june-2010

So the police would wait for you outside. You’d leave the club,
they’d take you to the police station, then you’d sleep over and
go to court the following morning and pay the fi ne. You’d go
back again to the club and do the same thing. It was a way
of fi ghting the regime. We fought the system through our
music—and through our persistence.”
In the late ’50s and ’60s, as former Sophiatown residents
dispersed into Meadowlands and other parts of Soweto,
the African jazz of Masekela and Makeba drifted there too,
evolving into a funkier, more rigidly rhythmic style known
as mbaqanga, or township jive. Paul Simon tapped into
this style on Graceland, collaborating with South African
musicians such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo. From there,
just as American funk morphed into hip-hop, township jive
went electronic, fi rst as bubblegum, then as kwaito.
One Saturday evening, Mduduzi Thusi, or Mdu, a 26-yearold
Huddleston Centre tour guide who lives in Sophiatown,
agrees to off er me a glimpse of how this music has evolved.
We begin in Newtown, a rising Joburg neighborhood in
which hip bars have opened in abandoned factories. An
upscale restaurant here is actually called Sophiatown,
and a wall mural inside depicts kids playing horns and
pennywhistles. Outside, a plaque enshrines local jazz heroes
such as Gwangwa and Masekela.
As it happens, there’s no action in Newtown tonight—the
Bassline club, which draws live rock and reggae bands, is
closed till Monday, and the venerable Market Theatre is
showing a play. So Mdu and his friend, Mpho, who drives
HAVING A BALL
Faces of the new
Sophiatown
a car with doors so rusted he describes it as a “moving
sculpture,” take me to Soweto. This township is home to
almost 900,000 residents, mostly black, who settled here
during the apartheid era, when the government seized
Johannesburg and the suburbs for themselves. We stop
briefl y at Vilakazi Street, where Nelson Mandela lived in a
tiny bungalow in the ’60s (it’s now a museum). Just down
the street is Desmond Tutu’s former home.
We pass shacks and shanties, house parties spilling into
the streets and street-corner food joints, eventually arriving
at News Café, a dance club in a strip mall on the edge of the
township. Some 150 people are here, drinking and dancing
to the thumping house music of regional acts like Durban’s
Finest and Black Coff ee. I am the only white person here,
and one of the few older than 25. Mdu and his friends grab a
table, then haul me to the dance fl oor. Soon Mdu is clapping
in my face, like a dance instructor, and a dozen clubgoers are
demonstrating impossibly twisty steps and insisting I not
deviate from “the beat! The beat!”
This goes on until 2:30 a.m., by which point we are all
drenched with sweat. Afterward, Mdu asks if I’ve found
what I’m looking for. And while I’d actually pictured
something more like a Hugh Masekela trumpet solo, the
answer is defi nitely yes.
Rolling Stone contributing editor STEVE KNOPPER has traveled everywhere
from Nashville and Harlem to the Mississippi Delta, but he’s never
come across a place like Sophiatown.
5
69