Sounds of the "Third Way": identity and the African Renaissance in contemporary South African popular traditional music.

"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 flashy suits. Comedy skits and comical dance turns provided variation and relief amid the musical items but were often outdone by a resident contortionist. Most intriguing, to an outsider anyway, was not the display of a reinvented performative traditionality but its deliberate burlesque in the acrobatic turns and mugging of the animal-skinned male dancers. In the cities and industrial hostels, as least, the self-parodic and crowd-pleasing antics of the icomic (comic) dance routines showed that not taking oneself so seriously is indeed part of African tradition.

During the late 1970s, divisions hardened between urban and determinedly urbanizing workers on the one side and doggedly rural-rooted labor migrants on the other. This was due in part to outbreaks of violence between migrant hostel residents and township communities during the "Soweto Uprising" of 1976-77, which were both a cause and a result of this rural-urban opposition. Public performances of mbaqanga declined as labor migrants sought a lower social profile and audiences drifted away from Mahlathini and his imitators toward the more urbanized African language vocal and instrumental styles of groups like the Soul Brothers. It would take overseas interest and concert tours in the 1990s, not local revival, to bring back Mahlathini from obscurity. Mahlathini was assisted in this by Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a traditional choral ensemble that adjusted Zulu male polyphonic vocalization to fourpart Western harmony in the old isicatamiya style (see Coplan 1985, 65-73; Erlmann 1996). Rich and well known at least locally by the mid-1970s, Ladysmith Black Mambazo arrived on the world stage through its collaboration with American popular singer Paul Simon in the mid-1980s and went on, like Mahlathini, to enjoy international success in "world music" in its own right.

Mahlathini's return from obscurity was likewise accompanied by a host of other ensembles, playing what I am calling "popular traditional" music, which had retained all along their rural, small-town, and urban migrant working-class African-language audiences. These groups included not so much the semi-urban mbaqanga performers as the more rural indigenous styles such as Zulu guitar maskanda, Basotho accordion and drum band (2) vocalists straight from the mines and mine shantytown taverns, and village bands from every corner of the country singing in Xhosa, Pedi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Ndebele, and Swazi. The provision of socially and sexually segregated housing in migrant workers' hostels in urban and mining communities helped to maintain and, more important, to develop popular traditional ensembles in the cities. The main vehicles for what was not simply a revival of popular traditional music but indeed a creative movement closer to indigenous rural-based musical styles than those popular in the 1960s and 1970s were the regular programming on African-language radio and Ezodumo on television. Begun under the older SATV segregated channel system that featured African-language programming on channels 2 (Zulu/Xhosa/Swazi) and 4 (Tswana/North and South Sotho), Ezodumo has survived every structural reorganization of the past decade to root itself firmly for the past few years, not on SABC 2, the staid, what's-good-for-you, "family-viewing" channel, but in prime time on SABC TV1, the channel for the young and frisky. Despite the disdain of many citified viewers, Ezodumo today has the third-highest rating of any regular program on SATV, and the commercial staff cannot cope with the demand from sponsors to purchase advertising time on the show.

Ezodumo is the principal public cultural space in which traditional amplified bands from virtually every black African-language group (other racial groups do not perform on this program) perform and play with both their own and other cultural identities, while attempting to establish themselves as musical professionals and also very clearly having a good time. Peculiarly, traditional bands rarely if ever give live performances in the urban black township as they did in the high apartheid period of the 1970s, nor do they seem to tour the small-town community halls in groaning old buses as they did then, although a few of the bestselling groups, such as that of maskanda composer Phuz'hukemisi and maskanda-gospel group Pure Gold do tour around the country, backed by their recording companies. Ezodumo is hosted in Zulu by producer Bhodloza Nzimande (who also hosts a maskanda music program on Zulu radio) and in Sesotho by Thuso Motaung, a preacher and agony uncle on Sunday morning on Sesotho radio. The other seven African macro-languages are somewhat neglected, although the Ndebele band of lead guitarist Nothembi Mkhwebane and the Tsonga guitar band of Thomas Chauke, who have achieved national fame and popularity though Ezodumo, are among the perennial favorites on the show. Appearances on Ezodumo are likewise behind the production of a new music-video collaboration between Phuz'hukemisi and Nothembi Mkhwebane.

The program presents itself as a repository of a cultural conservatism that is by no means confined to or even identified with rural origins. Indeed, city people with rural or small-town origins, who constitute a major proportion of Ezodumo's audience, criticize the announcers for pitching their presentation in the discursive style of migrant workers. The ensembles themselves are not only recruited from the workers' hostels but are sent over by the recording companies to air their latest recordings, and there are many more requests from the companies to present their groups than available space on the program. Some groups are composed of rural people hoping to find musical success in Johannesburg through the media and who do not care that they are not paid for their appearance. SATV provides these performers with return transport, food, and in some cases, accommodation. Studio sidemen recruited to strengthen an ensemble for the occasion are paid perhaps two hundred rands (twenty dollars). In line with the concept and practice of the broadcast of "traditional" culture on the state media under the present government, as under its white minority predecessor, the professional exposure and the prestige and notoriety "back home" (where the performers are held to properly reside) bestowed by an appearance on television is held to be sufficient reward, and perhaps this is so.

The flow of people and cultural formulation is of such duration and diversity in South Africa that urbanized but not fundamentally Westernized cultural styles are as much a background to concepts of tradition as rural indigenism. Indeed, one might well conceive of contemporary African identity practices, regardless of regional origin, as "cultures of mobility": forms of practice not merely transported by but formulated "on the road" within the social context of multisited, mobile networks of kin, homeboys and girls, and reciprocal friendships. Indeed, in the case of maskanda, the form itself began in the late nineteenth century as a musical expression of self-propelling individuality, as courting songs sung "on feet" (as isiZulu puts it) by young lads on amorous walkabout. When these same young men found themselves confined to the all male black hostels in the towns, they transformed the nostalgic songs of love played by their sweethearts on gourd-bows in the country into the multipart guitar melodies of migrant longing (Clegg 1981, 5). When the early recording companies came to the migrants' hostels in search of musical products for the African market in the 1930s, they found the solitary itinerant guitarist (and violinists and concertina players) competing against one another after the manner of a country stick fight. Over time, the studios recognized that the appeal of the form could be widened by backing up the individual songsmiths and guitarists with ensemble players, creating traditional bands if you will, and later, when urban concerts became established cultural events, with dancers.

Maskanda, still in origin rural traditional music, became popularized and progressively transformed on the road, in the hostel, at the tavern, in township and inner-city halls, on the urban streets, and in the radio and record studios. The style originated in female gourd-resonated monochord songs, was transferred to the solo acoustic guitar as it made its way along country roads toward the city in the hands of male migrants, developed in servants' quarters and workers' hostels, and ended up as an electrified, heavy-beat song and dance-band music in the communal halls and radio and recording studios of black Durban and faraway Johannesburg. In discussing the solo acoustic guitar music of Durban's Shiyani Ngcobo, Katheryn Olsen (2000, 4-6) has observed that Ngcobo employs this early, foundational style of maskanda as a means to construct musical tradition as a "home-space." In this musical practice of the moral imagination, rural Zulu tradition provides a culturally continuous, socially cohesive identity against the background of a lived experience of uprootedness, insecurity, and familial disintegration. The song texts that evoke this home-space foreground images of rural life, but they are images of dissent, conflict, and movement. In this way, musical tradition seen as "established structures of creativity" (Joyner 1975, 262) mobilizes an imagined past and, through the trope of "authenticity," gives meaning to an ambivalent present (Olsen 2000, 9). Ngcobo has also blended in the heavy drum rhythms and poetic style of ngoma group dance competitions, blurring musical genres in a way that provides his mobile, interstitial home-space the authenticity of tradition.

More broadly, innovations in maskanda have kept pace with the form's increased visibility. Rural performers, observing that a folk entertainment has become a sector of the commercial music industry, now form their own bands and try their luck with the urban media market, sometimes appearing on Ezodumo. The musical dominance of the lead guitarist/vocalist/composer over the performance is now sometimes shared with other popular members of the ensemble. Traditional self-praises, apostrophizing the lead performer and his home district and community, now may alternate with a younger vocalist rapping in Zulu on wider topical subjects. Electric keyboard appears in the instrumental ensemble on occasion. Veteran maskanda bandleader Ihashi Elimhlope ("White Horse") has recently recorded a CD, AmaFong Kong ("Cheap Knock-Offs") that in the words of a newspaper reviewer, "is riddled with streetwise lingo--to appeal to younger audiences" (Mofokeng 2000). The CD's title song was turned into a hit by teenage artists Senyaka and Kamazu in the best-selling style of the moment, the youthful "drum and bass" township dance music kwaito, and Ihashi himself has backed pop music stars Boom Shaka on their retro-Zulu hit "Bambanani."

Conversely; urban performances of maskanda have retained some aspects of rural Zulu dance music such as the indescribably powerful and dramatic dance challenges between male dancers, accompanied by the "rolling thunder" of the great isigubu cowhide drums. These challenges, so gripping to the eye and ear, rarely feature in maskanda band performances on Ezodumo. I would be tempted to the facile speculation that they evoke some perceived atavistic power of Zulu militarism that disturbs the senior producer at SATV, if I were not afraid that the next broadcast I see would present such a male dance challenge in full swing. Phuz'ukhemisi noKhetane, a leading maskanda composer and performer whose ensemble built a successful recording and touring career with appearances on Ezodumo, wrote the song "Sicela kuBhodloza" (We Request, Bhodloza) in order to demand that the umgangela (stick fighting) singing and guitar-playing challenges be featured on the program, as well as on Zulu-language radio:

   We give praises to Bhodloza's program
   We dance to the music down in Durban's waves
   I am requesting Bhodloza to announce that we should resume
      killing each other, Nzimande
   I am requesting Bhodloza to announce that we should resume
     killing each other in song.
   We say: "Announce that the fierce song competition should
     resume." (my translation)

SATV management has made several attempts over the years to cancel Ezodumo and alternatively to shift the musical content toward more characteristically urban "township" genres such as "soul-mbaqanga" and kwaito, because, like most highly educated Africans for the past century (see Coplan 1985, 118), they considered popular traditional music embarrassingly premodern and ethnically differentiating for their own ideological self-image. Such attempts were always met with a deluge of protests from the black viewing public, who wanted Ezodumo left as it is. Even Sesotho presenter Thuso Motaung, who briefly departed to further his career in radio, leaving Bhodhloza Nzimande on his own, returned by popular demand.

It is not my purpose to delineate here the musical and performative qualities of maskanda today. I do, however, want to consider these qualities in relation to their ideological significance within the field of cultural production. First, I would note the thorough embeddedness of the form in demonstrably continuous Zulu performance traditions, albeit they are indeed modern traditions. In partial contrast to Zulu mbaqanga performers such as the late Mahlathini, maskanda musicians have not so much innovated in search of a wider commercial audience but in effect have insisted that their audience, now expanding but still largely confined to South Africa, come to them and to what they insouciantly remain: parochial Zulu and proud of it, if pride were to be consciously required. As Nhlapo (2000, 29) puts it, they continue "to reaffirm a specifically African cultural identity and expressive mode, despite its assimilation into a commercialized context." Not that explicit entertainment values are eschewed; as Nhlapo further notes, entertainment is a fundamental expressive principle of maskanda, from the flair for the instrumental technique, the eloquence of the lyrics, the flamboyance of the animal-skin costumes, and the acrobatics of the male dancers to the fetching rotations of the ample derrieres of the female singer/dancers (12-13). This quality explains why the old performances I saw at black inner-city cinemas in the 1970s, as well as the ones that I enjoy today, could be so artfully serious about comedic burlesque. There is even a time-honored term, ukukekela, for antic movements "played" by Zulu suitors to impress a woman with a mixture of amusement and performative prowess.

Second, maskanda currently enjoys a broad popularity among a range of working-class African-languages, not only the Zulu. By the same token, anyone observing the listening habits of primary African-language speakers will find that many listen to stations broadcasting in other languages than their own, indeed ones that they may not even understand. Why? Because they like some of the music styles of other language cultures, even when they understand the lyrics imperfectly or not at all. On Ezodumo, ethnic dance and dress--the more local-exotic the better--of ensembles from all southern African-language groups are popular with viewers of all backgrounds. Exposure through the broadcast media has promoted popular traditional music and dance beyond ethnic boundaries and helped this category of genres secure a place in both the commercial music industry and the urban performance settings, as well as in the musical life of small regional communities. It is important to observe, along with Karin Barber (1997), however, that the broadcast media float in the sea of popular culture that surround it. Maskanda merely surfaces on television and radio; these media do not create it.

For the whole of the twentieth century, the opposition between urban and rural operated as one of the central organizing metaphors in black popular culture and social interaction. Now at the dawn of the twenty-first century, presaged by an epochal nonracial political transformation, the city and the country appear to be negotiating modes of cultural acceptance of one another. Maskanda and the other ethnic styles, too, have now become transculturally accepted, a trend contrary to the previous denigration of forms unreflexively categorized as premodern or pre-Christian. Lead singers and guitarists in popular traditional music have previously been male, but today the music has come full circle and returned to its female roots. Perhaps the most innovative exponents of this trend in performance are female composers and performers such as singer and lead guitarist Tu Nokwe, who plays a style of traditional Zulu pop-rock, and vocalist Busi Mhlongo, whose superb CD UrbanZulu (1999) features an evocative, seamless blend of popular traditional musical resources and sophisticated styles of Afro-jazz-fusion. The title of this award-winning CD has itself become a metaphor for a newly explicit self-recognition of the continuities rather than the disjunctions between rural and urban musical traditions. All this is occurring at a time when other black musical genres in South Africa--including African jazz, gospel, and the most visible form in the country, kwaito--are attempting to flourish by broadly approximating African-American models while retaining and developing a local cultural stylistic character.

Finally, popular (not popular traditional) music of the rest of subSaharan Africa--specifically artists from Congo-Kinshasa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Senegal, some of whom are well known in the Euro-North American field called "Afro-Beat" or "World Music"--have begun to find a place in South Africa's popular black dance culture and on radio. In noticeable contrast to the widespread black South African chauvinism that rejects anything and anyone from Africa to the north as inferior, prominent popular musicians such as veterans Sipho Mabuse and Brenda Fassie and township youth icons Bongo Maffin have attempted tentative but successful collaborations with performers of kwasa-kwasa, as the neighboring south-central musical styles are called. Indeed, even in the culturally bounded is'camto township argot, kwassa is now a local dance on its own, based on the Congolese ndombolo dance style, popularized in a popular song and music video by Abashante lead singer Iyaya, a standard-bearer of unapologetic African female sexual self-assertion, and by her brother, Arthur, in his new popular dance video, Mnike. All of these are but performative signs of larger ideological movements in South African public culture.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and also at the G-8 Economic Summit held earlier in 2000, South African president Thabo Mbeki successfully popularized the notion of a "Third Way," by which marginalized economies outside Euro-North American or East Asian spheres of economic dominance might construct more locally relevant pathways to stability and prosperity, that is, to competitive economic modernism. Known or unknown to rhetorical enthusiasts such as President Bill Clinton, who repeated the "Third Way" catch phrase in his addresses to the G-8, the notion derives from the local concept of "African Renaissance" with which Mbeki replaced the earlier, more ethnically pluralist Mandelian representation of South Africa as a "Rainbow Nation." Although I cannot here attempt to define, explicate, or critically debate what is intended or accomplished by the idea of an "African Renaissance," a substantial literature has already begun to accumulate on the subject (see Mbeki 1998), and local print and broadcast journalism has picked up on the idea. For the present, I will note only that the concept attempts explicitly to resolve, or find the way forward from, a set of evident contradictions in the social character of the country and subcontinent. These moves include a call for the revival of black Africa's "past glory" in a world where traditional monarchs are enjoined to reign and not rule, the engagement of the marginalized black masses in a nationalist project from which there is little real prospect they will personally benefit, and the promotion and empowerment of distinctly "African" modes of managing modernity and globalization against the backdrop, with admitted exceptions and contrary positive indications, of over thirty years of regional failure, conflict, and decline.

Past glory? Unless people want the present Zulu king, mild-mannered, cultivated voluptuary Goodwill Zwelethini, to reinvent himself as his militaristic ancestor Shaka or to model the region's republics after the functioning absolutism of Mswati III in Swaziland, it is difficult to know precisely what glory should be revived. Difficult, but on further reflection, not impossible: the point being made is that precolonial African state builders created highly organized polities within the historical circumstances and technological resources of the time and place, leaving a legacy in which their descendants might justifiably take some pride. But what is actually to be saved from that independent era? The answer is forms of social relatedness, their moral and spiritual foundations, and their associated cultural practices. Furthermore, presently available but obscure and often denigrated African contributions to the knowledge base of improved human futures are well worth valorization and serious study.

Transforming "African Renaissance" from an exercise in political ideology into a vehicle for the mobilization of mass nationalist commitment? If indeed the Rainbow Nation offered nothing more by way of economic advancement to the majority of dispossessed black people than the rueful sight of a small number of their more fortunate brothers and sisters enjoying economic privilege, then the African Renaissance could still serve as an ideological weapon in the struggle to extend benefits and opportunities more broadly. If in the end it is but a suggestion that if the poor are hungry, let them eat rhetoric, then at the very least, distinctively African cultural practices--the only materials from which many can still construct a positive social self-image and experiential narrative are publicly validated.

Participating successfully in modernity? By now it should be clear to Africans and non-Africans alike that this can be facilitated only by integrating rather than opposing ideologies and practices of tradition and modernity. Otherwise, the silenced past, as in the case of the European Renaissance, exacts a terrible revenge.

As to the embedding of Western empirical knowledge into an African epistemological and social context, this is not as unproven or far-fetched an idea as its detractors assume. In the late nineteenth century in South Africa's eastern Orange Free State region, African peasant farmers combined European agricultural plow technology and methods with the economies of the African family and communal systems of labor deployment and exchange. The result was a level of productivity that threatened to drive the far less efficient white family farmers out of business and off the land. Only overt state intervention in the form of racial land expropriation, legal discrimination, and economic dispossession prevented this from occurring and preserved white supremacy in South African agriculture (see Keegan 1986, 14-19).

More to the point, in post-apartheid South Africa today, one of the industries in which this marriage of Western technology and organization and African social and cultural materials and resources has the greatest potential is popular music. In the field of cultural production, African artists in every medium and genre, including popular music, of course, continue to demonstrate that, against the self-serving, crooked odds of Western prejudice, they can access and demonstrate the generative diversity and power of the subcontinent's creative resources and, if allowed, compete on even terms.

Professionally, however, the well of African musical tradition has not slaked the musicians' thirst for livelihood and recognition. From the very outset in the 1920s and 1930s, the South African recording industry has used the concept of traditional music to legally inscribe the category "trad." as a compositional credit on African recordings. Until 1964, the "trad." label kept African compositions in the public domain, made the composers anonymous, and obviated royalties or copyright protection (see Coplan 1985, 139, 178). For the next twenty-five years, apartheid helped keep these ideas and practices in place despite ameliorative legal remedies and new institutions such as the South African Music Rights Organization (SAMRO) and the South African Recording Rights Association, Ltd. (SARRAL). Sipho Mngadi, keyboardist for the urban maskanda band Umkhonto ka Shaka, complains that the traditional/communal concept of African culture is used to deny African musicians individual recognition and even their rights as professionals in the music industry, both locally and internationally. Historically, thanks to racism, African traditional musical resources and performers are supposed to come cheap, and the industry and the SABC still work to keep things that way. Recently, Pete Seeger said in a reply to Joseph Shabalala, "The word `traditional,' when used by a publisher [to credit a songwriter], usually means that somebody is keeping some money that should have been sent somewhere else" ([Johannesburg] Sunday Times 2000). Nor are recording companies the only ones to blame. More industry-wise urban black popular musicians often rearrange and record the compositions of maskanda composers, whom they regard as amateur rural folk artists, without credit or payment (Myandu 2000).

All of this plays out locally with something of a contrary motion. In the one turn, music and other domains of cultural production popularly identified as African have been steadily acquiring increased acceptance and status. Black urbanites seldom, at least publicly, dismiss migrant workers' popular traditional music as backward, and performance of these styles in the cities attracts a significant urban working-class audience. Interestingly, too, the resistant strain of African political and cultural nationalism expressed in the Ethiopianist church movement at the turn of the twentieth century has reappeared in the form of the increasing cultural influence of Rastafarianism in South Africa. Once dismissed as marijuana-smoking lumpen proletarians affecting alien dress and slang, Rastas have gained acceptance of the cultural style of pan-Africanist revivalism and rewoven the Ethiopianist/Garveyite thread, even if as a movement and as persons they are still profoundly, even defiantly, marginalized. When I visited the syncretist Afro-Christian shrines of the Basotho people in the remote caves of the eastern Free State in April 2000, I found amid the colorful panoply of ancestral rituals and Basotho nativist ("Zionist") Christian mysticism the unmistakable outward signs and inward spiritual influences of Jah and Rastafari.

Back in Johannesburg, the self-consciously traditional ensemble Umkhonto ka Shaka (Spear of Shaka) is led by Rastafarian John Sithole, who performs in long dreadlocks and antelope and leopard skins. Sithole is lead singer and dancer in the group, and while keyboardist Sipho Mngadi, who has been in Johannesburg for twenty-two years but who was originally from Stanger (near Shaka's original headquarters) is a Rasta, lead guitarist Mangisi Dhlamini is a dyed-in-the-zebra-skin traditionalist from kwaZulu who dresses like a hostel migrant and has no Rastafarian leanings. Although one might expect Umkhonto ka Shaka to have fashioned a musical blend of reggae and maskanda, such is not the case, and while incorporating some urbane reflexivity, the style is securely maskanda. Indeed, rastaman John Sithole leads the thoroughly traditional isigubu male drum ngoma dance challenges, his chest-length dreadlocks flying. When not performing, Sithole dresses Rasta, speaks elegant South African black English, and carries a bead-covered cell phone. He lives in Soweto and runs a small agency in the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) arts school in west central Johannesburg called the African Cultural Heritage Trust, which rents out sound systems, books engagements, and handles organization and promotional problems for aspiring maskanda groups in Johannesburg.

As a teenager in rural southern Natal, Sithole acquired enough education and political consciousness to protest the cynical, manipulative contempt in which the apartheid system held Zulu culture. His natural organizational and leadership abilities were expressed in a commitment at first to Pan-Africanism, but his immersion in cultural and spiritual concerns led him then to Rastafarianism. He felt then as he does now that Rastafarianism provides the ideal nonviolent and politically nonsectarian bridge between Zulu ethnic tradition, a generalized South African black nationalism, and Pan-Africanism: between the urban and the rural areas of continent, country, and region. Indeed, he does not view Shaka as an empire builder or Zulu national hero but as a sort of regional power for African unification, a commander who fought to bring all of South Africa's black polities into a single hierarchical structure. The partnering of Zulu cultural practice, Rastafarianism, and performance suits Sithole as an urban township-based Africanist, providing an independent lifestyle that avoids proletarian wage work for "Babylon" through culture-based self-employment. Such a strategy also provides an affirmative existential answer to the crucial question facing the students as well as the practitioners of resistance in marginalized communities: can battles lost in economics and/or politics be won in culture?

Such self-conscious hybridity, however, points to a potential contradiction in popular traditional musicians' play with South African black identifies. Maskanda is very much a Zulu genre, and beyond that, many of its identifying stylistic features, such as the interspersed clan- and self-praises, the song texts and dance forms with their stick-fighting metaphors, references to specific ancestral lines, the short ihlabo (Nhlapo 2000, 18) melodic runs and scales on the guitar that introduce each dance song, and the percussive polyphonies that have their roots in the root progressions of uguba and umakweyana gourd-bows all serve to identify the leader's origins in a specific rural district and as a display of (very) "local knowledge." Such localism can expand to represent contemporary performance tradition as a whole, as is currently the case with umzansi (south), a style of male dancing from southern Natal that is currently widespread among popular traditional Zulu dance performers. Similarly, musicians perform styles drawn from various rural areas, not only their own, and the interpolation of praises provides not only the stamp of personal and thus local identity but also that of a more general cultural knowledge and authenticity (Olsen 2000, 7-8). Indeed, maskanda itself has become a cover term for all Zulu guitar-based popular traditional music (3).

Such expressions are opaque to non-Zulu people and would seem to prevent maskanda from serving as a performative representation of a Pan-African cultural identity for black South Africans, less than a third of whom speak Zulu as their home language. Interestingly, however, this has not appeared as a problem. Echoing John Sithole, innovative maskanda bandleader Madala Kunene, who grew up in the old Durban African location of Mkhumbane (Cato Manor) and not in a rural area, locates one vector of tradition in an imagined, distant past (8). This past is Pan-African, represented by aspects of musical style that connect to an idealized Africanness that denies a colonized consciousness and its expression in ethnic division (16).

As both Sithole and Kunene would agree, their Zuluness is a local and therefore primary instantiation of a more generalized Africanness (19). While Africans of other groups are wary of militant Zulu ethnic nationalism and the Zulu reputation for using violence as a favored means of dispute settlement, the power of Zulu performance culture to evoke an image of a resilient, autonomous Africa is widely accepted and enjoyed by all South Africans, black, brown, and white. So the predominance of Zulu maskanda on Ezodumo, accepted as partly a function of the explicit Nguni (Zulu-Xhosa-Swazi) language programming focus of SATV1, nonetheless has a broader cultural effect. Umkhonto ka Shaka recently put on a successful performance at Johannesburg's bastion of Rastafarian dub and reggae, Tandoor club, for a crowd of black city teenagers. At the recent national conference on the African Renaissance, Zulu performance groups were featured as representative of South Africa's overall billing in the African "stage show," fitting in neatly as well with African-American delegates' parochial preconception that South African black people all belong to the Zulu "tribe" (Sehume 1999, 132).

What then finally of the vaunted African Renaissance in the domain of musical identities? If S'bu Ndebele, head of the African National Congress (ANC) in KwaZulu-Natal, is correct in noting that "the African Renaissance has been emotional to intellectuals and intellectual to the masses" (128), how can it be turned instead into a vehicle of what Habermas called "communicative competence, ... the ability to, in an interpreting manner, search for a consensus about the value of people and their co-existence, about the kind of life that is worth living and the nature and content of the symbolic forms which best express those values" (quoted in Van Niekerk 1999, 76)? This task is particularly difficult in a society so multifariously divided, not least in its access to the dynamisms of modernity, a place of not one but many "todays" in many South Africas, as post-apartheid cultural theorist Graham Pechey (1993) notes. In such a situation, the African Renaissance becomes what Sehume (1999, 131-132) calls a necessary strategic essentialism, wherein the romance of the distant past, informed by an awareness of dispossession, leads to a militancy for change that privileges an African discourse. This route to social power through cognitive reintegration is guided by a search for new post-apartheid black identities based in a conscious cultural moralism. The many song texts devoted to social commentary (amaculo akhayo) in maskanda explicitly link the revival of tradition, including customary practices, ancestral spiritualism, and the chieftaincy, with moralistic prescriptions against practices that are "killing the black nation," as one text puts it (Nhlapo 2000, 71). Thus, for Madala Kunene, tradition has a second vector in the practices of his urban youth, when the slum location of Mkhumbane provided a home-space for thousands of migrant Zulu (Olsen 2000, 10). Kunene sees the role of musician as that of latter-day healer and prophet, conjuring an identity that lived experience has denied him out of cultural memory in the face of social fragmentation. If the distant past of the moral imagination is a source of authentic Africanist tradition, so equally is Mkhumbane, bulldozed (literally) by modernist racial domination (18).

Professor Pitika Ntuli of the African Renaissance Institute is of course quite correct to dispute the ANC's construction of the renaissance as centrally a Third Way to nationalist modernism, since modernity simply does not accommodate indigenous epistemologies or their historical cultural fameworks. Fight tradition, even under an Africanist banner, and you will lose, observes Ntuli (2000), who suggests that the valorization of Africans' knowledge and modes of knowledge production is the only means to provide the majority of the people with some sense of agency and a basis for participation. Echoing Ntuli, Umkhonto ka Shaka's John Sithole insists that the renaissance only has meaning if driven by such grassroots participation and is therefore positive as a basis of identity, pride, and self-reliance but negative as a basis for participation in neoliberal globalization and in modernist homogenization of Africa's cultural resources that consigns precapitalist practices to the dustbin of nonhistory.

If Mbeki's fear of the divisiveness of ethnic traditions leads him to the bland, shallow, generalized conept of African heritage contained in his "I am an African" public speeches (Mbeki 1998), there is of course the equal danger of constructing African identity as exclusionary out of a need to define Africa in opposition to the West and the rest, promoting the false and dangerous notion of a monoracial continent. Whites and other "Others" in Africa may have only themselves to blame for this exclusivity, of course; while they might be African, they have certainly not Africanized. The way forward, as embodied in popular traditional music, is to envision a moral universe based in local cultural knowledge and practice (Boloka 1999, 123), for Africans to do what they do well the best that they can and to be insistent in demanding full exchange value for it, and to play productively with identities within the established structures of creativity that constitute African traditional music.

(1.) The Khoi-khoi were the indigenous herders of the Cape of Good Hope who were contemptuously called "Hottentots" by German and Dutch settlers because of the sound of their "click" languages. Small Khoi communities survive today, and a majority of the "Cape Coloured" people have some Khoi ancestry.

(2.) These bands had no real generic or stylistic name, and informants simply referred to this music as lipina tsa Sesotho (Sesotho songs), but admittedly not as mino oa setso (music of origin: traditional music).

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Nhlapo, Joseph. 2000. Maskanda: A study in Zulu traditional guitar music. Masters thesis, University of Witwatersrand.

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Olsen, Katheryn. 2000. Marking time: Discourses on identity in contemporary maskanda. Paper presented at conference, Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa, October 19-22, Turku, Finland.

Pechey, Graham. 1993. Post apartheid narratives. In Colonial discourse, post colonial theory, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, 151-172. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Sehume, Jeffery. 1999. Strategic essentialism and the African renaissance. Critical Arts 13, no. 1: 127-133.

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Waterman, Christopher. 1982. "I'm a leader, not a boss": Popular music and social identity in Ibadan, Nigeria. Ethnomusicology 26, no. 1: 59-72.

DAVID B. COPLAN is the Professor and Chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has been researching South African music for over twenty-five years and is best known for his book In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theater (Longman, 1985).