isicathamiya

isicathamiya, a type of secular a cappella choral singing developed in South Africa by migrant Zulu communities. The music became widely popular outside of Africa in the late 20th century when it was picked up and promoted by the world-music industry.

Isicathamiya is a synthesis of diverse traditions, including local musics, Christian choral singing, and blackface minstrelsy, a form of entertainment that flourished in the United States and England in the mid- to late 19th century. The music is performed in call-and-response fashion by male choral ensembles that range in size from 4 to more than 20 singers. Although all vocal ranges—soprano, alto, tenor, and bass—are represented, the bass vocalists are the greatest in number. The group sings in four-part harmony, typically led by a tenor soloist. Zulu is the principal language of performance, although many songs contain an admixture of English.

Isicathamiya has been cultivated primarily through weekend competitions in which contestants are evaluated not only on the precision of their singing but also on the neatness and integrity of their appearance. Groups perform in unique uniforms, if not in matching formal wear. As they sing, the members of the ensemble execute smooth, carefully coordinated gestures atop light, shuffling footwork. It is from this distinctive movement that the genre draws its name: the term isicathamiya is derived from the Zulu root -cathama, which carries the sense of walking lightly but stealthily, in a catlike fashion.

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The prototype of isicathamiya dates to the years following World War I, when Zulu men from the countryside moved closer to urban areas to find work in coal mines and factories, especially in the province of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) in eastern South Africa. Within these migrant communities, workers formed vocal ensembles—usually named after the homeland of their members (or of their leader)—as a type of competitive entertainment within and between the workers’ hostels. In the late 1930s a local choral style emerged that exhibited the polished sonic and visual qualities that later came to characterize isicathamiya. This style was called mbube. Although mbube took on a more boisterous, so-called “bombing” sound in the late 1940s, it returned about two decades later to its mellower manifestation. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Enock Masina’s King Star Brothers arose as the most prominent a cappella group of the region, and it was their gentler style that became known as isicathamiya.

Joseph Shabalala and his ensemble Ladysmith Black Mambazo were the musicians through whom global audiences were exposed to the genre. Performing in various combinations of 7 to 13 singers, the group released a number of immensely popular isicathamiya recordings that sparked a veritable frenzy in the local music market in the 1970s and early 1980s, but by the mid-1980s the craze had subsided. It was then that the ensemble caught the attention of international popular music artist Paul Simon. By recording with Simon, Ladysmith Black Mambazo gained access to and was enthusiastically received by the world-music market. Isicathamiya consequently became the most readily recognized South African music genre of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.