‘Harepa’ is a musical genre that is unique to the Sepedi-speaking Northern Sotho - or Pedi - cultural group who are predominantly resident in the Limpopo Province of northern South Africa. In the mid-19th century, when this area was still an independent entity known as Sekukunaland, it was proselytised by German Lutheran missionaries who brought the German harp with them as a musical tool to aid in their conversion efforts. Eventually, the Pedi began using the harp to accompany their own indigenous vocally-centred music, tuning it to the five-tone scale upon which their pre-colonial genre was based. The result of this fusion of indigenous with a touch of Western influence was ‘harepa’ (from ‘harp’) and while often referred to as being ‘traditional’, it is in fact more correctly classified as ‘neo-traditional’.

Commercial harepa recordings began to appear in the late 1930s but for several decades they were relatively few in number and only constituted a small percentage of the local catalogs of South African record companies. This continued to be the case even after a dedicated Sepedi-speaking radio service was inaugurated in the mid-1960s as part of the Bantu Radio system - which although instituted by the apartheid government as a divide-and- rule tactic to encourage competing ethnic identities and to lay the foundation for the future ‘homelands’, did also provide a platform for the commercial development of all the various neo-traditional styles to the enrichment of South African musical culture as a whole. However, well into the 1970s, harepa music continued to be exclusively released on 45 rpm ‘seven-singles’ only (with two songs per disc).

Born in 1936 in the village of Motsetladi, Johannes Mogkwadi made transcription recordings (exclusively for broadcast) for the SABC and recorded singles for two different companies including Gallo-Mavuthela beginning in the mid-1960s. In 1974 his SABC recording of ‘Tsodio Le Khwembu was used as the introductory theme for a popular Radio Pedi serial drama, ‘Mmotse Gore Ke Mang’ (this was two years before television broadcasts were inaugurated in South Africa, and several more years before any programming was tailored for African audiences.) This exposure subsequently popularised the song and the following year, 1975, Mogkwadi recorded it for Gallo, probably at the initiative of Rupert Bopape, the head of Mavuthela who was himself Pedi and sympathetic to the local culture. ‘Tsodio Le Khwembu’ together with seven additional songs were released on four seven-singles as by the JM Mogkwadi Lulu Mountain Sisters.

Sometime later, after the Gallo session, Mavuthela producer West Nkosi decided that there might be commercial scope to release an entire album of Mogkwadi’s music. (He had recently employed the same marketing tactic with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, initially also a singles-only group whose albums were now selling in huge numbers.) However, rather than bear the expense of bringing Mogkwadi back to Johannesburg to record the additional four songs needed to make up a standard twelve-song album, Nkosi instead decided to reach back six years and pull four tracks from a 1969 Mogkwadi session where he was accompanied by James Twala.

West Nkosi’s hunch proved correct. Bolstered by the popularity of the radio program, the ‘Tsodio Le Khwembu’ album went on to sell in excess of 10,000 copies, a number which at the time certainly constituted a ‘hit’ for any local African release, let alone one from a ‘traditional’ genre. Mogkwadi would later record a further two albums but neither sold nearly as well; however the success of this very first harepa album provided a precedent for other harepa artists, particularly Johannes Mohlala, who began recording albums as a standard procedure.

‘Tsodio Le Kwembu’ has been out of print and unavailable for several decades (although an illegal bootleg CD was circulated with bad quality sound dubbed off a worn copy of the old album.) Our new legal re-release has been taken directly from the master tapes and we have also included the remaining eight tracks from the earlier Mogkwadi session with James Twala.