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Music played a central role in their rituals. Their music is largely characterised by polyphonic chants, not unlike that incantations of the amaXhosa. The original inhabitants of Southern Africa were the Khoi and San people, collectively known as the Khoisan. Instead this essay simply aims to provide an overview of its main variations, touching on its originators as well as those who continue to draw on it for inspiration. Given South Africa’s rich cultural diversity and the importance of music to all its people, it is not possible to cover all traditional genres and artists in detail. White ethnomusicologists such as Hugh Tracey, credited as the first to record traditional South African music from as early as the 1920s, and John Blacking made local folk available to a global ear, although much of the music had been performed (but not recorded) for many generations before that. The presence of whiteness in the music narrative also provokes issues of what it means to 'discover' or 'pioneer'. Any mixing of languages or collaborations between artists of different groups was prohibited. Musicians were forced to comply, recording music that was defined by the ethnicity of the artist – to the point where albums covers were labeled, for example, ‘Zulu’, ‘Sotho’ or ‘Venda’. Many were forced to live in homelands, where radio music broadcast by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) played a central role in promoting apartheid ideology, with each group encouraged to listen to their ‘own’ station. Black South Africans were divided and defined according to ethnic groups. Until the dawn of democracy in the early 1990s, the government attempted to classify and separate all citizens in the name of cultural purity. Traditional music in South Africa has been complicated by the country’s history of entrenched racism, embodied in the system of apartheid and the policy of separate development.