In one of our recent discussions of kwela, Dale suggested that there is a niche for a web site devoted to kwela and that, if one of us were enterprising enough, we might fill that niche. I’d love it if such a site appeared but, at the time Dale made the proposal, I was sceptical about the need. I still am. I want to air my reasons here and thus open up discussion of Dales’s proposal, considered as a serious practical opportunity.
A suitable site for discussing kwela already exists. It’s Chiff and Fipple. This is a whistle site. Kwela is whistle music. When I first found this site, I read through the main site quite carefully without seeing any policy of bias towards ITM. You find out about the de facto bias only by hanging out on the message boards and we can and do discuss a lot else besides ITM here.
Who would use the site? If the answer is ‘us’, read no further. If someone else, why haven’t they found us and why aren’t they supplying knowledgable answers to our frequent questions? Kwela is black South African township music. Probably there is very poor access to computers in the townships, even in the new South Africa. Is there a large diaspora of South Africans with a sentimental attachment to this music? I doubt it. More on this later.
None of us knows enough about the music to host a good site. I doubt whether anyone living outside South Africa would have access to the information, the musicians who survive and the original recordings that would be needed to make the idea work. Any South Africans out there with the required knowledge who could advise if not host such a site?
Kwela came and went in the 1950s. It is just one amongst many black township styles that have become popular only to be replaced by other styles. As with African American popular music, the intended initial audience seems to have been fickle and interest in the music ephemeral. This makes kwela (and African American styles) very different from ITM. If you ask of either ‘who is guarding the tradition?’, the answer is that nobody is guarding it as a living tradition. It is in the nature of both traditions not to be too concerned with looking back.
It would make a lot of sense to have a web site devoted to township music generally. The site would contain information about all styles that have been popular and about the evolution of the music. It would educate young South Africans about their heritage, it would remind older South Africans about the music that helped to make life bearable, to the extent that it was, and it would provide people in our community with information that seems frustratingly elusive right now.
That will do for now. I should stress that I’m not trying to pour cold water on Dale’s idea. Give me a site and I’ll hang out there. Rather, I just want to raise for discussion the practical obstacles that make me sceptical. Even if there were a general site for township jive, I’d still like to see a kwela-only site if it could be made to appear.
I love seeing music other than ITM discussed here, though that is still my main outlet. The occasional discussions of Kwela that do come up spark interest - having a separate site might mean people miss out on Kwela because they never hear of it.
I’m not sure how much “living kwela” there really is in the world today. The Positively Testcard perform Kwela-Style, they do maybe half a dozen performances a year (It’s not their primary outlet either) but the only other players I’m aware of are those South Africans who played in the 50s and early 60s, and are still playing now.
Nice idea though it is, I think it’s trying to cater for a market that isn’t there. There are only a handful of kwela recordings on CD, even those are hard to come by (I finally got a message from Amazon about four months after my original request, saying they couldn’t get a CD I’d seen advertised on their site), very few live performances, and no signs of a massive kwela worldwide revival.
The obvious first step would be to set up a kwela forum here at C&F in the same way the ITM forum was done, and I think it would have very little traffic, and only remove kwela discussions from this forum which has a greater audience.
Martin I think your proposal is right although I’d like to hear the views of others interested in the style. The best current place for discussing kwela is right here on this board and this isn’t about to change.
The need for a good, historically aware, general site on township music is another matter and it would be great if one existed so we could offer a link for interested whistlers.
Even amongst township styles, kwela is scandalously neglected. Walk into any well-stocked world music store and you can walk out with any number of compilations of 60s saxophone jive. But you won’t find anything devoted to kwela and will be hard pressed to find an anthology with a single track in that style. I’d like to think that a community of our size could make some small independent record label realise that there is a market for a few reissues.
But for this forum, I’d never had been interested in kwela.
Thanks to those around who posted about it, I got interested and keep updated.
Same way, I’d never have met the Csakan, if not introduced to it by Waldenczky
So, all in all, I find this here Poststructural WB interesting precisely because it’s not strictly limited to the 6-hole tin (or metal, banning plastic and wood) whistle and True Believers’ ITM (banning polkas and waltzes)…
Beside, if there were separate forums for closely-related instruments, I’d really miss the redorker-bashing we already got here
The reason I’d love to see a kwela website, say, http://www.chiffandfipple.com/kwela/ is that, while there is a good bit of information on the web about it, it is scattered.
An alternative would be to set up a kwela section of this board. Rich would probably be uneasy, because I know he doesn’t want to overspecialize the forums, and he’s right but, hey, this is kwela.
Thanks for clarifying, Dale. I wasn’t aware of there being much out there on teh classic period, scattered or otherwise, but if there is, then a section of the main site devoted to kwela and giving links would seem to be the way to go. Part of the update perhaps?
For the reason outlined by Martin, I don’t think we should go for a separate forum. Kwela is pennywhistle music and we already have a whistle board. Potential new devotees would be lost if they weren’t exposed to our regular reminders.
So why don’t I offer to do the spade-work here? I know quite a bit about township jive in general but I’m at the stage of knowing enough to know how little I really know. I also suspect that to really do this thing properly we need a Johnny-on-the-spot. So I’m beyond the stage of the enthusiastic amateur who takes on the impossible task because he is too naive to know that it is impossible. That aside, to say that I currently have too much on barely begins to describe my current situation. That said, if in about six months I have more time and nobody in the meantime has chosen to pick up the ball and run with it, I just might. After all, this is kwela!
I think a web-page for Kwela is a grand idea.
I always thought that the whistle posting forum was universal in concept, but in reality biased towards ITM because that was what everyone, including myself, was most familiar with.
