South Africa’s shared and unique history is played
out in music.   BY SETH WATTER


There is great, unavoidable joy to be felt when first listening to Next Stop”¦ Soweto, Vol. 2: Soultown. R&B, Funk & Psych Sounds from the Townships 1969-1976, recently released on Strut. Knowing just a slice of the historical and political context of the time and place from which this music comes—even without understanding the languages of the lyrics—certainly adds dimension to this experience.


South Africa’s ”˜blues’ stood as a symbol
of black resistance to apartheid

Critics and scholars alike have long acknowledged the debt of black popular music to an illustrious pan-African tradition. What is less well known is the extent to which contemporary South African music springs out of American genre stylings. Paul Simon’s tepid Graceland album of 1986 is generally cited as the channel through which South African music broke through to an international audience. But, as John Shoup writes, it is because the local music of the townships already bore such a distinctly Anglophone inflection that it became immediately appealing to a Western musical audience.

Far from a recent development, history records the influx of white minstrel groups into South Africa as early as 1848. Like their brothers in America, the black population soon tailored the derogatory genre to its own demands. The purely vocal style, called mbube, gave way in the early twentieth century to the jazz-influenced marabi. These “illiterate improvisations,” as one critic dubbed them, functioned as the spontaneous expression of the urban ghettos.

In his “Brief History of South African Popular Music,” from which the above description takes its cues, Christopher Ballantine claims for marabi the same status accorded the blues in America. Both make use of “cyclical harmonic patterns,” a point of intersection that belies a common origin in ages-old African ceremonial music.

Marabi gave way to a more overtly jazz-based idiom, the versatile mbaqanga, a Zulu word connoting everything from “everyday cornmeal porridge” to “the poorman’s soup.” Unavoidably, mbaqanga became the symbol of black resistance to segregation and apartheid oppression. All the more reason for the ruling legislators to decimate the township scene with the Group Areas Act of 1950, purifying all remaining racially mixed neighborhoods of the black populace—and in effect disbanding the big swing bands that had thrived there for decades.

“By 1970,” writes scholar David Coplan in his liner notes to Next Stop”¦ Soweto, Vol. 2, “there was not a single legal city venue for black performers.” The mbaqanga sound lived on in small ensembles, a strictly for-us-by-us phenomenon without studio amenities or wider public interest. The more advanced township artists like Hugh Masekela, Dollar Brand and The Blue Notes found themselves in self-imposed exile in order to find work; and while the South African influence is clearly heard in their music, its hybridity and ambition set it apart from the “poorman’s soup” which gave sustenance to the black population on a daily basis.


1970s bring a stylistic shift from upbeat jazz to
darker Western-influenced songs

This is roughly the period covered by the first installment of Strut’s thoroughly researched Next Stop”¦ Soweto series, a wonderful collection of marabi, mbaqanga, and kwela (pennywhistle) music. The current volume, the second of a projected trilogy, is a significant departure borne out by the anthology’s subtitle: Soul, Funk & Organ Grooves From the Townships 1969-1976. While this album and its predecessor share some of the same artists, such as the Mgababa Queens and the Mahotella Queens, one can immediately hear the stylistic shift enacted under the all-pervasive influence of Jimi Hendrix.

The Mahotellas’ “Zwe Kumusha”, which appeared on Soweto’s first volume, is an upbeat folk-jazz number full of beautiful vocal harmonies, radiant guitar work and wistful saxophone. Their contribution to Vol. 2 is like skipping from Serge Gainsbourg’s “La Javanaise” to Histoire de Melody Nelson. The two could not be more different.

“Wozani Mahipi” (“Come On, Hippies”) is darker, its organ-driven rhythm a more traditional Western pulse. The guitars have become hard and acid-fried, like a South African version of Cream. The Queens harmonize between their leader Mahlathini’s groaning chorus, hailing the young rock fans of Soweto who rebel against the working-class values of their elders.


Liberating music likely influenced 1976 student uprising

While guitars had long been a traditional component of the South African ensemble, the electric organs and keyboards introduce an element of 1960s psychedelia previously absent in township music. Ripping organ refrains and solos appear on The Monks’ “Blockhead”, The Toreadors’ “Gwinyitshe”, The Heroes’ “Funky Message”, The Klooks’ “Nkuli’s Shuffle”, and Bazali Bam’s song of the same title, among others.

At a certain point there is little aside from language preventing a track like the fabulous SA Move’s “Skophom” from appearing on an American Nuggets compilation; the funky organ pyrotechnics and straightforward rock rhythm would sit comfortably alongside The Electric Prunes and The Blues Magoos.

In a different vein, artists like the Heshoo Beshoo Band (which Coplan translates as “moving forward with force”) retain traditional instrumentation of guitar, bass, drums and sax but push the mbaqanga sound into the realm of 60s “freedom jazz”—not quite Clifford Thornton or Archie Shepp but damn soulful, with a terrific solo by altoist and bandleader Henry Sithole.

The highlights on this installment of Next Stop”¦ Soweto are legion, spanning the samba-driven instrumental “Soul Imbaq” by The Soul Prophets to the rousing spiritual funk of Philip Malela & The Mover’s “Intandane”. What emerges is a tremendously fertile and exciting music whose liberating effect likely exerted an influence on the Soweto student uprising of 1976, where this collection’s periodization ends.

A tragedy of some 500 deaths, the student resistance to the enforced educational use of Dutch-derived Afrikaans—the “oppressor’s language”—capped a period of increasingly brutal apartheid mandates. “The songs on this compilation,” writes Coplan, “are in that sense the first rock(s) thrown at the System.”


Language barrier can’t hide political commentary

Though we in America will not understand the Zulu spoken by these musicians, and therefore will likely remain ignorant of their literal content, critics contend that political commentary in South African popular music is more implicit than anything.

Like jazz in the Soviet Union, even its instrumentals are politicized due to their very structure of feeling and openness to formal experimentation. Anything that looks beyond the narrow confines of government-imposed sanctions will necessarily appear explosive, subversive, and otherwise undesirable due to the joy it lends these so-called “wretched of the earth.”