IsiNdebele is a creole language which contains parts of every other tongue from South Africa. Dizu Plaatjies’ group Amampondo has since the 1980s also helped to put the traditional music of the amaXhosa on the map. Madosini has mentored other Xhosa speaking mainstream artists such as Thandiswa Mazwai and Camagwini. Born in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape, she is one of a few remaining artists of her generation keeping the torch burning for traditional Xhosa music, specialising in overtone singing and composing for indigenous instruments such as the uhadi (music bow), umrhumbe (mouth bow) and isitolotolo (Jewish harp). One of the most revered traditional musicians is Madosini. Other prominent dances include ukuxhentsa, performed by girls and by traditional healers during their ceremonies, and umguyo (or ukuguya), performed by boys during their traditional initiation to manhood. At weddings, umbholorho (traditional songs) are accompanied by dancing known as umdudo (from the verb ukududa). One example of this would be the umngqungqo dance performed by married woman at the intonjane ceremony marking girls' coming of age. All these groups have their own distinct ways of musical expression rooted in the oral tradition. The amaXhosa are a nation whose subgroups include the amaBhaca, amaFengu, amaMpondo and amaThembu.
Mac Mackenzie, a founding member of The Genuines and The Goema Captains, is one of the few musicians to remain dedicated to the goema sound. The annual Kaapse Klopse festivities on the 2nd of January, known as Tweede Nuwe Jaar (second new year), see colourful minstrel parades take to the streets of Cape Town. The goema sound is still celebrated today. It also overlaps with the traditional vastrap, langarm or tiekiedraai rhythms favoured by Afrikaners. Goema is thus rooted in the collision of cultures, including Malay and Khoisan.
Ibrahim relayed that his own style of playing drew from folk traditions of "the doekums and the Coons." To Ibrahim, it’s a narrative that urged coloured people of the Cape to be proud of their roots. In his column in the late 1960s for The Cape Herald, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (then Dollar Brand) wrote about goema as an essential coloured artform in Cape Town. Khoisan rhythms influenced the coloured people of the Cape, helping to forge the carnival sound known as goema. The same has also been seen in contemporary hip-hop artists such as Quintin ‘Jitsvinger’ Goliath and Richard ‘Quaz’ Roodt, who through rapping reach out to their deepest roots. His motivation for doing so in the market domain was to retrace his own ancestry. One of the main artists to revisit the way of the Khoisan is Pops Mohamed. Their ‘trance dance’ mimics the movements of animals such as the antelope. For the Khoisan music is a means to transcend to a cosmological existence where engagement with the ancestors is the intent. Music played a central role in their rituals. Their music is largely characterised by polyphonic chants, not unlike that incantations of the amaXhosa. The original inhabitants of Southern Africa were the Khoi and San people, collectively known as the Khoisan. Instead this essay simply aims to provide an overview of its main variations, touching on its originators as well as those who continue to draw on it for inspiration.
Given South Africa’s rich cultural diversity and the importance of music to all its people, it is not possible to cover all traditional genres and artists in detail. White ethnomusicologists such as Hugh Tracey, credited as the first to record traditional South African music from as early as the 1920s, and John Blacking made local folk available to a global ear, although much of the music had been performed (but not recorded) for many generations before that. The presence of whiteness in the music narrative also provokes issues of what it means to 'discover' or 'pioneer'.
Any mixing of languages or collaborations between artists of different groups was prohibited. Musicians were forced to comply, recording music that was defined by the ethnicity of the artist – to the point where albums covers were labeled, for example, ‘Zulu’, ‘Sotho’ or ‘Venda’. Many were forced to live in homelands, where radio music broadcast by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) played a central role in promoting apartheid ideology, with each group encouraged to listen to their ‘own’ station. Black South Africans were divided and defined according to ethnic groups. Until the dawn of democracy in the early 1990s, the government attempted to classify and separate all citizens in the name of cultural purity. Traditional music in South Africa has been complicated by the country’s history of entrenched racism, embodied in the system of apartheid and the policy of separate development.