[...] In the 1920s and 1930s the urban culture of the slumyards, centred in Doornfontein in Johannesburg, was known as marabi, possibly derived from the township of Marabastad in Pretoria. Marabi reflected the way of life of the people living in the slumyards. It was centred on beer-brewing and shebeens. The marabi dance parties became centres of community life and gave the African working classes a new sense of identity. This is how Wilson "King Force" Silgee, a famous jazz saxophonist, described Marabi:
Marabi: that was the environment. It was either organ but mostly piano. You get there, you pay your 10 cents. You get your share of whatever concoction there is - and you dance. It used to start from Friday night right through to Sunday evening.
Music was fundamental to the new culture of the yards. It created the vivacity and the energy of the shebeen parties. The sound of marabi music was original and improvisational.
With the removal of the slumyards beginning in the early 1930s and ending during the second half of the decade, the focus of African community life shifted to the freehold areas of Sophiatown and Alexandra. Shebeens and dance-parties continued here, but the music began to change. Gramophones, the introduction of American jazz to the townships and the start of radio were also important to the development of black professional musicianship. Black musicians in South Africa were able to hear the music of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, and these made a strong impact. Township music was also heavily influenced in the 1940s and 1950s by American music and American movies. Hollywood's two all-Black musicals in the 1940s, Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky were hugely popular with Sophiatown audiences and the local musicians thus had full exposure to the music of black American musicians.
Local groups began performing American swing. Such groups included The Manhattan Brothers, the Gay Gaieties and the The Synco Fans. The Jazz Maniacs, The Pitch Black Follies and The Merry Blackbirds, following on American tradition, began to front their bands with female vocalists. It was in this way that Dolly Rathebe, Dorothy Masuku, and Miriam Makeba began to gain their reputations.
At this point, African musicians in Sophiatown developed their own new sound, called "Tsaba-tsaba". It combined African melody with American swing and jazz. Tsaba-tsaba was essentially a working class form of dance music. Walter M.B.Nhlapo, a music journalist of the time said of it:
Everybody spoke of Tsaba-tsaba ...There were no radios to broadcast it all over; but everybody sang it. There were no printed copies of it, but some dance bands played it; it had the spirit of Africa in it. (Source: Quoted in D.Coplan, In Township Tonight!, p. 154)
Tsaba-tsaba eventually evolved into "kwela", which began as street music based on the penny whistle. Younger, juvenile musicians played the pennywhistle, and drew on and extended tsaba-tsaba and other African jazz styles in new directions. They blended indigenous music with American musical elements, producing a new form of street music. The term "kwela" means "pick up" and "kwela-kwela" was often the name given to the police vans that roamed the streets, looking to pick up pass offenders or illegal street corner gamblers. When a van drove past, all evidence of gambling would disappear quickly, and somebody would haul out a pennywhistle and begin to play innocently. By the 1950s penny whistle music and dance parties were a major recreational activity of urban Africans. Kwela generated its own dance form, called the phata-phata (touch-touch).
During the 1950s studios used professional jazz musicians to back the penny whistlers, adding saxophone and piano to kwela instrumentation. Innovators in the filed of kwela music were Ntemi Piliso and his Alexandra All-Star Band as well as the Jazz Maniacs, who recorded "Majuba". At this point all music in this style became known as Majuba until the term "Mbaqanga" was coined.
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