How Kwaito Continues to Influence South African Hip-Hop and Amapiano

In 2013, rapper K.O was looking for a change. Teargas, the group with whom he'd spent years crafting memorable hits for the hip-hop and Afropop market, was coming apart at the seams, and he was searching for the exit door out of the very thing he had helped nurture. But first he had to find a song and an identity, a stamp that defined him beyond DJ Vigilante's "God's Will," on which he'd featured alongside AKA. He stumbled upon a template while listening to DJ Mustard on a trip to Durban, and quickly called Lunatik, a new producer he was working with, to help him give it a style and identity fluent in (South) Africanisms.

"We knocked [an instrumental] out, and the hook just sat perfectly," he tells OkayAfrica. He reached out to Kid X, who at the time was signed to the Cashtime Life indie label, to contribute a verse. "It only made sense, because as soon as I took off, I needed X to be right behind me," he says.

"Caracara" emerged on the other side, allowing him to parlay a single hit — one of 2014's biggest and most defining songs — into a career that has produced five acclaimed studio albums so far, along with collaborations with Sjava, Black Coffee, Nandi Madida, Blxckie and more.

In DJ Mustard, he had found an approach to programming basslines reminiscent of the kwaito he'd grown up listening to.

Less often discussed is how that moment also inspired a lyric-writing technique that mined a recent, vast archive. When he raps, "Mina uk'jaiva ngak'qala ngingaka / Ngaze ngaba ngaka bheka manje seng'ngaka," it's a direct reference to Trompies' "Bengim'ngaka," from the group's 2004 album, Respect (Toasted Gona Ganati). The quintet became one of the quintessential groups of the '90s, co-founding the Kalawa Jazmee label, defining a sound, and helping a generation of artists craft a vernacular that felt natural to their lives and their conditions.

K.O wasn't alone. Khuli Chana, who came up in a group setup as part of the trio Morafe, had worn his influences openly since his debut, Motswakoriginator, folding kwaito and '90s rap into a career that saw him emerge as one of the 2010s' most notable and influential emcees. On "Hape le Hape 2.1," from the deluxe edition of his sophomore album, Lost in Time, he made the debt explicit.

"The nineties kwaito, the nineties feel, the nineties boom bap, the hooks, the colors — I'm about that! The nineties' music was so authentic and so timeless. I'm down to experiment and try out some new things, but I'm still stuck in the nineties," he tells us.

"The song is inspired by a Magesh classic joint from his second album. That's been my favorite joint, so I kind of merged 'Hape le hape' with 'Time and time again,' which is a Magesh hook. I used to always freestyle on that beat."

The knock-on effect of the reverence rappers like K.O, Khuli Chana, ProKid and others held for kwaito was that the 2010s saw various mutations, none more memorable — or more short-lived — than new-age kwaito, best typified by Major League DJz's 2015 single "Slyza Tsotsi," featuring Cassper Nyovest, Riky Rick, Okmalumkoolkat and Carpo. It stripped away the grime of earlier kwaito, favored the sheen that came to define the genre's later years, and combusted as quickly as it had taken shape.

Kwaito couldn't become the exclusive domain of hip-hop. A pre-amapiano Samthing Soweto turned a line from Kabelo Mabalane's "Pantsula 4 Lyf" ("labofeleba bathandi' icash") into a cult classic for his band, The Fridge, who were running the Johannesburg live-music circuit from the late 2000s into the mid-2010s. "uCash" got crowds jumping — because it rode the indie wave sweeping the world at the time, but also because it carried something deeply familiar to a wide range of people. On the eve of Isphithiphithi, he spoke widely about the influence of producers like M'du Masilela on his sound, and about how others, including Mandla "Spikiri" Mofokeng of Trompies, had shaped his love of the bassline.

The artist explores that love further on his current album, Touch Is a Move (Good Morning). "325," co-written with kasi rap emcees Maseven and Anzo, takes the moody basslines Masilela and his peers employed and folds them into a bounce fit for a king. "The first verse, I wrote. And then the chorus. But to continue it, I was like, it has to be more hip-hop. So to continue it, I went to the hood. That's why it sounds like that," he says. Maseven fell into hip-hop after starting out as a kwaito artist. The connections run wide.

Much like kwaito, Samthing Soweto says, the factory style of amapiano that allows for mass production isn't for him; he needs to take his own time with songs. "It seems as if when I first started with that genre, in piano and stuff, there was still time. Like, they would allow you time to craft. And yeah, although they were reluctant, they gave you your time, you know. They would bitch and moan, but at least they allowed you," he says.

The talk over the past two years has been about the demise of amapiano. The culprit, some say, is a lack of focus: repetitive lyrics, non-existent concepts, and production that sounds stale. The jury is still out on how long its shelf life will be before it goes back underground, as kwaito did in the mid-2000s, when it gave way to a faster sound called Durban kwaito — a term coined by Zakes Bantwini, who signed and managed L'vovo Derango.

"I did not want to call it something else, because I remember [someone saying], but this is not kwaito, and I was like, but I don't want to shy away from the word, because, you know. So I called it Durban kwaito music," he told us earlier this year.

And if South African hip-hop took anything from kwaito, it's only because kwaito did the same. The music's foundations rest on the likes of Oskido, one of the founding members of Kalawa, who was moved by '80s films like Beat Street.

"[The] movie was shot in the ghetto in New York, where guys were doing breakdancing. That's why you see me doing a lot of breakdancing in videos. And when I saw that movie — those guys later, through culture, ended up going into the financial hub of New York City. And from there they conquered everything, through music, through culture, and they started making decisions in the boardrooms of New York, running businesses. So when I grew up, I've always said, I want to be that kid," he told us.

There are plenty of other examples. Notably, Kabza De Small and Kwesta’s 2022 album, Speak and Vrostaan, made these links between hip-hop, kwaito, and amapiano explicit, and contributed to the archive a body of work worthy of all the awards.