By the 1930s, the Zulu people had easy access to guitars, which had been introduced into their society by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Zulus were the only culture in southern Africa to adopt the instrument, and a man walking down a dirt road, picking a melody on a guitar became a familiar image. 

Probably the first star guitarist in the Zulu-Traditional style was John Bhengu, born in central Zululand in 1930. He spent his early musical career adapting indigenous melodies to the guitar, and created a fingerpicking style called ukupika, which went against the more common idea that a guitar’s strings were to be strummed. Beginning his recording career in the 1950s, Bhengu followed a certain structure on his recordings that would become the standard for all Zulu-Traditional recordings to follow: he would begin with an instrumental flourish, called the izihlabo. Next would come the main melody, interrupted once by a praise chant for clan or family.