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Every Women’s Month, South Africa is asked to remember the women who helped shape the country. This year there’s another anniversary worth turning up the volume for: Gallo Music is 100.
Founded in 1926, Gallo grew from a modest record business into one of Africa’s most enduring music institutions. Its catalogue is effectively a century-long soundtrack to South African life, travelling from mines and townships to Sophiatown and District Six, from church halls and rural homesteads to nightclubs, festivals and international stages.
Jazz, marabi, mbaqanga, maskandi, gospel, soul, disco, rock, kwaito and house are all there. So are the songs South Africans have fallen in love to, danced to, prayed to, protested to and cried to.
And running through that extraordinary archive are women.
The roll call reads like a condensed history of South African music: Miriam Makeba, Dolly Rathebe, Dorothy Masuka, Margaret Singana, Irene Mawela, The Skylarks, Dark City Sisters and the Mahotella Queens. Later came artists including Lebo Mathosa, Gloria Bosman, Vicky Sampson, Thandiswa Mazwai and Simphiwe Dana; today, younger voices including Paxton, Sneziey, K.Keed and JayJayy continue the lineage.
What makes the centenary interesting, though, isn’t the number of famous names. It’s what those women were doing while making the music.
At a time when black women’s lives were constrained by apartheid, censorship, patriarchy and social convention, they occupied stages, studios and eventually international platforms. They helped define genres and influenced fashion and performance, while making everyday South African experience worthy of being recorded.
The archive also traces changing ideas of South African womanhood. The sophisticated jazz and vocal harmonies of Sophiatown give way to the infectious call-and-response of mbaqanga, gospel carries faith between generations while later artists claim increasingly independent space for black female identity, politics and experimentation.
In that sense, Gallo’s centenary turns a record catalogue into something bigger: an archive of national feeling. Few institutions survive long enough to contain colonialism, apartheid, exile, democracy, the digital revolution and the current global appetite for African music within the same musical memory.
And perhaps that’s the real value of an archive. History isn’t only the large events we put into textbooks. Sometimes it’s the song your grandmother knows every word to, the hymn everyone sings at a funeral, or the dance track that instantly returns you to 17 years old.
Gallo has preserved the records, but for a century its women have supplied many of the voices that have lifted up our nation.
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