The patriarchal order entrenched by Apartheid in South Africa shaped the minimal presence of Black women instrumentalists such as alto saxophonist Lynette Leeuw, uhadi and mhrubhe tradtional musical bow player Latozi ‘Madosini’ Mpahleni, and Ndebele guitarist Nothembi Mkhwebane. These women are part of a larger experience of invisibility and disappearance where Black women sit at the margins of sexism and anti-blackness. In as much as the apartheid system shaped their trajectory as musicians in South Africa, there is a commonality of experience across borders, seas and oceans. The circumstances of Black women musicians in the Global South have been shaped by similar structural conditions that police presence, performance, and artistic gesture. Thus, the analysis of these conditions and that which allows them to exist is a central political project of Black feminist historical studies. 

Music has been one way of examining both racist and sexist practices that undermine the artistic output of Black women in multiple ways, such as creating single heroes, which allow for some to emerge depending on their proximity to whiteness, and the aesthetic demands of racism, even though such hypervisibility becomes the consequence of unseeing them. Some are subjected to a particular infantilising fetishisation, where they are given recognition for their appeal and overall palatability in a western-dominant world that mostly centres on biological difference as ways of ordering the world. In The Invention of Women: Making an African sense of Western Gendered Discourses, Nigerian scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí writes about the dominance of biological difference and the power of sight in some western discourses: “The reason that the body has so much presence in the West is that the world is primarily perceived by sight. The differentiation of human bodies in terms of sex, skin color, and cranium size is a testament to the powers attributed to ‘seeing’’.

The creation of difference and its subsequent capitalisation allows for figures to emerge and others to disappear depending on their proximity to the capitalist logic of accumulation. The point here is that the music industry is part of an aesthetic order, and it is embedded in a world that opposes some of the most sincere creative gestures. The so-called alternative music scene in South Africa predominantly includes musicians who are not making pop or commercially successful music. This form of success is socially engineered by a mainstream logic that streamlines music taste. Recognition under a mainstream sensibility becomes a mirror exercise, a contaminating act, where some musicians become popular because of an ideal they symbolise above and beyond their musical capabilities. Commercial success is a symbolic construction, and preferences are not neutral. For instance, musician Sho Madjozi is lauded for bringing Tsonga cultural and sonic aesthetics into a cross-cultural popular fold, and part of this praise is against the backdrop of her mixed-race background. 

And so, through the lives of the aforementioned women artists of the Apartheid era, we see how race, class and gender organise against them, via under-compensated musical careers, minimal presence in historical archives, and a general disregard for the worlds that created them and the worlds that they have tried to preserve through their artistry as instrumentalists. The subjugation of African women in music happens on two fronts. They are oppressed as Black subjects and as women. Gender isn’t something that only organises against women, but the need for this singling has to do with the ways in which women are affected by patriarchy and sexism; and how inseparable this experience is to their existence as Black subjects. 

Representation matters, but we must remain aware of the danger pointed out by scholar Shiera El-Malik, who notes, “asking where are the women reveals a complexity in how women’s intellectual energies and writing practices get harnessed in defining the political problem and devising a response.” Moving with El-Malik’s logic, our reflection on these Black women musicians must be “about examining a relationship between a historical moment, its actors and its location in the present historical moment.” In other words, we must concern ourselves with how these women present in the present-past and the people, institutions that have been at the core of their unfolding. By doing so, we avoid the burden usually placed on oppressed people, where their intellectual energies and artistic practices are reduced to the sum total of their negation and its resolution. 

Lynette Leeuw

Lynette Leeuw was born on the 9th of October in Randfontein, a mining city that was at the forefront of advancing Apartheid’s racial capitalism and its migrant labour system. She was the first known Black woman alto saxophonist in South Africa, who became an instrumentalist through unconventional means that were quite fitting to the precarious place of people Black people under the apartheid system, particularly Black women. Her career started out as an early sixties experiment to see what sort of attention could be achieved by getting a female instrumentalist – unheard of at the time - to play Mbaqanga, a genre of music native to Black urban life. The book A Common Hunger to Sing: Tribute to South Africa’ Black Women of Song 1950-1990, featured a 1993 interview with Leeuw at the infamous Dorkay House (former headquarters for the Union of South African Artists), Johannesburg, in which she remarked, “The studio wanted a marketing gimmick. They desperately needed a hit. They took me and showed me how to play an alto saxophone. They made me practice the instrument for two hours, and the following day a studio was booked for a recording […] most of the people couldn’t believe that a woman could play the saxophone. I became what was known in the trade as a ‘personal advert’. We toured countrywide, even Lesotho and Swaziland, playing in record shops. People have to see me playing the saxophone.”

Leeuw went on to make more records for a series called Girls Can Blow yet she could not recall how many records she actually produced. She worked under different record labels that mostly ended up closing and as a result iit is difficult to get an accurate account of her catalogue. This obscurity is a consequence of the sort of historical precariousness that underscored Black musicians who lived in a state of being moved between different labels, predominantly treated like session musicians in a studio with no control or ownership of the records, even in circumstances where they’d ought to.

Through patterned exploitation and sidelining, the fate of Leeuw’s historical record is summed up by her own reflections: “I’d sometimes be travelling in a taxi and hear songs with a familiar melody being played. Then after sometime, something would click that it was my song, maybe recorded years ago.” Indeed, Leeuw’s placement in the world as an instrumentalist was gimmicked, at the very least, on the basis that people would be intrigued to see a woman playing a saxophone, despite her genuine talent and command of the saxophone.  

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Latozi ‘Madosini’ Mpahleni

Storyteller, music educator, uHadi*, isitolotolo* and mhrubhe* traditional musical bow player Latozi ‘Madosini’ Mpahleni was born in 1922 in the Eastern Cape. She is considered a living archive of Xhosa musical traditions and bow instruments. Like many folk musicians and storytellers, Madosini comes from a lineage and community of poets, storytellers and instrumentalists who were important to her aesthetic development. The fate of folk musicians in South Africa has been associated with anthropological styles of understanding. The white gaze is ever-present, affecting how these musicians are read in the world. Madosini is well known in South Africa for her legendary status and contributions to music and culture. However, like many musicians of her status and category, her decades of excellence have not always been acknowledged at the level that one might expect.

Madosini is part of a generation of Black women musicians who have suffered the fate of unfavourable contracts and exploitative commercial relationships within the music industry that Lynette Leeuw details above. Many of these musicians made music in a time where one could not legally own all rights to the masters and exercise control of their music through adequate royalties. In Madosini’s account she notes these struggles and the positive shift in her journey: “I had little education, and all I wanted to do was sing, dance and play my instruments whenever and wherever. I had little knowledge about legally owning my music. I’m happy that I have more rights to my music now. It’s something I can leave for my grandchildren.”

The changing tide in label and artist relations has meant that some musicians are now able to renegotiate ownership rights and establish favourable future contracts that enable them to see their artistic practice as a labouring force that is contributive to the longevity of their lives and the well-being of their families.  

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Nothembi Mkhwebane

Nothembi Mkhwebane was born in the provincial lands in Mpumalanga, South Africa, on the 1st of January, 1953. She grew up under a cultural lineage of Ndelebele* music makers through the close tutelage of her grandmother, Mantombana Mthimunye and uncle, Besaphi Mthimunye. Her grandmother taught her to play specialised Ndebele instruments, like the African drum (iingubhe), isikumero (reed flute) and isidonodono, while her uncle Besaphi Mthimunye gave instruction on guitar playing, in between their cattle farming labouring duties in the early sixties. In 1977 she moved provinces, settling in the city Tshwane (previously known as Pretoria) to take up work as a domestic labourer while pursuing her desire to record music, despite her illiterate reality at the time and lack of formal music training.

Mkhwebane is a product of community logic and organising, with her music springing from the nurturing efforts of family members. As her earning capacities increased, she became able to purchase a keyboard and acoustic guitar and hone her skills as a composer. In 1980, she began her career as a bandleader, with the formation of her group, Nothembi Nezelamani Zakonomazyana (Nothembi and the siblings from her clan ‘onomazyana’). This band performed at traditional gatherings and cultural spaces.

Mkhwebane’s trajectory has been inundated with many challenges that included a tremendous struggle to find a recording label that would ensure that she was compensated appropriately for her seminal output. She suffered the fate of many Black women musicians who never reap the full fruits of their labour, akin to South African songbird and lyrical jazz laureate Sathima Bea Benjamin, who launched her own independent label, Ekapa records, after experiencing artistic alienation in her exiled ‘home’ in New York. Fully aware of the difficulties of navigating the music industry, Mkhwebane created under her own record label, which gave her the space to own her artistry. 

Mkhwebane’s importance exceeds her technical excellence in music but also extends to the innumerable contributions that she has made in the preservation of Ndebele cultural histories through her mesmerising, colourful Ndebele attires and a performance style that honours the energy of indigenous Ndebele sounds. She has upheld the canon of Ndebele sonic traditions with supreme integrity and style in a country where Ndebele histories and modern sensibilities continue to live in the shadow of dominant cultural and linguistic Nguni groups.  

Legacy

The experiences of these musicians, however different they may be, detail a history of inadequate structures of support. They also show their unwavering desire to remain true to their art. Through their lives, we learn both the values that we want to emulate and those that we need to undo. These musicians are custodians of South African indigenous musical histories and urban Black music. Indeed, they are a testament to how community-orientated and collectively-driven sound is in South Africa – it is the work of many hands, generations, relatives, and other socially engineered relations. 

Glossary

uHadi - A Southern African musical bow instrument predominantly played by Xhosa linguistic cultural groups.

Isitolotolo - It is an African musical instrument known as the jaw’s harp.

Mhrubhe - A Southern African mouth-bow instrument that is part of indigenous musical string instruments. 

Ndebele - A Southern African linguistic cultural group that is part of the Nguni people in South Africa. They have their own unique music, dance and aesthetic traditions often passed down through family generational lines. 

Coloured identity - Under Apartheid people were racially classified and ‘coloured’ became one of many forms of racially categorising people. It often meant people of mixed European, African or Asian ancestry. Coloured identity is a creation of the Apartheid state that sought to segregate and create unfounded biological difference among people of colour.