How Johannesburg musicians created kwaito
In the 1990s, South Africa was going through a much-needed period of flux and rejoice filled the air as the apartheid movement ended. At the same time as Nelson Mandela began his time as President of South Africa, something else seismic was happening in Johannesburg township of Soweto as kwaito was born.
Music reflects society, and kwaito is a sonic explosion that represents the euphoric feeling felt by Black South Africans as they were finally able to live their life as an equal citizen. The genre had been secretly bubbling underneath the surface for some years, but it couldn’t thrive until apartheid was over.
As South Africa finally stopped being isolated from the rest of the world, art from other cultures began to seep into the region. For the first time, artists from Soweto could be inspired by other areas, and it was house music they took to their hearts.
The two pioneers of the genre are Johannesburg DJs Oscar ‘Oskido’ Mdlongwa and Christos Katsaitis. They were playing house favourites but slowed the tracks down to 110 beats per minute which delighted clubgoers and increased their reputation.
As their popularity began to soar, the duo wanted to add a taste of South Africa to their sound and started to sample historic native genres such as mbaqanga. They also added lyrics in Tsotsitaal, a language that is a mixture of Afrikaan and local township slang in Soweto. The duo then labelled their invention kwaito, which translates to ‘angry’ and epitomises the fiery tempo of the genre.
“I saw at that time a lot of Chicago DJs like Frankie Knuckles, Louie Vega, Marshall Jefferson, were remixing stuff,” Oskido said in an interview with MG in 2011. “That’s when the idea of kwaito came through for me. And after we slowed down the beats we started thinking: ‘Why can’t we put our own lyrics on it? Why can’t we write? We are free now!”
The Black community of Johannesburg had previously been silenced culturally as part of apartheid, but kwaito was their creation, and nobody could take that away. By 1996, the sound had finally infiltrated the South African mainstream, and Mandela even invited Oskido to a meeting organised by the ANC Youth League. “He encouraged us, like, ‘Listen, we need to do more positive things on the music,’ because he could see that it was becoming bigger and bigger,” the musician later recalled.
Kwaito’s social currency in South Africa has dwindled in recent years due to the homogenisation of the world’s taste in music, but it’ll never die. In those initial post-apartheid years, it gave Black people from the townships a vehicle to express themselves and provided a voice to the voiceless.
In 1995, Arthur Mafokate released ‘Kaffir’, which has sold over 500,000 copies to date, and the success of the track awarded him the title of ‘The King of Kwaito’. It’s the sound of a community that’s broken free from the brutal shackles of oppression, and all they wanted to do was dance until their feet bled. Most importantly, kwaito symbolises a historic moment in time, and it sonically captures the exuberant emotions felt by the Black population of Johannesburg as they finally recieved liberty.
