The African musician and the development of the Johannesburg entertainment industry, 1900–1960

Abstract

This study is primarily concerned with the music and musicians of a selfconsciously urban community: Africans who were of Johannesburg and not merely in it. Its purposes are, firstly, to explore the role of certain forms of cultural expression in the emergence of urban African identity and social order, and secondly, to outline the nature of the conflict between the African performing community and white commercial and political agencies over control of these performances and the qualities of identity they expressed. It is not suggested that these processes have been characteristic of Johannesburg alone. The development of urban African performing arts and the struggle for cultural autonomy have involved all of South Africa's growing urban centres. But as the centre of South Africa's entertainment industry and the major location of my own research Johannesburg must serve as an example and a focus for the sociohistorical analysis that follows. In addition to over 90,000 male Africans working on the Rand as miners in 1896, 42,733 others, variously employed as clerks, domestics, teachers, artisans, and criminals, were reported living within a three-mile radius of the Market Square. I Their numbers daily swelled by new arrivals, most of these people were not migrant workers who intended returning to their homes in distant parts of southern Africa when their short-term contracts expired. They were, or soon became, aspiring townsmen who formed the core of Johannesburg's permanent African community, though they varied in degree of westernization from illiterate 'rickshaw boys' to the future editor of the Bantu World, R. V. Selope-Therma, and his associates. Journalistic accounts of the first quarter of this century2 regularly