A pan-ethnic city music, developed in South Africa’s urban slums (principally those of Johannesburg) during the second and third decades of the 20th century. A rhythmically propulsive dance music, marabi was forged principally by unschooled keyboard players who were a notorious part of the culture and economy of illegal slumyard liquor dens. Harmonically, it rested upon a cyclical pattern stretched over four measures, with one measure per chord: I–IV–I6-4–V. The cyclical nature of this style clearly derived from indigenous sources, repetitive harmonic patterns being typical of traditional African musics.
The melodies superimposed on these endlessly repeating patterns sometimes became legendary; sometimes lyrics were invented, in some instances containing political commentary or protest. A significant proportion of these melodies are traceable to local traditional origins. But often the tunes were drawn from other sources, such as the familiar stock of African Christian hymns, the commercially popular tunes of the day or Afrikaans dance music.
In performance, cyclical repetitions of a melody or melodic fragment would eventually yield, perhaps, to a similar treatment of another melody or fragment, and perhaps then still others. In this manner, performers would play for long periods without stopping. A simple rhythmic accompaniment would be provided throughout by a player shaking a tin filled with small stones.
The most famous of marabi’s venues were the shebeens, and the weekend-long slumyard parties. For almost everyone outside ghetto life, however, marabi and its subculture were shunned. Associated with illegality, police raids, sex and a desperately impoverished working class, marabi was vilified as a corrupting menace. It is no surprise, then, that no early marabi musicians were recorded.
Marabi in its classic form had a short life. In the wake of the Urban Areas Act of 1923, officials began to lay claim to inner-city suburbs as ‘white’; as the relocation of black residents began, so too did the destruction of marabi culture. Gradually stripped of the small, informal domestic space which had nurtured it, marabi musicians realized that their art had no future in the new sterile dormitory suburbs. By the early 1930s, those who could were already developing a new genre, rooted in part in marabi: South African jazz.
M. Andersson: Music in the Mix (Johannesburg, 1981)
D. Coplan: ‘Marabi: the Emergence of African Working-Class Music in Johannesburg’, Discourse in Ethnomusicology, ii: A Tribute to Alan P. Merriam, ed. C. Card (Bloomington, IN, 1981), 43–65
D. Coplan: In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (Johannesburg, 1985)
E. Harsch: ‘Unearthing Marabi’, Africa South (1990), 40–42
V. Erlmann: ‘Cultural Osmosis, Ethnicity, and Tradition in Black Popular Music in Durban, 1913–1939’, African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago, 1991), 54–94
C. Ballantine: Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville (Johannesburg, 1993)
CHRISTOPHER BALLANTINE