The history of South African music is one of discourse with varying degrees of hybridization over the years. Since colonial days until the present time, ours has been a music created out of mingling of local ideas with those from abroad, unleashing the unmistakable flavour that is Mzantsi.From the Dutch colonial era were indigenous tribespeople and slaves imported from the east adapted Western musical instruments and ideas until today’s rapidly emerging versions of South African Hip Hop.

The Khoi-Khoi, for instance, developed the ramkie, a guitar with three or four strings, based on that of Malabar slaves, and used it to blend Khoi and Western folk songs. In a style similar to that of British marching military bands, coloured bands of musicians began parading through the streets of Cape Town in the early 1820s, a tradition that was given added impetus by the travelling minstrel shows of the 1880s and has continued to the present day with the great carnival held in Cape Town every New Year. The penetration of missionaries into the interior over the succeeding centuries also had a profound influence on South African musical styles. In the late 1800s, early African composers such as John Knox Bokwe began composing hymns that drew on traditional Xhosa harmonic patterns. And in 1897, Enoch Sontonga, then a teacher, composed the hymn Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika (God Bless Africa), which was later adopted by the liberation movement and ultimately became the National Anthem of a democratic South Africa.

In the early years of the 20th century, the increasing urbanisation of black South Africans in mining centres such as the Witwatersrand led to the development of slum yards or ghettos, where new forms of hybrid music began to arise. Marabi was the name given to a South African keyboard style (usually played on pedal organs, which were relatively cheap to acquire) that had something in common with American ragtime and the blues, played in ongoing cycles with roots deep in the African tradition.
The sound of marabi was intended to draw people into the shebeens and then to get them dancing. It used a few simple chords repeated in vamp patterns that could go on all night - the music of South African pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim still shows traces of this form. This association with the illegal liquor dens and with vices such as prostitution, South Africa's early marabi musicians formed a kind of underground musical culture and were not recorded. Both the white authorities and more sophisticated black listeners frowned upon it, much as jazz ("the devil's music") was denigrated as a temptation to vice in its early years in the United States.

In 1955, the most progressive jazz-lovers of Sophiatown had formed the Sophiatown Modern Jazz Club, propagating the sounds of bop innovators such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. The jazz club sponsored gatherings such as "Jazz at the Odin", at a local cinema, and from such meetings grew South Africa's first bebop band, the highly influential Jazz Epistles. The band's earliest membership was a roll-call of musicians destined to shape South African jazz from then on: Dollar Brand, Kippie Moeketsi, Jonas Gwangwa and Hugh Masekela among them.

In the 1990s, a new style of township music grabbed the attention and the hearts of young black South Africans. That music was kwaito, probably now the biggest force in the South African music scene. Just as township "bubblegum" had drawn on American disco, so kwaito put an African spin on the international dance music of the 1990s, a genre loosely referred to as house music. As house, in its many forms, swept the globe, so young South African music-makers gave it a homemade twist: the beat is paramount, the instrumentation usually minimal, and the lyrics more chanted than sung, with echoes of hip-hop and rap.

With all this said, it perplexes me how some South Africans, both old and young, are still rejecting the emergence Hip Hop as a duplication of an American lifestyle. These ignorant folk conveniently forget the sun’s baking heat even though they are sun burnt. They refuse to see their own replication of foreign ideas and choose to let their lack of knowledge become a thermometer of measuring authenticity. Hip Hop is a progressive movement (not just a musical genre) that aims to empower the participator in various ways. With its many components, it’s a sure mobilizer of the youth and with adequate support it could even help with job creation and getting the youth become proactive. But yeah, what do I know I’m just a man who knows nothing.

P.S Hip Hop is the only musical genre with a consistent magazine and many developing web outlets.

REFRENCES
www.southafrica.info
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_South_Africa
www.sahistory.org.za