Jogging my memory of the UN Summit in Johannesburg those years ago, made me think of and re-listen to the time I spent in South Africa. One afternoon, toward the close of the UN Summit, Bertrand, who headed Green Cross France, came up to me asking if I was going to see Johnny Clegg that evening. I looked at him quizzically, replying, “Who is Johnny Clegg?”
With a look and tone of incredulity, as the French do best, Bertrand replied, half question, half statement, “Who is Johnny Clegg?!” Then starting to turn away, he looked back and said, “It is great music, you should go.”
So, I went. And Bertrand was right, it was great music. It's always impressive when you hear a band live you knew nothing about and they knock you over. It was such a beautiful, almost spiritual sound. Everyone danced. Clegg, as I learned more about him, was one of those unique individuals, for lack of a better term, a beautiful soul. Clegg's bands Juluka and Savuka became part of the soundscape as I traversed South Africa for the next ten months.
South Africa is an amazingly beautiful place of mountains, deserts, savannas, and some of the most astonishing coastline pounded by surf emanating not far off Antarctica. It has a mass diversity of people, including the largest immigrant European population of any African nation. Most queer was an industrial era infrastructure – roads, water, sewer, electric, and communications – stretching across the entire country, yet 80% of the population wasn't connected. It was only eight years since the end of apartheid and the country flowed with an electric current of opportunity.
Learning about South Africa, I learned more about Clegg. He had been born in England, but moved with his mother to then Rhodesia now Zimbabwe, Zambia, and then Johannesburg. His mother was a jazz singer. Clegg started learning guitar early. In Johannesburg, he heard a street Zulu guitar with its different tuning and plucking styles and became enchanted. Upon my first hearing, I understood the seduction. Incredibly, at fourteen he began hanging around the Zulu migrant worker hostels of Johannesburg, which not only was illegal, but pretty much unthinkable. He was adopted to learn Zulu dancing.
At sixteen, he met Sipho Mchunu, a Zulu migrant worker his age, who taught him more Zulu guitar and other traditional Zulu sounds and vocals. Clegg and Mchunu played together the next dozen years forming the band Juluka (sweat), named after Sipho's bull. A white and black South African playing a mixture of Zulu, European, and American sounds across 1970s and 1980s apartheid South Africa is extraordinary to think about.
They were banned from the radio, shows canceled and stopped, arrested, and generally harassed. Nonetheless, they kept playing in hostels, small venues, and in a great many of the townships, where the homogeneous color of the population made moot apartheid's rules of separation. Here's a great short talk of Clegg's on some of his early experiences, he's receiving an Honorary Degree of Music at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
While playing, Clegg stayed in school and became an anthropologist, teaching for four years at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, which was one of the growing centers of white opposition to apartheid. He talked of the difficulty of teaching almost all white students born into apartheid the universality of humanity, that homo sapiens across the planet were all out of Africa, something still little accepted across this world. He wrote a lovely song on this theme called, “Scatterlings of Africa:”
Ancient bones from Olduvai
Echoes of the very first cry
Who made me here and why
Beneath the copper sun?
African idea
Make the future clear
We are the scatterlings of Africa
Both you and I
With the success of this song, he left teaching and dedicated full time to music, creating some outstanding sounds. Hard to imagine the courage of releasing a song like “Impi” in 1981. South Africa was soon to enter the darkest days of apartheid. The song is the story about the one time the British army got their due in South Africa at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879. The song's strident chorus in Zulu:
Impi! wo 'nans' impi iyeza
Obani bengathinta amabhubesi?
(War/the Warrior is coming, here comes war/the warrior}
Who will stop the lions?)
With the growing success of Juluka, Sipho left the band, having made enough money to move back home, build a house and have a nice herd of cattle. Clegg formed a new band called Savuka, which became much bigger than Juluka, and in regards to my initial introduction, sold their most records in France.
In 1992, Dudu Mntowaziwayo Ndlovu, Clegg's long time Zulu dance teacher and partner was assassinated in KwaZulu-Natal. Between the release of Mandela in 1990 and his election as president in 1994, South Africa was plagued by violence. Not to be unexpected, as it became clear the violent regime of apartheid was ending, there was great struggle across the bottom as the boot lifted.
Clegg wrote a beautiful song titled, “The Crossing” (Osiyeza) for his old friend, also as metaphor for what South Africa was experiencing with the not yet passing old system keeping the new from arising. In Zulu tradition when someone dies, their soul can still wander around, not willing to let go, to move across. They don't quite know their dead. So after a year, a ceremony is held, calling on the soul to go and become an ancestor, a good ancestor. One thinks how this whole idea of ancestor is lost to the modern world. Most especially that a person should live their life with an understanding it will impact a future they will eventually no longer be part, only the results of their actions live on. There isn’t a more foreign notion to contemporary American life.
Clegg passed a couple years ago, leaving behind a beautiful musical and political legacy, a wonderful ancestor. Near the end, he was of course concerned where South Africa was fifteen years after the fall of apartheid. He talked of history being long, human life short. History's length created the equivalent of cyclical seasons in the affairs of humanity. He believed South Africa was in the midst of a winter.
In the end, cultural power such as apartheid, while overwhelming and seemingly intractable at any given time, can prove weak and very transient. Just as importantly, culture offer few solutions to humanity's existential problems – water, food, shelter, and community. South Africa finds itself today not with the overwhelming cultural challenge it faced under apartheid, but the existential problems facing humanity as a whole. Industrialism's destructive environmental legacy and growing resource challenges make it a no longer viable development option. While the two and half century old structures of modern republicanism falter and fail to offer viable political structures and processes to meet the challenges homo sapiens faces today as a species.
In looking at the struggles of present South Africa, Clegg offered an old Zulu saying, Obulele Buvuswa Wumlilo. He interprets, “The dry grass is made green again by fire. It is through the fire of experience that you're made new. You learn that you become refreshed through struggle, overcoming difficult odds you are reinvigorated and reinvent yourself.”
Old Zulu wisdom for the new life in the 21st century.
"There isn’t a more foreign notion to contemporary American life"
Amen.
How do we change that?