Troubling the divide: Jazz, History and the new African

An interview with Lindelwa Dalamba

Lindelwa Dalamba is an historian of South African jazz, focusing on its itineraries in the country and in exile during apartheid, as well as music history, modernism and cultural politics. She joined the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) as a Senior Researcher in 2025, from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she worked and lectured in the Department of Music for a number of years. This interview was carried out by New Archival Visions (NAV) Research Fellow, Samuel Longford, in April 2025. It is the first in a series of conversations which seek to place questions pertinent to the work of the CHR in conversation with broader publics online. Rather than providing a conclusive biographical account, this conversation draws on Lindelwa’s history as a musician, student, teacher and scholar, traversing the local and the global, the rural and the urban, exile and return, as well as questions of inter/disciplinarity, aesthetics and politics, music, history, literature and sound. In particular it draws from Lindelwa’s ‘three strands of interest’ – Music, Literature and History – so as to come at disciplines from a different angle, one that questions and troubles the prevailing logic of the worlds, institutions, and disciplines that we produce, inhabit and navigate.

Music, Literature, History

SL: So Lindelwa, I just want to start by asking about your interests in South African jazz, music and musicology, very broadly.

LD: I started off as a classical musician from primary school. I only studied classical music until I moved to high school in the mid to late 90s, and this kind of music [Jazz] was now suddenly getting legitimacy because apartheid had ended.

SL: And where was high school?

LD: High school was in East London, Stirling High School. At the time, the high school teacher, Mr. Webster, who was a historian (you might know his article on the Mfecane aftermath with Carolyn Hamilton), he had always had an interest in music, and he really worked hard to get jazz going at Stirling. If you look at the jazz landscape in South Africa, a lot of us come from that school. I first tried the clarinet, and it was just too weird, so I asked to borrow the saxophone, and I started practicing it in the classical mode. When I went to high school I started with the jazz thing. I remember the first jazz piece I played was Fly Me to the Moon, and I remember exactly what I said to Mr. Webster. I said, this rhythm is very odd because I wasn’t used to swing rhythm.

We played all over East London. It’s very important to note that much like the ethos here at the CHR, Mr. Webster would not have been able to do what he did without community, cooperation and collaboration. So we played a lot with Lulama Gawulana, who was the guru of jazz in Mdantsane, and did his own teaching. A lot of students who were not part of the reified, formerly white-only schools, the ones who were in Mdantsane, in the township, went through him. So there was a lot of crossing, bridge building, and crossing of journeys. This was the immediate post-apartheid moment, so it was very idealistic, well-meant, good faith crossing of borders, and jazz really facilitated that in quite interesting ways. That is what got me into South African jazz. If there hadn’t been that cross-pollination between the township and the city, I might well have just remained with American jazz. It was actually meeting the guys from Mdantsane via Lulama Gawulana that got me exposed to a very different kind of sonic regime, even though it all fell under jazz. It was quite fascinating.

The same thing was happening at what was then the Grahamstown National Festival. The National Schools Jazz Festival was a subset of that festival, and it had a more educational component. So that’s when I met people that I now know are from Cape Town. That’s where I met Duke Ngcukana and Fitzroy Ngcukana. A lot of these guys have passed on now. It’s also where I met Johnny Mekoa. It’s where I was first exposed to their histories, and they taught us. It was always extra curricular, because the music curriculum did not focus on South African jazz as such. That doesn’t mean it was not important. People who do music education always say there’s no such thing as formal or informal. There’s good and bad education. So that’s how it started in terms of performance.

In East London, you didn’t pay extra to study music. That’s another reason why there’s so many musicians coming from East London, because you can actually do music as a subject without paying for it. That included doing music theory and music history, which I had already started in primary school. Music history especially was something that was encouraged, so I got into that. And again, that was mostly questions like ‘what year was Mozart born?’, etc, etc. Then, with my exposure to literature, particularly to South African literature, the little that we were taught, jazz featured quite heavily in South African literature. That’s Michael Titlestad’s whole point in his book, Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage. So my further understanding or interest in South African jazz history was cultivated through South African literature. Not so much with history. We didn’t do history at Stirling because the curriculum had been insufficiently transformed to reflect post-apartheid realities, and the teachers refused to teach it. I actually only got into history at university. That’s still my three strands of interest today: Music, literature and history.

Canon, Musicology, Sound

The Blue Notes Township Bop

SL: You’ve touched on music and education, but also on your first encounters with canon, right? I wonder if you want to say anything about canon and how you first encountered and understand it? Or to be more specific, are you interested in saying anything about disciplines like ethnomusicology and its history, and musicology as you see it?

LD: There is a romantic view of jazz which makes people forget that jazz also has a canon. The teaching of jazz as a particular kind of music has not necessarily translated into an awareness of a fugitive kind of education, of a radical kind of education. They teach in the same way as the classical canon even though they are teaching a different genre and history. Musicology is also part of the colonial project. The ology itself was cultivated when music was wanting to carve a legitimate space in the discourses of the university. Before ethnomusicology, there was a thing called comparative musicology, in the same way that there’s such a thing as comparative literature. Comparative musicology could not have happened without movements of empire, because it came with discovering the music of the other. And so what do you do when you are confronted with the music of the other? How else can you learn it without comparing it to the music you know? Of course, the problem is that that comparison became stark and stratified. You get people like Eric Hornbostel, Guido Adler, etc, etc. And later on in the 20th century, you get Hugh Tracey in our South African context. I think ethnomusicology has gotten quite a hard rep, which at times is not a fair reflection on how far it’s come. It has come far, more so now that people can represent themselves. But musicology, in many ways, has escaped the censure that it deserves. You get cultural musicology, you get music and gender, music and sexuality, but there is still a core canon that makes up musicology.

Popular music scholarship is something quite interesting. You hardly find it in music departments. A lot of popular music scholars reside in sociology, media and communications. It was part of that post-Second World War movement to study the masses and popular culture. The UK Birmingham schools were very important for the elaboration of popular music. Wilfred Mellers wrote one of the early seminal texts on the Beatles. And that spurred on a particular kind of movement. The first journal on popular music was in the early 1980s. Interestingly, a lot of those scholars, Richard Middleton, for example, were from the north of the UK. It was a very UK-specific thing. You’re not going to find a lot of that particular culture in music departments, like in Oxbridge, for example. You’ll find them in Newcastle upon Tyne, and then up in Scotland. That’s where that popular music scholarship really thrived. And it was there that South African jazz could find a voice, because

South African jazz is deemed a poor cousin of American jazz. So it didn’t really fit in. Because it doesn’t necessarily reward a formalist analysis. It can be more rewarding to study it using ethnomusicological methods. It’s quite a complex thing, and its an eclectic field, rich in that way. But that richness is coupled with some very strong critique that is responsive to other trends in the humanities, like what happened in historical debates, or, as I said, anthropology, and also literary studies.

SL: It’s great to get these insights Lindy, thank you. Just riffing of what you have said there, I’m wondering where you would situate yourself in relation to these different histories and disciplines? And how does this inform the kinds of questions that you’ve found yourself asking, whilst navigating these quite complex interdisciplinary sites and institutions?

LD: I’ve never had to situate myself squarely in any one discipline. I was fortunate because of the kind of open liberal education system that Rhodes had at the time. I did a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in music, instead of a Bachelor of Music, precisely because I wanted to do English, history, and linguistics. But music was my guide, it was the spine that, you know, had guided my questions. You could think of it as a stem where all these branches came from, where they also cohered. By the time I got to the English Department at Rhodes, scholars like Melvin van Wyk Smith were there. Very, very strong advocates for South African literature, and not just Coetzee and Gordimer, black South African literature, black in the broader Black Consciousness sense. So I came into that milieu, and I was able to do everything from Chaucer to Alex La Guma, and I took charge of all of that and enjoyed myself.

The history department had Julian Cobbing, Paul Malem, and Julia Wells, a small department. I’m sure it’s bigger now. It was heavily skewed towards modern South African history, even though, of course, Paul writes beyond 20th century South African history. And obviously, Julian’s world history, global historical perspectives were crucial in seeing how different histories connect different kinds of articulations and how power works through them. And Julia Wells and Helen Dampier, who came later, brought strong gender perspectives to history.

Brotherhood of Breath

So you go to your English class, and then run across campus and you’re in the history department, and you learn the context of what it is that you’ve just read in English. And then you run with your saxophone to the music department, and there might not be resonance.

I remember feeling so out of joint this one year. In history, we were doing the 19th century, the gross, terrorizing 19th century of the Eastern Cape. And in music, we were studying romanticism with Chopin and all of those guys. And it was too much for me, hearing about all this beauty and reading and learning about all this terror. And I thought, there’s something going on here. I’m not looking for a unified theory of everything, but it was uncanny. I remember that Gary Baines was at the department, and he was actually quite crucial, because he talked about cultures of the Vietnam War, particularly the anti-Vietnam War movement. We got to learn about popular groups in the U.S. like the Doors, and how they helped to shape the anti-Vietnam War ethos. And I understood that this is how music can work in society, this is how music can be read or heard alongside history. I remember that Baines gave us an assignment to do. Because we had just finished reading All Quiet on the Western Front I went down to the music department and I said, I want to do 1917, the October Revolution, but I want to do it from a musical perspective. I was given this book written by Richard Taruskin. The title was Defining Russia Musically. And that just blew my mind. That to me is musicology. And that’s what really started my understanding that these things don’t need to be unproductively separated.

Now I would just situate myself as a African scholar of the humanities. I’m not interested in other divisions. The only thing I insist on is rigor. People must be thorough. It’s not a matter of being a magpie and getting useful bits from each thing. It’s a radical position to take. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’m happy to be at CHR.

SL: Super. There’s lots of questions that spring to mind. But just going back to your description of life at Rhodes, how you were jumping from history to literature, running with your sax to the music department. I’m just thinking about that in terms of education and pedagogy. I think it lends itself to the type of work we do at the CHR and at the Iyatsiba (it is jumping) Lab. Like the name, we’re often jumping between platforms, abiding by an interdisciplinary understanding of the arts and humanities. Although you’ve arrived from Wits with a reputation in musicology, it’s also very clear that after spending some time and working with you, one of the things you’re interested in is undoing the rigid lines between certain disciplines and certain bodies of thought. And I’m just wondering if, through this, we can get to a question of sound and aesthetics.

LD: I’m going to have to learn about sound. Music is organized sound. But then it’s organized by people, people in society, people doing certain things. So sound is something that I’m going to have to learn about. I can think through the sonic but it’s something that I have to think about very, very carefully. It’s important to guard against the dissolution of music into mere sound, and to guard against the disappearance of the human, which sound studies might lend itself to. Because one has to be careful that we don’t replicate the Cartesian split. Because the human and the body in black music studies is crucial for me.

So, for example, that might become a problem if black music is reduced only to the score, right? I’m not saying that sound studies does this, but what of the ethnographic ear? Because when everyone’s jumping to something, what’s happening to the ship? What’s going on? Why would sound be important here? Why are we turning to sound? What does sound offer that music doesn’t offer? Especially if music is not seen simply as a succession of genres.

Pedagogy is important. Are we teaching how to think through sound? How to think sonically? In music now, what’s tended to happen is that people just teach repertoires. Without necessarily thinking sonically and thinking differently. So there are specialists at the CHR who deal with sound and the sonic. I’m going to learn from them, but I’m not going to stop being a musicologist, because that project is important. It’s unfinished. And that project is vulnerable to creeping conservative forces that want to do something else with it.

SL: Okay, thanks Lindy. I think we could talk much longer about sound, methodology and music, but I want to move on and ask about your current research. What is it that you are focusing on now that you have arrived and settled at the CHR?

LD: My first article was from my Master’s thesis. I was lucky enough to be supervised by the godfather of South African jazz studies, Christopher Ballantine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. That thesis was a distillation of everything we’ve been talking about. My Master’s was a chronotopic reading of South African musicians’ autobiographies, specifically by formerly exiled musicians. Hugh Masekela, two by Miriam Makeba, and one by Joe Mogotsi of the Manhattan Brothers. Doing this work got me into thinking about exile. I was able to take my knowledge of literary theory to read these autobiographies for how time and space work. I was using the Bakhtinian notion of the chronotope and how music works in those worlds, describing exile, rupture, return, death, etc, etc. That led me to my PhD, which was supervised by Roger Parker. That one was on South African jazz in exile, in Britain specifically. At first I wanted to work with the Blue Notes because they were exciting. But then Roger said, well, why don’t you start with King Kong? And that just opened up huge avenues for thinking about how to be in Britain as a black person, in post-imperial Britain that was going through its own rapid decolonization.

The King Kongers were cousins of the Windrush generation. Understanding how they implanted and created lives in Britain enables us to find ways beyond the Black Atlantic. Other people like Brett Piper at Wits studied the exiles in America, and that comes with a different imperative. So this was a very different relationship between, you know, South Africa and the old motherland of Britain.

The King Kongers, for example, left the Union of South Africa that was still a dominion of Britain. But by the time they were coming back in 1961, South Africa had been kicked out. They came back to a republic. So even their documents, they no longer existed. They didn’t exist.

If I had started with the Blue Notes in the 1960s, that would have been a very different kind of time. That’s a time of the growth of Powell-ism, if we can call it that, leading to the horrors of 1968 in the Rivers of Blood speech. So that led to a very different kind of existence for Black South Africans there. They were now members of a decolonizing Africa. There was a burgeoning of the BBC African writers’ series at the Transcription Center.[i] All of those kinds of things. So they inhabited Britain very differently because they were inhabiting a different kind of Britain. The waves of exiles by those who left in the late 1960s were very much influenced by the Black Consciousness Movement and by musicians like Philip Tabane. By the time you get another wave from the 70s, much younger musicians, much less wedded to jazz, more into Afro. So they had far more in common with Afrobeats and reggae and all those kinds of Black cultures in Black London. So as you can imagine, this required a broadening of the notion of South Africa. Considering the dispersing effects of modernity as such, never mind the particular racial modernity of apartheid, where does South Africa end?

So that’s some of the research I’ve been carrying out. Looking at how South African jazz disdained or participated in other movements like Free Jazz in the United States, or the Chicago school of jazz from the late 1960s. How others like Hugh Masekela went more pop with Herb Alpert and friendships with the likes of Miles Davis and everything. I think that one just has to have this big mind, you know, because we’re dealing with big people who were forced to live bigger lives precisely in response to those who wanted to constrict their lives.

Now I want to go back to the 1930s. At the moment I’m riffing off Tim Couzen’s work on the new African and H.I. Dhlomo. Where was music during the phase of the new African? What is the new African musician? What’s going on there? So those are the kinds of questions I’m interested in.

Ntongola Masilela says that the project of the new African ended in the 1960s. I’m not sure about that. I’m not disagreeing. I’m saying let’s think about it a little bit. Because that 1960 cutoff is so overdetermined, right, by Sharpeville, by the exodus of people, by banning and underground activities. But does it actually show in the stuff, in the nuts and bolts of the materials we are apprehending? Or is it more contoured by broader historical narratives? The golden age of South African jazz is usually associated with Sophiatown, etc. But when you cut it off like that, it’s almost as if it doesn’t have a history.

It’s important to go back to the 1930s before apartheid, because the role of jazz during apartheid has been fixed. That narrative is falling apart with the realities of the post-apartheid, and jazz is kind of unplaced at the moment. There’s an identity crisis going on. There’s brilliant music going on. The musicians are brilliant. They know what they’re doing. But talk about jazz seems to have come unstuck in the 90s. The old certainties about progressive white musicians collaborating with black musicians is becoming unstuck in much similar ways to how other cultural talk about South Africa is becoming unstuck. Jazz can no longer be the panacea, the one that covers up those cracks. And so I think to face the post-apartheid, we have to go back to the 1930s prior to these things becoming solidified and being given an overriding justification as anti-apartheid all the time.

This is something that Ballantine has disproven in Marabi Nights: Early South African jazz in Vaudeville. But the connection is still not made. There’s still an assumption that there’s a break between that early jazz and Sophiatown. And guys like Walter Nhlapo and Todd Matshikiza straddle this supposed temporal divide that is also structured by rural-urban narratives of South African history. That then means that we have to trouble the rural-urban divide. We do this also by noting how pre-Sophiatown jazz was played in spaces that would now not be considered urban. So that relationship of jazz and urbanity becomes complicated in some ways. And I think that does take us into the new African, because jazz was considered modern music everywhere. It was read and heard and understood, approved and disapproved of, precisely because of its newness. So the new African, for me, is a way for me to be able to talk about the Afro-modern in its South African iteration.

SL: You’ve been talking about the 60s as a break and I’m wondering about the 1990s. We started this conversation in the 90s, right? And now, thinking about the process of return after exile. You were on the panel for Paul Hamner’s re-launch of Trains to Taung which I think is an important reference here. Listening to you speak about exile in Britain, and South African’s relationship with the Windrush generation, made me think about Moses Molelekwa’s album, Genes and Spirits, released in 2000. When I first heard that, I thought, wow this is Jungle music. At least this is not jazz in the conventional sense. And I’m just wondering if you want to say anything about that moment as well, the moment of return. And thinking about jazz, more broadly in relationship to other genres. Obviously, Jungle and Drum n Bass are, you know, they comes from the Caribbean, along with Reggae and Dub, and a lot of other genres which define modern British music, shaping it in ways that are quite distinct from the U.S. for example, and I’m just wondering if you want to say anything about that before we close?

LD: People are trying to, but you can’t talk about British jazz without talking about South African jazz, because their influence there was so definitive, particularly with the Blue Notes and the Brotherhood of Breath. They didn’t stay in their little capsule. They entered discourses, conversations that were already happening, and those conversations were open enough for their voices to enter into a broader Black planetary expressive culture.

What’s interesting about the young ones and the eclectic sounds, okay, Moses is much older than me, but, you know, the younger generation, the eclectic sound has to do with the feeling of youth, that connection with dance music. Moses had a lot of friends in the Kwaito scene, for example. It had something to do with the hiatus, the silencing of jazz on the airwaves during apartheid. So that generated different things.

You can negatively call it a cutting of roots, but it also generated other ways to connect with other musical identities. As you say, it’s Caribbean, it’s there. Because if you compare somebody like Moses to somebody like Feya Faku, for example, those guys in New Brighton, where that jazz culture continued. Jazz culture in places like New Brighton wasn’t cut off at the roots, partly because it was never as exposed to the vagaries of capital, the recording industry, etc. It was always a people’s culture. So that leads to a different kind of relationship that can sometimes be a bit more staunch.

In terms of the exiles that returned, that’s a complicated political and politicized question, because some returned more as political ambassadors than as musicians. Some struggled to return. We know Bheki Mseleku really, really struggled. He did the album Home at Last, but then he actually went back. Pinisa Saul, who also recently just died, she returned, but she couldn’t stay. She went back. And people don’t really want to talk about those who went back, because talking about those who went back points to the failures of post-apartheid South Africa.

Lindelwa Dalamba in conversation with Sam Longford, Iyatsiba Lab, Woodstock, Cape Town, 15 April 2025

Troubling the divide: Jazz, History and the new African

An interview with Lindelwa Dalamba

Canon, Musicology, Sound

Further Reading…