Music of South Africa

• 1. Introduction

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  The music of South Africa carries within it a story that begins before anyone thought to write it down. Enoch Sontonga composed Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika in 1897, a hymn that would eventually become the national anthem of a unified democratic nation decades later. That a single song could travel from a missionary school classroom to the halls of a new democracy tells you something essential about this place: music here has never been merely entertainment.

  Long before Sontonga put pen to paper, the African, European, and Asian cultural currents that moved through southern Africa were already fusing into something the world had never heard. By the end of the nineteenth century, Cape Town had grown large enough to draw foreign musicians across the ocean, including American ragtime players who arrived to find audiences already primed for something new. In the 1890s, Orpheus McAdoo's Jubilee Singers brought African-American spirituals to South African stages, and the crowd that heard them began almost immediately to reshape what they heard.

  What happened next is the subject of this documentary. How do you tell the story of a musical culture that kept reinventing itself under the pressure of one of the twentieth century's most brutal systems of racial control? How does music thrive in a shebeen where Black South Africans were forbidden from buying alcohol at licensed premises? How does a banned song become a coded tribute that everyone understands? And how does a choir that traced its origins to a series of dreams go on to win five Grammy Awards?

  Solomon Linda's recording of "Mbube" in 1939 would go on to seed two American pop hits in the following decades, while Linda himself died with almost nothing. Lucky Dube would become one of the best-selling artists in South African history while drawing on a Jamaican musical tradition sparked by a concert in Zimbabwe. Die Antwoord would challenge hip-hop conventions by rapping in English, Afrikaans, and local slang. The music of South Africa keeps moving, keeps absorbing, keeps insisting on being heard.

• 2. Shebeens and Marabi

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  In 1927, Black South Africans were forbidden from selling alcohol or entering licensed premises. That single law helped give birth to one of the most vital musical genres the country ever produced.

  The discovery of gold and diamonds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pulled Black workers from villages into the mines of South Africa's cities. But the Natives Land Act of 1913 barred them from owning property even in those cities, and so slums grew in their place. Into this world came the shebeens, illegal drinking establishments run predominantly by women who drew on traditional beer-brewing knowledge learned in rural areas. These women, who produced and sold traditional beer known locally as "Umqombothi", became known as "Shebeen Queens".

  The shebeens became the only spaces where mineworkers and slum residents could express themselves freely, and the music that filled them was jazz fusing with African traditional music to create something entirely new. By the end of the 1920s, this style, called marabi, had swept through the shebeens. Its home was Sophiatown, a vibrant multiracial suburb, and its reputation was mixed at best. Drug dealers, criminals, and prostitution were regularly associated with the music, and educated Black South Africans joined White South Africans in condemning it.

  None of that condemnation slowed it down. By the 1940s and 1950s, marabi was at its peak. It produced stars who would go on to reshape South African and international music: Miriam Makeba, Dolly Rathebe, Hugh Masekela, and Abdullah Ibrahim all came of age in this world. The style that respectable society dismissed as the music of the underclass turned out to be the training ground for the country's greatest artists.

• 3. Voices That Carried

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  Solomon Linda recorded "Mbube" in 1939 with his Original Evening Birds, and the song was probably the first African recording to sell more than 100,000 copies. It also provided the melodic foundation for The Weavers' "Wimoweh" in 1951 and The Tokens' "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" in 1961, two American pop hits that reached audiences who would never have heard of Solomon Linda or of the Zulu a cappella tradition he was working in.

  That tradition, which came to be known as mbube, had spread from the Natal area across much of South Africa during the 1930s. A harsher variant called isikhwela jo flourished from the late 1940s into the 1960s. National interest in the style cooled in the 1950s until Radio Zulu began broadcasting to Natal, Transvaal, and the Orange Free State in 1962, reviving the audience.

  The group that would eventually carry Zulu a cappella to the world had its origins not in a studio but in a dream. Joseph Shabalala experienced a series of visions in 1964 in which he heard the melodies that would define Ladysmith Black Mambazo's distinctive sound. Their first album, Amabutho, released in 1973, became the first gold record by Black musicians in South Africa, selling over 25,000 copies.

  The decisive moment of international recognition came when American musician Paul Simon included Ladysmith Black Mambazo on his Graceland album in 1986, followed by a world tour in 1987. Graceland won the Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year. Simon then produced the group's first US release, Shaka Zulu, which won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in 1988. As of 2024, the ensemble has accumulated 17 Grammy nominations and five wins across a four-decade relationship with the awards. The Stellenbosch University Choir, founded in 1936 by William Morris, stands as the oldest continuously running choir in the country, a separate thread in the same tradition of communal voice.

• 4. Mbaqanga and the Township Sound

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  The word "mbaqanga" means "dumpling" but connotes something homemade, something local. Jazz saxophonist Michael Xaba coined the term, and he meant it as a slight: he disliked the emerging style that bassist Joseph Makwela and guitarist Marks Mankwane were developing in the early 1960s, incorporating electric instruments and influences from marabi and kwela into a funkier, more African sound.

  Mbaqanga's vocal architecture grew out of American doo wop, but South African bands like The Skylarks and the Manhattan Brothers adapted it by adding a fifth harmony part to the American four-part model. The Dark City Sisters were the dominant vocal group of the early 1960s. Aaron Jack Lerole added groaning male vocals to the female harmonies, and then Simon "Mahlathini" Nkabinde took over that role and became perhaps the most influential and best-known South African "groaner" of the twentieth century.

  The style reached its most danceable form, called mgqashiyo, when Mankwane and Makwela joined forces with Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, backed by the Makhona Tsohle Band. That band included saxophonist-turned-producer West Nkosi, rhythm guitarist Vivian Ngubane, and drummer Lucky Monama. The outfit recorded for Gallo Record Company and achieved significant national success.

  Miriam Makeba, who had emerged from the marabi world, released the US hit "Pata Pata" in 1967. Hugh Masekela's "Grazing in the Grass" reached number one on the Billboard pop chart in 1968. Pennywhistle jive, which came before mbaqanga, had its own international dimension: Willard Cele is credited with creating the pennywhistle style by placing a six-holed flute between his teeth at an angle, and the style spawned groups of street flautists who played across South African cities in the 1950s, including in white areas where police arrested them for causing public disturbances.

• 5. Apartheid, Resistance, and Sound

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  In 1962, the South African government launched Bantu Radio as a tool of separate development, intended to keep different ethnic communities listening to their own folk traditions. What it got instead was a platform that recording studios immediately used to promote pop stars. The government responded with a crackdown on lyrics, censoring songs deemed a "public hazard".

  The three composers considered the "fathers of South African art music" navigated apartheid in sharply different ways. Stefans Grové became one of the first white composers to incorporate Black African music into his work and openly rejected apartheid. Arnold van Wyk composed nationalistic works that the government endorsed, though he was personally reluctant to support the administration. Hubert Du Plessis was a committed Afrikaner nationalist who felt a "growing consciousness" of heritage in his chamber music, orchestral pieces, and piano works.

  Stimela, the afro-fusion band formed in the early 1980s by Ray Phiri, who had previously led The Cannibals, navigated these boundaries through its music. The band sang in English and various South African languages, including Chichewa, the Malawian language, at a time when the government promoted "retribalization" in Black music. A 1984 duet featuring white singer Katie Pennington, titled "Where Did We Go Wrong", was rejected outright by radio stations. Songs like "Whispers in the Deep", which advocated for fearless expression, were banned from the state-controlled SABC. Yet Stimela's 1986 album "Look, Listen and Decide" achieved bestseller status and went gold and platinum.

  The Voëlvry movement in the late 1980s channeled dissatisfaction from the other side of the racial divide: Afrikaans-speaking white artists led by singer-songwriter Johannes Kerkorrel and his Gereformeerde Blues Band, along with Bernoldus Niemand and Koos Kombuis, built a counter-culture explicitly hostile to the National Party and conservative Afrikanerdom. The movement was named after Kerkorrel's 1989 regional tour. In township pop, Dan Tshanda and then Sello Chicco Twala pushed the "bubblegum" style into political territory. Twala's "We Miss You Manelo" was a coded tribute to Nelson Mandela; his collaboration with Mzwakhe Mbuli, "Papa Stop the War", made the stakes explicit.

• 6. After 1994

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  When South African media were liberalised in 1994, kwaito arrived as the sound of a generation that had grown up under apartheid and was now stepping into a different world. The genre originated in Soweto, Johannesburg, built on house music structures with African sounds and samples, slower tempos, and deep bass lines. Stars including Trompies, Bongo Maffin, TKZee, Mandoza, and Boom Shaka defined the form.

  Afrikaans music experienced something unexpected after the end of apartheid. Losing state protection and promotion, the Afrikaans-speaking community appeared to turn inward in the best possible way, spontaneously embracing its own language and culture. By 2004, a Steve Hofmeyr album was named the best-selling album of the year in South Africa. In 2007, Bok van Blerk's song about Boer War general Koos de la Rey became a national debate about whether it represented a call for political revival or simply cultural nostalgia.

  Gospel had its own surge: Rebecca Malope's 1995 album Shwele Baba was a major success, and in the 2000s, Vuyo Mooena became the best-selling gospel artist in the country, recording in Venda, Shangaan, Sotho, Zulu, and Xhosa on a single album.

  In Durban in the early 2010s, a young generation of producers working with FL Studio developed gqom, a minimal, bass-heavy sound built on repetitive patterns that departed from the four-on-the-floor structure of other house music. Pioneered by producers including DJ Lag, Rudeboyz, and Distruction Boyz, gqom eventually crossed international cultural lines when the South Korean boy band BTS incorporated its rhythmic elements into their 2018 track "Idol" from their Love Yourself: Answer album. FAKA's music from their Amaqhawe EP was selected by Donatella Versace for the Versace Spring 2019 Menswear Collection fashion show. Amapiano, a subgenre combining house and kwaito elements, emerged in the mid-2010s and became the country's most globally recognized contemporary sound, carried in part by Master KG and Nomcebo Zikode's "Jerusalema".