Music like Shortstraw

The South African music scene includes both popular (jive) and folk forms like Zulu isicathamiya singing and harmonic mbaqanga. South Africa has a global music industry.

Early records of music in southern Africa indicate a fusion of cultural traditions: African, European and Asian.

Modern country's early musician Enoch Sontonga wrote the Southern African national anthem Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika in 1897. By the end of the nineteenth century, South African cities such as Cape Town were large enough to attract foreign musicians, especially American ragtime players. In the 1890s Orpheus McAdoo's Jubilee Singers popularised African-American spirituals.

In the early-twentieth century governmental restrictions on black people increased, including a nightly curfew which kept the nightlife in Johannesburg relatively small for a city of its size (then the largest city south of the Sahara). Marabi, a style from the slums of Johannesburg, was the early "popular music" of the townships and urban centres of South Africa.