Meet the Mahotella Queens

Mbaqanga is a South African township dance music that crystallized in the early 1960s, blending marabi piano-jazz harmonies, kwela’s lilting rhythms, and traditional Zulu/Sotho vocal styles with electric guitars, bass, saxophones, and drum kit. Characterized by a driving 4/4 shuffle, cyclical bass ostinati, choppy off‑beat rhythm guitar, tight horn riffs, and vibrant call-and-response vocals, it is both earthy and urbane—music made for public dances, shebeens, and radio alike. The term “mbaqanga” (a Zulu word for a steamed maize bread) came to signify a homegrown, filling, and proudly local sound that nonetheless drew on global jazz and R&B currents. A signature substyle, mgqashiyo, features a gravel-voiced male lead (“the groaner”) backed by a bright female chorus and a virtuoso electric band, epitomizing the music’s propulsive, joyful energy.

Marabi is a South African urban dance music that emerged in the townships around Johannesburg during the 1920s. It is built on hypnotic, cyclical chord vamps—often a simple I–IV–I–V loop—played on cheap pedal organs or upright pianos in informal drinking houses known as shebeens. Blending African melodic phrasing and call-and-response with the syncopation and harmonic language of American ragtime, stride, and early jazz/swing, marabi created an irresistibly danceable groove. As the style moved from small shebeen settings to larger ensembles, saxophones, trumpets, guitar/banjo, bass, and drums amplified its energy and helped define what became known as “township jazz.” Marabi’s infectious vamps and social vitality laid the groundwork for later South African genres such as kwela and mbaqanga.