Township Jazz is any of various music genres created by Bantu peoples living in poor, racially segregated urban areas of South Africa ("townships") during the 20th century.
The principal genres of township music are mbaqanga, kwela, and marabi. Marabi evolved from jazz influence in the 1920s. Immigrants from Malawi developed the kwela sound by fusing Malawian music with marabi. Mbaqanga music is marabi's successor. It, too, is jazz-like; its roots are in marabi, American jazz, and traditional Zulu music.
History
The origins of township music in South Africa began from the formation of townships, which are urban residential areas where Africans were authorized to rent houses built by the government during the 1950s. Binns and Nel state in their article that townships were the poor, black residential areas created under apartheid, explicitly revealing that these townships were not for the wealthy Westerners living in South Africa, but for the lower class of South Africa. According to Ballantine, legislation was passed during the 1950s to further consolidate the apartheid state, and violent methods of implementation also assisted this along. In fact, the most serious legislation that was passed for urban black music was the Group Areas Act of 1950, which separated all racially mixed neighborhoods by removing black communities and relocating them on the peripheries into townships. Williams confirms this relocation by describing them as similar to African American ghettos and illustrates the emotion of musicians within the townships as a lack of power, which resulted in the musicians' need to explore alternative music paths. To those who tried to suppress the lower-class Africans, jazz aspired to (among other things) musical and social equality, which was viewed as a form of rebellion during the time, hence its suppression. According to Ballantine, "the white and racist South African state" was forming an ideology and program for separating and turning black South Africans against one another.
Different styles of township music
Marabi
Marabi is seen as the very first form of township music that arose between the 1920s and 1940s in the Johannesburg slumyards of South Africa. Marabi was said to be influenced by not only the social and economic conditions of working-class life, but was also influenced by a variety of sources, assimilating a large amount of performance tradition into one main style of music. Marabi was commonly considered by non-lower-class people as a rebellious style of music in its time, being associated with illegality, police raids, sex, and a desperately impoverished working-class. The term marabi appears to have a murky origin; despite this, Coplan sheds light onto possibilities, tracing the meaning, “to fly around” (which apparently describes the styles of marabi dancers) and citing the Mabille and Dieterlen’s Sotho dictionary, which defines marabi as slang for “‘lawless person; gangster’”. Also, as Robinson references the Johannesburg 1936 Empire Exhibition, marabi music was not allowed to be a part of the show, indicating the selective enthusiasm of white audiences for contemporary African performance. Marabi was easy to criticize because it reflected the dangers, dynamics and hardships of urban life in slum-yards along with the fact that it was associated with a heavy drinking culture as well. Because this music originated in the urban townships, this form of township music was frowned upon because of the candor reflected in its lyrics. Common instruments found in marabi style music include the guitar, piano, brass instruments, and organs; vocalists were also common for marabi music. According to Coplan, Marabi lyrics are considered rather loose in that participants were free to make up lyrics to suit the melody as they wished and also were well-known for being an expression of political protest at the time. Other analyses, aside from Coplan’s, regarding Marabi lyrics appear to be lacking within this field, which could be attributed to the obscurity of this subject as well as the age of this style of township music.