18 maart 2010
South African maskanda music emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century from an experience of forced labour migration. Labourers, having been chased from their land to work in the cities and mines, commuted between their rural homes and work places. During their long walks they played on a stringed oil can, a cheap guitar or a concertina, singing about the hardships, loves, and events they encountered on their way.
From the 1960s, maskanda musicians were invited into the studio to produce (often censored versions of) maskanda songs, labeled as ‘Zulu Traditional’. Dance, dress and other exoticist attributes became the core of the performance, creating the musical equivalent of a ‘homeland’, neatly separated from the visibly (rather than audibly) different ‘white’ South African musics.
After the fall of apartheid in 1994, this studio practice went global. Musicians such as Shiyani Ngcobo, iHashi Elimhlope, Busi Mhlongo and Phuzekhemisi regularly perform in Europe and North America. Increasingly, they blend their music with stylistic features from global soundscapes that connotate ‘blackness’: gospel, jazz, r&b. These globalized gestures are contradicted by, and complemented with, the attempt to use the stage for the performance of a Zulu identity, satisfying global demands with local musical triggers.
In this seminar, I will pay particular attention to the various (and often incompatible) utopias that maskanda helped shape: maskanda as the evocation of a 'home' that was forcibly left behind, maskanda as an instrument to realize an apartheid society, maskanda as the perceived ‘essence’ of ubuZulu (Zuluness), maskanda as the path towards the land-of-milk-and-honey called phesheya olwandle (overseas), maskanda as the missing link between Afro-American and black South-African musical expressions of resistance against racial discrimination.
I will illustrate my argument with interviews with musicians, fans, and record producers, my own recordings of rehearsals, and commercial recordings, assembled during my fieldwork in Durban in 2008 and 2009.
Barbara Titus is assistant professor of musicology at the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She gained her doctorate from Oxford University in 2005 with a thesis about Hegelian thinking in German music criticism around 1850 (‘Conceptualizing music: Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Hegelian currents in German music criticism, 1848-1887’). In 2007, she shifted her attention from German metaphysics to African street music, with the explicit aim to question the polarity that these two fields of investigation still seem to represent. In 2008 and 2009, Barbara was a visiting researcher and lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. She presented her research in The Netherlands, Germany, the UK, the USA, and South Africa, and published it in journals such as Acta Musicologica, SAMUS: South African Music Studies and the Dutch Journal of Music Theory.