South African music
A short guide to the country's music, from the Cape jazz of the 1970s to today's amapiano, and to the artists who made it.
Play the South African music quizSix decades of South African music
South African popular music has never had a single sound. Cape jazz took shape in Cape Town in the 1960s and 1970s, bubblegum pop and protest songs filled the 1980s, and kwaito became the sound of the 1990s. South African house found an audience abroad in the 2000s and 2010s, and amapiano, which grew up in the townships of Gauteng in the mid-2010s, spread well beyond the country from about 2019. The styles overlap, and many of the artists below have worked in more than one.
Each generation built on the music before it. Jazz musicians in exile took the fight against apartheid to audiences abroad, kwaito artists set township slang to slowed-down house beats, and amapiano producers turned the log drum into a sound now heard far beyond South Africa.
Miriam Makeba
Born in Johannesburg in 1932, Miriam Makeba sang with the Manhattan Brothers and took the female lead in the jazz opera King Kong before leaving South Africa in 1959. When the government cancelled her passport in 1960, she began thirty years of exile, in which she toured with Harry Belafonte, shared a Grammy Award with him in 1966 and testified against apartheid at the United Nations. She came home in 1990 and died in Italy in 2008, shortly after a concert.
- Pata Pata
- The Click Song
- Welela
- Malaika
Born in Witbank in 1939, Hugh Masekela got his first trumpet with the help of the anti-apartheid priest Trevor Huddleston and left South Africa after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. In exile he studied in London and New York, and in 1968 his recording of Grazing in the Grass went to number one in the United States. Bring Him Back Home, written after Nelson Mandela smuggled a birthday letter to him out of prison, became an anthem of the campaign for Mandela's release. He came home in 1990 and died in Johannesburg in 2018.
Born Adolph Johannes Brand in Cape Town in 1934, Abdullah Ibrahim grew up in Kensington listening to marabi, langarm dance music and American jazz, and co-founded the Jazz Epistles in 1959. In 1974 he recorded Mannenberg in Cape Town with Basil Coetzee and Robbie Jansen, and through the 1980s the tune became an anthem at rallies against apartheid. He gave his last public concert at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival in March 2026 and died in Germany that June, aged 91.
Bongo Maffin formed in Johannesburg in 1996 around the Zimbabwe-born producer Jah Seed, the vocalists Stoan Seate and Speedy, and the lead singer Thandiswa Mazwai. The group's kwaito caught the mood of the first years of democracy, and Thathisigubhu (1998) was among its biggest hits. Mazwai went on to a solo career, beginning with the album Zabalaza in 2004.
Mafikizolo formed in 1996 with Theo Kgosinkwe, Nhlanhla Nciza and Tebogo Madingoane, who was killed in 2004. The group started out in the kwaito years and moved towards Afropop, and Gate Crashers (2000) became its best-selling album. Khona, the 2013 single made with the production duo Uhuru, introduced Mafikizolo to a younger audience.
Brenda Fassie was born in Langa, Cape Town, in 1964 and moved to Johannesburg as a teenager to sing. Weekend Special, recorded with Brenda and the Big Dudes in 1983, made her a star, and her song Black President called Nelson Mandela president years before he took office. Her 1998 album Memeza was the best-selling South African record of that year. She was often called the Madonna of the Townships, and she died in 2004, aged 39.
Nkosinathi Innocent Maphumulo, known as Black Coffee, was born in Umlazi near Durban in 1976 and studied jazz before turning to house music. After the Red Bull Music Academy in 2003 he built an international career, with residencies in Ibiza and sets at Coachella, and his album Subconsciously won the Grammy for best dance/electronic album in 2022. His Afro house and deep house records did much to take South African dance music abroad.
Joseph Shabalala founded the group in 1960 and named it after Ladysmith, the KwaZulu-Natal town near which he grew up. Its unaccompanied isicathamiya singing, a Zulu choral style that developed in migrant workers' hostels, reached listeners around the world after the group sang on Paul Simon's Graceland in 1986. Ladysmith Black Mambazo has won five Grammy Awards, the first for the album Shaka Zulu.
Beatenberg is a Cape Town trio of Matthew Field, Robin Brink and Ross Dorkin whose guitar pop borrows the rhythms of Afropop. Their second album, The Hanging Gardens of Beatenberg (2014), carried the singles Chelsea Blakemore, Pluto (Remember You) and Rafael and won Album of the Year at the South African Music Awards.
Sanele Sithole, who records as Sun-El Musician, was born in KwaZulu-Natal in 1989. His first single, Akanamali, sung by Samthing Soweto, came out in 2017, went platinum in South Africa and launched the singer's career as well as his own. His debut album, Africa to the World (2018), also went platinum.
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Three styles and where they came from
Cape jazz
Cape jazz is jazz as Cape Town plays it, built on the goema beat of the New Year carnival, the marabi groove of the townships and the saxophones of the langarm dance bands. Its best-known recording is Abdullah Ibrahim's Mannenberg, made in Cape Town in 1974 with Basil Coetzee on tenor saxophone.
Explore Cape JazzAmapiano
Amapiano, whose name is isiZulu for the pianos, grew up in the townships of Gauteng in the mid-2010s out of kwaito, deep house and jazz. Its signature is the log drum, a deep and rolling bass line, and producers such as Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa took it to audiences far beyond South Africa.
Explore AmapianoKwaito
Kwaito came out of Soweto at the turn of the 1990s: house music slowed down, with deep bass, loops and lyrics in township slang. It became the sound of young black South Africans in the first years of democracy, and Brenda Fassie, TKZee and Mandoza all had kwaito hits.
Explore Kwaito