Emadlangeni RadioLet me tell you about that man. You’ve seen him. We all have. Walking down West Street in the 1950s, or through the homeland or the dusty streets of KwaZulu, or along the roads between the hills. A Zulu man with a guitar slung across his shoulder, decorated with colourful straps, sometimes painted, always loved. He walks and he plays and he sings to himself, and the music cycles round and round like the wheels of a train, like the turning of the earth, like the long walk home.
That is Maskandi.
We also had the privilege to see or hear these men around Johannesburg or at various hostels in the when he was a boy in the 1940s. They would appear at the edges of weddings, at shebeens, at the markets. They carried news from one valley to the next, from one town to another. They were wanderers, yes—but they were also historians, poets, praise-singers with steel strings..
The word comes from the Afrikaans musikant—musician. But it became something else entirely in Zulu mouths. It became a way of being. A way of walking through the world with a guitar as your companion, your voice, your story.
The Guitar Comes Home
There is a beautiful irony in the guitar’s journey. They say the Moors brought it from Africa to Spain in the eighth century. And then, nearly a thousand years later, Portuguese traders brought it back—through the back door, into what is now Zimbabwe. But the guitar found its way home.
Because we already had the umakhweyana, the musical bow. We already understood how one string could hold a universe of meaning. So when the guitar arrived, it was not a stranger. It was a cousin returning.
By the 1930s, cheap guitars were being made in Durban, in Johannesburg. And the Zulu people, the Ndebele across the border, the Shangaan—they took this instrument and made it speak in tongues they already knew.
The Two Ways of Playing
There are two ways to play maskanda guitar. The first is ukuvamba—vamping, strumming, laying down the rhythm like a heart beating. The second is ukupika—picking, intricate, the fingers dancing on the strings like rain on a tin roof.
They say the picking came from the north, from the Ndebele of Bulawayo. And maybe it did. But Rob Allingham—God rest his soul, he knew more about this music than anyone—he would tell you that John Bhengu’s picking came from the Umkomaas valley, right here in southern KwaZulu-Natal. So perhaps it came from everywhere. Perhaps it came from the earth itself.
The Men from Bulawayo
Josaya Hadebe. George Sibanda. Say those names.
They came down from Bulawayo in the late 1940s, guitars in hand, and they stood on street corners in Durban and Johannesburg and drew crowds that stopped traffic. Hadebe would play his ukuvamba style and people would press coins into his palm just to hear another verse.
Hugh Tracey recorded them—fifteen tracks each, for the African Music Research unit. Those recordings survive. You can hear in them the influence of the American cowboy films that had swept through Southern Africa. The singing cowboys—Gene Autry, Roy Rogers—they had found their way into the Zulu and Ndebele imagination. And so the maskandi became a kind of cowboy too, a wandering hero with a guitar instead of a six-shooter.
In Bulawayo, they called them omasiganda—again from musikant. They played at tea parties, at shebeens, at the Stanley Hall, built in 1935, where the floors were polished and the music never stopped.
Earlier Still
But here is the thing. Phineas Maphumulo’s Guitar Twins were recording in 1942. And if you listen to those tracks—really listen—you hear maskanda, fully formed. Picking and strumming both. The patterns are there. The structure is there.
So maybe the music was always there. Maybe recording dates don’t tell the whole story. Maybe the maskandi were playing in the hills long before anyone thought to capture them on wax.
George Sibanda’s Reach
They say George Sibanda was so popular that his influence crossed borders and languages. They say he reached the great Congolese guitarist Jean Bosco Mwenda, who was also recorded by Hugh Tracey. A coincidence? Perhaps. But in music, there are no coincidences. Only connections.
The Sugar Drinker
John Bhengu started on the streets of Durban in the late 1940s. By 1955, he was recording for Troubadour. And by the time he became Phuzushukela—the Sugar Drinker—he had changed maskanda forever.
He worked with Cuthbert Matumba, who you can hear in this very collection as part of the Zoutspanburg Brothers. After Matumba died, Bhengu moved to Trutone, then to GRC, where Hamilton Nzimande electrified his sound. The bass lines of mbaqanga wrapped themselves around his picking, and the result was irresistible. That sound would carry maskanda through the next thirty years.
How a Maskanda Song Works
Every maskanda song has four parts, though you might not notice them unless you know to listen.
First comes the intela or izihlabo—the introduction, improvised, the guitarist showing what his fingers can do, calling the listeners close.
Then the chorus—ihubo—everyone singing together, voices weaving in harmony, a moment of community in a music often made alone.
Then the story—the lead singer’s voice rising and falling, telling of love and loss, of cattle and women, of the city and the hills, of everything that matters.
And finally the ukubonga—the praise. Suddenly, rapidly, the singer calls out the names of his family, his ancestors, his heroes. It is a blessing, a remembering, a way of saying: I did not come from nowhere. I am part of something.
About This Collection
I have spent many hours with the 78s in the flatinternational archive. I have listened to them crackle and pop, have held them by the edges, have tried to imagine the hands that first placed them on turntables in houses in Cato Manor, in Lamontville, in the valleys of the Umkomaas.
This collection is my tribute to those hands. To the men who made this music.
Volume 1 runs from 1927 to 1952. Some of these tracks are not strictly maskanda—they are unaccompanied voices, ngoma dancing, praise-singing. But listen closely. You can hear the maskanda struggling to be born. You can almost hear the guitar that is not there.
Volume 2 runs from 1954 to 1964. Here the guitar is present, is central, is singing its own song. These are the years when maskanda found its voice and would not be silent again.
I have tried to order them chronologically, to show the music growing, changing, becoming. But music does not really move in straight lines. It moves in circles, like the maskandi walking the streets, like the cycles of a picking pattern, like the turning of the years.
What Is Missing
I must be honest with you. There is much missing from this collection. The lyrics, for one thing. Without translations, we hear only half the story. The maskandi were poets, and their words carried weight. One day, perhaps, someone will help me understand what they were saying.
And there are so many great maskandi I could not fit here. Shiyani Ngcobo, who carried the tradition into our own century. Phuzukhemisi, whose first three CDs belong in every collection. Mfaz’ Omnyama. Skeleton. Vusi Ximba. And the young ones—Zuluboy, with his “skandi-hop,” proving that this music is not a museum piece but a living, breathing thing.
Where to Go from Here
If this music moves you—and how could it not?—then seek out Rob Allingham’s Singing in an Open Space. It picks up where this leaves off, from 1962 to 1982, and it is a masterwork of documentation and love.
Seek out Squashbox, if you can find it—Harry Scurfield’s compilation of concertina maskanda. It will cost you, but it is worth every penny.
Seek out Gumboot Guitar from the British Library. Seek out Street Sounds of Durban, though I have not seen a copy in years.
And seek out Juluka—Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu—who brought maskanda to the world without ever losing its soul.
A Final Word
I grew up with this music. Not in the way I should have—I was a white boy in the suburbs, and maskanda was not played on Springbok Radio. But it was in the air. It was in the sound of the city, in the taxi ranks and the markets, in the men who walked past our windows with guitars on their shoulders.
It took me years to understand what I was hearing. To understand that this music is not just entertainment. It is memory. It is geography. It is the sound of a people walking through history, carrying their homes with them in the strings of a guitar.
This collection is for them. For Josaya Hadebe and George Sibanda and John Bhengu. For the nameless maskandi who never recorded, who played only for their families, their neighbours, their own walking feet. For the hills of KwaZulu-Natal, which hold their songs like a mother holds a child.
Siyabonga. Thank you. The music remains.
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