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The professional stage act of one of South Africa's newest musical prodigies, Sho Madjozi, may be analysed as a quintessential Afropolitan example of the innovative and hybrid combination of music, costume, and dance in urban youth popular culture in Africa. This paper analyses the dynamic intersection between costume, music, and dance, presenting it as a crucial site where urban youth popular culture can reimagine tradition, while simultaneously demonstrating that contemporary African cultural identities exist in a constant state of flux. The paper borrows from scholarly insights on hybridity, identity, the Afropolitan and popular culture, as well as other writings in youth agency and popular culture, to argue that South Africa's Sho Madjozi belongs with a tradition of contemporary urban youth performance culture that continuously resurrects and destabilises elements of the past as it reimagines the future. Sho Madjozi's unique style as a rap artist in Tsonga is presented as an illustration of the progressive role that contemporary urban youths in Africa can play as proponents of cultural preservation, even as they stand at the cross-roads between the old and the new. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their encounter with Europeans under colonialism and apartheid, black South Africans struggled to preserve their African identity. From the middle of the nineteenth century, an emergent urban black intellectual elite used choral music to articulate the experiences and aspirations of their people. This paper discusses their use of choral music as expressive culture and a form of cultural nationalism that sought to maintain a balance between the integrity of their African identity and their Christian experience by reformulating and reinterpreting elements of biblical Christianity to correspond to their African worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]