In the 1980s, Afrikaans-speaking young South Africans increasingly disassociated themselves from the dominant institutions, i.e., the Calvinist church, the state and the parental generation. Their oppositional ideas could be partly conveyed through Voëlvry, rock-punkish music at the time labelled 'Boerepunk' and 'Alternative Afrikaans Music Movement', which lasted ...

This article focuses on muziki wa dansi (dance music, i.e., ‘urban jazz’ and ballroom dancing), a genre that became extraordinarily popular in post-1945 Tanganyika, primarily in towns. While musicians and aficionados, mainly ‘young’ townspeople, embraced this music and related dances as a means for shaping cosmopolitan and ‘modern’ identities, most African ‘elders’...

Drawing on private papers and interviews conducted between 2009 and 2015, this article analyses the Swahili lyrics (mashairi) of three of the twelve songs or sung poems composed between the mid-2000s and 2015 by Mzee Waziri Omari Nyange (born 1936), a Muslim man of peasant origins who was once a solo guitarist with the renowned Cuban Marimba Jazz Band, a craftspers...