www.southerninnovator.org – Page 2 – David South Consulting

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

South Africa’s township music is pounding its way into the global music charts. How has music made in the impoverished townships that are a hangover from decades of apartheid – the country’s former racial separation laws, which trapped millions of black South Africans in disenfranchisement and poverty – travelled around the world? By hitching a ride with the country’s ubiquitous taxi drivers.

In the age of digital downloads and rampant pirating of music CDs by bootleggers, musicians in the South face an epic struggle to earn income from their music. It’s estimated 95 percent of digital downloads of music are unauthorized, with no payment to artists and producers (www.ifpi.org).

And for musicians and artists from the world’s poorest places, who are far out of sight of the mainstream music business, life is even harder. The question remains: what on earth do you do to get heard?

Many South Africans are big fans of European House, a type of dance music. An enterprising group of producers living in the townships of Pretoria started to experiment, taking the House they loved and turning it into something more reflective of where they lived. The result, dubbed Township House, blends the school-of-hard-knocks beats of South African hip-hop, Kwaito, with House music’s tempos and electronic sounds.

Being from the townships meant the musicians behind Township House were frozen out of the mainstream music industry. And as every artist knows, if you can’t get heard, then your music will go nowhere. Rejected by radio stations and big record labels, they turned to an unlikely outlet: taxis, the ubiquitous small minibuses that are the only alternative form of transportation for people who do not have a car.

They are heavily used: the University of Pretoria (www.web.up.ac.za) estimates between 5 and 10 million people use minibus taxis every day to get to work or get around.

“In South Africa, the easiest way to the people is through the taxis,” musician DJ Qness told CNN.

The vast network of taxis serving the country represent a captive audience of listeners. Many are simply bored as they endure lengthy commutes. The Township House producers handed out compact discs (CDs) of their tracks to taxi drivers to play. They soon had a hit on their hands. But without any presence in record stores people couldn’t buy the CDs they wanted. And a new source of income was born for taxi drivers: selling CDs from their taxi stands or roadside stalls.

With appetites whetted for Township House, it started to outsell imported dance music.

The biggest hit maker of this pioneering group was DJ Mujava, whose track Township Funk was a global dance club hit in 2008.

“These people created a demand. The Mujava’s ‘Township Funk’ blew up on the streets and everything went crazy,” said Qness, who works for record label Sheer Music.

After all this home-grown success, the record labels jumped in. DJ Mujava landed a record deal with the small label Sheer Music. But the township musicians were still just reaching a local audience. However, by putting together a low-budget video using township dancers, and by posting the video on the YouTube (www.youtube.com) video-sharing website, they attracted the attention of British record labels Warp Records and This is Music, who re-mixed the track for clubs.

The model of using taxis as a music distribution vehicle has been copied by others. Pretoria’s Gospel Taxi Club uses the method to promote their religious music. Political parties are also using music CDs to get their message out.

Other Pretorian township successes are making waves as well. They include Bojo Mujo and Tembisa Funk by McLloyd.

“By combining the electronic sound from European House with the hard drum and the raw snare they’ve created something totally unique. You can’t find it anywhere in the world — only in South Africa,” said Qness.

Published: June 2009

Resources

DJ Mujava: Listen to all of DJ Mujava’s tracks at his website. Website:www.myspace.com/mujavaDigiArts Africa: The DigiArts Africa network is a tool to find people working in Digital Arts in Africa and to provide a collaborative working space to promote digital arts in Africa. Website:http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=5346&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.htmlAfrican Musicians Profiles: A lively website featuring profiles of African musicians by alphabetical listing and also reviews African films. Website: www.africanmusiciansprofiles.comRecording Industry of South Africa (RiSA): RiSA is the main body representing the South African recording industry. Website: www.risa.org.za

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

© David South Consulting 2023

Mauritanian Music Shop Shares Songs and Friendship

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

Around the world, traditional music stores selling vinyl records, tapes and CDs (compact discs) are closing down. Digital downloads distributed over the Internet and mobile phones make it unnecessary to build a music collection in these hard formats.

While this has been a revolution that has made acquiring music as simple as firing up a digital download service like iTunes, it has many downsides as well. One of them has been the loss of vast swathes of musical history, as many songs recorded in the past have not made their way into digital downloads. And how can you find music online if you only remember part of a tune or song and can’t remember its title or the musician?

The background and knowledge that was once imparted by an informed person in a music store has been lost in the world of digital downloads.

A Mauritanian music shop is showing how a traditional record store can stay relevant and commercially viable in the 21st century. Entrepreneur Mohamed Vall’s Saphire d’Or store in Mauritania’s capital Nouakchott (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouakchott), is a treasure trove of the sort of long-lost recorded songs that normally vex lovers of African music. Pictures of the shop can be seen at the sahelsounds blog (http://sahelsounds.com/?p=887).

Vall has run the shop for three decades and amassed a large collection of rare African music on records and tapes. He has married this trove of African creativity to a clever business model: Vall doesn’t let customers buy the precious records themselves but instead will transfer the songs to a disc or a USB stick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive) for US 30 cents each.

He has also used traditional hospitality to create an atmosphere that encourages people to interact and keep coming back.

“I have the biggest collection in Mauritania,” Vall told The Guardian newspaper. “Any music you want from Africa – I mean the kind of music that puts Africa on the map – I have it.”

The shop is down an alleyway in the bustling capital and offers a refuge for music lovers.

The atmosphere encourages friendly conversation and lets customers take their time making a selection. Customers can relax in armchairs while browsing and drink some traditional mint tea or enjoy a snack from a communal bowl.

The shop uses traditional Mauritanian nomadic hospitality to improve the customer experience. It also uses the music it sells to heal rifts between the different cultures that cross Mauritania, as it bridges Arabic-speaking North Africa and the majority black sub-Saharan Africa.

“When you are here, it doesn’t matter who you are,” Vall said. “We get youngsters wanting 1940s ballads and old people whose minds are musical museums. We get toubabs (white people) who heard one song decades ago.”

One of the treasure troves held in the shop is the recordings made by West African orchestras during the post-colonial period.

The shop also acts as an interactive museum and archive of many African musical greats, from Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour to Nigerian afrobeat pioneers, Guinean pop legends and Maliaian and Congolese musicians.

Its collection ranges beyond Africa to take in musical genres from around the world, from blues to salsa to rock.

“The music allows you to travel in your head,” said one customer, teacher Abdoul Kaba.”When I first came to Mauritania from Guinea, I went round and round looking for zouk (West African funk) music that everybody listens to in Guinea until I ended up here.”

The shop also serves as a sanctuary for many from life’s everyday hardships.

“It’s not about the music any more. People come back because in here you can be free. You can listen to music and forget this hard life,” Kaba said.

Published: June 2012

Resources

1) The African Music Encyclopedia: Search by alphabetical listing the continent’s musicians. Website: http://africanmusic.org/

2) African Musicians Profiles: African Musicians Profiles (AMP) is a website for the promotion and publicity of African musicians. Each musician “has a profile, and there are pages on news of recent and future events, special features, recommended CDs, relevant reading (biographies, reference books and magazines) and photos”. Website: http://www.africanmusiciansprofiles.com/

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

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