South Africa’s Five Time GRAMMY Award winning singing group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, was founded in the early 1960s by Joseph Shabalala, then a teenage Zulu farm boy living on the lands just outside the small town of Ladysmith. In naming the group, Joseph used his hometown to honor his family history. The word Black is reference to the black oxen, the strongest of the farm animals he worked with, so to announce the strength of the group’s vocal singing. Mambazo is the Zulu word for chopping axe, a symbol of the group’s vocal ability.
The group sings from a traditional music style called isicathamiya (is-cot-a-ME-Ya), which developed in the mines of South Africa. It was there that black workers were taken to work far away from their homes and families. Poorly housed and paid, the mine workers would entertain themselves after a six-day week by singing songs into the wee hours on Sunday morning. When the miners returned to their homes, this musical tradition returned with them.
