Township music
| Township music | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | South African jazz |
| Cultural origins | 1920s Johannesburg slums; 1950s South African townships |
| Typical instruments | concertina, double bass, drum kit, electric guitar, saxophone, tin whistle, trumpet, violin |
| Subgenres | |
Township music is any of various music genres created by Bantu peoples living in poor, racially segregated urban areas of South Africa ("townships") during the 20th century.
The principle genres of township music are mbaqanga, kwela, and marabi. Marabi evolved from jazz influence in the 1920s. Immigrants from Malawi developed the kwela sound by fusing Malawian music with marabi. Mbaqanga music is marabi's successor. It, too, is jazz-like; its roots are in marabi, American jazz, and traditional Zulu music.
The origins of township music in South Africa began from the formation of townships, which are urban residential areas where Africans were authorized to rent houses built by the government during the 1950s. Binns and Nel state in their article that townships were the poor, black residential areas created under apartheid, explicitly revealing that these townships were not for the wealthy Westerners living in South Africa, but for the lower class of South Africa. According to Ballantine, legislation was passed during the 1950s to further consolidate the apartheid state, and violent methods of implementation also assisted this along. In fact, the most serious legislation that was passed for urban black music was the Group Areas Act of 1950, which separated all racially mixed neighborhoods by removing black communities and relocating them on the peripheries into townships. Williams confirms this relocation by describing them as similar to African American ghettos and illustrates the emotion of musicians within the townships as a lack of power, which resulted in the musicians' need to explore alternative music paths. To those who tried to suppress the lower-class Africans, jazz aspired to (among other things) musical and social equality, which was viewed as a form of rebellion during the time, hence its suppression. According to Ballantine, "the white and racist South African state" was forming an ideology and program for separating and turning black South Africans against one another.
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