The new edition of In Township Tonight!, the classic work on township culture from David Coplan, includes a new introduction that reflects on the once unimaginable changes in South African black music and theatre that have occurred over the past 20 years, plus two new chapters updating events in this vibrant arena since the first edition, and a new, retrospective conclusion.
Against the harsh background of apartheid, popular culture in the townships was a dynamic force which gave life and hope to the people, producing artists of international reputation – Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela – and a host of local entertainment heroes. Every night, musicians and other performers would draw enthusiastic audiences to dance halls, jazz clubs and shebeens, part a culture which has a long and complex history, continuing today.
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Video: Watch a youthful Miriam Makeba perform her most famous song, “Pata Pata”:
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In Township Tonight! explores the richness of black popular culture, taking us from indigenous musical traditions into the world of slave orchestras, penny whistlers, clergyman-composers, the gumboot dances of the dockers and mineworkers, and the touring minstrelsy and vaudeville acts. It traces the emergence of the first jazz bands – the Darktown Strutters, the Merry Blackbirds, the Jazz Maniacs – and the marabi, kwela, and mbaqanga dance styles. It records the development of black theatre from the first all-black musicals, to the popular drama workshops and the internationally successful Market Theatre, Johannesburg.
At the same time the author, a distinguished social historian, anthropologist and musicologist, examines the social, political and economic environment within which these developments took place: slavery, diamond and gold discoveries, the industrial explosion in the Transvaal, the boom and destruction of Sophiatown, and the consolidation of apartheid.
In Township Tonight! is a tribute to the resilience and achievements of black South African artists who, in the author’s words, “humanised a wasteland of oppression and neglect”. It is a book which will be of great interest to social historians, musicologists, jazz enthusiasts and all those concerned about cotemporary South Africa and its development.
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