Christopher Ballantine

Re-thinking ‘whiteness’? Identity, change and ‘white’ popular music in post-apartheid South Africa

In South Africa, the prospects for social integration were auspicious after the first democratic elections in 1994. As the popular music of the time shows, it was not only blacks who exulted in the new ‘rainbow’ euphoria: many whites did so too. But for millions of black and white citizens, this moment was short lived. The governments adoption of neo-liberal policies had severe social consequences – which it and the new elite sought to conceal behind populist calls to ‘race’ solidarity, a new racial typecasting and slurs aimed at whites in general. ‘White’ popular music has responded to these reversals in a variety of ways – including direct criticism, sharp satire, humour and the expression of ‘fugitive’ identities. Perhaps more remarkably, white musicians have stressed the need for self-reinvention in music that is ironic, unpredictable, transgressive. These songs play with malleable identities; tokens of a disdain for fixed or essential identities, they are hopeful signposts towards a more integrated future.

A brief history of South African popular music

No-one could have foreseen it and, with hindsight, it looks like the intrusion of an impudent gatecrasher. The sudden, unheralded arrival of South African popular music at, or very near, the centre of the international arena is surely the single most startling event in the recent history of popular music. The massive Human Rights Now Concert in Abidjan on 9 October 1988, part of the world series organised by Amnesty International, made the point once again. The featured superstars, in what was one of the largest popular music events ever staged in Africa, included not only the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Sting, but also the South African band Johnny Clegg and Savuka. One thinks of other recent examples. At the Nelson Mandela birthday concert at Wembley in June 1988, South African musicians, such as Amampondo or the ageing Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, were as much of a draw as Whitney Houston and Dire Straits: an astonishing turnaround for a musical culture that, not long ago, was little known outside the sub-continent. And the Bishop Tutu Peace Concert, scheduled to take place in Los Angeles (but finally postponed), was to have been the biggest line-up of South African musicians ever to appear on an international platform. Yet, despite the unprecedented international exposure of South African music, despite the record-breaking success of Graceland (and the world tour that followed), despite the award of a Grammy to Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the fact that music

Music and emancipation: the social role of black jazz and vaudeville in South Africa between the 1920s and the early 1940s

Within the specified sub‐culture, a number of beliefs existed about musics role. On the one side, were a set of beliefs that were essentially liberal and individualistic in character — in part a consequence of the petit‐bourgeois outlook and practice of (especially) the African National Congress at the time. On the other side, more radical views and practices existed, on the basis of which music might lend assistance to efforts for more fundamental social change. Of particular interest here was the assertion that there was intrinsically a value in jazz bands or vaudeville troupes incorporating musical and other materials that were African; and this in turn was part of a broad groundswell of militant protest in the early 1940s, expressed ideologically in the philosophy of New Africanism, and politically in (for example) the formation of the ANC Youth League.

Concert and Dance: the foundations of black jazz in South Africa between the twenties and the early forties

The explosive development of a jazz-band tradition in South African cities from the 1920s – closely allied to the equally rapid maturation of a vaudeville tradition which has been in existence at least since the First World War – is one of the most astonishing features of urban-black culture in that country in the first half of the century. Surrounded by myriad other musics – styles forged by migrant workers; traditional styles transplanted from the countryside to the mines; petty bourgeois choral song; music of the church and of western-classical provenance – jazz and vaudeville quickly established themselves as the music which represented and articulated the hopes and aspirations of the most deeply urbanised sectors of the African working class.

Joseph Shabalala: Chronicles of an African composer

Ethnomusicologists generally have laboured under the ideology that the music they studied belonged to societies that were culturally homogeneous. Music has been treated as a kind of mystical outpouring of a folk collective, and the diversity of singular, creative individuals has tended to be ignored. In the case of Africa, this has largely led to the presumption of a continent full of music but empty of composers. Against this ideology, this paper proposes the need for a precise ethnography of the creative process. Making a case study of the composer Joseph Shabalala, it looks at, inter alia, aspects of his education as a composer, his methods of composing, and some social, aesthetic and educational issues related to his work as a composer. It also introduces some of Shabalalas own written thoughts on composing music.