{"id":191266,"date":"2021-06-07T14:02:55","date_gmt":"2021-06-07T12:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/the-magnificent-mabi-thobejane-master-south-african-drummer\/"},"modified":"2021-06-07T14:02:55","modified_gmt":"2021-06-07T12:02:55","slug":"the-magnificent-mabi-thobejane-master-south-african-drummer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/the-magnificent-mabi-thobejane-master-south-african-drummer\/","title":{"rendered":"The magnificent Mabi Thobejane, master South African drummer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Winter chokes the highveld in Johannesburg, South Africa, and takes from me, from our entire culture, a mighty mountain. Gabriel Mabi Segwagwa Thobejane<\/a>, the diminutive tower of rhythmic power, has left us: a man who did not so much play the drums, but became The Drum. <\/p>\n

He reportedly<\/a> suffered a stroke at the age of 74 and passed<\/a> on 3 June 2021. <\/p>\n

Even though he was both master and a creator of South Africa\u2019s indigenous sonic archive, Mabi, as we all came to call him, was also a showman and a collaborator. He could and would play in support of almost anyone, from jazz musicians to poets to mainstream artists. He was artistically intimidated by nothing and no one.<\/p>\n

The young Gabriel<\/h2>\n

Mabi was raised in the township of Mamelodi<\/a> near the capital city Pretoria, where he absorbed the rural, neo-traditional, urban folk and Sepedi<\/a> jive drum and dance-song forms that commingled in the streets and backyards.<\/p>\n

The young Gabriel<\/a> had no calling to blow his horn in a church and defied his mother who insisted he become a priest. Her tendency to break up his makeshift drum kits led him to hang about the tanneries and artisanal workshops, collecting materials he fashioned into high-quality hand and mallet drums for which he later became so famous. From early on, Mabi pursued whatever \u201carrested\u201d (bopha<\/em>!) him full force without equivocation or compromise. And he was to serve a life sentence in the total reinvention of the highveld\u2019s African percussion.<\/p>\n

This single-minded pursuit of a fading musical patrimony from the ancestors ran in the family. Gabriel\u2019s uncle Philip Thabane<\/a> was already doing so on the electric guitar, forming the Malombo Jazzmen<\/a> with flautist Abbey Cindi<\/a> and afro-percussionist Julian Bahula<\/a> in the 1960s. <\/p>\n