Meanings
- South AfricauncountableentertainmentA style of music featuring words chanted over house music, originating in Johannesburg during the 1990s.
The residue of this otherworldliness is still audible in contemporary kwaito, which consistently thwarts any simple identification with ethnicity, language, or social position.
2016, Gavin Steingo, Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 431 more example
Kwaito is a genre-defying style blending the programmed percussion and vibrant call-and-response vocals of 1980s bubble-gum with British garage, American hip-hop and the new Jamaican ragga music; this inter-cultural mix, in turn, is framed by laid-back bass lines that can sound like Chicago-based house music in slow motion.
2005, Martin Scherzinger, “The Globalisation of South African Art Music”, in Christine Lucia, editor, The World of South African Music, Cambridge Scholars Press, →ISBN
Origin
- Afrikaanskwaai“cool”
- Englishkwaito
From Camtho, from Afrikaans kwaai (“cool”, literally “angry”).
More words from Afrikaans
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
kwaito. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/kwaito
“kwaito.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/kwaito. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “kwaito,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/kwaito.
Source: kwaito on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.