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COPYRIGHT 2001 Center For Black Music Research
"It is in the production of audiences that the political and social reality of art can be found."
--John Fiske (1989)
Many of you will have already remarked on the word traditional in the title of this article and perhaps prepared yourself for yet more ink spilled in the quest to define this rare, possibly mythical, concept of musical style. But it is my purpose here to develop rather than to authenticate the notion of tradition, and I shall not be concerned (regrettably) with the sounds of southern Africa that evoke most ineffably its cultural geography: the demonstrably indigenous, audibly other-than-Western music of imagined communities of custom that ethnomusicologists might deem truly traditional. Yes, players of acoustic percussion, string, and wind instruments made of materials animal and vegetable can still be found if one has the endurance and four-wheel-drive vehicle required to seek them out. People who sing in the old prehymnodic way, with scales unadjusted to Western harmonic intervals, are still yet more common in South Africa's rural areas. I propose rather to give up the ghost of alien organicological and tonal categories and simply use traditional to mean what black African people in South Africa, and more specifically, Zulu people in Johannesburg and Durban, mean by it. Their conception, a la Chris Waterman's Yoruba slogan, "Our tradition is a very modern tradition" (Waterman 1982), is that musical tradition is quite adequately maintained and signified through continuities of genre, verbal idioms of experience, and polyvocalities of tone, tune, and texture, of hue and cry. Where tradition is used to signify correspondences between aesthetic structures and an idealized social order, such correspondences are created through the specifically musical qualities of style, timbre, texture, and rhythmical flow (Erlmann 1966, 237). Electric guitars, basses, and keyboards; pentatonic and hexatonic 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, nude (insouciant rather than provocative) breasts; antiphonal lead vocalists and a chorus of back-up singers; synchronized hip swinging and stealthy Afro-Christian step-dancing--all are part of Zulu traditional popular music. Indeed, Joseph Nhlapo (2000, 29-30) has convincingly argued in a recent thesis that maskanda guitar need not be termed "neo-traditional" as I had done (Coplan 1985, 268) but simply "traditional."
Ezodumo (It Shall Sound), the state broadcaster's (SABC) single live-performance music television offering explicitly devoted to "traditional" music, features bands of rural-born labor migrants whose only (amplified, of course) acoustic instruments are the guitar, the German button concertina, and piano accordion. The gourd or mouth-resonated monochords, hand-beaten wooden drums, and reed and animal horn aerophones of preindustrial Africa are almost never heard on the broadcast media, although they are still played in rural communities. Significantly for the present discussion, when such instruments do appear on an urban stage, it is as syncretic elements in the eclectic ensemble music of serious African jazz composer/performers. These include Johannesburg's Sipho Mabuse, who employs a lesiba (mouth-resonated quill-reed monochord) player from Lesotho, and Cape Town's Pops Mohammad, who plays Khoi stringed instruments in an explicit attempt to musically reconstitute his self-avowed Khoi aboriginal origins. (1) No musical ethnonationalist, Mohammad also performs his own original improvisations on the twenty-one-stringed Malinke kora.
In brief, traditional for black South Africans means the Afro-industrial popular music of African urban labor migrants and dispossessed peasants. And the particular uses that they make of the term must figure prominently in this discussion. In any music chain-store outlet in the formerly "white," now broadly middle-class, suburbs, one will not find any shelf, bin, or CD labeled "traditional." Black people with rural or small-town roots do not buy at these outlets, even when they reside or work in those areas. They buy their music from inner-city cassette stalls or street-corner pirates or at the general supply stores where they buy the primus stoves, portable players, and other items that comprise their mobile material culture. This has been the case since the early 1960s, when apartheid legal structures intended to keep rural and small-town migrants from urbanizing permanently either in residence or culture began to have practical effect. Among the expressions of this enforcement of what the white government called "influx control" in popular culture was the emergence of a new, more rural-derived indigenous style of music known as mqhashiyo (bouncy), `simanje-manje (the now-now thing), or mbaqanga (everyday cornmeal porridge). Important exponents of the style included Simon Nkabinde, known as Mahlathini, and his female backing vocalists the Queens, as well as Zulu lead-guitar virtuosos such as John "Phuzhushukela" Bhengu, whose music would now be called maskanda (Afrikaans: musikant). The term mbaqanga is interesting in this connection, as it had been in wide circulation since at least the mid-1950s as a label for the local style of African jazz band music that appropriated well-known folk melodies and phrasing from a variety of African-language corpuses. The audience for mbaqanga was mostly working-class urban African jazz enthusiasts, for whom these homegrown jazz arrangements of folk material were a staple form of musical sustenance. Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masakela both built their early international careers on the elaboration of mbaqanga. When the leopard-skin-bedecked Mahlathini and his Zulu headdressed, beaded beauties were subsequently awarded this term, it was because apartheid had cleared the near-suburban black neighborhoods and closed the performance spaces that had nurtured African jazz in the city. Mbaqanga was now used to identify the musical daily bread of uprooted African proletarians who were not allowed to put down roots in the city but could not sustain themselves in the country.
In those days, more than thirty years ago, Mahlathini and the Queens did not perform in Johannesburg's elegant theaters and halls or on the prestigious stages of Europe and North America, as they did during their revival in the 1990s. Nor could they, under the terms of the Separate Amenities Act, use the venues African jazz orchestras such as the Harlem Swingsters had used in the postwar era. They instead put on musical variety shows at segregated black cinemas in the inner cities or in dingy, ramshackle halls in the new municipal African townships such as Soweto in Johannesburg or KwaMashu in Durban. And unforgettable shows they were. Antiphonal Zulu vocals were backed up by an electric guitar band, and dancing was to a souped-up [??] township beat. Multiple costume changes displayed the range of contemporary African elegance from Zulu fringe skirts and loin skins to Bermuda shorts, sneakers, and baseball caps to svelte evening gowns and...
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