First World / Third World

A book I'm reading says that South Africa contains at once a first world and a third world. It turns out that looking for traditional African vocal music is a good way to see exactly what that means. As it turned out, my academic contacts have thus far not been especially helpful because they are still on holiday. The school year starts in another week, so this should change soon, but thus far, I've had no luck finding the music professor in Durban I want to speak with.

I figured that in the meantime I would contact performing groups directly. However, it quickly became clear that this would be more difficult than I thought. None of the groups have websites. There are no performances advertised in the papers or around the city. None of the local CD shops sell their music-- it's all American pop with a small section of local artists, but very little traditional music. The people who worked at the CD shops had no idea where to find traditional music, but took my number just in case. I tried calling the local culture ministry, the tourism office, and the music school attached to the big art gallery in town.

My experience at the tourism office was especially telling. It's located in one of the big shopping malls that make South Africa feel like suburban America. The people in the office told me there was nothing they knew of in Pietermaritzburg as far as traditional music was concerned, and tried to interest me in a performance of the Pietermaritzburg Philharmonic. Ironically, I found out later that while that very mall was under construction, the bricklayers and construction workers had formed an isicathamiya group, though it's no longer active.

I eventually struck gold in one office of the Department of Culture. They had an old database of local performing artists that included a section on isicathamiya groups. Some of the contact numbers still worked, and led me to my first solid contacts.

Basically, this is music that is sung primarily by working class blacks, often in the rural areas where people live in mud huts and have goats and chickens running around. Its exposure in the world of South Africa's shopping malls is minimal.