled on the stage. And when the turn was over they encored persistently! But woe betide the not-so-goods! After a minute of a comparatively mediocre turn the audience became restless … Feet shuffled and many walked out to the adjoining milk bar. Cat calls broke out from the back of the house.125

Even more important was the famous, history-making ‘Jazz at the Odin’ series in the mid-1950s. Although they involved individual musicians and not formal bands, the sessions did lead to the formation of historic ensembles such the bebop stylists the Jazz Epistles (Jazz Epistles: Verse 1) (Continental 14.ABC18341), who established an 212 In Township Tonight

influential ‘mainstream’ modern jazz movement that claimed national attention among urban black South Africans during the 1960s. The Epistles included such future jazz legends as Dollar Brand (piano), Kippie Moeketsi (alto), Jonas Gwangwa (trombone), Hugh Masekela (trumpet), Johnny Gertse, (guitar) and Early Mabuza (drums). During the late 1950s, and even into the 1960s, interracial cooperation helped to keep musical professionalism alive in South African jazz and set the stage for international recognition of black South African performers. Indeed, jazz musicians led the movement for politically conscious interracial collaboration among musicians, most notably the Blue Notes, led by Chris McGregor, who were ultimately driven into a European exile from which they never returned. In the midst of this politically charged atmosphere stood the Anglican missionary Father Trevor Huddleston, an energetic religious leader, social worker, educator, fund-raiser, and champion of urban African rights, who took an active interest in the welfare of black performing artists in Johannesburg. His encouragement of Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, and many others led to the formation of the Huddleston Jazz Band during the 1950s. When Huddleston was recalled by his superiors (to avoid further trouble with the apartheid authorities) in 1954, a farewell concert attracted more than 200 performers and netted more than four thousand dollars for its sponsor, the newly formed Union of Southern African Artists (‘Union Artists’ or USAA). Union Artists began as an interracial effort to protect the professional rights of black performers. Under the leadership of clothing workers’ trade unionist, Guy Routh and, later, the theatrical personality Ian Bernhardt, Union Artists successfully arranged royalty payments to Solomon Linda, Spokes Mashiyane, and Mackay Davashe. They also engineered the boycott by British Equity of all segregated shows in South Africa. After Routh departed for England, Bernhardt emphasised the promotional aspects of Union Artists. The Huddleston concert provided the means to acquire permanent premises in Dorkay House, down on Eloff Street Extension near Johannesburg’s Faraday Station. There Bernhardt initiated a programme to locate, train, and present African musical performers, before a multi-racial audience. So began a series of talent contests and small ‘festivals’ leading to the production of the famous Township Jazz and Dorkay Jazz concert series that began at Selborne Hall in 1957 and continued until 1966. The concerts were highly successful, with Union Artists competing with Alf Herbert for talent, and many top African performers including Dolly Rathebe, Thandi Klaasens, Letta Mbulu, Sophie Mgcina, Patience Gcwabe, the Jazz Epistles, and Jazz Dazzlers appeared. Among the early highlights was a benefit in 1957 for the families of the murdered journalist Henry ‘Mr Drum’ Nxumalo and stage comedian Victor Mkhize, who died in a car crash while on tour. Typically, city government took one-third of the proceeds as entertainment tax. Sophiatown 213

These concerts allowed musicians to perform in secure, well-organised circumstances, without significant artistic interference from whites, as Alf Herbert had done initially. Though audiences were segregated, the series did gain African jazz musicians a wider multi-racial following and greatly revived interest in jazz within the Johannesburg black community. In addition to concerts, Union Artists organised the African Music and Drama Association (AMDA) at Dorkay House, where performers such as Wilson Silgee enthusiastically instructed their younger colleagues. Some performers accused Union Artists of exploitation and its African management committee members of favouritism, but most were pleased with their artistic freedom and broadened opportunities. Artists received some cash for concert appearances, while others resented the condescending taint of amateurism implicit in the standard format of the ‘talent search’. Somehow talent was always being sought and never finally identified, or as pianist Dollar Brand (later Abdullah Ibrahim) shrugged, ‘Ian Bernhardt only gives out trophies, and one is enough!’126 Still, as a ‘union’, the USAA played a key role in arranging Pete Seeger’s royalty payment for Solomon Linda for ‘Wimoweh’ (‘Mbube’) in 1954, and in negotiating a royalty agreement for Spokes Mashiyane when he moved from Trutone to Gallo in 1958. Township Jazz may have been at best a somewhat disembodied, artificial shadow of the old concert-and-dances of the black community. Todd Matshikiza remarked in 1957 that he would gladly have given up the opportunity to play with the troupe in City Hall to perform again with the Harlem Swingsters at the old Jig Club in Western Native Township.127 But the USAA shows of the 1950s, of which one (named after the London show In Township Tonight! ) lent its name to this book, along with the better offerings of African Jazz and Variety, provided a vital bridge between vaudeville and international as well as national musical theatre for black South African performers. So the culmination of the Union Artists’ phase in the history of Dorkay House as a centre of black performance was the birth of the musical play King Kong in 1959. King Kong was based on the tragic career of South African black heavyweight boxing champion Ezekiel ‘King Kong’ Dhlamini, immortalised by ‘jive’ singer Mabel Mafuya’s song of the same name. Its creators consciously intended it to be a model of fruitful cooperation between blacks and whites in the international entertainment field and a direct challenge to apartheid. Production and direction were by Leon Gluckman, script by Pat Williams, choreography by Arnold Dover, musical direction by Stanley Glasser with a score by Todd Matshikiza and costumes by Arthur Goldreich. Using black musical actors and musicians, however, the show proposed to combine the polish and style of Broadway with the cultural vitality and resources of the townships. The musical actors were largely drawn from the personnel of the Union Artists shows, and included the members of the Manhattan Brothers and Woody Woodpeckers vocal 214 In Township Tonight

groups, with the Manhattan’s Nathan ‘Dambuza’ Mdledle as King Kong and Miriam Makeba as his lady love, Joyce. Other members of the Manhattan Brothers and Skylarks played other key roles, including Patience Gcwabe, Sophie Mgcina, Phyllis Mqomo, Thandi Khumalo, Louisa Emmanuel (later Mrs Nathan Mdledle), Abigail Kubheka, Hazel Futa, Vinah Bendile and Martha Mdenge. The fiery Jazz Dazzlers Orchestra, led by Mackay Davashe, included members of the Shantytown Sextet, Harlem Swingsters, and Huddleston Jazz Band. The music was big band, but ten-year-old Lemmy Mabaso was also on hand, electrifying audiences with his pennywhistle kwela solos. The play did not make a strong political statement, but it did show something of the hardships, violence, and frustration of African township life. The show infused African musical and dramatic stage traditions into a narrative structure, and presented a mixture of African and Western song and dance. There was jazz, a tsotsi’s knife dance based on Sotho mokorolo war dancing, and a dance celebrating King Kong’s release from prison, which echoed the traditional Zulu welcome for a returning hero.128 The show premièred on 2 February 1959, to a full house at the Witwatersrand University Great Hall, just steps away from where I sit writing, and was an immediate, overwhelming success with Johannesburg people of all races. A broadly South African production, it challenged the best of international musical theatre. The show’s producer Leon Gluckman sincerely believed, with the naive faith of the genuine liberal, that it might create a more sympathetic attitude among whites towards urban blacks: ‘Any white person who has seen the show will think twice now before he pushes an African out of the way on a street corner. It’s not politics, but a question of human relations.’129 Lewis Nkosi, writing not long after in Home and Exile, recalled: the finished product did not – could not have succeeded in mirroring half the conspiratorial excitement, the tremendous amount of underground planning, the rehearsals in a large Johannesburg warehouse for lack of non-segregated theatres ... the resounding welcome accorded the musical at the University Great Hall that night was not so much for the jazz opera as a finished artistic product, as it was applause for an Idea which had been achieved by pooling together resources from both black and white artists in the face of impossible odds. For so long black and white artists had worked in watertight compartments, in complete isolation, with very little contact or crossfertilisation of ideas. Johannesburg seemed at the time to be on the verge of creating a new and exciting Bohemia.130

In 1960 a tour to London was organised, with a substantially different cast. On the tarmac at the airport in 1960, the performers sang ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ and departed for the cosmopolitan world of the West End. So King Kong arrived in London, where Sophiatown 215

its black performers believed they had left the restrictions and parochialism of the townships and entered the international performing world for good. But international attitudes towards Africa had left South Africa behind. In 1960 African nationalism, independence, and cultural resurgence were already dominant movements. Staggeringly blind to the situation in South Africa, white and black critics alike complained about the show’s lack of overt political expression: Politically, King Kong is about as dynamic as a bag of laundry. Everything, including the gangsters and the social misery, has been agreeably prettified ... A full-blooded entertainment this may be but a whistle and a wiggle are no match for the policy of apartheid. One swallow of black and white collaboration doesn’t make a summer of South Africa’s bleak shame.131

Clearly, a liberating ‘anything goes’ shocker in South Africa was in England simply an advertisement for the social status quo. In fairness, the show would never have been granted wide public exposure in South Africa if the system had been frontally attacked. No doubt the producers should themselves have seen that a stronger concoction was needed to suit a London audience. What the production expressed was the dream, no less than the illusion, of a better, more humane South Africa. Yet the financial rewards for performers were hardly a dream come true. While Todd Matshikiza got £80 per week and the leading instrumental soloist Kippie Moeketsi got £35, most actors and band members made only £15.132 Artistically the production was also damned, ironically, by white play-goers who expected an ‘African’ (traditional) display, and so were disturbed by its modern, hybrid nature and considered it ‘inauthentic’. Because King Kong was presented in the style of European musical theatre, the actors appeared amateurish to London audiences. Nevertheless, the show ran for a year; and many of the cast, including Peggy Phango (who had replaced Miriam Makeba, already pursuing her career in exile in New York) and the four Manhattan Brothers, stayed on to pursue performing careers outside South Africa. Matshikiza’s music underwent significant transformation at the hands of the music director, Stanley Glasser, who essentially removed the African township character from the London arrangements. This change was clearly perceived by urban black South Africans back home, who gave the London cast album (‘King Kong Original Cast’ on Gallo Record Company’s African Classics label 66890-2) an indifferent reception. The original recording was released in the LI format (OALP 1040) and on 78s (GB 2890; GB 2892; GB 2893). A recording of the London cast was released on GAIP 1133. Ethnomusicologist A. A. Mensah noted: ‘The White collaborators … had managed to gain the upper hand and had introduced splendid arrangements but in doing so had missed some of the basic elements in the 216 In Township Tonight

conception of modern entertainment music held by Black South Africans.’133 In the Johannesburg of 1959, King Kong represented at once an ultimate achievement and final flowering of Sophiatown culture, a typically sturdy South African ‘hybrid’ that the devotees of racial and cultural purity and separation were determined to root out. The white suburb of Triomf rose where Sophiatown had stood, its final days immortalised in Lionel Rogosin’s brilliant, searingly political film Come Back Africa. The African jazz epitomised by Miriam Makeba’s cameo performance in the film died out or escaped into exile with Miriam, Dorothy Masuka, Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Dollar Brand, Letta Mbulu, Caiphus Semenya, and so many other leading lights. Still, King Kong remained as both an enactment and a symbol of the character and indestructibility of Johannesburg’s urban African community. The show was imitated by Alfred Herbert and other producers, but the most important was the tireless Wilfred Sentso, whose productions Washerwoman (1959) and Frustrated Black Boy (1961) unflinchingly portrayed African suffering through the medium of musical theatre. During the 1960s, African director-playwrights adopted the King Kong model. Without white interference or assistance, they produced a self-supporting, indigenous urban musical theatre. As we shall see, by the middle of the decade this theatre had re-emerged in Soweto as the most socially and politically significant art form in black urban communities. The 1950s witnessed changes in the social personality, status, and self-image of professional performers in the urban community. Opportunities in performing for white and black audiences, recording, and broadcasting continued to offer at least some African musicians the chance to earn a living from performance activity alone. The Manhattan Brothers, for example, earned five hundred dollars a week as a group during the best periods of the early 1950s, despite the violence at African shows. Still, performers’ efforts to get out of the township environment and into the white and international arenas reinforced the ambivalence that many urban Africans felt towards them. Ever since the emergence of the African dance musician around the turn of the century, urban and mission-school Africans had looked upon professional popular musicians as social deviants, drinkers, gamblers, and womanisers unaccountable to either traditional or Christian social morality. In contrast, amateur choral and keyboard musicians who were active in the schools and churches and middle-class professions were highly respected. So were performers who appeared exclusively at middle-class minstrel concerts and European-style dances. Middle-class youngsters who showed an interest in professional performance, however, were warned against leading the dissolute life of a ‘ragtimer’.134 Dambuza Mdledle recalled that the Manhattan Brothers’ parents ‘could not foresee a future for their clean-living lads “eating music” and mixing with musicians, whose bad behaviour and drunken habits were legendary’.135 Sophiatown 217

During the 1940s, African jazz musicians benefited from their associations with black American performance culture and from their ability to express the cultural aspirations of their audiences. Nevertheless, working-class dance forms such as tsabatsaba and the occasions where they were performed perpetuated the ‘ragtimer’ image. Like their black American counterparts,136 professional black South African musicians began to complain that their performances were socially accepted but that they as persons were not: ‘It seemed to us that musicians were only regarded as human beings while they were on stage and performing. After that nobody cared about them.’137 Herbert Dhlomo defended performers, saying, ‘We either do not appreciate the value of or we expect too much of our creative artists. We ignore their contributions and do not think them “Leader”’ and patriots unless they play a prominent part in our social and political life.’138 The attempt to model themselves upon Duke Ellington or Lena Home and to cultivate the image of the impeccably dressed, smoothly mannered, glamorous American jazzman or -woman heightened both the status and popularity of African performers during the 1940s. Amid the bitterness and fragmentation of African society in Soweto in the late 1950s and 1960s, the image of the hard-drinking, dagga-smoking ‘hep cat’ reduced jazz musicians once again to the status of social marginals. The performers’ desire to escape professionally the urban African community aroused resentment among many of their fellow Africans, who saw no chance of doing so themselves. People being strangled by the wider system criticised musicians who played in white nightclubs and City Hall concerts as self-important, and sometimes violently attacked them. Bloke Modisane noted bitterly: ‘The African directs his aggression, perhaps more viciously, against his own group, particularly against the more successful Africans who are resented for being successful.’139 The notion that African professional performers had sold out to the white entertainment industry and abandoned their people persisted alongside genuine admiration of the African Jazz and Variety, Township Jazz, and King Kong performers. Internally, the jazz performance community itself suffered from exploitation, professional insecurity, and modes of cultural production that discouraged group integrity and stylistic development. Both black and white promoters frequently violated the terms of their agreements with musicians. Non-professional promoters could simply withdraw from the entertainment field after a more or less successful attempt to make a quick profit. They could always find new performers to replace those unhappy with past treatment. Working conditions contributed to a rapid turnover of personnel within the bands despite the high level of demand for their services. With so few outlets for independent achievement and public recognition, band members often quarrelled over money, 218 In Township Tonight

leadership and personal prestige. Promoters found this lack of unity easy to exploit. Performers frequently left established groups and set up new ensembles of their own, since a disproportionate amount of revenues, recognition and authority normally went to the group leader-manager. Professionally insecure younger musicians were no longer taking the time and effort to develop reading and other technical skills common among the older generation. This trend was reinforced by the new system of Bantu Education, which in the late 1950s closed some mission schools, brought others under government control, and replaced their curriculum with one designed to educate Africans for subservience. Music education suffered along with instruction in all other fields. Even earlier, however, the Voice of Africa complained: ‘African artists are talented but fail to reach the top because they are intoxicated by immediate success to the extent of leaving off the hard work of practising, and depend on inspiration in their performances, which invariably results in failure and the artists’ disappearance and despair.’140 With the possible exception of Orlando, begun in 1932, there was as yet no feeling of community in Soweto, whose endless rows of identical brick ‘matchbox’ houses reflected the authorities’ view of the urban black population as mere ‘temporary sojourners’ in the towns. Urban Africans lost, at least temporarily, the sense of direction and identity once embodied in Sophiatown and its way of life. Africans protested against the destruction of Sophiatown far more strongly than they had objected to removal from the slumyards, because its streets, houses and institutions seemed so much more truly their own. As Father Huddleston lamented, ‘When Sophiatown is finally obliterated and its people scattered, I believe that South Africa will have lost not only a place but an ideal.’141 Even as government bulldozers were levelling its houses, Sophiatown generated a cultural flowering unequalled in the urban history of South Africa. Principally in the pages of Drum magazine and Bantu World, Henry Nxumalo, Can Themba, Stanley Motjuwadi, Casey Motsisi, Arthur Maimane, Todd Matshikiza, Walter Nhlapo, Nat Nakasa and many others produced the best investigative journalism, short fiction, satirical humour, social and political commentary, and musical criticism South Africa had ever seen. Musical creativity and appreciation and intellectual discussion flourished in the backyards and shebeens. The great dance orchestras, soloists, and song and dance groups of the day packed Sophiatown’s clubs, cinemas, and halls. Even as a memory, Sophiatown serves as a symbol, a legendary point of reference for an older generation of black writers and artists of every sort. Today, amid growing political tension, a number of African performers and organisers are renewing the quest for artistic and professional autonomy that Sophiatown embodied. And on 11 February 2006, the despised name of Triomf disappeared into history as the suburb was officially renamed Sophiatown. Somewhere, Tobiansky is smiling … Sophiatown 219

Notes 1 Proctor, ‘Class struggle, segregation and the city’, p. 57. 2 Ibid., p. 62. 3 Ibid., p. 81. 4 Ibid., p. 76. 5 James Fernandez, cited in Lara V. Allen, ‘Representation, Gender and Women in Black South African Popular Music, 1948–1960’, Ph.D., Cambridge University, 2000, p. 73. 6 Brandel-Syrier, Reeftown Elite, p. 60. 7 Allen, ‘Representation, Gender and Women’, p. 174. 8 Ibid., p. 174. 9 Ibid., pp. 58–9. 10 The Star, Johannesburg, 17 September 2004. 11 Allen, ‘Representation, Gender and Women’, p. 122. 12 Ibid., p. 121. 13 Ibid., p. 71n. 14 Ibid., pp. 74–5. 15 Ibid., pp. 131–2. 16 Ibid., p. 129. 17 Ibid., p. 251 18 Inkundla ya Bantu, 17 June 1944. 19 Ilanga Lase Natal, 2 November, 1923, cited in Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 22. 20 Allen, ‘Representation, Gender and Women’, p. 145. 21 John Storm Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds, New York, 1972, p. 245. 22 Alan P. Merriam, ‘African music’, in Bascom and Herskovits, Continuity and Change in African Cultures. 23 E. J. Collins, ‘Post-war popular band music in West Africa’, African Arts 10, 3 (1977). 24 Allen, ‘Representation, Gender and Women’, p. 68. 25 Bantu World, 23 September 1939. 26 Ibid., 11 January 1941. 27 Lestrade, ‘Traditional literature’ in Schapera, Bantu-Speaking Tribes, p. 194. 28 Toll, Blacking Up. 29 Bantu World, 4 February 1940. 30 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 37. 31 Ibid., p. 44. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., pp. 44–6. 34 Bantu World, 27 May 1944. 35 Ike Brookes, interview, 23 May 1977. 36 Ilanga lase Natal, 18 May 1946. 37 The South African National Film and Video Archives in Pretoria now has a rare copy of this film. 38 Essop Patel (ed.), The World of Nat Nakasa, Johannesburg, 1975, p. 21. 39 Proctor, ‘Class struggle, segregation and the city’, p. 81. 40 Allen, ‘Pennywhistle Kwela’, p. 18. 41 Ibid., p. 21. 42 A. A. Mensah, ‘Jazz: the round trip’, Jazz Forschung (Jazz Research), 1971/1972, p. 128. 43 Allen, ‘Pennywhistle Kwela’, pp. 22–3. 44 Todd Matshikiza, Drum, July 1957. 220 In Township Tonight

45 Drum, August 1955. 46 Bantu World, 12 July 1941. 47 Ibid., 19 April 1941. 48 Ralph Trewhela, interview, 9 August 1976. 49 Allen, ‘Pennywhistle Kwela’, p. 20. 50 Elkin Sithole, ‘Zulu Music as a Reflection of Social Change’, MA diss., Wesleyan University, 1971. 51 Rycroft, ‘The new “town” music’, p. 55. 52 D. K. Rycroft, ‘Zulu male traditional singing’, African Music, 1, 4 (1957), pp. 33–5; and personal communication, 1981. 53 Ibid. 54 Malan, ‘Where does the lion sleep’; Bantu World, 20 August 1954. 55 Malan, ‘Where does the lion sleep’. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Allen, ‘Pennywhistle Kwela’. 59 Drum, November 1957. 60 Ntemi Piliso, interview, 22 November 1976. 61 Trevor Huddleston, Naught for Your Comfort, New York, 1956, p. 34. 62 M. Wilson and A. Mafeje, Langa, Cape Town, 1963, p. 22. 63 Burchell, Travels, vol. 2, p. 421. 64 Kirby, Musical Instruments, p. 112. 65 Drum, November 1957. 66 Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds, pp. 257–8. 67 Allen, ‘Pennywhistle Kwela’, p. 16. 68 Ibid. 69 Gerhard Kubik, The Kachamba Brothers Band, Manchester, 1974, pp. 10–13. 70 Rycroft, ‘The new “town” music’, p. 56. 71 When I was arrested on suspicion of political agitation after a concert in KwaThema Township, Springs, in October of 1976, the Special Branch officers said my trendy jeans identified me as a communist. 72 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 38. 73 Allen, ‘Pennywhistle Kwela’, p. 178. 74 Ibid., p. 204. 75 Allen, ‘Representation, Gender and Women’, p. 132. 76 Ibid., p. 51. 77 Dave Dargie, ‘A theoretical approach to composition in Xhosa style’, in Papers Presented at the Second Symposium on Ethnomusicology, Grahamstown: ILAM, 1982, p. 20. 78 Allen, ‘Pennywhistle Kwela’, pp. 59–75. 79 Ibid., p. 60. 80 Cited in ibid., p. 81. 81 John Storm Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds, New York, 1972, p. 258. 82 Rycroft, ‘The new “town” music of Southern Africa’, p 55. 83 Aaron ‘Jack’ Lerole, interview, 28 December 1976. 84 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 8. 85 Ibid., pp. 56–57. 86 Bantu World, 8, 22 May 1954. 87 Allen, ‘Pennywhistle Kwela’, p. 239. Sophiatown 221

88 Gerhard Kubik, ‘Recordings and films by Donald Kachamba, 1947–1987’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1988), pp. 251–4. 89 Hugh Tracey, interview, 10 June 1975. 90 Cape Argus, 12 November 1954. 91 Bantu World, 9 August 1952. 92 Ilanga lase Natal, 16, 19 August 1952. 93 Ibid., 11 January, 2 April 1947. 94 Peter Rezant tells a similar story about the Merry Blackbirds; cf. Andersson, Music in the Mix, p. 24. 95 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, p. 74. 96 Anthony Sampson, Drum, London, 1956, p. 108. For tsotsis, see Clive Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976, Portsmouth, NH, 2000. 97 Sampson, Drum, p. 103. 98 Nathan Mdledle, Weekend World, 12 June 1954. 99 Drum, April 1962. 100 D. K. Rycroft, ‘African music in Johannesburg: African and non-African features’, Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 9 (1959), p. 25. 101 Andersson, Music in the Mix, pp. 31–2. 102 Sampson, Drum, p. 228. 103 David Coplan, ‘The African musician and the development of the Johannesburg entertainment industry’, Journal of Southern African Studies 5, 2 (April 1979), p. 149. 104 Bantu World, 19 December 1953. 105 Patel, World of Nat Nakasa, pp. 89–90. 106 N. Hentoff and N. Shapiro, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, New York, 1955, p. 177. 107 Andersson, Music in the Mix, p. 41. 108 Allen, ‘Representation, Gender and Women’, pp. 133–4. 109 See Peter Davis, In Darkest Hollywood : Exploring the Jungles of Cinema’s South Africa, Athens and Johannesburg, 1996. 110 Allen, ‘Representation, Gender and Women’, pp. 87–8. 111 Ibid., p. 98. 112 Anthony Sampson, cited in ibid., p. 100. 113 Drum, February 1956. 114 Programme, Johannesburg Bantu Music Festival, October 1948. 115 D. K. Rycroft, personal communication, 1980. 116 Wilson Silgee, interview, 16 September 1976. 117 Bantu World, 5 March 1955. 118 Lucas Makhema, interview, 22 April 1978. 119 Allen, ‘Representation, Gender and Women’, p. 190. 120 Programme, African Jazz and Variety, 1959. 121 Cape Argus, 5 January 1965. 122 The Star, 4 March 1961. 123 Alfred Herbert, The Star, 4 March 1961. 124 Bantu World, 15 February 1956. 125 Bantu World, 18 January 1957. 126 Drum, December 1959. 127 Drum, August 1957. 128 Harry Bloom, King Kong, London, 1961, pp. 52, 65. 129 The Star, Johannesburg, 7 August 1959. 222 In Township Tonight

130 Lewis Nkosi, Home and Exile, 1965, pp.23–4, cited in Allen, ‘Representation, Gender and Women’, p. 200. 131 Robert Muller, quoted in Andersson, Music in the Mix, p. 34. 132 Ibid., p. 34. 133 Mensah, ‘Jazz’, p. 134. 134 Bantu World, 15 May 1954. 135 Quoted in Huskisson, Bantu Composers of Southern Africa, p. 98. 136 Hentoff and Shapiro, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, p. 330. 137 Nathan Mdledle, Bantu World, 13 March 1954. 138 Ilanga lase Natal, 16 August 1952. 139 Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History, London, 1963, p. 59. 140 Voice of Africa, May 1950. 141 Huddleston, Naught for Your Comfort, p. 137.

Sophiatown 223

7 Township music and musicians, 1960–1980 The year 1960 witnessed the end of Sophiatown, the massacre at Sharpeville, and the departure of King Kong for London. The next three decades could be considered the darkest night of the souls of South Africa’s black folk (to paraphrase W. E. B. Du Bois),1 as white supremacy in South Africa and neighbouring Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South West Africa (Namibia) made their last stand. Such a stand was necessitated by the ‘winds of change’ that British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said were blowing through Africa, embodied in the emergence of the continent’s post-colonial states. The end of European domination, both imperial and settler-colonial, whether peacefully negotiated or, as in the case of South Africa’s immediate neighbours Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Mozambique, bitterly fought over, clearly foretold the end of white minority rule in South Africa. Or did it? In the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre, the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress were outlawed, their leadership pursued, imprisoned or driven into exile. In response both organisations proclaimed a shift of strategy to armed struggle, and eight important leaders, including Nelson Mandela, were convicted of treason at the infamous Rivonia Trial in 1963, and sentenced to life imprisonment.2 Not, as the Afrikaner nationalists and their ethnic British industrial and financial partners believed, if the ideological, legal, and communicative bases of the divided and unequal society could be remodelled and updated to preserve and institutionalise what had long been inscribed in political economy, identity, and custom. As the Italian proverb has it: ‘Things must change if they are to remain the same.’ So the apartheid programme of the National Party and D. F. Malan that had replaced the gerry-rigged colonial segregation of the United Party and Jan Smuts, 224 In Township Tonight

increasingly secure in its mandate, brought to power its chief architect, Hendrik Verwoerd. Under Verwoerd’s leadership, black rights and aspirations were to be reduced to the point where there would ultimately be, legally speaking, no such thing as a black South African. Instead, their identities and ambitions were to be recognised in a set of ‘independent’ ethnic-language ‘homelands’ confined to the most underdeveloped and undesirable one-seventh of the nation’s territory. In the remaining 87 per cent of the land designated as ‘white areas’, black people were to be allowed only where and as long as they provided the kind of labour (not work) that the white-controlled economy required of them. In those areas, which of course included all the major towns and cities, Africans, coloureds, and Indians were to be kept strictly apart not only from whites, but also from one another, through the creation of ‘Group Areas’. Even Johannesburg’s famous South West Townships, dubbed ‘Soweto’, were not designed as an African community but as a collection of twenty-two named subdivisions based on official ethnic and language categories. Proper urban communities became ‘black spots’ and were duly destroyed, in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, and also in smaller towns throughout the length and breadth of ‘white’ South Africa. Urban black South Africa was to be torn up, root and branch. Needless to point out, this dispossession was aimed just as much at urban culture and the home-made forms of social life through which it thrived. It was not only modern education and post-colonial politics that had to be forbidden; cosmopolitan styles of performance were deemed equally subversive. This chapter is a story, my own for what it is worth, of the response of the performance community to the systematic attempt to kidnap and replace these dynamic worldly forms with types of expression deemed suitable to the ideological vision of apartheid, like some terrible changeling left in place of black performance culture’s legitimate offspring, in the very homes and public spaces that gave them birth. Gwen Ansell’s whirlwind tour through the struggles of South Africa’s jazz community during the twentieth century, Soweto Blues (2004), provides a moving account of the effect of systematic repression on the urban performance culture that had reached such celebrated creative heights during the post-war period in Sophiatown and other hot black spots around the major towns.3 There is no way to improve upon the first-hand testimony from the performers featured in the Ubuyile/Jazz Coming Home radio series of 2000 that Ansell draws upon for her account. I can, however, add harmonic ballast by reflecting upon the meaning of their experiences and the consequences for forms of expression that pump from within the very heart of black South African life. As Ansell’s evidence shows, the attack on black urban show business had two interrelated, mutually supportive purposes.4 One was to prevent local black artists from self-identifying with and appropriating cosmopolitan forms of popular culture and, most pointedly, African-American music and musical cinema. After all, if a local Sophiatown 225

could sing like Paul Robeson then what was to prevent not only the performer but also his audiences from adopting some of Robeson’s radical ideas? The second was to achieve the wider objective of ‘de-skilling’, by which a whole range of abilities, capacities, and professional trades mastered by black South Africans since the founding of Cape Town and the arrival of the Christian missionaries were now forbidden them. The policy that insisted that they not be educated above certain forms of labour included the field of performance, and so there was active discouragement of tuition and spaces for professional development in choreography, acting, Western orchestral instrumentation and – the devil’s own soundtrack – jazz. It is not by chance that the title of my account is taken from the musical variety show In Township Tonight! Presented by Union Artists at the Johannesburg City Hall in the late 1950s, it featured a star-studded cast of black performers for mostly white and some (segregated by night) black audiences. By that time the white patronage that was essential to the survival and professional development of the most cosmopolitan level of black show business was being systematically removed. The racist rot that included the removal of black jazz and theatre’s most reliable paying customers had begun long before, in 1934, when the government had approved the Liquor Amendment Act barring blacks except as menials from places where liquor was (legally) sold.5 During the forties the white musicians’ union filed complaints whenever their members encountered competition from black bands. During the fifties the authorities, high and low, systematically moved to deny black performers access to any space for rehearsal or performance in white areas. Miriam Makeba recalls that her famous Skylarks formed up at the corner of President and Troye streets, outside Gallo’s Johannesburg studios, and they would rehearse on the steps or in a garage, or anywhere they could.6 Black performers returning from such rehearsals or venues after hours were harassed, arrested, or made to perform for their freedom. By the mid-1960s Union Artists and Alf Herbert’s African Jazz and Variety, the companies that showcased the top black professionals at city halls all over South Africa and beyond, were forced to stop touring. The legendary Inchcape Hall had burned down in 1951. Pinocchio Mokgaleng’s famous, epochal sessions ‘Jazz at the Odin’ ended with the removal of Sophiatown. Most of the black cinemas that had played such a key role in spreading jazz and other forms of African-American performance culture were closed. African restaurants in the city that featured live music, such as that run by the father of Lucky Michaels, who later opened the famed Pelican nightclub in Soweto’s Orlando West township, were shut.7 By 1970 there was not a single legal city venue for black performers.8 Confined to remote township halls, the top bands were forced to play what the Huddleston Band’s trombonist Jonas Gwangwa called the ‘soundtrack’ for knife fights between local and visiting criminal gangs.9 Black entertainment had become unsafe for performers and audiences alike. 226 In Township Tonight

In the meantime, 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, the ethnic-language musics of migrants were mobilised by the authorities to fill the public space for black performance culture. Despite the criticism of the wired-in ‘rediffusion’ by black journalists and intellectuals, working performers like Jonas Gwangwa recalled that the service offered storytelling, sketches and plays as well as African jazz on programmes such as Gideon Nxumalo’s This is Bantu Jazz. It is one of the paradoxes of apartheid cultural policy that programming intended to promote ‘separate development’ in the cultural sphere, prevent the spread of cosmopolitanism, and keep Africans African had the unintended consequence of reinvigorating cultural pride and self-knowledge among urban black people, advancing black nationalist consciousness. Indeed, the government woke up to this contradiction after Sharpeville and replaced rediffusion with Radio Bantu. Gideon Nxumalo, who was playing politically relevant songs in the wake of the massacre and its attendant political crisis, was sacked.10 At the nine wireless stations of Radio Bantu (one for each Bantu ‘language’) that replaced rediffusion, musical programming director Yvonne Huskisson campaigned mightily to substitute traditional, or at least neo-traditional, music for her bête noire, jazz, which had arrived with its hated linguistic counterpart and medium, American English. For black township schools, she recommended the teaching of indigenous rural music, but the government had to settle for varieties of formal choir music instead. This was because a self-sustaining rural music required actual village communities, and not just a waning nostalgia for them, or at least suitable performance spaces in organic urban neighbourhoods, such as are found in towns elsewhere in Africa. The record companies showcased their top neo-traditional electric guitar bands and vocal groups in township halls, but otherwise this music had to make do with piped-in services to overcrowded single-sex hostels and radio/cassette players in tiny, isolated servants’ quarters. Not that the new urban neo-traditional music did not enjoy success: the cities were indeed home to increasing numbers of rural and small-town labour migrants, driven from their homes by landlessness, dispossession, and low-wage labour and unemployment. For them, a new generation of black music producers at the recording companies created a new neo-traditional music in msakazo’s prestigious urban image. Foremost among these studio izinduna (headmen) was Rupert Bopape, a one-time record press operator from the rural Transvaal who intuitively grasped the relationship between neo-traditional migrants’ music and African jazz. Bopape built on the vocal jive mbaqanga of Miriam Makeba, Letta Mbulu, Susan Gabashane, Sylvia Moloi, and Thandi Klaasens to create a style specifically called simanje-manje (Zulu: ‘nowTownship Music under Apartheid 227

now’). But more generally this new form, copiously and dramatically documented in Louise Meintjes’s new book, Song of Africa!, was ironically but deliberately mislabelled mbaqanga by the studios.11 So the marabi-jazz blend that had formerly served as the musical ‘daily bread’ of the city bands and their urbanised listeners was rhetorically as well as legalistically (in terms of apartheid influx control regulations) replaced by a more rurally derived style aimed at labour migrants under the same name. When I arrived in Johannesburg in the mid-1970s, it was with some difficulty that I came to understand the double stylistic and political meaning of the term mbaqanga. 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 derived from marabi and tsaba-tsaba, and was played at a rapid tempo by back-up groups of three reeds plus electric bass, guitar, and drumset. Musicologist Andrew Tracey notes that the ‘principle of parts cutting a cycle at different points is very noticeable in black urban mbaqanga bands’ of this kind.12 Bopape used spoken introductions in tsotsitaal to liven up recordings by the female quartets and the Lerole brothers’ Black Mambazo group. Searching the mines, hostels, and even the rural areas, Bopape discovered some outstanding talents whose neo-traditional 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 eighteen traditional wedding singers during the 1950s. At that time, the Leroles’ pioneering Black Mambazo included Mahlathini’s cousin Zeph Nkabinde. Influenced by Jack Lerole’s deep lead vocals – he would later be known professionally as ‘Big Voice Jack’ – Mahlathini developed his ‘groaning’ bass ‘goat voice’ (Zulu: ukubodla, ‘to bellow, roar’) and sang in praise of rural, traditionalistic values.13 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. After Lerole quit Bopape at EMI in 1961, Bopape went to Gallo where he helped make Mahlathini famous. Soon every simanje-manje group had to have its male ‘groaner’, as they were called, 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 the late Mahlathini, 228 In Township Tonight

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 recollected ‘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. For them, Nkabinde was Indoda Mahlathini (‘Mahlathini the Man’), and his deep groaning voice embodied all the masculine power of the traditional Nguni imbongi (praise poet). 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 and the East Rand. For the African jazz community, whose ‘Sophiatown Renaissance’ was now definitively over, there were only two choices: fight or flight. The names of those who left, whether on an actual passport or a one-way ‘exit’ permit, read like an honour roll of politically as well as artistically committed professionals, and included some of the brightest stars in South African black show business. Not all of them succeeded in their musical careers or even in surviving abroad. Most of them left not so much in political protest as in the unquenchable thirst to express and develop their talents and simply to have professional performing careers. In some cases the ‘exit permit’ option was a last resort after applications for a passport to travel to desirable engagements overseas had been repeatedly denied.14 Yet overall the illustriousness of many of their careers and their personal as well as professional courage compose a magnificent tribute to their place of origin and a legend that still reverberates years after they finally returned. The list includes the members of the Manhattan Brothers and many other members of the cast of King Kong who decided to stay and give England a try (largely without success). Legendary composer and music journalist Todd Matshikiza first tried London, then broadcasting in Lusaka, where he died prematurely. The loss to South African show business was incalculable. Trumpeter and band leader Hugh Masekela and trombonist Jonas Gwangwa from the Jazz Epistles became giants of the Afro-jazz world in New York and Los Angeles, along with piano genius Dollar Brand (later Abdullah Ibrahim), vocalist Letta Mbulu and bassist/arranger Caiphus Semenya, pianist Blythe Mbitjana, musical playwright Welcome Msomi and singer Thuli Dumakude, and the most justifiably famous of all, Miriam Makeba. To England and the Continent went Chris McGregor and many members of his famous Blue Notes jazz orchestra including renowned drummer Louis Moholo, trumpeter Mongezi Feza, bassist Johnny Dyani, saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, bassist Ernest Motlhe, and drummer Makhaya Ntshoko. Bassists Jeff ‘Hoojah’ Cartiers and Jacob Lepere also reached Scandinavia, as later would piano virtuoso Bheki Mseleku. Township Music under Apartheid 229

The London scene was further enriched in the 1970s by the arrival of the Black Consciousness, Afro-jazz-funk improvisational sound of percussionist Julian Bahula, guitarist Lucky Ranku, and vocalist Pinise Saul, who along with Pukwana created the historic ‘London Township’ scene at the famous 100 Club.15 Virtually everyone arriving from South Africa in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976, including myself, was guided and aided by Bahula and his extensive network. These Londonbased musicians also travelled tirelessly around Western Europe, providing music for anti-apartheid demonstrations and rallies and doing a great deal to promote European interest in and solidarity with the movement’s cause. There is no need here to reprise the first-hand testaments to these ‘best and worst of times’ for the exiles, so insightfully recounted by Ansell. In addition, great international stars such as Masekela and Makeba have published their own accounts of their global journeys and careers.16 What there is some need of observations about the experiences of the two sides of the professional coin, cultural boycott and political exile, and their effects on the music. A sizeable number of those who chose exile were jazz musicians, seeking the creative interaction and development and professional careers that apartheid legislation denied them. Yet despite opportunities for formal training and performance, South African musicians in the United States found they could not actually compete in the rarefied artistic hothouse that small-ensemble, abstract modern jazz had become by the 1960s. Nor was it easy to find a place in the company of Miles Davis or Herbie Hancock, whose innovative genius was infusing jazz with electronic Afro-funk, soul, and rock. In stepped Harry Belafonte, a child of West Indian immigrants who made a career out of popular ballads based on Anglo-Caribbean folk and calypso songs. Belafonte’s message to Makeba, whose early international career he greatly assisted and with whom he entered into important creative collaborations, was that she should not simply create a South African niche in the neo-folk music trend that was sweeping the United States in the early 1960s. He made the far more enduring and significant point that South African musicians in North America would be expected, indeed required, not to add their interpretations of American styles to the existing embarrassment of riches, but to bring a distinctively South African, or even more broadly African, sound, repertoire and feeling to a newly receptive multi-national musical mix. So it was the souped-up traditional ‘novelty’ lyric, ‘The Click Song’ – featured in Makeba’s opening engagement at New York’s Village Vanguard in 1960 – that became something of an obligatory part of every South African vocalist’s overseas repertoire ever after. That and her 1968 hit, the swinging marabi-jive number ‘Patha Patha’, created Makeba’s stunning success, and not so much ‘Lovely Lies’, the languorous English version of Mackay Davashe’s jazz ballad ‘Lakutshona Ilanga’. Makeba reinforced the continental ‘African’ identification with hit versions of the Tanzanian folksong ‘Malaika’, and the Tswana children’s song ‘Mangoane Pulele’. 230 In Township Tonight

Later arrivals from South Africa’s female jazz vocal cohort, from Letta Mbulu to Sophie Mgcina to Thuli Dumakude, had to learn the same lesson, but it was Makeba who turned the near necessity of an ‘African’ professional identification into such a virtue. She wore her hair in a short, natural style and draped herself in simply cut, elegant East African robes that expressed the ‘black pride’ of African-Americans of the period. Radicalised by this exposure to black American political consciousness, she made a momentous address before the United Nations Commission on Apartheid in 1963. This exposure cost her dearly, as the South African government cancelled her passport and the American authorities branded her a communist. Not one to be intimidated, Makeba divorced Hugh Masekela and in 1968 married radical black liberationist Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Black Panthers. This spelled the end of her American career, and with Carmichael she departed for Sékou Touré’s Guinea. But as Ansell rightly points out, the damage to her career was offset by the growth of her international stature, which reached legendary proportions as she performed at concerts attended by world leaders in Africa and Europe. Losing her only daughter, who died giving birth in Guinea, she became ‘Mama Africa’, stateless refugee but mother to a continent.17 For Makeba’s male instrumentalist counterparts, the necessity to ‘go South African’ and play kwela and jive was if anything even more difficult to assimilate, so passionate was their love of American jazz and the creative and spiritual freedom it embodied. This passion notwithstanding, South African musical roots proved the grace that saved Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa, who trained at New York’s Manhattan School of Music but then headed for Los Angeles where they were joined by the inventive studio composer/arranger Caiphus Semenya. It was principally in Los Angeles, the base for extensive international touring and musical rejuvenation, that the characteristically Afro-funk-jazz fusion for which these performers/composers have become so renowned was created and refined. Masekela had hits with ‘Grazin’ in the Grass’ in 1968, followed by ‘The Boy’s Doin’ It’ (1975). Taking up the pan-African theme, he produced the classic ‘African Market Place’, and sounded the political note with ‘Stimela’ (‘The Train’). The roots of mbaqanga jazz were updated on Masekela’s collaboration with Gwangwa and Pukwana on the 1971 album, The Union of South Africa. Jazz purists both in South Africa and abroad responded by cancelling the status of ‘jazzman’ that Masekela had earned (playing a trumpet given him by Louis Armstrong on a visit to Johannesburg in 1954) with the Huddleston Band and the Jazz Epistles. But Masekela never looked back, touring the world and claiming a permanent place on New York’s jazz club circuit. Most significantly, Masekela, Gwangwa, Semenya, and others showed doubters wrong by proving indisputably that South Africa’s own marabi-rooted jazz tradition was worth developing and expanding and playing. Their live celebrations of Africa’s modern musical spirit in the United States were an unforgettable experience. Township Music under Apartheid 231

Other expatriates took their own course. Chris McGregor and his Blue Notes, later transmuted into the Brotherhood of Breath, powerfully influenced the British jazz scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but could not sustain such a large ensemble on jazz alone, and disbanded. McGregor settled permanently in Grenoble, France. Dollar Brand and his wife, jazz vocal stylist Sathima Bea Benjamin, continued to visit South Africa from their base in New York until 1982, and kept in touch with local musical trends. In 1968, Brand converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdullah Ibrahim. This spiritual commitment helped to sustain him politically and psychologically, and reconnected his composing and performing to his Cape musical origins. Dollar Brand returned to South Africa in 1968, having gained formal training and top-level experience in Europe and America. With great imagination and technical skill, he took an old jazz mbaqanga melody composed by trumpeter Elijah Nkonyane in the late 1950s, and combined it with marabi, Xhosa ragtime, and hymn melodies, Cape coloured folk music, kwela, American swing, and township rhythms to create Manenberg (Is Where It’s Happening) (The Sun, SRK 786134) in 1974, a record that began a new trend with old materials in black South African urban music. A collaboration between Ibrahim’s nostalgic piano rhythms and fellow Capetonian Basil Coetzee’s saxophone melodies, Manenberg (named after a Cape Town ‘coloured’ suburb) was laid-back, swinging marabi jazz, rectified by the hymnody of the AME Church. Manenberg’s enormous success was due to its combination of so many forms of South African music into a coherent whole with which listeners of all kinds could identify. The message to the South African music world was clear – an authentic syncretism in tune with the cultural reality of black experience is potentially the most creative and marketable direction that contemporary black music can take. Innovative performers must closely follow the cultural aspirations of their communities if they are to play an important role in African self-definition. Other South Africans abroad, like Louis Moholo in London, eschewed the ‘township jazz’ marabi–kwela–mbaqanga–jive tradition and became established members of the European jazz fraternity. My final point on forced exile, however, involves its terrible costs; costs of which the exiling authorities, in their sadistic shrewdness, appeared to be aware. Perhaps the oppression itself created a kind of claustrophobic but supportive closeness in black South African communities, a closeness based on a shared intensity of experience that was disorientingly absent from the free but alien insecurity of the host society. Musicians loved the individualism and anonymity of New York, but like a tyrannical but familiar family, they missed South Africa as the absent source of the real music of their souls. Hugh Masekela recalls sitting in New York parks speaking to himself in Zulu like a madman so as not to lose the language of his deeper self. Other South Africans banded together in tight, semi-exclusive networks: networks to which only those locals who had lived in South Africa would be granted conditional admission. 232 In Township Tonight

Some gave up show business and settled down as permanent immigrants, like the Manhattan Brothers. Some drifted into depression, drink, or drugs, or lost their physical constitution and fell victim to ill health and untimely death, like Mongezi Feza, or Johnny Dyani. Some, like Masekela, Gwangwa, and Makeba, suffered tremendous difficulties and self-inflicted hardships but emerged triumphant in the end. Others, like Abdullah Ibrahim, kept on course through strict personal, spiritual, and artistic discipline. All of them certainly entertained, inspired, and enlightened those who, like myself, were granted the pleasure not only of their music but also their company. Most importantly, as much as any South Africans abroad, these artists put South African performance culture and the political struggle for their beloved country’s freedom on the global map. The performers (and audiences) who stayed behind suffered mightily from the bulldozing of not only city freehold locations like Sophiatown, but also their public cultural landscape. Nevertheless, spaces and strategies for resistance and even stylistic development were in turn staked out and vigorously defended. Black jazz performers remained as popular as ever among the liberal white commercial classes in the major cities, and white nightclubs and private parties often featured black musicians smuggled in for the occasion. But surely the most important of these spaces was Dorkay House, where Union Artists took up the torch of providing both jazz and literary and musical theatre with a production venue. Khabi Mngoma even taught classical music theory and instruments at Dorkay under the banner of the African Music and Drama Society. There he was joined by ex-Jazz Maniac Wilson Silgee and pianist Gideon Nxumalo, who taught jazz. Dorkay House became the port of call for local jazz musicians and others arriving from all over the country. Legendary ensembles such as the Jazz Epistles, surviving the demise of the Huddleston Band, or Mackay Davashe’s Jazz Dazzlers and Shantytown Sextet of King Kong fame, played at Dorkay. When I first arrived in Johannesburg in 1975, Dorkay was still thriving under the long-suffering management of impresario Ian Bernhardt, who had to make his real living producing an in-house trade magazine for a chemical company. As Ansell points out, informal musical exchange, more than formal training or rehearsal, was the most important contribution of Dorkay House during the 1960s and 1970s.18 There, old veterans like Kippie Moeketsi teamed up in new ensembles with consummate professionals like Barney Rachabane and new talents like bassist Sipho Gumede and drummer Gilbert Matthews. Even white musicians (like myself ) were welcome at Dorkay, as were new mixes of styles and cross-fertilised genres of all kinds. With the expulsion of black show business from the city centres from the early 1960s through the enforcement of the Group Areas and Separate Amenities Acts, the bleak, dusty subdivisions of Soweto and other ex-urban townships took centre stage Township Music under Apartheid 233

in the struggle for urban black culture in South Africa. By 1970, Soweto’s population approached one million, half of whom could be considered fully urbanised, with no rural ties. Yet almost a third had no legal right to live there, and two-thirds were officially below the Poverty Datum Line, the level of income needed for minimal family subsistence.19 The quality of life in Soweto for all but a tiny elite in sections such as Dube was nothing short of dispiriting, and only the tenacious community-building ethos of the inhabitants could have created the townships’ irrepressible sociability. As the Minerals sang in their infectious 1975 hit, ‘In Soweto’: … Situated southwest of the Golden City You’ve never been there? Shame, what a pity. The population, is about a million Livin’ in harmony, in my opinion … … In Soweto, oh oh – in Soweto … (Hear what I’m talkin’ about …)

At that time Soweto had no centre, no downtown, few stores and fewer public amenities, and only a few thousand jobs in small neighbourhood businesses. Each day hundreds of thousands of Sowetans rode – as they still do – the dangerous, overcrowded trains to work in Johannesburg, where they were supposed to spend as well as earn their meagre wages. Any person who was not born in the area or had not worked continuously for a single employer for ten years could be ‘endorsed out’ – forced to leave the area – if he or she could not find work. All faced the threat of immediate arrest if their passes were not in order; widowed or divorced women faced eviction, and the waiting list for housing – then as now – grew daily. In apartheid’s final solution to the Native Problem, all urban Africans could lose their South African citizenship and be deported to ‘independent homelands’ they might never have seen. Since Soweto is divided into separate ‘townships’ (with ‘zones’) for Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Ndebele, Venda, and Tsonga speakers, with only five mixed areas, neighbours from the old locations were most often separated in the move to the townships. Living among strangers in individual houses, families easily become suspicious, antagonistic, and afraid of one another. Guns were scarce and illegal, yet Soweto had a higher rate of murder and serious assault than most large American cities. The efforts of the house-proud middle class to improve their dwellings and establish peaceful, affluent neighbourhoods in Dube and Mofolo could do little to counteract the atmosphere of insecurity that pervaded the townships. Yet there, just as they had done in the old inner-city locations, Africans created a sense of place and community out of a determination to establish their permanence as recognised members of urban society, no matter how often the government knocked their neighbourhoods down. In the later 1970s even Alexandra was partly destroyed, many of 234 In Township Tonight

its families endorsed out of Johannesburg, packed off to Soweto, or divided; husbands and wives were made to live apart in single-sex workers’ hostels. The government did this not merely to make room for white expansion and to spare white communities the discomfort and fear of proximity to black residential areas. Soweto and the dozens of more or less identical townships throughout South Africa were physically designed to facilitate the control of urban Africans and the suppression of violent protests like the Soweto Uprising of 1976–7. Just as deliberately, their very barrenness and lack of amenities, their labour-camp atmosphere, were intended to discourage Africans from identifying with the urban areas, from calling the city their home. Despite these conditions, community life took shape in Soweto and some other urban townships, a process enhanced by the inability of the residents to move out to proclaimed ‘white areas’. Social institutions like the stokvel and shebeen still flourished, despite municipal bar-lounges and liquor stores that operated since 1962. Voluntary associations were everywhere, including independent and mission churches, sports, school, and youth clubs, welfare societies, amateur choirs and, in some areas, newly powerful labour unions that fought for and won official recognition. Class differences became more pronounced due to the growth of a skilled professional, salaried, or entrepreneurial middle class, and of the hostel system that hindered the urbanisation of industrial workers. There were several large male hostels in Soweto, though most migrants were housed nearer to their places of work. Social class was expressed in lifestyle, particularly in modes of recreation and entertainment, and the celebration of family events such as weddings and funerals, as well as in material possessions.20 With the significant exception of popular township musical theatre, treated in the next chapter, there was little in the way of autonomous black show business in Soweto or Johannesburg itself. Soweto in the late 1970s had one established nightclub, Lucky Michael’s ‘Pelican’, one hotel, one cinema, a few discos, Jabulani Amphitheatre and Orlando Stadium for outdoor concerts, and a small number of community halls. 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 or mqashiyo (a dance form) song-and-dance groups like Mahlathini and his Queens, backed by the Makhona Tsohle Band, the all-male Abafana base Qhudeni (‘Rooster Boys’; named after Gallo Records’ company symbol, the rooster – gallo in Italian), and many others. Whether presented in the townships or at black cinemas in the city like the Rio, whites could not attend these shows without special permission, an unnecessary requirement since virtually none would choose to attend such an alien exhibition or venue. 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. Under the direction of music Township Music under Apartheid 235

and dance coaches working for record company producers like GRC’s Hamilton Nzimande, the mbaqanga groups rehearsed constantly, putting more energy into their stage choreography than into the making of recordings.21 Most vocalists were drawn from Soweto’s working class, and some were even migrants in search of better-paid, more enjoyable, and prestigious employment than in the mines, offices, and factories. On a given evening you could still find any number of neighbourhood ‘backyard bands’ in Soweto and its workers’ hostels, practising for a chance to audition for black studio or television talent scouts. Rupert Bopape of GalloMavuthela searched for talent in the mines and hostels, and his successor, the recently deceased West Nkosi, actively recruited performers in the rural areas, like the Basotho Lihoba Group, who performed Sotho mohobelo men’s dance songs. 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. As Rob Allingham points out, the many compositions that Bopape and the other black producers registered in their names were not simply appropriated from the musicians.22 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 heterogeneous urban 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. Average pay in the late 1970s for mbaqanga performers was £12 10s per show for women and £19 for men, with £10 flat fee plus 2.5 per cent royalties and £8 10s monthly allowance, with no pay for rehearsals. Clearly, a lot depended upon record sales and the willingness of the record companies to abide by reasonable royalty agreements. Stars like Mahlathini were not only wealthy but could also afford to resist interference from studio producers by switching companies or setting up production arrangements of their own. In Mahlathini’s own case, however, he stuck with West Nkosi until the end, a loyalty that ultimately produced a career revival in the early 1990s. No one, as Louise Meintjes has demonstrated, knew how to produce mbaqanga in the studio like West Nkosi.23 Much negative comment was made about Mahlathini’s poverty at the 236 In Township Tonight

time of his death in 1999, but there is no doubt that he spent his money freely both on himself and others, and his later popularity as a live performer overseas was never reflected in CD sales. In their seventies heyday, mbaqanga shows generally had several segments, proceeding from the most traditional in music, dance, and costume towards the more westernised. Songs in the opening segment begin with a lead guitar introduction, followed by the bass melody pattern based on the F–C–G#–C ostinato formula played over a bouncing 8/8 township rhythm. Piano or accordion lines are laid on top in African staggered fashion, each part entering the phrase cycle at different points. The traditional appreciation for incremental repetition with slight but important variations was basic to mbaqanga as well. Song lyrics consisted of a few short couplets, for example: The girls of this time They slip into the bush and get pregnant And then come to the mother and say ‘help me’.

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. In later segments, vocalists changed from tackies, shorts, T-shirts and visored caps to colourful clerical robes for an upbeat mbaqanga Zionist hymn, disco gear for a soul number in Zulu, Sotho or Xhosa, and evening wear for a recent black American hit in English. 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 referencing the old vaudeville format. 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 wethu (‘power is ours’) from the audience. Another major musical form, the Zulu solo guitar song tradition called maskanda, goes back beyond the amagxagxa proletarian guitarists of the 1920s, and maskanda (from Afrikaans, musikant , maskander : musician) – traditional tunes performed on Western instruments – appears to have started back in the nineteenth century. 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 by two Ndebele singers Township Music under Apartheid 237

from Bulawayo, George Sibanda and Josaya Hadebe. Indeed, Hadebe was the most popular artist in the Gallo catalogue at the time, and one of the company’s early neotraditional musical stars.24 Both these pioneers sold their composers’ rights for flat fees, as was the system, and died penniless, confirming the Zulu proverb, Isigingc’ asakh’ umuzi, ‘a guitar does not build a homestead’.25 This adage originated as an observation on the life of the early generation of young migrants who returned home and took up the life of the itinerant musician, travelling on foot over the countryside, playing guitar, concertina (‘the devil’s handles’) or violin for coins or even just board and lodging for the night. They were also known as amasoka, great seducers of women. Maskanda is fundamentally an acoustic tradition, played solo on guitar or in a duo or trio with a concertina and/or violin. The guitarists of the 1950s constructed their self-image, both through their music, which featured social commentary and ironic self-praises, and with reference to the model of singing cowboy guitarists in American Western films. Even so, maskanda is said to be performed on ‘Zulu guitar’, foregrounding the indigenisation of the instrument and the style, and distinguishing it from the guitar as a Western instrument.26 Indeed, maskanda was developed to fill the vacuum left by the abandonment of traditional instruments in the urban workplaces. In the 1950s John Bhengu, who was influenced by Hadebe, 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 these materials. Musically, maskanda is based on the transposition of indigenous Zulu gourd bow (ugubhu, umakhweyana) songs and choral dance songs to the guitar. As Zulu/rock guitarist Johnny Clegg puts it: One of the problems in this was to find the right rhythm for these songs, because most of them were slow, when they were sung, either as a war chant, or as a slow wedding dance, or whatever, and they had to be changed for the guitar. And that took a certain amount of understanding of the guitar and its dynamics in order to adapt it. The next class, which was considered more important, were the original writers, writing new songs, no longer based on either traditional formats or traditional structures. They were creating original, unique music for the guitar.27

As Davies explains, guitarists remained faithful to the tuning systems of gourd bows, based on the two fundamental pitches of the ugubhu and umakhweyana, extending up to the harmonic partials which were selectively amplified by moving the gourd.28 The droning pattern kept up by the thumb on the lower strings reproduces the beating of the stick on the bow string, while the forefinger picks out melodies based on the harmonic partials. The two or three parts played on the guitar are inseparable and 238 In Township Tonight

interwoven, and cannot be played separately. The vocal part improvised above is also integrated but has a different, off-setting rhythm, creating a structure of call and response. Maskanda songs always begin with the characteristic, identifying intela izihlabo (isawundi), a bright, flashing run up and down the chosen scale, displaying the guitarist’s virtuosity and setting the tonal context.29 The initial problem of slow tempos and solo vocal rhythms was solved by incorporating indigenous rural Zulu ngoma (drum) dance rhythms such as mzansi, isishameni, and isikhuze into the genre, which were later strongly emphasised by the addition of electric guitar, bass, and drum kit in the recording studios. While Davies may be correct in asserting that this radical set of innovations was ‘coerced’ by studio producers looking for a danceable addition to the popular Zulu mbaqanga recording and concert repertoire, the changes both preserved maskanda and turned it into a dynamic form of ‘traditional popular’ music that has outlived the music of the mbaqanga ‘groaners’.30 Back on the streets, competitions on acoustic guitars, violins, and concertinas took place wherever migrant Zulu musicians gathered, and as in competitive dancing, the prize was prestige and the assertion of superior manliness (ubudoda) rather than money. Among the criteria of excellence was the inventiveness of the isihlabo/iihlabo introduction. Second is ubugaku, the originality of melody and lyrics in a new song; and third ukubonga, the way a player praises his people, his home, his chief, and himself. Before long, the nostalgic songs about country life were replaced by lyrics that confronted the problems of urbanism, apartheid, and migrant working conditions. As Clegg put it: in the street competitions ... very seldom will a traditional adapting performer win over an original composer/performer. A traditional adapting performer will possibly win because the song he played was so well known, and it had never been thought possible that it could be adapted to the guitar so there’s an emotional flood of recognition from the crowd, they start singing with him, so it’s a celebration. … But the guitar became also an expression of the whole tradition of ukubonga [praising]; the praise poetry tradition, but in a much more common or popular sense; that is, you would sing about your own various problems in the city …31

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 both famous and wealthy enough to buy cars as well as a homestead, Township Music under Apartheid 239

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. Though his playing and singing retained their original integrity, Phuzhushukela’s stage appearances and recordings clearly represented an artistic compromise with commercial appeal. Significantly, his dancers did not reproduce but rather broadly satirised traditional dance, and acrobatic turns by male dancers in warrior dress were greeted by screams of laughter from the appreciative audience. This kind of traditional burlesque began with early mine dancers and developed in urban competitions between Zulu migrants, in which also-rans performed comic steps to ease their discomfort. Later on, humorous elements of this ikomik style became a staple feature of Sunday performances at city workers’ hostels, where teams and supporters performed for their own entertainment. At mbaqanga shows sponsored by the recording studios in the 1970s, this burlesque form of rural Zulu male dance came to dominate the choreography. Still, the close relation between maskanda and indigenous Zulu music is unique among styles of popular music in South Africa, and explains why it is so different from the familiar Latin-influenced ‘world beat’ of Central and West Africa.32 The faster tempo, using the ukupika technique, led to dramatic improvement in the technical skills of Zulu guitarists.33 Even so, many exponents would rather play solo, but this has not been commercially viable since the early 1970s, and won’t get them recorded, and so a band is required. He who pays the piper, after all, calls the tune. Nevertheless, the solo acoustic tradition still flourishes, especially in Durban, and not as professional recorded or live concert entertainment, but as a deeply-rooted working-class male social tradition.34 Under Rupert Bopape at Gallo, Mahlathini too originally performed in traditional dress, backed not by males but by an urban all-female quartet, the Mahotella Queens, so originating the pervasive 1970s simanje-manje style. Mbaqanga audiences enjoyed traditional performance styles, but in their urban circumstances also required some psychic distance from its ‘primitive’ associations. Displayed on a stage backed by electric guitars and saxophones, it assumes the appearance of unreality, a satire in which the listener takes pleasure while maintaining a comfortable cultural distance. Other popular all-male mbaqanga groups, such as Amaswazi Emvelo and Abafana Besishingishane, also specialised in comical parodies of traditional dance.35 Educated Africans did not attend mbaqanga shows or buy Mahlathini’s records, but they were at least of two minds about them. On the one hand they regarded mbaqanga, with some justification, as the stagnant, commercially processed performance aspect of apartheid homelands ideology, the musical equivalent of Bantu Education. On the other hand mbaqanga retained some of its original meaning as the Africans’ own music. It had been developed by Africans out of their own cultural resources, and the size and enthusiasm 240 In Township Tonight

of its mass audience were too great to be dismissed as mere self-deception. As a result, some of the most popular, talented, and innovative black rock and fusion groups of the 1970s, such as Harari, derived creative inspiration from mbaqanga musicians like Phuzhushukela.36 Another case in point is the world-famous ingoma busuku group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who have been recording the style called isicathamiya (‘a stalking approach; a surprise attack’) or cothoz’ mfana (‘sneaky boy’) for more than three decades. This twelve-member Zulu–Swazi unaccompanied male choir was made up of two groups of brothers and cousins from the Shabalala and Mazibuko families. The name is derived from their hometown of Ladysmith in Natal, plus the name of Jack Lerole’s old group, Black Mambazo, added because their leader and principal composer Joseph Shabalala likens their vocal phrasing to the sharp attack of an axe (imbazo).37 An admirer of Mahlathini and Lerole, Shabalala had been seriously interested in developing isicathamiya since his days as a migrant worker in Durban in the 1950s. After getting together in the early 1970s, his group began to harmonise and polish their vocal style after the manner of mbaqanga groups with the help of Durban SABC broadcaster Alex Buthelezi. Ladysmith Black Mambazo went on to sign with Gallo-Mavuthela, where mbaqanga producer West Nkosi turned them into one of the top-selling recording groups in the company’s history, long before they were ‘discovered’ by Paul Simon in the early 1980s. Their music is truly beautiful by Zulu or Western standards, full of soulful glides, sweet tonalities, rhythmic variety, and cut-and-run phrasing that befits their name ‘Mambazo’. The term isicathamiya fits their lyrics as well as their vocal style, as they creep up by indirection and then stun with sudden clarity. Though they were favoured by the SABC because they sang mostly of religious and idyllic rural themes in elegant, figurative Zulu, there is more to Ladysmith Black Mambazo than first meets the ear.38 Joseph Shabalala is highly respected among his listeners because he is qinile – worldly-wise, cunning, with a wiry voice that is the timbral embodiment of cultural knowledge. His lyrics are a blend of melancholy wistfulness and self-assertion that ineffably capture the dilemma, the trapped, contingent quality of migrant life. The title song of the group’s album, ‘Isitimela’ (‘Train’) laments: Here is the train; it has gone, O father It is going to Pietermaritzburg They will weep, they will remain behind, Sorrowful over us ... The heavens are trembling If you marry a lady, she will remain behind weeping They will remain behind, sad over us ... Township Music under Apartheid 241

and in ‘Khulekani we Zinsizwa’ (‘Salute, Young Men!’): We see you young men We see you young girls Says brother Mshengu We don’t sing songs We blaze away! There in Johannesburg, They know of us ...39

Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s hymns of the hardships of exploited migrant labourers, like the rock-maskanda of Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu of Juluka, mounted an implicit political challenge to the white minority government by transgressing the boundaries of apartheid cultural ideology. But just as importantly, Ladysmith Black Mambazo helped to humanise oppressed black South Africans to a mass audience overseas. The success of Paul Simon’s Graceland album and tours in the mid-1980s led to a successful international touring and recording career for Ladysmith Black Mambazo in their own right. American audiences who enjoyed the stunning beauty and exotic perfection of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s intricate vocal harmonies could hardly believe that these were the same sort of people as the unarmed protesters that brutal South African police were shown beating, shooting and tear-gassing on the evening news. Suddenly, as their song ‘Homeless’ from Graceland prayerfully intimated, every black life lost in South Africa’s struggle was a real, human life, one whose loss ought to be prevented. Of course, in reply to those English-speaking critics who believed they looked in vain for political consciousness in Ladysmith’s songs, leader-composer Joseph Shabalala rightly pointed out that in Zulu there are subtleties of reference that do not survive translation, and that in the 1980s virtually all popular music was held to have a political valence in black communities because politics had become the implicit ground of social discourse.40 Finally, just to add more ink to the seemingly endless debate over the relation between performance and ‘resistance’, we might note Timothy Taylor’s argument that Ladysmith’s appropriations of AfricanAmerican hymnody and gospel are part of a tradition of ‘black Atlantic’ political crossfertilisation and aspiration that receives perhaps its most notable expression in ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, the anthem of the African National Congress that has become the first part of the national anthem of post-apartheid South Africa.41 Ladysmith Black Mambazo have been frequently nominated for Grammy Awards in the ‘World Music’ category, winning ‘Best World Music Album’ in 1987 for Shaka Zulu, and again in 2005 for Raise Your Spirit Higher. Released to coincide with South Africa’s ten-year democracy celebrations, this album held the number 1 spot on Billboard’s World Music chart for several months. Even in South Africa, Ladysmith 242 In Township Tonight

are still popular with the older generation, and some of the younger generation, of the semi-urbanised Zulu working class. Veit Erlmann’s thorough, workman-like study of isicathamiya perfomance, Nightsong, which includes short but brilliantly illuminating reflections by Joseph Shabalala, is the definitive work to consult on the world of this particular genre of Zulu choral song.42 The early 1960s were an especially difficult period for jazz musicians, yet the black townships still produced a constant stream of players and an audience dedicated to its international as well as global expressions. Many of today’s popular musicians who do not perform within the stylistic ambit of jazz have nevertheless been deeply influenced by its forms because they grew up hearing jazz floating so jauntily out of the windows and doorways of every second house on their township street. Meanwhile, the veteran big band and mbaqanga jazz players could at first still get work in the studios backing early simanje-manje groups like the Dark City Sisters. Producers like Bopape and Mathumba, however, preferred to hire musicians individually for standard msakazo recordings. Professional urban musicians expressed their dissatisfaction with the new system, while the producers disdained the jazzmen’s sense of artistic and professional independence and found their demands for better pay and working conditions annoying: Who did these hired hands think they were?43 In response, Bopape replaced the middle-class players with working-class and migrant performers and instituted a system of rigid studio control, employing only players who obeyed them like village or mine indunas (headmen). Performance units were rehearsed incessantly and the musical results became his property. The late Rupert, though not a performing musician himself, has more than a thousand compositions copyrighted in his name, including Jack and Elias Lerole’s ‘Tom Hark’. Jack Lerole himself received about £8 for ‘Tom Hark’, and performers generally got about £6 for a recording. Wilson Silgee, Zakes Nkosi, Ellison Themba, Ntemi Piliso, and a few others stayed on to help organise and rehearse the new groups, but most had no studio contracts and changed to freelance recording with pickup ensembles. Among these were Early Mabuza, Eric Nomvete, Mongezi Feza, Mackay Davashe, Kippie Moeketsi, Gideon Nxumalo, Cyril Magubane, Blythe Mbitjana, Alan Kwela, Elijah Nkonyane, Dalton Khanyile, Skip Phahlane, and many other great jazz talents. While Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were still much admired, American players who looked to Africa for inspiration, like John Coltrane, were leading South African jazzmen to re-examine their own indigenous resources. A major innovator in this direction was Gideon Nxumalo, a university-trained pianist and jazz composer from Kimberley influenced by Dave Brubeck. In the late 1950s, Nxumalo composed kwela tunes for pennywhistler Spokes Mashiyane. In the 1960s, he taught the piano at Dorkay House and organised a series of groups using Kippie Moeketsi (alto), Dennis Nene (flute), Chooks Tshukudu (bass), Jeff ‘Hoojah’ Cartiers (bass), Mackay Davashe (tenor), Township Music under Apartheid 243

Churchill Jolobe (drums) and Gordon Mfandu (drums). Nxumalo’s efforts to use traditional instruments like the Chopi xylophone (timbila) and to combine traditional musical features with mainstream jazz on recordings like Gideon Plays (JPL02), Jazz Fantasia, and Anibulali/uDanayi (HMV JP2129) were not well understood by the public at the time, but remain among the most refreshingly experimental in South African jazz. Enduringly successful players like Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) and the late Victor Ndlazilwana clearly learned from him. The untimely deaths of Nxumalo and Mackay Davashe in the early 1970s were probably hastened by their weakness for alcohol, a common problem among jazz musicians. Perhaps no personal career better represents the hardships faced by creative jazzmen and the contradictions in their relationship to the urban African audience than that of alto virtuoso Kippie ‘Morolong’ Moeketsi. Born in Johannesburg in 1925, Moeketsi had no real contact with music until he picked up his brother’s clarinet at the age of twenty. Over the next two years he taught himself the instrument and learned to read staff notation, while listening to the greats of American swing and local bands like the Jazz Maniacs, Rhythm Clouds, and Harlem Swingsters. In 1947 he joined the Band in Blue under Bob Twala which played marabi, mbaqanga jazz, swing and dixieland in the rough shantytown and location dance halls. Kippie was serious about music and the prostitution, drunkenness, and violence of the halls frightened and depressed him. Knife-wielding tsotsis preyed on other patrons and forced the band to play until dawn or destroyed their instruments. Kippie broke with the band in a dispute over the pay for their appearance in the Zonk! film and, after a brief stint with the Harlem Swingsters, joined Mackay Davashe’s Shantytown Sextet in 1950. The band toured with the Manhattan Brothers, and Kippie earned a solid reputation for hot swing solos on his new alto sax, the instrument of his idol Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker. Kippie was the one local jazzman who had the talent and perseverance not only to understand Parker’s bebop revolution but also to master and disseminate it among the Johannesburg jazz community, giving the style a distinctly South African melodic and harmonic feel.44 Like some players in New York, Kippie tried not only to play like ‘Bird’ but also to dress, talk, and act like him. Although Kippie was not a Rolong clansman, but Hurutshe, his nickname ‘Morolong’ does refer to the name of a bird. Kippie played the role of the hard-drinking, irresponsible, arrogant jazz genius, damaging his reputation in both the black community and black show business, where the erratic, alienated hipster image seemed conceited, anti-social and immoral. But as Ansell points out, this rebellious professional persona and its fierce enactment were rooted in a deep-seated sense of affront and anger over the racial repression of black artists and the relentless strangulation of their cultural air supply.45 Kippie was always the one to protest against degrading treatment on the job, and he was made to suffer accordingly. 244 In Township Tonight

On tour in the Cape in 1954, where apartheid legislation was less enforced and contemporary jazz still found a few places of refuge, pianist Todd Matshikiza suddenly left the band and was replaced by Dollar Brand, who became Kippie’s closest friend. Together they listened and experimented with the music of Parker, Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington, Bud Powell, Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas, Lester Young, Ben Webster, and other Americans. Back in Johannesburg at Dorkay House, Dollar drew Kippie together with Hugh Masekela (trumpet) Jonas Gwangwa (trombone), Johnny Gertse (bass) and Makhaya Ntshoko (drums) to form the legendary Jazz Epistles and at last played uncompromised jazz with complete artistic freedom, though most often before a white or integrated audience. This is the explanation for the title ‘Scullery Department’ for the famous bebop number on their album Jazz Epistles, Verse I, as it refers to the rule that the musicians enter white venues only through the kitchen, and remain there between sets. The name ‘Epistles’ reflected Dollar’s religious background in the AME Church, and Jazz Epistles, Verse I remains one of the great classics of South African jazz. When Mackay Davashe absorbed the Shantytown Sextet into the Jazz Dazzlers Orchestra for King Kong, Kippie was all set to go to London as star soloist. Just before the show left Johannesburg in 1960, Kippie got into a fight that landed him in hospital for several weeks. Joining the show late in London, Kippie began drinking and fighting with other members of the company and wound up in a mental hospital. Unlike his hero Charlie Parker, who also spent time in a sanatorium, Kippie did not escape electric shock treatment, which he claimed ever after had hampered his ability to send musical ideas from his mind to his fingers. Returning to South Africa, he appeared in United Artists’ final Township Jazz series and then rejoined the Jazz Dazzlers on their return in 1961. But the dance halls were gone and the city clubs and auditoriums closed to black performers due to pressure from white musicians and the tightening of Separate Amenities provisions of Group Areas legislation. In a last hurrah for the Sophiatown Renaissance, United Artists managed to get permission for a major series of concerts at the City Hall in 1962, where Kippie played with Gideon Nxumalo’s Quintet. City venues were preferred because they were safer and transport was better between the city and Soweto than around the townships themselves. But now the only major venues left were big concerts and outdoor jazz festivals in Soweto and its counterparts, famously sponsored by South African Breweries with the organisational support of United Artists. Sponsorship by the Breweries was not disinterested, as it coincided with the legalising of sales of ‘European’ beer (monopolised by SAB) under the Liquor Amendment Act.46 The first of these famous Cold Castle Jazz Festivals was held in 1961, with the Jazz Epistles winning first prize for jazz band, though other categories such as mbaqanga were included as well. The first prize for best solo artist, won by Pretoria’s young Philip Township Music under Apartheid 245

Thabane with his eclectic Afro-jazz-fusion guitar music at all three festivals (1961, 1962, and 1963), signalled the influence of 1960s Black Consciousness ideology on township music. Thabane soon formed the Malombo Jazz Men with flautist Abie Cindi and drummer Julian Bahula, and despite changes in personnel, Malombo became a fixture of the black music scene through the next three decades and beyond. At the 1962 Cold Castle Festival, Kippie played with Mackay Davashe’s Jazz Dazzlers, who won first prize. The live recording of the festival is the only reminder of the excitement and innovation that electrified culturally oppressed festival-goers at the time. The 1963 festival attracted 50 000 fans and the jazz band prize went to pianist Chris McGregor’s integrated big band, the Blue Notes, and Eric Nomvete’s famous Afro-jazz composition, ‘Pondo Blues’ (Gallotone New Sound NSC1011). Unfortunately there was violence both inside and outside the stadium, and at the 1964 festival six men died outside the gates in a confrontation between township gangs. The Cold Castle series ended, and sickened by the violence and chaos, the Blue Notes left South Africa forever. But the festival format remained the only workable commercial setting for live jazz and its various popular hybrids, and despite unprofessional, dishonest producers and unreliable participants, festivals were held in townships near various cities every year thereafter. During the 1970s, festivals routinely suffered from social, organisational, and programme conflicts. Those that tried to attract a large audience by featuring jazz, soul, mbaqanga, and even choral groups on a single programme risked disruption by listeners who preferred one type of music over another. Those that presented only jazz bands could not be sure of a good turnout. The solution at the time, still used in practice today, lay in hiring a limited number of popular, versatile groups who drew their music from a variety of local and foreign sources. Predictably, poor arrangements, bad sound systems, lack of accommodation and transport for performers and fans, no-shows, police harassment, and a get-rich-quick attitude among promoters and musicians ruined many potentially successful festivals. The ultimate problem, of course, was apartheid, which made an autonomous, self-supporting, culturally relevant black music world impossible and created social conditions in which frustration and violence in black urban communities could not be excluded from major performance occasions.47 Disgusted with South Africa’s dying jazz scene, Dollar Brand fled to Europe in 1962, leaving a bitterly disappointed Kippie Moeketsi behind. Many smaller festivals were poorly organised, audiences were small, and players often stranded with no pay. Suffocating in apartheid’s social atmosphere, Kippie was expelled from a series of groups for drinking and arguing. After finishing second to Early Mabuza’s group at Pretoria’s Ga Rankua township festival in 1964, Kippie had his alto confiscated during a tour to Bulawayo with Ben ‘Satch’ Masinga’s Zulu Variety-cum-theatrical Revue, Back in Your Own Back Yard. He did not pick up a saxophone again until 1971. 246 In Township Tonight

Many other jazzmen who resisted the alternative of permanent exile gave in to involuntary retirement, alcohol, or an early grave. Fortunately, with the encouragement of Dorkay House artistic director Corney Mabaso, guitarist Alan Kwela, and others, Kippie returned to the performing scene during the last two decades of his life. Though his erratic behaviour still got him into trouble with other musicians, he freelanced regularly, and his recordings with Dollar Brand, Pat Matshikiza and others showed that the old brilliance was still there, darkened and refined by the bitter frustrations of the jazz life. His solo on ‘Memories of You’ from his 1973 album with Dollar Brand, Dollar Brand + 3 with Kippie Moeketsi (Gallo-Soultown, KRS113) remains a gutwrenching cry of the heart against what South Africa had done to its black artists. In the last years of his life, my friend Kippie became a fixture at Dorkay House, where he rejoiced in playing with the fresh young township jazzmen learning their trade there. At last receiving the reverence denied him in life, Kippie’s funeral in April 1983 attracted thousands of mourners. Kippie will always be remembered as a selfless but demanding teacher of generations of South Africa’s most talented professionals, from Dolly Rathebe to Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Victor Ntoni, Barney Rachabane, Sipho Gumede, Duku Makasi, and later even Sipho Mabuse of the Afro-rock ensemble the Beaters in the 1970s. In 1987, in a reprise of New York’s apology to Charlie Parker in naming one of its premier jazz concert venues ‘Birdland’, the Market Theatre opened a now-legendary new club, Kippie’s. Despite the frustrations, new young players continued to emerge during the late 1960s and 1970s, teaming up with the veterans to give both continuity and vitality to South African jazz. Jazz survived the dark years by unapologetically continuing to blend with various more popular styles of mbaqanga, indigenous soul, rock, and popular music. The Xhosa mbaqanga jazz of Victor Ndlazilwana’s Jazz Ministers survived his death in the capable hands of trumpeter Johnny Mekoa, who became a legendary teacher and leader of youth jazz orchestras. Highly professional groups like Port Elizabeth’s Soul Jazzmen and Johannesburg’s The Drive regularly won first prize at festivals in the late 1970s with their blend of jazz, American soul and mbaqanga. Talented freelancers like saxophonists Winston Mankunku Ngozi, known for his Coltrane-inspired classic, ‘Yakhal’ Inkomo’ (‘The Death Bellow of the Sacred Sacrificial Bull’, 1968), the best-selling jazz album in South African history, and his collaborator Mike Makgalemele also blended American funk and soul with African jazz. In the 1970s they toured with other jazz greats like Dennis Mphale (trumpet) and Duku Makasi, even backing popular performers like ‘Soweto soul’ singer Babsy Mlangeni. The old Jazz Maniacs’ Zakes Nkosi continued to appear with his City Jazz Nine, and it was after one of their concerts in October 1976 in the township of KwaThema on the East Rand that I was arrested as an ‘agitator’ and spent two weeks in prison enjoying the interrogative attentions of the Special Branch. While Township Music under Apartheid 247

this provided the opportunity for some interesting if stressful first-hand research into certain forms of daily life, the cost in musical terms was high. I had been due to appear at Johannesburg’s Colosseum Theatre as a drummer with Afro-percussionist Gabriel Thobejane and Philip Thabane of Malombo as the opening group for jazz giant Dave Brubeck, who was performing in South Africa with his two sons, Chris (drums) and Darius (piano). This tour had other momentous and lasting effects on South Africa’s jazz community. Apart from allowing jazz lovers and performers to engage with the elder Brubeck, who was revered in South Africa, his son Darius was like myself ‘arrested’ by the place (as the locals like to put it), later marrying and settling in Durban. Meanwhile, Zakes worked part-time for Gallo at their Johannesburg black music studios, and played with groups of every description until his death in 1982. Zakes’s funeral, like Kippie Moeketsi’s, was one of the largest ever seen in black Johannesburg. His album Our Kind of Jazz, a reprise of 1950s Alexandra Township big-band jazz, remains a classic of the national style. Zakes’s son, the outsized keyboardist and my good friend Jabu Nkosi, went on to become a widely travelled professional studio and sideman, and played with all the local greats of the 1970s such as bassist Sipho Gumede and sax virtuoso Barney Rachabane along with international stars such as Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte, but died in painful and impoverished circumstances in the old family home of Alexandra in 1999 at age forty-six. In brief, jazz maintained its vitality in South Africa through the darkest times, through the ‘never say die’ attitude of its performers, a toughness they have passed on to their successors in the not very easy professional circumstances of South African jazz artists today. For many musicians, exile without immediate hope of return was not an option. Ties to South Africa were too strong, and the chances of professional success abroad too chancy. And would they, like Miriam Makeba and Letta Mbulu, have to take Belafonte’s advice and compromise their devotion to ‘jazz’? Not that this problem did not face those who chose or had no choice but to stay in South Africa. Jazz at home also survived – then as now – through the versatility and professionalism of its performers. Although some might consider backing performances of various transient styles of popular music a waste of serious creative talent, the resulting cross-fertilisation also reinvigorates all the styles involved. Most importantly, it ties both jazz and fusion music to indigenous roots and provides a degree of audience involvement in the continuing re-definition of black South African musical culture. And despite more than a century of American influence at all levels, the most popular jazz recordings always have something South African about them. Of course, the international cultural boycott, in force from 1968, also limited the chances for South Africans either to travel and perform overseas, or to gain exposure to overseas musicians and musical influences at home. But most musicians supported the boycott, as they believed there could be no 248 In Township Tonight

free artistic exchange under such oppressive conditions, and they suspected the motives of those who agreed to play in South Africa. After all, travel in the other direction was not an option for them, unless, like the ‘African musical’ Ipi Tombi (1976), it was something the regime approved of. Also, as saxophonist Khaya Mahlangu observed, whatever work there was, was ‘reserved’ for local performers.48 As calls for an even larger quota for South African music on radio than the present 25 per cent indicate, there are those who wouldn’t object to the blocking of imported music even now. Apart from the interesting exception of Jamaican reggae, the most popular forms of black city music during the 1970s, as today, were imported from the United States, but local soul, rock, and fusion styles also had a solid and growing following. The relationships between performers and audiences for any form of black South African music can be understood, however, only with reference to South Africa’s whitecontrolled recording, concert and broadcasting industries, which greatly determined what black people could perform and hear. From 1963 the Publications and Control Act was used to direct and censor recordings and performances. Jazz was not as susceptible to media industry control, since instrumental music was not censored and most jazz players either stayed out of the studios or, like Abdullah Ibrahim, recorded with independent black producers such as Rashid Vally or small recording companies seeking to provide alternatives to the music of giants like Gallo Africa. The lack of studio access and effective distribution for serious jazz was, of course, a form of interference and censorship in itself. Nevertheless, there was method in the madness of the authorities, who recognised in the black diasporic hybridity of jazz an alternative, cosmopolitan cultural self-image for Africans subversive of the essentialised otherness of apartheid’s social imaginary.49 It was furthermore not for nothing that South Africa’s jazz luminaries of the period, whether in exile or battling it out at home, spoke so often about the freedom of jazz, the personalised avenues for self-expression opened up by its characteristically improvisational form and dialogic inter-play with musicians and compositions present either on stage or in one’s interior archive.50 In any event the image of jazz, with its international, multi-racial audience and recognition was something the apartheid ideologues wished to erase. By closing every viable venue for its professional performance, the authorities managed to degrade both the image of jazz and cut off its local oxygen supply, but not to kill off creative interest on the part of either performers or township audiences. Interest in African-American jazz and indeed in American music in general continued to grow as black city music, submerged under ever-higher waves of segregationist restriction, struggled to fill its lungs with cultural ‘winds of change’. In setting up Radio Bantu, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) explicitly promoted the ideology and aims of the apartheid government and its secret Township Music under Apartheid 249

elite fraternity, the Broederbond. The recording industry responded more directly to the realities of the market, and would have distributed oppositional black recordings if the state censors had been less vigilant and if producers had not believed they needed broadcasting exposure to promote their wares. During the 1970s, journalist Muff Andersson provided an excellent account of how commercial media and state broadcasting combined to alienate performers from their art and their communities and exploit black performing arts and artists for economic and political profit.51 The recording companies could argue, with some validity, that they ran their business according to the productive and financial conditions of the time, and in many cases provided professional security for musicians at a time when this form of employment was not legally recognised for blacks. Despite new royalty provisions, however, contracts were written to protect the profits and rights of the companies, not the performers, the majority of whom saw their contracts in complicated English and only once – when they were signed. The state Radio Bantu rigorously censored any music referring to explicit sex, the reality of urban African existence, or social and political issues. African censors were employed to expunge any township slang or oblique reference to politics. Eager to get airtime, the producers and performers pre-censored themselves or risked rejection by the SABC. Despite this, neither form of control could root out the political suggestiveness communicated through innuendoes, allusions, double entendres, and ironies in black popular song lyrics whether in African languages or (more rarely) in English, because listeners understood them in political terms even when this was not consciously intended. The supposedly independent Swazi and homeland commercial radio stations played little music of political or cultural relevance. Radio Bantu and the new black TV channels were designed to reinforce apartheid homeland policy and inculcate the government’s version of the beauties of rural life and the evil of cities among Africans. Swazi Radio, Capital Radio, Radio 702, and Bophuthatswana Radio (Radio Bop) did play more progressive groups, like Harari, and exercise less censorship. The bulk of their fare, however, like that of the white-oriented Radio 5, was more of the order of musical pacification, ‘entertainment’ to make the frustrations of urban youth and workers more immediately bearable. A partial exception to this pattern was Radio Metro, which started as a big footprint, round-the-clock station for long-distance lorry drivers, dedicated not only to entertainment but also networking communication and keeping their listeners awake on the highways. The station’s heavy rhythm-and-blues format and in-your-face presentation soon attracted a broad black youth audience, and expressed some of their rebellious attitudes and musical preferences as well. With regard to Radio Bantu, much scorned but often listened to by urbanised Africans, it can at least be said that they recorded a broad range of music and helped 250 In Township Tonight

more rural styles and players to survive, be heard, and earn something for their music. When regular radio ‘transcription’ players were in need of money, director Yvonne Huskisson was known to put on a session and use the material when opportunity arose. Nor was the SABC immune to commercial imperatives, as the government insisted that the service should to a large extent pay for itself through advertising. Attracting advertisers required the building of a large, loyal audience base, and so Radio Bantu was compelled to play at least some of what their listeners wanted, leading to a departure from their usual ‘homeland’ musical fare. Most importantly, it must be acknowledged that the rich archival resources, programming capacity, and strong institutional development of the nine African language radio stations today, despite changing their names, derive from the Radio Bantu system.52 Despite efforts to expropriate African performance culture and to use it to impose an apartheid version of African identity, there were ways of resisting. Many of South Africa’s most popular and progressive groups, like the Drive, Juluka, and the Afrorock group Harari, began with independent black producers and resisted signing with the major studios unless they were given some control of their music. Many groups continued to produce political, socially relevant, authentic township music even though it was never played on radio. African record shops had great influence on sales, and once word got out about a politically meaningful recording like the Minerals’ Sweet Soweto or Era’s Manyano, it could sell thousands of copies despite lack of airplay. Explicitly political foreign styles like reggae also sold well in the townships. Musical cries for justice, recognition, and social action from black American performers drawing on the spiritualistic tradition of black religious music, like those of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (‘Wake Up Everybody,’ 1975) and the Staple Singers (‘When Am I Gonna Be Paid’), became anthems for township youth. The most popular South African soul performers, including Steve Kekana, the Soul Brothers, Kori Moraba, Babsy Mlangeni, Sox, and Mpharanyana sold hundreds of thousands of records with music that combined the American soul ballad with mbaqanga. The Soul Brothers, and their leader Moses Ngwenya in particular, created a distinctively local blend of Zulu traditional guitar maskanda music, simanje-manje (without the ‘groaner’) and high Zulu male vocal tight harmony, which even today remains the basis of what might be called urban popular traditional music, often featured on ‘traditional’ music television shows such as Ezodumo. While the song lyrics of these groups were not explicitly political during the 1970s, they did establish new styles of ‘Afro-fusion’ based on rhythmic and emotional appeal that was put to more critical use by new performers less concerned with media exposure or sales. What we must not fail to recognise is the importance of musical form as well as lyrical content in the cultural politics of black South African music. Songs whose words have little explicit political reference may communicate a sense of cultural pride and creative Township Music under Apartheid 251

development vital to African identity formation and black political consciousness. The two groups most representative of this development in African cultural selfconsciousness at that time were Malombo and Harari. Philip Thabane, founder and guiding spirit of Malombo, is the son of a Ndebele mother and Tswana father who grew up in Pretoria’s Mamelodi Township. As a youngster Philip began playing the guitar by himself, picking up a variety of musical ideas from the neo-traditional, mbaqanga, African Christian, and American jazz styles that floated about the township. Leaving school after Standard One, Thabane spent his time improvising and blending musical elements into an impressionistic, loosely structured and intensely personal style. He first appeared publicly at the age of thirteen in 1958 at a variety show in Pretoria, and in 1959 formed the Lullabylanders, a group with four male voices backed up by Philip’s idiosyncratic guitar. The group disintegrated but in 1960 Philip began working with another member of the group, Abie Cindi, who played silver flute, and African mallet drummer Julian Bahula to create the unique Afro-jazz sound of the Malombo Jazz Men. Malombo is a Venda word referring to ancestral and other spirits consulted by traditional diviners, and signifies the deeply African spiritual attitude that the group brought to their music. While they rehearsed, developing a new, expressionistic, multitraditional African music, Philip won successive first prizes in the solo instrumental category at the 1961, 1962 and 1963 Cold Castle Jazz Festivals in Soweto. Encouraged by radical poet Sipho Sepamla, the Malombo Jazz Men played as a group at the 1964 festival, sharing the prize with Early Mabuza’s Quartet. The music of both groups is immortalised on the now classic recording Cold Castle Jazz Festival 1964 (EMI Number One N9033). The music’s loose progression of improvised phrases, disjunct melodic and rhythmic lines, and poeticised chanting was puzzling to listeners, who had difficulty explaining its unique appeal. Its roots in neo-traditional music, African church melodies, marabi, mbaqanga, and the jazz guitar work of Wes Montgomery and John McLaughlin gave it a feeling at once indigenous and rural, contemporary and urban. The key, however, was the powerful and visually dramatic style of live performance. Intensely theatrical poetic recitation was vital to Malombo’s music, and the group soon became associated with African cultural nationalism and the emerging political aims of the Black Consciousness Movement. Their initial success led to conflicts within the group, as Julian and Abie were more interested in direct political involvement than was Philip. They split up in 1965, Julian and Abie forming the Malombo Jazz Makers with guitarist Lucky Ranku. This group played for the rallies of the radical South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) led by Steve Biko, and Julian and Lucky eventually fled to London with Hawk in the early 1970s. There they formed a large new group called Jabula, officially linked to the exiled African National Congress. 252 In Township Tonight

Philip Thabane meanwhile involved the brilliant natural drummer and dancer Gabriel Thobejane in his music, and as Malombo this duo revolutionised progressive indigenous music in South Africa from 1965 to 1977. Their first recording appeared in 1968, and in 1971 Philip and Gabriel travelled to the United States, where they appeared at clubs and concerts around the country for two years, playing with Miles Davis, Max Roach, Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, and other first-rank jazz musicians. Free of apartheid restrictions, Malombo achieved musical recognition and financial success in America, but Philip, a true son of the townships, began to suffer from creative isolation from the sources of his inspiration. In 1973 he and Gabriel returned home to perform for and learn from their own people in the Transvaal townships. Their international reputation was enhanced by their album Pele Pele (WEA ATC 8003) and their appearance at the New York Newport Jazz Festival in 1977. Good as they were, their recordings were a poor representation of the electricity and spellbinding virtuosity of their live performances. I had the unique privilege of performing with Malombo as a second percussionist at many of their concerts in the townships and at the Market Café, Johannesburg, during 1976–7. Philip and Gabriel kept up a constant, almost competitive musical dialogue on guitar, kalimba (‘hand piano’), flute, pennywhistle and drums. The intensity of Philip’s guitar solos and melodic poetic recitation, and Gabriel’s percussive power and dynamics with drums, dance, and ankle rattles, kept black and white concert-goers alike jumping and shouting on the edges of their seats. Truly innovative creative departures in black South African music tend to create their own trends and offshoots, and this was certainly true of Malombo. In addition to their influence on more mainstream bands such as Harari and later Ray Phiri’s ‘Stimela’, a number of new ‘alternative’ Black Consciousness ensembles combining mallet drums, guitars, and spoken or sung poetry in both English and African languages appeared in the late 1970s, including Dashiki, led by the soon-to-be-exiled poet and artist Lefifi Tladi; Thabang Masemola’s Batsumi; and the Malopoets, who were in some ways forerunners of the early Afro-rap groups such as Cape Town’s Prophets of Da City, which made such an impression more than a decade ago. The explicit politics of these groups’ lyrics went well beyond the ambiguity and multi-layered semantics of Malombo’s pithy couplets, which may explain why they made a splash at township festivals and then vanished under repression’s waves. After a difficult return tour to the United States in 1977, Thabane and Thobejane went their separate ways. But Malombo has continued to perform in South Africa to this very day under the leadership of ‘Dr Malombo’, as Philip is now called. The content of Malombo’s music remains a unique contemporary blend of traditional and imported resources symbolising the cultural orientation of Black Consciousness. Thabane’s songs, however, refer not to political issues but to a deeper cultural and spiritual sensibility. The Township Music under Apartheid 253

song ‘Khoedi’ (‘The Moon’), for example, poetically evokes a conflict in the relationship between the singer’s own lineage and that of his maternal uncle: The moon is out My uncle’s wife You talk too much.53

Philip Thabane has been remarkable for his ability to capture a multi-racial and international audience while still retaining the respect and goodwill of his township community. During the conflict-ridden 1970s and 1980s, Thabane was among the few prominent black South African musicians who could move freely between the townships, white and inner-city theatres and concert halls, and America and Europe. A key venue in this audience ‘crossover’ was sound engineer Dave Marks’s Market Café (situated where Kippies was until 2005, in the Market Theatre precinct in Newtown), which headlined Malombo and many other seriously innovative eclectic ensembles in the late 1970s. The sense of a fiercely dynamic, possible multi-racial future for South Africa that I felt during my own appearance with Malombo at the Market Café in 1977 remains one of the most memorable experiences of my life, musical and otherwise. Thabane achieved this simultaneous township and ‘crossover’ success by continuing to follow the same unpretentious lifestyle as his Mamelodi neighbours, while avoiding political involvements that might cause the authorities to restrict his appearances or his travel. At the same time, his faithfulness to urban African cultural identity saved him from social and creative alienation and made him a leader in the musical realisation and shaping of that identity. In 1977 personal conflicts led to the dissolution of Thabane and Thobejane’s musical partnership, and Philip expanded his group to anywhere between five and eleven members, training his son Thabang on the African mallet drums, with more traditionally oriented choreography, percussion, and vocal work. Gabriel Thobejane became one of the leading independent African percussionists in the country and in the 1980s joined up with the legendary Afro-jazz-fusion band Sakhile, led by saxophonist Khaya Mahlangu and bassist Sipho Gumede. Today he is still a much sought-after percussionist with a variety of Afro-jazz ensembles as well as the reunited Sakhile, now minus the late lamented Sipho Gumede. A second important group in this respect is the Afro-rock band Harari. Harari began in 1968 with Selby Ntuli (guitar, keyboards, synthesiser), Sipho Mabuse (drums, later flute and keyboards) and Alec Khaoli (bass), who got together at Orlando West High School, playing covers of the Beatles and other popular American rock and soul bands of the day. Sponsored by Ewert Nene, who, along with star player Kaizer Motaung was organising top Soweto football club Kaizer Chiefs at the time, they called themselves the Beaters until after their successful tour of Zimbabwe in 1976. 254 In Township Tonight

Changing their name to that of the famous African township near then Salisbury (now called Harare), they continued to develop their exciting and accessible combination of black American funk, progressive rock, Zulu guitar maskanda, Malombo’s Afro-fusion minimalism, and Bra Sello’s old-fashioned classic mbaqanga saxophone style. Their willingness to forgo premature stardom in favour of musical integrity greatly aided their creative development and social integration in their Soweto community. Given freedom by independent producer Rashid Vally, they produced successful albums like Rufaro (The Sun GL1874) that electrified the young township audience and spawned a new movement in black South African music, which was called ‘progressive mbaqanga rock’.54 At the same time, Harari courageously built up an enthusiastic multi-racial audience, eager to see them at the few but notoriously unsegregated clubs that were beginning to appear in marginal, ‘grey’ areas of Johannesburg, such as the Las Vegas in Hillbrow and Club New York City in Fordsburg (the American hypernyms were not accidental) in the early 1980s. It was for this audience that Harari wore their signature head bandanas, which became something of a symbol for free-thinking, rebellious urban youth of all races in that repressive time. Just as important was their sharp white manager, a girlfriend of Sipho Mabuse’s, who secured proper terms and better pay for the group’s performances than they could have demanded on their own. With the death of Selby Ntuli in 1978, the group had to reorganise, but emerged stronger than ever with a string of popular live appearances. Moving from Vally to the more commercial Gallo Africa company led to some artistic compromise, but songs like ‘Jikeleza’ (‘Surround’) on their album Kalahari Rock (Gallo ML4303) matched the freshness, power and cultural authenticity of their best previous work. Ostensibly addressed to a ‘witch’ who is troubling the community, ‘Jikeleza’s’ English refrain confronts the white colonial mentality: You’re surrounding another man’s home, Why did you leave yours alone? You’re casting your spell on my soul, Why don’t you leave me alone?55 At their height in the 1970s, the group featured Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse on multiple instruments, Alec Khaoli on bass, Oupa Segwai, Thelma Segonah, Masike Mohape, and Doc Mathilane. Harari appealed to working-class as well as middle-class Africans, and their ability to survive their unlooked-for identity as a leading Black Consciousness band amidst the conflict between apartheid cultural repression and the expressive demands of the township audience was under constant pressure. As Alec Khaoli put it, recalling their early concerts: Township Music under Apartheid 255

because you know that was the ‘hippie time’... peace and love… we used to do what we used to call peace concerts; which we used to do at Eyethu Cinema [Soweto] because actually that’s the time when the politicians, ANC and stuff like that, people were being conscientised. So we used to play a lot of political songs that we wrote. They used to call them political songs but those were just good songs about our lives. … And one activist approached us and said guys; if you play that music you are going to be taken to John Vorster [Johannesburg Police Headquarters] and never come back.56

The Harari band knew they were fairly forewarned, as their friends in the Lesothobased Uhuru Band (the name means ‘Freedom/Independence’), egged on by their eccentric dreadlocked guru, ‘Black Jesus’, got themselves banned from South Africa for their song ‘Africa’ in 1978, and had to reinvent themselves as the famous 1980s funkhouse band Sankomota, the most successful band ever to emerge from a neighbouring state on to the South African musical scene. There were other dangers quite apart from the police and censors that sprang from the repressed, frustrated social atmosphere of the townships themselves. As Alec Khaoli recalls: When we changed our name from The Beaters to Harari at Mamelodi [a Pretoria township] stadium, it was billed as the ‘Harare Music Festival’ after our song ‘Harare’, which was popular. And that day it was raining; there was a bit of a drizzle. The stage was in the middle of the field. And when we came on to the stage a lot of people rushed forward, and in the process somebody I think stepped [on] or pulled a wire or something and the current went off. So we were standing on the stage and everybody was looking at us expecting us to perform. But for a good thirty minutes we couldn’t communicate with anyone because the mikes were off. People watching us standing there, they got upset, and began throwing cans at the stage … at first a few, because they were drinking, and then there was a rain of objects and we ran to the truck. And mind you, in a festival situation like that nobody knows what’s going on. So people just joined in and the police came, because there was a really bad riot, and we locked ourselves in a kombi and somebody tried to burn the kombi. They thought the kombi was burning and they ran away when the cops came. So about three or four people were killed there that day by the police. And the newspapers the whole week, it was: ‘Harari caused a riot because they arrived late’, which was not true. They kept wanting to create a sensation; you know the newspapers. And it took months, man, months, you know, to get over. And we couldn’t go and perform at Pretoria, because everybody hated us there, they think we caused this riot. And with all these things hitting the truck, I thought we were going to die. We lost our shoes and everything; we were just running for our lives. Somebody in the township harboured us in his house and hid us in one of the bedrooms. It was terrible, because imagine you are in a township and this 256 In Township Tonight

thing is happening there and people think you are the target. Where are you going to show your face? We had to wait, somebody had to hide us there until it was dark and we didn’t have transport to go home. But then that was one thing that made Harari famous because it was front page, front page, front page; because thereafter Harari was a household name, and records started to sell. We were big now. Actually that time your mother would discourage you if you wanted to become a musician, because musicians were not making money. Producers were taking all the money. So I think we were one of the first bands that started to make money, and I think that we encouraged a lot of people to allow their children to become musicians.57

Another group that learned to walk the political and cultural tightrope with surprising success is Juluka, created by Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu. Clegg, son of a journalist who grew up in several southern African countries where his father covered the African beat, began hanging about in Johannesburg’s Zulu workers’ hostels learning acoustic maskanda guitar and male team isishameni dancing from the age of fourteen. In a few years he had mastered the Zulu language as well as migrants’ performance culture, and went on to do an honours degree in anthropology and become a lecturer in this subject at the University of the Witwatersrand. Here is Clegg’s recollection of his first encounter with Bhaca workers’ dancing: The Bhacas at that time were living at Sikas Hostel. So while they were doing this, the thing I remember, I had the feeling they knew something I didn’t know. That was the first thing, a very powerful sense of being outside a very profound mystery. And not a mystery so much as sacred knowledge, or something very special and very profound that was being enacted. And as I walked up, I could feel in the concrete the stamping of the feet, and as I got closer the humming was so powerful. I was a little bit in awe and a little bit afraid, because I didn’t know these guys. Charlie was going to introduce me that night to them. And I stood and I watched this thing. And each guy seemed, although he was part of the team, he was doing his own thing; they were doing a team dance, but every guy was obviously involved in his own thing. There was a fierce, terrible commitment ... a magnificent, horrible, terrible commitment which was being divulged. And I wanted to be able to do that. I wanted to know what they were feeling when they did that, because it looked so incredible. And it was such a foreign movement, it was such a foreign thing. And the other thing was I felt like I had been made privy to an incredibly important behaviour and a secret and I felt like I was being inducted into some kind of cult. You know the young 14-year-old. Nobody, nobody knew that in the middle of Hillbrow [central Johannesburg] in a courtyard, a traditional Bhaca war dance was being stamped out every Tuesday and Thursday night.58

Township Music under Apartheid 257

During the 1970s, he teamed up with migrant guitarist, composer, and choreographer Sipho Mchunu, a Johannesburg gardener from Mkhabeleni in Natal, whose father had been a famous traditional healer. Together they created an original blend of Zulu rural maskanda, mbaqanga migrant dance, and American folk-rock. After some years of struggling (they were a favourite at Dave Marks’s small Market Café venue), during which Radio Bantu refused to play their records because they considered Clegg’s efforts ‘an insult to the Zulu and their culture’ (really a threat to cultural apartheid), Sipho and Johnny began taking the multi-racial concert and record scene by storm. Sipho had a remarkable grasp of all aspects of both maskanda guitar playing and composition as well as of team choreography. With his colloquial knowledge of Zulu and store of knowledge and mastery of Zulu performance culture, Clegg had become truly bicultural – a remarkable example of what could be done despite apartheid, and of what might be possible without it. This biculturality came to express at once and embody what Allen calls racial and cultural ‘crossover’ in South African music, and Juluka symbolised for both urban white and black young people the kind of coherent new South African cultural identity they wished to create if only the older white generation and its policies and laws could be cleared from their historical path.59 From their very first album, Universal Men (1975), Juluka combined politically and socially relevant and experientially evocative lyrics in English, and soft rock lead vocals with Zulu maskanda and mbaqanga rhythms, scales, and melodies. The resulting blend was lyrically thoughtful and provocative, and emotionally moving in an entirely original cross-cultural manner. Juluka managed to attract a large audience of progressive young white rock fans wishing to proclaim their liberal credentials through musical expression, and urban African rock fans of a similar persuasion along with many thousands of non-English-speaking Zulu migrant workers, attracted by the modernism and multi-culturalism of Juluka’s unique style. Not really a music of the townships, it was a style that could stand for young South Africans’ new non-racial national imaginary in the international sphere. Of the South African popular groups, the 1980s Juluka certainly achieved the most significant international success, and this continued even after Clegg’s at first reluctant expansion and reformulation of his ensemble, under the new name Savuka, following Sipho Mchunu’s decision to pursue a solo career. Seeking to reinforce their public commitment to musical development of the Zulu language, Juluka had a great mbaqanga hit single with ‘Woza Friday’ in 1977, even though Radio Zulu would not play it due to its hybridised lyrics, and recorded an all-Zulu album, Ubuhle Bemvelo, in the early 1980s. Real success came with overseas tours, however, and Juluka undertook exhausting rounds of concerts through America and Europe throughout the 1980s to secure their professional success and international reputation. As a result, Juluka and its successor Savuka became, after Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the 258 In Township Tonight

most successful South African-based band on the international market in the country’s history. This success was particularly evident in France, where Clegg became known as Le Zoulou Blanc, a nickname that survived re-importation to South Africa in the 1990s. During the 1980s, as the apartheid state and its opponents engaged in increasingly more violent and multi-dimensional confrontations, some of which pitted black against black and Chief Mangosuthu Buthlezi’s Zulu sectarians against Harry Gwala’s more broadly black nationalist Zulu ANC cadres, Clegg’s tolerant ‘crossover’ musical movement lost relevance in South Africa, and Savuka enjoyed greater success overseas. During these tours, while his macho white Zulu rocker persona never mellowed, Clegg began in the 1990s to draw upon his brief experience as an anthropology lecturer at Wits University to become more reflective and pedagogical in his stage performances. Between each song, some of which, like ‘All Along the River’, recounted complex historical events such as the Battle of Isandhlwana in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, Clegg began to deliver amusing and informative five-minute explanations of some significant and characteristic aspects of Zulu culture and experience. It is difficult to think of another performer who could have risked his reputation on such lectures in contemporary anthropology, but Clegg kept his audiences entertained and enthralled. Back in South Africa, Clegg and Savuka still enjoy the loyalty of their generation, and these mini-lectures are today an essential and developing dimension of his still-popular concerts at established venues around South Africa. Under conditions present in the 1970s and 1980s, Clegg’s and Ladysmith’s achievements were all the more remarkable. It has always been difficult for any resident South African band to achieve what record companies call the ‘Big Overseas’. Searching for profits for international parent companies, or licences, producers promoted imported artists over local talent, encouraging South Africans to play American music even though international audiences were looking for something African as well as accessible and contemporary. On the other shore of the ‘black Atlantic’ the cultural boycott extended the international ostracism of apartheid to the performing arts. In Britain, birthplace of the modern colonial mentality, audiences often accepted South African shows, but artists travelling to the United States and continental Europe were asked about their politics and expected to express opposition to apartheid in their work. If they did so, they could expect police harassment and loss of their passports on their return. Many black South Africans could not travel overseas in any case, thanks to the government’s insistence that they get passports from homeland governments which were not recognised internationally. Any successful artist who was allowed to travel overseas and return regularly was suspected, perhaps understandably, by people in the townships of ‘selling out’ in some way to the government. Black performers had to choose between limited careers and second-rate treatment in South Africa or exile abroad. This most extreme form of alienation of artists from Township Music under Apartheid 259

their home communities was in itself a powerful indictment of apartheid. Meanwhile, the ‘star system’ of musical commoditisation aborted personal and artistic development among aspiring performers and discouraged artistic professionalism. Record producers were obsessed with finding a black group who could make the Big Overseas, while in practice apartheid prevented international acceptance short of self-exile and strangled the aspirations of black artists at home. Even during the dark 1970s, black city music in South Africa was not confined to the world of recording professionals. The black recording and concert industry itself has always depended upon the new talent and styles produced in the townships. With the rise of Soweto, the street singers and pennywhistle bands finally vanished, since neither the township nor the city streets offered hospitality to music and dancing any longer. They took refuge in the shebeens, backyard parties, servants’ quarters and hostels, where amateur instrumentalists still got together for sociable entertainment. The brass bands and the marching MacGregor women also disappeared, though stokvels still functioned. African brass bands came to be sponsored by the police and by independent African churches in the homelands. On Sundays, African Zionist Christians still paraded in both the city and the townships in their multi-coloured uniforms bright with sacred symbols. In the backyards, amateur vocal groups and neighbourhood youngsters still sang for the weddings and other family occasions of their friends. Social workers organised youth clubs where urban children came to appreciate their heritage by learning rural-traditional songs and dances from migrant workers. In the backrooms of the Donaldson Centre in Orlando, aspiring soul singers and mbaqanga bands practised for a chance to audition at the recording and broadcasting studios. Young jazz enthusiasts held all-night akulalwas (‘we don’t sleep’), talking and listening to records or serious jazz performers, taking refuge in good music and good company. Veteran swing bands still performed the jazz ‘evergreens’ for ballroom dance clubs in townships all over South Africa. Professor Khabi Mngoma’s Soweto Symphony Orchestra and Ionian Male Choir provided an outlet for Africans interested in Western classical music. At political marches, students produced powerful new songs of protest based on the melodies of African school songs and hymns. Despite this activity, the wellsprings of amateur music-making were probably never so dry as in the 1970s. Music was not included in the Bantu Education curriculum, and few of the overworked, underpaid African teachers could organise school choirs on their own time. Transportation problems and lack of money made it difficult to put together adult choirs and choral competitions. The sense of cultural progress that inspired previous generations of choral composers, conductors and singers died with the lost faith in liberal ideals and government promises of a better life. Some fine choirs, such as those of James Mzilikazi Khumalo and Wilby Baqwa, still carried on, but disruption, disorganisation and even violence plagued amateur as well as professional 260 In Township Tonight

concerts. Dorkay House, the only non-commercial show promoter and sponsor of African talent, closed at the beginning of the 1980s. University students had a declining interest in music, rejecting African folksong as homeland culture and modern music as politically irrelevant. Committed Black Consciousness Movement musicians, such as Molefe Phetoe or Lefifi Tladi, who read virile poetry to Malombo-style instrumental music, were driven into exile. It might be, perhaps, that in the sombre social landscape of Soweto, the people had become too sad or too angry to sing. Yet Mtutuzeli Matshoba, in an autobiographical account of the life of industrial labourers in Johannesburg, writes movingly of the musical response of migrants to the squalor of the hostels: At least two days a week they sang traditional choral music. After supper they would assemble in the adjoining closet and start singing 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 sung those lyrics; and interruptions were not tolerated. Sometimes I was so moved by their music that I yearned to join them ... After an evening of invigorating talk and untainted African traditional song I went away feeling as if I had found treasure in a graveyard.60

No matter how many concerts failed, amateur promoters still tried, many from a genuine love of musical entertainment, to put together the best township talent for an afternoon of community celebration. Though the inter-racial nightclubs that flourished in Johannesburg’s Hillbrow district in the late 1970s later closed, liberalisation in the late 1980s finally allowed black and white performers on the same stage together, even in the townships. A black musicians’ union, the South African Musicians Association, flourished despite the jealousy, mistrust, fractiousness and self-aggrandisement that threatened it. The South African Recording Rights Association and the South African Music Rights Organisation increasingly protected the contracts, royalties and copyrights of hundreds of black members. The Federated Union of Black Artists worked within the Black Consciousness Movement to provide training and financial support to aspiring black musicians. Producer Ray Nkwe’s Johannesburg Jazz Appreciation Society and Black Music Foundation attempted to re-ignite interest in serious jazz and all forms of indigenous African music.61 As the 1970s came to an end, the situation of black urban music was dark indeed. The most dynamic creative development, and the place where live jazz and many other kinds of black music took refuge, was township musical theatre, which more than any other art form flourished amid the dust and heat of apartheid’s attempts to bulldoze urban black performance culture into rubble. Township Music under Apartheid 261

Notes 1 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903. 2 Hilda Bernstein, The World That Was Ours: The Story of the Rivonia Trial, London, 1989; Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945, London, 1983. 3 Ansell, Soweto Blues. 4 Ibid., p. 58. 5 Ibid., p. 76. 6 Ibid., p. 55. 7 Ibid., p. 140. 8 Ibid., p. 82. 9 Ibid., pp. 87–88. 10 Ibid., pp. 109–110. 11 Louise Meintjes, Song of Africa!, Durham, NC, 2003. 12 Andrew Tracey, quoted in Andersson, Music in the Mix, p. 13. 13 J. Clegg, ‘The music of Zulu immigrant workers in Johannesburg: a focus on concertina and guitar’, in Papers presented at the Symposium on Ethnomusicology, Grahamstown: ILAM, 1981, p. 6. 14 Ansell, Soweto Blues, p. 167. 15 Ibid., p. 241 16 Hugh Masekela and D. Michael Cheers, Still Grazing, New York, 2004; Miriam Makeba and Nomsa Mwamuka, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, New York, 2004; Miriam Makeba and James Hall, Makeba: My Story, New York, 1988. 17 Ansell, Soweto Blues, p. 227. 18 Ibid., p. 118. 19 Julian Kramer, ‘Self-help in Soweto: Mutual Aid Societies in a South African City’, MA diss., University of Bergen, 1975, pp. 6–23. 20 Ellen Hellmann, Soweto: Johannesburg’s African City, Johannesburg, 1967, p. 19. 21 Meintjes, Song of Africa!, pp. 31–2. 22 Rob Allingham, interview, 31 January 2004. 23 Meintjes, Song of Africa!, pp. 55–8. 24 Rob Allingham, interview, 31 January 2004. 25 Clegg, ‘Music of Zulu immigrant workers’, pp. 3–5. 26. Nollene Davies, ‘The guitar in Zulu maskanda tradition’, The World of Music, vol. 25, 1994, p. 119. 27 Johnny Clegg, interview, 30 April 1992 28 Davies, ‘Guitar in Zulu maskanda tradition’, p. 119. 29 Ibid., pp. 125–9. 30 Ibid., p. 122. 31 Cited in Coplan, ‘A terrible commitment’, p. 323. 32 Davies, ‘Guitar in Zulu maskanda tradition’, p. 119. 33 Ibid., p.123 34 Ibid., p.134 35 Andersson, Music in the Mix, pp. 124, 127. 36 See ‘Uzulu’ on Rufaro: Happiness, Harari, The Sun–Independent Records GL1874. 37 Andersson, Music in the Mix, p. 125. 38 Ibid., p. 123. 39 Trans. J. Clegg, Copyright Gallo-Mavuthela Music, 1975. 40 Shabalala, cited in Tim Taylor, Global Pop, New York, 1997, p. 82. 262 In Township Tonight

41 Ibid., 1997, pp. 70–82. 42 Erlmann, Nightsong. 43 Oscar Mvungana, Bantu World, 20 August 1955. 44 Ansell, Soweto Blues, pp. 99, 119. 45 Ibid., pp. 168–9. 46 Ibid., p. 127. 47 Johannesburg Post, 7 February 1978. 48 Ansell, Soweto Blues, pp. 182–3. 49 See Michael Titlestad, Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage, Pretoria, 2004. 50 Ansell, Soweto Blues, pp. 244–5. 51 Andersson, Music in the Mix, pp. 45–99. 52 Rob Allingham, interview 31 January 2004. 53 Copyright Philip Thabane, 1977. 54 Alec ‘Om’ Khaoli, interview 2004. 55 Copyright Gallo Africa, 1979. 56 Alec ‘Om’ Khaoli, interview, 5 September 2004. 57 Alec ‘Om’ Khaoli, interview, 6 September 2004. 58 D. Coplan, ‘A terrible commitment’, p. 313. 59 Lara Allen, ‘Kwaito versus crossed-over: music and identity during South Africa’s rainbow years’, 1994–1996, Social Dynamics, 2005. 60 Matshoba, ‘To kill a man’s pride’, p. 123. 61 Andersson, Music in the Mix, pp. 173–4.

Township Music under Apartheid 263

8 Twenty years of black theatre: the struggle for black city culture Before King Kong burst upon the scene in 1959, there appeared to be little formal theatrical activity among urban Africans. Phoenix Players (Union Artists) artistic director Corney Mabaso went so far as to declare that there was no African drama in Johannesburg until the young Athol Fugard arrived from Port Elizabeth in 1957.1 This judgement is too sweeping. Though there was not yet an African mass audience for literary drama, quiet experimentation by a number of African dramatists was setting the stage for the theatrical renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. Just as important, African dramatic practice had been developing its own ‘hybrid’ aesthetic on the variety stage for the better part of a century before the ‘New African’ elite began to make a significant contribution to literary theatre. The Bantu Dramatic Society continued its efforts to promote literary drama at the BMSC during the 1940s, and African authors turned to themes more relevant to urban life. After the failure of H. I. E. Dhlomo’s Moshoeshoe, which was too rural and folkloristic for urban taste, his company, the African Dramatic and Operatic Society, wrote and produced Ruby and Frank, a ‘vivid picture of the trials and experiences of modern Africans’.2 The overriding themes of literary dramas at this time were the clash of traditional values and institutions with Western culture and the necessity of townward migration and urban cultural change, themes that remain a staple of working-class township theatre today. Among the most interesting of these experiments was Isinkwa ‘Bread’, first written and produced as a radio play for Johannesburg Broadcasting’s African programme by 264 In Township Tonight

the multi-talented Dan Twala for his Bantu Sports Club Choristers. The play begins with scenes depicting the rural village life of African Christian peasants. In Part Two, one family is forced to move to a nearby town, where their son gambles away their small savings. Failing to survive as a petty trader, the father works himself to death in the mills while his wife is arrested for brewing. As the son gives himself over to drinking and gambling, the daughter disappears in the location of a larger city, and the family disintegrates. The end of the play finds the mother on her knees in prayer by the bedside of the dying old man.3 To whites like Twala’s producer Michael Kittermaster, such stories emphasised the moral superiority of rural life and the dangers of the city for Africans. The dark vision of African urbanisation portrayed in Isinkwa, however, contained an implicit indictment of a system which forced African peasants off the land and into the unrelenting struggle for existence in the urban labour market and the locations. Other attempts to dramatise the squalor of African working-class life, such as James Jolobe’s Amathunzi Obomi (1958), tended to emphasise individual moral responsibility for personal destiny among urban Africans, and suggested ethical behaviour as a solution to the problems of poverty and social disorganisation.4 Within the urban community, the schools continued to provide performance training. Comic sketches, scenes from English plays, and dramatised African folktales were featured at school concerts and area festivals. Khabi Mngoma and Ezekiel Mphahlele’s efforts to catch the attention of the general African public with this kind of material met with little success. By the time police harassment forced their Syndicate of African Artists to disband in 1956 there was no black-run theatrical organisation left in Johannesburg.5 Amateur dramatic societies and teachers like Bob Leshoi of Lady Selborne High School in Pretoria continued to organise dramatic scenes for community concerts and some full-scale productions. African variety stage troupes laid the foundation for township musical theatre with comic sketches and folkloristic displays until the death of the old locations and the success of King Kong put an end to this medium of black performance. Though they produced little in the way of drama relevant or authentic to African social experience, white producers were responsible for much of the theatrical activity among Africans during this period. The multi-racial, socialist-oriented Bantu People’s Theatre of André van Gyseghem was reorganised by labour organiser Guy Routh in 1939. Under their new name, the African National Theatre, they produced Routh’s Patriot’s Pie, about a young African enlistee, and The Word and the Act, a satire of Prime Minister Hertzog’s Native Administration Acts, along with some Eugene O’Neill oneacters and G. Radebe’s The Rude Criminal, a play about the pass laws. Though the company disintegrated during the Second World War, they must be considered South Africa’s first radical, committed theatrical organisation.6 Township Music under Apartheid 265

During the 1950s a good deal of black dramatic talent was tied up in the exploitative burlesques of African culture purveyed to whites by show producers like Alf Herbert, but other efforts were more positive. Beginning in 1941, the drama teacher Teda de Moor produced African dance dramas acted by students from the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work in Johannesburg. Though naive and patronising in her approach to African performance, insisting that ‘Africans are born actors; they do not need to be taught’, De Moor made honest attempts to have rural, migrant and urban African culture portrayed authentically.7 While teaching at the Witwatersrand Technical College, she involved urban labourers and domestic servants in dramatising their own experience as a means of easing their adaptation to city life. In 1952 she teamed up with herbalist, dancer and variety actor George Makanya to found the Bantu Theatre Company of Cape Town. The company toured South Africa, staging Hugh Tracey and K. E. Masinga’s Chief Above and Chief Below, with its traditional themes, and scenes from African life on the railways, mines, and locations, with their inevitable focus on the transition from country to town, often in Zulu or Xhosa. This theme was treated most comprehensively in their full-length production, George’s Journey, in 1961. Although their plays seldom dealt with the reality of urban conditions and reflected an uneasy mix of folkloristic revival, migrant culture and black performance for white audiences, the Bantu Theatre Company helped to make Africans aware of the potential of theatre as a medium of self-realisation and cultural development. Ian Bernhardt, who was to become one of the most important organising personalities in multi-racial show business in South Africa, also became involved in black theatre through his interest in social work. African schools kindled interest in drama but there was little professional theatre for township Africans to see. In the early 1950s Bernhardt and a troupe of young white fellow actors toured the Witwatersrand townships with a programme of three one-act plays. Following this, the Public Transport Corporation’s welfare officer asked Bernhardt to help form a drama group among its African employees. The result was Bareti Players, who staged Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and a series of one-act plays on South African themes in the Johannesburg townships from 1953 to 1955. At that point Guy Routh, Bernhardt, the actor Dan Poho, the musician Gwigwi Mrwebi, Bob Leshoi, Sipho Sepamla, Meshack Mosia and others founded Union Artists. At Dorkay House, Union Artists made Township Jazz, King Kong, and dozens of other innovative black variety and theatrical productions possible. Bernhardt’s aims were not only to protect black performer’s rights and to provide non-commercial, artistically free outlets for their talent, but also to facilitate creative exchange between artists and communities of all races, and to develop a broadly South African urban performance culture. In line with this ideal, Union Artists secured a boycott by British 266 In Township Tonight

Equity of all segregated performances in South Africa. The high point in black–white cooperation reached in the field of musical theatre in the late 1950s was largely a result of Union Artists’ efforts and influence. Among the most important events in the theatrical history of Dorkay House and all South Africa for that matter was the arrival in Johannesburg in 1957 of a young playwright from Port Elizabeth, Athol Fugard. Fugard had been involved with amateur drama in Port Elizabeth’s Korsten location, where he later helped organise a black company, Serpent Players. In Johannesburg he soon familiarised himself with Sophiatown and its way of life. The result was his first play, No Good Friday (1958), which dealt with an individual’s stand against the gangsterism and extortion practised in the locations. The play opened at the BMSC and drew upon Union Artists for its cast, which included Bloke Modisane, Dan Poho, Steve Moloi, Corney Mabaso, Sol Rachilo, Ken Gampu, Zakes Mokae, Gladys Sibisa, and Fugard himself. No Good Friday avoided larger political, economic, and racial issues, but it authentically reflected black urban experience and inspired some electrifying acting from Modisane and the others. Fugard’s success with the cast was due in part to his innovative composing and directing methods. Drawing on African creative traditions, he developed scripts through actors’ extemporaneous performing, or by giving them skeletal scenes to work up through their own improvisational treatment. The play attracted the attention of white theatrical people, few of whom had thought such a production possible, and enjoyed a moderately successful run at Johannesburg’s Brooke Theatre. One result was that Fugard and his talented actors left the township audience behind. There was no mass African audience for theatre, and the majority of Africans were not prepared to accept Western dramatic forms, even though their content might be familiar. In his succeeding plays, including Nongogo (1959), Boesman and Lena (1960), and The Blood Knot (1962), Fugard addressed black experience but not black audiences. The Blood Knot, perhaps his finest play to that point, was a success in the United States, gaining Fugard an international reputation and his co-star Zakes Mokae an acting career in London and New York, but bypassed the townships. The success of the play established the template for the dialogic ‘two-hander’ that became such a staple of black South African theatre, and persists today. It also inspired a group of young Africans in Port Elizabeth to ask Fugard to help them start Serpent Players. Not until Fugard teamed up with two members of Serpent Players to create Sizwe Bansi Is Dead in 1972 did he successfully place his work before black South African as well as international audiences. Despite the indirectness of his connection with black playgoers, Fugard exerted a powerful influence on the development of black theatre. His plays produced the first cadre of African professional dramatic actors. The success of No Good Friday attracted the support of Union Artists and convinced Bernhardt, author Harry Bloom, and others that the staging of a major black production, King Kong, was artistically feasible. Black Theatre under Apartheid 267

King Kong itself, of course, inspired a variety of productions intended to capitalise on its success. King Kong director Leon Gluckman followed up with Union Artists’ staging of Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, starring Manhattan Brother Joe Mokgotsi. In Durban, the novelist Alan Paton scripted Mkhumbane, a musical portrayal of the daily life of Africans in Cato Manor, one of the poorest, most crime-ridden yet socially vibrant of the old urban locations. At the time, Africans protesting against government resettlement policies were being expelled from Cato Manor, and the community was already marked for destruction. Paton used traditional African forms of choral verse chant (in English), and dialogue alternating with an emotionally exhilarating score for 200 voices by King Kong composer Todd Matshikiza. Though production difficulties, police harassment and mixed reviews combined to allow Mkhumbane only a short run, its particular uses of theme and musical dramatics made it an important forerunner of the popular working-class township theatre of the 1970s. Among those most influenced by these developments was a young musical composer-arranger from Grahamstown, Gibson Kente, who revolutionised urban African popular theatre during the 1960s. In 1962, King Kong veteran Ben Masinga produced his own jazz musical in Zulu, Back in Your Own Back Yard, for Soweto audiences only, and Union Artists declined to help him. Yet Masinga was more realistic and forward-looking than Ian Bernhardt, for changes in black urban attitudes and white apartheid legislation would soon make black-produced, black-acted shows for black audiences the only viable direction for black theatre to take. It was Gibson Kente, who had worked with drama at the Jan Hofmeyr School before writing and arranging for Miriam Makeba and other vocalists, who grasped most fully the theatrical implications of urban South African society in the early 1960s. For the next two decades, the most dynamic creative development, and the place where live jazz and many other kinds of black music took refuge, was township musical theatre, which more than any other art form flourished under the weight of censorship from apartheid’s Publications Control Board. Kente soon became aware of professional black performers’ bitter feelings of artistic and financial exploitation, not only by Alf Herbert and Bertha Egnos, but also by Ian Bernhardt, the King Kong organisation, and Union Artists. Artistically, despite their good intentions, Union Artists’ productions tended to fall into the gap between the cultural expectations of white and black audiences. As a result, Union Artists mounted fewer shows, but continued to provide rehearsal facilities, talent, and organisational support for African producers with fresh ideas of their own. One of these was Kente, who used the talents of singer Letta Mbulu and others trained in the white-sponsored musicals to produce Manana, The Jazz Prophet in 1963. In every way, the show was designed to succeed with the African township audience. Manana was scripted in English, the language of international show business and the one that symbolised urban Africans’ desire to overcome ethnic division, local 268 In Township Tonight

parochialism, and the implications of apartheid. The plot was a straightforward melodrama about the efforts of an evangelistic African minister to mobilise the energies of delinquent township youth for religious and community service by bringing jazz and other forms of popular music into his church. Heavily influenced by African-American music, Kente used this story line to blur the boundaries between gospel, jazz, and local musical styles, creating an uplifting spectacle of township dance and song. Equally effective was the expressive tension he created between rhetorical exaggeration and the thoroughly realistic portrayal of the conditions of urban African life. Manana was a black play, produced, directed, written, and scored by a black playwright, using black actors to dramatise their experience according to emerging black urban aesthetic conventions. Most important, it created a theatre of self-realisation, in which black audiences could see themselves and their concerns brought to the stage in a rowdy festival of identification. In this post-Sharpeville era of government repression, Kente carefully avoided dramatising the wider political issues underlying the suffering and frustrations of urban Africans. He concentrated instead on personal morality and social responsibility based on African Christianity as the foundation of community life. While his perspective at this point in his career only indirectly helped to raise the political or class consciousness of his audiences, he did achieve the important goal of developing a theatre faithful to African daily experience that for the first time reached thousands of township residents. In so doing he formulated a new theatrical language for the townships and provided black theatre with its first mass audience. In 1966 Kente produced Sikalo (‘Lament’), another musical melodrama that dealt with gangsterism, intergenerational conflict, social disorganisation and physical suffering in the townships. Once again, the stereotypical scenes and characters were just sufficiently larger than township life to capture the popular imagination, and the music played by Mackay Davashe and his superb band was a further development of Kente’s own stylistic blend of African gospel and township jazz. Kente developed Sikalo on his own, using Cocky Thlothlalemaje, Kenny Majozi, Simon Sabela, and Margaret Mcingana in leading roles. United Artists produced the show for integrated audiences at the Witwatersrand University Great Hall, where it enjoyed moderate success. The première at Soweto’s Mofolo Hall, however, was a major cultural event in Johannesburg African society, and the play made an overwhelming and seemingly permanent impression on African playgoers. To this day, Sikalo is recognised as a milestone by the African theatrical community, by whom the show’s political shortcomings are less remembered than its artistic dynamism and social authenticity. From that point on, Kente dissociated himself from Dorkay House and set out on his own. Based in Soweto, he achieved independent artistic and financial success with Lifa (1968) and Zwi (1970). Kente recognised that the costly sets, crew, and equipment Black Theatre under Apartheid 269

required by white theatre were not necessary in the townships and would serve only to reduce his mobility. Packing young, newly-trained actors, simple costumes and a few crudely painted flats and backdrops into an old bus, the company performed under the house lights to standing-room-only audiences in township halls all over South Africa, and so became a major force in a rejuvenated black community show business. Kente was no isolated innovator, but a talented man able to grasp and synthesise the right cultural and organisational elements to develop township theatre, and, inevitably, followers followed. Working independently, a young student, Sam Mhangwane, and his Sea Pearls Drama Society produced a township melodrama in 1963 called Crime Does Not Pay, with dialogue in Soweto tsotsitaal. After competing successfully in a Union Artists’ black drama festival in 1964, Mhangwane wrote his sexy musical portrayal of social immorality and retribution, Unfaithful Woman, which toured continuously for the next twelve years, mostly in English. Simultaneously, apartheid was putting up barriers to interracial cooperation in the arts at every turn. Beginning in 1964, separate amenities and community development provisions of the Group Areas legislation outlawed multi-racial performance companies, and required permits for blacks to perform in or attend shows in the white areas and for whites to do the same in the townships. Union Artists had to give up doing shows altogether, though the African Music and Drama Association (AMDA) retained its separate teaching functions under black leadership. Ian Bernhardt helped to form a new black company at Dorkay House, Phoenix Players, initially for the purpose of presenting Athol Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye to blacks. Fugard himself was despondent, declaring in 1968, ‘The legislation that governs the performing arts in various forms makes it impossible for an African and me to get together on the stage as we did five or six years ago ... It’s an appalling deterioration.’8 Alan Paton tried again with his rousing musical Sponono, starring Cocky Thlothlalemaje, with music by Gideon Nxumalo, which finally enjoyed some success at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and launched songbird Letta Mbulu on her international career. With the exception of the doggedly courageous director Barney Simon, most whites simply gave up as the darkness of apartheid dimmed the lights of interracial theatre in Johannesburg. Athol Fugard returned to Port Elizabeth to work with Serpent Players. The aptly named Phoenix Players carried on with the effort to resurrect an international black show business out of the ashes of the legacy of King Kong. Corney Mabaso briefly revived H. I. E. Dhlomo’s Zulu drama Chaka there, and Barney Simon continued to train African actors using British and American plays. But in Soweto, an autonomous, community-based black show business again began to flourish in the very teeth of apartheid. Its medium was musical theatre, and its exponents made it a major cultural force in the 1970s. This decade witnessed the division of black theatre into three performance areas, 270 In Township Tonight

distinguished by audience, venue, expressive style, and political and thematic focus. These divisions have been loosely labelled ‘township theatre’, ‘town theatre’, and ‘Black Consciousness theatre’.9 Until almost the end of the decade, township theatre was dominated by Gibson Kente, followed closely by Sam Mhangwane and trailed by a number of younger playwright-directors such as Boikie Mohlamme, who began to reorient, diversify and politicise his basic style. Kente was, of course, a member of South Africa’s emerging black entrepreneurial middle class, and financial success, cultural leadership, and public recognition were always among his priorities. Unlike some white companies, black theatre received no public subsidy and could only be seen in the townships if it attracted a large paying audience while somehow escaping government censorship. Kente accomplished the first requirement by developing the synthesis of narrative, mime, movement, vocal dramatics, music, and dance found in traditional oral literary performance into a township melodrama using urban experience and cultural resources. He used virtually every medium of performance found in the streets and social occasions of the townships, so that working-class Africans unfamiliar with formal theatre could be drawn in by a sense of connection to not only the story and characters but also the style of his stage. He kept admission prices and expenses low (at first barely paying his cast, who had to find their own accommodation in the townships, they played using their popularity as coin), establishing a circuit of seemingly endless one-night appearances in township halls all over the country. By 1974 he had three travelling companies and was paying his top actors between £25 and £50 a week. The professional experience and regular salaries he offered kept many performers with him despite the enormous disparity between his earnings and theirs. But Kente’s greatest challenge, in fact, lay ahead as he came under increasing pressure to meet his audience’s demands for political expression, while keeping the authorities from shutting him down completely. Interestingly, it was the success of Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, first produced in 1972, that helped convince Kente to bring more explicitly political themes into his plays. Sizwe and its cast went on to national and international acclaim, but Kente remained in the townships. There, audiences were no longer satisfied with the simple representation of their experience; they demanded an exposure of the political and economic system that produced their condition and a suggestion of what they were to do about it. In response, Kente produced a series of epic political musical melodramas between 1974 and 1976, How Long, I Believe and Too Late, which squarely placed the blame for the suffering and squalor of the townships on apartheid, while compassionately heroising the resilience, vitality, and essential humanity of their people. How Long  became a township classic and its title song was used by other playwrights. It emphasised the importance of African education and family unity as sources of Black Theatre under Apartheid 271

strength in a predatory environment. I Believe used elements of traditional Xhosa performance culture in presenting a call for black political unity, and Too Late served as a theatrical warning to the government to do something before it became ‘too late’.10 Too Late also introduced a second theme central to Kente’s later work, the ‘generation gap’ in the township community. Proletarian characters of the younger generation were used to present the radical, bitterly militant critique of South African society, a position the playwright finally discredited in favour of the reformist moderation advocated by the older, more bourgeois characters.11 The poignance of Kente’s warning was demonstrated in the Soweto uprising of 1976–7, during which he was detained while attempting to film How Long in Kingwilliamstown. Though the film was completed, the producers did not release it for fear of government retaliation. Following his own release, Kente produced Can You Take It (1977), a township love story more in the presentational style of American Broadway musical theatre. Though this show was the first township musical to use tinted stage lighting, which enhanced wonderfully colourful costumes and beautifully choreographed chorus routines, the innovations in form and mise-en-scène pleased only those playgoers who identified Americanisation with ‘raising the standard’ of local black productions. The play’s single thematic focus on the urban black generation gap could not satisfy the growing political consciousness of township audiences, so in La Duma (‘It Thundered’) (1978), Kente created a direct confrontation between radical political organisation and family and community solidarity. The conflict between the Marxist urban guerrilla Paul and his police constable brother in La Duma was ultimately resolved in the rejection of the radical position as contrary to African religious and family values. Yet the ambivalence of Kente’s position was revealed in the very identity of the lead character Paul’s brother as a policeman; a kind man but a stooge and a sell-out whose job made him as much of an enemy of the black community as the thoroughly vicious Constable Pelepele in Too Late. In La Duma’s denouement, the radical Paul’s ultimate fate was not resolved. This ambivalence became characteristic of later township dramas, and in this instance served to express the unwillingness of the township community to give up even its most violent and anti-social militants to the common enemy, the state. The theatrical style of La Duma was a creative compromise between the brash colour, polished choreography but rather static action of Broadway productions and the almost acrobatic movement and expressive realism of township drama – yet another indication of Kente’s innovative leadership in popular theatrical form. Another production, Mama and the Load (1980), used visible stage imagery to illustrate its central themes of poverty and family disintegration, the decline of adult moral authority and guidance, and the need for renewed kinship and community unity among urban blacks.12 Clearly, Kente was caught in the contradiction of his own class 272 In Township Tonight

position, which was becoming increasingly untenable in relation to the continuing polarisation of South African society.13 Sam Mhangwane dealt with similar problems in a different way. Following Crime Does Not Pay and Unfaithful Woman, came Blame Yourself (1966). The melodramatic realism of this play resonated with Africans’ experience in the townships, and it remained popular with black audiences until the late 1970s. Mhangwane studied stagecraft in both the United Kingdom and America in 1974, and his plays had consistent, ‘well-made’ plots and believable township settings and characters. His Sunday acting workshops at Soweto’s Donaldson Centre generously served the theatrical community by recruiting and training fresh young talent. In Mhangwane’s plays, music and dance were used for comic and dramatic relief rather than as integral parts of the story, but the acting and action were pure township – acrobatic, rhythmical, electrifying and bombastic; running the gamut of emotions from the maudlin to the satirical, angry, or deliriously celebrative – communicated through the actors’ faces and bodies as well as their words and voices. Mhangwane’s actors switched from dialogue to soliloquy to dance to frantic activity with practised ease. Everything one might see in the township streets, from traditional Shangaan dancing and Zionist church parades to tsotsi gangs and – Mhangwane’s speciality – explicit sex and the war between the sexes, was done with comic naturalism and rhetorical flair. The lead character, Paul, in Blame Yourself displayed an uncanny ability to turn a soliloquy into a heated dialogue with the audience, breaking down the ‘third wall’ and achieving an identity between the artist and his audience-community. Mhangwane, Kente, and followers such as Boikie Mohlamme (creator of the hit Mahlomola) recognised that the essence of African theatre was tragicomedy – the genius for exploring physical and emotional suffering through satirical mime and dramatic irony. The stories of Unfaithful Woman and Blame Yourself are like mirror-images of each other, the first portraying a township woman’s fall into promiscuity and degradation, the second a rake’s progress from hardworking, churchgoing township husband to penniless, suicidal wretch through moral weakness, philandering and alcoholism. These plays avoided direct confrontation with the authorities, resolving the black playwright’s political dilemma by concentrating on personal responsibility and social morality as the primary need in urban African communities, a prerequisite for united struggle for change. Africans, argued Mhangwane and Kente, must put their own house in order before transforming the wider society. In another production, Thembi (1978), Mhangwane treated the problem of generational conflict, family relationships and changing social consciousness among Africans and xenophobia among whites through the themes of youthful sexuality, sex education and family planning. The success of Thembi, despite its hours of dialogue almost unrelieved by music, dance, Black Theatre under Apartheid 273

or visual display, demonstrated the concern that Mhangwane and his audience shared for the creation of new social values, patterns of integration and communal identity in the townships.14 The preoccupation of township playwrights with social tension and reintegration was most often expressed in the narrative idiom of kinship relations against a background of cultural change and the urban–rural dichotomy. In Solly Mekoe’s wellknown ULindiwe (‘The Awaited One’), for example, a city man, Dabula, sells his virility to a traditional African doctor in exchange for the power to acquire wealth. Childless, Dabula arranges for his rural brother, Dumdum, to impregnate his wife for him according to traditional custom. A child, uLindiwe, is born, but Dabula is robbed, framed on a dagga-selling charge by his girlfriend and her lover, and sent to prison. After his release Dabula is killed in a shebeen knife brawl, but the sufferings of uLindiwe for her social father are somewhat relieved when she discovers the identity of her true biological father, a good man of ‘traditional’ (read ‘moral’) outlook who cares for her and her mother. A degree of family harmony is restored in an uneasy compromise between modern and traditional values typical of township society.15 The implication was that city life led to greed, moral degeneration and impotence among Africans, and that traditional family values could serve to strengthen the social foundations of township community life, despite the social destruction wrought by South African political economy. The popularity of such themes was paralleled on the formal level by the uses of language, music, and dance in township theatre. Despite the widespread use of tsotsitaal and urban dialects of Zulu, Sotho, and Xhosa, township playwrights almost always wrote in English at that time, albeit the performances were interlarded with jokes, exclamations, song texts, and throwaway lines in a variety of African languages and polyglot slang. When questioned, playwrights responded that English was the only lingua franca understood in townships throughout the country, but their preference for it as a medium of communication had a deeper significance. Some theatre companies gave their productions a more indigenous feel by using tsotsitaal, changing from urban Zulu to Sotho or Xhosa depending on where they were performing, or simply stuck to a single African language and relied on the multilingualism so prevalent in the townships to help them in areas where that language was not predominant. This last strategy was most prevalent in West Africa, where popular ‘concert party’ and ‘folk opera’ was always presented in widely distributed African languages such as Twi in Ghana and Yoruba in Nigeria. English, however, had both political and psychocultural advantages in apartheid South Africa. Firstly, in any African art form in that contradictory period, retreat to the more localised and indigenous smacked of the separate development, homeland culture promoted by the white Nationalist government. Secondly, playwrights (like 274 In Township Tonight

musicians) suffered from a sense of cultural isolation that the international theatrical medium of English helped to overcome. Fighting government censorship and control of the channels of inter-group and international communication, black playwrights desired, psychologically at least, to create a theatre that could bring their message to white South Africa, Europe and America, even if their plays were rarely performed outside the townships. As regards acting, the expectations of white and overseas audiences differed from those of township playgoers, who demanded the vigorous, broadly gestural and rhetorically commanding style of presentation handed down from the performance traditions of oral and choreographic narration. The missionary Francis Gardiner remarked in 1836 that the brave deeds of Zulu soldiers were always recounted in mimetic dancing, full of ‘energetic gesticulation … violent leaping, and sententious running’ supported by ‘displays of muscular power in leaping, charging, vaulting several feet into the air, drawing up the knees towards the chin, and at the same time passing the hands between the ankles’.16 Such dancing can still be enjoyed at urban workers’ hostel dance competitions today. Township actors didn’t always go quite this far, but emotional and dramatic conflict were more often expressed through vocal quality and physical movement than in dialogue or psychologically intense posing or naturalistic action. As in traditional performance, music, dance, and costume were integral to dramatic action and character development. A number of academic and radical black dramatists argued that such rowdy, colourful display subverted the socio-political focus of black theatre, and turned it into ‘mere entertainment’ that pacified rather than aroused political consciousness. In addition, the township performance aesthetic was not easily accepted by ethnocentric white and overseas audiences and critics, and had to be blended with European modes of theatrical expression and techniques, as in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and Workshop ’71’s prison drama, Survival, to gain acceptance outside the townships. Yet in part, the success of Sizwe and Survival as drama derived from the ability of their actors and creators to communicate a strongly political, universally human social message by combining Western dramatic structure and narrative with genuine township performance style. The audience, noted John Kani, is like a third actor who must be constantly wooed ‘to cross the barriers of illusory distance, to feel his plight as theirs’.17 It was largely this expressive vitality that brought Tony Awards to Kani and Ntshona for their performances in Sizwe on Broadway in 1974, an achievement repeated by Zakes Mokae in 1982 for his role in Fugard’s Master Harold … and the Boys. Fugard succeeded in adapting black South African acting to Western plays as well, including two highly regarded productions of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ; the first featuring Zakes Mokae, Fats Bookholane, Corney Mabaso, and Gilbert Xaba in Johannesburg in 1963, and the second starring Kani, Ntshona, and two white actors Black Theatre under Apartheid 275

in Cape Town and London in 1981. In these productions, Godot immediately becomes a political play, an indictment of the barren, oppressive callousness of South Africa’s human landscape.18 Black playgoers, however, complained that despite the high quality of Sizwe and the strength of its protest against homeland policy, influx control, and the pass laws, it was too complex in structure and expression, too ‘talky’, and too unmusical – in short, too Western in form – to be worth seeing more than once. As one theatrical promoter in Port Elizabeth told me, Africans might return any number of times to Kente’s How Long, but Sizwe was not ‘a renewable experience’.19 Other African critics complained that characters representing the African ‘common man’ in Fugard’s plays, like Zack in The Blood Knot, Willie in Master Harold, and even Robert in Sizwe, were too shuffling, unintelligent, and unconscious; not proud enough or admirable enough to represent black sufferings, values, and aspirations.20 Workshop ’71’s Survival, on the other hand, had fully conscious characters and used tuneful township music, dance, and tragicomedy to get across the message that South Africa was a prison. Similarly, the Reverend Mr Mqina’s remarkable, frequently banned Give Us This Day (1974) passionately condemned apartheid in pure township musical theatrical style, revealing its potential for the transformation of mass political consciousness. Ironically, Survival was allowed to tour abroad because it had not developed a mass black audience, while the far more moderate Gibson Kente play How Long did command such a following and so got its author jailed for putting it on film in 1976. When Survival finally began to tour successfully in the townships in 1978, it was promptly banned. A last issue of concern to township playwrights during the Struggle period was the proper role of indigenous historical culture in town and township theatre. On the one hand, urban cultural disorientation, social disintegration, and the philosophy of Black Consciousness fostered the positive reasessment of the ‘traditional’ among urban Africans. On the other hand, the success of Welcome Msomi’s Zulu Macbeth, UMabatha (1972), and of exploitative displays of African tradition by white producers, Ipi Tombi (1974), nonetheless inspired township playwrights to blend traditional music, dance, and divination scenes into their plays. The verdict of township audiences on these attempts was that ‘traditionality’ was acceptable, even rousingly effective, provided it was done ‘authentically’ (a world in quotation marks!) – in a manner recognisable from rural community performance – and with expertise. Examples of successful reintegration at that time included the Zulu roadworkers’ poignant lament over their families’ sufferings in Mohlamme’s Mahlomola and the Tsonga dance scene in Mhangwane’s Blame Yourself. Probably the most exciting and innovative use of traditional forms of language, dramatic narrative, legend, history, music, dance and setting are Credo Mutwa’s U276 In Township Tonight

Nosilimela (1973) and Fatima Dike’s (with the help of the Barney Simon and Rob Amato, both sadly deceased) Sacrifice of Kreli (1976). U-Nosilimela was an African romance modelled on Zulu folk narrative (inganekwane) and traditional mimetic dramatisation (umlinganiso). Its protagonist was an outcast and time-traveller, a young princess whose historical sufferings had the ultimate purpose of re-establishing traditional values in African life. The positive re-evaluation of the African past and its reintegration into contemporary consciousness was intended not only to reduce the self-alienation of urban Africans but also to provide a cultural pattern for the eventual peaceful regeneration of South African society as a whole. Staging in U-Nosilimela attempted to recreate the physical setting of dramatic narration and episodic mime in traditional villages. The play was a festival of movement, song, dance, declamation and dramatic action, but the demands of creating such a setting in inflexible, ill-equipped, poorly lit township meeting halls proved too much for its sponsors, Workshop ’71. In addition, the elements of pure fantasy, the whirl of action and plot, and the unfamiliar settings seem to have proved too innovative for township audiences at that time, and the run of U-Nosilimela was regrettably short. Credo Mutwa’s personal brand of cultural politics may have puzzled township playgoers as well. A religious visionary who thoroughly rejected the city and its human environment, Mutwa is a conservative traditionalist manqué who publicly denounced the youth of Soweto as they fell to police gunfire during the uprising of 1976. He even accused McLaren, his patron at Workshop ’71, of setting off the Uprising through his radical township theatre.21 Today Credo Mutwa remains a conservative critic of the ‘degenerate’ character of township youth culture, and, like Mathole Motshekga, the broadcast media’s favourite professional cultural commentator, identifies anything unattractive in black community life with either colonialism or townships or both. Of course both Mutwa and Motshekga are aware that most black South Africans today, including themselves, would find a return to pre-colonial lifeways inconvenient and unappealing, so they prefer to idealise instead the good very old days when Africans built Great Zimbabwe, and Timbuktu, and the pyramids of Giza. A more realistic, historically accurate, and dramatically satisfying recreation of the African past in relation to the concerns of the time was Xhosa playwright Fatima Dike’s Sacrifice of Kreli (1976).22 Based on historical research by the play’s producer, the late Rob Amato, the story takes place in 1885 and recounts the efforts of Gcaleka Xhosa chief Kreli to revitalise his nation after yet another defeat by Cape colonial forces in 1877–8. Hidden with his followers in a deep canyon far from his former domain, Kreli sends his trusted iqira (diviner), the famous historical millenarian rebel of the 1850s, Mlanjeni, into the nether world of the ancestors to discover what course of action he should take. Beset by defeatism and threats of desertion among his men, Kreli uses Mlanjeni’s miraculous return from the land of the dead to rally his people to return to Black Theatre under Apartheid 277

their glorious traditions, reclaim their children from the foster care of the neighbouring Bomvana, and renew their resistance to dispossession and national disintegration. Makwedini Julius Mtsaka and Barney Simon’s clear, austere supra-direction gave the play a feeling of disciplined power. Mtsaka’s shrewd portrayal of Kreli, the ageing outlaw king, was at once pathetic and magisterial, an unbending spirit in a bowed and grieving body. Chris Baskiti’s Mlanjeni was equally spellbinding; a muscular, uncanny evocation of the mystical power of Xhosa spiritual consciousness. Sets were almost painfully simple, calling for the imaginative participation of the audience, who were carried seamlessly from the seen to the unseen, from knowledge to imagination. In the hands of Dike and Cape Town’s Sechaba Theatre Company, the story of Kreli became a commentary on the nature and challenge of African leadership relevant to struggles for national regeneration. The play was performed in Xhosa for African audiences in the Cape and Transkei, and in Xhosa and English for racially mixed or non-Xhosa audiences elsewhere. Fatima Dike was clear about the use of English not as a convenience or a compromise, but as a creative tool for translating the beauty and rhythm of Xhosa into an international poetic medium. Though the play was more successful in small Xhosa towns than in large cities like Johannesburg, it remained a model for the effective mobilisation of traditional and historical resources in a cultural and political context. This was the time when the ‘angels’ (I use the term in the Broadway sense) of the white liberal theatrical firmament descended to attend the birth of a black theatre quite different from the dance musical melodramas of the townships. In the 1970s there were three travelling theatre groups in the eastern Cape: Imitha Players under Amato, based in East London; Rhodes University lecturer Don Maclennan’s Ikwezi Players in Grahamstown; and the soon-to-be world-famous Serpent Players under Fugard in Port Elizabeth. In addition, there was Rob McLaren (aka Mshengu Tshabalala, aka Robert Mshengu Kavanagh) with Workshop ’71 at Wits University and Barney Simon at the Market in Johannesburg, and the Govenders with the Shah Theatre Academy in Durban, who produced the remarkable Lahnee’s Pleasure in 1974.23 Through this network, they created a travelling circuit for each other’s plays, which they often directed in their own theatres. Imitha’s first major production was Aeschylus’ classic tragedy Oedipus, with Mtsaka, who was to have such a Lear-like presence in Sacrifice of Kreli, playing the doomed king. Amato describes a climactic moment in the performance: They finally got to the point where Oedipus in the shape of Julius Mtsaka, comes in with his eyes gouged out … And he’s stabbing his own eyes, and he comes in with tomato sauce all over his eyes, feeling his way. And a big, fat mamma in the front row, says, ‘Agh, come on Julie, we know you’re not blind’. The whole place packs up! ... [and] he went and stood over her, and cried, as if saying ‘Mama, I am talking about pain, I 278 In Township Tonight

am talking about man, I am talking about ancient things.’ And she fell silent, and the people around her fell silent and contrite, and the whole house became contrite and quiet. And he went on to the most wonderful climax to end the play. So it worked, but only by a rescue which was of extraordinary proportions.24

No narrow classicist, Amato also had the extraordinary ability to persuade radical Black Consciousness to work with him, even to accept his direction and mentorship. Seeing an early version of Matsemela Manaka’s Egoli, an overtly political piece of ‘agitprop’, Amato worked tirelessly with the playwright to improve and tighten the script. As a result, with Amato directing and starring John Ledwaba, the play went on to successful runs at the People’s Space in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and even toured to Germany without much alteration.25 Amato’s energies extended to writing about theatre, and in the mid-1970s he published and edited S’ketch’  (followed by Speak a decade later), one of the first-ever black theatre magazines, in which he published long excerpts from the scripts of Gibson Kente’s political township musicals. Amato’s ability to win over and work successfully with radical black writers and performers was something he shared with his colleagues Rob McLaren, Don Maclennan, and Athol Fugard. MacLennan recalls Fugard’s métier: ‘It is one thing to look at a Fugard written text. Its another to watch him directing. The real magic of Fugard’s theatre is not so much in the play as finished product, as in the rehearsing, in the psycho-therapy, if you like, of the actual contact between Athol and the actors … As a catalyst he is incredible.’26 This ability to gain the acceptance of artists who had grown up angrily and internalised a deep distrust, even dislike, of whites led Manaka, John Kani, Zakes Mda and Fatima Dike, to name but a few, to develop splendid careers and also to transform their bitterness concerning race into the sophisticated and humanistic views that distinguish their mature theatrical work. One extraordinary example of the way Fugard and Serpent Players collaborated, in this case in the making of The Island, is described by John Kani. Serpent Players had previously produced Aeschylus’ tragedy Antigone, and The Island actually contains this ‘play within a play’, as the two actors enact parts of Antigone in order to survive the psychological torture inflicted by a monstrously cruel prison warder on Robben Island known as ‘Hodoshe’ (Xhosa for a vicious, persistent green fly): The man who played Haemon, son of King Kreon, Shark Mguqulwa, was arrested three days before the first performance, and he disappeared to Robben Island for seven and a half years. So he never performed. I stepped in to play the part, which was my first speaking part in the Serpent Players. Then we received letters from my brother on Robben Island that Shark, who never knew his lines, because I prompted him all the Black Theatre under Apartheid 279

time, was now performing a one-man performance of Antigone, while working at the quarry, trying to do all the lines himself and messing things up. That’s where the idea of a play within the play came up. And that’s when we began to work to make The Island.27

It was only later that the ‘Fugard syndrome’ – the unjust and untrue assumption that black playwrights required white mentorship and direction to achieve produce of lasting value in theatre – became a problem. Maishe Maponya, who had the advantage of a bursary to complete an MA in theatre studies at Leeds University, cited this problem later in the ‘method of work’ in Malcolm Purkey’s Junction Avenue Theatre company.28 In stark contrast, the successful efforts of white theatrical producers to package African traditional performing arts for the musical stage reached new depths of cultural and economic exploitation and political misrepresentation in the 1970s. Perhaps the most glaring example is Bertha Egnos, who first came to public attention as the composer and director of ‘original African music’ for Jamie Uys’s film Dingaka in the 1960s (Gallotone SCALP 1385). Bertha Egnos achieved fame and fortune in South African show business with her 1974 production Ipi Tombi (incorrect Zulu for iph’izintombi, ‘where are the girls?’), which eventually supported three touring companies and played longer, both in Johannesburg and London, than any other South African show ever. On the cultural level, Ipi Tombi was an inauthentic burlesque of African urban and rural life which portrayed Africans as happy children better suited to the pastoral joys of the homelands than to the corrupting evils of the city. African men must come to the city for work, of course, but they should return as soon as possible to the bosom of their rural families and the land. In this apartheid-inspired vision, African culture as represented by traditional song and dance was good, but the traditional religion which nurtured them was bad.29 In one menacing scene, the traditional diviner was represented as a dark, evil witchdoctor from whom the soul of a Zulu maiden was rescued by the minions of Christian light. Despite producers’ claims that, like the government, they were promoting the value of traditional African culture, Ipi Tombi showed little respect for it. Ethnic traditions were mixed haphazardly throughout the show for sensational effect. Blanketed Sotho sing Zulu traditional songs, scantily-clad young girls wore married women’s beaded headdresses, dancers at an urban wedding wore beads and tiny skirts never seen in rural or urban celebrations, and the whole was pervaded by a coy semi-nudity and licentious display that would have been unacceptable at the most rowdy shebeen party.30 From the start, Ipi Tombi’s producers were aware of the show’s potential for polishing up apartheid’s international image. As the original programme stated: ‘When it goes overseas Ipi Tombi may well become South Africa’s most valuable export, and 280 In Township Tonight

the cast our most exciting ambassadors. The commodity it sells is happiness, which surely must compare favourably with the export of our gold and our diamonds.’31 The producers did not then anticipate the political sophistication of New York (as opposed to London) theatre-goers, or the angry public protests that would quickly end Ipi Tombi’s Broadway run in 1976. When the producers of Ipi Tombi finally arranged for special blacks-only performances as the show neared the end of its Johannesburg run in 1975, few black theatre-goers were interested. Nevertheless, the international success of Ipi Tombi, Meropa, and other shows of this kind inspired young black playwrights to bring traditional music, dance, and cultural themes back to the township stage.32 Brown Keogotsitse worked with migrant mineworkers in creating dances and settings for Mbube: The Warrior (1978), a play about political conflict in a traditional chiefdom. Bapupi Motlhabane revived the familiar theme of the inconclusive struggle between tradition and modernity in African life by juxtaposing traditional and urban dance styles and music in his 1977 production, Asazi (‘We Don’t Know’). The paternalism and cultural exploitation of Ipi Tombi were paralleled in the apparent economic and professional exploitation of Bertha Egnos’s African musicians, choreographers and performers. The procedure in both Ipi Tombi and Lulu Wena (1977) was to audition and hire African singers, composers and dancers, and ask them to display their materials. These artists were paid as little as R6 per day and signed to contracts that put their contributions under Egnos copyright, with the understanding that better pay and opportunities would follow once the show opened. In some cases, it was alleged that artists who developed the show in rehearsal were fired and paid off when the show opened, and their contributions copyrighted by Egnos.33 Some musical items were appropriated from ‘traditional’ African music supposedly in the public domain, but in other cases were the recorded or published work of professional African musicians. In 1976 a panel appointed by the South African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) concluded that composer Strike Vilakazi was justified in charging that the hit song from Ipi Tombi, ‘Mama Thembu’s Wedding’, was indeed based upon one of his published compositions, but he was unable to win his case in court. Perhaps this is why Queen Iyaya looked so thoroughly uncomfortable performing in the video of the cover version of the song, re-issued in 2002 through Arthur Mafokate’s 999 Studios. Then again, her discomfort may simply have resulted from the insistence of the producers on replacing the song’s original irresistible township swing with an incongruous Latin beat. But returning to the redoubtable Bertha Egnos, those who did perform on stage, as well as artists who did not, were then forbidden by their contracts to take any of the techniques or materials involved in the show to any other production. When a group of former Ipi Tombi cast members tried to take their own new show, Sola Sola, Black Theatre under Apartheid 281

on a tour of Australia in 1977, Egnos threatened them with a law suit.34 What she attempted, in effect, was to hire African talent at bargain rates, appropriating African performance culture, debasing it for sale at a huge profit, claiming it as her own legal property, and preventing her performers from marketing their own talents and resources freely thereafter. In return, performers displayed their bodies and talents in eight shows per week, for a salary which in 1975 stood at an average of R100, R70, and R50 per week, for the first, second, and third casts respectively. Miss Egnos, of course, denies the allegations of those who have worked for her, proclaiming her dedication to the welfare and professional advancement of black artists: ‘I would like to see a strong actors’ union to protect Black theatre. You all know that Black artists are being exploited by their own people too. We will be working to form a union to protect them’.35 The real spirit of King Kong, of interracial artistic collaboration in the development of a fully South African as distinct from black theatre, lived on in the productions of a ‘fringe circuit’ of university and ‘off-Broadway’ companies and theatres in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and other cities.36 Dorkay House’s Phoenix Players made a major effort ‘to promote cultural exchange between township and city’37 with Phiri early in 1972. Phiri was an African jazz musical which revived Ben Jonson’s Volpone in a township setting. With stage direction and script by Barney Simon, music by Cyril Magubane and Mackay Davashe, choreography by Gordon Wales, and musical acting by such talents as Stanley ‘Fats’ Dibeco, Willie Moloisi, Sophie Mgcina, David Phetoe, Corney Mabaso, Sam Williams, and many others, Phiri presented black Johannesburg culture and social experience with the highest theatrical professionalism. The social and critical environment of the time was not good, however. The official closing of the BMSC following Phiri’s last rehearsal there was a bad omen for supporters of black performance culture in the city, and stylistically the show effected an uneasy compromise between black and white production values and aesthetics. The show opened to white audiences at the Witwatersrand University, but patronising, ethnocentric theatre critics like Percy Baneshik failed to comprehend or appreciate the tragicomedy, earthiness, physicality, visible emotionality, and episodic structure that are the soul of African drama.38 Lengthened and revised for black audiences, Phiri attracted a good following, but its expensive equipment, sets and other white production values condemned it to a short run. Inevitably, perhaps, interpersonal rivalry among its many powerful talents tore apart the cast and prematurely ended the show. In retrospect, Phiri helped to raise artistic and production standards in black theatre, and several of its songs, including Sophie Mgcina’s impassioned servant’s complaint, ‘Madam Please’, became classics of the South African musical stage. The year 1972 was a productive one for Phoenix Players. First they sponsored Corney Mabaso’s Black and Blue (I and II), followed by ahead-of-their-time poetry 282 In Township Tonight

readings by Soweto intellectuals like Sol Rachilo set to contemporary blues and percussion. Then came by Isintu, a ‘traditional’ stage musical that later toured Japan as Meropa and London as KwaZulu. Phoenix capped the year by staging the first Johannesburg performances of Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead. The success of Sizwe helped to nurture the township-to-Broadway dreams of black actors and playwrights, but the failure of Phiri discouraged the artists at Dorkay House and destroyed their faith in the professional value of white theatrical training and expertise. Boxed in by Group Areas restrictions and pressured by the growing racial polarisation of the midseventies, Dorkay House and Phoenix Players slowly sank into obscurity. Fortunately there were newer, more forward-looking and vigorous fringe companies working to provide an outlet for socially relevant black theatre in the white cities. These included Workshop ’71, which combined Western improvisational ‘workshop’ drama techniques with township acting, dance, music, and a satirical social consciousness to create Crossroads, Zzzip, Uhlanga, U-Nosilimela, and Survival in the early and middle 1970s. Director Robert McLaren asserted in 1976: ‘Workshop ’71 attempts to create South African theatre out of a composite culture of all South Africans at a time when there is not a meeting of cultures but a confrontation of cultures.’39 But the seed of such a theatre could not grow in such poor political soil, and with the departure of McLaren for England and the cast of Survival for California in the wake of the Soweto uprisings, Workshop ’71 ceased to function. Undaunted, the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and the People’s Space in Cape Town moved rapidly to provide homes for both multi-racial and township theatrical productions in the white cities. Some of Workshop ’71’s best black talent, such as Ramolao Makhene, joined Malcolm Purkey’s group of white radical student thespians in the instantly legendary Junction Avenue Theatre Company. With the lifting of the ban on multi-racial companies in late 1977, the Market began to feature integrated productions. These included the biting political comedy Woza Albert! (1981), which played in Soweto as well as Johannesburg and London, and Hilary Blecher’s adaptation of Elsa Joubert’s Afrikaans novel about the pathetic life of a black domestic servant, Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena. This last play was brought to New York in 1982 as The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena, and had a successful run both off-Broadway and subsequently in London, the cast album winning awards for lead Thuli Dumakude’s powerful singing. In addition, the Market Theatre and Witwatersrand University’s small experimental theatre, The Nunnery, began to exhibit township plays like U-Lindiwe and Makwedini Julius Mtsaka’s powerful allegory of traditional and contemporary African values in conflict in the context of homeland politics, The Last Man. Such exposure and support encouraged a new, post-Kente generation of young township playwrights to confront the social, political, and economic realities of African Black Theatre under Apartheid 283

life more directly, using the performance culture of the townships to raise popular political awareness with less metaphorical self-concealment. The People’s Space theatre in Cape Town became a centre of this new effort to infuse by now familiar township forms and themes with political consciousness and naturalistic theatrical expression. In 1979, the Space produced Matsemela Manaka’s lucid, imagistic evocation of black economic exploitation, Egoli, a play about the daily degradations of migrant mineworkers in Johannesburg, originally staged at the Market Theatre. Like traditional African theatre, Egoli was plotless, episodic, and improvisational, but like the productions of Workshop ’71, it employed flashbacks, dream sequences, and other non-naturalistic techniques as it attempted to break down the physical barriers between actors and audience.40 Egoli was followed by two plays by Zanemvula ‘Zakes’ Mda (later to become one of the country’s most prolific black writers).The first, We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, was a biting satire on the pathetic fate of former combatants after the glorious ‘freedom war’. The play was a literary two-hander in the Fugard-cum-Samuel Beckett mode (with death from exposure standing in for Godot), and played to a radicalised university audience rather than the township crowd. Mda’s other play of the time was Dark Voices Ring, a portrayal of the damage done to individual lives by the apartheid system, which illuminated the immediate sources of the revolutionary impulse in the circumstances of apartheid South Africa. The 1980s saw The Girls in their Sunday Dresses, Mda’s screamingly funny take on the failings of the Lesotho government bureaucracy. When asked if he is a ‘magical realist’, Mda ironically notes that he was writing in that milieu before he ever heard of the term or read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but in his case he was writing about ‘actual’ Sotho magical practice. It would be the mid-1990s, however, before Mda produced the ‘magical’ theatre admired by William Kentridge in such plays as Ways of Dying (1996), a dramatisation of Mda’s first novel.41 Another 1979 production was Maishe Maponya’s Hungry Earth by Soweto’s Bahumutsi Drama Group. The title refers to the soil of the townships, which seemed hungry for the bodies of African working-men, who died in such numbers from mine and industrial accidents and other slings and arrows that the flesh of black South Africans was heir to. Here, episodes of working life were linked by songs, chants, and monologues on political topics. Naturalistic sound and mime were used and actors switched roles from scene to scene, often talking to the audience directly in order to destroy the rhetorical and illusionary frame of the drama and jolt the audience into critical appraisal of the action.42 Techniques of this kind were first pioneered in South Africa by Workshop ’71, and playwrights like Manaka and Maponya were clearly reacting against the stylistic and thematic orientation of the theatre of Gibson Kente. Their perspective was influenced 284 In Township Tonight

also by the radical theatre movement generated by the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) and other Black Consciousness groups during the 1970s. Kente’s popular success as well as his shortcomings helped to make student leaders aware of the uses of theatre in formulating and communicating an ideology of African cultural re-evaluation and rehabilitation. In setting up a Culture Committee, SASO had recognised that ‘culture is tied up with the aspirations of a people’, and charged the committee to deal with the ‘awakening and heightening of cultural awareness and of the involvement of the black people in their struggle for identity, self-respect, and liberation’.43 The government, of course, used its own version of African culture to promote ethnic division and retard modernisation among Africans. The Black Consciousness Movement had therefore to attempt to restore cultural identity and autonomy without playing into the hands of government policy. Pascal Gwala, editor of Durban’s radical Black Review, regarded ‘authentic’ black theatre as a blend of the performance culture of the African past with modern theatre techniques and the ‘black ethic of full, equal humanity recognised for all people’.44 He made a distinction between ‘black drama’ and ‘drama for blacks’.45 Gwala identified black drama with a theatre that promotes dignity, self-reliance, and critical selfassessment among Africans on their own cultural terms, and with heightened political consciousness in the service of a national black liberation movement. Drama for blacks he identified with both white-sponsored theatrical areas of economic and cultural exploitation of blacks, and with the theatre of Kente and other popular dramatists who emphasised internal community problems and personal morality over the external system of repression and the need for political consciousness and action. Among the first radical theatre groups to attempt to operate within the townships themselves was the Music, Dance/Art, Literature Institute or MDALI (Zulu: ‘creator’) of Soweto, an offshoot of Union Artists and Phoenix Players formed in 1972. Led by such talented people as the actor David Phetoe, MDALI sought to promote selfdetermination, self-realisation, and self-support in theatre arts, to create an audience for committed theatre, to form an actors’ union, and to recruit talent from the townships through local performance festivals. Perceiving apartheid as a total system, MDALI and the associated Mhloti (‘Tears’) Black Theatre, led by David Phetoe’s brother Molefi, who left for exile in England, rejected white artistic leadership, criticism, financial sponsorship, and inter-racial front organisations such as the abortive South African Theatre Organisation (SATO).46 To differentiate black drama from the popular theatre of Kente, Pascal Gwala asserted that his was a theatre not of protest or complaint, but one which negated old stereotypes and affirmed new, positive self-images for black people. The cultural dialectic of negation and affirmation was to provide the dynamic for social and political change.47 Similarly, Mhloti Black Theatre vowed never to Black Theatre under Apartheid 285

present plays that tell you how unfaithful our women are ... of our broken families, of how black people fight and murder each other, or bewitch each other, pimp, mistrust, hate and despise each other ... this kind of theatre leaves the people broken and despaired. We tell the people to stop moaning and start doing something about their valuable and beautiful black lives.48

The difficulty was that the things which Mhloti promised not to tell the people did in fact occur everywhere – social consequences of colonisation, economic deprivation, and apartheid. Not surprisingly, therefore, productions by MDALI of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade or Mhloti’s of West African plays like those of Wole Soyinka had little impact on township theatre or theatre-goers. In 1973 an African–Indian theatre group, People’s Experimental Theatre (PET), was formed in Lenasia, an Indian suburb of Johannesburg, to perform Shanti, an overtly political play by the recently murdered vice-president of the Black People’s Convention, Mthuli Shezi.49 While this play about revolutionary struggle and love was set firmly in South Africa, the characters were not realistic by township standards, and their tendency to preach radical ideology rather than personify the conditions of black existence again limited its potential appeal. Despite the desire for better ‘grass-roots contact’ between artist-intellectuals and the African working class, none of these plays or even Mhloti’s increasingly popular musical poetry readings brought this about. More disappointing was the reluctance of radical dramatists to re-examine African history or cultural tradition, especially in view of the greater identification of township residents with the cultural rather than the political dimensions of the Black Consciousness Movement.50 That this could be done without fostering ethnic parochialism or artificial revivalism was clear from the artistic success of Dike’s Sacrifice of Kreli and actor James Mthoba’s Uhlanga (‘The Reed’), a gripping one-man dramatisation of African history produced by Workshop ’71 in 1975. The play argued that historical understanding, cultural rediscovery, and self-confidence are part of the essential groundwork of liberation, and ‘directly states to all of us that no man is without his peculiar indestructible form of culture even if there may be external forces seeking to eradicate it’.51 Black Consciousness theatre might have become more familiar and accepted by township audiences if its leaders and productions had not been so promptly banned under the Publications and Entertainments Act or even the Terrorism Act. The arrest of Black Consciousness Movement activists Saths Cooper, Mrs Sam Moodley and Strini Moodley in 1973 effectively silenced the Theatre Council of Natal (TECON), and in 1975 PET disintegrated after the banning of its newsletter and the arrests of Sadecque Variava, Solly Ismail and Nomsisi Kraai. Included in the charge sheet at their arraignment under the Terrorism Act was the accusation that these leaders 286 In Township Tonight

did ‘stage, present, produce and/or participate in inflammatory, provocative, antiwhite, racialistic, subversive and/or revolutionary plays or dramas’.52 In the same year, Port Elizabeth playwright Khayalethu Mqhayisa’s dramatisation of the social re-entry problems of prisoners released from Robben Island, Confused Mhlaba, was banned just as its popularity began to grow in the townships. Outright banning was not the only problem faced by committed political theatre. While white provincial arts councils received heavy government subsidies, financial sponsorship was virtually non-existent for black theatre companies, radical or otherwise. White commercial producers siphoned off black talent, and it was illegal for an African to be registered as an independent professional actor. As a result, actors of internationally recognised talent such as John Kani and Winston Ntshona were listed officially as clerks for Athol Fugard.53 The lack of sponsorship may actually have been a good thing both artistically and politically, since the course of this entire narrative proves nothing so much as that he who pays the piper calls the tune. But it also meant that the development of an effective political theatre in South Africa depended upon the (not very evident) willingness of radical playwrights to establish continuity with the existing indigenous traditions of popular theatrical performance developed over the past century. Committed theatre could only survive economically in the manner of all modern African performance culture – through the paid support of its audience. Furthermore, the effectiveness of theatrical communication was determined by the ability of plays to fulfil the cultural as well as political values of a broad range of urban Africans. Though their productions may have appeared to the outsider as naive or poorly constructed, they were based in fact on the recognition that theatre was the most accessible and forceful medium through which the black working class could articulate its ideology, expose the contradictions of apartheid, and communicate a more accurate portrayal of their actual conditions of existence to members of their own and other classes.54 Emerging directly from the townships, these dramatists understood that for African playgoers, theatre was not a matter of creating an illusion, suspending disbelief, or identifying with metaphoric representations of experience. The working-class aesthetic of the townships envisioned theatre as a direct extension of the actual conditions of black existence, with no necessary boundaries between art and life, performer and audience. This perspective was revealed in spontaneous audience responses to cathartic episodes such as the attempted suicide of Paul in Sam Mhangwane’s Blame Yourself : ‘Is he really dead?’ In Aby Madibane’s play Black Tears (1977), the author ‘simply draws his ideas by letting the lead actor, Sello, loose into the society and notes his development without leaving out important effects on him … The society is to be blamed for each individual … and somebody up there (on stage) is to be blamed for the society.’55 Black Theatre under Apartheid 287

Township playwrights reacted implicitly against the view of white theatre critics who argued ethnocentrically that plays like Manaka’s Egoli were not theatre at all but mere forms of political statement.56 For Manaka and Maponya, the more their work approached the metaphoric structure of the well-made play, the less effective as theatre, for their intended audience, it became. Drama theorists like Michael Etherton were misguided in regarding the breakdown of barriers between real time and performance time, between lived experience and theatrical reproduction, and between performers and audience that occurred in popular theatre as retarding the development of coherent aesthetic principles and forms of presentation.57 As artists, the township playwrights were aware that drama achieved its affecting power through a dialectic between rhetoric and authenticity.58 Building on the audience expectations created by Gibson Kente, these authors used theatre to transform political consciousness by the reflexive heightening and intensifying of black experience on the stage. The ‘drama’ arose out of performance within the play itself and the concurrent real world. Texts were rarely recorded but rather nurtured in the minds of their collective creators, constantly updated and modified in terms of the lived relationship between people and their physical and social environments.59 Despite repression and the lack of facilities, violence and insecurity, training, and capital, black theatre flourished in South Africa during the Struggle. Kavanagh counted no less than 150 separate productions between 1953 and 1977, and the proportions were growing.60 Apartheid may even have served to encourage this outpouring, for as John Kani explained, ‘repression is like some kind of gangrene within you, inside of you, that eats your soul, that forces you to save your soul. I couldn’t really say that a repressive society would result in creative art. But somehow it does help, it is an ingredient; it acts as a catalyst to a man who is committed.’61 One of the most significant areas in which South Africa’s political economy inspired spontaneous theatre was among black miners, industrial workers, and urban squatters. McNamara noted how Mozambican migrant workers began to use performance as a means to express the common values of their fellow miners during compound recreation: In one such situation, a group of Ndau dancers from Northern Mozambique used the dance arena as a platform for the dramatization of the common involvement of all in the underground work process. In their dance they recreated an ‘accident’ underground, from which the victim miraculously recovered after certain rites had been performed over him by an individual wearing the steel arm badge of an underground ‘boss boy’ or team leader. This was followed by a sequence in which the lead dancer, wielding a spade, lashed ‘rock’ into a ‘cocopan rail loader’ (in reality a tomato box). When lashing was completed the dancer suddenly turned up the box onto the arena floor, an action which 288 In Township Tonight

represents the tipping of ore-bearing rock into the orepass. The action also appeared to have subversive intention in terms of sabotaging the products of labour, judging from the approving roar of the crowd which followed.62

White theatre activists like Hilary Blecher found new and more meaningful outlets for their efforts in conducting theatre training and appreciation workshops in the sprawling, ramshackle squatter camps of Winterveld, near Pretoria, and Cape Town’s famous Crossroads.63 In 1978 the women of Crossroads created their own play, Imfuduso, dramatising the efforts of the police to remove the camp and deport its residents to the Ciskei, and the women’s own successful resistance, for the edification of their neighbours.64 This was followed by Wathint’ Abafazi Wathint’ Imbokodo (‘You Strike a Woman You Strike a Rock’) in 1986, a memorial to the 1956 women’s anti-pass campaign and march on Pretoria’s Union Buildings, revived on the fiftieth anniversary in 2006. The play illuminated the hardships suffered by women migrant workers from the countryside, a category of labour exploitation then usually assumed to be confined primarily to their men. Perhaps the best example of the potential of theatre for the articulation of experience, the raising of consciousness, and the creation of solidarity among African workers was the Zulu play Ilanga.65 This play developed initially out of the efforts of trade union lawyer Halton Cheadle to defend fifty-five Zulu foundry workers arrested for striking illegally in 1980. Among the immediate provocations for their brutal arrest by police was a dance they performed before Department of Labour officials outside the foundry, enacting some of the conditions which prompted them to down tools. Finding it difficult to get the strikers to clarify their version of events for the purposes of their defence, Cheadle had them act out the story, an exercise that led to the elaboration of these roles into a full-scale play. In reconstructing statements and events, the workers demanded exact recreation of reality from each other, debating each enactment until consensus was reached. No one was allowed to embroider his reconstruction to show himself or others in a better or worse light than they deserved. With the help of Johannesburg’s multi-racial Junction Avenue Theatre Company, these re-enactments were adapted to courtroom procedure and actually performed for the magistrate during the trial. Finally, Ilanga emerged as a real piece of theatre, performed for co-workers in the evening at the Metal and Allied Workers’ Union hall by the original actor-defendants in the strike. The play as theatre thus achieved an almost seamless reflexive continuity with African experience, as the characters played themselves and enacted their lives before a participant audience which was drawn into the structure of the play.66 Characters directly addressed the audience as well as each other, and actors sat and acted among the audience as a means of encouraging individual engagement and response. The Black Theatre under Apartheid 289

natural evolution of Ilanga from a legal strategy to a theatrical vehicle of collective consciousness demonstrated the social vitality of African theatre and its central role in contemporary cultural reintegration. Just as important, the need to make workers’ voices heard led to novel, spontaneous innovations in dramatic form and language of black theatre. The creative involvement of committed intellectuals such as Ari Sitas in Durban and of other white directors, actors, and theatre managers in some of the most progressive forms of African theatre also presaged the interracial artistic collaboration that is both the norm and the hallmark of professional South African theatre today. It is to people like Barney Simon, Malcolm Purkey, Ari Sitas, and Rob McLaren, among so many others, that we owe the current progress towards the disappearance of ‘black theatre’ in favour of a South African, mzansi theatre in the post-apartheid period. The Junction Avenue Theatre Company, partly an outgrowth of the radical History Workshop conferences at Wits University, produced a dramatisation of Modikwe Dikobe’s novel of African working-class life in Johannesburg in the 1930s, The Marabi Dance, for the festival-symposium on Culture and Resistance held in Gaborone, Botswana, in July 1982.67 A number of symposium participants argued that aesthetic and political goals in committed theatre were mutually exclusive, such that the more artistically structured and metaphorical in expression a play was, the less authentic and politically effective it became. While I concur in the implicit rejection of class-based, socially emasculated Western formalist drama criticism, my experience compels me to maintain that a consciously formulated performance aesthetic is as important as social realism and ideological content in heightening the political and cultural consciousness of black audiences. The history of black theatre in South Africa strikingly illustrates that it is not only what, but also how performers communicate that gives performing arts their revelatory, transformative power. By the end of the 1980s certainly, what was condescendingly called ‘protest’ theatre was in decline in parallel with the apartheid regime itself. Theatre of any kind appeared to disappear from the townships, while city venues, though available, were not yet practical as a new space for the re-development of a black audience for theatre. Government funding was drastically reduced now that theatre was no longer needed as a ‘weapon of the Struggle’. New works of relevance and quality were in any case thin on the ground. The future of theatre, judging from this unpromising beginning, seemed not what it used to be. And thereby hangs a tale.

Notes 1 Corney Mabaso, interview, 22 December 1976. 2 Bantu World, 7 October 1939. 3 Bantu World, 21 February 1948. 290 In Township Tonight

4 Gérard, Four African Literatures, pp. 80–1. 5 Bantu World, 4 February 1956. 6 Guy Routh, ‘Bantu people’s theatre’, Trek 14, 10 (October 1950). 7 Teda de Moor, Forum, 11 October 1941. 8 Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 31 March 1968. 9 Robert M. Kavanagh, ‘Introduction’, South African People’s Plays, London, 1981, p. xiv. 10 Ibid., p. xxvi. 11 Ibid. 12 Larlham, ‘Black Performance in South Africa’, p. 141. 13 Kavanagh, South African People’s Plays, p. xvii. 14 Hellmann, Soweto, p. 16. 15 Elliot Makhaya, Post, Johannesburg, 24 February 1978. 16 Francis Gardiner, A Journal to the Zulu Country, London, 1836, pp. 47–50. 17 John Kani, interview with J. Marquard, To the Point, 23 December 1972. 18 Sunday Observer, London, 15 February 1981. 19 Welcome Duku, interview, 18 April 1977. 20 Larlham, ‘Black Performance in South Africa’, p. 163. 21 Rolf Solberg, Alternative Theatre in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg, 1999, p.73. 22 Fatima Dike, ‘The Sacrifice of Kreli’, South African Drama No. 1: Theatre of the ’70’s, Johannesburg, 1978. 23 Solberg, Alternative Theatre, p. 53. 24 Amato quoted in ibid. 25 Manaka quoted in ibid., pp. 194, 202–3. 26 Maclennan in ibid., p. 266. 27 Kani in ibid., p. 224. 28 Ibid., p. 179. 29 Russel Vandanbroucke, Yale/Theatre 8, 1 (Fall 1978), p. 69. 30 See Mshengu, S’ketch’, Summer 1974/75, pp. 9–11. 31 Larlham, ‘Black Performance in South Africa’, pp. 166–7. 32 Ibid., p. 153. 33 Saul Malapane, interview, 14 April 1977. 34 Weekend World, 3 April 1977. 35 Weekend World, 10 April 1977. 36 Kavanagh, South African People’s Plays, p. xvi. 37 Ian Bernhardt, Rand Daily Mail, 6 January 1972. 38 The Star, Johannesburg, 10 January 1972. 39 Mshengu, ‘South Africa: where Mvelinqangi still limps’, Yale/Theatre 8, 1 (Fall 1976), p. 47. 40 Larlham, ‘Black Performance in South Africa’, p. 173. 41 Solberg, Alternative Theatre, p. 39; South African Theatre in the Melting Pot, Grahamstown, 2003, p.249. 42 Larlham, ‘Black Performance in South Africa’, p. 177. 43 Black Review, Durban, 1973, p. 210. 44 Pascal Gwala, ‘Towards a national theatre’, South African Outlook 103, 1227 (August 1973), p. 133. 45 Pascal Gwala, Black Review, 1973, p. 105. 46 The Star, Johannesburg, 6 January 1972. 47 Gwala, Black Review, 1973, p. 133. Black Theatre under Apartheid 291

48 Ibid., p. 113. 49 Kavanagh, South African People’s Plays, p. 64. 50 Philip Frankel, ‘Status, group consciousness, and political participation: Black Consciousness in Soweto’, Witwatersrand History Workshop, 1978, p. 5. 51 Vincent Kunene, S’Ketch’, Summer 1975, p. 14. 52 Kavanagh, South African People’s Plays, p. 65. 53 The Observer, London, 15 February 1981. 54 Keyan Tomaselli, ‘Black South African theatre: text and context’, English in Africa 8, 1 (March 1981), p. 51. 55 World, 25 April 1977. 56 Michael Venables, ‘From a seat on the aisle’, Scenario 16 (1980), p. 19; Rosemary Raphaely, Star Tonight, 27 December 1979. 57 M. Etherton, ‘The dilemma of the popular playwright; the work of Kabwe Kasoma and V. E. Musinga’ in Eldred D. Jones (ed.), African Literature Today, No. 8: Drama in Africa, London, 1976, p. 39. 58 James Brink, ‘Kote Tlon’, Ph.D., Indiana University, 1980, p. 63. 59 Tomaselli, ‘Black South African theatre’, pp. 51–2. 60 Kavanagh, South African People’s Plays, p. xvii. 61 S’Ketch’, Winter 1975, p. 26. 62 J. K. McNamara, ‘Brothers and workmates: home friend networks in the social life of black migrant workers in a gold mine hostel’ in P. Mayer (ed.), Black Villagers in an Industrial Society, London, 1980, p. 334. 63 H. Blecher, ‘Goal-oriented theatre in the Winterveld’, Critical Arts 1, 3 (October 1980), pp. 23–39. 64 Larlham, ‘Black Performance in South Africa’, p. 167. This play has been videotaped in Crossroads as part of Chris Austen and Peter Chappell’s production I Talk about Me, I Am Africa, Icarus Films, New York, 1981. 65 This discussion is based upon K. Tomaselli, ‘From laser to the candle’, South African Labour Bulletin 6, 8 (July 1981). 66 Ibid., p. 68. 67 Dikobe, Marabi Dance.

292 In Township Tonight

9 The darkness and the dawn: black popular music since 1980 The early 1980s were a period of transition in the South African music world. Jazz and associated mixed forms were in something of a holding pattern owing to the severity of repression. If your playing had anything visible to do with black political aspirations, or with the cultural expressionism of Black Consciousness audibly encoded in Afrofusion, soul-jazz, and other syncretic ‘Africanist’ styles, then contracts, engagements, and venues were hard to secure. Sponsorship by a major studio was the key to a live performing career. Since the end of the ‘big band’ period in jazz in the early 1960s, it had become very difficult to earn a living performing exclusively unhybridised jazz, African or otherwise. Even so, those stalwarts whose dedication to jazz overpowered any such discouragements kept body and instruments together through their technical skills and professional versatility. And so they hot-footed it (there were no private taxis serving black people in town) from studio session work for every style of performer, to orchestras for theatrical musicals, to backing touring foreign recording artists and local pop stars on stage, to festivals in neighbouring states, to the few unsegregated venues and privately sponsored and hosted occasions where they could play what they wanted together. Great ensembles, such as Roots and Spirits Rejoice, that gave expressive voice to some of the best young talents in Afro-funk jazz did not survive the 1970s and some members, such as drummer Gilbert Matthews and pianist Mervyn Africa, were lost to exile. All along, the homeboys and girls still at home tried to keep to the professional’s cardinal rule: Play with a bad band for good money, or a good band for bad money; but don’t play with a bad band for bad money. Too often, of course, this rule was broken involuntarily, as promoters, festival organisers, club owners, and tour Black Theatre under Apartheid 293

operators claimed they hadn’t made enough profit to remunerate the performers, or simply disappeared before a proper financial reckoning could be secured. While we may blame apartheid for this situation, such practices and problems have not entirely disappeared. Then as now, musicians must look out for themselves, and not by any means only in South Africa. On the positive side, becoming and being a professional the hard way had some benefits as a training ground, and many of the young and not so young jazz ‘allrounders’ of the time went on to illustrious careers in instrumental artistic virtuosity, ensemble leadership, composing and recording. Their names include Sipho Gumede (bass), Khaya Mahlangu (saxophone), George Tyamzashe (trumpet and trombone), Duku Makasi (saxophone), Gilbert Matthews (drums), Dennis Mphale (trumpet), Barney Rachabane (saxophone), Pat Matshikiza (piano), and many others. Some, like the Cape Town fraternity that included Robbie Jansen, Basil Coetzee, Winston Ngozi, and Chris Ngcukana and his sons Duke and Ezra, only rarely accepted work outside their world of Cape Jazz, while others such as Brian Thusi (trumpet), Bheki Mseleku (piano), and even star pop-jazz vocalist Jeffrey Butler formed a second wave of those who chose exile in Europe or the United States. Out of this crucible came new black ‘township’ and ‘crossover’ styles and talents that powerfully energised the Struggle years both politically and musically, and bridged the transition from high apartheid to high hopes.6 The new township style, which superseded ‘Soweto soul’ and Harari’s African rock, was unflatteringly known as ‘bubblegum’. There is no better illustration of the inappropriate inscriptions of generic labelling than this term. Both Ansell and Meintjes – who self-admittedly have not researched this genre – misidentify it as a term for superficial British-style local pop.7 Even the first infectiously bouncy recordings were not the tasteless ephemera, musically or politically, that the dismissive ‘bubblegum’ label assumed. But perhaps the term was rather more clever than we knew, since Allen has noted that record companies such as Troubadour in the 1950s used the term ‘jive’ to deliberately mislead government watchdogs into ignoring ‘their product as the innocuous candy-floss of popular culture’.8 Musically, bubblegum clearly had both audible roots in local black popular balladry as well as engagement with popular social and political issues, and drew inspiration from Harari and the politically conscious township fusion groups that preceded it. In a stereotypical sense bubblegum almost begins and ends with the spectacular career of Brenda Fassie, who died at the age of thirty-nine in 2006. Her first big hit recording with the Big Dudes in 1983, ‘Weekend Special’, was political only in the sexual sense of protesting against the subordinate romantic status of the ‘weekends-only’ girlfriend of the philandering African man. Perhaps it was this perceived shallowness in the midst of the gathering political storm that led some radio disk jockey to deride it 294 In Township Tonight

as ‘bubblegum’: a childish tease in which the initial burst of sweetness quickly vanishes on the tongue. And yet today, over two decades later, there is hardly a local kwaito or pop music diva who does not cite Fassie’s inspiration. This is due to her unique and powerful voice, her endlessly self-regenerating capacity for multi-stylistic referencing and innovation, and also, wondrously, to her changing politics. By the late 1980s, Brenda demonstrated that she had far more than adultery on her mind when, under the powerful influence of her producer/song-writer and soulmate Sello ‘Chicco’ Twala, she issued the mould-breaking political album Too Late for Mama (1988). On it were songs written by Twala including ‘Black President’, an unabashed praise poem to the then still-jailed Nelson Mandela, looking prophetically toward the day when he would indeed be the country’s first black President. The same album also contained ‘Shoot Them before They Grow’, an imaginary debate between a liberal and a racist white on the future of young blacks, with its fierce, bitter indictment of police violence against youthful protesters: … The good white man says, send them to school. The bad white man says, shoot them before they grow …

Brenda’s blend of explicit political and sexual explosiveness was never the contradiction to herself or her fans that the term ‘bubblegum’ might suggest. In fact, her defiantly self-destructive lifestyle and in-your-face rebellious female articulateness were as much part of her politics as her recordings and her frenetically sensual stage performances. But the bad girl of pop wanted more than anything to be loved, wickedly mimicking Winnie Mandela’s questionable title ‘Mother of the Nation’ with her own self-description as ‘Girlfriend of the Nation’. Despite all the self-promoting journalistic moralism, South Africans forgave their wayward ‘MaBrrr’ (as she was called) even though she actually died of a drug overdose, and was HIV positive at the time. In May 2004, Mandela, President Mbeki, ministers of government, the aristocracy of black show business, and hundreds of other notables attended her hospital deathbed, and we all deeply mourned her passing. Since that sad event, local television, which played its part in creating her as the quintessential bad example, cannot seem to get enough of her, screening and re-screening the flimsy documentaries made about her such as I’m Not a Bad Girl Really, and ironically providing the posthumous publicity and respect that she so obsessively craved in life. Of course, back when all this started in the 1980s, Brenda wasn’t at all alone. Yvonne Chaka Chaka, with her respectable family lifestyle, provided an ideal personal foil to Brenda, while Yvonne’s hit tribute to umqombothi (indigenous grain beer) proudly revalorised home-brewed black culture. Other black music stars of the late eighties period, including Condry Ziqubu (‘Confusion’: an evocation of a Black Popular Music 295

political riot), ‘Chicco’ Twala (‘We Miss You Manelo [Mandela]’: a hymn to political prisoners and exiles), Sipho Mabuse (‘Chant of the Marching’, with its militant toyitoyi introduction), and reggae stylist Lucky Dube (‘Slave’ and ‘Prisoner’), all issued daringly political pop anthems. The attempt by the authorities to ban these anthems was half-hearted at most, in revealing contrast to their efforts to use the censorship of black performance as their own ‘weapon of the Struggle’ in previous decades, in line with Stalin’s maxim: ‘When someone talks about culture, I reach for my gun.’ The reality was that the National Party regime, forced to defend its core political real estate of the apartheid legal structure and power itself, had ceded the cultural domain of black culture to the blacks and their fellow travellers, and popular musicians had been among the first and most aggressive in its appropriation. Chicco Twala, for example, who played, wrote songs, arranged, and produced albums for many of the great ‘bubblegum’ stars including Sipho Mabuse, insisted on combining an element of political protest with the danceability of Soweto soul. This combination proved explosively successful, commercially as well as politically, and Chicco, following closely in the footsteps of the pioneer Koloi Lebona, who first spotted Brenda Fassie in township dramatist Gibson Kente’s entourage, must be regarded as the studio maestro of the Struggle period. Chicco established and embodied the key role that studio producers have come to play in black popular music. With their talent for putting together the right musicians with the right songs and sound, these producers, like today’s Oscar ‘Oskido’ Mdlongwa, have earned creative reputations as great as the musicians they produce. And indeed this talent is not confined to one or other popular genre, as Oskido produces the latest popular township dance songs and Zulu guitar maskanda with equal sureness of touch. In fact, it is unusual today to read a thumbnail professional biography of any recording artist in the South African print media that does not credit a producer with a seemingly magical responsibility for the performer’s success. By the time Chicco and his collaborators had reached their peak in the late 1980s, popular politics among the urban black working class had more than caught up with the music emanating from the bubblegum machine. Black trades unions, long banned but still active under cover, came into their own in the 1980s, organising strikes and mass mobilisation campaigns that integrated the parallel struggles for workers’ rights and the end of apartheid. Working-class writers and performing artists from within the labour movement were not slow to provide accompaniment and expression for these struggles, and union ‘cultural days’ soon became regular events featuring inspirational song fests, rhythmic ‘chants of the marching’, and oral poetic calls to arms. In Durban, the Dunlop Rubber strike of 1984 galvanised ‘worker poets’ Mi Hlatshwayo (‘The Black Mamba Rises’), Alfred Qabula, and Nise Malange into creative and organisational action, leading to the formation of the Durban Workers’ Cultural Local.9 296 In Township Tonight

Surely the most important figure to emerge from the ‘workers’ performance poetry’ movement, called mzabalazo (Zulu: resistance), was Mzwakhe Mbuli. It was at the large union ‘cultural days’ that Mzwakhe became known as the ‘People’s Poet’, a name that remains his mantle even two decades later, after many soaring highs and disastrous lows in his eventful career and personal life. Perhaps there is no better way to pay tribute to this extraordinary artist and inspirational personality than to quote at length from New York Village Voice music columnist Robert Christgau’s 1992 profile: As his father’s favorite, Mzwakhe was immersed in the culture’s choral tradition at the all-night mbube competitions his father loved. For two years [1976–8] Soweto’s schools were on strike, and after Mbuli returned to complete his matric he also participated in a cultural group that continued the semiformal Afrocentric education of the strike period. There he was encouraged to write poetry. In 1981 he got up to recite at a funeral, and soon he was performing his poems of praise, pride, and defiance at weddings, cultural days, union meetings, May Day rallies, and funerals. … Mbuli’s … voice is distinct, resonant, wise, shaped by timbres and cadences that tinge moral zest with bitter irony whether you understand the language or not ... His unrhymed, rhythm-charged verse was rife with historical analysis, humanistic exhortation, and racial pride – with politics. But like all poetry it was concrete, structured, given to reverie and drama and lyric celebration. The names of the living and the dead – martyrs of apartheid, African rulers, ANC exiles, deportees – recapitulated Zulu praise-poem tradition: …Let my mind interpret my dreams of Mount Kilimanjaro Let my brain-power interpret the last struggle in Africa Unless human rights are embarked in the statute books Loyalty shall mean vengeance Obedience shall mean rebellion Conformity a bluff And happiness a sign of danger And Africa shall know no peace Until we in the South are free. … In 1986, South Africa’s bravest independent label – called Shifty because it recorded on the run, in a sound truck – matched Mbuli with an integrated backup group featuring Kenyan guitarist Simba Morri. The banned tape became a literal underground hit in South Africa, where Shifty sold it as unmarked contraband, and surfaced in the United States on Rounder Records as Change is Pain. Much of the music, a rough avant-trad potpourri that owed a debt to Jamaican dub poetry and to Philip Tabane’s black-consciousness band Malombo, had to be created in Mbuli’s absence, though he Black Popular Music 297

joined the final sessions. The collectively conceived music on Unbroken Spirit seems wholer, with touches of sax jive and mbube-style female chorus, and though for the most part Mbuli once again intones over backup, occasionally he sings as if he’s been doing it all his life, which of course he has. It took the efforts of thirteen embassies to get him a visa to play Europe with a newly formed band, The Equals. He became controversial on the typically fractious and exceptionally puritanical South African left, where some charged that he was a rogue, a self-promoter, and – based on his work with the UDF cultural desk and the South African Musicians Alliance – a ‘cultural commissar’. … He overreached himself administratively – at one point he opposed an Abdullah Ibrahim appearance because he hadn’t gone through channels. Shortly after Mzwakhe exited his UDF post, he embarked upon a career as a pop star – ‘poet-musician’ is his term. Although Mbuli has international ambitions – he sees his themes as ‘universal’, ‘not confined to the South African situation’ …

As Christgau also noted, the political thaw of the early 1990s did not warm Mzwakhe to ‘police, politicians, and talking heads’, black or white. But as protest culture waned, Mzwakhe turned his attention to the killing fields of KwaZulu-Natal, where political violence raged between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC. His musical plea in 1991 to both sides, ‘Papa Stop the War’, a collaborative effort with Chicco Twala, proved a tremendous success. By the mid-1990s Mbuli was touring, both locally and abroad, with The Equals, and early in 1997 he released his pop-musical, poetic, hopeful tribute to his ancestral home, KwaZulu-Natal.10 Then in 1998 the People’s Poet was, astoundingly, arrested for the armed robbery of a suburban Johannesburg bank. Convicted and sentenced to thirteen years in prison, Mzwakhe has always protested his innocence, and claimed that his own criticism of Mandela’s government and investigations into drug dealing in high places were the reasons behind this false charge. His case became a cause célèbre both locally and internationally, and a great deal has been written concerning the peculiar, alarming gaps in the prosecution’s case. In any event he was released, and then only conditionally, after serving five years. Even in prison Mzwakhe continued his organisational and musical activities, issuing a CD, Born Free but Always in Chains, in 1999, and Mbulism in 2004, some months after his release. Of all Mzwakhe’s work, perhaps no composition is more moving in performance than the poet’s sonorous reading of his poem ‘Alone, All Alone’ from the volume Before Dawn (COSAW, 1989): Perhaps like God on the day of creation; Alone all alone; Perhaps like an animal inside the cage; Alone all alone; 298 In Township Tonight

No mirror permitted to create my twinself; And conquer the loneliness; Alone all alone …

In general, from the end of the 1970s until 1991, professional black musicians searched, sometimes ambivalently, for validation from the political organisations leading the anti-apartheid Struggle. Some wanted music and musicians to play a visible part in the overthrow of the old order and the emergence of the new, while others were seeking a blessing for or at least tolerance of renewed international touring and exposure. Local performers’ organisations, like the South African Musicians Association (SAMA) under the chairmanship of Johnny Clegg, were drafted into the crucial roles as political spokesmen for performers, channelling their energies in progressive political directions, and making sure they ‘ain’t gonna play Sun City’ as American rap giants Run-D.M.C. and Artists United Against Apartheid’s famous protest song ‘Sun City’ (1986) put it. SAMA gave an enormous boost to both the political and professional representation of musicians.Transformed into the Musicians Union of South Africa (MUSA), it still plays an important role as arbitrator in the professional community of musicians, especially in Johannesburg, the centre of the industry. In Cape Town, the leading political voice for musicians in the 1980s was Musical Action for People’s Power (MAPP), a musicians’ collective that organised performances for political commemorations, rallies, and protests, but soon became the quasi-official source for what musicians should and shouldn’t, would and wouldn’t do for political reasons. In time MAPP transformed itself into a combined township booking agency, ensemble stable, music school, and student big band called Musical Action for People’s Progress, and its closing due to problems of management and the withdrawal of Swedish donor funding in 1995 left a hole in Cape Town’s community musical life that has not been filled. In the meantime, Cape Town’s local jazz traditions were kept alive by Basil Coetzee, the saxophonist on Abdullah Ibrahim’s legendary jazz-marabi hymn Manenberg (1974), and his group Sebenza. Pacific Express, led by one-time Coon Carnival saxophonist Robbie Jansen, kept both the political and musical home-fires burning in Cape jazz. Jansen, who came to embody the very soul of Cape jazz locally as Abdullah Ibrahim did internationally, seemed as eternal as the landmark after which he named his group, the Sons of Table Mountain, until April 2005 when he and, it seemed, the beat of the Mother City herself suffered an incapacitating heart attack. His subsequent full recovery has rekindled the artistic home-fires of Cape Town’s jazz venues, which in the new millennium have burned perhaps more brightly than those of smoky Johannesburg. Equally important as a musical reflection of popular politics, in its own stylistic way, was ‘crossover’: a term for Afro-pop fusion groups who attracted a rather more Black Popular Music 299

cosmopolitan and multi-racial audience, crossing the usual racial divide in musical tastes. Crossover is an apt term since these ensembles consciously sought to bridge and blend not only genres from jazz to marabi to Zulu rural migrant dance, but also audiences from township to white suburb, from dense Durban to one-stop De Aar, sprawling Soweto to nearby Swaziland. Lara Allen’s thoughtful essay compares 1980s crossover with other contemporaneous styles: A highly inter-textual and nostalgic mélange of musical elements, crossover attempted to do the work of racial integration, offering a metaphor for broad political representation in sound. … While all popular music – perhaps all music – blends elements from other musical styles, crossover was differentiated first by the self-consciousness with which such fusion took place, and secondly by the political significance intended by stylistic fusion. The complexity of the resulting signification was part of the power of crossover music, for musicians and audiences. Ideologically, and to an extent stylistically, the roots of 1980s South African crossover lie in the inter-racial collaborative projects of the 1950s and early 1960s, particularly the musical King Kong and Chris McGregor’s modern jazz ensemble, the Blue Notes. From the 1960s South African exiles (particularly Jonas Gwangwa, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Caiphus Semenya, Letta Mbuli and Abdullah Ibrahim) developed an idiom that, while speaking strongly of a South African heritage, remained within the bounds of genres known and appreciated by Euro-American audiences … … During the 1980s the term crossover came specifically to denote any music that clearly drew from, and amalgamated, styles held apart by apartheid. The major boundary to be crossed, therefore, was that of race. This was generally accomplished through the fusion of distinctly black musical elements with styles patronised by white South African and international audiences. Crossover was often produced by racially mixed bands and was generally aimed at racially mixed audiences. Stylistically, 1980s crossover ranged from Juluka’s blend of rock and maskanda and Mango Groove’s kwelapop, to the afro-jazz fusion of such groups as Sankomota and Bayete. Many of these collaborative projects were driven by a revolutionary impulse and, with varying degrees of political understanding and sensitivity, they protested against separate musical and cultural development, revelling in and celebrating communality despite difference. … Through music these bands enacted in the present a vision of the future. Under apartheid, crossover was vanguard, musically and politically, and in producing and patronising such music musicians and audiences alike expressed their opposition to the political status quo.11

Among the outstanding Johannesburg-based crossover groups of the time, those who made a lasting musical as well as broader public cultural contribution were Johnny Clegg 300 In Township Tonight

with his new group Savuka, Ray Phiri and Stimela, Jabu Khanyile and Bayete, Tshepo Tsola and Sankomota, the band Sakhile, and Ringo Madlingozi. Cape Town gave the country the unique multi-racial crossover ensemble Tananas, composed of acoustic guitarist Steve Newman, drummer Russell Herman, and bassist Gito Baloyi As Ansell nicely summarises: ‘What these groups … had in common was their combination of social themes and a musical language drawing on both urban pop and rural tradition, and often jazz, too. It was in many ways an alternative kind of neo-traditionalism, crafted – unlike the state’s version – from the bottom up.’12 By 1986 Johnny Clegg, not merely a Zulu composer, instrumentalist, and dancer but virtually a force of nature, wearied of waiting for his comrade in musical arms, Sipho Mchunu, to rejoin Juluka and founded Savuka (‘Awakening’), again a multi-racial/ cultural ensemble of musicians and dancers, but with a greater emphasis on rhythm and rock and less on the Zulu guitar mbaqanga stream of musical confluence: just a bit more crossed-over. Clegg also further developed an innovative aspect of his performances that creatively employed the knowledge and communicative skills he had acquired and honed as a student and then lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. Before each song, Clegg provided a few minutes of information, commentary, and humour on things Zulu. In the hands of a less skilled cultural raconteur, these mini-lectures might have evoked impatience from the audience, but Clegg’s obvious passion, sense of timing and irresistible charm held them spellbound. So great was Clegg’s reputation that no boycott of his international shows was considered. When Savuka was at first refused permission to play at Mandela’s seventieth birthday concert at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1988, Winnie Mandela called from South Africa to intercede and Clegg’s ensemble was allowed to perform. Meantime, at home black crossover bands made some of the most important contributions to a distinctively South African music and to the politics of culture. The brutal repression of the Soweto Uprising of 1976–7 was followed by a period during which the internal forces of resistance nursed their wounds, and the ANC and PAC in exile worked to infiltrate back into, and re-assert leadership of, the Struggle at home. By 1983, with the formation of the United Democratic Front to represent the banned liberation movements above ground, South Africa was suffused with a state of more or less continuous resistance that would lead to the release of the imprisoned leadership, including Nelson Mandela in 1990. Black performing artists were galvanised by this spirit of resistance as well, but these were dark days indeed, and those inside the country were as subject to censorship, detention, and attack as those in exile in the neighbouring African ‘frontline states’. Prohibited from entering South Africa between 1977 and 1991, I joined South African exile networks in New York while teaching at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, and spent many fruitful months in London, Botswana, Swaziland, Black Popular Music 301

and Lesotho, learning from local as well as exiled political and cultural activists. We must not forget how dire was the repression of the performing arts nor the dogged, ultimately successful struggle by performers to overcome it – a situation powerfully described in Gwen Ansell’s recent volume, Soweto Blues.13 Artists had to perform with care, but many were at the same time eager to counter the criticism that they were ‘mere entertainers’ strumming and fiddling while Johannesburg burned. Conversely, the authorities were often willing to offer musical stars suspiciously large sums of money through front promoters to play at very questionable events and venues, and not all performers asked any questions. Sipho Mabuse was not one of these, but he steered clear of explicit politics until the very late 1980s, instead providing the rhythms and melodies for the esprit de corps of township youth with ‘Burn Out’ and ‘Jive Soweto’. And with good reason, as his overtly political Chant of the Marching, recorded in London in 1989, was banned. Lucky Dube abandoned his local Zulu jive for reggae, providing albums such as Exile and Prisoner which, following Jamaican stars Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and Peter Tosh, did not have to mention South Africa explicitly to get the message of the freedom struggle across. Further, anyone who attended one of Lucky’s live performances in those days would have been treated to a superb, exhausting display of reggae song and dance. Nor should we neglect Dube’s outstanding musical achievement in mastering the reggae idiom to the degree that he became an international star of the genre in his own right, and his albums could be found in record shops throughout the world in the ‘reggae’ and not the ‘World Music/Africa/South Africa’ section. In the early 1980s new musical ensembles and innovations continued to steam out of the pressure cooker of political repression. Guitarist Ray Phiri, the son of a Malawian migrant from Nelspruit in the north-eastern Lowveld, emerged, like Malombo’s Philip Thabane, from some self-taught musical nowhere to form Stimela (‘Steam Train’) – a recollection of their own travels by train as well as a tribute to Hugh Masekela’s hit song celebrating migrant workers. This group, like Savuka, crossed over both audience and stylistic boundaries, fusing American rock with township jive and the African-jazz fusion of Malombo. Their musical ‘Afro-cool’ style was overlaid with lyrics that slyly intimated the depths of South Africa’s crisis without blowing it in the listener’s face. Even so, the message was clear enough to the diligent censors at the SABC to get some of Stimela’s hits banned from the airwaves. The most famous of these was ‘Whispers in the Deep’, which became a runaway success because of public curiosity as to just what quality had led to its banning. So the record company had it re-released as ‘Dance Old Man’. As Foucault observed, if you want something to spread, try to stamp it out. Phiri and Stimela were already popular heroes and their albums bestsellers across racial and cultural lines before the unexpected intervention of the most famous crossover artist of them all, American star Paul Simon. 302 In Township Tonight

Paul Simon and his Graceland project are among the most famous episodes in the history of South African music, and a good deal of commentary has been spoken and penned about the ethics and politics of culture involved.14 The outlines of the story are well known. Simon was exploring ‘world music’ for new sounds and inspiration and came across some from South Africa. Of course, he was already familiar with exiled stars including Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba. Off to Johannesburg he went (boycott notwithstanding) where he heard firsthand the musicians he ultimately brought into his Graceland album and tour, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ray Phiri, and bassist Bakhiti Khumalo. The result is a layered, parallel movement of Simon’s ambiguous, wistfully sophisticated, ironic American lyrics floating over the deep bass choruses supplied by Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the lively bounce of township rhythms of Ray, Bekhiti, and the band. Somehow the ‘blend’, if we may call it that, worked, perhaps most notably at the affective level, where songs like ‘Homeless’ and ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ somehow awakened the sympathies of listeners on both sides of the Atlantic to the plight of South Africans’ unheard suffering and urban Americans’ personalised desolation of the spirit. The follow-up tour, including the famous concert in Zimbabwe, also roped in established South African stars Masekela and Makeba, and set Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the road to a sterling international career of their own. Everyone was well paid, and Simon gave Ladysmith’s leader Joseph Shabalala co-composer credit for the tracks on which the group performed. The rest is musical history, and there is little to be gained from beating a horse (or, as Simon might himself put it, a ‘One Trick Pony’) dead, except to offer observations from the musicians themselves. The two main criticisms of Simon were that he violated the cultural boycott and had not consulted the ANC in exile, and that he exploited South African musicians and the music of an oppressed people to revitalise a fading personal career. On the first count, Simon was obviously politically myopic and naive, but none of the musicians, not even Masekela or Makeba, complained. On the second point, even if one believes that music prior to recording is some sort of intellectual property of the cultural group or groups who first performed it, Simon may be said to have increased the value of this property internationally. It may be a crying shame that it requires the leading involvement of a foreign star to produce this value, but that is how it is. Certainly, the applause given Simon when he joined Ladysmith on stage for the final item in their concert in 1988 at New York’s Carnegie Hall, during which these one-time Zulu factory workers held the audience entranced by the force of vocal harmony alone, was grateful and sincere. In 1987 and again in 2005, Ladysmith received Grammy Awards for best world music albums. Indeed, Ladysmith Black Mambazo were Gallo Africa’s top-selling recording artists and wealthy men a full decade before Paul Simon brought them international fame and fortune. Black Popular Music 303

Bayete (the word is a Zulu salute to a king) was not originally the brainchild of its famous and beloved vocalist and leader, Jabu Khanyile, who died in 2006, but of legendary Koloi Lebona of CCP Records, who nurtured and produced so many Afro-pop performers and styles, from Sotho migrants’ accordion and drum bands to Brenda Fassie. Jabu Khanyile grew up in Soweto as a son of a minor chief from Inkandla in Zululand. Jabu’s father was among those many involuntary migrants who remain in but not really of Johannesburg. His father had his own isicathamiya group, typically composed of fellow migrants from the workers’ hostels, who sang and drank umqombothi at their home every Sunday. The music of other African language groups was heard all over the neighbourhood through the cable rediffusion service. Jabu’s mother was Sotho, however, and after the parents divorced he went to stay with her family for some years where he often joined in the singing of their hymns, returning for a while to his father’s house until he was sixteen, when he set out for himself. Looking for employment, he joined one of his brothers in a band called The Edition, playing cover versions of American popular songs. His hero, though, was blind ‘Soweto soul’ star Babsy Mlangeni, then at the peak of his career. But when Jabu went to see Koloi Lebona about playing for Babsy, Lebona suggested, with his infallible creative intuition, that Jabu rather join the township jive ensemble Bayete as their drummer for a tour to Zimbabwe. The key to the transformation of this group into an innovative Afro-fusion, acoustic Zulu jazz group was the collaboration between young brass virtuoso and composer Themba Mkhize and Jabu, who created a brilliant vocalisation for Mkhize’s ‘Mbombela’, giving Bayete their first hit in 1987. Bayete’s music might be labelled ‘neo-traditional popular’ in that it was intended to appeal to the ‘crossover’ audience, and used acoustic instruments, including some like the marimba that originated north of South Africa. Cape Town’s Amampondo Drummers had brought the marimba into South African acoustic popular music, but Bayete was the most polished and successful of its exponents. At a time when most township groups were focused on the latest electronic technology, Bayete took an opposite direction. Along with Mkhize and Khanyile, guitarist Johnny Khonqo, who had played with Caiphus Semenya on his tours of Central Africa, and Mduduzi Magwaza of the fantastically successful multi-racial updated pop-kwela crossover band Mango Groove, were together responsible for innovating the Bayete style. For the next six years Jabu fronted the band until they went their separate ways and the singer was forced to find new personnel to carry on the music with which he had now become inescapably identified. After the break-up of the original Bayete, when the future of the style looked uncertain, Jabu came up with their greatest hit, ‘Malowe’, a superbly rendered marimba-driven folk love ballad Sakhile, a different, more jazz-based Afro-funk fusion ensemble, involved some of the most creative and technically professional younger township musicians of the 304 In Township Tonight

early 1980s, including Khaya Mahlangu (saxophone), Sipho Gumede (bass), Gabriel Thobejane (African percussion), Menyatso Mathole (guitar), Mododa Mathunga (drums), Jabu Nkosi (keyboards), and jazz composer and arranger Don Laka. An important influence on their coming together to form Sakhile, into which all the band members and many of their professional colleagues put a great deal of thought as to style, sound, and cultural stance, was the environment of Lucky Michaels’s Pelican Nightclub in Orlando, Soweto. Why this wide-ranging, ungainly and voracious seabird gave its name to a landlocked and besieged outpost of township musical and political creativity, I do not know. Whatever the origins of the name, ‘unlicensed’ music clubs such as Pelican played a major part in keeping professional black urban music both live and alive during the late 1970s and early 1980s.15 Weekends at Pelican featured a parade of superb talents, including the brilliant saxophonists Mike Makhalemele and Duku Makasa, keyboardist Jabu Nkosi, bassist Sipho Gumede, and guitarist Alan Kwela (all now deceased), ensuring that word of the music was somehow getting out. As Ansell puts it: ‘It was the time that made the place.’16 Lucky Michaels moderated the considerable risks involved by making sure the white police were regularly paid off. Open mike nights were frequent, and occasionally local independent films were screened. During the week and on some afternoons, the Pelican provided a venue for political meetings.17 Young talents like Khaya Mahlangu played with veterans like Barney Rachabane, perfecting their skills, and even retired veterans like big-band guitarist General Duze made the club their headquarters. While Khaya Mahlangu was still a music student under Professor Khabi Mngoma (father of jazz diva Sibongile Khumalo) during the late 1970s, he received part of his musical training at the Pelican. It was there as well that the formation of a new group that would express the African and local orientation of the younger and more restless jazz musicians was discussed and at length agreed upon. To enhance the African element, Khaya insisted in bringing in master percussionist Gabriel Thobejane, then freelancing after his split with Philip Thabane and Malombo in 1978. The group was to be called Sakhile (‘We Have Built’). Their first album, Sakhile, released in 1982, was a landmark, but then, as now, one had to hear Sakhile live to apprehend their creative impact against the background of social disruption and violent resistance and repression of the times. By the mid-1980s, entertainment venues in the townships were under threat from the Struggle itself, as young ‘comrades’ objected to relaxation and enjoyment in the neighbourhoods they sought to mobilise against the white regime and its agents’ violent repression in the townships. Lucky Michaels closed the Pelican in 1986. As for Sakhile, the group has had its better, worse, and non-existent fortunes since that time, but their audience never forgot them, and in the new millennium a new, younger audience has given them a second lease on musical life. Black Popular Music 305

Another ensemble that appeared to possess the proverbial cat’s nine musical incarnations was Sankomota. Originating in the late 1970s in the small neighbouring country of Lesotho, the band was at first known by the bold name Uhuru, and guided musically by virtuoso guitarist and composer Frank Leepa and spiritually by Sotho rasta guru Black Jesus. Their first tour to South Africa, following the release of their hits ‘Africa’ and a cover of the Black Five’s ‘Pula ea Na’ (‘It’s Raining’), got them sent packing back to Lesotho and banned from South Africa. There they became the favourite local house band and, most importantly, acquired the services of huskyvoiced lead vocalist Tsepo Tsola. Reborn as Sankomota, Tsepo, Frank and company became Lesotho’s first genuine popular musical stars. Due to their mix of tempos, vocal phrasings, and complex changes, Sankomota’s lively rhythms are strangely undanceable, but like Savuka, Bayete, and Ringo, Sankomota benefited immeasurably from the presence of a commanding vocal lead that could melodically embody their audiences’ emotional experiences. Sakhile and Stimela, lacking such a presence, faded by the late 1980s. Today, Savuka, Bayete, and Ringo are still playing to adoring audiences, and Sakhile has made a comeback in part due to the addition of the incredibly versatile and powerful ‘urban Zulu’ singer Shaluza Max Mntambo. Similarly, even with the death in a road accident on tour of two of its core members, Sankomota lasted in some form until the death of guitarist-composer and guiding spirit Frank Leepa in 2003, even though Tsola left the group some years earlier. A recent inheritor of this musical tradition, although more a township than a crossover performer, is Joe Nina. Born Makhosini Henry Xaba in 1974, Joe Nina made his early reputation as a kwaito song-writer and producer. But after a period of decline and uncertainty in the late 1990s he discovered how to combine his rhythmic and vocal gifts and re-emerged as a township jive balladeer in the footsteps of Ringo Madlingozi. Joe enjoyed tremendous success with his classic ‘Zodwa’ from his album Sbali, and also with his live shows where his swinging township beat and smooth memorable lyrics never failed to get the entire audience both dancing and singing. Since 2004, Joe has teamed up with the all-butforgotten ‘bubblegum’ king Steve Kekana for live performances that have given both Kekana and eighties’ township soul music a new lease on life. Tsepo Tsola himself is still very much around, and appears regularly on television specials. Growing up in Lesotho in the midst of a Negro spiritual-singing AME Church family, Tsola’s singing is soaked in gospel and African jazz but rooted in Sotho melody and lyric. After a decade with Leepa and Sankomota, his successful solo album The Village Pope gave him his lasting professional praise name. Despite his long habit of substance abuse (Hugh Masekela convinced him to undergo an apparently successful rehabilitation programme in 2001), Tsola blended his vocal talents with virtually every major local black singing star of the 1980s and even the very different 1990s periods. 306 In Township Tonight

His 2002 solo release, New Dawn, marks a more reflective musical self-contemplation, fitting for such a beloved elder statesman of song. Ringo Madlingozi was born in Gugulethu Township, Cape Town, in 1964 and imbibed a deeper sense of Xhosa cultural identity during his high-school days in Umtata, Transkei. As a youth he was a typical ‘tin cans’ drummer, but his destiny was ultimately to revolutionise Xhosa balladry. After singing with an a cappella group in Umtata, he first joined the group Ikwezi as their vocalist. In 1986 his new band, Peto, won the Shell Road to Fame talent competition, bringing the young singer national exposure. During this period Ringo was infatuated with Lucky Dube and reggae in general, and he waited hours to get in to see famed Island Records reggae producer Chris Blackwell on a visit to Johannesburg, to which Ringo, like so many of the Cape’s most talented musicians, had relocated. Blackwell listened to Ringo’s demo but advised him bluntly to use the unique qualities of his voice to develop popular singing in his own native language, and not waste time copying reggae stars. This marked a turning point for Ringo, who joined Gecko Moon in the early 1990s, with whom he professionalised his vocal style and worked on the composition of Xhosa ballads to suit his unique vocal timbre. By 1996 he was finally ready to emerge from commercial session work and released Vukani (‘Wake Up!’), also touring South Africa with Congolese soukous superstar, Papa Wemba. It was his second album, Sondelani (‘Get Closer’), released in 1997, however, that made Ringo a fixture in South Africa’s popular cultural imagination. The title song, ‘Sondela’, perfectly suited to the unique qualities of Ringo’s voice and phrasing, is a soaringly wistful Xhosa love song to his country, which some listeners thought should be made an unofficial national anthem for the new South Africa. The album sold over 100 000 copies and created for Ringo a loyal following, and he still features at major festivals and concert programmes around the country. His stage performances with his group, both at home and on tour abroad, are as colourful and enrapturing as a western Cape sunset, with Ringo’s luminous smile topping off energetic Xhosa ukuxhentsa dancing in neo-traditional beaded leather robes. Turning to the popular music of labour migrants, by the late 1970s Mahlathini’s simanje-manje style of mbaqanga was losing favour, as the African urban working class came to identify more with the cities in which they needed to labour than the communities in the countryside from which they came. However nostalgic the songs and male and female personae of Mahlathini and his Queens, they represented an attachment to destitute ‘homelands’ to which only the heartless legal regime of apartheid and its authorities could make them return. Although the environment of Johannesburg, Pretoria or Durban was inimical to the pursuit of what they considered a properly African social life, the need to achieve some permanency there was a consuming strategic motivation. One consequence was a desire for music that Black Popular Music 307

expressed identities created both ‘home’ and ‘away’ – signifying both familiar, local self and appropriated, external other. Into this aspirative space in 1974 wandered a group of musical migrants from Durban, singer-drummer David Masondo, bassist Zakes Mchunu, and guitarist Tuza Mthethwa, who called themselves the Groovy Boys, but who soon changed their name to the Soul Brothers. The addition of Hammond electric organist Moses Ngwenya and the aptly named American Zulu on rhythm guitar in 1976 put them on the road to stardom with their first hits, ‘Mshoza Yami’, ‘Mama ka S’Bongile’ and ‘Ubaba no Mama’. The Soul Brothers blended the old guitar band mbaqanga with the local African working-class conception of African-American ‘soul’ music to produce a form of ‘traditional popular’ music that emphasised a bouncing township beat in rapid 8/8 time, complex organ riffs, a characteristically South African lead bass melody, and a team of male rather than female stage dancers in classy mapantsula brightpatterned shirts, tackies, and creased trousers, who provided close-harmony, falsetto vocals addressing social issues familiar to their urban working-class audience. This formula pushed Mahlathini and his ‘groaning with girls’ formula off the mbaqanga stage for more than a decade, until the end of the cultural boycott in the early 1990s, when they made a brief final comeback overseas and issued the superb classic CD, Paris to Soweto. Not to be outdone, the Soul Brothers also toured to Europe and performed at the ceremony in 1990 when Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Over the years the Soul Brothers, anchored by the indestructible Moses Ngwenya despite regular turnovers of personnel, issued dozens of albums and spawned countless imitators, many of whom are still performing on the popular-traditional SABC show Roots (which has succeeded Ezodumo as a showcase for neo-traditional music). It is principally due to the Soul Brothers that Meintjes’s remarkable book Sound of Africa! (2003),18 which probes to the very heart of Mahlathini’s old mbaqanga style, is a eulogy to a bygone genre rather than an evocation of a living form. Today, what passes for ‘traditional’ music among the Zulu working class is either the Soul Brothers style, Phuzhushukela’s guitar maskanda, or that hardy perennial, isicathamiya choirs. As Gunner’s recent work amply demonstrates,19 isicathamiya is alive and well in the new province of KwaZulu-Natal over a decade after Erlmann’s definitive study.20 Tragically, the residents of the province are not so well now, and in too many cases no longer alive, as the Aids pandemic rages unabated. Gunner shows that contemporary amateur isicathamiya groups continue to mobilise local moral imagination through the authoritative vehicle of an innovative stylistic ‘tradition’.21 The textual range of their songs has moved far beyond, without neglecting, the travails of labour migrancy and modern love, epitomised by Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s original 1970s hit, ‘Nomathemba’, to the ‘space of death’ in which seemingly all social relationships 308 In Township Tonight

are now situated.22 Some of the younger groups, such as the Mpumalanga White Birds, have moved beyond the older poetic style of ironic allusiveness to confront the catastrophe with startling directness: Shwele Mama! Shwele Baba! Shwele Mvelingqangi! Yiba nomusa kithi! Asazi ke Baba ukuthi lo nyak’ omusha usiphetheleni. Kwenzeka izimanga ezinyantis’ igazi Baba sekwanele. Kwaf ’ uMama! Kwaf ’ uBaba! Awu! Kwaza kwafa nabantwana. Awu! Bafa bonke Ma! Yiso sona lesi sifo Esiwumbulalazwe kuwo wonke umhlaba Awu sabaqeda Ma! Nakwe labamhlophe Sabaqeda Ma! Isifo sabaqed’ abantu nalaph’ Eningizimu Awu isizwe sonke NabaBishobhi Nezazimthetho Namakhosi Awu Badidekile Ma! Badidekile Ma ngalesi sifo sengculazi Awu! Awu! Saze sabadida Ngempela siyabadida Noma becwaninga ngaso Noma besipopola Siyabadid’ abantu lesi sifo Ubon’ abantu laph’ emhlabeni we Ma! Ubon’ abantu bebheke le Abanye bebheke le Benzani? Babiz’ iNkosi

Forgive us Mother! Forgive us Father! Forgive us Almighty God! Have mercy on us! We don’t know Father what the New Year holds. Things’ve happened that have chilled the blood. Father! It’s enough! Ah! Mother has died! Ah! Father has died! Ah! And then the children died! Ah! They’ve all been finished off! And it’s this disease, Nation-destroyer of the whole world. Ah! It’s finished them, off, Ma! Even in the lands of the Whites. It’s finished them, Ma! It’s also finished off people here in the South. Oh the whole nation And the Bishops And the lawyers And the chiefs. Oh they’re all confused Ma! They’re confused Ma by that disease of Aids Ah! Ah! It’s got them on the run. Truly it’s got them on the run. Even when people research into it Even when they use their microscopes That disease beats people. You see people in this world Ma! You see them looking this way Others looking that way. What are they doing? They’re calling on God. Black Popular Music 309

Inkos’ enjani na? We Mama! Wehlukene kaninginingi Nkosi Nkosi ehol’ amaqembuqembu Bayezwa abezwisisi Bayabona ababonisi Bayahamba ababoni Bathi ngumholi/Umholi wabo Yimi Yimi nawemfowethu Singabaholi baba Yimi nawe dadewethu Wena onalesi sifo Musa ukuzibulala Kuningi osangakwenza empilweni Ukuphila nalesi sifo Ubon’ abantu [bezixongololo] Uthi uyabuz’ ukuthi kwenzenjani Yabe Silalele nsizwa yomuntu Lesi sifo madoda sibi Sifuna ukusiqeda kulomhlaba Ungazivikela kanjani? Ngokungayi ecansini Shwele Baba! Ngokubuyisa amasiko esintu Njenge lokuhlolwa kwezintombi Ubona nje. Kunjenje emhlabeni. Yingoba siwalahlile amasik’ ethu Awakithi akwaZulu. Yiyo Mama Yiyo Mama Lesi sifo sengculazi Siqedile entsheni yakithi

What kind of God? Ah Mama! God has many faces Lord, Lord who leads the different congregations People hear but not well People see but not well They move around but they don’t see They say ‘I’m the leader’/Their leader But it’s you and me my brother We are their leaders. And it’s you my sister and it’s me. And you who have the disease Don’t kill yourself There’s a lot you can still do in your life To live with that disease You see people And you ask them what’s going on Young man you must listen to us That dread disease, men We’re going to beat it on this earth. And how can you protect yourself? Avoid sex. Forgive us Father! Go back to our own old customs. Like the [vaginal] inspection of young girls. You see. That’s how it is in the world. ’Cos we’ve lost our Zulu customs That’s it Mama. That’s it Mama That disease called Aids Is finishing off our youth …23

Even in the performance of such lengthy texts, younger choirs like the White Birds do not neglect visual entertainment. Nothing new is so acceptably familiar as an old style reinvented, and so these younger groups appeal to their youthful audience with S’khwela Jo, a dance style more than half a century old that now incorporates movements and routines from recent dance genres including urban pantsula and kwaito. These choirs are equally adept at situating themselves in ‘a transnational flow of ideas about the world … [an] awareness that allows for this switching between a 310 In Township Tonight

local and global idiom’.24 Of course, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, internationally the most successful group in the history of South Africa, has had more than a passing impact on the continuing local vitality of isicathamiya. However, the group now occupies a different position in Durban’s musical life. As Gunner cogently observes: the very transnational nature of Black Mambazo, its ‘internationalisation’, has impacted on the self-styling of a number of the groups practising at home. Yet in other ways the ongoing dialogic exchange with a primary public means that the ‘home’ groups respond to the tastes and needs of a regional constituency in a way which the now famous group can no longer do … the world stage has blunted its ability to work closely with the ‘knowledgeable community’ at home. They no longer compete in the community halls of the rural and semi-rural or former townships to which Zulu Messengers, Try Singers and others go. They sing in up-market venues such as Durban City Hall, when they do have ‘home’ visits, and the tickets, at R150 each, are not within the reach of the regular audience at the Durban YMCA who pay their R8 to attend the all-night sessions of the competing teams who operate there. Nevertheless, even though they no longer compete, they are revered, and deeply admired as, in some key way, masters of the genre and ambassadors for others who might follow behind them. In their world travels they meld ‘Zuluness’ and ‘South Africanness’; the groups at home, however, engage with the pain and potential of the present local and national moment and embrace the global too, with the confidence of ‘uhlel’ olusha’, the new era.25

Maskanda is a complex neo-traditional form with a long and honoured history in the vast Zulu-speaking province of KwaZulu-Natal. Since the departure of John ‘Phuzhushukela’ Bhengu from the music scene (he died in 1985), its most prominent professional exponent has been Joseph ‘Phuzekhemisi’ Mnyandu, recently joined by Ihashi Elimhlope, Bhekumuzi Luthuli, and an extraordinary number and variety of other composers and singing guitarists. Joseph Mnyandu got his stage name when he was working in a furniture shop in Durban and the only water tap was at the chemist next door. Visitors trying to locate him for musical engagements got used to being told he was ‘drinking at the chemist’ (phuzekhemisi ). Phuzekhemisi’s prominence among so many superbly talented exponents of this form has resulted not only from his virtuosity on the guitar and the charisma of his ubudoda (‘manly’) movement and stage presence, leading to a variety of television appearances, but also from the topical social criticism of his song lyrics. In addition to addressing social problems in the manner of his isicathamiya counterparts, his most significant targets have been the oppressiveness and greed of Zulu district chiefs at home, and the mafia-like control exercised by the indunas (headmen) in the hostels at work. These authorities have Black Popular Music 311

long kept Zulu migrant working men in thrall, and Phuzekhemisi is not alone among them in pressing for change. This accounts in considerable measure for his national stature and popularity among maskanda performers, even though he is disliked by the chiefs; his first successful album, Imbizo, recorded in 1992 with his brother Khetani, has been banned from some city hostels. In the title track, the duo complain about ubiquitous petty taxation, and wonder out loud whether, since villagers must pay taxes on their dogs, the canines might one day qualify for a pension. After their second album, Emaphalamende in 1993, featuring ‘Udlayedwa’, another similarly barbed protest song, Khetani was tragically killed in a road accident, and it was several years before Phuzekhemisi made another album. Once back in business, Phuzekhemisi toured Europe, and released a series of successful albums, including Sihlanganis’izizwe, a duet with female Ndebele maskanda virtuoso Nothembi Mkhwebane that gained popularity through its accompanying video. For those concerned with the politics of terminology, I use ‘traditional’ here to mean what black African people in South Africa, and more specifically Zulu people in Johannesburg and Durban, mean by it. Their conception, à la Chris Waterman’s Yoruba slogan ‘Our tradition is a very modern tradition’,26 is that musical tradition does not specify a fixed corpus or content, but is quite adequately maintained and signified through continuities of genre, verbal idioms of experience, polyvocalities of tone, tune, and texture, of hue and cry. So, where tradition is used to signify correspondences between aesthetic structures and an idealised social order, such correspondences are created through specifically musical qualities of style, timbre, texture, and rhythmical flow.27 Electric guitars, basses and keyboards, five- and six-tone scales, and staggered linear melodic polyphonies; shiny drum kits thumping out rhythms of centuries-old stamping dances; faux leopard tails, antelope skin or string skirts with sneakers and spandex underwear, miraculously balanced beaded headdresses and Kangol caps worn backwards; rhythmically bouncing breasts; antiphonal lead vocalists and a chorus of back-up singers; synchronised hip swinging and stealthy Afro-Christian step-dancing: all are part of Zulu traditional popular music. Indeed, Joseph Nhlapo has convincingly argued that maskanda guitar need not be termed ‘neo-traditional’, as I had done,28 but simply ‘traditional’.29 The flow of people and cultural formulations is of such duration and diversity in South Africa that urbanised but not fundamentally westernised cultural styles are as much a background to concepts of tradition as rural indigenism. In brief, ‘traditional’ for black South Africans means the Afro-industrial popular music of African urban labour migrants and dispossessed peasants. So we might well conceive of contemporary African identity practices, regardless of regional origin, as ‘cultures of mobility’; forms of practice not merely transported by but formulated ‘on the road’ within the social context of multi-sited, mobile networks of kin, homeboys and -girls, and reciprocal 312 In Township Tonight

friendships. In maskanda we are dealing with what is still in origin rural traditional music, popularised and progressively transformed on the road, in the hostel, at the tavern, in township and inner-city halls, on the urban streets, and in the radio and record studios. Ezodumo (‘It Shall Sound’), now renamed Roots, the SABC’s only music television offering explicitly devoted to ‘traditional’ music, features bands of rural-born labour migrants whose acoustic instruments (amplified of course) are the guitar, the German button concertina, and piano accordion. The gourd or mouth-resonated single-string bows, hand-beaten wooden drums, and reed and animal horn aerophones of preindustrial Africa are rarely heard on the broadcast media, although they are still played in rural communities. Foremost among these rural performers are Xhosa-speaking women from the eastern Cape, most prominently the umrubhe (mouthbow) and uhadi (gourd bow) virtuoso Madonsini Manqina from the Transkei, whose superbly engaging talents as a stage performer as well as musician (Power to the Women) (Melt2000, 1997) have made her something of a household name among traditional music purists. Although they do play traditional acoustic guitar and concertina, the Xhosa do not have a counterpart to maskanda, and perhaps this is why there is still an important space for indigenous instruments in their contemporary performance landscape. Significantly, when indigenous instruments do appear on an urban stage they are usually as syncretic elements in the eclectic ensemble music of serious African jazz-fusion composer-performers. These include Sipho Mabuse, who employs Ntate Thabang, a lesiba (mouth-resonated, quill-reed monochord) player from Lesotho, and Cape Town’s Pops Mohamed, who plays Khoi stringed instruments in an explicit attempt to musically reconstitute his self-avowed Khoikhoi aboriginal origins. Maskanda musicians, in partial contrast to Zulu mbaqanga performers such as the late Mahlathini, have not so much innovated in search of a wider commercial audience as in effect insisted that their audience, now expanding but still largely confined to South Africa, come to them and to what they insouciantly remain: parochial Zulu and proud of it, were pride to be consciously required. As Nhlapo puts it, they continue ‘to reaffirm a specifically African cultural identity and expressive mode, despite its assimilation into a commercialised context’.30 Not that explicit entertainment values are eschewed. Entertainment is a fundamental expressive principle of maskanda, from the flair of the instrumental technique, the eloquence of the lyrics, the flamboyance of the costumes, the acrobatics of the male dancers, to the fetching rotations of the ample derrières of the female singer-dancers. This quality explains why the old performances I saw at black inner-city cinemas in the 1970s, as well as the ones I enjoy today, could be so artfully serious about comedic burlesque. There is even a time-honoured term, ukukekela, for antic movements ‘played’ by Zulu suitors to impress a woman with a mixture of amusement and performative prowess. Black Popular Music 313

Yet to some degree, the mobilisation of maskanda as a performance of modernist ‘tradition’ has changed in attitude and direction since the self-satirising days of 1970s ikomik dancing at maskanda-mbaqanga shows – the ones I so enjoyed at downtown Johannesburg’s down-at-heel Rio Cinema. Maskanda stage dance is now proudly contemporary Zulu, referencing the extraordinary cultural dynamism of working-class Zulu society. Indeed, some urban Zulu musicians more used to playing township jazz and popular music, such as the ensemble Bambatha, have returned to maskanda and brought a new creative stylistic energy to the old form. For the whole of the twentieth century the opposition between urban and rural operated as one of the central organising metaphors in black popular culture and social interaction. Now at the dawn of the twenty-first, presaged by an epochal non-racial political transformation, the city and the country appear to be negotiating modes of cultural acceptance of one another. Maskanda and the other ethnic styles too have now become trans-culturally accepted, a trend contrary to the previous denigration of forms categorised as pre-modern or pre-Christian. Innovations in maskanda have kept pace with the form’s increased visibility. Rural performers, observing that folk entertainment had become a sector of the commercial music industry, now form their own bands and try their luck with the urban media market. The musical dominance of the lead guitarist/vocalist/composer over the performance is now sometimes shared with other popular members of the ensemble. Traditional self-praises, apostrophising the lead performer, his home district and community, now may alternate with a younger vocalist rapping on wider topical subjects in Zulu. Electric keyboard on occasion appears in the instrumental ensemble. Veteran maskanda bandleader Ihashi Elimhlope (‘White Horse’) has recently recorded a CD, AmaFong Kong (‘Cheap Knock-offs’), which in the words of a newspaper reviewer ‘is riddled with streetwise lingo – to appeal to younger audiences’.31 The CD’s title song was turned into a hit by teenage artists Senyaka and Kamazu in the bestselling style of the moment, the youthful ‘drum and bass’ township dance music, kwaito. Ihashi himself has backed kwaito music stars Boom Shaka on their retro-Zulu hit ‘Bambanani’. Bheki Khoza, a veteran guitarist with roots in maskanda, has taught or performed with virtually every important exponent of the guitar in South Africa in any style. Conversely, some aspects of rural Zulu dance music have been strongly retained in urban performances of maskanda, such as the indescribably powerful and dramatic dance challenges between male dancers, accompanied by the ‘rolling thunder’ of the great isigubu cow-hide drums. Along with the ‘deep’ maskanda that is as closely related to gourd bow and choral dance songs as ever, there is also another style derived from the old marabi tradition and the tonic-dominant-subdominant ‘three-chord vamp’.32 While this style harks back to the ukuvamba playing style of Josiah Hadebe in the 314 In Township Tonight

1940s, some of today’s maskanda bands, such as Umshika Shika, have transformed it into an irresistibly danceable style of rollicking traditional pop. Even the solo acoustic guitar tradition is showing vigorous new life, with talented performers employing it to create innovative personal playing styles and individualistic reflections on Zulu social experience in the ambiguous South African present. In writing of the acoustic guitar music of Durban’s Shiyani Ngcobo, Kathryn Olsen suggests that Ngcobo employs this early, foundational style of maskanda as a means to construct musical tradition as a ‘home-space’.33 In this musical exercise of the moral imagination, rural Zulu tradition provides a culturally continuous, socially cohesive identity against the background of a lived experience of uprootedness, insecurity, and familial disintegration. The song texts evoking this home-space foreground images of rural life, but they are images of dissent, conflict, movement. In this way, musical tradition seen as ‘established structures of creativity’ mobilises an imagined past34 and, through the trope of ‘authenticity’, gives meaning to an ambivalent present.35 Ngcobo has also blended in the heavy drum rhythms and poetic style of ngoma group dance competitions, blurring musical genres in a way that provides his mobile, interstitial home-space with the authenticity of tradition.36 Maskanda currently enjoys a broad popularity among a range of working-class Africans, not only the Zulu. By the same token, anyone observing the listening habits of primary African language speakers will find that many listen to stations broadcasting in other languages than their own, indeed ones that they may not even understand. Why? Because they like some of the music styles of other language cultures, even when they understand the lyrics imperfectly, or not at all. On Ezodumo, ethnic dance and dress, the more local and exotic the better, of ensembles from all southern African language groups were popular with viewers of all backgrounds. Exposure through the broadcast media has promoted popular traditional music and dance beyond ethnic boundaries and helped this category of genres secure a place in both the commercial music industry and urban performance settings as well as in the musical life of small regional communities. Ezodumo presented itself as the repository of a cultural conservatism that is by no means confined to or even identified with rural origins. The ensembles were not only recruited from the workers’ hostels, but also sent over by the recording companies to air their latest recordings, and there were many more requests from the companies to present their groups than available space on the programme. Some groups were composed of rural people who hoped to find musical success in Johannesburg through the media, and did not care that they were not paid for their appearance. The SABC provided these performers with return transport, food, and in some cases accommodation. Studio sidemen recruited to strengthen an ensemble for the occasion were paid perhaps R200 (US$30). The state media under the present government – as under its white minority predecessor – regard the professional exposure and the Black Popular Music 315

prestige and notoriety ‘back home’ (where the performers are held to properly reside) bestowed by an appearance on television as sufficient reward. Such localism can expand to represent contemporary performance tradition as a whole, as is currently the case with mzansi (‘south’), a style of male dancing from southern KwaZulu-Natal that is currently popular among all popular-traditional Zulu dance performers. Similarly, musicians perform styles drawn from various rural areas, as well as their own. The interpolation of praises provides not only the stamp of personal and thus local identity, but also that of a more general cultural knowledge and authenticity.37 Indeed, today maskanda has become a cover term for all Zulu guitarbased popular traditional music.38 Despite the historical development of maskanda as a quintessentially male rural form, in recent years female composers and performers have been prominent among those, like Ihashi Elimhlope and Bambatha, who have worked it into more urban and contemporary expressive directions. Best known among these women are Tu Nokwe and Busi Mhlongo. Mhlongo is the elder of the two ‘divas of maskanda’, but both have had lengthy and remarkably varied journeys on the bumpy road to local and international recognition for their talent. Those who admire the physical power of Busi’s voice and the contemporary look and feel of her style may be surprised to learn that she is in her sixties, and has floated around both the local and international African music scene for several decades. Although she is from the small community of Inanda in the heart of KwaZulu, she made her first appearances with Alf Herbert’s African Jazz and Variety company in the early 1960s. Drifting into self-imposed exile, Busi married legendary jazz drummer and bandleader Early Mabuza and spent the 1970s in London working occasionally with Afro-jazz fusion exponents Dudu Pukwana (saxophone), Julian Bahula (percussion), and Lucky Ranku (guitar). During the 1980s Busi formed her own band, Twasa (‘Possessed’), and absorbed Portuguese and West African popular musical influences. But she remained unknown in South Africa until well after her return to the country, and her ultimate success came only in 1998 with her unique, haunting blend of old mbaqanga jive and contemporary jazz with maskanda on Urban Zulu (Melt2000). There had been nothing like this excursion into contemporary urban Zulu musical consciousness before, and the recording and Busi have both won numerous awards. It is worth noting that such an experienced and widely travelled woman chose to return to the space of musical origins represented by Zulu male migrants’ maskanda to create such stunningly original innovations. Her stylistic landscape is a sonic panorama of contemporary Zulu perspectives on modernity, embracing the latest techniques fostered by today’s most advanced studio technology. Tu Nokwe is another composer-performer who has brought together her routes and roots to extend the boundaries of maskanda to encompass a wider stylistic territory.39 316 In Township Tonight

Tu is the daughter of famous impresario Alpheus Nokwe from Durban’s KwaMashu township. Her mother Patty had been something of a vocal prodigy as a child, and as a teenager received training in classical voice and opera from one Madame Daviar. She became one of the country’s great mezzo-sopranos of her time, yet owing to apartheid remained almost unrecognised professionally. Some of this formal understanding and technique were passed on to her four beautiful daughters who, led by Tu, were keen to form a sister act. After performing at weddings and other social events around the township, like so many budding musicians of the period, the sisters got their wish when they were given free tuition at Umhlanga High School in return for representing this distinguished institution at concerts. Back in the township in the 1970s, Tu met Busi Mhlongo through emerging young jazz pianist Bheki Mseleku, who used to drop by to practise using the Nokwes’ piano. The charming and sensitive aesthete Bheki was no match for the tough township environment and Tu’s protectiveness led after some time to their marriage. A bit at a loose end after high school, Tu began learning the guitar and, more audibly, composing her own original Zulu songs. Her interest in the future of township youth led her to found the Amajika Youth Project. Seven members from the first class went on to join Mbongeni Ngema’s Broadway hit Sarafina, including Leleti Khumalo, who played the lead role and is today one of South Africa’s most renowned stage, screen, and television actresses. Determined to get out of South Africa’s suffocating environment, Tu was working and saving for her fare to London when she was recruited to play the part of King Shaka’s devoted lady love in the controversial six-part international mini-series Shaka Zulu (1986). Although she did no singing in the production, her demure performance and eye-catching figure brought her wide public recognition. Not interested in sensationalised portrayals of Zulu history, Tu departed for London, and then New York, where she studied and worked at the Manhattan School of Music. Exhausted and discouraged by life in New York, she returned to South Africa where, inspired by the traditional umakhweyana bow songs of Princess Constance Magogo and taught maskanda singing and guitar by unheralded virtuoso Joe Mokonyana, she recorded her 1996 hit maskanda album, Inyakanyaka. Since then, Tu Nokwe has toured widely in Europe and America, and appeared in several plays and television productions. She maintains a school and rehearsal studio in her rangy Johannesburg home, where young dance and music students are housed and trained, and established stars like Ringo Madlingozi and Shaluza Max rehearse for albums and concerts. The careers of Busi Mhlongo and Tu Nokwe demonstrate, paradoxically or not, that there is no contradiction between routes and roots, and that a community’s popular culture is not only a movable feast but also home cooking. The taste for it has not simply been retained but has grown in their sensory imagination due, very possibly, to the global trials and trails of their unstable and itinerant lives. As both Zulu and Black Popular Music 317

female, they have chosen maskanda because it is one of the quintessential Zulu ‘popular traditional’ musical genres of our time – women have yet to breach the boundaries of the other Zulu migrant style, isicathamiya, as performers. Yet as contemporary women composers, they have pushed the boundaries of the form well beyond those observed by their male counterparts, to produce perhaps some of the most original yet recognisable Zulu music ever performed. An exception to this observation – every observation has to have one – is Madala Kunene, whose dreamy, trance-inducing Zulu folk guitar melodies, played in his combined picking and strumming madala style, really bear very little relation to maskanda. Like Philip Thabane of Malombo, Kunene is entirely self-taught and has invented a unique style of Zulu folk guitar song all his own. He has collaborated with Busi Mhlongo (K’onko Man) (Melt2000), as well as with a number of internationally renowned acoustic folk guitar stylists, including Max Lasser and Baba Mokoena, and toured widely overseas. In 2002 he began the Bafo Bafo project with Syd Kitchen, in which he played with Steve Newman, of Tananas fame, and Newman’s new partner, Tony Cox, in a series of live concerts called ‘World in a Guitar’. Not surprisingly, his audiences tend to be cosmopolitan African jazz listeners, more often white than black. In 2003 Madala composed the soundtrack for the film Yesterday. The first-ever fulllength feature film in Zulu, it was nominated for ‘Best foreign language film’ at the 2005 Academy Awards. Kunene, who grew up in the old Durban African location of Mkhumbane (Cato Manor) and not in any rural area, locates one vector of tradition in an imagined, distant past. This past is pan-African, represented by aspects of musical style connecting to an idealised Africanness that denies a colonised consciousness and its expression in ethnic division. Kunene and other Zulu folk musicians believe their Zuluness is a local and therefore primary instantiation of a more generalised Africanness.40 While Africans of other groups are wary of militant Zulu ethnic nationalism and the Zulu reputation for using violence as a favoured means of dispute settlement, the power of Zulu performance culture to evoke an image of a resilient, autonomous Africa is widely accepted and enjoyed by all South Africans, black, brown, and white. So the predominance of Zulu maskanda on Ezodumo, accepted as partly a function of the explicit Nguni (Zulu–Xhosa–Swazi) language programming focus of SABC1, nonetheless had a broader cultural effect. At the recent national Conference on the African Renaissance, Zulu performance groups were featured as representative of South Africa’s overall billing in the African ‘stage show’, fitting in neatly as well with African-American delegates’ parochial preconception that South African black people all belong to the Zulu ‘tribe’.41 The many song texts devoted to social commentary (amaculo akhayo) in maskanda explicitly link the revival of tradition, including customary practices, ancestral 318 In Township Tonight

spiritualism, and the chieftaincy, with moralistic prescriptions against practices that are ‘killing the black nation’, as one text puts it.42 So for Madala Kunene, tradition has a second vector in the practices of his urban youth, when the slum location of Mkhumbane provided a home-space for thousands of migrant Zulu. Kunene sees the role of musician as that of latter-day healer and prophet, conjuring an identity that lived experience has denied him out of cultural memory in the face of social fragmentation. If the distant past of the moral imagination is a source of authentic Africanist tradition, so equally is Mkhumbane, bulldozed (literally) by modernist racial domination.43 The way forward, as embodied in popular traditional music, is, first, to envision a moral universe based in local cultural knowledge and practice; second, for Africans to do what they do well the best they can and to be insistent in demanding full exchange value for it; and third, to play productively with identities within the established structures of creativity that constitute African traditional music. Returning to the women, we must note that their onslaught on the identifying historical qualities of maskanda is not confined to Zulu performers alone. Among the best is the Ndebele virtuoso Nothembi Mkhwebane, who became famous owing to the many appearances of her Ndebele-style maskanda group on Ezodumo. Born in 1953 in Carolina in the eastern Transvaal, Nothembi was an orphan and never attended school. Unusually for a girl, she spent her younger years herding her grandfather’s livestock, learning traditional reed instruments, and even assisting her uncle with the heavy work of ploughing. From him, however, she received the paraffin-tin guitar that would lead her out of poverty on to the path of musical stardom. Starting a group to perform at cultural events and weddings, Nothembi put her first earnings into a keyboard and a guitar. She soon proved a prolific composer, and her recordings found a ready audience on Ikwekwezi (Ndebele) and Ukhonzi (Zulu) language radio stations. To date she has recorded no less than eight albums, including her 2000 collaboration with Phuzekhemisi, Sihlanganis’izizwe. To protect herself professionally, she has even returned to school and completed Grade 11. She has won numerous awards and performed in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Those fortunate to attend her live performances are rewarded with an astonishing virtuosity on electric guitar that goes far beyond the maskanda items featured on Ezodumo. Varied stylings from mbaqanga to contemporary African jazz are well within her range, and her startlingly original instrumental solos leave audiences stunned and open-mouthed. As a member of a small-town migrant working community, Nothembi had no need to retrace her steps back to her stylistic musical ‘roots’, as she had never been uprooted. She has rather traced her routes in the opposite direction to Nokwe and Mhlongo, reinventing maskanda as an Ndebele form, and absorbing urban and global influences into a neotraditional complex of expressive practice. The Sotho, famous for mine work, have carried on the accordion and drum band Black Popular Music 319

focho or famo tradition of earlier generations, and Lesotho too has produced a number of leading recording artists in this genre, just as their predecessors had done with the concertina back in the 1940s and 1950s. During the early 1960s the piano accordion (koriana) appeared in music stores and was adopted by Sotho instrumentalists in the mining compounds and shebeens in preference to the heavy, immobile pedal organ. Combining the portability of the concertina with the musical range and full-textured volume of the organ, the piano accordion enabled its most serious exponents to make live performance something like a full-time profession. Shebeen owners could afford to buy accordions and supply them to musicians playing in various locations. A musician could sling the instrument over his back and tour by bus and foot from the black townships of urban South Africa to the remotest village shebeens in Lesotho. Others made long-term agreements modelled on mine-working contracts with shebeen queens in the border towns to stay and play daily for the patrons. Ensembles were completed by the addition of a drum (moropa) constructed of a twenty-litre tar can topped with a piece of inner-tube, above which was fastened a row of bottle caps or metal jangles (manyenenyene) to provide a jingling beat to alternate with the thump on stretched rubber of drumsticks made from slices of tyre. Trend-setters included Forere Motloheloa (‘Pau Manyetse’), who made enough money with his band on the mines to give up mine work altogether. Adding singer/composer Apolo Ntabanyane in 1980, the band went professional as the recording ensemble Tau ea Matsekha (‘Lion of Matsekha’, the performers’ home district in northern Lesotho). The band’s name became virtually synonymous among migrants with the musical form, and despite Apolo’s departure in 1983, the group remained one of the most popular exponents of the male vocal focho style. Apolo went on to take his own band to a kind of famo stardom, and his recordings remained popular with the Sotho working class for the next two decades. On cassette tapes and later CDs, the music rode on buses, trains, and taxis, and thumped out of the radio in any Sotho migrant’s home. In the villages of Lesotho and the backstreets of Sotho towns and urban informal settlements in South Africa, famo was wherever working-class Sotho gathered for drink and entertainment, with most of the singing provided by the brewers and customers themselves. Dominating the live performance domain of the shebeen, renowned female composer-singers have been much respected and sought after, and in some cases become famo recording stars. Of these women, the long-time and current champion is indisputably Puseletso Seema. Puseletso was born in Seteketekeng, a raucous section in Johannesburg’s old Western Areas. In the early 1960s she was removed with her mother to the Soweto township of Orlando East, where she presently resides. Working in her mother’s shebeen, she developed her performing talents and soon set off on her own itinerant career, brewing and singing in shantytowns throughout the Free State and the former Transvaal. The object of rivalry among Sotho gangsters, she had lengthy 320 In Township Tonight

liaisons with three of them, and attended numerous gang fights around Johannesburg. After the death of the last of these men in 1976, she began her professional recording career. In the mid-1980s she mysteriously suffered a loss of voice for an extended period. The Sotho diviner diagnosed ‘spirit sickness’ and prescribed initiation as a diviner and healer. During her training her voice returned, and she is now a medical as well as musical practitioner. Puseletso has hence achieved a summa of proletarian Sotho cultural knowledge, combining the three professions of migrant shebeen queen, chanteuse, and herbalist/ diviner. Throughout her difficult life, her shield has been that powerful voice that sends chills down her listeners’ spines, and led gangsters to kidnap her just to sing for their side in famo competitions. The success of her recordings, backed by the superb accordionist Maele Phuthiang and studio singers, guitarists, and drummers, has enabled her to retire to stable single motherhood in Soweto. During the 1990s, Puseletso and her group appeared regularly on Ezodumo. The following text – He O Oe Oe! (Globe Style ORB003) – is edited from an album she made in 1981 with male vocalist and composer David Motaung and his band, Tau ea Linare. He! Ke le mose hara makhooa mona, Hey! when I’m across among whites yonder, Le hoja ke ne ke le monna oe! If I was a man oh! Nkabe ke lula seporong I would sit at the railway line Ke hapa likobo tsa batho. And seize people’s blankets. …Hee! Bashanyana kea tla, Hee! Boys I am coming, Hee! Ke saletseng marena ha Hee! Why am I left behind boloaoa oe! when chiefs are killed oh! Hee! Lefu la motho e mong bana beso, Hee! The death of another, my siblings La motho e mong ha le rekoe. That of another isn’t bought. Hee! (or) I would have taken money, girls Hee! Nkabe ke ntsitse chelete, banana Ka reka lefu le ngoana Santho, oe! And bought the death of Santho’s child, oh! Motsoalle mong’a marato Friend, master of love affairs Ntat’e buti Tselinyana ’nake Father, brother Tselinyana Ngoana’ka ngoanana. dear, my girl child. Ke mofu hobane a robetse oaka He is dead; for he sleeps, oa litjepa. mine who married me by oxen. Hee! Mine for years, everywhere over there, Hee! Oaka oa lilemo, mose khateane Mose hara makhooa mona. The other side among whites there. …’Na ‘Me’ Khubelu ke sa … I, Khubelu, I enlighten visitors. khantsetsa baeti. Ke hopotse mehleng ea khale, I recall in times gone by, Khale-khale hosa phela marena … In times gone by when chiefs still lived … Black Popular Music 321

The passage begins with a humorous reference to the petty criminality of some of Puseletso’s associates, who lurked by the railway lines to steal blankets off the backs of unsuspecting travellers. Next she asks not to be left behind in South Africa at a time when gang commanders – whom she calls ‘chiefs’, of course – are being killed. Among these is a husband named Santho or Tselinyana, whose death she would gladly have given everything to prevent, if only life could be bought. Finally she recalls better times, when she ‘enlightened’ customers with the brilliance of her songs, a time when the redoubtable gang chieftains she knew and loved ruled the townships. Each of the broadly grouped African languages has ‘traditional’ or rather ‘ethnic’ popular styles of its own. Tsonga, for example, has the ethnic popular music of soukous exponent Penny Penny, and Thomas Chauke and the Shinyori Sisters, one of the bestselling bands of any ethnic popular or neo-traditional style. Venda popular music features the perennially popular Ramavhea, Mundalamo, Eric Mukhese, the Adziambei band, and contemporary rumba stars Zozo. Why the Sotho koriana le meropa (accordion and drum) bands have been less open to outside stylistic influences or genre mixing than Zulu or Tsonga traditional popular music is an intriguing subject for further investigation. In many cases these more indigenous styles of ethnic popular music have in recent years overcome South Africa’s previous musical isolation and become susceptible to stylistic influences from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and even the Democratic Republic of the Congo. All this activity can only help to enrich the cultural matrix out of which new stylistic combinations and interpretations are constantly emerging. Even more significantly, Venda ‘Limpopo pop’ exponents Zozo were the top-selling artists in Gallo Africa’s 2006 catalogue, apart from gospel groups. This demonstrates the importance of working-class African-language speakers to the contemporary music market, and, conversely, the value of forms of own-language cultural entertainment (some remarkably durable) to African listeners. The new influences incorporated into these established, identity-laden genres – from Zulu kwaito-maskanda to Tsonga jit rhumba – illustrate once again the fundamentally hybrid nature of black South African music and put paid to the idea that there are now, or indeed ever have been, any of the suiwer vorme (pure forms) so beloved of the Afrikaans nationalist ideology of culture. Having mentioned gospel, we cannot move on without considering its massive and ubiquitous impact on the South African music industry and the output of leading artists in virtually every genre. A key bridge to the emergence of an indigenous gospel tradition in the twentieth century was the African independent or ‘syncretic’ Afro-Christian Zionist and Ethiopian churches. Their blends of indigenous polyphony with orthodox Protestant or already African-influenced Apostolic and Pentecostal hymnody (some music has made the circuit in America, Britain, and Africa more than once) are a striking illustration of the cultural triangulation that composes Paul Gilroy’s famous ‘Black Atlantic’.44 322 In Township Tonight

While these hybrid hymns may have fertilised the musical soil in which South African gospel was to grow, there is no doubt that today it is a local varietal sprouted from musical vines transplanted from African-American gospel in the 1960s. This is what makes contemporary South African gospel different from the African formal choral music rooted in the amakwaya music of the earlier twentieth century. While amakwaya retains its prestige, participation, and support as a South African institution (during a visit to South Africa, comedian Bill Cosby joked that one couldn’t come out of a lavatory without bumping into a choir), in popularity it no longer rivals gospel, to which most African religious musical programming on television and radio has been given over. This is due to the ability of gospel to appeal to all classes and categories of African listeners, even some who are not apparently very religious. In turn, gospel songs have taken their place, alongside the best-known African-language hymns, in the broad corpus of songs that people sing for their own entertainment. This is not a genre about which I can speak with any authority, but the significance of its revival (in every sense of that word) cannot be ignored. African-American gospel already had an audience when I first visited South Africa in the mid-1970s, as well as high-quality local practitioners such as the all-male Mighty Clouds of Joy. But there was no trend at that time that might have prepared the music industry for the explosion that coincided with the end of apartheid in the early 1990s. At first the new ANC government, with its Marxist ideological schooling in the eastern European socialist countries, planned to reduce religious programming on state radio and television. This policy derived not only from the ANC’s fond expectation that with a ‘people’s government’ most of the people would no longer need any religious ‘opiate of the masses’, but also from the misperception of the depth of religious commitment among the black majority. Whether or not religion would have declined in popularity if the new government had actually delivered on its promises of ‘A Better Life for All’, instead of for a Chosen Few, cannot be known, but the reality has been that new as well as old, home-grown as well as imported, forms of formal religious organisation, belief and practice have flourished since the advent of democracy. Gospel has provided the musical accompaniment to this efflorescence. Of course, there were gospel groups around before the 1990s and gospel or gospelderived songs and tunes graced the albums of many performers in a variety of vocal music genres over the years. This was due in part to the fondness of the black listening public for these songs and melodies. Just as important, a great many popular music performers, such as Tsepo Tsola to cite a prominent example, were the children of clergy or religious parents and were introduced to religious music from their infancy. Like African-American ‘soul’ music of the 1960s and 1970s, township music has strong roots in the churches. But perhaps the performer who has done most to both bring about and embody the rise of gospel is Rebecca Malope. Black Popular Music 323

Rebecca’s story, like Brenda Fassie’s, is one of rags to riches. Not cut out for the life of a farm labourer like her parents, she hitchhiked from her birthplace near Nelspruit in 1986 to Johannesburg, where she entered the Shell Road to Fame national talent competition. Perhaps this contest, much criticised for not providing career support for previous winners, ought to be given some credit where it is due, since Rebecca, and several other current musical stars such as Thandiswa Mazwai, got their start there. In Rebecca’s case she achieved the extraordinary feat of winning Best Female Vocalist on only her second try in 1987, singing an Anita Baker favourite. Backing the vocal contestants on piano was Sizwe Zakwe, who had an Afro-pop group called Pure Magic, into which he later brought Rebecca as lead vocalist. With the further addition of singer Vuyo Mokoena who had a background in gospel, Pure Magic released a successful version of the old religious standard, ‘Bayi lam’. Rebecca’s wholesale switch to gospel, however, came only after the success of her Afro-pop CD Shwele Baba in 1995, when she suffered the loss of her father, brother, and sister in an automobile accident. Ngiyekeleni and Moya Wam her two next releases, enjoyed immediate, tremendous success and have since become gospel standards, and Moya Wam in particular a pathbreaker, for the genre has opened the way for countless other performers. While the expressive mode of most of these singers tends to bright eyes and fixed, beatific smiles, Rebecca’s facial and body language communicates rather an intense spiritual suffering and search for release, while her voice, astonishingly soaring and powerful for so small a person, liberates the hidden sorrows of her listeners like doves from a cage. In her wake, it seemed as if every popular singer of the time was suddenly doing a gospel album or featuring one or two gospel songs on secular popular music albums. Tsepo Tsola and even Brenda Fassie and her alter ego, Chicco Twala, released a gospel CD, Children of God (1995), featuring the popular single ‘Soon and Very Soon’. All of Rebecca’s ten CDs have sold at least 50 000 or 100 000 copies, and her total sales top one million. Her success overseas has been just as remarkable, and when she appears in London, for example, the advertisements in the newspapers do not announce ‘Rebecca Malope, South African gospel singing sensation’ or the like, but simply ‘Rebecca Malope in Concert at …’. Another distinguishing feature of Rebecca’s output is the composition of new gospel songs, rare among gospel artists, written principally by her long-time collaborators Sizwe Zakwe, Vuyo Mokoena, and the formally trained pianist and arranger-producer Jabu Nkabinde. In 2004, Rebecca teamed up with veteran popular balladeer Tsepo Tsola and recorded a CD called Queen of Gospel and the Village Pope (CCP/EMI). Today, successful gospel projects abound. Rebecca Malope hosts a gospel television show. Jabu Hlongwane’s ‘Joyous Celebration’ national tours and CDs, featuring a large massed gospel choir, are in their tenth year. American ‘house’ music DJ Christos has begun a collaboration with Jabu Nkabinde called ‘Gospel House’. Saturdays as well 324 In Township Tonight

as Sundays, television and radio, especially the African-language stations, are crowded with gospel programming. How to explain both the rapid rise and the sustained popularity of gospel? The most important reasons have as much to do with the role of religion in the formation and operation of contemporary African social networks as with the music itself. Churches and movements of every conceivable persuasion, whether mission-based, indigenous, foreign or a mixture of these, are ubiquitous in contemporary black society. Some celebrate and spiritualise the ‘miraculous’ rise of the nouveau riche noir. Others comfort the downtrodden and, where the new government’s efforts at upliftment have failed, provide networks for social support. Still others focus on moral regeneration and opening avenues towards economic and social salvation in environments infected by HIV/Aids, crime, conflict, anomie, ruthlessness, and the broken promises of modernity. Many urban churches have their own gospel choirs and recording artists, or listen to those of others. Christian fellowships and evangelical ‘ministries’, arriving from the United States in the 1990s and spawning many home-grown offshoots, also rely heavily on music in worship, with vocalists and instruments accompanying the preaching. As a result, this rise of evangelical Christianity has also helped to popularise gospel. The perennially successful Joyous Celebration Choir, for example, is largely drawn from and supported by ministries such as the Grace Bible Church, Rhema Bible Church, and Breakthrough Ministries. These ministries also preach on TV, providing their own channels on satellite, or on programmes such as the multi-denominational Radio Pulpit. And so, gospel has become mainstream in this sense. The wealthier churches have programmes to aid the poor, free meals and limited means of employment. They do not treat HIV infection as a curse, as the mission-based churches often do, but rather provide sufferers with some counselling and assistance, and educational programmes on the disease. Gospel has become the musical dimension of hope and relief in despair, Marx’s ‘heart of a heartless world’. The musical ‘healing’ provided is of course not physical but emotional: the tonic of brotherly love. Gospel music makes everyone feel they belong, even the HIV positive. Many of the songs are just popular hymns or folk religious songs, arranged for gospel band. That’s why the songs are so similar, and why claims to authorship are so conflicted. A number of churches have even taken popular gospel performers such as Solly Moholo or Ishmael to court over the gospel arrangement and recording of hymns from their official published hymnals without acknowledgement. Eighties musical gadfly Blondie Makhene has also put his name on the old gospel-like, inspirational zabalazo songs of the anti-apartheid Struggle. In practice, even the first artist to record a religious song cannot claim compositional credit because it is already documented as ‘traditional’. This is also why many people buy gospel recordings, because they belong to the folk corpus that has been sung in Black Popular Music 325

the townships for generations. Indeed, many gospel listeners are not religious but are simply seized by the new, uplifting rhythms that gospel arrangements give to the old songs. On the other side of the spiritual spectrum, we certainly cannot conclude this story without considering what has happened to black popular youth music and performance culture since 1990.45 Black popular performing artists are certainly grateful for the creative freedoms they have enjoyed since the democratic political revolution of the 1990s, and take pride in the role they played in challenging state censorship and breaking down the restrictions on political expression in the arts during the decades of protest. But they now express their cultural self-confidence in ways very different from the generations with first-hand experience of apartheid. Among black youth who were not concerned with creating careers in the performing arts, much energy was consumed in political struggle. When their attention focused on performance, it was primarily to apply its unifying and galvanising effects to the process of political conscientisation and mobilisation. Those whose dream it was to earn a living and a name from their creative productions were confronted by a serious dilemma. On the one side, political leaders, some with questionable authority, applied pressure to commandeer ‘cultural workers’ (as artists were called) and their work in the service of the Mass Democratic Movement, usually without reward. Alternatively, the same Movement maintained pressure for the international boycott of South African products of all kinds, including performance, so denying these same cultural workers valuable professional work. Now the struggle against white colonial nationalism is over and the struggle to expand the size and power of the black nationalist elite has begun. For the millions of black urban youth who will never belong to the nouveaux riches or even the working class, the question has been what to do with their energies since they are no longer required for political upheaval. The field of popular culture has provided one alternative. Music, television, radio, and even theatre and interpretative contemporary dance all in various ways thrive among black township youth, and their activity and visibility are no longer at all confined to the townships. Before I get ahead of myself, there is an important sense in which all black music in South Africa is popular music. This is so because contemporary African cultures do not recognise the problematic conceptual distinctions between folk, popular, classical, jazz, and colonised ‘ethnic’ or (the rest of the) ‘world’ music, unnaturally naturalised in the record-store terminology of the West. From village voices to Christian choir to sophisticated jazz quartet to popular shake-your-booty band, it all has a popular audience crossing categories of class, generation, gender, language, and rural–urban roots. Of course, listenership varies along these stylistic fault-lines, especially that of age group, but without the prejudices associated with these generic labels elsewhere. 326 In Township Tonight

This point is significant because of the tendency of Western commentators to identify ‘South African popular music’ with whatever style gets the country’s black teenagers out on the dance floor, which since the crucial political juncture of the early 1990s has been kwaito. Kwaito – we will discuss the folk origins and meaning of this term later – has attracted few admirers outside its youthful fan base, and the problematics of its cultural production may indeed be partly responsible for its apparent decline in the new millennium. Yet kwaito has never existed as the genre-apart that it has been widely made out to be, and its most skilled and creative exponents, such as Arthur, Abashante, Trompies, M’du or TKZee, were swimming in the broader stream of South African pop traditions from the very first plunge. I note this to caution that the focus on kwaito in the market blurred this wider, richer field and made it more difficult to recognise and fully understand the total presence of popular music within popular culture during the post-apartheid period. But a more important purpose, amidst the present general condemnation of black youth by their elders, is to consider the form more seriously in relation to the times that gave it such evident, even excessive life, and not mistake what the fuss has been all about. With the early 1990s came both a new political and stylistic ambivalence in South African black popular music. ‘Bubblegum’, indeed local popular music in general, was no longer selling, and its best-known exponents, including Brenda Fassie, seemed (temporarily in her case, it turned out) to have run out of political heat and creative light and dropped out of sight. International genres such as American ‘rhythm and blues’ and rap dominated the youth market, and the studios’ call for a new homebrewed popular style was answered, as is so often the case, by the culture of the streets. This answer was kwaito. Lara Allen, certainly one of the leading scholars of black popular music now writing in South Africa, describes it: In its early years kwaito was a South Africanised blend of hip-hop with European and American dance music, especially house and techno, and pop. The music of the top kwaito groups of this period … was generally dominated by an unyielding, pounding bass beat that was marginally mediated by other cyclically repeated rhythmic modules. The instrumental backing tended to be entirely computer generated. Snatches of catchy melodies were layered and looped around the vocal parts that tended to be the only ‘live’, human aspects of kwaito performance … Although the rhythmically spoken lyrics were inspired by rap, vocal delivery tended to be much slower in kwaito, and the lyrics consisted of a few of the latest catch phrases repeated and played against each other …46

The music expressed and embodied the new sound for the post-Struggle young black Black Popular Music 327

lions and lionesses: a prideful, even predatory roar of pleasure-hunting. In those first heady days, the first freedom the youth demanded was to freely enjoy themselves. Nor was this demand really even anything new. As Johnny Clegg said at the height of the Struggle in the 1980s: ‘The weekends are for reconstitution … “Good time” music is reconstitutive because it says, climb inside and I’ll make you whole, get up off your chair, don’t feel so bad, let’s move together, a bit more strongly with each repeated cycle of the song … It is defiant. It expresses the determination that every one of us will be free one day. It cannot be explicitly political … it expresses in its tone, in the sound of the voice and the sound of the instruments, the soul of the black South African.’47 Overtaking yet incorporating this now bygone inspirational outlook, however, was a rampant materialism that accompanied the at times raw sexuality of early kwaito, reflected by the expectation of the black majority that the wealth which the white minority had enjoyed at their expense would now be made over to them. It had not yet become evident that the public cupboard was almost bare, and that the new ANC government’s political capacity to commandeer material resources would be employed primarily in the creation of a small black political and economic elite. The multiplicity of mutually reinforcing social and economic headaches left behind by the previous system were all too evident to the youthful musicians and audiences suddenly faced with the decision of what to do with their new expressive freedom. As the focus shifted from what was wrong with the old system to what was glaringly unsatisfactory with the new, including the social dysfunction in black communities themselves, political song lyrics turned to the condemnation of alcoholism, violent crime, the abuse of women and children, or the need for children to stop marching and go back to school (Oyaba’s ‘Calling All Children’, 1991). An important exception was the rebellious Arthur Mafokate, whose independent anti-racist post-1994 election kwaito hit ‘Don’t Call Me Kaffir’ caused tremendous controversy both within the music industry and in the ‘new South Africa’. Arthur’s subversive challenge to the mainstream pop music industry demonstrated that American ‘house’ music and even hip-hop were becoming a major influence in the new post-apartheid township youth consciousness that was replacing the old Struggle discourse of the ‘comrades’ and ‘young lions’ with astonishing rapidity. At first the major recording companies didn’t know what to make of kwaito, and Arthur formed his own production company, 999. Before long, however, the potential of kwaito was clear even to the most cautious studios, and in 1996 more than one thousand kwaito CDs were released. Intuiting the direction of this trend, jazzman and producer Don Laka put together the group Boom Shaka, who burst on the scene with their greatest hit, ‘It’s About Time’ in 1993, with its self-promoting ‘hook line’, ‘It’s about time/to listen to Boom Shaka’. Boom Shaka consisted of specially trained lead male singer ‘Theo’ and female 328 In Township Tonight

singer-dancers Thembi Seete and Lebo Mathosa (who died in a highway crash in 2006), whose superb vocal harmonies, flashy modes of undress, gorgeous feminine forms, and athletically sexual dance combinations gave new meaning to the notion of ‘back-up singers’. On top of this trio, Laka added the hot young rapper Junior Sokhela from Cape Town’s poetic hip-hop ensemble Prophets of Da City. The result took the black township music scene by storm and put the group’s kwaito style at the centre of the industry. In the wake of Boom Shaka’s success, kwaito soloists and groups too numerous to mention have risen and fallen. Among these are artists of genuine talent and musicianship, such as Trompies, Ishmael, M’du, Mandoza, and Kabelo, who rapidly developed and diversified the style, combining it with other established stylistic forms from the entire range of black South African music. Drawing on the classic influences of Miriam Makeba and the Sophiatown generation, Thandiswa Mazwai and Bongo Maffin broadened the kwaito audience and became one of the only kwaito ensembles to tour the United States, even if their impact was submerged in the general ‘world music’ fashion in ethnic overseas pop. The term ‘kwaito’ appears to have come from the Afrikaans word ‘kwaai’ (edgy, wicked, but by implication ‘hip’), commonly used in the township multilingual argot (isicamtho) in which many of the recordings in this style are sung. Indeed, Lebo Motshegoa, author of an isicamtho dictionary, Township Talk,48 argues that from the end of the 1980s, the music was largely responsible for developing and spreading this youth street dialect. As another township lexicographer, Louis Molamu, put it, ‘isicamtho is tsotsitaal under the influence of mass media’.49 Today, quite a number of words commonly regarded as ‘genuine’ Zulu or Sotho in fact originated as isicamtho. As to kwaito, Ballantine notes that the term also connotes the gruff, clever, socially subversive ‘cool operator’ much admired in township youth culture and expressed in its American counterpart in words such as ‘wicked’ or ‘bad’, meaning of course ‘good’.50 That a local brand of ‘gangsta’ music succeeded in displacing imported pop at the centre of the market reflects the dawning awareness among otherwise unemployed black youth that sharp practices, including street crime, are often the only means to secure basic subsistence, not to mention the symbols of successful consumerism they so passionately seek to acquire.51 The term was popularised by the music’s own irrepressible marketing genius, Arthur Mafokate.52 Yet despite the popular notoriety of isolated vulgar, sexist, egotistical, or anti-social lyrics (Pure Black Afro’s gimmicky ‘Matofotofo’ – ‘plump and fleshy’ – is a current example), relatively few kwaito artists or songs are vulgar, sexist, or violent. What exponents of kwaito managed to do was to bring together the self-aggrandising consumerism of the children of the middle class with the gritty, unapologetic bravado of the youth of the township streets.53 In so doing they defied the gravity of their elders’ burdensome pre-liberation social morality and became culturally central ‘masters of marginality’.54 As Allen correctly observes, kwaito Black Popular Music 329

musicians did not merely express street culture, they actively composed it.55 This was achieved not simply through music but through the creation of an entire domain of style, including verbal, body attitude and movement, and fashion codes: Loxion Kulcha (‘location culture’), as the name of one instantly successful black clothing design house labelled it. In the field of mass media, the launch of what would quickly become the most popular radio station in the country, Johannesburg’s Yfm, and its glossy companion magazine, Y, broadcast this ‘kulcha’ based on a music platform of kwaito, as well as the latest international black popular styles, and their local South Africanised reformulations. Importantly, a new generation of local television series that focused on the dramatic portrayal of ‘real’ black South African people, communities, and social issues, such as Gaz’lam, (in which young people come to Johannesburg’s racy, run-down Hillbrow district to seek fame and fortune); Tsha Tsha (love, dance, and HIV among the troubled youth of a small eastern Cape town); and most famously, Yizo Yizo, a thriller set around a troubled township high school and the most watched South African programme in the post-1994 period, all used kwaito as well as other current popular music for background scores and featured kwaito performances as part of their stories. Musical performance and video programmes proliferated on late afternoon and evening programmes on SABC1, the channel directed at youth and the nation’s most popular service overall. Among the most severe and frequently heard criticisms of these programmes, and especially of Yfm and similar stations such as Radio Metro, was that their talk and play list were too American or Americanised. Of course, American, specifically AfricanAmerican, influence on South African music goes back to the first half of the twentieth century, but that is not the point. The point is that South African musicians plagiarised and, more significantly, reconfigured international dance music styles because kwaito … was perceived as simultaneously local and global, national and international. Through kwaito, township youngsters were able, with new pride and confidence, to associate with concerns of young people all over the world who share similarly mapped identities, without losing a sense of their own individuality. Stylistically kwaito did not merely imitate, it contributed to a dialogue on common issues, using a common language. Kwaito claimed: we are young, hip, tough, streetwise, internationally connected, and proudly South African.56

For some commentators, such resonance with the aspirations of so many of the young black majority translated into direct political influence. As journalist Buyile Mdladla enthused in a column in Johannesburg’s Drum magazine:

330 In Township Tonight

As a genre, it may not feature that prominently on the international music charts, but the musicians have built an amazing – and probably the most powerful – cultural influence in Africa. It has become a lifestyle. Not many people in kwaito realize they have become more powerful than politicians, certainly more powerful than any force that exerts a cultural influence on us. These precociously talented icons have assumed the power to change society any way they decide … The moment of political clout for the kwaito generation has arrived.57

A few performers, such as Trompies leader Eugene Mthethwa, have shown initiative in promoting a positive social role for kwaito. Mthethwa has been working with former ANC Youth League president and now Deputy Minister Malusi Gigaba in campaigns against HIV/Aids and in restoring a ‘culture of learning’ in schools. Says Mthethwa, ‘Kwaito has been a dominant force in popular culture since 1995. If we use it constructively it could really empower.’58 This potential is expressed in the far more positive, even adoring image that township fans now have of black popular musicians. Before the end of apartheid, township music consumers had an ambivalent attitude towards the best-known performers, suspecting them of seeking commercial success and physical escape from their home communities above political change. Today, however, young township musicians, dancers, actors, and media presenters are lionised for both expressing and achieving a kind of collective goal in exposing, promoting and artistically enhancing township performance culture. And as Allen reflects, ‘kwaito groups and personalities started to shift from unmitigated hedonism into a more thoughtful and self-reflexive mode of self-making that retained a commitment to the individual while addressing the interests of a more widely defined social group’.59 Explicitly, however, the lyrics of kwaito are more socially than politically engaged. True, as the genre, its performers, and its audience mature, more songs lament the failure of the new government to address social problems, crises and inequities. And as Ballantine has recently demonstrated, an astonishing range of purely musical, as opposed to textual, elements and references – from Zulu traditional guitar bands to African jazz to European classical – are imported into kwaito for their ability to index moral societal values, as well as ‘for irony, or to connote transgression, or as figures in a symbolic enactment of integration, or as tokens of a newfound freedom, or as celebrations of alternative identities. After the dark years of apartheid, these idioms participate in kwaito’s joyous acts of reclaiming, reconnecting and renewal.’60 But direct involvement in South Africa’s current political processes is not a favoured activity of either black youth or their popular musical heroes. Nor does kwaito make a particularly convincing effort at creating a national imaginary or imagining the new South African nation. The outsized and glossy publicity magazine that was published Black Popular Music 331

to accompany the re-launch of a stylistically somewhat exhausted Yfm in 2002 was entitled The Kwaito Nation: An Industry Analysis.61 An inspection of the contents, however, reveals that the nation referred to is neither one wholly transformed through kwaito, nor a sub-nation or trendy subculture within the current configuration of South African lifestyles, but simply composed of those music industry professionals who are in some way directly involved in kwaito’s cultural production. Still, as Allen argues, ‘the Y culture that evolved around kwaito has not just retained its valency since the mid-1990s, but has evolved into a dynamic, multifaceted zone of performance and reception in which over nine million people work through definitions of blackness (diasporic and local), South Africanness, and Africanness on the complicated shifting ground of a purportedly “post-racist” state’.62 As a musical assertion of attitude and a strongly inscribed stance of South Africa’s urban black youth towards the new society and identity they are acting to create, kwaito’s message can hardly be ignored. First, the explicit sexuality of the stage dancing (Arthur Mafokate, the group Abashante, and Boom Shaka established this dimension) does not, as Stephens has mistakenly suggested, represent the local commercial exploitation of American rap misogyny or of gender inequality between black boys and girls.63 It expresses much more loudly black young people’s insistence on enjoying their freedom and majority status with as much in-your-face sexuality as they can get, breaking away at once from the hypocritical apartheid-era repression of black sexuality, the controlling condemnation of their elders, and the finger-wagging moralism, however well-intentioned, of anti-Aids campaigners. Second, the hard-edged voices and aggressive rhythmic pulsations of kwaito – fundamentally a dance rather than a song form – literally as well as figuratively embody the demand of black urban youth for a new society that fulfils their modernist material aspirations and accepts their pleasure principle as a valid replacement for the now painfully passé politicised ideology of social sacrifice. Nor is this movement any longer confined to black youth but it is rapidly spreading among white teenagers as well (white adolescents are called ‘teenagers’, while their black counterparts can never be anything but ‘youth’). Witness the emergence of Yfm from a black to a multi-racial urban youth radio station, and the popularity among whites of Mandoza’s kwaito hit, ‘Nkalakatha’ (2000). Shaking off the depressing, downward social gravitation of both the sadly unimproved, disoriented black townships, and the uncertain future of the once taken-for-granted privileges of white surburban youth, kwaito fans want it good, and without self-misrepresentation. These aspirations are reflected in the physically fit, beauty-conscious images of black youth that are as common today on the streets of Johannesburg as in television advertising. It is important to recognise as well that much in kwaito and youth culture in general which appears simply to be about sex is really about the high-pressure, productive re332 In Township Tonight

negotiations surrounding gender relations among the post-apartheid urban generation. Indeed, one of the most popular kwaito song/story videos ever made was Trompies’ satirical Fohloza (2000) (the sound supposedly made when the rolls of fat along an overly voluptuous woman’s flanks rub together!). In this video the band is featured attending a beauty contest held in a township nightclub. The roars of approval give the top prizes to the fattest contestants, who triumphantly leave their overly slender sisters behind and exit the club on the arms of the admiring Trompies’ crew. Rather than moving towards an easy moral judgement on the basis of analytical categories that seldom appear in local discourse, perhaps we should pay closer attention to the performative dynamics of how South African young people are struggling to cast off unwanted burdens the past has placed upon them. Apparently, as the new millenium settles in, kwaito has lost its grip as a form of musically embodied youth consciousness. Most groups only exist in the studio and are a product of its sleightof-knob technology. Leading exponents have gone on to other styles, or even other aspects of musical production in the industry. Arthur Mafokate, running out of creative gimmicks, brought his 999 stable into the music establishment’s Gallo Africa group in 2002. Mandoza is among the only established kwaito stars who give concerts regularly. People have become weary of kwaito lead singers’ failure to actually sing. Most revealingly, a recent sensation was a song called ‘Hamba Nawe’ (‘Get Together’), by the ‘Afro-pop’ group Mafikizolo. Inspired by the eclectic mixed-genre kwaito of Bongo Maffin, the song reaches all the way back to the 1950s for a wellknown local jazz melody, backed by a jazzy horn section, but driven by a high-tech kwaito township rhythm. ‘Hamba Nawe’ is sung by a superb young female vocalist, Nhlanhla Mafu, supported by a very youthful collection of former kwaito artists, including popular choreographer Tebogo Madingoane (killed in a ‘road rage’ incident in 2004), with better-than-average musical educations. All are surprisingly serious about establishing the basis for their own longer-term viability in the music business. This seriousness is expressed in their enthusiasm, like Mandoza, to set a high standard in music video and live performance production. Their distinctive video and stage appeal is consciously based on the contemporary development of popular township dance styles. These go as far back as the 1950s but their choreography is rooted in mapantsula, the working-class urban black youth culture of the 1980s that achieved public visibility in large, synchronised male dance displays. The overall message of mapantsula, then and now, is: ‘we are contemporary, but we are thoroughly local; we are not concerned with foreign trends’. In the history of South African popular music, whenever a stylistic era has drawn to a close without an obvious immediate or organically emerging replacement, musicians and audiences have mined the everrenewable stylistic resources of the past. Mafikizolo have built their entire performative image around an imaginative recreation of 1950s Sophiatown style. The title track Black Popular Music 333

from their second album Kwela (2004) not only cited this classic 1950s genre but also involved collaboration with kwela-jazz veteran Hugh Masekela.64 The mix of historical and contemporary local styles in both the dance and music of Bongo Maffin and Mafikizolo reflects the changing perspective of the kwaito generation. They are getting older, and they have concerns additional to the frenetic urge to attract the opposite sex. These concerns include the establishment of stable livelihoods and families (a distinct rarity in the townships), and also the creation of a new distinctively local urban black South African identity. With regard to international trends, there is a great deal more to Americaninfluenced hip-hop and its impact than politically incorrect social sentiments. A new South African hip-hop ensemble, in addition to winning the prize for the most tongue-in-cheek new band name, Skwatta Kamp, and CD, Skwatta Kamp-pain, has recently recorded some of the most outrageously subversive political lyrics currently on offer, and calls have predictably been heard to ban their songs from the radio. Skwatta Kamp’s stock in trade is the global disgust they believe working and wishthey-were-working black South Africans feel towards what they regard as a self-serving, wrong-headed ruling black political elite. While such sentiments are indeed a staple of everyday political discourse among black South Africans, to express them in song over the radio is a powerful indication that the State President’s and ruling party’s honeymoon is over, at least among urban black youth. Here are some lyrics from the controversial song ‘Politics’ from their album Khut en Joyn (2001): Pounds and dollars for bombs and arms But there’s hardly a rand when I reach out my arms As a matter of fact, I think I better shut up The President might slap me for speaking too much.

In the townships themselves, the weekend streets have been partly taken over by hiphop ‘splash jams’ where aspiring lyricists try out their rhythmic verbal compositions for an audience of adoring neighbourhood fans.65 Once again, the street is the stage before the studios and concert promoters catch on and co-opt. In 2002 another undercurrent of politics, one even less acceptable to the selfappointed ‘nation-builders’ of the new elite, suddenly bubbled to the surface. Mbongeni Ngema, a vastly creative and influential playwright, director, and popular musical composer, who has had his troubles with the authorities before and during the Sarafina II scandal of 1997, recently raised ethnic antagonism’s unlovely head in his song ‘AmaNdiya’ (‘The Indians’). Ngema, who is from KwaZulu-Natal, holds strong Zulu and wider black nationalist views. In this song he was moved to express rather bluntly the strong sense of resentment that many Zulu feel at what they consider 334 In Township Tonight

the conspiratorial arrangements through which the Indian South African community continue their economic exploitation of black Africans in KwaZulu-Natal. Of course this strain of tension and resentment is commonly acknowledged in social discourse in the region. But to voice such sentiments openly in public culture throws off key the melody of racial and ethnic ‘reconciliation’ that the government and keepers of public morality are whistling in the dark. The release of the song led to a court action which produced a ruling condemning the song as ‘hate speech’. The television news featured a seemingly endless stream of Indians accusing Ngema of racism and demanding that the song and all public expression of its sentiments be banned. Black persons in the street, however, were just as unanimous in insisting that the song was not racist. Perhaps both communities were wrong-headed, and that may ultimately be the point. Here, then, are the actual lyrics of the offending ‘AmaNdiya’ (ironic in the light of the Schabir Shaik trial for bribery and corruption involving Deputy President Jacob Zuma, a Zulu from Durban): Oh my fellow brothers we need strong and brave men to confront the Indians. The situation is very difficult, And needs to be reported to men of leadership. Indians don’t want to change. Even Mandela has failed to convince them to change. Whites were better: We knew it was a war of politics. You too country leaders, You don’t want to intervene in this fight You have been bribed with roti and paku [bread] from these Indians Indians don’t vote for Africans. If they vote they vote for whites. But there are lots of them in parliament; There are lots of them in Government. We suffer this much in Durban. Everything was taken by Indians Our people buy at Indian shops, But then they turn to oppress our own people Mkhize is crying: he wants a business in West Street. But Indians close him off, Saying there’s no space to rent They’ve closed off Mkhize, Saying there’s no space to rent Black Popular Music 335

What do you say, [Zulu nationalist leader, Mangosuthu] Buthelezi? You are quiet, yet the children of your clan Are being turned into clowns by Indians But why you Mbeki, and your Government Why are you so quiet, while Indians are using us?

An outside observer might be forgiven for thinking that as hate speech goes, this is reasonably mild material. More importantly, as the legal columnist for the Johannesburg Sunday Independent, Rob Amato, wrote: ‘AmaNdiya’s tone is ironic rather than hateful. It makes no character attack on Indians, although it says they are oppressive and don’t help the Zulu poor. It calls for political, not violent, responses to social inequity. It might be right or wrong, but it is not unconstitutional.’66As Ngema himself said (perhaps disingenuously): ‘The song represents the way many African people feel about the behaviour of Indian people in this country. It’s intended to begin a constructive discussion that’ll lead to true reconciliation between Africans and Indians.’67 However self-serving such a spin, Ngema was to some degree proved right. In the aftermath of the initial outrage, both Indian and Zulu spokespersons were moved to consider the song’s complaint seriously, and a series of meetings were held between leaders of both communities to see what could be done to further Ngema’s call for ‘constructive discussion’, in the interests of ethnic reconciliation. All of which simply leads me to say that if South African popular music is evidently lacking in the kind of political relevance that requires an attack on the shortcomings of those in authority no matter who the powers that be, then we may need a major rethink of the nature of ‘the political’ in popular musical rhetoric. Politics in music, need it be said, inheres in turning the energy and pleasure generated in performance into social transformation. In a divided society such as South Africa that seeks reformulation at all levels and a new, more coherent national identity without the benefit of a unified public culture, it may be as important for music to assist citizens in speaking truth to one another as in speaking truth to power. What we do need to reflect upon is what Fabian – following Foucault – recognised as the ‘liquidity’ of political expression in popular cultural forms, which not only leak and seep into every blissfully neglected corner of the social architecture, but bring forth pesky weeds and lurid new blossoms from the washes of dirt they find there.68 So our first realisation must be that the politics of popular music, and indeed those of popular culture more broadly, do not require explicit verbal encoding to be political. This represents something of a blind spot or a frustration for many scholars who approach these forms from a literary critical or cultural studies perspective. This is why they prefer to discuss rap and hip-hop, despite the relentless unmusicality of these genres, to a style like kwaito, which employs sound and movement perhaps more than 336 In Township Tonight

words as media for its message. It is not merely that politics get lost in translation when urban Zulu or isicamtho is rendered, uneasily, into English for analytical purposes. Nor it is simply the impenetrability of an unstable, ephemeral youthful cultural gestalt that confounds academic researchers. It is the surprisingly protean possible forms of politics to which popular performance contributes that make interpretation both so contested and so fascinatingly productive. Yes, we have all at last realised, with Kelly Askew, that culture and politics implicate, even imbricate, one another.69 But what sort of politics is this? A politics of equally implicated personal and group identities? Ideologies of such identities, masquerading as styles ? An embodied representation of social aspirations and moral relationships, emerging from lived experience? A structure of feeling? A medium of social exchange? An implicit critique of political economy? A moral imagination of the post-contemporary? Or simply a complex politics of the voice and viscera; an importunate demand by youth to be both seen and heard? I say ‘complex’ because, as Allen enquires, what are popular artists’ conscious political intentions, do they necessarily have any, and, if so, what is their relationship to political effect as achieved through music?70 Unintended consequences are not confined to the roads to hell paved with politicians’ good (or otherwise) intentions. Perhaps the artists themselves do not consider this or care or say as much about all this as their academic fans and critics would like them to. They are the ones imagining new lives, selves, worlds, through sonic, verbal, and kinetic fury. Must it consciously signify something? Well, by that very imaginative materialisation yes, because as Fabian insisted, ‘Popular culture is not merely a response to questions and conditions; it asks questions and creates conditions.’71 Lastly, by such questions, rather than definitive answers, the real meaning of ‘the popular’ is, whether we like it or not, revealed: a great many people of all conditions like it. Popular music is, well, popular (even if it does not sell), and it is in this production of audiences that the political and social reality of art can be found.72 Performance as a mode of creative as well as communicative action is, as Askew notes, contingent, emergent, and undetermined.73 Yet through the cultural brokerage of popular music, black South African young people are giving notice that their creative energy will imaginatively over-determine their society’s future, and that no one can confidently predict or imagine the nature of that future. Notes 1 Ansell, Soweto Blues, p. 249. 2 Campschreur and Divendal, Culture in Another South Africa. 3 Ansell, Soweto Blues, p. 193. 4 Ibid., pp. 181–2. 5 Ibid., p. 183. 6 Allen, ‘Kwaito versus crossed-over’, pp. 82-111. Black Popular Music 337

7 Ansell, Soweto Blues, pp. 280, 326; Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa!, Durham, NC, 2003, pp. 147–8. 8 Lara Allen, ‘Commerce, politics, and musical hybridity: vocalizing black South African identity during the 1950s’, Ethnomusicology 47, 2 (2003), p. 243. 9 Mi Hlatshwayo, Alfred Qabula and Nise Malange, Black Mamba Rising: South African Worker Poets in Struggle, Durban, 1986. 10. Robert Christgau, ‘Mzwakhe: culture hero’, Village Voice, July 1992. 11 Ansell, Soweto Blues, pp. 1, 8–9. 12 Ibid., p. 187. 13 Ibid., pp. 109–77. 14 Meintjes, ‘Paul Simon’s Graceland’, pp. 37–73; Hamm, Putting Popular Music in its Place. 15 Ansell, Soweto Blues, pp. 146–7. 16 Ibid., p. 147. 17 Ibid., p. 166. 18 Meintjes, Sound of Africa! 19 Liz Gunner, ‘Those dying generations at their song: youth, isicathamiya and singing of life, death and AIDS in today’s KwaZulu-Natal’, English Studies in Africa 46, 2 (2003), pp. 42–53. 20 Erlmann, Nightsong. 21 Gunner, ‘Those dying generations’, p. 43. 22 Ibid., p. 48. 23 Ibid., pp. 52–3. 24 Ibid., p. 47. 25 Ibid., p. 43. 26 Christopher Waterman, ‘“I’m a leader not a boss”: popular music and social identity in Ibadan, Nigeria’, Ethnomusicology 26, 1 (1982), p. 63. 27 Erlmann, Nightsong, p. 237. 28 Joseph P. Nhlapo, ‘Maskanda: The Zulu Strolling Musicians’, MA, University of theWitwatersrand, 2000, pp. 29–30. 29 David B. Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre, London and New York, 1985, p. 268. 30 Nhlapo, ‘Maskanda’, p. 29. 31 Lesley Mofokeng, City Press, 3 December 2000. 32 Davies, ‘Guitar in Zulu maskanda tradition’, p. 133. 33 Katheryn Olsen, ‘Marking time: discourses on identity in contemporary maskanda’, Paper presented to the conference, Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa, Turku, Finland, 19–22 October 2000, pp. 4–6. 34 Charles Joyner, ‘A model for the analysis of folklore performance in historical context’, Journal of American Folklore 88, 349 (1975), pp. 254–65. 35 Olsen ‘Marking time’, p. 9. 36 Ibid., p. 9. 37 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 38 Ibid., p. 3. 39 James Clifford, Routes, Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1997. 40 Olsen, ‘Marking time’, pp. 8, 16, 19. 41 Jeffrey Sehume, ‘Strategic essentialism and the African Renaissance’, Critical Arts, 13, 1 (1999), pp. 127–33. 338 In Township Tonight

42 Nhlapo, ‘Maskanda’, p. 71. 43 Olsen, ‘Marking time’, pp. 10, 18. 44 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, London, 1993. 45 This section is drawn in part from David B. Coplan, ‘God rock Africa: thoughts on politics in popular black performance in South Africa’, African Studies 64, 1 (July 2005), pp. 9–27. 46 Allen, ‘Kwaito versus crossed-over’, p. 83 47 Cited in Taylor, Global Pop, pp. 82, 80. 48 Lebo Motshegoa, Township Talk, Cape Town, 2005. 49 Louis Molamu, ‘Friday’, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, 9–15 September 2005, p. 5. 50 Christopher Ballantine, ‘Popular music and the end of apartheid: the case of kwaito’, Paper presented at the Conference of the International Association for Popular Music, Montreal, July 2003, and at the Congress of the Musicological Society of Southern Africa, Johannesburg, August 2003, p. 2. 51 Allen, ‘Kwaito versus crossed-over’, p. 5. 52 Ibid., p. 3. 53 Ibid., p. 2. 54 B. Peterson, ‘Kwaito, “dawgs” and the antimonies of hustling’, African Identities 1, 2 (2003), pp. 197–8. 55 Allen, ‘Kwaito versus crossed-over’, p. 4. 56 Ibid., p. 7. 57 B. Mdladla, ‘Kwaito power’, Drum, 12 July 2001, pp. 18–19. 58 Ibid., p. 26. 59 Allen, ‘Kwaito versus crossed-over’, p. 4. 60 Ballantine, ‘Popular music and the end of apartheid’, p. 6. 61 K. Gostner, The Kwaito Nation: An Industry Analysis, Johannesburg, 2002. 62 Allen, ‘Kwaito versus crossed-over’, p. 7. 63 Simon Stephens, ‘Kwaito’, in Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael (eds.), Senses of Culture, Cape Town, 2000, pp. 270–2. 64 Allen, ‘Kwaito versus crossed-over’, p. 16. 65 ‘Friday’, Mail & Guardian 21–27 January 2005, p. 1. 66 Rob Amato, ‘Suppression of Ngema’s controversial song unconstitutional’, Sunday Independent, 14 July 2002, p. 7. 67 Ngema, cited in ibid. 68 J. Fabian, ‘Popular culture in Africa’, Africa 48, 4 (1978), p. 328. 69 Kelly Askew, Performing the Nation, Chicago, 2002, p. 14. 70 Allen, ‘Kwaito versus crossed-over’, p. 2. 71 Fabian, ‘Popular culture in Africa’, p. 316. 72 Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, Rowley, MA, 1977, p. 27. 73 Askew, Performing the Nation, p. 15.

Jazz and Other Fusions 339

10 Jazz and other (con)fusions since 1990 Overall, South African jazz musicians had far fewer difficulties than their theatrical counterparts in occupying the vast new creative space liberated by the abolition of apartheid. Blinded by the burst of light suddenly appearing at the end of the tunnel, many artists in exile found it difficult to believe what was happening, despite the previous anticipatory high-point of the Culture in Another South Africa conference held in Amsterdam in 1987.1 Among these artists was the legendary Hugh Masekela, whose bitterness over the long years of his people’s suffering had made him sceptical of the hope and joyful astonishment that was filtering back to New York. A great deal of credit for Hugh’s change of heart is due to his sister Barbara, former ANC cultural attaché in Lusaka, Fordham University graduate, and close associate of future president Nelson Mandela. With encouragement from his legions of friends and fans, Hugh pulled himself together in 1991 and put together Sekunjalo, a musical concert tour of South Africa featuring dozens of local vocalists and instrumentalists from a range of stylistic backgrounds. Beyond the concerts’ stunning artistic success, the outpouring of enjoyment and adulation from audiences finally persuaded Masekela that South Africa was changing irreversibly. And what more sure sign of this than that Bra Hugh was finally back? Indeed, I know these things because so was I. After fourteen years of exclusion from South Africa, I returned as part of the first cohort of American Fulbright Scholars since 1962, to teach at the universities of Cape Town and the Western Cape. Just in time to get tickets to Sekunjalo. Also coming back were Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam Makeba, Jonas Gwangwa, Caiphus Semenya and his wife Letta Mbulu, and a steady stream of other notable musical and theatrical exiles. Others, such as drummer Louis 340 In Township Tonight

Moholo, who had made it to the top of the European jazz ensemble circuit and were unwilling to give up established careers for a musical environment they believed they had outgrown, remained in exile. So too did the members of the Manhattan Brothers, who had faded into obscurity in Britain along with the music of their era. Abdullah Ibrahim was still a luminary in North America and Europe as well, and the solution for exiled stars of this calibre was to maintain residence and professional presence both overseas and back home. There was no longer any need, mercifully, to choose between the two. Louis Moholo and Miriam Makeba are now both back home in South Africa for good. Nor, even more important, was there a need to choose between home and exile creatively. Abdullah Ibrahim, who led the superb ensemble Ekaya in New York during the 1980s, teamed up with the elegant, highly trained bassist and composer Victor Ntoni back in South Africa in the early 1990s. At first Abdullah, at that time very much a jazz elitist, complained that his own people did not appreciate his music but asked endlessly for the old thumping strains of Manenberg instead. But like Hugh Masekela, Abdullah the old master was soon to change his tune yet again, when he realised that South Africa was indeed producing younger jazz performers of the highest international standard, and that black audiences, long deprived of even ‘our kind of jazz’, not to mention the live performances of overseas luminaries, needed to be empathetically led back to jazz. One of the results was Knysna Blue (TipToe Records), released not long after Abdullah’s return to Cape Town in 1993. An experiment in lyrical narrative text-and-melody, the album at last explores, after so many years of injury and at considerable painful expense to Ibrahim himself, the lieux de memoire and longing, the losses of separation, the social sickness among the performer’s generation, that the cooling wind of the ‘Cape Doctor’ cannot cure. Yet in this very act of musical narration, bitterness becomes beauty, and the songs of exile are at last shared at home. By the end of the 1980s, the cultural scrap-yard dogs of the apartheid regime had ceased biting if not barking. Seemingly from nowhere, the nominally illegal black ‘kombi’ taxi industry emerged to ferry club patrons to bright, overcrowded nightspots in the dark, otherwise empty city centres. In Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban, blacks and whites experimented tentatively with attending the same venues. Yeoville on the fringe of downtown Johannesburg, long a racial ‘grey area’, briefly bloomed with a multi-racial musical and social scene, including experimental jazz venues. By the time of the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, however, Yeoville had already fallen victim to white flight, uncontrolled and under-resourced foreign African immigration, and crowds of bellicose, inebriated teenagers.2 At that time the cultural pinnacles were the voluntarily de-segregated jazz venues: Kippie’s in Johannesburg, joined by the Bassline in Melville, Rosie’s and Manenberg in Cape Town, as well as Jazz and Other Fusions 341

larger, more formal concert spaces such as Johannesburg’s legendary Market Theatre, Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre, and Durban’s BAT Centre. Owned by experienced performance managers such as Rosie’s Rashid Lombard (today the organising genius behind the marathon Cape Town International Jazz Festival), these venues sustained themselves by featuring a range of styles from rock to ‘African pop’ to world beat as well as jazz. So began the first attempts to establish a viable national ‘circuit’ of jazz performance spaces that could sustain local professionals on musical activity alone. Legally, the abolition of the despised pass laws in 1986 helped a great deal, and the last barriers finally fell in June 1991, when all remaining ‘apartheid’ legislation relating to racial classification, including the Group Areas, Population Registration, and Land Acts (the Separate Amenities Act was erased in 1989), were repealed by President De Klerk. In regions such as KwaZulu-Natal and the East Rand, however, continuing political violence throughout the early 1990s had a terribly negative effect on the ability and willingness of both performers and audiences to travel to performance venues, day or night.3 Despite the new cultural imperialism promoted by the emerging neo-liberal macroeconomic regime in the capitalist North, South Africa’s urban musical communities entered the 1990s with a tremendous sense of openness and optimism. The cross-racial socialising that had served as a political statement in the 1970s and 1980s managed, for a decade or so, to survive in mixed nightspots. There, liberal whites, temporarily grateful that so much of their property, privilege, and prospects had been left in place, hobnobbed with the insouciant but just-pleased-to-be-there serious music fans from the emerging black bourgeoisie. In 1994 in Johannesburg’s once quiet but increasingly trendy and lively suburb of Melville, Brad Holmes and Paige Dawtrey founded the Bassline. This intimate, low-key venue vied with the famous Kippie’s, now under the management of veteran bandleader Sipho Mabuse, as the premier exhibition space for virtually every important musical voice, old and new, to be heard in the country. By the time I moved up from Cape Town in 1997, the Bassline had become a fixture in the musical life of the city. I recall vividly my own sense of musical history in the making while standing amidst the crowd transfixed by the meditative sonic explorations of new virtuosos like pianist Moses Taiwa Molelekwa (who died tragically in 2001) and saxophonist Zim Ngqawana, or old masters like saxophonists Barney Rachabane and Winston Ngozi. Also present and very much accounted for was a new generation of white and mixed-race instrumentalists and composers who made the most of the music’s liberation. Pianist-composer Paul Hanmer (with his wonderful unit, Unofficial Language, featuring fellow Capetonians Peter Sklair and drummer Ian Herman); guitarist Ernie Smith, and the unclassifiable, eclectic, experimental avant-gardist Carlo Mombelli (with Prisoners of Strange, a group that included both Wyatt and Sidney Mnisi), formed fluid ensembles with newcomers such as Cape Town 342 In Township Tonight

saxophonist McCoy Mrubata, or versatile veterans like saxophonist Khaya Mahlangu. For the first time in some time, jazz began to attract a younger but better-educated black listenership.4 The urban jazz scene was now racially mixed on stage, in the audience, and in the recording studios. Saxophonist Errol Dyer formed a large unique Afrojazz ensemble, Mahube, which included Zimbabwean pop traditional guitarist Oliver Mtukudzi and Zulu vocalist Suthukazi Arosi. No arena of social life better illustrates the liberation of South Africa’s whites granted by the end of apartheid than the performing arts. More importantly, music re-asserted its place as a medium of social reflection and criticism more quickly and aggressively than literature, theatre, comedy or other performing arts.5 Kippie’s and the Bassline did more than host the rebirth of a national jazz tradition suppressed since the destruction of Sophiatown and its ‘Jazz at the Odin’ sessions, and the closure of the downtown venues to shows like ‘In Township Tonight!’ They also provided the right space at the right time for the emergence of new South African jazz and jazz fusion, equally South African and African-American in its sources, assured and brilliant in technique, eclectic and multi-vocal in style, experimental in instrumentation and ensemble, commemorative yet original in composition, at once elegiac and celebratory in mood, soulful but often irresistibly danceable. Both venues had little standing room, yet by the end of the performances just about everyone was on their feet, overwhelmed with a new-found pleasure in being South African. It was to be part of this that I came back to South Africa from New York, and even in the nervous times that lay ahead, I never regretted it. Creatively, the post-apartheid period produced a renaissance in South African jazz, but the issue of the quality and number of performance venues, forms of media exposure, recording and other professional opportunities remains a crucial and highly controversial one for the musicians. On the positive side, the jazz audience that had been driven underground and nearly suffocated by apartheid cultural policies began to revive. The return of exiles such as Masekela, Makeba, Gwangwa, and Ibrahim created a new enthusiasm for jazz in the townships, leading to the formation of jazz appreciation societies, especially in communities and among listeners who did not find the premier city and suburban venues accessible or affordable. These societies held public as well as members’ events such as stokvels, most often on Sundays, the traditional ‘jazz day’ in South Africa, where the thirst for beer, musically grounded sociability, and jazz could all be slaked. For white audiences, the Standard Bank’s support of serious jazz at the National Arts Festival’s Joy of Jazz concerts each July provided an important showcase and catalyst for re-engagement. More important was the rapid emergence of a black middle class that regarded the appreciation of jazz as a participatory sign of their re-inclusion in the most prestigious artistic levels of international black cultural production. In addition there was a new young generation of black university students – the prestigious English-medium Jazz and Other Fusions 343

institutions, for example, went from an average of perhaps 20 per cent black enrolment to 65 per cent and more over the course of the 1990s – who were being encouraged by teachers like myself to appreciate the finer things of life, the South African jazz tradition among them. On the negative side, the available venues and audiences dedicated to jazz were not large enough to support those musicians – world-class though they might have been – who were committed to performing the genre in what they considered its unadulterated form. By ‘unadulterated’ they did not mean necessarily confining themselves within the American jazz mainstream, but they did in practice mean no obvious ‘jazz fusion’ with more popular genres, no Hugh Masekela ‘Afro-funk’, no perennial retreat to the crowd-pleasing comfort zone of Sophiatown style, no search for a signature blend of one’s ethnic or regional traditions with the international mainstream, no ‘easy listening’. The guiding principle among this group, which includes such luminaries as saxophonists Khaya Mahlangu, Sidney Mnisi and Zim Ngqawana, pianists Andile Yenana, Paul Hanmer, and Moses Molelekwa, trumpeters Marcus Wyatt and Feya Faku, bassists Herb Tsoedi and Fana Zulu, drummers Vusi Khumalo, Louis Moholo, Lulu Gontsana, and Morabo Morojele, and quite a few others, is that no listener who cannot actually see them playing should be able to tell they are South African. Like Abdullah Ibrahim in exile in the 1980s (whose music, interestingly, remained unmistakably both his own and Capetonian), they want to be regarded as jazz musicians, not South African musicians like Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, or Caiphus Semenya. While such aspirations are understandable, the potential South African audience remains, just as understandably, far too wedded to their local sounds and styles to provide by itself an adequate living for the ‘purists’. As Khaya Mahlangu joked to me: ‘What’s the difference between a jazz musician and a pizza? A pizza can feed a family.’ The always innovative jazz intellectual saxophonist Zim Ngqawana won three South African Music Association (SAMA) awards for his superbly original, eclectic CD Vadzimu in 2004, but as his publisher at Sheer Records, David Alexander, lamented, awards do not sell recordings. Even the otherworldly Moses Molelekwa had to compromise with ‘fusion’ in an attempt to find a market for his CD Genies and Spirits, and both Moses and saxophonist McCoy Mrubata played on recordings by the kwaito sensations TKZee (themselves, admittedly, far from musically illiterate). To be realistic, the jazz avenue in South Africa has never been an easy walk, and there are many, multiple solutions to this dilemma. One platform has been formal musical education, no longer the exception among full-time professionals. Such training does not by any means distinguish jazz performers from their fellows in other genres, as good technical training can be found among gospel instrumentalists, rock musicians, kwaito, rhythm and blues, Afro-fusionists, and the many successful exponents of Afro-pop, including the currently popular multi-racial group Freshly Ground. A 344 In Township Tonight

new expression of the appreciation of technical training is the growth in interest in symphony and especially European opera in black communities, particularly around Cape Town, where U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, a live staging and film version of Bizet’s opera Carmen in 2004, was a resounding success. Further, at the heights of jazz artistry in South Africa, just as in the United States, ‘apprenticeship’– the sustaining system during the years of educational discrimination – remains very much in place. Legendary trumpeter Feya Faku is just one of many established performers who learned his craft from other practitioners, mostly on the job. The point, however, is that formal training provides professional versatility, so that the player whose heart belongs to jazz can apply his skills to short-notice studio and concert calls, popular concert backing bands, overseas touring, composing, and shifting ensemble work, with unruffled professionalism. There are those players, like top saxophonist Sidney Mnisi, who feel their training in international jazz would be betrayed if they played styles of jazz fusion, Others have responded to the realities of the market with some superb musical encounters, as when Paul Hanmer and McCoy Mrubata play sideman in each other’s ensemble engagements at the Bassline, or when Afro-jazz guitar virtuoso Louis Mhlanga teamed up at the same venue, time and again, with folk poet and balladeer Vusi Mahlasela. Among the outstanding proponents of this ‘axe for hire’ approach is veteran saxophonist Barney Rachabane, who, when he has not the opportunity to join fellow maestros like Winston Ngozi or Professor Darius Brubeck for a serious jazz performance, backs visiting foreign performers or locals playing other genres, and does his best to ensure that he spends at least part of each year overseas earning hard currency in Europe or North America. Barney, a complete gentleman who in forty years of tough times in the industry has never lost his optimism or composure, told me his strategy had enabled him to educate his children and buy two houses in Soweto. In Barney’s view, the long decades of dependency and paternalism had turned too many of his fellows into perennial accusers and complainers who were simply unable to take advantage of the professional opportunities, challenging though they might be, available over the past fifteen years. More of this issue later. Of course, as the talent and technical accomplishment of the ‘internationalists’ of South African jazz have become more widely heard and appreciated abroad, opportunities to play internationally have dramatically increased. Zim Ngqawana’s visit with veteran producer Peter Tladi to New Orleans in 2003 lent some ironically humorous yet beautifully crafted new dimensions to his award-winning eclectic ‘beyond jazz’ CD Vadzimu. Others have used the jazz ‘educator’ road so much travelled by generations of black South African academics, travelling abroad to conduct master classes, student workshops, and festival collaborations. One of the most noteworthy of these was Lulu Gontsana, who died tragically in December 2005. As the legendary trumpeter of the Jazz and Other Fusions 345

Jazz Ministers and prominent jazz educationist Johnny Mekoa, founder of the Gauteng Music Academy in Daveyton Township, said at Gontsana’s memorial, Lulu and his fellows are fortunate to belong to an international artistic nation where all command the same musical history, language and professional codes, and all have the same goals. As a drummer, Lulu practised the highest form of jazz citizenship, mastering a range of local and international rhythmic styles so as not to merely support but to lift the ensemble playing of whomever he was performing with. Lulu was born and raised in Port Elizabeth, a centre of big band and ballroom dance jazz and renowned for its pianists and rhythm sections. Both Lulu’s father and grandfather played for Banacal Beans, a band that specialised in the swing of Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington. His father’s record collection and the music that throbbed from the gramophones of neighbourhood shebeens provided Lulu’s early musical education and inspired in him an interest in local jazz history. When Port Elizabeth became too musically confining, Lulu followed the path well trodden by so many Cape musicians and in 1981 migrated up to Johannesburg to replace Gilbert Matthews in the premier jazz-fusion ‘Weather Report’ group of the period, Spirits Rejoice, playing with trumpeter George Tyefumani, saxophonist Duke Makazi, pianists Bheki Mseleku and Russell Herman, trumpeter Thabo Mashishi, and bassist Sipho Gumede. At the same time, Lulu began freelancing with saxophonists Winston Ngozi and Mike Makhalemele, and other members of the city’s jazz elite. Lulu’s interests and talents went far beyond just playing, and he was soon awarded the Ronnie Madonsela Scholarship (1983), created in honour of the great 1970s comedian and cabaret artist, to study at the University of Natal under Darius Brubeck, son of the famed jazz innovator and composer Dave Brubeck. Darius first came to South Africa with his famous father and brothers Chris and Dan in 1976. His family returned home but Darius had been bitten by the South African bug that has attracted so many talented outsiders over the decades, and Brubeck remained to become Director of the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music and Professor of Jazz Studies in Durban. From that seat he has had a profound influence on formal jazz education in South Africa. Lulu joined the University’s ensemble, the Jazzanians, which included the young Zim Ngqawana. Apart from playing with the aristocracy of jazz, from Abdullah Ibrahim to Dizzy Gillespie, Lulu attended the International Jazz Educators Conference in 1998 in New York where he and Darius Brubeck presented a forum on South African jazz. Lulu also conducted jazz workshops and performances at the United Nations in New York, the Milton Academy in Boston, and universities in Switzerland, Sweden and elsewhere, including my own Wits University, where he was a frequent participant in musical seminars and debates. At the time of his death Lulu was a member of Voice, an ensemble composed of Sidney Mnisi, Marcus Wyatt, Herb Tsoedi, and Andile Yenana: the jazz elite of Johannesburg. 346 In Township Tonight

I recount something of Lulu’s history not only because he embodied in his person and outlook as well as in his music the best that South Africa is and might be, but also because his story is exemplary of how South African jazz could both sustain and enhance itself through the expansion of its international participation and scope. If our cities are presently too local to sustain our kind of jazz, then the music capitals of the world beckon. The broader issue of whether and how to think and play local and global goes well beyond the strategies of individual musicians, and affects South Africa’s city music as a divergent but interconnected whole. Nor of course is this music produced in a social vacuum, but is rather vitally affected by the new attitudes and trends emerging among the listeners it seeks to engage. Indeed, it has been a long time since there has been any real agreement among South African jazz enthusiasts as to what ‘jazz’ is. Purists (including American critics Stanley Crouch and Leonard Feather) scoff at the notion that Hugh Masekela is a jazz musician, a critique perhaps answered by the 2005 release of an album of jazz standards, Almost Like Being in Jazz (interestingly on the Straight Ahead label), by this icon of South African music in any style. Or take the situation of today’s songbirds, now called ‘divas’, whether of the ‘jazz diva’ or ‘pop diva’ category. Interestingly, there are only a very few male jazz vocalists with a commanding reputation in Johannesburg, and women dominate the field of song. At the top of the list surely must come Sibongile Khumalo, daughter of University of Zululand professor and national music mentor Khabi Mngoma. From her father, who loved and promoted all forms of music, from Zulu gourd bows to symphonic, she received a superb formal education, including an encounter at the age of eight with the pioneering pianist and leader of the Merry Blackbirds Orchestra, Emily Motsieloa. Later she completed degrees at the universities of Zululand and the Witwatersrand. Khumalo’s training has enabled her to branch out beyond performance to experiment in various fields including music educational writing. Her powerful command of all vocal registers, inadequately reflected on her recordings, enables her as well to switch from European opera (Bizet, Verdi) to ‘classic’ (in South African parlance, ‘evergreen’) jazz vocals, to contemporary interpretations of African folksongs, to Sophiatown and Soweto jive and pop. As part of the project to create an opera based on the life of the late umakhweyana gourd bow performer and composer Princess Constance Magogo, Khumalo has interpreted classical arrangements of Magogo’s songs by renowned composer Peter Klatzow. Sibongile’s son Themba has recently joined her as a jazz wizard on her own original instrument, the (electric) violin. As a first-rank international star, there is seemingly no song Sibongile cannot make her own, and she can afford to move away from the ‘Sophiatown comfort zone’ that so frustrates her fellow diva Gloria Bosman and multi-instrumentalist composer Zim Ngqawana.6 For other jazz divas, however, the mastery of a fully international style appears to have led them to stray across a bridge too far. Judith Sephuma, whose models are Jazz and Other Fusions 347

American and who has always sought to achieve their technical standard, has found her career stuttering after the success of her lovely CD A Cry, a Smile, a Dance in 2001. The CD has American aspirations despite the presence of her children’s father, Selaelo Selota – very much on the side of Afro in the Afro-jazz equation – as producer and guitarist. Sephuma’s website (www.music.org.za) says that this recording ‘sets a hugely high benchmark for female vocalists not just in South Africa, but on the continent and beyond’. Apparently the benchmark has been too high for Sephuma herself, and she released no further recordings until New Beginnings in 2005. On this effort, the very local-sounding Pedi tune ‘Mme Motswadi’ has received most of the album’s airplay as a single, while Zimbabwean guitarist Oliver Mtukudzi has been brought in to lend some ‘cross-border’ African feel on ‘Kupedza Nguva’. Gloria Bosman, who enjoyed great success early on with jazz interpretations of local African songs, is presently so caught up in complex, self-conscious attempts at vocal ornamentation that one knows not what to make of her performances. Perhaps it was that scholarship to study opera that distorted her musical judgement. In any event, if you are a South African jazz diva and you leave ‘Sophiatown’, you must find a comfortable musical location elsewhere. Here are cases where the constant lament by musical ‘Africanists’ like Ray Phiri that America’s influence is too pervasive may have some validity. Other jazz divas of the new millennium have taken their cue from their sisters in Afro-pop, the dominant commercial style at the moment for young female vocalists, including Mafikizolo’s Nhlanhla Mafu, Freshly Ground’s Zolani Mahola, Kwani Experience’s Nosisi Ngakane, and Malaika’s Matshediso Mpholo. The most influential of all the Afro-pop divas, however, is the multi-faceted jewel Thandiswa Mazwai, whose solo CD following the break-up (until 2005) of Bongo Maffin, Zabalaza, is a stunning, near-seamless blend of Xhosa rural song (sampled on the CD), funked indigenous rhythms, old-fashioned American soul and gospel, local jazz (the evergreen ‘Ntyilo Ntyilo’), and Afro-pop melodic balladry. The daughter of panAfricanist media commentator and publisher Thami Mazwai, Thandiswa is something of a public cultural intellectual as well as a singer. Having left Wits University to become a kwaito star, as an adult she has emerged as a commentator on youth culture and the state of popular music in South Africa. Many of her lyrics are in English and often comment on the troubling social attitudes prevalent in the country. Her Africanism is personal and practised as well as inherited. Inspired by the post-modern reformulation of Zulu guitar songs by veteran Busi Mhlongo (Urban Zulu), Mazwai’s music, while more popular and eclectic, has a Xhosa melodic and rhythmic unifying structure and feel, even when she teams up with Sotho balladeer Tsepo Tsola. Says Thandiswa: I grew up in Soweto. So being Xhosa to me represents something else. It’s more of a vibe, you know, than a life. It’s an instinct. That’s what I want to put in the music ... it has to 348 In Township Tonight

be driven by that energy. … So that’s what I’m doing, I’m going back into the musical archives … those early Xhosa ballads. But also rhythms, the actual Xhosa rhythm, is part of my subconscious. I would also prefer our own African sounds to dominate, to reflect the current cultural trend towards things that are more of our own experience.7

In Thandiswa’s wake have appeared a number of other successful jazz divas, some far better trained, who have taken their cue from her multi-stylistic experimentations. Artistically, the most accomplished and original is Simphiwe Dana, who has combined a completely unique jazz contralto intonation with Xhosa jazz balladry, and weaves the whole over an infectious, often danceable fusion rhythm from her superb backing ensemble. Her debut CD for Gallo, Zandisile, sold 70 000 copies, astonishing for a ‘jazz’ release by a new artist. Perhaps even more successful has been Zamajobe Sithole, a beautiful, coolly self-assured young lady with a glamorous dress sense most unusual for a South African jazz diva. Her music tends towards the more popular style of the romantic ballad, and less towards the complexities of jazz, but she gets audiences eating out of the palm of her hand. A recent concert on Women’s Day (9 August 2005) at the New Bassline – the old one closed in 2003 – in Newtown, Johannesburg, featuring Zamajobe, Simphiwe, and Thandiswa was packed to the aisles with adoring fans, many of whom knew the lyrics to the performers’ songs and quite a few of whom were young jazz fans from the emerging black middle class. On the less promising side, women in South African jazz are still largely confined to the role of vocalist, occasionally playing the piano but no other instruments apart from the exception that proves the rule, trombonist (and of course, vocalist) Siya Makuzeni of Carlo Mombelli’s avant-garde Prisoners of Strange. Siya is unusual in playing a ‘man’s instrument’ in an otherwise male ensemble. Female horn players most often take refuge from male prejudice in all female groups such as Ladies in Jazz, an all-women ensemble including bass and lead guitars, keyboards, drum kit, and saxophone, providing a jazz backing for beautiful Zulu vocals sung in the indigenous tonality. Moving back then to the men, their approaches also reflect different, highly personal solutions to the problematic relations between local Africanism and global jazz. For this we might take the guitar as our instrumental case in point. In South Africa, the guitar has played a key part in bridging the Black Atlantic since the days of Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.8 Today, the list of leading local guitarists includes Jimmy Dludlu, Louis Mhlanga, Musa Manzini, Ernie Smith, and Selaelo Selota. Jimmy Dludlu’s African legacy grows out of Mozambique, a country where the roots of Portuguese and Latin American guitar traditions are deep. Dludlu’s command of his instrument is so astonishing it is hard to believe that he was initially self-taught. An instant success with both jazz and contemporary African guitar enthusiasts when he emerged in 1990, his playing and composing freely blend the infectious feel of Jazz and Other Fusions 349

southern African tropical and township rhythms with complicated instrumental and vocal arrangements that meet the highest standards of international jazz. As a result, his South African and overseas careers took off almost simultaneously. Dludlu has formed several ensembles of his own in addition to playing with a formidable list of international stars at countless major festivals. His earlier recordings represent an African jazz at its most interesting, keeping a range of influences and genres in nearperfect balance. At the height of his early career in 1994, Dludlu sought to upgrade his technical skills, though this hardly seemed necessary, at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and in Chicago. His music supports Barney Rachabane’s contention that it is possible to have a steady professional life in South African jazz if the country is your springboard and not your swimming pool. On the less promising side, Dludlu has diverted into a ‘crowd-pleasing’ cul-de-sac, repeating himself on record and leaping about on festival stages exhorting audiences to sing along with his best-known ‘Brazilian’ tropical hook lines. Meantime, his original admirers wait for clown prince Jimmy to be dethroned and the artistic guerrilla commandante Dludlu to re-emerge. Louis Mhlanga, a Zimbabwean who has established a solid reputation in South Africa as well as elsewhere in the region, proves a similar point in a different way. Like Dludlu, his roots north of the Limpopo have been an advantage in evolving an African contemporary jazz-fusion. In many ways his brightest moments have been his collaborations with other African and European performers, rather than as a band leader. His stylistic range and mastery exceeds even that of Dludlu, however, and Mhlanga has no difficulty in gliding from European jazz to Central African tropical dance tunes to dense African rock. His skills and experience go well beyond performing to musical directing, producing, archiving, and teaching. Following an early involvement in musical theatre in Zimbabwe, Mhlanga ran that country’s Ethnomusicology Trust, where he developed teaching programmes for traditional and contemporary Zimbabwean music.9 Selaelo Selota chose yet another path to ‘jazz’.10 Brought up in a Pedi village near Pietersburg (now Polokwane), Selota enjoyed local dance songs, but it was only on a visit to the town when he was twelve that he saw a local band playing at a supermarket opening and realised people got paid to play. After high school he took a job on the mines simply as a way to survive around Johannesburg, the centre for professional music. In the mine compounds he learned a good deal about other indigenous musical styles to add to those of the Pedi. Soon he was sweeping up around the Market Theatre precinct and taking music tuition at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) academy across the way. Within a few years he was teaching guitar at FUBA and playing in their band, and in 1994 he went to study jazz with American saxophonist René McLean (son of the late alto saxophonist Jackie McLean) at UCT. There he featured as a soloist and composer with the UCT Big Band, and in 1996 Selaelo was 350 In Township Tonight

appointed as one of the guitar teaching staff at the university including jazz guitar and jazz improvisation. Selaelo graduated from UCT in 1997 with a major in jazz composition and arrangement. Since then, Selota has laboured long in the business, establishing a quietly successful career in the Afro-fusion jazz genre, and branching into production in 2001. His music combines superb pop jazz arranging with a Pedi melodic and rhythmic drive, and along with his sometime colleague at FUBA, Malimabe Geoff Mapaya (my own MA graduate from Wits), Selota may be called a leading exponent of Pedi jazz. Selota has said he would, like Mapaya, who teaches music at the University of Venda, be happy to take up a teaching post if he could find the right one. Further, his more popular, ‘easy listening’ Pedi ballad style, heard on his two CDs Painted Faces and Enchanted Gardens (both BMG Africa, 2003) illustrates his insistence that one cannot build a professional career on ‘pure’ international jazz in South Africa, and that stylistic mixing and matching are inevitably part of the show. His one commercial ‘hit’, ‘Thrrr … Phaa’ is featured on Enchanted Gardens. Moving to other instruments, a relatively new but astonishingly successful arrival on the jazz scene is Lesotho saxophonist and band leader Bhudaza Mapefane, a protégé of the late great Sankomota guitarist composer Frank Leepa, who has taken the Sotho–Tswana-language audience by storm since the release of his CD Bo-Mapefane in 2003. The music is a revival of the classic, sophisticated township jazz of the 1950s, with a characteristically rolling South African rhythm section fronted by Bhudaza’s melodious sax lines and warm, relaxed, jazzy vocal style. Equally important are the songs, whose lyrics cover topics from the racy modes of contemporary life to a ‘deep’ Sotho that evokes a powerful nostalgia even among those by whom this rich idiom is not understood. From Gaborone and Mafikeng in the north to Kimberley in the west to Maseru and Bloemfontein in the south, Bhudaza has given Sotho and Tswana (the two languages are very close and were only differentiated perhaps 150 years ago) something both familiar and fresh by way of ‘their kind of jazz’ to listen to. An astute businessman, Bhudaza’s strategy has been to serve a particular neglected ethnic and language-based audience of old-fashioned African jazz lovers who may, consciously at least, have forgotten how much love they had for it. He has been rewarded with considerable fame and some fortune, even if the internationalist, ‘pure’ jazz fraternity might sigh at yet another messenger from the ‘comfort zone’. The message is of course that, like it or not, successful careers are built upon the constitution of an audience. Tsonga guitarist and composer Jeff Maluleke can testify to the validity of this point. He moved from the Tsonga mbaqanga pop of northern South African stars like Thomas Chauke in the mid-1990s to the eclectic ‘tropical beat’ and township jazz of the CD Mambo (featuring Hugh Masekela, no slouch in the world of tropical beat Jazz and Other Fusions 351

himself ) in 2003, for which he won a Kora African music award. Crossing categories and audience boundaries, and drawing in a new, more diverse range of listeners towards a multi-stylistic African jazz has been Maluleke’s strategy, and it has been working. We might also note in this connection that this is precisely why Hugh Masekela continues to hold on to his very large and devoted fan base. Another elder statesman and keeper of the flame of the Sophiatown jazz tradition is trombonist and former exile Jonas Gwangwa, who continues to perform and record widely both at home and abroad, and who will always enjoy the admiration of the jazz fraternity and devotion of the older township jazz audience. A good many of South Africa’s most experienced and best-trained jazz composers and instrumentalists, including Don Laka, Sipho Gumede (who died in 2004), and even the jazz guitar phenomenon Ernie Smith, have taken the easy-listening/mixedgenre path, particularly in their carefully thought-out record releases. Ernie Smith’s debut album, Child of the Light, released by the prestigious independent jazz label Sheer Sound, features serious jazz performers Gloria Bosman, pianist Themba Mkhize, Paul Hanmer and Marcus Wyatt, and yet as commentators have noted, the sound is a mixture of African jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul. Indeed,. easy listening/ mixed genre may be considered the mainstream in South African ‘jazz’, with or without the indigenous African or Cape Khoi and Muslim influences. A good example is Paul Hanmer’s 1996 release, Trains to Taung (Sheer), ‘the first major crossover jazz album after liberation’, and still the odds-on favourite for a romantic evening at home.11 Moving by a round-about route down to Cape Town, we find Durban guitarist Musa Manzini developing a rhythmically driven, full-bodied Afro-jazz sound on both guitar and bass in the musical hothouse of the city’s major African townships. Back in Johannesburg in 2000, Manzini attracted the attention of Mfundi Vundla, creator of the top local evening soap opera, Generations, who made Musa the musical director of his youth spin-off series, Backstage. In 2002 Manzini joined Generations as well. This involvement in the musical side of television has enabled Manzini to maintain a more uncompromising jazz direction in his public performances and on his recordings, New Reflections (BMG 2000) and Tributes and Memories, on his own label, Manzini Entertainment, through Gallo Jazz (2002). With regard to Cape Town’s jazz community, this could and should be the subject for a book of its own, and indeed we do have Basil Breakey’s superb and moving photo essay, Beyond the Blues: Township Jazz in the ’60s and ’70s (1994) as a starting point. The Mother City of course has a jazz tradition and style all its own. In addition to the generations of talent, including contemporary saxophonist and composer McCoy Mrubata, and pianist composer Paul Hanmer, sent north to Johannesburg, Cape Town has, in the post-liberation era, come into its own as a centre of jazz performance. This major regeneration has been built upon the city’s new visibility as an urban tourist 352 In Township Tonight

paradise, rivalling San Francisco in its physical beauty and comparing favourably even with Honolulu in its comfortable and well-resourced exoticism. Both major and independent international film studios today routinely use Cape Town as a setting for their productions. Cape Town is not just for South African families on tight budgets escaping to the beach for school holidays anymore, and the city’s performing artists have benefited. One important benefit has been the emergence, finally, of a regular ‘circuit’ of jazzfriendly performance venues in the Cape Peninsula. With a foundational audience of vacation and business tourists, these venues do not have to depend entirely on local patrons who have often heard the established names in Cape jazz many times. Local supporters are nonetheless grateful that these venues, adequate to (almost) support a regular professional playing schedule for local and visiting talent, are there when they wish to enjoy them. Indeed, Cape jazz is flourishing on tourist support and especially on the enthusiastic local response from the newly assertive coloured community, for whom jazz is one of the most proudly embraced aspects of cultural identity. I use the term ‘Cape jazz’ knowingly, because the Mother City has its own characteristic style, strongly indebted to the American tradition starting with African-American minstrelsy, but mixed with old Khoi rhythms and melodies, Moravian and other mission hymnody, ‘Malay’ choral music, and Afrikaans coloured goema parade band music. The style can be heard in comprehensive form on two superb compilations from local label Mountain Records, Cape Jazz and Cape Jazz 2. The established exponents of Cape jazz include some of South Africa’s most accomplished performers. Veteran saxophonist Robbie Jansen and his Sons of Table Mountain combine superbly the range and depth of Cape musical traditions with intense, complex contemporary instrumental jazz. The influence of America at this level is clearly nothing to regret, as Jansen’s vocal on the Ray Charles classic ‘Georgia’ on his Cape Doctor CD (2004) rivals the original for technical brilliance and emotional warmth. Then there is pianist Hilton Schilder, taking the lead from his father Tony and brother Chris, and saxophonist Duke Ngcukana, doing the same for his brother Ezra and Cape jazz founding father Chris, who died in 1993. The entire jazz world in South Africa remains in awe of the incomparable classic Xhosa jazz of Winston Mankunku Ngozi. Cape jazz to the core is the late saxophone soloist for Abdullah Ibrahim and leader of the band Sebenza, Basil ‘Manenberg’ Coetzee, whose CD with his group Sabenza, Monwabisi, is as Cape township as jazz can get. And one can’t get more kaapse than guitarist Mac McKenzie and his group, the Goema Captains, whose CD for Mountain Records, the home label of Cape jazz, Healing Destination, features the classic Cape coloured goema rhythm, parodied hilariously on ‘Alibama’, and a goema version of Ravel’s own parody classic, ‘Bolero’. With the crew of McKenzie, composer and keyboard composer Hilton Schilder, saxophonist Robbie Jansen, and trumpeter Jazz and Other Fusions 353

and vocalist Alex van Heerden on board, there was no way goema lovers were going to have plain sailing. Ismail ‘Pops’ Mohamed, originally from the East Rand near Johannesburg and known in the old days for pop jazz hits such as Black Disco, went to Cape Town to explore his local roots. There he ended up composing for and performing on a range of African instruments including the Zimbabwean mbira, Senegalese kora and Angolan birimbau, along with indigenous Khoi mouth bows and other stringed instruments. For a while he toured with a group of San singers and dancers in traditional skins, lured down from the Kalahari, but he can also put the best of the local jazz tradition on display, as in his collaborations with bassist Sipho Gumede on the Kalamazoo series. In 1991 pianist Hotep Idris Galeta (once known as Cecil Barnard) returned from thirty years of exile, during which he studied with jazz professor John Mahegan, obtained a master’s degree in music, and taught jazz at Hartford’s Hartt College of music. Since his return he has concentrated on educating young musicians in the global jazz tradition. Old Capetonian Louis Moholo, who left South Africa in the company of the Blue Notes in the 1960s, has been very reluctant to return from his position as one of Europe’s premier free-form, avant-garde polyrhythmic drummers. He toured his native South Africa with his group Viva la Black in 1992–3, and performed as part of Return to Roots: International Jazz Comes Home in 2003. We cannot move on from Cape Town without taking notice of Tananas, a group of three very independent talents who came together for a few months each year from the mid-1980s until the tragic murder of Gito Baloyi, their Mozambican bassist and vocalist in 2004. The other two members were acoustic guitar wizard Steve Newman, one of the most original and individualistic stylists on the instrument South Africa has ever produced, and drummer Ian Herman, a master of Cape rhythms from every genre. Their music is seemingly impossible to describe accurately or fittingly – with any music, of course, to encapsulate is to misrepresent – full of twangy strings, uptempo but meditative, shadowy and brooding, but bright and foot-tapping. The jazz feel is somewhere there but the melodies and rhythms somehow sing die ou Kaap like no other sound. In view of the reality that the identifying character of South African music is hybrid, multi-stylistic, poly-cultural, cosmopolitan, we should confront the popular critique that it is altogether ‘too American’. In the country itself, one can hardly encounter a discussion of contemporary black music today, whether in the print or broadcast media, in which young and even not so young musicians, DJs and musical presenters are not condemned for slavishly copying their American counterparts. Of course, such critiques find it inconvenient to recognise the length of time – more than 150 years – that American music and other forms of popular performance have engaged the social and creative imagination of South Africans of all racial and cultural backgrounds. 354 In Township Tonight

It follows that in this respect our forefathers and mothers were no better than their young descendants. Indeed, the nostalgic glow that now more than ever surrounds Sophiatown (a.k.a. ‘Little Harlem’) and the great black jazz orchestras of the 1940s and 1950s is in this sense contradictory, as they were closely modelled on the leading American big bands of the day. Yes, South Africa is exceptional in having developed its own distinct national jazz idiom, and one may rhapsodise endlessly about ‘our kind of jazz’. But the stylistic template, in music, fashion, writing, indeed in permanent urban black identity itself, is America. Why is this, and why was it viewed more positively both then and now in retrospect? As Paul Gilroy wrote of ‘black Atlantic’ cultures, including, unmistakably, South Africa: the unashamedly hybrid character of these black Atlantic cultures continually confounds any simplistic … understanding of the relationship between racial identity and racial non-identity, between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal. Here the idea of the racial community as a family has been invoked and appealed to as a means to signify connectedness and experiential continuity that is everywhere denied by the profane realities of black life amidst the debris of de-industrialisation.12

What post-colonial South African performers are doing is what they have done since colonial times: searching out varying combinations of elements from indigenous, Euro-North American, other African, and New World African forms as a way of inserting local currents into global stylistic streams, multiplying the estuaries of contemporary cultural identity. Performances or works are African not because they display a preponderance of ‘indigenous’ elements, but because Africans have chosen to perform them. Having made this assertion, it is worth the attempt to identify and distinguish local historical elements, forms and processes from imported ones in the volatile creative mix that defines South African culture. As Stuart Hall said during his visit to South Africa: Again and again, cultures that feel under threat, live the fantasy that they could just lock the doors and go back to being British in the old way; or French in the old way. … Now if we can’t do that … and we are not prepared to open the skies, to lie down and think of Manhattan – you know, to say, ‘come in please I’m yours’ … then we have to work out the most complicated and ingenious, imaginative compromises which allow our citizens to have a strong enough sense of themselves that they are not obliterated by what is coming in. But not so closed against the experience of others as to write themselves out of modernity.13

We are more than a decade into the post-apartheid period and what has changed? It Jazz and Other Fusions 355

might appear at first that we could now dispense with American popular culture as an unnecessary and expensive import and give the industry over to our local producers. The feeling that we ought to do just that perhaps explains the condemnation of seemingly America-mad performers, audiences, and their media, and the apparent need to impose a minimum quota (currently 25 per cent) of how much ‘South African music’ (however defined) can be played over the radio. Yet we are still caught in Hall’s dilemma, and like so many other countries, busy paving the road to hell with the intentions of modernity while we are outraged at the imported cultural vehicles in which we seem compelled to make the trip. The option of a ‘third way’, an alternative cultural path to modernity, has yet to assure us of the desired destination. Despite the political unfashionability of the United States, the cultural dimension of the superpower’s imperialism is as welcome as ever, never mind our denunciations and denials. I would like to believe that Gilroy is correct in suggesting that music might actually provide a model for resolving this contradiction.14 Certainly, the broadcast and even print media are implicated in this schizophrenic argument between nativism and cosmopolitanism, which has been going on at least since the arguments among the New Africans in the 1930s and 1940s. The ethos of South African radio has always been multi-format, with a selection from one genre following another with no discernible stylistic order. Cover versions enjoyed a perverse preference. The African-language Radio Bantu stations were to some degree less guilty of this, at times offering half or full hour programmes of one type of material on a scheduled basis. Since the early 1990s, South African radio has undergone an explosive diversification. The public broadcaster, SABC, offers a far broader selection of stations targeting specific listener profiles with stylistically consistent musical formats, and there are also a host of new independent stations in the community and commercial categories. While some, such as Classic Fm, Highveld Stereo (popular and soft rock ‘hits’), Radio 5 (hard rock, heavy metal) and the SABC’s own Radio Metro (rhythm and blues, hip-hop) inevitably play overseas music most of the time, others such as Yfm (Johannesburg’s black youth station) and Kaya FM (‘adult urban black contemporary’, as they put it) make a dedicated effort to play a good proportion of local music as well, although this material is often local versions of rhythm and blues, hip-hop, and other American genres. Both play quite a lot of local jazz, and while Kaya leads the way in providing African and world popular music, Yfm’s playlists for local contemporary sounds are often more interesting, original, and experimental than the more conservative ‘adult’ Kaya’s. One problem with these two stations is the constant switching among genres, so that it is unsatisfying for any listener, regardless of their age, who has any specific kind of musical preference to stay with either of them for more than a song or three. While 356 In Township Tonight

driving, one must keep punching those channel buttons. On the other hand it is hard to blame station managers for this approach to programming. The only dedicated jazz ‘niche’ station in South Africa, P4 radio, based in Cape Town and Durban and not, interestingly, in Johannesburg, founded in 1998, could not expand its listenership beyond 500 000 and closed on Valentine’s Day, 2006. The frequency was renamed Heart 104.9 and, according to station manager Gavin Meiring, ‘our research shows that the jazz market is too small and our target market, urban adults, prefer listening to contemporary, soft rhythm and blues’.15 Less of a problem for listeners in this regard and others are the nine African-language stations, which discarded the most objectionable aspects of their programming and transformed themselves into what one might call language or regional community radio almost as quickly as they changed their names from the old Radio Sesotho to Radio Lesedi (‘Light’), for example. These stations also mix their musical formats and genres, but they all play a majority of material in the designated home language. In addition to ethnic popular music, they play some amount of both local and international jazz, often in regular, dependable time slots. Radio Thobela, the mostly Pedi/northern Sotho station, follows an explicitly Africanist policy and plays 75 per cent local material. Since Thobela’s footprint reaches other African-language speakers in Limpopo Province, it also provides regular scheduled programmes in Venda, Swazi, and other languages. Many of these stations have enormous listener bases, and Radio Ukhonzi, broadcasting in the Zulu language, is the most popular channel overall in South Africa. What ties listeners to these outlets is not only language itself, providing for many the main source of news, information, and entertainment, but also the steady stream of presenters, personalities, and culturally embedded ‘local knowledge’ that relates listeners to one another on a national scale. So highly talented, audience-embracing presenters such as Radio Lesedi’s Chomane Chomane (my personal favourite), not to mention his colleague on Sunday mornings, radio preacher Thuso Motaung, become mediators of national social life to Sotho speakers in general. So too are the radio dramas, often set in rural areas or familiar small home-towns, that these stations still broadcast, a tradition of African-language theatre reaching back more than sixty years.16 The Tsonga station reaches across the borders to listeners in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, while Radio Motsweding (Tswana), Radio Ligwalagwala (Swazi), and Radio Lesedi (southern Sotho) compete with national broadcasters in the neighbouring states of Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho. Local community stations such as Jozi Fm, serving Soweto, and Bush Radio, serving the Cape Flats townships near Cape Town, have also succeeded admirably in attracting superb new young talent in all aspects of production, significant outside funding, and large local followings. Musically, community stations, some as small Jazz and Other Fusions 357

as student-organised and -run Radio Setsoto in Ficksburg, Free State, have helped enormously to diversify the music available to listeners, even if not all of it is worth listening to. Then too, American music still makes up the larger portion of community radio play-lists. Their greatest problems seem to be satisfying a government licensing mandate that requires ‘community’ management and programming participation (not easy to arrange or even define) and keeping the larger commercial and public stations from poaching their staff. While public support has to some extent eased the pressure for ‘community management’, there appears to be as yet no way to change the role of community radio as a training ground for the larger national outlets. All of this demonstrates that while South Africa is a sub-Saharan African country – perhaps the only one – in which television is a universally available, dominant communications and entertainment medium, this has not meant the dimming of radio’s star in the mass media galaxy. On the contrary, radio, freed at least to some extent from its role elsewhere in ‘nation building’ and as a primary source of government information, has expanded rapidly into a constellation of other roles and services, including of course a primary one in the distribution of music and information and commentary about it. Characteristic of the growing recognition of the importance of this role, both socially and in the business of broadcasting, is the relatively recent agreement to pay recording artists and their labels ‘needle time’ for the use of their product in radio programming. One obvious reason for radio’s continued relevance is the general poverty of South African television’s musical programming. Television has changed radically over the years since 1991, even if there is still only one ‘free to air’ independent station, etv, to go with the three channels of the SABC. These outlets have provided relatively little in the way of edifying musical programming in the new dispensation, although this is no doubt in part because South Africans are not ready to support it. The early 1990s, a wondrous interregnum between the mind control of the old regime and current unashamed commercialism in television, were in retrospect a ‘golden age’ of documentary production in South Africa. Some of the best of these were portraits of musical legends such as Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, and Abdullah Ibrahim. Others included excellent archival presentations of South Africa’s black popular musical history, some based on the first edition of In Township Tonight!, such as History of South African Jazz, narrated by the country’s premier double bassist, Victor Ntoni, and Our Kind of Jazz, presented by music professor Khabi Mngoma. Over the succeeding years, occasional musical documentaries were broadcast (sometimes repeatedly) and music video and taped performance programmes featuring some local music came and went at regular intervals. High points for jazz audiences among these were the limited series Bejazzled and the longer-running Standard Bank-sponsored Joy of Jazz. The local recording and music distribution industry, confronted by freedom, went from the suffocation of apartheid and the isolation of the cultural boycott to 358 In Township Tonight

the challenges of globalisation in a frighteningly brief period. The major recording companies, subsidiaries of global giants like Sony or Warner, or owned by national investment giants (Gallo Africa), are perfectly willing to produce local music, provided it sells as well as the American competition. Further, while they generate the greater proportion of their profits from overseas licensing, they do invest some of this revenue in searching out, signing, and distributing local artists. But they have no interest in promoting South African music for its own sake. Further, where just a few years ago there were at least ten major global recording companies, now there are only four, and the day may even be at hand when there are none. This is principally due to the global music industry’s inability so far to adapt adequately to digital music production and the distribution of music over the Internet and other digital media. For this reason reflection on the history and present state of the art of independent recording in the South African music industry may be of particular interest, especially in light of the dark past and sporadically enlightened present of the country. It would be unfair – really – to characterise the major recording companies that operated throughout the apartheid period as ‘agents of the system’. Yet it is fair to say that these companies did take advantage of the discriminatory, exploitative labour regime of post-Second World War South Africa to organise disempowering and paternalistic modes of cultural production in the professional black music sector. One would have to be an incurable ‘presentist’ – judging the past by the standards and values of today – to expect otherwise, as they knew no other system, and, to use that obscene cliché, business was business. But while we may understand why these arrangements were naturalised as the most practical way of producing and distributing recorded black music in that time and place, we must not forget that those who attempted to blaze a more autonomous creative and financial path through the unenchanted forest of the South African recording industry found their way blocked at every turn by the demons of apartheid’s unwritten as well as formal codes. So the story of independent recording in South Africa is one not simply of slingshot Davids taking on big-gun Goliaths, but also of the demand for the professionalisation of black musical performance as a dimension of the struggle for freedom in general. The pioneer of independent black recording in Johannesburg was record shop owner Rashid Vally, who has earned a permanent place in the annals of South African jazz history through his relationship to Abdullah Ibrahim/Dollar Brand: Then Dollar Brand walked into the shop one day, and I said this is an honour, and he said, ‘I hear you are doing good work, why don’t you record me?’ He was already a Muslim, like me. I said well I can’t afford you, but he said we’ll talk, so I said could you do the piece ‘Tintinyana’ you did with Elvin Jones? And the first album we did was Peace in 1971, and then another one then with Kippie called Dollar Brand + 3, Jazz and Other Fusions 359

only released two years later … Manenberg was done in 1974. Dollar called and said I need money; I’ll play what ever you want. So we went to Cape Town, and we were in the studio for 6 days. And I took it to Teal to make the master, and I used to play it at my shop as a sample and everyone went mad for that song. I knew this was our hit. When it came out, it sold 5 000 in a month. But doing my own distribution was tough. Later I went back to Gallo for recording and distribution, as Peter [Gallo] now saw the commercial value of it. The famous cover photo was an amateur shot by Dollar himself. We did all of Abdullah’s covers ourselves, all on As-Shams label. Somehow it got to the States, and it was released by AudioFidelity as Cape Town Fringe. But it was all politics, and I never saw some money from it …17

Manenberg was a huge success for Vally’s fledgling label, and a precedent had been set. Vally was already something of a legend in Johannesburg’s jazz world, as there was hardly a performer or collector who hadn’t spent some time in his store, Koh-I-Noor Music. But these were the darkest days, with the jackboot weighing as heavily on the arts as on every other aspect of black city life, and Vally’s attempt at independence and his gift of unquestioned creative autonomy to his artists have been truly remarkable. Vally was followed by a few other independents, notably in the 1980s by Lloyd Ross’s Shifty Records: my first major project involved mobile recording down in little Lesotho. There, a superb Afro-funk-house band called Uhuru (‘Freedom’) was languishing under expulsion orders that forbid their return to South Africa, even for purposes of transit. Re-named Sankomota, Shifty recorded them, but I had no success in selling the masters to any of the established companies, who did not know what to make of Sankomota’s innovative, somewhat undanceable Afro-house, cross-genre sound. And so Shifty Records was born, and a distributor found. As there were no independent radio stations at the time, getting Sankomota on SABC was essential, but the songs were rejected because they mixed languages and violated government guidelines on language ‘purity’. Finally it began to receive airplay on venturesome ‘homeland’ stations like Radio Bophuthatswana, and of course Radio Lesotho, and the record started selling. Sankomota was followed by an eclectic selection of some of the most talented and inventive multi-racial, multi-genre ‘crossover’ ensembles of the era, all of whom are now legendary, partly due to Shifty’s efforts. The most successful album that Shifty released, significantly, was the overtly political Change is Pain by ‘people’s poet’ Mzwakhe Mbuli, which sold more than 50 000 units without a single play over the radio. The album was even banned from possession and distribution, but ways were found to carry on distributing it.18

At the exhausted end of the 1980s, Don Laka and his Kalawa Records introduced a 360 In Township Tonight

fresh approach to South Africa’s weather-beaten local music industry. Among the most important capabilities Laka brought to his enterprise were those of a formally trained musician, having earned qualifications in classical guitar and music education through the Royal College of Music in England. When apartheid denied him entrance to the Pretoria Conservatory, he joined the Afro-jazz fusion group Sakhile, and played with a range of South Africa’s most accomplished new-wave black popular musicians. With some mentoring from Tony Visconti as a producer and arranger, Laka formed an independent record label, Kalawa-Jazmee. At the same time he developed a powerful solo career in light jazz with several successful CDs of his own. Now regarded as one of South Africa’s premier producers, Laka is particularly proud of producing Hugh Masekela’s recent albums Black to the Future and Sixty, where he combined the latest township rhythms with the music that created Masekela’s towering reputation. To launch Kalawa-Jazmee, Laka formed a creative partnership with Oscar Mdlongwa, a Zimbabwean who has become perhaps the leading producer of the postapartheid era. The company is possibly the first black record company in South Africa to successfully produce, record, and market their own product without help from any major label. Kalawa-Jazmee’s artists have achieved star status and are responsible for much of the music that is driving the country’s contemporary youth culture. Further, Laka’s own success as a jazz-fusion artist helped new entrants to the independent field such as Sheer Studios, as well as large local companies like Gallo Africa, to see the renewed market potential of local jazz. Every major company now has at least one major jazz artist in its stable, thanks to the success of local jazz-loving independent entrepreneurs like Sheer. Today the major companies use the independents as musical bloodhounds, stalking horses and trial balloons (to mix my metaphors), buying out those who find and record, manage, and market new local talent. Meanwhile, major international companies like Sony will not bother with an international release of a South African jazz album that sells even a respectable 10 000 units, but requires local sales of at least 50 000 to consider that. In the North American market, 10 000 units is not worth the trouble. Some independent labels have been able to play this numbers game. Malaika, a new ‘crossover’ (multi-racial audience) group – they call their music ‘kwaito-house’ but their public thinks of them as ‘Afro-pop’ – is produced by Heita! Records, which distributes through Sony-BMG. Their eponymous first CD in South Africa sold 370 000 copies in 2004 and it will get an international release. Among all South African artists, only Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela in jazz and Lucky Dube in reggae escape the ‘World Music’ sections of North American CD outlets.19 A major problem for both artists and independent labels is the working relationship between the two. Artists, whether newcomers preparing to take the music scene by storm, or established names in the ‘serious jazz’ world who have never enjoyed the Jazz and Other Fusions 361

income to which they feel entitled, have a tendency to jump nervously from one company to another. Commonly, they may be ‘seduced’ by a contract with a major label, only to find themselves languishing unpromoted at the bottom of the company catalogue and unable to record for anyone else. If they escape this trap, they often sign with an independent label that claims to love their sound and to concentrate on their promotion, but with far fewer resources to offer either in the studio or beyond. Quite often the next step is to join the legions of one-CD sensations who announce in the media that their careers are taking off and they are ‘soon starting their own record labels’. Hardly a week goes by without such a breathless announcement in the entertainment pages of the major black newspapers. But few are heard from after. Unable to shake off the mistrust and suspicion that continue to plague small black businesses in the post-apartheid environment, most refuse to partner with others who might have the knowledge or resources to improve the chances of success. Currently the most consistently successful and visible independent label in South Africa – not a one-CD wonder – is Sheer Sound, known to music lovers as a quality label dedicated to making the best of contemporary African jazz and Afro-world beat available while turning a modest profit. Despite the usual stories of betrayal and dispute, it is to Sheer that many artists have turned to solve their own ‘major vs. independent vs. go-it-alone’ production quandary. Here is an edited account of Sheer founding partner and publishing director David Alexander’s approach: At first we used small operators, and then eventually more high-tech studios. So gradually there was more money, more budget, more production, and slowly the company grew. We signed jazz legend Mike Makhalemele. In 1994, I met Damon Forbes, and he had just set up Sheer. I said why don’t we set up Sheer publishing, and it will be an equal partnership. Damon was very conservative, and that helped us stay afloat. Just go for the moderate profit from a moderate investment. My artists are paid 15% of revenues; that is, from after-expense profits. I tell young artists just to use record companies as a vehicle to build their brand, and as a reliable source of income. Let them pay to get you on the radio and TV. We take very conservative views of what we think we can sell, but I am frugal with resources. I don’t spend 7 000 Euros if I don’t think I can get it back. You record for what I can give you up front or no deal … … One of the barriers to entering the market has been distribution, and that is monopolised by the major companies because it is an economy of scale business. We contracted to Gallo Africa, and they were taking a big percentage for what they were doing. So for African jazz we’ve tried some smaller, independent distributors. We were lucky to become the South African representative of a world music company and we liked the music they were doing. We picked up quite a few good albums, like Buena Vista Social Club, when the movie was showing ... Then came the local content push, 362 In Township Tonight

and the impact of the post-1991 proliferation of local radio stations. These stations and their listeners were looking for more sophisticated local music, and at that time we were the only label doing it … What we are looking for now are not overseas companies that want to push their own world music brands using our creative capital but doing our own foreign distribution … In South Africa, Sheer has reached critical mass, so we can go to a small but aggressive company, and get a distribution deal at a much better rate, and we leverage that rate to allow us to offer distribution services to other indies. So we have our own company now called Iris, that offers full distribution to indies … So we now have our own representatives and teamwork in every aspect of the business. Not like Richard Trunz [owner/producer] of Melt2000, who does it all himself. … … The Internet hasn’t had a big impact yet in South Africa, because we have no bandwidth here. We’ve seen a big swing from international music to South African, and the reason is the local content quota or requirement. Sheer itself isn’t just for jazz anymore, but a multi-genre company. In order to keep growing, we couldn’t be just a niche genre producer … It is always a tough decision to invest in an artist, and it goes way beyond marketing and recording, because you may have to drop another artist or divert all the overheads and resources to the new artists. So you are talking anywhere from three to five times the cost of recording alone as the total budget for an album. Sheer looks for longevity and stability in its stable; people who will grow with us.20

As to the relationship between the independent and major companies, policy consultant André le Roux explains: the existing White Paper on the music industry reflects the views of the major recording companies, who have influence with government. So, for example, the document regards music as a recorded product, when live music is equally or indeed more important as a source of direct, career-sustaining income for musicians … There are many layers to the music industry, and the copyright establishment is developed and paid for by the majors, so they set it up to secure their stake. We do have the 25% radio quota for South African music, but as we do not have a proper musicians union, we need an independent labels association, or the majors’ own organization, the Recording Industry of South Africa (RISA) will always have the floor, since government sees that as ‘the industry’. The National Arts Council presented our recommendations to parliament, and the only result was the decision to facilitate the taxation of musicians. As to promoting South African music, that’s not the mandate of the major companies. It is the independents who want to promote South African culture, so the government has a mandate to support them. Independent labels are where most local product is, where the development of our musical culture lies. It is not a question of the indies fighting the majors: it is about market share. As it is, the government supports no one. Jazz and Other Fusions 363

The independents can appeal to cultural nationalism, and to cultural industry creation and advancement: this is about jobs too … And with today’s Internet technology, you can leapfrog the whole licensing, distribution and retail system.21

The live performance industry, especially in Johannesburg, leads a tenuous existence. After nine historic years, the Bassline was forced out of cosy Melville by high rent, but soon re-established itself with sponsorship from Edgar’s clothing outlets in two spaces, one small and one large, in the old Megamusic venue in the Johannesburg Development Agency’s renewed Newtown Cultural Precinct, which includes the Market Theatre complex. Across the way at the Market, Kippie’s Jazz Club, a landmark since 1987 and before that operating as the Market Café, was discovered by Precinct engineers to sit upon a major structural fault and summarily closed. In 2006, manager Sipho Mabuse was finally given a new and charmingly upgraded venue for Kippie’s on Carr Street in Newtown, a fitting tribute to the city’s regard for its illustrious cultural life, past and present. The major kind of venue for live performance in the new millennium is the multiensemble weekend outdoor festival. In Gauteng, municipal parks from Pretoria’s Moretele in the north to Vereeniging’s Dickenson in the south resound with the boom of massive sound systems, as a crowded line-up of musical luminaries take the raised stages from midday until the wee hours of the morning. Even when these concerts are referred to as ‘jazz festivals’, the term seems more associated with the prestige of the genre than with the stylistic identity of the actual performances. Non-jazz artists from gospel diva Rebecca Malope to Afro-pop ballad and dance sensations Mafikizolo to kwaito groups to hip-hop leaders Skwatta Kamp have all performed at ‘jazz’ festivals, alongside Miriam Makeba, Sipho Mabuse, a reborn Sakhile, Joe Nina and Steve Kekana, Bhudaza, and a few of the actual jazz ‘purists’ in need of a pay cheque. Such occasions have some serious disadvantages for jazz. The picnic atmosphere, where alcohol flows freely and acrid smoke rises from innumerable braai cookers, is inconsistent with serious listening. Day-trippers who will leap up en masse to jive on the grass to the bouncy township jazz-pop of Joe Nina, sit and chatter inattentively when Zim Ngqawana takes to the ivories. Attendance is entirely drawn from Gauteng’s African townships, and white patronage is non-existent, depriving the international jazz fraternity of its historically mixed-race club audience. It is not simply that whites fear – unnecessarily – being robbed and killed at concerts at which they wouldn’t be caught dead. Audiences at these festivals are, to be fair, always extremely orderly and courteous. But ‘serious’ jazz listeners are just that: listeners first. Socialising and dancing come second. They may be criticised for not joining in the party spirit amidst a sea of black people, but they can’t be made to. Jazz musicians recognise that major festival sponsors, like the Standard Bank’s Joy of Jazz circuit, have provided 364 In Township Tonight

much-needed employment and exposure.22 The Joy of Jazz concert series each year at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown has proved an enduring success, with mixed audiences in overcoats packing moulded plastic chairs in musty school halls to celebrate their jazz heroes. Indeed, it is Cape Town, and not Johannesburg, that hosts what has become the premier international jazz festival in the country, the sprawling Cape Town International (formerly North Sea) Jazz Festival. Lasting a marathon three days at Easter time, every imaginable style and persuasion of both local and international jazz and beyond are on offer. The considerable cost of getting to and staying in Cape Town if one lives elsewhere, added to the more than R300 ticket price, makes attendance a luxury for many. The festival is consequently an admirable success, but at the price of a steadily declining proportion of performances that might without mendacity be categorised as jazz. Jazz musicians are pleased if they are invited to the party, but they lament this situation, and sorely miss the 1990s club scene. Most recently in Gauteng, the raft of new, ostentatiously kitsch gambling casinos have thought to raise the cultural dimension of their entertainment complexes, and quite a few important concerts from the artistic point of view, featuring jazz as well as other musical forms, are held there. With the 1990s came a trumpet’s blast of freedom that is still ringing in our ears. Relations with the major players in the music industry may not, as musicians ruefully point out, have changed all that much. But certainly radio has opened up dramatically, and the garden of independent labels is providing a riot of recorded musical colours. The levels of musical inventiveness and technical mastery in jazz have never been so high, but it is more difficult than ever to recruit an appreciative audience for its best exponents. Even so, watching a mixed bag of listeners from townships, suburbs, or anywhere you choose listening spellbound to Moses Molelekwa at the Bassline, or jiving joyously to McCoy Mrubata and Paul Hanmer at the Cape Town Jazzathon, one remembers how recently such a spectacle was unthinkable. If the music has come from a far, once-ignored corner of Africa to claim a regular place on the bill of worldwide jazz, then the society that produces it, to be fair, has also been to the mountain after a hard climb. The homes of many jazz musicians may still be way across town from easy street, but the company couldn’t be more entertaining.

Notes 1 Campschreur, and Divendal, Culture in Another South Africa. 2 Ansell, Soweto Blues, p. 277. 3 Ibid., p. 262. 4 Ibid., p. 277. 5 Keorapetse Kgotsitsile, in Ansell, Soweto Blues, p. 300. 6 Ibid., pp. 275–6. Jazz and Other Fusions 365

7 Thandiswa Mazwai, interview, 23 April 2004. 8 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 1993. 9 www.embargo.ca/zim/artists/bios/lmhlanga 10 I wish we could dispense with this term, but like ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’, ‘jazz’ is too deeply etched into popular discourse to rub out. In addition, there is little chance of such categories dying away as long as music merchandisers need them to label their racks and bins. 11 Ansell, Soweto Blues, p. 310. 12 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 99. 13 Stuart Hall, ‘Random thoughts provoked by the conference “Identities, Democracy, Culture, and Communication in Southern Africa,”’ Critical Arts 11, 1–2 (1997), pp. 1–16. 14 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 99. 15 Quoted in Mail & Guardian, 27 January – 2 February 2006. 16 Liz Gunner, ‘Zulu radio drama’, in Nuttall and Michael, Senses of Culture, pp. 216–30. 17 Rashid Vally, interview, December 2005. 18 Lloyd Ross, ‘The amazing true story of Shifty’, www.shifty.co.za/about.htm. 19 Ansell, Soweto Blues, p. 284. 20 David Alexander, interview, 26 July 2005. 21 André le Roux, interview, 23 June 2005. 22 Ansell, Soweto Blues, p. 278.

366 In Township Tonight

11 Out of the townships tonight: emerging South African theatre Among South African theatrical ventures I have always, not surprisingly, been drawn to those that aesthetically, creatively, or stylistically had the unmistakable characteristics of the local, whether mzansi or volkekuns. In the 1970s and 1980s South African theatre, rejecting the applicability and sometimes even the relevance of European theatrical canons to the representation of its ‘non-European’ oppressed, abounded in thumb-inyour-eye localism. Athol Fugard departed from the time-honoured ensemble methods employed in his early ‘Sophiatown’ plays No Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (1959) as well as the lower-depths dramas Boesman and Lena (1969), and The Blood Knot (1961), the latter a landmark not only in South African but in world English-language theatre. This greatest of all literary theatrical voices in South Africa’s history chose instead to share authorship and direction with his black subjects and actors themselves, famously ‘workshopping’ his masterpiece Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1968) ‘township style’ with Port Elizabeth’s Serpent Players and launching the careers of Winston Ntshona and the illustrious John Kani in the process. The Market Theatre’s superb dramatisation of The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena, which went on to a successful off-Broadway New York run in 1983, is another case in point, as was Mbongeni Ngema’s Sarafina, a Durban township ‘protest’ musical of the Kente genre remodelled and polished for New York in 1984. Even so, Sarafina, misunderstood by New York critics, had to depend on word-of-mouth and audience enthusiasm to achieve its stunningly successful off-Broadway to Broadway run. Meanwhile, Fugard had abandoned collaborative ‘workshop’ production to team up with his old Blood Knot partner Zakes Mokae, now in exile, for Master Harold ... and the Boys in 1982, as well as the New York revival of The Blood Knot in 1985, and Emerging South African Theatre 367

has not returned to that method since. This has exposed his work to criticism from the young generation of contemporary playwrights, such as the Afrikaans ‘magical impressionist’ Reza de Wet, who sees the need to ‘re-enchant’ theatre, after decades of didactic and political texts. Theatre, argues De Wet, should be creative, magical, a place of transformation: a ‘crucible of mysterious forces’, as she puts it.1 ‘In ritual and ecstasy lie the answer to the South African theatre,’ she insists, and not in ‘that linear theatre that Athold Fugard forced down their [blacks’] throat’.2 Along these lines, multi-media artist William Kentridge has observed that novelist and playwright Zakes Mda’s theatrical work, which spans the instrumental, developmental, communitarian and the ironically political as well, is at its best when it portrays and symbolically evokes the magical.3 While Fugard’s later work has not indeed been greeted with particular enthusiasm in South Africa, revivals of his earlier plays written in the era of high apartheid do still seem to strike a resonant chord, and continue to run to houses full of both black middle-class and liberal white theatre-goers.4 Indeed, the marquee event at the 2006 National Arts Festival was a revival of Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, directed by the State Theatre’s Aubrey Sekhabi and performed by the original cast (thirty-eight years older), John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Other re-productions in a festival seemingly dominated by revivals were Zakes Mda’s 1970s’ political lament We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, and Wathint’ Abafazi Wathint’ Imbokodo (‘You Strike the Women You Strike a Rock’), an old community political play commemorating the famous women’s march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria protesting against the law requiring African women to carry passes in 1956. The directors of these revivals inevitably claim that ‘this play is as fresh and relevant today as it was when it was written!’, and I must admit that the 2006 production of We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (with a slightly updated script) did seem startlingly reflective of post-apartheid society. Perhaps the chief value of such productions, however, is to acquaint audiences who never saw any black theatre, literary or ‘township’, political or otherwise, in its heyday, with the landmarks of the genre. Certainly, enterprising young producer Duma Ndlovu avoided the Fugard problem when he brought a more straight-from-the-townships example of mzansi theatre to New York in the form of a festival staged at Lincoln Center, one of its most glamorous venues, including Children of Asazi, Asinamali, Bopa!, and Born in the RSA in 1986. Of the four, only brilliant director Barney Simon’s Born in the RSA had any respect for Anglo-American theatrical expectations. The other three, despite the involvement of several of Gibson Kente’s protégés (such as Mbongeni Ngema with Asinamali ), were not at all nice, not at all moral, not at all aspirative, not at all tragic, not even apparently redemptive. Almost as shocking, they had only episodes rather than plots, grotesques rather than characters, gallows humour rather than scripts, acrobats and dancers rather 368 In Township Tonight

than actors. Despite their confusion (where were the well-made productions like Sizwe and Poppie Nongena?), Americans overcame their uneasiness with wild applause. These were young black ghetto South Africans after all, not professional actors: audiences thought it a wonder they had any idea what to do on a stage. But this festival, trailing in the wake of Mbongeni Ngema’s ‘smash hit musical’ Sarafina, was pretty much the last New York would see of mzansi ‘township’ theatre until after the end of legal apartheid in 1991. It is ironic, if perhaps not surprising, that the once-mighty chorus of black popular theatre in South Africa at first fell to a faint whistling (in the dark) in the postapartheid period. Ironic because the social issues, if not the political context, that this theatre took up, sometimes in courageous cultural isolation, have not faded. They have, on the contrary, not only retained their relevance but also been augmented by a range of equally serious but far more ambiguous forms of social and political crisis since (some of ) ‘Mandela’s people’ came to power. Post-apartheid society is almost as racially and culturally divided as was its predecessor. Pre-liberation social gulfs yawn, now widened by the extraordinary rise of a new haute bourgeoisie with little practical empathy with the plight of the poor, who make up the vast majority of the population. Old accusations, resentments, and misunderstandings blend dangerously with disappointed expectations and overblown notions of social and personal entitlement in every region, town, rural slum, and walk of life. Quite apart from the world’s highest levels of violent crime, intra- and inter-community violence is endemic. All this surprisingly optimistic, cheerful misery should, as leading contemporary playwright and outspoken arts activist Mike van Graan said recently at a panel discussion at the Market Theatre, provide the platform for a more humanly complex, thought-provoking theatre than the old two-dimensional, monologic anti-apartheid ‘protest’ plays with their obvious heroes and villains. However, the new elite, who have limited cultural literacy, seem to think that theatre has served its purpose now that it is no longer ‘needed’ as a vehicle of anti-apartheid protest. More broadly, as John Kani observes, ‘The new state thinks it cannot afford to put money into the imagination, and it is hard to reinvent a country without reinventing the imagination.’5 So Van Graan is quite right to reject the popular idea that in the immediate postapartheid period, playwrights had nothing to write about. Even so, ambiguity and frustration over the apparent inability of South African society to change for the better fast enough did present a problematic basis for ‘popular’ dramatic inspiration and receptivity. The relation, or rather the continuity, of the theatre with the drama of the social is a process, not a structure or a correspondence. In South Africa this process, at once driven and concealed as performance history by the immediacy of the present, is producing a stage on which an emergent theatre is, with difficulty, finding its feet. To begin with, if one considers the tremendous obstacles with which innovative theatre, Emerging South African Theatre 369

whether avant-garde, popular, or both, is faced – undeveloped community audiences, competition from local television drama, inadequate sponsorship for training and production, inadequate transport, the price (however modest) of theatre tickets, even fear of urban nightscapes – South Africa’s three largest cities host a range of theatrical events that are slowly increasing in both quantity and quality. But first a trip down South African theatre’s memory lane. By the end of the 1970s the pioneering radical company Workshop ’71 had disbanded, with its director Rob McLaren in Zimbabwe (an exile from which he has yet to return) and its core of actors in the United States. Perhaps it was the national tour of Survival in 1978 that proved too much for the censors. Gibson Kente was still producing his township musicals, including his last real success, Mama and the Load (1981), but the escalation of the internal struggle against apartheid into its most widespread and violent phase in the mid-1980s spelled the end for Kente’s style of reformist politics and naive hypertropic melodrama. While the politics of ‘resistance’ was ostensibly and most visibly the performative rationale driving post-Kente black theatre, the focus on personal stories, the tragicomedy of ordinary black South African lives, remained a strong thread tying this theatre to its roots in township musical melodrama. As one of today’s young playwrights, Bheki Mkhwane, complained, ‘the label “protest theatre” underestimates our creativity. Every piece of work produced during the heyday of apartheid dealt with experiences of ordinary people rather than politics.’6 While Mkhwane’s point is well taken, his use of the words ‘rather than’ is unnecessary. The stories of wrecked hopes and lives, wasted potential, individual strength and weakness, family and community conflict were as political as any formal ideology or explicit act of resistance. A good example, unheralded at the time, was the ‘post-resistance’ play by actress and storyteller Gcina Mhlope, Have You Seen Zandile? Produced in the darkest days at the end of the Struggle, the play was political in a different, more personal sense, evoking rather more than portraying social oppression through a young black girl’s conflicted experience.7 The mis-named ‘protest theatre’ of the townships did survive in local townships as ‘community theatre’, occasionally surfacing into wider public view at the newly established Market Theatre in Johannesburg, the People’s Space in Cape Town, or at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. More important, original visions and new talents were emerging to better suit the mood of national gatvolheid (‘fedupness’) with the untenability of white minority rule as the regime thrashed about ever more violently in its death throes. The story goes that while rattling along in the tour bus for Kente’s Mama and the Load, young actors Mbongeni Ngema and Percy Mtwa came up with an idea for a play based on what might happen if Jesus Christ chose South Africa for his Second Coming. They took the idea to the Market Theatre’s legendary ‘workshop’ directorial genius, Barney Simon, who sent the young pair out into the streets of the townships 370 In Township Tonight

to find their scenes and characters. The result was one of the most witty and moving black (in both senses) comedies of the Struggle period. More than twenty international engagements and numerous festival awards followed its success in South Africa, and the play was filmed as well for American public television. Kente protégé Ngema went on to write Asinamali (‘We’ve No Money’), which toured to New York in 1986, and of course the most successful South African production ever to tour overseas, the radically political Kente-style musical, Sarafina. In the arena of radical political and social theatre in the cities, Cape Town and Durban kept pace with mighty Johannesburg. In Durban, Ronnie Govender and Muthal Naidoo founded the Shah Theatre Academy in 1964, and produced plays until the end of the 1970s, while the Black Consciousness-aligned Theatre Council of Natal (TECON) and People’s Experimental Theatre (PET) companies enjoyed only a brief life until they were snuffed out by the arrest of their members. In Cape Town between 1972 and 1977, the legendary Space Theatre, first under Brian Astbury and his actress wife Yvonne Bryceland, established itself as a defiantly non-racial venue in a racially divided country. The first pioneering fringe theatre in the country, it mounted almost 300 productions starting with the premier of Athol Fugard’s Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act. It hosted the first productions out of Port Elizabeth of the Kani/Ntshona/Fugard collaborative The Island and Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and gave a voice to Donald Howarth’s Othello Slegs Blankes, Fatima Dike’s early plays, and many others. It also became home to a host of young actors who would become stars and stalwarts of the South African stage. Taken over by Moyra Fine and Rob Amato after Astbury and Bryceland left, it survived as The People’s Space for some two years before succumbing to overwhelming financial pressures.8

But it was at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre complex that innovative management, production and performance techniques, radical oppositional politics, and multiracial theatre and dramatic artists would come together most successfully. Veteran theatre manager Mannie Manim and writer-director Barney Simon, looking for a creative space they could fashion in complete independence to house a new vision, took over the old Indian fruit market in Newtown and converted it into a performance complex that embodied ‘theatre against apartheid’ (as well as live music and visual art). For two decades beginning in June 1976, the Market defied the Group Areas and Separate Amenities Acts and survived on private donations and ticket sales without any support (of course) from government. History-making productions and playwrights that showcased at the Market are too numerous to mention, and include almost every important name in South African theatre over the past thirty years. In addition to Emerging South African Theatre 371

bringing township theatre to ‘town’, Simon and his cohorts trained up a good many of its exponents, and polished works such as The Sacrifice of Kreli locally, and Master Harold … and the Boys and Poppie Nongena for the overseas circuit, where they won numerous awards and, not incidentally, earned significant funding for the Market. Throughout the period of the Struggle, from the Soweto Uprising to the epochal democratic elections of 1994, the Market (and its sister theatres in Cape Town and Durban) became a magnet for the enlightened minority of all races who wanted to make a non-violent statement against the apartheid government. It is instructive, though not unique to South Africa, that live theatre should provide a rallying point as well as a shared cultural activity for those who accepted that there must be a democratic ‘regime change’, who prayed it might be relatively peaceful, and who wanted to start the groundwork for a workable, mutually accepting society in its aftermath. The theatre’s musical counterpart was found next door at the Market Café, run by radical soundman, archivist, and independent recording pioneer (3rd Ear Music) Dave Marks, a venue that in 1987 became the legendary Kippie’s. This role demonstrated the power of formal public modes of cultural resistance and, in combination with its many landmark productions, gave the Market an ineradicable place in South African social history. This is why the new government stepped in when, the Struggle over, liberal whites no longer saw any need to make a political statement through cultural exchange and the Market, its surroundings now shabby and fearful, lost the core of its audience. Recognised as a treasure of public cultural history and production, the Market has been heavily subsidised in the post-apartheid era. In 2006 Malcolm Purkey, a multitalented dramaturge and arguably South Africa’s greatest director, left his professorship in theatre at the nearby University of the Witwatersrand and took over the directorship of the Market from John Kani, arguably South Africa’s greatest actor. Malcolm Purkey’s own story is perhaps as remarkable as that of the theatre he now directs. Purkey was one of the many young, culturally inclined English-speaking whites who supported the struggles of black people but could not readily find a place within them. But Malcolm was not the sort to be diverted by a mere crisis of identity. A quintessential man of artistic action, Purkey put together a core group of white performance activists, including poet Ari Sitas, and formed a company to produce the landmark Fantastical History of a Useless Man in the wake of the Soweto Uprising. Sitas recounts what followed: Purkey desperately needed an ‘extravaganza’, an ‘extroverted fantasia’ – in short, a fantastical play about our (white) predicament … There are three crucial facets about this play. First, it reflected our feelings, our experiences of being an ‘audience’ observing a history unfolding in front of us without being able to participate in it, let alone write it. The play was, despite its scabrous sense of humour, an honest attempt to come to 372 In Township Tonight

terms with the hell that was going on around us. So we started settling our historical scores and our contemporary feelings through surrealist and fantastical representations of the political economy of racialism. The second facet was that the workshop technique became central to this production. All our experiences from our different angles came together to create a kind of tension which gave the play its wealth and managed to kill the ‘author’. Third, at the time the play proved to be a rallying cry for the white democratic Left in South Africa. It argued for a new identity and inveighed strongly against cultural imperialism. It argued for discovering one’s own personal and social traditions in South Africa. The main character of the play, Steve the useless man, was seen to be wandering around moaning, ‘We’ve been taught all our lives that our home and our culture [lay] somewhere else. There’s been a conspiracy, a tacit agreement that we must never look around us.’ The play ‘looked around’, explored roots, and demanded of audiences that they take their social responsibilities seriously; yet it recoiled from the war songs and fires of the township streets: ‘There is going to be a war,’ stated a resigned Steve, ‘a war between those who have power and wealth and will not relinquish it and the broad mass of the people who live voiceless at the edge of poverty. What I have I would willingly give up to avoid that war but I am a dreamer and a fool. Many people I know are gearing themselves – willing that war. ‘These men are White Men. White is not a colour. White is an attitude. And myself? I am a coward and a useless man – the most I can do is be the least obstruction.’ … We despaired at our own conclusion that we were an audience watching a history we were not writing. That members of the company were in the future jailed, detained, exiled, harassed, followed, spied upon, and shot at demands another story. Creatively, we proceeded to strive to create a theatre sensitive to our local conditions. At the same time, around 1977/78, Workshop ’71 disbanded. Some of its members went into exile; quite a few were searching for new projects. So we decided to get together through a new common project, Randlords and Rotgut, and launch a nonracial ensemble. This play, very loosely based on Charles van Onselen’s social history of the role of liquor in the mines, tried to deal with the creation of a migrant black proletariat on the Witwatersrand at the turn of the century. It did so to trace the origins of white wealth and power and black exploitation. It used Brechtian narrative techniques, alienation effects, and narrators to remind people about leaps in history and humorous leaps between themes. This was mixed, in the workshops leading to its production, with a more ritual theatre based on the oral-performance traditions brought to the fore by the black members of the company. Through this a story of ruthless profiteering, of violence and anger, of powerlessness and survival was presented to audiences who in their white component felt highly affronted. The relative success of Randlords and Rotgut was followed by a series of plays that Emerging South African Theatre 373

combined a need for the ‘rediscovery’ of a repressed past, a revival of vital urban forms of performance, a castigation of the madness that was apartheid, and a challenge to the country’s power structure. Will of a Rebel explored the predicament of people who chose to take up ‘arms’ against the state. Security explored the degradation of black unemployment through the story of a man employed to act as a watchdog. Dikhitsheneng dealt with the predicament of black domestic servants and gender relations through the story of a black man who takes the place of his domestic servant and lover and, as a disguised woman, has to face the intimacies and power of a white ‘madam’. Finally, plays like Marabi and Sophiatown celebrated the lives of black urban ghettos before their destruction by the South African government and their residents’ forced removal to townships on the margins of Johannesburg – indeed, what became Soweto. Marabi and Sophiatown captured Junction Avenue’s contribution to the broader South African theatre: a sense of history, of power, of resistance, was crafted which did not collapse into a forced heroic rendition. The plays showed how Doornfontein and Sophiatown were demolished and how, when the time arrived for people to resist, they failed to do so: they fragmented according to their peculiar interests. At their heart were the real traditions and popular cultures that animated those ghettos, away from the seriousness and anger of the BC-inspired political plays … Junction Avenue crafted bodies that were musical, celebratory, vital, raided from the traditions of ordinary people in the shebeens, hostels, and jazz joints. It is precisely the tension between the two that informed and opened up the spaces for the energetic and performance-driven theatre of the 1980s.9

By the end of the 1970s this company had solidified around Purkey as the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, one of the most innovative, important and, thankfully, long-lasting ventures in South African theatrical history. Bringing together such talents as Sitas, Workshop ’71’s brilliant Ramolao Makhene, artist William Kentridge, Steven Sack, Arthur Molepo, Siphiwe Khumalo and Joe Mosaka, Junction Avenue bridged some of the fundamental gaps and resolved the stylistic contradictions between European and African dramaturgical traditions and practices in South Africa to an astonishing extent. Further, Junction Avenue had a major developmental effect on ‘workers’ theatre’ through their dramatic collaborations with Benoni Foundry workers, Dunlop tyre factory employees, and Samcol co-op T-shirt-makers. What Sitas, a stalwart and pioneer of workers’ theatre, rather too modestly does not mention as well is the very serious research that went into the writing and stage preparation of the productions. Randlords and Rotgut and Dikhitsheneng were both based upon the best of radical historical and sociological research of the time. The company went much further in 1986 with the script for Sophiatown, which involved meticulous research into the popular culture of the legendary township and, in particular, into the response of residents to its removal on the ground. Yet the play has as much of 374 In Township Tonight

the feel of the tragic township musical melodrama as it does of literary or European narrative theatre. While the structure is transparent, tight, and relatively linear, the plot is painfully simple, and serves primarily as a background to foregrounded tableaux, soliloquy, and dramatic song. This synthesis of generic theatrical modes seems to have created a production that could claim to be characteristically South African, and achieved stunning success not just with experienced white theatre critics and theatregoers but also with the emerging black middle-class audience as well. In the late 1980s Junction also demonstrated they could do established literary theatre with their production of Fugard’s Master Harold … and the Boys in Durban. While South African dramatists might be criticised for attempting to master too many aspects of theatrical production at once, Purkey’s credits as a director, producer, scriptwriter, and project developer were, like those of his master Barney Simon at the Market, perhaps a key to Junction Avenue’s success at stylistic and aesthetic synthesis and innovation. In 1991 they collaborated with artist William Kentridge’s Handspring Puppet Company (Kentridge had been involved in Purkey’s The Fantastical History of a Useless Man) to create Tooth and Nail. The play represented ‘a radical departure from previous narrative structure’, and embodied Purkey’s project to grow a new language for theatre in the seemingly limitless creative discourse of post-apartheid South Africa.10 While this may have proved a bridge too far at the time, Tooth and Nail showcased the now-mature acting genius of Ramolao Makhene, and combined literary and performative/theatrical elements in an interactive actor-puppet tragicomedy – a searingly funny, too-true satire on race and politics in South Africa at the fag-end of apartheid. Junction Avenue repeated the success of Sophiatown in 1995 with their dramatisation of Modikwe Dikobe’s popular novel The Marabi Dance (1997), which attracted a large and appreciative black middle-class audience to the forbidding and once-forbidden State Theatre in Pretoria.11 In the musical based loosely on the truth-stranger-thanfiction saga of ‘people’s poet’ Mzwakhe Mbuli, Love and Crime in Johannesburg (1999), the company strove to incorporate solid period research, literate scripts, and professional performance standards with local workshop production traditions, genuinely popular appeal, and snappy music and dance. The Handspring Puppet Company has been less concerned with appealing to any putative popular audience, and used the new expressive freedom available in South Africa to blend animated art video, mise-en-scène, puppetry, and wildly satirical scripts and acting in the absurdist tradition to break truly new theatrical – performative as well as literary – ground.12 International audiences may be aware of their 1998 Grahamstown Festival hit, which toured Western Europe, Ubu and the Truth Commission, written by Jane Taylor, directed by Kentridge, and based on, or rather inspired by, the Alfred Jarry radical absurdist classic, Ubu Roi. Of course, there would have been no Ubu without Emerging South African Theatre 375

the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose hearings turned the daily news and indeed the country’s entire recent past into the greatest and longest-running theatrical event in South African history.13 In South Africa, the festival has long been a particular favourite of performing arts organisers, and theatre is no exception. In 1974, the small but historic capital of English settlement and education, Grahamstown in the eastern Cape, decided to make good use of the many small school and church halls and auditoriums there to stage a theatre festival. Beginning with a modest sixty presentations, the festival has grown over the years to provide more than ten times that many plays and over 1 800 items overall during eleven winter days of music, art exhibitions, crafts fair, both African folk and contemporary dance, cinema, poetry readings, public lectures and a ‘fringe’ as well as ‘main stage’ programme of theatre. The festival attracted major sponsorship from Standard Bank, established itself as a national forum for the showcasing of new theatrical work, and had an impact on the cultural visibility of the eastern Cape that is hard to overestimate. In 2001 it was renamed the National Arts Festival, and despite the withdrawal of Standard Bank’s sponsorship from all but the musical events in 2003, the festival is holding its own as the premier arts festival in the country. The Grahamstown Festival has also attracted fierce criticism over the years for its obvious and less apparent shortcomings. Forced to defend itself, from the beginning until today, against charges of elitism and political irrelevance, the festival steadily increased its commitment to showcase black community theatre companies both at its main venues and at the ‘fringe’ festival that quickly sprang up alongside the programme of sponsored productions. Certainly, the festival has traditionally attracted older, more prosperous, whiter audiences, who have the time, money, and personal transport to invest more than a week in remote, inconvenient Grahamstown. Black participation in the festival has indeed grown in all spheres, but primarily as producers rather than consumers. Despite this encouragement, bringing a production to Grahamstown is no easy project. Producers must act like theatrical entrepreneurs, paying all the costs of their performers, staging and venue with the hope that ticket sales will at least repay expenses, and a successful appearance will bring forward bookings in the larger cities. The well-known, such as Malcolm Purkey, John Kani, Andrew Buckland, Paul Slabolepszy, or Reza de Wet, use Grahamstown as an inevitable and much-valued tryout. Unknown artists, however, without some sort of sponsorship from the public, private, or NGO sector, may find Grahamstown a risk wich they are ill advised or simply unable to take. Despite this, the 2006 festival fringe programme, virtually unique among festivals in imposing no selection process, almost overflowed with performances, such as Ghetto Dust, by the young, black, penniless, and unknown who have braved the odds and somehow gotten themselves to Grahamstown to expose their efforts.14 376 In Township Tonight

By the 1990s, the political necessities that had mothered theatrical invention in the townships had changed. Popular political musical drama in the townships seemed to disappear more rapidly than it had arisen, but theatre that traced its social and stylistic roots to township plays of the Struggle period transmuted into new forms, some of them more thoughtful, innovative, and artistically realised than their vital but disorderly, burlesquing, self-indulgent predecessors. Such productions include Bheki Mkhwane’s Sitting Around the Fire and single-handed tour de force Solomon’s Pride at the Civic in Johannesburg in 2002, and, more notably, Brett Bailey’s Third World Bunfight Company’s 1997 Grahamstown Festival sensation iMumbo Jumbo, characterised thus in the production’s press release: a dramatic ritual recounting the true, intrepid, sacred and quixotic 1996 quest of Chief Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka (sangoma [healer], priest, liquor salesman, guru) to Scotland to retrieve the skull of his ancestor, King Hintsa kaPhalo, Paramount Chief of the AmaXhosa (treacherously beheaded whilst attempting to escape a Colonial Posse in 1836) and thereby to usher in an era of New South African peace and fertility. Performed by witchdoctors, ancestors, prophets, musicians, hill tribes, media hounds and other animals The surrealism of this wild, fun-house mirror portrayal was enhanced by the real-life theatrics of Gcaleka (not his real name), who was neither a chief nor a descendant of Hintsa. Despite the lack of any real evidence that Hintsa’s head had either been cut off or shipped to Scotland, Gcaleka managed to convince corporate sponsors to pay his fare, and he duly returned with a skull with a hole in the temple taken from the mantelpiece of a sympathetic Scottish family. Subsequent DNA examination in South Africa failed to identify the skull, so the mystery endures. It is perhaps regrettable that first-run performances of iMumbo Jumbo were confined to the National Arts Festival and a subsequent run at the Market in Johannesburg. A more recent revival of the production at Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre created a furore when an iqirha (traditional healer) in the play ritually slaughtered a chicken on stage. African dramatists who are understandably sensitive about the portrayal of indigenous ritual on the entertainment stage – particularly by non-blacks – find Brett Bailey’s efforts brave but offensive: they are obviously not pleased by titles such as iMumbo Jumbo.15 Bailey himself is rather ingenuous and unconcerned about such sensitivities, having acquired his theatrical direction, if one can call it that, through an eclectic series of personalistic Emerging South African Theatre 377

and inspirational encounters with his own Africa. After studying under Mavis Taylor at Cape Town, Bailey lived with traditional healers in the Transkei, including the very Chief Gcaleka who later embarked on his quixotic quest for Hintsa’s head. In his determination to move away from what he calls ‘message theatre’ towards a more savagely entertaining medium he believes more suited to the grotesque ironies and contradictions of contemporary Africa, Bailey indulges raucously in repeating history as farce. More specifically, Bailey says he is interested in patterns of cultural collisions of the spirit between Africa and the West, and the chaos these cause.16 But what has happened to explicitly black theatre, ‘popular’ or otherwise? In a single word, more ambiguous than it first appears: freedom. That the 1990s, and in particular the post-1994 arrival of a legally non-racial, politically democratic South Africa produced – at least at first – a withering rather than a flowering of black theatre should not necessarily come as a surprise. This is because the clarity and inspiration that fuel creative effort in the face of oppression by an identifiable other dissipate when the possibility is admitted that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings. After 1994, the lament of Walt Kelley’s comic strip hero Pogo’s paraphrase of Admiral Perry could find application in South Africa: ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’ Not much inspiration in protesting against Mandela’s government, even if the rank and file of ‘Mandela’s people’ – unionists, students, shanty dwellers – danced a toyi-toyi demanding more money, free education and free services from the first government they could call their own. Of course, the ‘legacy of apartheid’ could both popularly and officially be blamed for every shortcoming, but legacies, whether bad or good, had little dramatic interest. It was a time of burgeoning but fragile hope, and if the future wasn’t what it once had been, no one, certainly not black playwrights, cared to dramatise the fact. The political contradictions of the current era have yet to provide a social canvas for the old township theatre’s inherently broad, stereotypifying brush, and moral ambiguity is the theme song of weary modernist – not African popular – theatre. Plus there were at last other entertainments to compete for the leisure-time rand. Fearing its subversive effects upon the impressionable ‘Bantu mind’, the National Party government allowed television only in 1976, and at first supposedly only for whites. When ultimately two African-language stations were established, one for the Tswana– Sotho and one for the Nguni language groups, no programming of a socially or politically relevant nature was of course provided. Popular local productions consisted primarily of cops-and-robbers pot-boilers and video transformations of the old Radio Bantu African-language dramas of a fictive, supposedly ‘traditional’ African life. Predictably, the collapse of the white regime was accompanied by strenuous demands for the reform and diversification of television in South Africa. As liberation approached, television began to play a leading role in the conscious development of new popular cultural 378 In Township Tonight

models for a self-creating society. The transformation of the SABC into a service that genuinely attempts to be a ‘popular’ public broadcaster has not simply democratised language programming to better serve all of the country’s language groups (Afrikaans excepted). It has also sponsored the scripting and production of local programming that at least occasionally focuses, sincerely if somewhat naively, on salient issues of a tumultuous and dynamic democratising society. As a field of inquiry, cultural studies of local evening television dramas, soap operas if you will, in southern Africa would repay the effort in insight into social self-images, provided that processes of cultural production are incorporated into the analysis. Support for such a proposal comes from other studies of national media in Africa and elsewhere. In Nigeria, for example, local African- or English-language dramas, expensive to make despite their shoestring budgets and low production values, are universally preferred to news or to programming imported from North America, Britain, and Australia. In southern Africa too, people are more entertained and engaged by representations of scenes, situations, and characterisations in which they recognise themselves. Further, in industrialised South Africa, television can now claim to be a universally available if not fully dominant national mass cultural medium. As Stuart Hall points out, however, TV does not obliterate other media but reconstitutes their uses (and vice versa). So with radio, as the South African government has de-centralised its ownership and control, the reality of pluralistic language communities has strongly reinforced that medium’s transformation from a national into a regional or local community voice.17 More to the point, the broadcast media, whether national or local, are not only located in but also help to fertilise and cultivate a landscape of ‘live popular genres produced by small-scale, localised artisanal methods, and disseminated on a face to face basis’, including, one may hope, popular theatre.18 As young writer directors such as Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom and Teboho Mahlatsi build national careers through collaborations with their actors across the range of television, film (both fictional and documentary), and theatre, we have reason to hope that the coming era will be one of mutual fertilisation and not robbery. It is high time for such an exchange, since popular theatre’s creative talent as well as its audiences, if not its social and political concerns and enactments, have largely migrated to television now that this state-sponsored (if not-controlled) mass medium is both universally available and actively concerned with dramatising popular self-concepts and imagination. Many black South Africans now, realistically or not, recognise themselves and their worlds in the evening video dramas scripted in any one or several of the local languages and shown on two of the three government service channels. As Stuart Hall explains, ‘the media are crucial not just because they put out information about us but because they trade in images of us, in possible identifications. The media ask us to assent to them and in return they promise to Emerging South AfricanTheatre 379

recognise us. Our emotional or psychological security is partly dependent on the way we are represented.’19 Television in southern Africa fails in this project. In Zimbabwe for example, where political self-expression is repressed and, despite the huge expense, not exactly legal, satellite dishes bloom in visible protest of the vacuous drollery of state television, popular live theatre remains vital and self-sustaining. Still, local television dramas in South Africa are also clearly inadequate as a medium of broad social representation. Issues such as the effects of political and social violence on the lives of ordinary people in KwaZulu-Natal’s killing fields, as presented in Mkhwane’s Sitting Around the Fire, or the desperate strategies and dreams of the jobless in The Long Wait in the Market Theatre’s Young Directors Festival, are not usually addressed in television or radio dramas. The serial Yizo Yizo (very loosely, isicamtho for ‘It’s on!’) has taken such a contentious set of issues head on, and in a sense best represents the destinations to which black theatre has migrated. Teboho Mahlatsi, the young creator of Yizo Yizo, grew up in the desolate Free State township of Maokeng (Kroonstad). Mahlatsi came up to Johannesburg in 1991 and studied documentary film under Wits University Drama professor and screenwriter Bheki Petersen at the Afrika Cultural Centre. His taste for innovative realism clearly showed in his first professional project, Ghetto Diaries (a local version of the BBC’s Video Diaries), in which a day in the life of ordinary township people is documented not only by the filmmaker but also by the subjects themselves, camera in hand. Mahlatsi came to feel that he was in the end doing nothing to better the lives or prospects of his subjects, but perhaps simply using them, and so he turned to hyperrealistic fiction. Working under director Angus Gibson on a series of documentaries on the history of Soweto, Mahlatsi learned his trade with the astonishing rapidity of the extraordinarily talented. When the brief came along from the Department of Education to produce a show about a black high school in crisis, Gibson and Mahlatsi formed Bomb Productions with producer Desiree Markgraaf and produced a series that washed so much dirty township linen over the public airwaves that the entire black audience felt naked and unclean. Shot in high contrast from every unpredictable angle, the programme had the look of a 1930s German Expressionist film in shocking colour, and the stories were awash with the dramatic tension of the harsh actualities of the life of youth in a Soweto rising from the coffin of apartheid like a township Dracula at sunset. Yizo Yizo had the ‘seduced and abandoned’ attitudes of late 1990s township youth dead to rights. Thembisa Classic, a first-division, north Johannesburg township football club, is to this day known by the nickname Yizo Yizo. Predictably, Yizo Yizo was heavily criticised by self-appointed arbiters of public morality, at the SABC, in press editorials, even in parliamentary debates, both for letting down the side and for fomenting or encouraging such chaos in the act of 380 In Township Tonight

portraying it, an accolade and an attention that live theatre would never receive. While many viewers disapproved, nearly everyone seemed to watch it, and the Department of Education remained supportive even though they had been given far more than they had bargained for. Its first two seasons established the programme as the most popular series ever shown on SABC. Sponsorship, however, was another matter, and only Smirnoff Vodka was willing to take a chance on a series that portrayed, for example, not only rape but also a homosexual rape in prison. Nevertheless, Yizo Yizo became something of a genre in South African television, with similar programmes following in its wake. Some of the same actors made famous in Yizo Yizo went on to star in these series or in other programmes, while ‘Zola’ (Bonginkosi Dlamini), who played the toughest of toughs in Yizo Yizo, went on to become an icon of black youth culture, developing his own new genuinely real ‘reality’ television series, Zola 7, a popular music CD, and important acting roles in the feature films Drum and Tsotsi. Interestingly, while Yizo Yizo is predominantly in English, many of the most popular dramas on SABC are in local African languages, providing an avenue of self-representation, of recognition in Stuart Hall’s terms. Live theatre, increasingly professionalised and performed only briefly or intermittently in township community venues, is usually also, like Yizo Yizo, predominantly in English with some admixture of vernacular jokes, references, and phrases in the Afrikaans and African poly-language of the townships. Of course, local audiences who have the time, money, and inclination to attend plays at the Civic, Market, and other formal ‘downtown’ venues are comfortable with English, not to mention the overseas audiences before which all playwrights and directors hope eventually to perform their work. Nevertheless, as Ruth Teer-Tomaselli notes, the problem of language does force us to recognise differences in the power available to different audiences to intervene in the processes of cultural production, distribution, and consumption.20 Indeed, in South Africa, as Michael Chapman points out, the interposition of ‘the colonial language in the indigenous terrain raises issues about English as the lingua franca or the language of the state; the significance of oral cultures, and the status of indigenous languages in conditions of modernity’.21 In the midst of this, the hegemony of standard English in daily discourse is breaking down owing to the new acceptability of both black dialects of South African English and of black ‘vernaculars’, the alternative press and media, popular music, dance, fashion, styles of humour, bodily expression, and implicit culture. As the 1990s revolution took hold, the rising crime rate in Johannesburg deterred theatre-goers from attending inner-city theatres like the Market, and theatre producers moved to suburban leisure centres, including the casinos and even up-market shopping centres. This move was also in line with where the millions of tourist rands are to be found in Johannesburg – not in town but in the suburban hotels and casinos. Predictably, little in the way of experimental or genuine theatrical work has been Emerging South African Theatre 381

presented at these venues, the management preferring glitzy commercial froth like the pseudo-historical mine ‘gumboot’ dance musical African Footprint. Township or, more properly, community theatrical hopefuls, such as those invited to the Young Directors Festival, directed their efforts at professionalising both themselves and their work, with the aim of filling ‘downtown’ venues in overseas as well as South African urban centres. So they performed only sporadically and briefly in their ‘communities’ and eschewed the long, gruelling series of two-night stands in dozens of townships that were the bread and butter of Kente and the other musical dramatists of the 1970s. Yet it is on the basis of such aspirations that community theatre continues to thrive despite financial and logistical obstacles, and in forms that more faithfully justify the term than did many previous projects in the pre-liberation era. An excellent example is the Sibikwa Players, founded by Phyllis Klotz and Small Indaba over a decade ago and well known for successful and provocative productions at the ‘fringe’ section of the Grahamstown National Arts Festival. Now located in a disused factory on the outskirts of the Ekurhuleni industrial town of Benoni, Sibikwa survives (barely) on the dedication of its staff and intermittent grants from private sponsors and the Gauteng Provincial Department of Education. Notably absent from Sibikwa’s list of sponsors are the national and provincial departments of Arts and Culture, but at Sibikwa, hopes of formal public sector support spring eternal. At present, Sibikwa uses veteran black actors such as Woza Albert! and Bopha! star Percy Mtwa to train community people as actors in projects that derive from donor or sponsor support. These include teacher-training programmes in the teaching and the uses of drama in the classroom; Isintu, a play produced for the Civic and sold to sponsors as a form of youth employment; and an eagerness to engage in ‘theatre for development’ efforts if only sponsorship would appear. Staff at Sibikwa speak of the need to recreate a community-based black theatre audience now that ‘township theatre’ at the old community halls has died. The South African Community Theatre Association, founded in 1979, continues to support and recognise achievement in community as best it can. The professionalisation of black theatre and the full, regular availability of the formal downtown commercial venues that accommodate it are a good development, they agree, but the problem remains of how to expose an audience beyond that of the new middle class to theatre once again. Sibikwa staff also observe quite cogently that the nature of theatre as a participatory and interactive, socially embedded art form gives it a developmental role different from and potentially more effective than that of television. They acknowledge, however, that realising such a potential role depends on direct linkages between community workshops such as Sibikwa, school drama programmes and festivals, professional theatre, and the broadcast media – linkages that have yet to be forged. One staffer bemoaned the government’s unwillingness to regard 382 In Township Tonight

theatre as a cultural resource entitled to public funding, but Percy Mtwa argues that official support is often artistically constraining and professionally debilitating. Mtwa notes that artists with a single-minded thirst for and dedication to creating plays do get their work produced, and that it is this kind of work that will in time constitute and attract its own paying audiences. He admits that it might be some time before township people are ‘ready for good shows’; that is, provided with a view of theatre as both a pleasurable and important form of cultural sustenance – a valid claimant on their limited entertainment budgets. Even so, community groups that are able to get the attention of the big-city theatres’ artistic managers can succeed in making a major impression on audiences. So the Market Theatre’s sponsorship (with help from the National Lottery and the Swedish– South Africa Culture Fund) of the Zwakala community theatre festival each year has brought fresh life to the predictable theatre season in Johannesburg. The winner of the festival receives an exclusive run at the Market itself. In 2004 this was Esuthwini, a play put together by writer, musical director and choreographer Mncedisi Thambe with a youth theatre group from Mafikeng in the North West Province. The plot and message, a celebration of the contemporary relevance of African male initiation schools in a time of danger for black youth, including the menace of HIV/Aids, are less important, perhaps, than the style, if one may call it that, in which it was created and performed. The ‘play’, apparently developed by Thambe and his young cast without outside dramaturgical tuition, ignores virtually every structural and performative convention of the Western theatre. Instead, songs, dances, dialogic interludes, speeches to the air (or are they to the ‘audience’, living or dead?), dreams and magical conjurations follow one another in lusty, carnivalesque profusion. Languages used include Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho, and English in about equal proportion if song and ritual texts are included, so it is a linguistically adept audience member indeed who can understand most of the verbal communication. The reason for this poly-lingualism is not simply that these are the languages commonly spoken in the black communities around Mafikeng, but more significantly that the rituals of initiation practised there have evidently merged aspects and elements from Xhosa, Tswana, and Sotho traditions. But the problem of audience understanding does not loom as large as might be expected. Esuthwini, directed by Oscar Motsikoe for its prize run at the Market in January 2005, follows the vision of a ‘poor theatre’ developed by Jerzy Grotowski that profoundly influenced the new generation of township playwrights such as Mbongeni Ngema, even if they never read Grotowski!22 This vision emphasises the physicality of the theatrical: the body as the stage, the externalisation of the human interior through movement and sound in enactment. This style, as the founder of township musical theatre Gibson Kente recognised all those years ago, is ideally suited to an indigenous African urban theatre. If not necessarily larger than life, this multi-channelled mode Emerging South African Theatre 383

of representation is certainly more visually evocative and noisily joyful than the usual Western play, with a tip of the hat to Broadway and the West End. Even the ‘message’ falls victim, so to speak, to the celebrative audio-visuality of the performance. Esuthwini, which might have offered a critique of initiation schools in their present, conflicted and controversial practice, offers none of that. As Mncedisi Thambe explains, ‘As a person who was initiated, I have used my true experience … [to] retain and restore our important tradition in this new generation, especially looking at the Aids pandemic and high death-rate in initiation schools.’23 An even more impressive venture in black alternative theatre was attempted in internationally renowned director Yael Faber’s workshopped ‘Afrocentric’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar, entitled SeZar in 2001–2. It is ironic (perhaps intentionally) that this hoary set-work book, a staple of township literature curricula for generations, should have been given such delightfully distorted form in this post-apartheid, postmodernist production. In this version, based on Sol T. Plaatje’s early-twentieth-century Tswana ‘translation’ Dintshontsho Tsa Kesari, the magical and divinatory aspects of the play are brought to the fore, and Ceasar (SeZar) is less a military hero and lordly politician than national shaman and diviner. Much attention is given to his wife’s fateful dream, in which the premonition of SeZar’s murder by his senators is expressed. It is SeZar’s arrogant pride and supposition of the superiority of his spiritual powers over his wife’s mediumistic apprehensions or the weak designs of supposed conspirators that lead to his bloody demise. The script is in Zulu, Tswana, and English, with much thundering music and dance (choreographed by Siyabonga Twala, who also plays Oktavius) to accompany the drama, which extends the atmosphere of dark dealing and existential fear in the post-assassination scenes to the final, piteous denouement. European traditionalists were almost guaranteed to find the ignoble, savage SeZar an egregious, offensive misappropriation of the classic. The Shakespearian assassination tragedy suited to Africa, after all, is supposed to be Macbeth, with its Scots clan chieftains betraying, murdering and battling one another in the lightning- and torchlit medieval darkness, orchestrated by witches and scheming noble wives. The 2005 Zwakala Festival produced a winning entry created in a variant of the same physical, top-of-the-lungs style of township youth theatre. This was Coal Yard, a Market Laboratory student play from the depressed old capital of the former QwaQwa homeland, Phuthaditjaba, with a gritty township setting quite different from the mystical, spiritually irradiated landscapes of Esuthwini and SeZar. Directed by Prince Lamla and Ohentse Bodibe, the story is a quintessential township melodrama about the achievement of manhood – this time through hard labour rather than ritual ordeal – of two township friends, one at first wealthy, the other poor. What is important is, again, not the story or the message but the experience of the performance itself. Raucous and satirical, the actors use the mimetic techniques developed by the still384 In Township Tonight

influential style of Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema in Woza Albert! Skits, jokes, comic reversals, and, above all, hyper-physical representations of township life as young men experience it in a mélange of local languages and slang, litter the stage. By virtue somehow of the super-real landscape of movement and sound wherein they are enacted, the humour and pathos of this charmingly raucous little potboiler come through to the audience no matter what languages they speak. This is why it won the festival and continued on in 2006 to a successful run at the Market. All of which leads to the revelation of perhaps the most important point of all: theatre in southern Africa will survive and potentially thrive because the region has its own deeply rooted dramatistic tradition quite separate from the ‘literary’ narrative genres that black audiences will only tolerate in the broadcast media. In this indigenous aesthetic, the body is the most critical tool in creating theatre.24 Updating the techniques of this aesthetic in line with the prescriptions of Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’, Kente disciple Mbongeni Ngema developed his early plays Woza Albert! and Asinamali in a style of theatre that he hoped would communicate with anyone anywhere in the world, and would bridge the barriers of language and culture: ‘something in which the body tells the story much more than the words’. That these productions were in the event hopelessly local and impossibly opaque to overseas audiences has more to do perhaps with the myopic self-obsession of the creators and the untranslatability of the black South African worldview presented than with any mistaken ambitions of the theory. In the townships, according to Thali Cele, who appeared in the revival of Woza Albert! at the State Theatre in Pretoria in 2006, the entire audience appeared to join in the performance of these plays as the hall itself became one great stage.25 Skhala Xinwa, a veteran of East London’s old Imitha Players, admires Ngema for appealing both to sophisticated and ‘grassroots’ black audiences, and for demystifying theatre by broadening its appeal. In that sense Ngema shares with Junction Avenue the mission to link and blend entertainment and serious theatre.26 As Mark Fleishman rightly observes, ‘The physical body in South African theatre is a source of primary meaning which constantly challenges the hegemony of the written word in the meaning-making system … By refashioning and re-inventing the material body into extraordinary, often grotesque forms, they subvert and parody aspects of the society and the world.’27 These techniques, whose origins pre-date formal theatre in South Africa, have survived the transition to democracy even if ‘township musical theatre’ has not.28 So productions such as Esuthwini and Coal Yard present a kind of ‘movement theatre’ that can capture both audiences who are not used to literary theatre, and those who do not understand the languages used in the plays.29 As Balme puts it: ‘The key to this success seems to be the creation of a theatrical language which … can in fact speak many languages at the same time.’30 Just as important, South African traditions are suffused with an associated and primary orality, as opposed to a literary consciousness. In these Emerging South African Theatre 385

multiple multi-media stories told with the body, as in the work of Gibson Kente, the spoken rather than the written word is dominant.31 So, notes Balme, multilingualism may derive from the polyglot nature of the township environment, but is also a dramaturgical strategy. Such a strategy can be used to include and unify South African theatre-goers of different ethnic backgrounds, and become an important element in the emergence of an mzansi public culture, even if it remains incomprehensible to those of other nations. While South Africa’s massive and all-encompassing social drama of the 1990s may have pushed theatre as such to the margins, the art form may regain its focal position in the new millennium both because it is incorrigibly local in its creative realisation and because it is such a ‘hot’ medium, facilitating the expression of things that the SABC can and dare not.32 Even if ‘township theatre’ did not survive the end of apartheid, theatre has begun to show renewed signs of life in the townships, as the astonishingly vital productions from Mafikeng show. And ‘black theatre’ as a genre in the stylistic sense of its 1970s heyday is also announcing its return. Among the boldest of these announcements is the work of young Soweto playwright and director Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom. Grootboom’s first ambition was to write for the cinema, and he was first discovered by John Rogers of Bateleur Films to whom he sent an unsolicited script. Rogers recognised Grootboom’s talent, and through his mentorship as well as that of experienced playwright Aubrey Sekhabi (with whom he co-authored the script of Not with My Gun in 1998), he rose to the status of Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for Drama in 2005. This well-deserved recognition was based largely on his 2004 hit play at the Market, Cards, a surrealistically wild and raunchy tour of a Hillbrow brothel run by Nigerian pimp Mubara, played superbly by Siyabonga Twala, and featuring a driving backing score of seventeen popular hit songs. In reflecting upon his aesthetic intentions in writing (with Mothusi Mokoto) and directing Cards, Grootboom returns to his first love, cinema: ‘My directing drive and style for this play (and, incidentally, my other plays) is first and foremost cinematic. … My interpretation and my intention with theatre is to prove … that … theatre has much more in common with cinema than there are differences between the two mediums … in short, this play is an attempt to merge the two mediums of theatre and cinema.’33 Grootboom goes on to cite cinematic influences from Godard to Scorsese to Kubrick to Tarantino, but from the cheap seats, this homage to cinema seems, with all due respect to the author’s sincere intentions, unconvincing. Cards is not only a wonderful play but also a stirring theatrical experience, arousing erotic responses in the audience only to make us ashamed of them as the limitless sordidness of the miseen-scène is melodramatically, even hyperbolically portrayed. What for me personally was so thrilling was the realisation that ‘black theatre’, as I had known it in the 1970s, was at last back. And the return was being led by an artist whose previous writing 386 In Township Tonight

for television (yes, even for soap operas) and cinema had enabled him to improve upon the style’s originators in dialogue, plot, and construction, while losing none of township musical/dance theatre’s totally immersing ebullience. Even the nudity and sex, so movingly presented, that were the main reason why audiences packed out the show, reminded one of the 1970s classic Unfaithful Woman by Sam Mhangwane, which ran for years largely on the strength of portraying a couple on stage having (not overly explicit) sex in a bed. The Windybrow, with insouciant irony, revived Unfaithful Woman’s on the Women’s Day holiday in 2006. Grootboom proved that his was no superficial talent and that his work’s sensationalism had a profound and artistically integrated theatrical purpose with his next work, Relativity: Township Stories, which premièred at the 2005 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. This play takes place largely in a shebeen, and sets a deceptively tender but abortive teenage love story against a gothic tale of parental sodomistic child rape, thuggery and crime, drunkenness, murder, and heterosexual serial rape and murder, which leaves only the dark recesses of the perpetrators’ psyches to the imagination. Audiences left the performances emotionally drained, having had to face some of the unpleasant actualities that South African society is necessarily vomiting up after so long imbibing the poison of racism and apartheid. Many would complain that life in the townships simply isn’t like Relativity: Township Stories, but Soweto-born, -bred and -buttered Grootboom insists that township experience is not overstated in the play. Certainly, there have been a number of sensational cases of serial rape and murder since 1994. For his part, Grootboom says he loves the play so much for its directing possibilities. It is a ‘goldmine of directing treasure/substance, especially for a neophyte director like me’.34 Grootboom’s apology for his own ‘self-indulgence’ in Relativity again cites cinematic precedent in the work of Fellini (8½) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.35 Here we might well give such citation more credibility, as his co-author, Presley Chweneyagae, who appeared also in Cards, as well as Relativity lead Karabo Kgokong, both starred in the 2005 Oscar-winning (Best foreign language film) Tsotsi. Both Chweneyagae and Kgokong have some years of collaboration with Grootboom to their credit in theatre and film, and so perhaps there is something in the director’s insistence that he is out ‘to merge the two mediums’. A merger of another kind is to be found in the recent work of Aubrey Sekhabi, Grootboom’s teacher and collaborator, and now artistic director at the State Theatre in Pretoria, where Grootboom is a Development Officer. In 2005 the ‘sister cities’ relationship between Birmingham, England, and Johannesburg was given theatrical realisation in the musical dance play Mother of Rain: Mmapula. The back-to-our-roots plot about a distressed black South African artist who leaves behind his self-imposed artistic conflicts in Birmingham to answer the call of his mother and sister back home, who are wasting away from a mysterious crippling disease. Only by undergoing Pedi Emerging South African Theatre 387

healing rituals and becoming a healer can the artist, played in workman-like fashion by television star Vusi Kunene, free his family from the ancestral curse that is destroying them. Supported by government and arts organisations in both countries and written by Birmingham playwright Don Kinch, this kind of story is perhaps over-familiar to black South Africans and was chosen as a kind of gift from them to the children of the British black diaspora. The dance direction by Zinzi Mbuli, a veteran of the commercial ‘gumboot dance’ musical hit African Footprint, is another thing altogether. The visual excitement generated by the ‘invisible’ (to the characters) spirits and sprites, supported by waves of jazzy rhythm from musical director Sello Galane, is enough to keep the audience glued to their seats with astonishment. This level of production shows that even the commercial (but immensely profitable) commercial dross of ‘international’ dance musicals like African Footprint and Umoja can have some beneficial influence on black theatre if creatively handled. Even the over-baked story may have struck a responsive chord with middle-class urban black audiences nostalgic for attenuated cultural identities. This was certainly the case with Mbongeni Ngema’s Zulu at the Market, an unashamedly nationalistic (and rather anti-white) musical recreation of Zulu history centred on the battle of Isandhlwana in 1879. Sitting riveted by the literary wit and raucous song and dance of Malcolm Purkey and Junction Avenue’s Love and Crime in Johannesburg – a ‘musical’ based loosely on the rise and fall of ‘people’s poet’ Mzwakhe Mbuli – at the Market back in 1999, one was possessed by mixed emotions. The production was worthy of attention and acclaim, possessed high artistic merit in script, composition, direction and performance, yet was intensely, joyously local. But at the same time, despite Junction Avenue’s determination to address complex issues in an accessible way, the play’s very professionalism – and the downtown venue at which it played – made it undeniably exclusive rather than broadly popular. Currently, the Market Theatre runs programmes that bus in township youngsters for plays and educational visits. Such worthy efforts cannot change the larger reality that the vast majority of township residents who do not own a car have no theatres in their communities and no convenient way of reaching or even affording venues in the cities and suburbs. Yet something is going on. Small city theatres catering to a youthful crowd like Cape Town’s Warehouse and Armchair theatres thrive on an ‘anything shows’ programme. Esuthwini and Coal Yard emerged from the unheralded efforts of young artists in remote communities in the North West Province. A more important enterprise still is Johannesburg’s Windybrow Theatre, established in a beautiful latenineteenth-century mansion at the far end of Hillbrow in the late 1980s by the white minority government. The Windybrow – notwithstanding the National Party – soon became a centre of explicitly Africanist (Black Consciousness) artistic training and activity, and explicitly attempted to serve the creative needs of inner-city and township 388 In Township Tonight

black youth. Apart from becoming, not surprisingly, perhaps more of a hang-out than a theatre, the Windybrow continues to attract significant numbers of new black drama enthusiasts to its productions, workshops, cultural forums, poetry performances, and the annual Windybrow Arts Festival, which showcases new experimental work from elsewhere in Africa and the world. Administrative problems have severely limited its capacity to achieve its greater goals of popular black theatrical quality and empowerment, but the Windybrow’s new director, veteran New York-trained actor and director Jerry Mofokeng, appears set to resolve these problems and, we hope, lead the centre into a new period of more influential, high-value productions. The Windybrow’s problems highlight another issue: ideological commitment is not enough. One of the great virtues of professionalised, in this case university-sponsored productions such as Love and Crime in Johannesburg is that their sophistication provides access to what cultural philosopher Raymond Williams called the ‘structure of feeling’: an articulation of experience with broader social forces and expressions of ideology; of emotions, perceptions, and reflections with the structure of reality.36 The Market’s Young Directors Festival, for example, features plays about the dreams of homeless immigrants to Johannesburg; the violence and disorganisation in the urban black taxi industry; the fate of a young girl accused of spying by both sides in the political violence in Alexandra Township in the early 1990s; the local game of football portrayed through choreography and dialogue; and life in a remote village in Mpumalanga Province and in the streets of the notorious, seedy Johannesburg district of Hillbrow. Intensely authentic and acted with an athletic freshness and superb gift for mimicry, these plays are both moving and fun to watch. But they are not related to the larger forces that structure these situations in the true lives of ‘the people’, because their creators simply do not know or do not know how to portray how the larger world is organised in relation to their characters’ thoughts, feelings, and experiences – what, behind or above the world of appearances, is really going on. It is this link, the ability to entertain these articulations – which the professional urban theatre of companies like Junction Avenue in South Africa reveals and portrays so well – and not just its superior production values that makes it, in the end, more entertaining. Theatre veterans had hoped that post-apartheid theatre would be less about situations, conditions, and group identities, and more deeply revealing of individual stories. This trend in the direction of European theatre did not happen.37 But as Malcolm Purkey argues, South African theatre defines itself as an actors’ theatre and an issue-driven theatre. There need be no regret that it remains so, but the challenge is always to raise its level of sophistication. Having proffered ‘movement theatre’ as an example of the continuing vibrancy of theatre in the townships, one must be mindful of the critique that plays performed under this banner, whether at Grahamstown or elsewhere, are not really plays, but rather offer a kind of unarguable situational Emerging South African Theatre 389

moralism on social issues, held loosely together and indeed made bearable by engaging pot-pourris of overly earnest dance and song. Theatrical training is crucial to this issue, and it is obvious that this cannot be left to the good fortune (his and ours) that led to the discovery and professional mentoring of Mpulelelo Paul Grootboom. The first generation of professional black actors was trained by township impresarios such as Gibson Kente and Sam Mhangwane, and Kente’s protégés such as Mbongeni Ngema and Darlington Michaels dominated the stages of black theatre and the studios of black television throughout the 1990s. With the decline of Kente there was, save for Ngema, a gap in mentorship and training in black theatre.38 With the ageing of that generation, new talent has begun to emerge, principally from high-school drama groups, community theatre run by dedicated local artists, colleges and art schools such as the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg, university drama departments, professional companies trolling for talent, and even the broadcasting industries. Unfortunately, to date no agency of government, civil society or performance industry seems to have focused on connecting and integrating these centres of development. There is no direct feed then among community, independent, public educational, professional, and broadcasting media institutions for the systematic emergence of talent in the various crafts of theatre, film, and television. Generated by personal drive and ambition and mentored by performance industry veterans, young artists are quite evidently gaining a range of experience that can be transported among professional crafts and contexts. So Leleti Khumalo, who started out in Durban as a teenager with Tu Nokwe’s youth company Amajika, was spotted by Mbongeni Ngema for the starring role in the musical Sarafina, a part she played again in Darryl Roodt’s film version opposite Whoopi Goldberg (1992). Recently, she starred in Roodt’s award-winning Yesterday and Hotel Rwanda (both 2004), and the popular black television soap opera Generations. Presley Chweneyagae and Karabo Kgokong, who starred in Grootboom’s plays and television scripts, played major roles in the Academy Award-winning film Tsotsi (2005). All these successes are based on acting as a craft, rather than on strong scripts, and it is frequently said that South African theatre (regardless of colour coding) is – Fugard notwithstanding – an actor’s (and director’s) rather than a writer’s theatre. This is part of the reason why William Kentridge said in 2003 that there had been no really great, memorable plays coming out of South Africa for the previous five or six years.39 Duma Ndlovu, having enjoyed huge success with his multilingual Venda television soap opera, Muvhango, decries the lack of literary quality in post-Mbongeni Ngema theatre. He wrote Bergville Stories (1996), his moving tribute to twenty-two men who were hanged for killing five policemen in his ancestral home, Bergville, Natal, in 1956, as well as Sheila’s Day (1996) and The Game (1997), which toured to the United States, with the intention that the actors would strictly perform his texts.40 390 In Township Tonight

For most writers, however, even more than performers, money or the lack of it is the root of much evil. Foreign ‘Struggle funding’ died with apartheid. Locally, rather than spreading the previous government’s arts budget more widely to cover more township artists, the abolition of the old provincial arts councils has left performers and performances of all kinds without much hope of a steady income. The new National Arts Council has very little money to spend for projects not already earmarked by the Department of Arts and Culture or some agency of government. And as John Kani admits, the current criteria for government funding are ‘nation building’, ‘preservation of indigenous culture’ (whatever that might mean), and projects of ‘national significance’.41 Furthermore, notes Kani, most government funding goes to elite centre-city parastatals like the Pretoria’s State Theatre, Cape Town’s Artscape, the Playhouse in Durban, and the Bloemfontein Theatre, production and performance houses that rarely send anything for try-outs at Grahamstown or anywhere else. While director Martinus Basson might argue that the disappearance of funds for theatre now that its role in the Struggle is over is a new form of censorship, the reality is that South African theatre has no choice and might indeed in some ways be better off if it became largely self-supporting. As Mark Fleishman bluntly argues, ‘secure’ funding can be more a curse than a blessing, especially when it disappears. When there is no promise of funding, you get on with theatre.42 With regard to ‘literary’ theatre, where script and, by extension, narrative, plot, and rhythmic verbal interplay must rule, Duma Ndlovu is certainly not the only advocate. The acting legend John Kani recently turned his talents to writing, and produced (and starred in) the admirable Nothing but the Truth at the Market. The story, partly autobiographical, deals sensitively, even elegiacally, with the issue of old wounds and necessary healing among family members scattered and estranged by the ambiguous sacrifices of the Struggle. In 2004 and 2005, another veteran of theatrical struggle bloomed late but splendidly with two literary plays, Green Man Flashing and Hostile Takeover. This was Mike van Graan, a Capetonian and drama graduate of the University of Cape Town whose involvement with theatre and other arts includes directing the Cape Arts Project, the BAT Arts Centre in Durban, acting as secretary general of the Performing Arts Network of South Africa, providing policy advice to government on arts and culture, writing columns on arts affairs fiercely critical of that same government in the Mail &Guardian and other print media, running artslink, an arts website, organising community theatre festivals, and so many other interventions that one wonders how, in middle age, he found time to become the country’s most fashionable playwright. Green Man Flashing (2004-5) is a sensitive story about the moral betrayal of the ideals of the Struggle after the liberation movement ascends to power. The key to the play’s dramatic success in this case is the performance of Charlotte Butler, whose steadfastness born out of pain and vulnerability, is like a Emerging South African Theatre 391

Hemingway character grown strong in her broken places. Hostile Takeover (2005) is the emotional converse, a wickedly satirical tale of the murderously cynical follies of the black nouveaux riches ten years into democracy. As Van Graan said in an interview: I’m a writer, not a propagandist. I don’t write in order to push any party-political agenda, but rather to explore issues of morality, of justice, of human rights and freedoms as they are affected by the exercise of power, and as they affect real characters, real people who have to make choices that have far-reaching consequences, and in very difficult and complex circumstances. … If Green Man Flashing was about exploring issues of morality and power as it relates to those who have and exercise political power, then Hostile Takeover – the play that will première in Grahamstown – is one that explores the nature of morality as it pertains to business and economic power.43 So, whither South African ‘black’ theatre? As Tevye says in Fiddler on the Roof, ‘I’ll tell you: I don’t know’. I am not even sure how to define the concept, since many works and productions that bear the unmistakable stamp of an indigenous black aesthetic are directed, designed, and workshopped with white thespians. To add yet another brilliant example, there is Lara Foot Newton, who took the true event of the brutal rape of a nine-month old baby, named Tshepang, in the township of Louisvaleweg in the Northern Cape in 2001, and somehow conjured a play about it. Written and directed by Newton, and featuring superb performances by Mncedisi Shabangu and Kholeka Qwabe, the play is at once a sensitive and a searing evocation of the circumstances in which such an unthinkable crime becomes committable. At its opening at Grahamstown in 2003, Tshepang was billed ‘a Duckrabbit collaboration’, a rather infertile metaphor for the distance that had been so fruitfully overcome by author-director and performers. Today, even though black directors tend to run allblack companies, white directors virtually always run mixed companies, even if only one racial group is required for the cast, as in the case of Tshepang and SeZar.44 No doubt it may be time to stop speaking or writing at all about ‘black theatre’ as a category defined by the ethnic backgrounds of its participants, and rather use the term – as for the work of Grootboom, for example, and not for that of Van Graan – to refer to a particular dramaturgical language and style. More broadly with regard to ‘South African theatre’, something is very visibly afoot above the footlights, and the new direction has to do with the expansion of the arena of ‘popular’ theatre as part of ‘popular culture’. This concept might itself be identified as those dynamic, anything-goes (together), contemporary forms that engage the self-expressiveness of the vast majority of people in Africa today, and shatter the common misconception that there is somewhere in the West a cultural capital of the world.45 By this token then, 392 In Township Tonight

local-language television and radio serials, folkloric astonishments in city newspapers (‘cursed by sex-mad tokoloshe!’),46 religious cults and street preaching, wall paintings, anti-witchcraft movements, ‘festivals of smuggling’ at border posts, political rumour, mythology, and cults of personality, kangaroo ‘people’s courts’, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), even the art of surviving until the next payday – these are all as much popular culture as the country’s eclectic musical recording styles and artists, or its re-emerging ‘black’ theatre. The forms of popular culture, in whatever sphere of social action they engage, and whatever cultural authority or reflexive status they may or may not possess, arise, flourish, melt away and, surprisingly, reappear as the conditions for their production and the constitution of their audience are progressively transformed. Despite a paucity of well-paid career opportunities, South African jazz (both ‘traditional’ and eclectically experimental) flourishes artistically as never before. In the case of what we hope will be a newly popular theatre, we in the universities are busy creating a new audience. Theatre veterans had hoped that post-apartheid theatre would be less about situations, conditions, and group identities, and more deeply revealing of individual stories. This trend in the direction of European theatre did not happen.47 In Gauteng Province, the Department of Education invests more money in community theatre than does the Department of Arts and Culture. There is more likely to be funding if an amateur production is concerned with HIV/Aids, youth and crime, gender discrimination, and other obvious social ills. The local African tradition of a kinetic, audio/visual, actors’ theatre ensures that dialogue takes a backseat and that no one stands silent and motionless on stage staring into a fire. Our artists compose and select performance materials from diverse sources so they can express, celebrate, and comment upon their experience, needs, and aspirations and provide their audiences with modes of self-recognition in a world of insecurity, uncertainty, and change. Our music represents not the disintegration but the creation of a culture: one that seeks autonomy in an environment in which people have little control over anything except a culturally guided sense of collective humanity and individual self. Black South African music retains its variety and vitality as part of an effort to develop newly imagined yet historically rooted arrangements for social survival and, ultimately, transformation. Understanding performance as a form of agency, that is, both as instance and as expression of our many-sided discourses of our own social re-invention, helps in understanding how successive cycles and re-cycles of style arise out of the ways South Africans experience themselves in an ever-present global imagination. Mark Lottering, playing a blowsy coloured ‘madam’ in one of his shows, explained her relationship with her Xhosa domestic: ‘well we had some problems at first but now we get on like a house on fire. Of course you had better because if you don’t they put Emerging South African Theatre 393

your house on fire.’ ‘House on Fire’ is one of the most popular songs by the legendary Lesotho Afro-house band Sankomota, written by their late great leader guitarist Frank Leepa. It is also the name of a perfectly wonderful roadside ‘new age’ arty wood-andthatch club venue outside Mbabane in Swaziland, where many of South Africa’s top jazz-fusion groups perform. Perhaps Frank Leepa and the owner of the Swaziland club have understood something about their neighbour South Africa’s performing arts world in both past and present eras: it is a house on fire. Notes 1 Solberg, South African Theatre, p. 179. 2 Ibid., p. 188. 3 Ibid., p. 249. 4 Miki Flockemann, cited in ibid., p. 39. 5 John Kani, cited in ibid., p. 225. 6 Bheki Mkhwane, interview, Mail & Guardian, 8–14 October 1999, p. 16. 7 Solberg, South African Theatre, p. 28. 8 http://www.southafrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/culture/926390.htm. 9 Ari Sitas, ‘Description of a struggle: South African theatre since 1970’, Special issue: ‘South African Literature in Transition’, vol. 70, World Literature Today, January 1996, pp. 83–5.  10 Malcolm Purkey, cited in Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs (eds.), Theatre and Change in South Africa, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 172. 11 Dikobe, Marabi Dance. 12 Sitas, ‘Description of a struggle’, p. 85. 13 Solberg, South African Theatre, p. 8. 14 ‘Friday’, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, 30 June – 6 July 2006. 15 Solberg, South African Theatre, p. 269. 16 Ibid., pp. 272, 284. 17 Hall, ‘Random thoughts’, p. 8. 18 Karin Barber (ed.), Readings in African Popular Culture, Bloomington, 1997, p. 4. 19 Hall, ‘Random thoughts’, p. 13. 20 Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, ‘Shifting spaces: popular culture and national culture’, Special issue: ‘Identity and Popular Culture’, Critical Arts, 11, 1–2 (1997), p. ix. 21 Michael Chapman, ‘South Africa in the global neighbourhood: towards a method of cultural analysis’, Critical Arts 11, 1–2 (1997), p.19. 22 Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, New York, 1968. 23 Ndaba Dlamini, ‘Get initiated at the Market Theatre’, www.joburg.org.za/2005/ jan/ jan28_market.stm 24 Davis and Fuchs, Theatre and Change in South Africa, p. 176. 25 Christopher Balme, ‘The performance aesthetics of township theatre: frames and codes’ in ibid., p. 80. 26 Xinwa, cited in Solberg, South African Theatre, pp. 79–80. 27 Mark Fleishmann, cited in Davis and Fuchs, Theatre and Change in South Africa, pp. 175, 179. 28 Balme, ‘The performance aesthetics of township theatre’, p. 84. 29 Dan Mvundle, cited in Solberg, South African Theatre, p. 121. 394 In Township Tonight

30 Balme, ‘The performance aesthetics of township theatre’, p. 65. 31 Ibid., p. 65. 32 Ibid., p. 67. 33 Programme, Cards, Market Theatre, 2004. 34 Dlamini, ‘Get initiated at the Market Theatre’. 35 Ibid. 36 Raymond Williams, cited in G. E. Marcus and M. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Chicago, 1986, p. 78. 37 Solberg, South African Theatre, p. 32. 38 Jane Taylor, cited in ibid., p. 224. 39 Willliam Kentridge, cited in ibid., p. 5. 40 Ibid., p. 262 41 John Kani cited in ibid., p. 194. 42 Mark Fleishmann, cited in ibid., p. 56. 43 http://www.litnet.co.za/toneelskool/vangraan_toneelskool.asp 44 Solberg, South African Theatre, p. 7. 45 Barber, Readings in African Popular Culture, pp. 1–2. 46 D  aily Sun, Johannesburg, 28 April 2006. In her doctoral thesis at the University of Cape Town (1999), ‘Narrative, Conflict, and Change in the New South Africa’, journalistic anthropologist Lesley Fordred shows that folkloric forms are beginning to attain the status of ‘news’ in mass-circulation print journalism. 47 Solberg, South African Theatre, p. 32.

Emerging South African Theatre 395

12 Conclusion: In township tomorrow night The stories of South Africa’s black city music and theatre have a good deal to say about this marvellously peculiar, historically brutal, sometimes hilariously quixotic country. Prominent New York music critic and author Robert Christgau, after reviewing the original edition of this book, made the (much appreciated) observation that In Township Tonight! was about as good a general introduction to South Africa in black and white as one would care to read.1 Amid the dispossession and oppression of white colonial ‘primitive accumulation’, black South Africans from every background have made history by and through the shaping of the country’s astonishing range and depth of cultural expression. From spine-chilling Swazi regimental anthems to township jive to elegant cosmopolitan jazz, it’s all there. Music in the Mix, writer Muff Andersson called it.2 And the mixing has happened in the towns and cities, or at times on the endless road to them. Having made life for black people in the rural areas near impossible – and never more so than since 1994, under a democratic dispensation – no government has been able to stem the tide of migration to the towns, large or small. And since 1991 they have been joined by an apparent flood of African immigrants from the north, fleeing the economic and political stagnation and collapse afflicting sub-Saharan Africa at the turn of the twenty-first century. While the end of apartheid ‘influx control’ within South Africa and its ‘opening to Africa’ beyond have brought some severe social problems, performance culture has undeniably benefited. True, African styles of ‘world beat’ produced in the Congos, Senegal/Mali, Nigeria, or Zimbabwe and popular across broad areas of the subcontinent, North America, and the United Kingdom have not enjoyed great acceptance in South Africa. Apart from its border regions with Zimbabwe 396 In Township Tonight

and Mozambique, South Africa has never had a tradition of Afro-Latin tropical beat, as its indigenous African dance rhythms are heavier and more supportive of vigorous stamping than of the polyrhythmic swaying of torso and hips. Still, West and Central African stars such as Salif Keita, Baaba Maal, Kofi Olomide, Papa Wemba, Femi Kuti (son of the legendary Fela Kuti), and Angelique Kidjo have toured frequently, collaborated superbly with local township pop and pop-traditional stars, and developed significant personal followings of their own. A few Kenyan performers are resident such as Simba Mori, and Zimbabwean and Mozambican bands move between entertaining their own communities and new South African enthusiasts. Jazz has absorbed exciting and danceable influences from elsewhere in Africa through performers such as Jimmy Dludlu and Sipho Mabuse. Still, the African audience shows almost as little interest in wider Africanisation as they do in socially accepting the new African immigrants, who are almost universally resented. The phrase ‘I’m going up to Africa’ is the most frequently heard reference to departure for anywhere north of the Limpopo. The focus, then, for better or worse is on re-imagining, defining and of course marketing mzansi, the bounded, self-identified ‘culture of the south’. Such a popular self-fashioning, however, contradicts the mixed historical development of South African performing arts. ‘Language culture’, as all the local African languages categorise it, is indissolubly mixed, providing South Africans (of all racial groups) with an extraordinary capacity to absorb global cultural flows into the rushing local torrent of performance. And this is true in theatre, contemporary dance and choreography, stand-up comedy, cabaret, cinema, and African-language television and radio as well as in music. The nightmarish legacy of the coercively divided society, with whites holding everyone else like distempered dogs on leashes, sullenly awaiting the chance to turn on their masters, cannot, like an actual bad dream, go away overnight. The apartheid system forced everyone to live on rotten or tainted social fare, and, like the local country dogs fed only on refuse, South Africans have a lot of offal to purge before they can digest wholesome psycho-social meals. Often enough, lacking any other soul food, like dogs they consume their own vomit. So both urban and rural communities struggle with racism and ethnic disharmony, poverty, crime, joblessness, social violence, alcoholism and other forms of drug abuse, broken families, low marriage and fertility rates, neglect, apathy, dependency, disease, and despondency. The deconstruction of African social institutions and structural values created an overly mobile, hypernetworked social arena in which the HIV virus has been shockingly free to play.3 The imposition of landlessness, wage labour, and labour migration which destroyed the self-supporting black peasant economy also retarded the formation of stable urban communities, a problem much worsened today by the influx of thousands of new informal residents into the margins of the old municipal townships. Those newly Conclusion 397

charged with extending the umbrella of basic services to cover the previously unserved majority simply have no idea how to get it unfolded, and if they do, once open it is found to be full of gaping holes. In the cities, strong ties to rural kin are not inconsistent with long-term urban residence, social relationships and cultural values. Nor does a near lifetime of industrial employment preclude a strong orientation towards rural communities of family origin. On a visit to the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) in Johannesburg not long ago, I met the guitarist of the ‘progressive’ maskanda band Umkhonto we Shaka. Mr Dlamini, as he was introduced, had lived in the building for years, in a small room that doubled as his workshop for the crafting of Zulu male dance regalia. Mr Dlamini, well into middle age, spoke only Zulu and, unlike his younger fellow bandsmen, expressed no interest in the affairs of the music industry of which he was a part. Reserved and soft-spoken, his concerns lay elsewhere; for no matter how long he lived in the city, he would never in his own mind be of it. Yet people like Mr Dlamini are in an expressive cultural sense as much a part of Johannesburg as any other residents. For almost a century and a half, the urban–rural divide has been a powerful signifier in both popular ideology and academic discourse, indexing fault-lines in the social construction of cultural identities. Looking back on all that talk of ‘men (and women) of two worlds’, I am convinced it matters and signifies less now than then, and less then than it appeared. Missionary influence, colonial conquest, and white settlement in South Africa initiated fundamental patterns of change in rural areas as well. The Christian–‘heathen’ divide split once tightly knit rural communities down the middle. When those affected migrated to the growing towns, these patterns were used to adjust to the stressful realities of urban racial capitalism, and in the process exerted considerable influence over the forms of urban social relations and cultural practices. African culture is not, as we all once supposed, something first manufactured in the ‘traditional’ countryside and then transported to the city where it is re-modelled and hybridised in the crucible of ‘acculturation’. Rather it is a ‘culture of mobility’, not merely transported but in practice formulated amidst the experience and organisation of multi-sited, mobile networks of kin, homeboys and girls, and reciprocal friendships.4 The culture of mobility formed around labour migration has long been the dominant rural practice – one in which wage workers store their dependants, homes, livestock and, later in life, themselves on land from which they cannot derive a living. The cities and rural districts have been importing and exporting these patterns to each other for all this time, and today in this era of mass communications, the flow of cultural materials and practices is continuous and multi-directional. So neither urbanisation, nor modernisation, nor for that matter even globalisation is identical with westernisation, acculturation, or other kinds of change associated with contact between disparate cultures of unequal material and communicative power. 398 In Township Tonight

While taking account of the historical complexities of rural–urban relations, this book has focused on the performative dimensions of the emergence of urban communities. South Africa is unusual in Africa in having so many city dwellers whose outlook is that of people with no rural home and no identification with the hinterland and, among those that do, no real intention of returning there. Historically, being urban was most importantly defined through self-image and conscious cultural practice and style. This was because the National Party government sought to retard African urbanisation and what they quaintly called ‘detribalisation’. Specifically, the government also tried to facilitate ‘Native administration’ and rural identification by reinvigorating African ‘traditional’ institutions (no matter how colonised) and hindering Africans’ acquisition of the repertoire of ‘modernity’. In response to this policy, African urbanites have struggled for permanent urban status in every sphere. African westernisation and urbanisation were seen by whites as a threat to their supremacy, and by many Africans as pathways toward their eventual emancipation. In such conditions, African urbanisation was more than a demographic process; it was an achievement. The National Party regime and that of Jan Smuts’s United Party before it did what they could to prevent black people from enjoying the city’s characteristic ‘democracy’ of paying your money and taking your choice . It has even been said that if its managers could have devised a dual currency, with black money for blacks and white money for whites (as they did with the buses), apartheid might have survived. Streaming in from the countryside, the cities inevitably offered black people a multitude of parallel cultural patterns that changed from situation to situation and provided alternatives just as they demanded flexibility. Some writers, gripped by ‘imperial nostalgia’,5 have perceived this process negatively, speaking of the ‘formlessness’ of urban African society.6 But despite all the suppression and endemic poverty and violence, urban African communities were not characterised by social confusion but rather by creative new forms of organisation. The weighing of alternatives and conflicting values by individuals as they moved from one situation to another brought form out of formlessness and facilitated innovative strategies not only to survive but even to prosper in town. Inconsistency, ambiguity, and disharmony are part of the dynamics of urban life, but conflict and the creative attempts to deal with it give momentum to culture as work in progress. Choice became especially important in cultural activities that reflected social distinctions among urban residents. So workers may wear the same uniform at work, but by examining what they choose to wear and do and whom to do it with in their ‘time off ’, one can tell where in the social landscape their networks are located. Performers also choose the styles they regard as most appropriate for specific audiences and occasions, and try to exert some control over what, where and for whom they choose to perform. It is in leisure-time activities such as performance that Conclusion 399

one gains the clearest impression of emerging African communities fashioning their distinctive yet unfixed, fluid cultural forms. It is not only since liberation that South Africans have busied themselves attempting to create new cultural identities while preserving some sense of self-conscious relation to an ambiguous past. In situations of change identity is dynamic, and people manipulate its symbols in order to define who they are, who they are not, and who they wish to be. The importance of relevant others, both local and global, helps to account for the movimiento of cultural identities, and the appropriation of models is informed by not only experiential but also historical realities and representations. The analysis of black status relations in urban South Africa involves oppositions – urban–migrant, westernised–traditional, and petty bourgeois–unskilled – but these relations have always been unstable. In the first half of the last century, the school-educated ‘middle class’ viewed their white and, to some extent, American counterparts as a primary reference group. Yet many also admired, at a distance, the cultural vitality and social accountability of rural traditional Africans, whom they otherwise saw as a threat to their ‘civilised’ status. Middle-class Africans’ ability to command some of the resources of white culture made them much respected among the working class and increased their social and cultural influence. The actual situation of working-class Africans, however, led them to develop their own patterns of adaptation, organisation, identity, and expression. These stemmed in part from a rejection of both the ‘raw’ migrant-rural Africans on the one hand, and of the ‘little white blacks’ (khooana tsoana) of the middle class on the other. The appeal of black American culture for members of both classes demonstrates that actual interaction with members of another group is not necessary for them to influence the formation of identity.7 The problems of temporary migrants in working out special relationships to both urban society and their rural communities led them to regard permanent urbanites positively in some respects and negatively in others. Rural ethnic background must be treated in relation to the values and interests it serves in the urban setting.8 By the same token, ethnicity among migrant workers is not a holdover from the rural past but reflects processes at work within the social arena of the workplace, its hostels, and its surrounding community.9 Black people called Johannesburg the ‘place of gold’, though no word for the gleaming metal could be found in any local language. Determined to extract a brighter day from the stormy weather of racial capitalism, black city dwellers constructed their own repertoire of symbols into the now rightly celebrated popular culture of Doornfontein, Malay Camp, Marabastad, Cato Manor, District Six, and Sophiatown. It is this popular culture that provided the original ethnographic material for the studies in urban anthropology in South Africa between the late 1930s and the early 1960s, studies that transformed the entire English-speaking discipline.10 It also provided the 400 In Township Tonight

texts for the furious argument between black anthropologist Bernard Magubane and his established white predecessors.11 The way in to effective participation in city life was provided by this popular culture, its resources of meaning, and the emergent cultural identities it fostered. In a short time entire alternative social realities took shape, as a powerful defence against the identities that apartheid ideology attempted to impose. In performance as in sport, a good offence is the best defence, and the authorities found the new black city culture offensive indeed. Performers were among the most active participants in shaping these alternative realities, re-ordering expressive elements and learning new compositional procedures to create distinctive local styles for the accordion, autoharp, violin, guitar, or jazz orchestras, and township vaudeville and theatre. In these ways, the flow of creative effort has been channelled into the production of maps of meaning that reimagined and then ultimately transformed the landscape of power. Africans in Johannesburg before the Second World War established their permanent claim to the city by inscribing and performing new social and cultural forms and by manipulating those they found in place. Even people who intended returning to the rural areas had to develop new arrangements for social cooperation and achievement under the perilous conditions of their daily lives. When first writing this account I was content to use the now rightly outmoded concept of ‘acculturation’ in attempting to illuminate the search for sources of identity that both reflect external conditions and bind the past to the present. The term is outmoded because it could not be freed, try as one might, from its colonialist formulation in which culture simply follows power. Ultimately, revisions that spoke about ‘exchange’ of culture between the dominant and the subordinate, Foucault’s more liquid refashioning of the concept of social power, and even James Scott’s persuasive portrayal of subordinate culture as one of the ‘weapons of the weak’, did not help. The chorus of African commentators who continue the centuryold lament over the ‘Americanisation’ of black South African popular culture certainly have faith in the reality of acculturation, whatever we academics may say about postcolonial cultural flows and the appropriation of dominant global representations in the construction of alternative modernities. South Africa, however, is irretrievably a model of mix and match, perhaps fortunately so. As an ethnomusicologist, I am aesthetically most attracted to the spare beauty of Madosini Manqina’s Xhosa gourd-bow songs. But such ‘unacculturated’ sounds do not sell CDs, especially when the producers try to gild the lily with unhelpful and unacknowledged conga drum accompaniment (Power to the Women, 1998) (Melt2000). Whatever one calls the process, South Africa has seen almost two centuries of the blending of various Western influences into the emergent configuration of urban-based African culture patterns. The adoption and reworking of Christianity to serve black communities in southern Africa during the nineteenth century paralleled local power Conclusion 401

relations, with the weakest and most fragmented groups proving most susceptible to the missionary project. So the subjects of Zulu kings resisted missionisation, while those of the Tswana embraced it. Perhaps this is why there is seemingly so much of pre-conquest Zulu cultural continuity evident today, and so little Tswana. Of course it is true that the culture of the colonisers created a hegemony that perpetuated their dominance and reinforced the structure of colonial society. On the other hand, not only was Christian identity used to win some room for political manoeuvre under colonial conditions, but mission schools also served as the breeding ground for the African nationalism that rules South Africa today. As the emerging African middle class experienced Western culture primarily through church and school, migrants and urban workers experienced ethnic mixing and westernisation in the urban workplace. People from various walks of life have influenced one another in developing syncretic cultural systems and values of their own. So our mix and match is not haphazard but takes its form from the historical circumstances in which people of differing backgrounds encounter one another, the interplay of forces in the environment, and the social spaces in which encounters with difference take place. However constrained the circumstances, practice is still the product of active selection, which brings perception to bear upon reality, and makes cultural confluence a matter of meaning, decision-making, and innovation. Although Western cultural repertoires were associated with colonial domination, black people constantly searched for ways to master and reconfigure those repertoires to escape or to mitigate their subordination. When the humanitarian promises of missionary liberalism were betrayed by white settler and imperial authorities alike, and these efforts failed to achieve their purpose, contrary tendencies towards cultural retrenchment emerged among urban Africans, leading to a heightened sense of cultural nationalism. The government actively promoted ethnicity and the revitalisation of African traditions in order to maintain cultural underpinnings for segregation and black racial disunity. Similarly, the apartheid policy of ‘separate development’ officially, if unsuccessfully, discouraged African westernisation. As a result, politically and culturally self-conscious Africans were suspicious of movements – always managed by whites – to re-position and re-invent ‘traditional’ culture, and had difficulty, as they still do, in developing the cultural component of African nationalism. Those who have done so with some success, including the leaders of the ICU in the 1920s and 1930s, Anton Lembede and the Congress Youth League in the 1940s and 1950s, the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the ANC’s ‘cultural desk’ in the 1980s, created pan-ethnic models promoting ‘black’ unity in opposition to a common oppressive racial enemy. Inevitably, ‘tradition’ has been politically reified into contemporary forms designed to replace Euro-American with African signifiers of modernity. In the process, what actually makes South Africa different from other 402 In Township Tonight

places and South Africans different from one another is downplayed. And so we move at speed from the Rainbow Nation-alism of the 1990s to the African Renaissance of the new millennium to the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) of President Mbeki’s second term, shedding cultural relevance with every new packaging. In the process the Ministry of Arts and Culture has become a department of marquee events, ploughing funds not into grass-roots cultural development or support for cultural industries like music or theatre, but into opening ceremonies for sporting events and UN summits, or tourist attractions like the palaeo-anthropological Cradle of Humankind. In South Africa, the reconfiguration of cultural practices and styles has been an aspect of the quest for social status and an instrument of social mobility. Performances have reflected and reinforced changes in social alignment and the status relations of groups, helping to create new urban cultural models and identities to which statuses are attached. Understanding how its involvement in social processes influences the development of performance requires a close look at the schemes of interpretation that come between experience and its cultural representation. An examination upon the forms of cultural activity pursued by members of different categories in the course of time greatly increases our knowledge of the role of performance in such a rapidly selftransforming social field. Studies of long-term cultural processes help to illuminate the relationship between forms of expression and all the conditions and behaviours that produce them. Black American performance culture figures importantly in this account not only for its comparative value but also because of its powerful influence on black South African culture. Black American music, dance, theatre, and the very ambience of communities like New York’s Harlem, communicated through travelling performers and educators, print media, recordings, and films, have constituted a challenge, a model, and a resource for black South Africans since the late nineteenth century. The blending of American influence into black South African culture represents neither slavish imitation of a glamorous but foreign popular culture nor the unthinking rejection of a subjugated but precious African heritage. It is rather the result of a creative syncretism – blending materials and techniques from different performance cultures, producing new styles quite different from their sources – in response to changing conditions, needs, self-images, and aspirations. In South Africa, stylistic elements from many sources have been recomposed into new frameworks of expression, reflecting changing moral relations, systems of identity and value, and realities of power. Looking at how syncretism and related processes actually work in specific situations, as we have done, helps reveal the factors responsible for the observable form of performance. In the middle of the agitated trading floor of selectivity, innovation and reinterpretation was the performer, playing the role of ‘cultural broker’. A cultural Conclusion 403

broker is a kind of entrepreneur in situations where alien and imposed cultural models need reinterpretation for the benefit of their own people, who, while they may have little choice but to make what use they can of them, may show considerable creativity and enthusiasm for the process. Cultural brokers link people in various sectors of their own social world and mediate between what subjects bring to the new landscape and what they encounter there that they must, indeed actively desire to, understand, absorb, and work with. Active in creating images of changing social reality, performing artists have been among the most visible cultural brokers in South Africa. Performers have been at the centre of cultural communication and reinterpretation, creating original combinations, reinventing old forms in new contexts, and transforming performance materials in ways that express social movement and meaning. From their place at the crossroads, they not only provide social commentary in music, dance, and drama, but also innovate styles of dress, speech, and social interaction. So their sense of artistic personality becomes a metaphoric enactment and a realisation of consciousness in itself. Performance occasions are important in re-establishing bases of social communication and order in situations of rapid transition. Providing the raison d’être for such occasions, performers gain prestige through their display of cultural competence and have an important influence on the flow of social life. So any reflection must be concerned with aesthetic judgement and the culturally encoded modes of receptivity through which performance is experienced, so that the value of performances and the status of performers must be seen in relation to participants’ own evaluative criteria.12 Performing arts are both a part and an expression of the movimiento of city life. At once both cultural practice and reflection, their form cannot be reduced to a function of this double process. We can speak of music or theatre only because we recognise them as modes of communication with their own principles of structure, logic of development, and patterns of elaboration. These characteristic, systemic qualities make it possible to talk meaningfully about the relation between the arts and their social field. Yet the arts often appear as an autonomous, natural cultural system, due to their self-focused structural logic, the inherent appeal of the integration of their forms, and the influence of artists and their works upon one another. Yet, the existence of these identifying features does not make artistic behaviour a separate reality.13 The particular appeal of artistic expression is always conditioned by the process of cultural production. Interviewers inquire endlessly as to which predecessors artists have worked with and been influenced by. But the influence of one performer’s activity on that of another is not simply a free-floating aesthetic encounter but is mediated by the context of that encounter and its meaning for those involved. In the historical process of cultural exchange, external factors condition internal structural constraints in the stylistic blending of performance materials. Internal constraints include not 404 In Township Tonight

only the nature of music, dance or drama, but also the historically similar features of different cultural systems which facilitate exchange between them, and the value of specific exchanges for whole life projects.14 Artistic performances are structured imagistic embodiments of values and qualities which people identify, at some level, with themselves. Performance, then, is a form of social practice that orders experience and brings values and identities to life. Artistic performances reflect ideas and create images of ideal personality, involving both the elaboration and learning of new scripts for self-presentation. By means of empathetic, emotionally charged cultural communication, performances both symbolise and actualise changing self-definitions and help to bring order out of the chaos of diverse and conflicting images. Performance is among the most effective means to engage both the emotions and imagination to achieve social movement. Further, the modernisation of consciousness by this means may provide a basis for collective social and political action outside the performance arena. An historical approach to this problem can focus on the mutual influence of social and performance processes over the long durée, giving new insights into the effects of performance. In addition, the particular cultural style and criteria which people employ in reformulating their reality derive from complex developments requiring historical explanation.15 In South Africa, urbanisation has involved a gradual shift away from ethnicregional ties towards neighbourhood residence and social class as bases of social identity and affiliation. The process, however, involves a complex articulation between kinship, ethnic-regional, residence and class ties, as position in the emerging status system becomes increasingly important. For new arrivals, incorporation into urban society is a process of both personal adjustment and group identification.16 From the 1940s, studies of African city life dealt with the African response to changed conditions, analysing new types of social groupings and status systems, categories, classes and patterns of organisation. Black performance was rarely part of the picture, but the study of its social history is essential for understanding how power relations have influenced cultural change. In a plural society where coercive authority and not common culture defines the social system, historical understanding reveals the nature of external pressures on the dominated.17 Internal factors are also important, including processes of reaction, adaptation and resistance, and patterns arising from the distortion and even destruction of organic autonomous social models by apartheid and what, under such a regime, could be put together in their place. Every attempt to reproduce forms such as musical or theatrical styles in performance is mediated by the cumulative experience and circumstances of the participants. The potential for change is therefore present in any act which contributes to the reproduction of structures of performance.18 As a result, any treatment of performing Conclusion 405

arts as expressive interpretations of experience must also describe the power relations within which cultural change occurs. It is in the representation and enactment of emerging systems of value and meaning that performing arts have participated in power relations and in the adaptation of Africans to life in South African cities. In brief, social power provides the dynamics of urban cultural adaptation and shapes the form and function of urban performing arts. The production and reproduction of performances must be located within the set of political, economic, social, and cultural relations between performers and the total context in which they perform.19 These relationships depend on the distribution of power in the environment, economic and other returns derived from various performance alternatives, the demands of sponsors and participants, available stylistic resources and performance training, and cooperation and competition among performers. Here again the performer acts as a cultural broker, promoting his or her own freedom of action while linking spheres of social reality and consciousness by their emotional, meaningful representation. Performers accomplish these things by applying an implicit theory of composition and expression. Performance products contain signs of the processes through which performers have realised their musical or dramatic choices. In order to understand both performance and the behaviour underlying it, we must look at how these expressive choices shift the definition of a performance situation and the means a performer uses to articulate his or her position in the context of social conflict. Performance has made a major contribution to the quality of life, and even to the psycho-social survival, of urban Africans in South Africa. This has been recognised by authorities concerned with the welfare of the African workforce. From Johannesburg’s earliest days, mine compound managers, municipal officials, missionaries, and some industrial employers have taken special interest in providing ‘healthful’ leisure-time occupations. Mine dancing, choir competitions, brass bands and cultural clubs helped to ease tension, soften hardship and divert energies that might otherwise have been directed against the industrial labour system itself. Mine dancing even had the added benefit, from management’s point of view, of promoting ethnic divisiveness and hindering worker solidarity. Performance played an important role in the total process of urbanisation among Africans, in part because it had been a central focus of activity in ceremonies of the life cycle, kinship and family, religion, and even political and military organisation in pre-colonial society. Middle-class Africans were influenced by the viewpoint of missionaries, who regarded performance as a form of cultural and moral preparation for full participation in a Western society. When the right to such participation was not granted, the command of certain key aspects of Western culture remained essential in the ideology of African nationalism. Early organisations such as Kimberley’s South Africans Improvement 406 In Township Tonight

Association and Johannesburg’s Bantu Men’s Social Centre used entertainment as a focus for organisational activity, social interaction, fund-raising, and the development of cultural models based upon African middle-class aspirations. Among the working class, entertainment fulfilled similar functions against a background of lower expectations but equal desperation. For them, entertainment provided a cathartic release and served as a defence against dehumanisation, through the expressive sharing of experience. Performing arts have been important in Africans’ attempts to find places for communities and personalised interaction to grow amidst the sprawling but repeatedly bulldozed peri-urban wastes of South African cities.20 African performances cannot therefore be regarded as ‘mere’ entertainment, since they are part of the process of cultural self-definition required to create the informal connections needed to unify people in practical ways. In the very early years, the very notion of performance entertainment was an innovation, an activity considered characteristic of modern urbanity and sharing in its general prestige. The capacity to participate knowledgeably in specific forms of entertainment became a sign of cultural competence and an instrument of identity, illustrating the social significance of ‘taste’ and expressive style. Assuming that power is by nature transformable, the question remains whether the performing arts can become a source of power available for use in other contexts. Organisationally, performances provide a focus for community orientation, leadership, and the emergence of social networks and institutions which in favourable circumstances serve as a basis for political activity. While the role of performing arts in creating such a basis is primarily ideological, this enhanced consciousness can become a source of solidarity, clarifying social aspirations. This was certainly true of South Africa’s cultural struggle to end apartheid. As Richard Adams has pointed out, however, cultural images and symbolic action do not so much create power as bring about the collective recognition of its potential.21 Expressive culture can become a source of power, but only in conjunction with the existence and increase of the material potential for power at other levels. Furthermore, the sources of African ideology and solidarity were long embedded in cultural models in part adopted from and mediated by the dominant white social sector itself. The determination and capacity of white society to repress African aspirations, coupled with the contradictions inherent in the struggle for autonomy through Afro-Western syncretisation, have made urbanisation culturally disorienting for many Africans. Gerhart rightly comments, ‘a distinctive African urban subculture did gradually come into being, but underneath its often vibrant and gay exterior lingered a continuing crisis of the spirit.’22 Today, while South Africa has many large, economy-size problems, not least in its performing arts industries, that spiritual crisis at least is very demonstrably dissipating. Optimism and confidence fill the space where prayers are not yet answered. Conclusion 407

The interests of the entertainment media that were once supported by political machinery limiting the performance alternatives of African artists have been replaced by the economic dictates of globalisation. Even so, the major media companies are losing rather than maintaining their former control over the channels of communication and distribution of performances, and over the social and economic constraints influencing their production. The ultimate value of a performance is based on its effectiveness in integrating human experience and in the meaning it is able to give to other levels of reality.23 Performance is more than a reflection of social movement; it embodies and actively participates in it. Additionally, understanding the process of cultural transformation requires the insights of a social history which links evolving forms of identity and association to changing vehicles of consciousness and expression. This narrative describes how Africans have built new communities despite apartheid, and then how new cultural landscapes are being painted on to the expanded and unfilled canvas of post-apartheid society. Performance events help create culture expressions that define group orientations and help generate new forms. Performers have been deeply involved in these social dialectics, acting as a medium for communication and ordering and, with the liquidity of all popular performance, occupying every interstitial space conceded by political and economic suppression. The struggle to create mzansi (‘south’), some sort of perpetually emergent but identifiable South African performance culture, continues, and the processes of cultural transformation outlined here continue to operate in relation to the external factors and power relations of post-apartheid society. Inheritors of the legacy of Doornfontein and Sophiatown, innumerable backyard bands and school vocal groups perform at weddings, funerals, meetings, and parties throughout the townships. Black and multi-racial theatre companies are creating new forms of socially and politically relevant drama. This reprise of my original project has turned out far more difficult a task than I first imagined. The contemporary scene is too vast and complex to do it any justice. My apologies to all I have failed, including for example the legacy of the late lamented Barney Simon, who was certainly, along with Fugard, among the most influential and productive talents in the history of South African theatre, and who fortunately has his own memorial, The World in an Orange: Creating Theatre with Barney Simon, written by sixty of the countless artists with whom he worked at the Market.24 What is even worse than such omissions is the rise to popularity in South Africa of performance arts that hardly appeared on the radar when I first researched this book. These include contemporary stand-up comedy, performance poetry, and choreography – genres that have declaimed, joked, and leapt to the attention of the urban South African public since then in what appears nothing less than an explosion of creative energy. The signs of their emergence were of course visible as more-or-less popular arts 408 In Township Tonight

in black urban communities long ago. In the 1970s, Black Consciousness ensembles such as Lefifi Tladi and Dashiki and the Malopoets chirped political poetry in the nest of Afro-fusion music and got themselves harassed and exiled for their efforts. ‘People’s poet’ Mzwakhe Mbuli rose out of the militant ‘cultural days’ performances of the black trade unions to become a stalwart of the ANC’s ‘cultural desk’ and a celebrated popular performer. In modern dance, Sylvia ‘Granny’ Glasser’s ‘Moving into Dance Mophatong’ is twenty-eight years old, and Alf Hinkel’s Cape Town-based Jazzart Dance Company is five years older. Stand-up comedy has been a part, usually introductory and connective, of the black variety show since the ‘coon’ and minstrel companies of the late nineteenth century. But at least in Johannesburg, the place of these forms was nothing like as front and centre as they are today. I have not as yet, regrettably, had the opportunity to document and understand these emerging modes of performance art. I will close the book with them by introducing a few artists whose work has crossed art-formal boundaries into theatre. In the very verbal arts, my favourite is Kgafela oa Magogodi, a colleague at Wits, popular published and performance poet, and director of what he calls ‘spoken word theatre’: I am trying to do through theatre things that people have not done … that is, spoken word theatre. When you take poetry and you create scenes around a poem and create a story whether that story is in words or is visual. There is a sense of a narrative but ... it’s never linear ... with spoken word theatre I have thought that the best thing for me is to do a collage … 25

Kgafela employs Wits University students in his productions, which include Itchy City (2002) and a trilogy: War (2003), Soil (2004), and now Bread. He proclaims artistic self-generation as a director, and cites only the influence of the original Woza Albert! on his theatrical style. As to directing: My attitude … is that it should not be a single vision. It should be a collaborative effort so that the cast for me are equally co-directors. I like working in that way, I can allow people to say, ‘this is how I see things’. Then I try to work that within the overall vision even if it comes out scattered. For me a creative work should be like that because it is closer to life when it is not too neat. I hate neatness in art and even in my writing I try not to be too neat. I like it to breathe. When it is too tight then it does not breathe and becomes something else.26

Each production, then, is a collaborative dramatisation, in part musical and choreographic, of a set of performance poems. In the case of Soil (with its sandstrewn, dust-raising, cough-inducing set), none of the texts is by Kgafela, but rather by the students who were both South African and African-American. The ultimate Conclusion 409

or underlying theme is revealed not so much in the individually dramatised poems as in the incremental bridging of the distance between South African and AfricanAmerican young people’s contemporary experience. Overall, the project succeeds and the performance is both exciting and thought-provoking for the audience. Kgafela is also a ‘stand-alone’ performance poet in his own right, and his readings, as well as his published work, written in multilingual township argot, certainly represent some of the most exciting innovations in vernacular South African poetic language. Recently, the Windybrow Theatre identified the spoken word, scriptwriting, seminars, and children’s theatre as focus areas for its development programmes, and appointed Kgafela to design and implement them. Here is a sample of Kgafela’s work, the title poem from his volume Outspoken (2005): Outspoken outspoken mouth wide open i stick my tongue out let loose the word refuse to seal my lips tongue-lash you i crack skulls open to release brain waves of slaves in days of fongkong freedoms chains are more insane they run trains of virus in the veins to kill us dead in the head but i escape the rape of good hope i break out of rib cages of dead pages i translate rebel souls to recreate mind states when i bim-sala-bim will sara baartman return to the soil as caliban or a taliban outspoken count on the open mic to amplify my truly irie lyrics i rip voortrekker diaries 410 In Township Tonight

to pieces i sink memories of dromedaries it sounds hip when i wreck van riebeeck’s ship i crush history’s kak stories to ground zero but i am just a scribe not a hero i bleed for the blue i bleed floods of whispers from homeless talk papers scripting the fall of skyscrapers because they rape us skyscrapers rape us skyscrapers 27

Another very well-known performance poet whose radical linguistic explorations venture into theatre is Soweto’s Lesego Rampolokeng. After years of performing, publishing (five books), and recording poetry of a somewhat opaque but always offbeat and intriguing quality, Rampolokeng put together a radical play entitled Fanon’s Children, aimed at ‘de-colonising the African mind’. The play premièred at the 2002 Grahamstown festival and had a run at Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre. Asked about his transition from live poetry to theatre, Rampolokeng explains: I have never in my life put any lines of demarcation between different forms available for the use of the word. I could always weave in and out of what is referred to as prose and poetry and any other genre that may exist in between, on top of or beneath. When I stand upon a stage all alone, all by myself, I represent my work. I don’t see myself as a poetry performer. What I am trying to do is to give life to the word. I attempt to find a vehicle by which the word can travel from me to the next soul, the next spirit, the next mind, the next conscience. For me then to have other people stand on stage and do that, was not all that out of the ordinary, I suppose, because what they were doing was giving life to the word that I had tried to create, and run with it. It was just being carried by other bodies than my own. And I also thought that alone I can only ever hope to reach a very limited number of people. Even if that number was part of a music festival and I was singing with a band, I could not truly capture what I saw as the essence of my life and my time, being all alone there. These other people brought their own words, they brought their own being into the picture.28 Conclusion 411

As a youngster in the 1970s, Rampolokeng was excited by the Black Consciousness Movement, and later mentored by two great theatrical creators within that movement, Maishe Maponya and the late Matsemela Manaka, along with poet Ingoapele Madingoane. In line with that movement, Rampolokeng is clear that he is not interested artistically in entertaining the audience but in moving them, both emotionally and intellectually, out of their comfort zones and their well-defended points of view: if they were there because they wanted to escape from whatever reality was pinning them down, when they saw our people acting out certain aspects of life that did not touch them, because we were alien to them, and they should sit there and enjoy, then I’m not very happy with them … from my very beginnings, I’d say my intention was not to connect with my work just to create for safety, but to get myself so absorbed in my time, in my place, in my situation that I could be able to explode it from within. I found myself, though, having to stand on stage and do a monkey dance and people applaud and laugh and giggle at whatever I get paid for. I have seen numerous plays, I have seen numerous artists jump up on stage and perform for societies made up of all these zombies running around. And people give standing ovations, they celebrate them. Because I suppose it bites into their olden prejudices, it locks in very nicely with their very, very limited world view. And they pay, these people, they pay all that money! But for me that is the ultimate prostitution. I found myself existing on the flip side of that coin, which did not make it particularly different.29

This view does indeed recall those of the radical Black Consciousness theatre groups and directors of the 1970s, who also used theatre as a stick with which to beat government. It also preserves a refreshing and salutary focus upon the overtly social and political valence of theatre in the current era, when the new (black) nationalists are, as Rampolokeng insists, beginning to resemble the (white) old nationalists.30 In another departure from the usual role of the performance poet, Rampolokeng supplied dialogue for Handspring Puppet Company’s Faustus in Africa (2002), and his short story ‘Highjack Stories’ was made into a feature film by Oliver Schmitz (2000). Here is a verse from his poem ‘The Second Chapter’ (2004): the shell of sham-calm a Pavlov bell become makarov welcome in poem form crawl walk then run is the line but hyper-kinesis here super-nervous i had & have to learn NOT to be in motion

Perhaps the most obvious point made by these brief artistic biographies is that 412 In Township Tonight

performance poetry in South Africa, strongly influenced by American hip-hop, crosses boundaries and mixes media from musical, choreographic, and theatrical as well as literary styles and genres. The distinction between the jazz hip-hop of Tumi and the Volume or the kwaito hip-hop of Skwatta Kamp and live poetry is not a clear one, while the poets themselves venture into scripting and directing with enthusiasm and aplomb. South Africans must not waste their time, as the old National Party ideologues did, in trying to isolate and preserve ‘pure’ (Afrikaans: suiwer) traditions, forms, and languages, condemning everything of a dynamic and hybrid character as a product of apartheid or the deracinated cities, because these have not existed for many generations, if they ever did. South Africa is a pack of mutts, and quite cosmopolitan mutts at that; not pedigreed breeds. And this is what enables oral poetry, once mistakenly thought nearly dead, in any language, from black English to isicamtho to Cape Flats Afrikaans to mine workers’ songs and township rap and text in dialects of African languages, to bloom in the thorny gardens of the post-apartheid cultural landscape. Beyond mzansi, ‘spoken word art’ festivals such as Urban Voices now bring together local heroes with international artists from the United States, Jamaica, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere several times a year in the largest cities. I am unable to give more than passing reference to the sudden and dynamic growth of contemporary choreography and performance in South Africa. Less than two decades since the repeal of apartheid laws gave impetus to this artistic movement, the field is already broad enough to demand its own book-length treatment. I can give it but a brief, celebratory pas. During the 1970s, white women modern dance enthusiasts with overseas experience began importing the art form to South Africa in a systematic and dedicated effort to make its possibilities available to black youth. One of these exponents, Sylvia Glasser, named the movement ‘Afro-fusion’ in recognition of the syncretism of formal Western technique with the embodied African imagination. Some of the early companies such as Moving into Dance Mophatong and Jazzart still thrive, but with the closing of the major government-funded provincial arts councils, professional dance companies became difficult to sustain, and individual dancerchoreographers have gathered their own performers around them to produce and perform individual works, often intended or commissioned for the major festival programmes and eventual touring overseas. From the very beginning these artists and indeed the whole contemporary dance movement itself, was multi-racial, and aspired to develop an original language and character as South African rather than African or black dance, even among its emerging black exponents. In the 1990s choreographers and dance producers like Sylvia Glasser, Carly Dibakwane, and Robyn Orlin created this new language and mzansi style of contemporary dance working with their own companies. The loss of public funding freed choreographers from the imperative to produce Conclusion 413

work coloured by nationalist ideological preconceptions, but it deprived them of secure financial support for their artistic development and public performances. Dance critics Adrienne Sichel and Marilyn Poole teamed up with Soweto Dance Theatre’s Carly Dibakwane, a choreographer immersed in the simmering pot of township dance, and in 1988 created the Dance Umbrella, sponsored by First National Bank. Since then, Dance Umbrella has provided a showcase for everything from community-based dance troupes to international companies, and launched many South African choreographers into international dance, including Vincent Mantsoe, Robyn Orlin, Boyzie Cekwana, Moeketsi Koena, and Gregory Vuyani Maqoma. Its success has been followed by other festivals, including the dance programme at the Grahamstown Festival. In her recent thesis on Maqoma and his artistic milieu, Hayley Kodesh explains that Maqoma works within the framework of his own definition of African contemporary dance. He is not concerned with linear narrative or a modernist rebellion against what has come before. Many of his contemporaries share his concerns with commenting on society and doing so through the embodiment of individuals’ stories. Maqoma’s intention is to make the internal world visible – to uncover what is hidden, as a metaphor for unmasking the contradictions in society. The dancers in his controversial, transgressive masterpiece, Virtually Blond (2004), were aware that their private stories would become the material that they and Maqoma would craft into a theatrical dance work. They knew that they would be performing their secrets through movement on stage with a viewing audience. The space of the stage therefore contributed to the shift in the nature of the work from a private catharsis in the intimacy of the studio to a public expression of the social ills that caused the wounding in the first place.32

While working on Virtually Blond, Maqoma was simultaneously choreographing Somehow Delightful, a criticism of the superficiality of certain of South Africa’s celebrations of its democracy. The latter was for his own company, Virtual Dance Theatre (VDT), and the former for Moving into Dance Mophatong (MIDM). Maqoma has a well-established relationship with MIDM and is often called in as associate artistic director to arrange performance programmes, for management meetings, or to give feedback on choreographic works. That said, his first commitment is to the success of VDT. It is undetermined to what extent his different priorities affected the outcomes of each work but possible that his priority is the success of VDT. Although Somehow Delightful was deprived of its ‘natural’ audience during its run at the forbidding, fortress-like State Theatre in Pretoria, performance journalists gave it more attention than they did Virtually Blond, and the work travelled to Holland as part of the Afrovibes 2004 festival, for which Maqoma was artistic director. John 414 In Township Tonight

Matshikiza described Somehow Delightful as an example of ‘simply the best and bravest all-round theatre that is going on around here today’.33 Inseparable from the works of Maqoma, Mantsoe, Cekwana and other alternatively post-modern black choreographers is the ultimately unproductive and always painfully contentious debate over whether they are ‘African’, and what such a label might or should mean. The event company that organised the opening ceremony for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2004 told Maqoma that his work was excluded from the performance programme because it was ‘not African enough’. The choreography that was chosen presented an idealised image of Africa, replete with drums, scanty faux-animal skin costumes on leaping black torsos, and a theme of ‘earth, wind and fire’. Critic Kettly Noël comments: When I look at what is going on in Africa, I see that it’s just a variation on history because in the past, we had Africans presented in public exhibitions almost like animals. Today we are perpetuating that by trying to fit into the image that is portrayed of us. We are exotic and I have nothing against being exotic. I like being exotic as well. But how can we also work in such a way that we don’t perpetuate that kind of image?34

The work of the contemporary South African choreographers is more than anything else an attempt not merely to illuminate such profane realities but indeed to liberate them emotionally and celebrate them imaginatively. At the same time, these artists are hyper-sensitive to issues of identity and difference, to their image in their own society, and, for very practical creative reasons as well, wish to retain for their idiosyncratic expression the excitement, beauty, coherence, and power that suffuse pre-colonial African dance and its aesthetic legacy. Mozambican choreographer Augusto Cuvilas proclaims confidently: ‘When I’m creating a piece, I’m not trying to say that I’m African. I know I’m African.’35 But like their colleagues in contemporary jazz, whose musical accompaniment they employ to such advantage, they may wonder how to create works that are both acceptable and challenging to their own communities, both familiar and new, ahead of but still in sight of the curve. Their response, argues Kodesh, is a kind of post-colonial crossing of boundaries and mixing of forms, what Adrienne Sichel calls an ‘eclectic cross-cultural interaction’ based on their interpretations of African ‘alternative modernities’. In Maqoma’s work as well, ‘aesthetic transgressions … become political transgressions’, and ‘hybridity itself becomes a vehicle for interrogating social identity, freedom and power in South Africa’. ‘Despite the limits imposed on them, it is the dancer, theatre practitioner, musician, choreographer, and oral poet who ask most forcefully what exactly it means to be free.’ In Gregory’s words, ‘A reflection of South Africa today is a cocktail – a fusion of all these identities, those ingredients in one pot. And when you start stirring you can’t separate one thing from another – they become something else. My body itself now is all Conclusion 415

these things’.36 In any event, sitting amongst an audience largely composed of students

at a Dance Umbrella programme presented at the Wits University Theatre, it occurs to me that Maqoma and his fellow choreographers need not worry so much on this account. It may be that a student attends a first contemporary dance event simply because they have a friend, classmate or relative on stage. But the astonished gasps and murmurs of pleasure and appreciation that come from such audiences indicate that a more educated and dedicated young audience for contemporary dance is even now in the making. I have aired some issues here in order to dispel the notion that contemporary dance has bloomed in an atmosphere where critics and audiences alike are tired of ‘issue-driven’ performance works, and long for a more intimate experience of beauty that is mercifully non-verbal. While young black audiences are learning to appreciate ‘poetry in motion’, this is not at all a sign that they are seeking refuge in an aesthetic of social unconsciousness. The infusion of South African contemporary dance with such consciousness is one of its defining qualities, along with an indefinable, fluid, but unmistakable mzansi ‘Africanness’. The New Dance festival was started in 2004 in Johannesburg by Georgina Thomson and Charmaine Monareng of Dance Forum. The 2006 programme included companies from Africa and South Africa and featured new choreography from Kettly Noël of Mali, Augusto Cuvilas from Mozambique, and Opiyo Okach from Kenya. Young South African choreographers appearing alongside them included Funeka Ramorula, Irven Teme, Lucky Ratlhagane and Mpho Masilela, all of whom emerged out of the Young Choreographers Residency Programme during the FNB Dance Umbrella, 2006. Established South African talents offering new works included Nelisiwe Xaba, Sifiso Kweyama, Portia Mashigo and Zoey Lapinsky, who collaborated with Gerard Bester, and Sbonakaliso Ndaba. Gregory Maqoma presented Rhythm Colour, evoking the 1976 Soweto Uprising thirty years on. The invitation to the festival described the work as ‘a reflection of what has come from the struggle and looks at our inner spiritual Colour, depicted by the outer Rhythm’.37 In addition to the usual foreign funding, New Dance is also supported by the National Lottery Trust and the National Arts Council. Recently Gregory Maqoma was awarded a grant of almost one million rand by the National Lottery Trust, so it may be that the days when artists who created works like Virtually Blond were beyond the pale are coming to an end, and a new acceptance of the quality and value of contemporary dance in the emergence of mzansi is at last being recognised. For most township residents, however, prestigious city festivals such as New Dance have far less relevance and accessibility in either the aesthetic or logistical sense than the cheerfully impromptu displays of the mapantsula dance teams, youth club troupes, and clever dance-and-music flat-bed truck campaigns staged by retail companies to flog their products. And so to end with some much-needed comic relief. The initial sanctimonious humourlessness of the post-apartheid apple cart has been upset by the emergence 416 In Township Tonight

of a stand-up comedy movement in South Africa involving new talents of all ethnic backgrounds. It is indeed the involvement of multi-cultural performers on the same stage on an equal basis that gives South African stand-up comedy its experimental character and healthy, liberating disrespect for sacred cows. Of course, in addition to the famous South African ‘gallows humour’ that sustained the fighting spirit of the oppressed through the darkest years of the apartheid period, stand-up comedy has existed at least since the nineteenth-century music hall and minstrel shows. Before the emergence of the form on television and the club circuit in the late 1990s, comedians like the late great monologist Ronnie Madonsela, the superbly versatile ‘Cousin’ Barry Holland, and, most of all, the perennial chameleon of theatrical comedic liberation, Pieter-Dirk Uys, kept audiences laughing in resort hotels and theatres, and in Uys’s case, on state television. Uys’s satirical parodies of the white minority government in his Evita Bezuidenhout female impersonations (‘Ambassador to the independent homeland of Bapetikosweti’) proved irresistible even to leading National Party politicians. Since 1994 he has continued in his iconoclastic, satirical mode with shows such as You ANC Nothing Yet (2004). Pieter-Dirk Uys has also worked tirelessly in HIV/Aids awareness comedy theatre, touring to schools throughout the country, and received an honorary doctorate – ‘honoris Xhosa’, as he termed it – from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2005. But the real news is the emergence of performers such as Mark Banks, Marc Lottering, David Kau, Riaad Moosa and Kurt Schoonraad, along with the regular schedule of festivals and comedy nights at casinos and other multi-purpose venues and the establishment of a ‘circuit’ of comedy performance spaces in the country’s three largest cities. The take-off point for the stand-alone comedy industry appears to have been the Smirnoff Comedy festivals that began in the mid-1990s. Development came first among white and coloured performers, whose communities were accustomed to stand-up comedy as an entertainment form on its own. The emergence in 1997of Mark Lottering, someone as close to a comic genius as South Africa has yet seen, energised the comedy show scene in Cape Town, a scene that Lottering has since come to dominate. Among black Africans, stand-up comedy took longer to develop because it was by itself an alien genre. Acceptance was helped a great deal by SABC’s willingness to support and screen programmes composed of half-hour ensemble sketches like the Pure Monate Show and comedy filmmaker Leon Schuster’s sidekick Desmond Dube’s Dube on Monday. Neither David Kau, a leading member of the Pure Monate cast, nor Dube was particularly strong as a stand-up comic, but rather grew their audiences around the hilarious but never-nasty skewering of stock characters, of all ethnic backgrounds and races, from the urban South African scene. Dube on Monday was more familyoriented, and Pure Monate the late-night favourite of township youth. Riaad Moosa Conclusion 417

and Kurt Schoonraad both emerged as major personalities on the comedy circuit from Pure Monate, as did Kau and Tshepo Mogale. Although the sketch shows are now gone, slowly a black audience – outside the townships – able and willing to pay the price of admission for stand-up stand-alone comedy, began to grow. Much of the publicity is word-of-mouth, and many audience members know one another through emerging social class networks. When it comes to the topical content of routines, nothing generic succeeds as the audience and its ethnic composition rules. While the edgy near-nastiness of British stand-up works well with white audiences, black audiences prefer less social one-upmanship and more race and politics – the subjects they care so much about. Headline shows targeting the black middle class now draw remarkably large audiences: Soul Comedy, starting in 2001 at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre with Shabba, Marc Lottering and Cory ‘Zooman’ Miller from Def Comedy Jam, drew 4 000 people. Blacks Only, sponsored by black youth radio station Yfm, is the show that launched David Kau as perhaps the leading black African stand-up comedian of the new century. Now in its third year, the show has a significant young black following despite the considerable R100–R140 ticket prices. Among Kau’s keys to success has been the ability to transcend the racial stereotypes that littered earlier South African stand-up comedy, and send up all racial and ethnic groups serially in a balanced, empathetic manner: mzansi comedy. For a mixed (race, gender, age, class), less cash-blessed audience there are new, experimental venues now appearing, featuring up-and-coming comics and open-mike nights for the enthusiastic, star-struck amateurs. The sessions may be of indifferent quality, haphazardly presented, and too numerous, but both performers and audiences learn a great deal, and it’s wondrously sociable and cheap entertainment for the young audience that attends. In reality, the new comedy clubs pay performers very little, and the real earnings are from the large shows like David Kau’s All These Jokes Are Mine, often held at the major casinos, and corporate engagements with private sponsorship that can range from amusing the new multi-racial business class to a holiday entertainment for line workers and their families. Finally, as in the other performance domains, there are the ‘hybrid’, cross-genre artists such as Spikos and the masked Mzekezeke; extraordinarily successful kwaito comedians (rather than rappers or singers), and hip-hop self-parody Pitch Black Afro, who appeared in Blacks Only with his comic rap songs and outsized retro wig. Those of us who feared that the new South Africa had lost its sense of humour are most grateful for all this comic relief.38 Over two decades since the appearance of this book, already out of date at the time, the performing arts continue to play an active role in the evolution of new black identities and the internal definition of black aspirations in South Africa. My summary thoughts on the original study now appear more out of date than ever, but the good news is I am not even at this late date out of date yet myself. Perhaps better news is 418 In Township Tonight

there are now more informative and thoughtful voices, such as Lara Allen’s, around than mine. But what then to make now of what has happened since?39 The 1980s saw the difficult, conflicted working out of the relationship between performers and the politics and politicians of the anti-apartheid Struggle. It also saw the emergence of township popular music and theatre (mistakenly labelled ‘protest theatre’) into the national and not only the ‘locational’ ear and eye. Nearly everyone black who was acting or playing had little choice but to chime in with the response to the people’s cyclical, antiphonal call for the freeing of their leaders, the unbanning of their organisations, the end to white minority rule. Although local jazz languished under the impoverishment of forced exile and lack of performance venues, theatre and township music, along with the supportive ‘crossover sound’ of musicians of other races who wanted to get on the freedom bus, thrived as never before in the country’s history. The days were dark indeed, right up to the surprise release of Nelson Mandela, but the performers not only saw but also created light. It was they as much as anyone who created the ‘Another South Africa’ envisioned in the Amsterdam conference of 1987, Culture in Another South Africa. The early 1990s were a time of great optimism, spurred by the release of Mandela, and by the repeal of every significant legislative ‘pillar’ of apartheid. Performing artists, understandably, didn’t always know just what to do. Township theatre was suffering competition from vastly expanded and improved television programming for black audiences, as well as the insecure, sometimes violent situation of its communities after dark. Without the continuing outrages of the old order to dramatise, and the outrages of the new order yet to take form, township theatre had seemingly lost its critical raison d’être and, without support from the authorities, old or new, simply died. While Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, the state theatres, and prestigious, distant, expensive theatrical venues of the cities were now available, only the emergent black middle class could think of attending performances there. Unfortunately, the audience that Gibson Kente built no longer existed (although his protégés were everywhere in show business), and a new middle-class audience was yet to compose itself. The new government considered theatre, shorn of its old political value, no longer of any value. In the townships, the early fears that their best and brightest would desert them for the once forbidden suburbs soon recovered as kwaito arose to challenge the hegemony of American rhythm and blues. The themes of reconciliation and the multi-racial ‘Rainbow Nation’ having outlived their usefulness, township popular culture rearose like a phoenix from the ashes. This kasi (township) – if not precisely African – renaissance was led not by the new government but by the still-marginalised youth, making a not altogether unsuccessful bid to occupy the cultural centre. Contrary to music industry rumour and one-country, one-genre international mindsets, there was Conclusion 419

already much more going on than teenagers dancing to their new freedom’s hedonistic beat. Jazz, jazz-fusion, whatever one might call it, was having a major renaissance of its own, as the older generation and their long-suppressed love for the international as well as local styles of this classic genre re-emerged. Independent labels and production companies mushroomed overnight as artists sought the returns that an end to professional dependency should bring. Some succeeded, most failed, but everyone was learning, and at speed. This new awareness of the realities of cultural production was indispensable, since the dependency and repression of apartheid capitalism in the performance industries was being rapidly replaced by the strictures of globalisation. It was as if South Africans, having never stepped into the international competitive arena before, were told their first opponent would be Lennox Lewis. While many hopefuls landed on the canvas, many picked themselves up before the count and others emerged bloody but unbowed. Just about everyone learned the importance of mastering contemporary studio production processes and technology, and the industry benefited immeasurably from the artistic and commercial contribution of a new generation of studio producers and engineers. The South African media and cultural industries and their players rapidly came of age. Do music and theatre still play as important a role in enlivening black political and social consciousness as in previous decades? Well no, but despite a host of failings, disappointments, and globalised assaults on contemporary South Africa, these are undeniably more hopeful times. Does music provide the sound tracks and the symbolic content and definition of emerging South African identities? Can theatre that distinguishes itself by daring to bring to artificial life the real life that no other medium can express survive, even prosper? No doubt about it. Life in the artistic fast lane of global media is as tough as ever for black South African artists, and the old obstacles have been replaced by the new. But there is now for the first time in urban history the chance to play their own song, enact their own story in their own way and in their own name. And for me it is now an honour and a pleasure to cheer them as they take it.

Notes 1 Robert Christgau, ‘Black melting pot: sounds of the city in South Africa’, Voice Literary Supplement, New York, December 1986. 2 Andersson, Music in the Mix. 3 Robert Thornton, Unimagined Community: Sex, Networks and AIDS in Uganda and South Africa, Berkeley, in press, 2007 4 David Coplan, ‘A river runs through it: the meaning of the Lesotho-Free State Border’, African Affairs 100 (January 2001), pp. 81–116. 5 Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, Boston, 1989, pp. 68–90. 6 P. G. Koornhof, ‘The Drift from the Reserves among the South African Bantu’, Ph.D., 420 In Township Tonight

Oxford University, 1953, p. 480. 7 Allie Dubb, ‘The impact of the city’, in W. D. Hammond-Tooke (ed.), The Bantu-Speaking Peoples of Southern Africa, London, 1974, pp. 441–72. 8 Max Gluckman, ‘Tribalism in British Central Africa’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 1 (1960), p. 56. 9 A. L. Epstein, Politics in an Urban African Community, Manchester, 1958; McNamara, ‘Brothers and workmates’. 10 James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, New York, 1998, pp. 1–37. 11 Philip Mayer, ‘Migrancy and the study of Africans in towns’, American Anthropologist 64, 2 (1962,), pp. 576–92; Bernard Magubane, ‘The Xhosa in town revisited: urban social anthropology: a failure of method and theory’, American Anthropologist 75 (1973), pp. 1701–15; Bernard Magubane ‘A critical look at the indices used in the study of social change in colonial Africa’, Current Anthropology 12, 4–5 (1971), pp. 419–45. 12 Stephen Blum, ‘Towards a social history of musicological technique’, Ethnomusicology 19, 2 (May 1975), p. 217. 13 Alan Merriam, ‘Music change in a Basongye village (Zaire)’, Anthropos 72, 5–6 (1977), p. 825. 14 Alan Merriam, ‘The use of music in the study of a problem of acculturation’, American Anthropologist 57 (1955). 15 S. Ortner, Sherpas through Their Rituals, Cambridge, 1978, p. 7. 16 Michael Banton, ‘Social alignment and identity in a West African city’ in H. Kuper (ed.), Urbanisation and Migration in West Africa, Berkeley, 1965, p. 146. 17 I. Wallerstein, Social Change: The Colonial Situation, New York, 1966, p. 2. 18 Anthony Giddens, The New Rules of Sociological Method, New York, 1976, p.102. 19 W. d’Azevedo, ‘A structural approach to aesthetics’, American Anthropologist 60 (1958), p. 712. 20 Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory, 2nd edn, New York, 1988, p. 89. 21 Richard N. Adams, Energy and Structure, Austin, Texas, 1975, p. 13. 22 Gail Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, Berkeley, 1978, p. 32. 23 John Blacking, ‘The value of music in human experience’, Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council, London, 1969, p. 34. 24 Leila Henriques and Irene Stephanou, The World in an Orange: Making Theatre with Barney Simon, Johannesburg and New York, 2005. 25 Patrick Dooms, field interview with Kgafela oa Magogodi, 10 February 2005. 26 Ibid. 27 Kgafela oa Magogodi, Outspoken, Cape Town, 2004, pp. 22–6. 28 Solberg, Black Theatre in the Melting Pot, p. 251. 29 Ibid., pp. 252–4. 30 Ibid., p. 256. 31 www.rage.co.za/issue43/lebobiog.htm. 32 Hayley Kodesh, ‘For art’s sake? Contemporary dance in South Africa’, MA, University of the Witwatersrand, 2006, n.p. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Gregory Maqoma in ibid. 38 www.artslink.co.za/arts Conclusion 421

39 I want to thank my graduate student, the ventriloquist extraordinaire Conrad Koch, for his insightful observations on the contemporary comedy scene. 40 Lara Allen, ‘Commerce, politics, and musical hybridity, pp. 228–49; ‘Kwaito versus cross(ed)-over’.

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Appendix A

Appendix A 423

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Appendix A 425

Influenza (English translation by Fatima Dike) In the year of 1918 It burnt the elderly out We were wiped out Mothers and fathers left orphans By a disease which they call influenza sad and suffering It took friends which we loved With no one to help them out Mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers It was like this in the wilderness In other homes, nobody survived For those who were travelling to Canaan It took maidens, and young men When they started to suffer on the journey Taking the most beautiful They pitied themselves It took the most coveted Because when they ruled The cream of our youth They were happy It took even handsome virile men They forgot their maker It took even virgins Only those who worshipped him constantly Who were pleasing to the eye pulled through It took those with home and promise The rest were destroyed, out there in the wilderness It took young brides and grooms Now we want to warn our sons and daughters It was as if there were a black cloud Do not let your hearts rule your heads Hanging over this earth Because it can never be satisfied Which had come to take our youth

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Appendix B

Appendix B 427

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Appendix B 429

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Appendix B 431

Appendix C ‘Highbreaks’, played by Aaron Lebona, is a typical marabi. Describing such a musical hybrid in Western terms risks falsifying the African performer’s own conception, and implying certain value judgements. Keeping this in mind, we can still see some of the ways in which tonality and part structure reflect traditional principles. John Blacking, writing of ocarina music among South African Venda, introduced the term ‘root progression’.1 He was referring to the short sequence of bass roots and the melody or melodies moving in relation to the tone centre in multipart structures in African music. Rycroft used the concept of root progression as a substitute for ‘chord sequence’ because African polyphony does not have real chords or a fixed harmonic scheme.2 Kubik’s observation that the ‘concept of root progression is projected into tone and chord material of Western provenance’ in African popular music applied to marabi. Blacking notes that the distribution of the root progression in African music extends ‘even in the Tonic-Subdominant-Dominant strumming that one hears on guitars and old pianos’. In addition, the combination of regularly moving roots and unresolved harmonic progressions gives the music ‘that quality of perpetual motion, which is a prominent feature of much African music’.4 The transcription of ‘Highbreaks’ reveals a four-bar root progression sequence, essentially I–IV–I6/4 –V7, with melodic phrases staggered in relation to it. This nonsimultaneous entry of parts follows the structure of traditional vocal polyphony. It also appears in Nguni guitar and bow songs. Usually, the main melodic phrase appears to run from the second eighth note of measure 1 to the end of measure 2. It anticipates the harmony of subsidiary phrases following in measures 3 and 4 of the four-bar sequence, which are suggestive of additional parts with separate entry points. The phrase scheme for the first twenty measures is roughly AA” (repeat) BA” (repeat) CC’C’C”. On page 437 we see the structure of ‘Highbreaks’ represented in a cyclical diagram, in which the circle represents two repetitions of the four-bar bass sequence.5 432 In Township Tonight

In the right hand, short solo melodic figures occur at the top of a series of chords that move mainly in parallel motion. These chords are frequently ‘irregular’. A typical Western listener might find them disconcerting, since they break the rules of standard harmonic practice, but not in any consistent way that might immediately indicate an alternative musical conception. While parallel motion does occur to some extent in southern African traditional music, in ‘Highbreaks’ it may well be that the right-hand chord sequences derive largely from retaining a roughly consistent alignment of the fingers while moving the hand as a whole. The fixed recurrent root sequence, as in traditional bow music, limits the choice of melodic notes at any point apart from the prolonged dominant descant, which overrides other features. This variation provides a point of rest in relation to the root progression and staggering of phrases and it is used in both traditional southern African music and African-American forms like jazz.6 The rhythm has several complex and interesting features. The variety, syncopation, delayed beats, and other elements of early jazz are set to a traditional off-beat pattern and played on two tin shakers filled with pebbles. Cadence to tonic, found in many melodic phrases in ‘Highbreaks’, is not unusual in traditional bow or guitar songs; it is inevitable if they happen to end regularly at the same point in the bass sequence. Interestingly, cadential endings here (V7–I) do not occur at the end of the bass sequence, which is on the dominant, but usually at the start of measure 3. In the sixth and seventh four-bar sequences, where the melodic phrase is drawn out to cover four measures, cadence occurs in measure 1 of the next sequence. Both placements are anticipated, with syncopation, and provide tonic harmony. Some variation results from phrase-shifting, and some melodic digressions may include short phrases from other songs assimilated from the player’s musical environment. A difficulty in analysing the influences in ‘Highbreaks’ stems from the possible identity of African-American and black South African musical practices. A four-bar chord sequence, ending on the dominant, may reflect a segmentation of progressions commonly found in blues. The exact sequence I–IV–I6/4 –V7 does not occur in traditional South African music, though the two-, four-, or six-bar recurrent root sequence is fundamental to it.

Notes 1 John Blacking, ‘Problems of pitch, pattern, and harmony in the ocarina music of the Venda’, African Music 2, 2 (1959), pp. 21–3. 2 D. K. Rycroft, ‘Nguni vocal polyphony’, Journal of the International Folk Music Council 19 (1967), p. 96. 3 Kubik, The Kachamba Brothers Band, p. 24. 4 Blacking, ‘Problems of pitch’, p. 23. 5 D. K. Rycroft, personal communication, 1979. 6 Blacking, ‘Problems of pitch’, p. 23. Appendix C 433

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Appendix C 435

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Appendix C 437

Glossary abaphakathi (Zulu: ‘middle one’) In modern usage, people neither traditional nor missionschool educated; those not encompassed by animist-traditional (pre-colonial) or colonial Christian socio-cultural systems. Freely, rural or small town African proletarians. African A native speaker of a Bantu language who is of reputedly complete African Negro ancestry; things of or pertaining to such people. Afro-pop Style of black popular dance-song in the early twenty-first century that revived classic township melodies sung over a contemporary kwaito beat. Afro-pop has a multi-racial or ‘cross-over’ youth audience. amahubo Traditional Zulu regimental anthems accompanied by slow, synchronised gestures and body movements. amakumsha (Zulu: ‘speakers of a foreign language’) Implying trickster or turncoat. Used by traditional rural Africans to identify African proletarians who are neither pagan nor Christian, but who affect European clothing and speech. See abaphakathi, ‘dressed people’, oorlams. amakwaya African sacred or secular choral music developed by mission-educated Africans, combining European classical song and hymnody, American popular song and African traditional choral music. Amalaita Organised northern Sotho/Pedi gangs who terrorised the outskirts of Johannesburg from shortly after the turn of the century to the Second World War. They also formed teams of competitive street fighters in urban African locations. AmaRussia/Marashea Name for urban criminal gangs of proletarian Sotho men that began as vigilante societies and developed into violent social predators. Suppressed by the police in Johannesburg in the 1950s, but active until the 1990s. Bantu (1) Group to which all southern African Negro languages belong; (2) obsolete official name for African Negroes in South Africa, disliked by Africans on political and linguistic grounds. black African, so-called coloured, and ‘Indian’ people, viewing these groups as a single category in opposition to ‘whites’; a thing of or pertaining to African and so-called coloured (and sometimes Indian) people. 438 In Township Tonight

Black Consciousness A political movement with roots in the Congress Youth Movement of the 1940s that uses pride in African cultural values and heritage as a philosophical basis for African political activity and unity. It became the ideological base of political resistance to apartheid among South African black students during the 1970s. bombing/mbombing The most traditionally-oriented form of Zulu–Swazi urban proletarian choral music (ingoma busuku), favoured by migrants and the least westernised urbanites during the 1940s and 1950s. Performances featured explosive choral yells compared by participants to the sound of bombs dropped by aircraft in the Second World War (seen in cinema newsreels). Bushmen Aboriginal hunter-gatherers of southern Africa, called San by the Khoi. See Khoisan. crossover Any local musical style that succeeds in attracting a multi-racial following, as kwela did in the 1950s, Afro-pop does today, and jazz has to a limited extent always done. cultural broker One who communicates between different sectors of a society; especially, one who mediates and transmits influences from one culture or subculture to another. culture A broadly shared system of knowledge and its products; a value-oriented system of ideation and symbolic classification and its material and behavioural expression. coloured An official and colloquial term for people of mixed European, Khoisan, East Indian, Indian, and African descent, or any combination of any two or more of these groups. The majority are of Euro-Khoisan descent, and have constituted a separate social entity since the early eighteenth century. Their native language is Afrikaans. Many coloureds resent this term, and prefer to use ‘so-called coloureds’, but no acceptable substitute has been found. Coon Originally, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American ragtime and blues songs caricaturing blacks in America. In South Africa, American-derived popular African ragtime songs and performers of the early twentieth century, popular with African students. Better known from the Coon Carnival, a New Year street parade in Cape Town of coloured men’s performance clubs in American minstrel costume and blackface, performing Afrikaans and American minstrel and jazz music. dressed people A term used by English-speaking Africans for African proletarians without Western education who affected Western clothing, speech, and mannerisms to gain social advantage. See abaphakathi. elite The highest stratum of African society in the colonial era; composed mostly of those educated at Christian mission schools and, before the 1950s, identified officially by an exemption certificate rather than by an ordinary pass. Ethiopianism In South Africa, a separatist or independent African Christian movement based on an ideology of pan-African Christian unity and political and religious independence. European In South Africa, an official and colloquial designation for people of reputedly complete Caucasian descent. Also, inhabitants of the continent of Europe, and things of or pertaining to European or white people, as in ‘European music’. See white, Western. famo (l)An urban dance and dance occasion in which Sotho women perform primarily for the entertainment of men, to the accompaniment of neo-traditional focho music or syncretic marabi music; (2) a form of Sotho proletarian women’s song performed at famo dances and recounting the singer’s life experiences. focho (Sotho: ‘disorder’) A neo-traditional style of Sotho shebeen dance music performed with or without vocal accompaniment on the concertina or accordion, and drum. Occasionally accompanies famo dance and song. Glossary 439

ghommaliedjie (Malay-Dutch: ‘drum-song’) A South African picnic song sung in Afrikaans and accompanied by the ghomma, a Malay hand drum. homeboys, homegirls A group of young men or women from the same rural area, residing in a distant town. They frequently form not only a social category, but also a tightly-knit network maintaining ties to the rural area among urban migrant workers. hip-hop Also known as ‘rap’, a style of music which came into existence in the United States during the mid-1970s. It consists of two main components: rapping (MCing) and DJing (production and scratching). Hip-hop music consists of rhythmic lyrics making use of assonance, alliteration, and rhyme. The rapper is accompanied by an instrumental track, referred to as a ‘beat,’ performed by a DJ, created by a producer or one or more instrumentalists. This beat has been created using a sample of the percussion break of another song, usually funk and soul recordings. In recent years, the beat is built up from individual drum samples (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop_music). Hottentot (German: hotteren-totteren, ‘to stutter’; after the many click sounds in Khoi languages) Obsolete name for aboriginal cattle-herding Khoi (non-Bantu-speaking) peoples of South Africa. ihubo Traditional song identified with a specific Zulu subclan, performed at weddings and other occasions directly involving the subclan as a corporate group. Also, in Christian usage, a Zulu hymn. indigenous (1) Anything deriving from African society or culture unaffected by outside influence, hence of local African origin; (2) in some cases, forms developed locally by Africans with some unconscious external influence. See traditional. ingoma (Zulu: ‘dance, song’) In urban areas, a form of dance and song in traditional idiom developed by Zulu male migrant workers in the mines, factories, and domestic service. ingoma busuku (Zulu: ‘night music’) Any of a range of urban working-class Zulu–Swazi forms of choral music patterned after African church choirs and combining Zulu–Swazi, European, Afrikaans, and black American performance elements in a syncretic blend. See bombing. isicamtho A contemporary dialect of African urban slang, based on a mixture of ‘township’ Zulu, Sotho, and English. isicathamiya A style of indigenous Zulu a cappella male choral music and step dancing influenced by Christian hymnody and tracing its roots back to the early twentieth century in Natal. Isicathamiya’s best-known exponents are Ladysmith Black Mambazo. isicathulo isicathulo (shoe) was adopted by students in Durban; from there it spread to dock workers who produced spectacular rhythmic effects by slapping and pounding their rubber wellington boots in performance. This rhythm made it popular with mine and municipal labourers elsewhere, especially Johannesburg. There it became the ‘gumboot’ dance, divided into a series of routines and accompanied by a rhythm guitar. jive A term for American-influenced popular urban African dancing, current since the 1950s, accompanied by American or African jazz; also, a term for African jazz, mbaqanga, or simanje-manje music. See mbaqanga, simanje-manje. Khoisan The aboriginal, non-Bantu-speaking, non-Negro inhabitants of South Africa. Combining the Khoikhoi (pastoralist) and San (hunter-gatherer; ‘Bushman’).

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kwaito a South Africanised blend of hip-hop with American dance music, especially house and techno, and pop. At first, kwaito was dominated by a pounding bass beat mediated by other cyclically repeated rhythmic modules. Snatches of catchy melodies were layered and looped around the vocal parts. Although the rhythmically spoken lyrics were inspired by rap, vocal delivery tended to be much slower in kwaito, and the lyrics, in black township slang, consisted of a few of the latest catch phrases repeated and played against each other. kwela A form of urban African pennywhistle music of the 1950s, syncretically composed of elements of traditional, marabi, and American swing-jazz music. lithoko Traditional Sotho praise poetry. location Obsolete official and colloquial designation for an authorised African residential area, commonly of two types: (1) government-built and -administered suburban rental housing areas for urban workers; (2) a mission-owned or freehold African residential area. See slumyard, township. marabi A pan-ethnic urban African working-class style of music developed in Johannesburg during the 1920s and 1930s. Also a term for the dance occasions where it was performed and for their patrons. Malay A culturally and, to some extent, socially autonomous segment of the coloured population originating in the Cape, descended from East Indian slaves brought to South Africa by the Dutch during the eighteenth century. More broadly, any Islamic coloured person. maskanda (Zulu: from Afrikaans musikant, ‘musician’) Neo-traditional instrumental music; that is, music in traditional idiom played on Western instruments. Today considered by Zulu musicians to be traditional music. mbaqanga (Zulu: ‘African maize bread’) Originally, the most widely distributed term for popular commercial African jazz in the 1950s which developed from kwela and blended African melody, marabi, and American jazz. In the 1960s, it came to be applied to a new style that combined urban neo-traditional music and marabi (not jazz) and was played on electric guitars, saxophones, violins, accordions, and drums. See msakazo, simanje-manje. mbube See ingoma busuku. Mfengu (Xhosa: ‘destitute wanderers’) Nguni refugees from Zulu expansion in the 1820s who settled among the Xhosa in the eastern Cape and were among the Africans most eager to join Christian mission communities. middle class The highest stratum of African society, composed of members of the professions, literate salaried employees, and independent businessmen who were educated at Christian mission schools. See elite. migrant Person leaving a rural area to work in an industrial area, especially an urban labourer who returns after a shorter or longer period, or habitually, to a home in the countryside. Things of or pertaining to such a person. minstrels Originally, American stage variety troupes representing or caricaturing black American secular and religious popular performance culture. Among urban black South Africans up until the Second World War, song and dance companies presenting American popular song and dance, and approximations of American jazz songs sung in African languages. modernisation Consequences of African involvement in capitalist commercial, agricultural, and industrial labour or Western education in urban or rural areas. See westernisation.

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msakazo (Zulu: ‘broadcast’) A term for popular commercial African jazz in the 1950s, used derogatorily by middle-class jazz musicians and listeners. See mbaqanga. mzansi literally meaning ‘south’ in Zulu, the term popularly applies to anything indigenous or exclusively local to South Africa, by which the country’s cultural identity might be illustrated. ndhlamu A Zulu dance in traditional idiom. Its leg movements have been likened to the sputtering of boiling water. First developed among rural peasants, it remains a favourite dance among Zulu male migrant workers. ndunduma (Zulu: ‘mine dumps’) A form of urban Zulu vocal and instrumental marabi music. Also, Zulu working-class concert-and-dance occasions where ingoma busuku and ndunduma marabi music were performed and used as an accompaniment for dancing. neo-traditional An adjective describing any African expressive cultural form in traditional idiom modified by performance on Western instruments, urban conditions or changes in performance rules and occasions. Nguni Originally, a language group encompassing the dialects of numerous clans in an area stretching from the eastern Cape north to southern Mozambique and South Central Africa. In South Africa, the Zulu, Swazi and Xhosa-speaking peoples. Ninevites A paramilitary African criminal organisation that resisted white oppression and terrorised the Witwatersrand between 1898 and 1927. non-European Any person not of reputedly complete European Caucasian descent. oorlams An Afrikaans term referring to clever, disingenuous Khoi and coloured people who had acquired enough knowledge of Western culture to exploit an intermediate position between whites and traditional blacks. Later, proletarian coloureds and Africans westernising through Afrikaans rather than English culture. See abaphakathi, amakumsha, dressed people. ostinato. In music, an ostinato is a motif or phrase which is persistently repeated at the same pitch. The repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a tune, or a complete melody. performing arts Creative musical, dance, dramatic, and oral narrative-poetic skills realised in public performance. See performance culture. performance culture The underlying system of knowledge and the material realisation of performance, as well as the relationships among performers, participants, styles, and occasions of performance. The complex of resources, perceptions, experiences, motivations, and behaviours of people involved in performance events. See performing arts. petty bourgeoisie See elite, middle class. popular Suited or intended for the general masses of people, thus generated and supported by the personal, social and economic resources of the general population rather than by public institutional subsidy. power The recognised ability to control the disposition of persons and things in the environment. professional performer One for whom performance is the main supporting economic activity. As distinct from ‘the professions’ (law, medicine, teaching, the ministry, and clerical and administrative employment), professional performers need not be considered middle-class. proletarian A person who has lost access to land, livestock, capital, or other material means of production, and is compelled to live either by selling his or her labour in the commercial economy, providing services to those who do, or by forms of social parasitism such as crime. 442 In Township Tonight

ramkie A small, three- or four-stringed plucked guitar developed by proletarian Cape Khoi after a model brought to South Africa by slaves from Malabar, on which were played blends of Khoi and Dutch folk melodies. In time, also adopted by rural Africans. rand The South African unit of currency. Once worth US$2.50, it was converted at about $1.25 in 1980, and at $0.15 (R7.20 = $1.00US) today. reinterpretation The ascription of old meanings to new elements, and the changes in the cultural significance of old forms brought about by new values. The cultural recombination of elements of structure and content present in experience according to their variable meaning in relation to changing systems of value. rhythm and blues A cover term for African-American popular music coined in the 1940s, referring principally to the rocking style of music that combined the 12-bar blues format and boogie-woogie with a back beat, which later became a fundamental element of rock ’n’ roll. By the 1970s, rhythm and blues was being used as a blanket term to describe soul and funk. Today the acronym R&B is almost always used instead of the full rhythm and blues, and mainstream use of the term refers to a modern version of soul and funk-influenced pop music (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R&B). shantytowns A term for the black informal settlements that originally ringed South African towns, and later grew from overcrowding in the official black ‘townships’ built by government during apartheid. These ‘shack’ settlements are constructed largely of waste materials by the inhabitants, and have mushroomed from the 1980s until today. sefela/difela A type of melodic recitative poetry performed by Sotho migrant workers containing commentary on the experience of migrant labour. shebeen An illegal private house of entertainment selling beer and liquor to black people. simanje-manje A style of mbaqanga usually featuring a male lead singer and a four-member female chorus, performing blends of urban neo-traditional and marabi vocal music backed by Western instruments at stage shows and on records. It is directed specifically at urban workers, migrants, and rural Africans. slumyard An unauthorised urban African residential neighbourhood in an industrial, warehouse or abandoned white area on the fringes of a large town. Most Africans had been removed from such yards by 1939. stokvel A working-class rotating credit association with entertainment, social, and economic functions. style A distinctive system of meaningful forms or method of treating characteristic elements, organised around the expressive purposes and outlook of its practitioners. Also, complexes of metaphoric symbols, forms and value orientations labelled and recognised by their participants and used to mark identity. syncretism The blending of resources from different cultures in order to produce qualitatively new forms in adaptation to changing conditions. tickey draai (Afrikaans, ‘turn on a tickey’ – a threepence) A coloured–Afrikaans dance derived from Cape square dancing in which couples turn rapidly around in one spot. Also, a guitar style popular between 1880 and 1930, used to accompany this and other black dances in the eastern Cape, Kimberley, and Johannesburg.

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tonic solfa A simplified system for notating vocal music, using letters and punctuation marks rather than notes and staffs. It is based upon tonic-dominant-subdominant harmony and has been used since the mid-nineteenth century to teach music in African (and AfricanAmerican) mission schools and churches. township Before 1991, the official term for urban residential areas where Africans were authorised to rent houses built by the government, subject to the Group Areas Act of 1950. Replaced the obsolete ‘location’ and did not properly apply to freehold or slumyard areas. Despite their names, Western Native Township was a location; Prospect Township a slumyard. Today ‘township’ remains in use as a residual term for the old black group areas, and the term ‘location’ (kasi; ekasi ) is common in black colloquial speech. traditional Describes forms with no perceptible Western influence or, on occasion, forms perceived by Africans as entirely indigenous and African in origin. tsaba-tsaba A working-class urban African dance, popular in the 1940s. Also a syncretic style of African urban music blending African melody and rhythm, American swing, and Latin American conga and rumba, used to accompany the tsaba-tsaba dance. tsotsi A term for African street thugs or gangsters, current since the mid-1940s. A corruption of the American word ‘zoot suit’, it suggested a clever, street-wise petty criminal or hustler, flashily dressed in urban American fashion. Today it applies broadly to any young, potentially violent African urban criminal. tsotsitaal (flytaal; mensetaal ) The Afrikaans-based urban African proletarian dialect, spoken by all urban African proletarians up until the 1960s, but especially by young juvenile delinquents, some of whom spoke no other language. tula n’divile A style of urban African proletarian music of the 1920s, blending Xhosa melodies and American ragtime and performed in shebeens, especially in Johannesburg’s Western Native Township (a location). umqhafi A type of urban proletarian Zulu street musician of the 1920s, influenced by American popular culture and participating in neither Christian nor traditional-pagan social systems. See oorlams, abaphakathi. urban African A permanent resident of an urban area with no direct connection, or intention of returning, to any rural area. urban (performance) style Any style developed in a city and in response to urban residence; being of the city and not merely in it. Western Anything deriving from European or American society or culture, regardless of previous origins. Thus black American performance styles are part of Western influence on black South Africans. white A person of reputedly complete European ancestry. zabalazo (mzabalaza) A term for the explicitly political ‘protest’ songs of the 1980s, especially popular for mass performance at rallies held by trade unions and political organisations. Zionism Separatist church movements that blend traditional African and Christian belief and ritual, producing new syncretic religious forms. Led by ‘prophets’, they aid cultural adaptation and revitalisation among African proletarians.

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