SA music: mbaqanga jazz
By the middle of the 1950s, the various strains of South African music were pouring themselves into an exciting melting pot of ideas and forms, propelled in part by the hunger of the vast urban proletariat for entertainment.A key area in this growth was the township of Sophiatown, in Johannesburg, which had grown since the 1930s into a seething cauldron of the new urban lifestyles of black city dwellers. In part because of its ambiguous legal status as a "freehold" area, and its proximity to the urban centre of Johannesburg, Sophiatown attracted the most adventurous performers of the new musical forms, and became a hotbed of the rapidly developing black musical culture.
The old strains of marabi and kwela had begun to coalesce into what is broadly thought of as mbaqanga, the mode of African-inflected jazz that had many and various practitioners, with a large number of bands competing for attention and income. Singing stars such as Miriam Makeba, Dolly Rathebe and Letta Mbulu gained fanatical followings.
The cyclic structure of marabi met with traditional dance styles such as the Zulu indlamu, with a heavy dollop of American big band swing thrown on top. The indlamu tendency crystallised into the "African stomp" style, giving a notably African rhythmic impulse to the music and making it quite irresistible to its new audiences.
The new black urban culture (the music accompanied by a mini-renaissance in other arts such as writing, especially by the group known as the "Drum Generation") also developed a sassy style of its own, based in part on the influence of American movies and the glamour attached to the flamboyant gangsters who were an integral part of Sophiatown life.
That lawless domain was one in which black people could mingle with the more adventurous and liberal whites drawn to the excitements of its vibrant nightlife, becoming a touchstone for the first real cultural and social interchange between the races to take place in South Africa.
Eventually the white Nationalist government brought this vital era to an end, forcibly removing the inhabitants of Sophiatown to townships such as Soweto, outside Johannesburg, in 1960. Sophiatown was razed and the white suburb of Triomf built in its place.
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