... If this was the irony of black popular theatre’s flowering in the 1970s and 1980s, then it was equally true, by means of different processes of cultural production, of the other black performing arts, including popular music. Black popular performing artists are certainly grateful for the creative freedoms they have enjoyed since the democratic political revolution of the 1990s, and take pride in the role they played in challenging state censorship and breaking down the restrictions on political expression in the arts during the decades of protest. But they now express their cultural self-confidence in ways very different from the generations with first-hand experience of apartheid. ...