Mirror, Mediator, and Prophet: The Music Indaba of Late-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article explores a movement of creative initiative, from 1960 to1990, that greatly influenced the course of history in South Africa.1 It is a movement which holds a deep affiliation for me, not merely through an extended submersion and profound interest in it, but also because of the co-incidence of its timing with my life in South Africa. On the fateful day of the bloody Sharpeville march on 21 March 1960, I was celebrating my first birthday in a peaceful coastal town in the Cape Province. Three decades later, on the weekend of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990, I was preparing to leave for the United States to further my studies in the social theories that lay at the base of the remarkable musical movement that had long engaged me. This musical phenomenon therefore spans exactly the three decades of my early life in South Africa. I feel privi-leged to have experienced its development—not only through growing up in the center of this musical moment, but particularly through a deepen-ing interest, and consequently, an active participation in its peak during the mid-1980s. I call this movement the Music Indaba, for it involved all sec-