1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Music as a Force for Social Change
Dr Angela Impey
Ethnomusicologist, South Africa
Our stories are collaborations of past and present, they are transplanted and indigenous and link us to family and culture throughout the country and throughout the world,and our artists are making the most of them.
Picture a dark, dank, dilapidated hall in downtown Johannesburg. In it there are no adornments save a few rows of broken plastic chairs and one or two bare electric lightbulbs hanging from the ceiIing in the centre of the room. On one end of the hall there is a low wooden stage in front of which is positioned a wooden table and a single chair.
It is a Saturday night, approaching midnight. People are slowly drifting off the dark streets and into the hall. The majority of those who enter are men. They are Zulu migrant workers who live in the city for periods of up to 10 months of the year, working in factories, on the gold mines or in the inner city as company security guards.
Once in the hall, they begin to congregate in tight groups, leaning inward towards one another and begin to sing softly, haltingly, in close three-part harmonies, a capella style. They are preparing for a competition they call ISICATHAMIYA,literally translated "a stalking approach", descriptive of the soft-footed dance styles, actions and songs they perform. The choirs are made up of "homeboys", men who come from the same villages or regions of rural KwaZulu Natal, an area to the north-east of South Africa. These weekly ISICATHAMIYA competitions serve to assert home-ties and to affirm regional identities.
This is the stage of the evening they call "ipractisi",practice time. It is the time to perfect voice parts, to make final corrections to lyrics, to remind themselves and each other of the finer details of their carefully choreographed dance steps. Later they will compete in front of a judge and the choir which exhibits the most synchronized actions and the most creative song arrangements will be awarded a small sum of money. On a more prestigious night, they may win a goat or a cow, but it is the pride and prestige gained from being awarded first place that is the incentive which attract the participants to the competitions.
The groups are distinguished from one another by their outfits. Each choir is immaculately dressed in a unique colour combination of three-piece suits, two-tone shoes, white gloves, pocket handkerchiefs and shining costume jewellery. The leaders of each choir wears a white sash across his body, loudly embroidered with the name of their group: The King Star Brothers, The Darktown Strutters, The Hundred Percent Brothers.
While the choirs prepare themselves for the competition, the atmosphere is thick with anticipation. One delegate from each group has been selected to comb the city streets in search of a judge. The judge must be a white man; he must be unknown and therefore unbiased. He is often a hobo found sleeping on a sidewalk or a late night inner-city kid found slouched outside a rough city discotheque. He will be approached with great humility and skilfully lured into the hall with offers of beer, cigarettes and a night of sweet music. He will be seated at the lone table facing the stage and told to select the three best choirs of the evening. For the remainder of the night, and often way into the following day, he will have to dedicate his attention respectfully and absolutely to the choirs.
The singers will begin their performance from the back of the hall and will process past either side of the judge, subtly drawing his attention to themselves as they pass him by, pointing out their matching cuff-links and socks, or the beaded badges of the new South African flag they may have pinned to their lapels. They will salute, smile and stare imploringly at him, all the while maintaining the absolute rhythmic precision, the steps, shimmering hand movements and respective vocal parts of the song.
The origins of ISICATHAMIYA rest in the African-American minstrelsy and ragtime tradition which came to South Africa at the turn-of-the-century by way of vaudeville troupes from the United States. These troupes greatly impressed Zulu migrant workers, who adopted stylistic elements of minstrelsy performance and combined them with izingoma zomtshado (Zulu wedding songs) and later, with a mixture of western popular song styles such as ie ilokilol (rock'n'roll) to form a performance genre whose identity is based specifically in the urban context. These competitions have thus survived almost a century with religious dedication. These weekly gatherings have continued to provide a comfortable space for Zulu migrant workers, whose reality in the cities is one of dislocation from home, family and community, and where conflict and hardship experienced in the everyday can be dramatized and temporarily discarded. It is a space where meaning can be negotiated through the communal design and performance of song and style; where dignity is sought through a few moments of glory in a social context which is otherwise dehumanizing and powerless.
ISICATHAMIYA, like countless similar semi-urban South African performance genres which developed during the harsh years of apartheid rule, has been a medium through which a particular cultural group has been able to think aloud about itself and their changing environment around it. That the participants of ISICATHAMIYA have chosen to seek dignity through the very symbols which are associated with their own oppressors,those forces which have denied them dignity and selfhood,demonstrates how symbols can be claimed through performance, reinvented and manipulated to serve the needs of another in powerful ways.
The performing arts have played a major role in the negotiation of social transformation in South Africa. In little more than a century, the southernmost tip of Africa has witnessed the growth of a highly sophisticated, modern society, with far the most advanced economy of the entire African continent. Its complex infrastructure is the result of the mass migration of diverse peoples, cultures and politics to the rich gold and diamond mines around which most of our present-day cities are constructed. The music and cultures that have emerged from the ferment of colonial conquest, dispossession and industrialisation count among the most resilient examples of African urban expressive culture (ErImann 1991:1). These diverse and often intensely passionate expressive forms have clearly both reflected social change as well as served as media through which transformation has been facilitated, in spite of, or arguably as a result of, severe state control, oppression and social division.
Thus the origins, development and structure of performing arts in South Africa cannot be disregarded from the complex social relations, economic structures, cultural traditions and individual creativity of the country. In this paper, I will briefly describe the development of some of the dominant urban music forms, and attempt to demonstrate how music, and the cultural contexts which have developed around music- making, have been inextricably linked to social action in South Africa.
We begin with the 1930s and 40s in the slumyards of Johannesburg and Cape Town. These neighbourhoods, known respectively as Sophiatown and District 6, were set apart from the usual South African city suburb, the positioning of which was meticulously designed to separate people of different racial identities. These ghettos were inhabited by people of all racial, religious and cultural persuasions. They were overpopulated and squalid; they were known for their dangerous gangs, their illegal drinking houses ("shebeens") and for their extraordinary cultural energy. It was in these congested city spaces where the beginnings of a South African working class identity began to be explored through the performing arts.
"Shebeens" were set up in the homes or backyards of slum dwellers. They were characteristically run by women who were refused formal employment status in the cities and whose only source of income was made possible through the illegal sale of home-brewed beer and prostitution. An enterprising "Shebeen Queen" would attract a healthy clientele by providing live music and much of the musical innovation of the day was promoted by shebeen owners who were aware that attractive women, lively dancers and paying customers followed the most popular musicians. The entertainers came from different musical backgrounds, reflecting the ethnic and regional diversity of their residents. In Johannesburg, musicians in Sophiatown came originally as migrant workers from various regions of South Africa and from as far afield as Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia. Musical groups in District 6 in Cape Town were a mix of Malay peoples (who had been imported to South Africa as indentured labour) and the so called Cape coloured or mixed race peoples,an Afrikaans-speaking people of Khoi-Khoi, Xhosa and white settler origin. Shebeen musicians had thus to assimilate elements from a variety of musical traditions into innovative, flexible urban styles. Their music had to appeal to a broad mass of working class people whose only tie was their common experience of urban hardship and racial oppression.
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