The official Bafana Bafana album, Shapa Bafana Shapa, gave me so much more listening pleasure than I initially thought it would. A two disc collection of great South African music old and new, it really does feature something for everyone – and I’m not just saying that for fun.
The first disc features 20 tracks that’ll set any soccer party alight. There’s the fiery S’gubhu from Skwatta Kamp, Dr Alban & Dr Victor featuring Cantona and SASH!’s Hello Afrika, the incredible Jamali’s Mzansi, Party Time by Jozi, and the song I love to hate and hate to love, JR’s Show Dem (Make the Circle Beega). Also featured are Eddy Grant’s Bafana Bafana (We Love You) and DJ Cleo featuring Baba Mthethwa with the title track. We even have Kurt Darren, and Don Clark and Leon Schuster (come on – no sport-themed album would be the same without Mr Schuster’s talents popping up somewhere) doing their thang.
The second disc of 16 tracks is my favourite of the two, presenting as it does a more classic South African sound. It opens with Lucky Dube’s Together as One, and moves on to other brilliant local talent like Stimela with Siyaya Phambili, Mango Groove’s Special Star, the fun 1999 remix of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’sShosholoza, the incomparable Miriam Makeba’s Pata Pata and Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse’s Stimela. I was tickled to hear Vicky Sampson’s My African Dream and The Warrior from Ipi Ntombifeaturing Margaret Singana. Hugh Masekela’s Burnout blew me away – what an incredible piece of music!
Shapa Bafana Shapa is one of the great music products to come out of the You-Know-What in South Africa. I don’t know if we’ve seen such a brilliant compilation of local sounds in a very long time, and if there’s one CD you get to remember a time when South Africa seemed to heave a collective sigh of relief and then get tarted up for a month-long, nationwide soccer party, this should be it.
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