World beat, the catch-all term for non-Western pop music, first reached a wider
audience in America thanks to Paul Simon`s 1986 ``Graceland`` album. But long
before Simon began cross-pollinating the rhythms of distant continents, Johnny
Clegg, a white South African, was forging a musical bond between his Zulu
brethren and his Western ancestors.
More importantly, where Simon created a pop hit with his record and then went
on to other styles of music, Clegg is building musical bridges to and from South
Africa for the long term.
"I am shaped by South Africa," he says in a recent phone interview from Los
Angeles. "Much of what I am, what I need, is in that country. It is a prison and
a wombthat contradiction is what draws me there."
Clegg, who will open for Tracy Chapman at Alpine Valley June 9 and Poplar
Creek June 10, was born in Manchester, England, but reared in Johannesburg. In
his teens, he forged a lifelong-and illegal-alliance with his Zulu neighbors,
slipping into the black townships to learn their language, music, dances and
customs.
With one of his black friends, he formed a band, Juluka (which means "sweat"
in Zulu), in 1976. Its mix of black and white styles and musicians became a
political statement in itself, an interracial affront to apartheid. Until it
broke up in 1985, Juluka was one of the most popular bands in South Africa, with
five gold and two platinum albums.
Each contained songs that were banned on the government-sponsored radio
station because they openly questioned the status quo. Clegg`s concerts, many of
which played to mixed audiences around the black ghetto of Soweto, were
frequently broken up by police.
Though Westernersmay believe that the situation in South Africa has
eased since black opposition leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison,
Clegg says, "It`s still tense-the context is getting better, but the events
themselves are still dark and brutal.
"We still have a state of emergency, and music is still seen as an
undermining force. I haven`t had a show stopped since March, 1989, but the
threat is still there."
As if to emphasize that the old days of repression haven`t ended, Clegg`s new
single, One (Hu)Man One Vote, was banned by the South African Broadcast
Corp.
As the lead track on Clegg`s new album, Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World
(Capitol), it is perhaps his most far-reaching political statement yet, a
state-of-the-world address that begins by challenging Americans:
The West is sleeping in a fragile freedom
Forgotten is the price that was paid
"The right to vote has become a hassle for a lot of people in the West, it`s
taken for granted," Clegg says. "With One Man, I tried to emphasize that
this is a universal right that people fight and die for in other parts of the
world."
Although previous albums spoke to the black community, Clegg acknowledges
that young whites are making up a larger share of his audiences back home.
That`s fine with him, because white attitudes are the ones he`s trying to
change.
But as much as his music is political, Clegg isn`t in the business of
politics. He brushes off the mantle of "spokesman" that some critics choose to
hang on him.
"It`s very important to understand that I`m not a spokesman for South Africa;
all I`m doing is describing the South African experience," he says. "There are
already too many politicians in South Africa; it doesn`t need another."
Indeed, much of Clegg`s popularity in his homeland rests on his energetic
live performances. With his new band, Savuka (which translates to "we are
risen"), pounding out wave after wave of joyful, cross-cutting rhythms, Clegg
often breaks into traditional Zulu warrior dances with black percussionist Dudu
Zulu. When they collapse on stage, triumphant after metaphorically stomping on
segregation and repression, their audiences roar with approval.
When he`s not dancing himself to exhaustion, Clegg`s voice combines the
keening ache of Celtic music with the warbling intensity of the black South
African choirs.
"I`ve been experimenting with my voice, looking for more emotional textures,"
he says. "Celtic music has a romantic appeal, because it reminds me of my
father, whom I`ve never seen. It`s a connection with part of my past."
When Clegg was only a year old, his English father left home and was never
seen again. His mother then moved with Johnny to Zimbabwe and later
Johannesburg, which has become home.
Its beauty and brutality have shaped Clegg`s life and art, never more so than
on his new album, a mirror of a "cruel, crazy, beautiful" land.
Clegg, who speaks fluent Zulu, married his wife in a traditional white
Christian church ceremony and also followed Zulu custom, "marrying" her again
after she gave birth to their son, a ritual documented on the joyful Moliva.
"It wasn`t a political act or a media event," Clegg says. "It was a
celebration of my son`s birth with the community I grew up with."
Moliva epitomized the tone of the album as Clegg began recording last
spring in Los Angeles. "I felt good, up, positive," he says.
Then, in the middle of the session, his friend and fellow anti-apartheid
activist, university professor David Webster, was assassinated in Johannesburg.
"I came back from the funeral and my mood was completely different,`` Clegg
says. "I wrote three songs Woman Be My Country, Cruel, Crazy,
Beautiful World` and One (Hu)Man One Vote that represented a
complete break from the other songs. The album went from being upbeat and
humorous to angry and desperate within a matter of days."
Clegg will carry these emotional postcards from his homeland around the world
on a 10-month tour, which will play Europe, North and South America, Australia,
the Far East and finally the Soviet Union.
"I believe that a solution in South Africa is within our grasp," Clegg says.
"But what I hope my music will do is show people that what goes on in South
Africa is not just South Africa`s problem."
It`s why Clegg`s album includes songs such as Warsaw 1943, inspired by
the writings of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. It tells a tale in both English
and Zulu of betrayal and friendship during the Jewish ghetto uprising against
the Nazis in World II.
"Our world struggle is not unique in South Africa," Clegg explains. "What is
happening back home has been happening all around the world for centuries and
Poland struggling under the Nazis and then the Soviets is just one example of
that."
With political change occurring almost daily around the world in the last
year-China`s Tiananmen Square uprising, Lithuania`s break with the Soviet Union,
the fall of the Berlin Wall-Clegg sees the world at a crossroads, as he sings on
One (Hu)Man One Vote:
In the East a giant is awakening
And in the South we feel the rising tide . . .
On a visible but distant shore,
A new image of man
The shape of his own future
Now in his hands
"In a world with a 21st Century technology base, an 18th Century morality and
a 16th Century religion, we are trying to shape an image of man that is
universal," Clegg says. "If that image is disturbed by one country, that image
cannot exist."
Twenty
years ago, Johnny Clegg ignored state-imposed racism, embracing Zulu sounds.
Today, he looks at a new South Africa, one filled with danger and confusion, as
well as promise. Banning Eyre talks with him about his new record
company, his life as a family man, and his musical plans amid such turmoil.
Banning Eyre writes about world music
for the Boston Phoenix. Billboard, and Guitar
Player. He co-authored Afropop! An Illustrated Guide to
African Popular Music. Also a guitarist, he plays Zairean
soukous and West African Folk in Boston-based groups.
Singer and bandleader Johnny Clegg holds a unique perspective
on changes afoot in Nelson Mandela's South Africa. Though a British citizen,
Clegg spent his boyhood in southern Africa, following the dreams of his
journalist father. Clegg landed in Johannesburg at twelve, with his mother, a
cabaret jazz singer.
His adherence to the country's apartheid policies ended when
he befriended a Zulu guitar picker on a Johannesburg street corner. Before long,
Clegg found himself sneaking into Soweto at night to practice high-kicking
indlamu war dances, study Zulu, and write songs with his age-mate Sipho Mchunu.
"Johnny and Sipho" became an unusual duo in the folk music underground in the
mid-1970s. But when they started Juluka, a mixed race, Zulu-folk-rock band, they
became so popular that apartheid authorities felt obliged to shut off the power
at Juluka concerts and to ban their songs from radio play.
In the mid-80s, Mchunu went back to his cattle farm, and Clegg
formed his current band, the slicker, pop-oriented Savuka, with which he toured
internationally through South Africa's late-'80s State of Emergency, the release
of Mandela, and last year, the country's first democratic election.
During those years, Clegg danced at the elusive edge of
international rock stardom. He also took some painful hits the assassination
of friend and anti-apartheid activist David Webster in 1989, and in 1993, the
murder of his longtime dance partner, Dudu Zulu, a shining star of the Juluka
and Savuka stage shows. Back home in South Africa, 42 years old, married with
two kids, Clegg faces new challenges. I called him at home in Johannesburg last
fall, just after he'd come off the road from a South African campus tour. He
began by breathlessly explaining why he had stood me up the day before, when we
had originally planned to talk.
Johnny Clegg: I had a major
train-smash, avalanche, cosmic explosion in my life yesterday. You know, I've
opened up a little record company here (Look South Records).
And I came off tour from Cape Town. We just played for the
student union there. Sting had come down for the show, and we had dinner
together. Then I got a call to say that problems had arisen with the record
company related to taxes and this and that basically administrative nonsense.
So I arrived back [in Johannesburg] in the morning, running around trying to
sort out General Sales Tax, and see accountants. It was one of those devilish
days.
Other than that, how's life in the new South Africa?
You know, its the best and the worst of times. It's the most
incredible social, economic, political, and cultural pudding. Starting with the
negatives, we've developed a very lawless criminal class over the last four
years. And because of the illegitimate status of the South African police, a
campaign has started up nationally to assassinate police in the townships. We
lost 250-odd last year. The South African police, on whom we all rely for some
form of law and order, are essentially under siege, and the criminals are
winning. We have 23 hijackings a day across the country, and of those, about 40%
result in death. My mother was mugged and hijacked four days ago. She was being
hustled into a car by these two guys and luckily, she was seen by another lady
on a double-decker bus. They stopped the bus to chase these people away.
The problem is that the ANC doesn't want to be seen as coming
down hard on its own constituency by passing draconian legislation or taking
tough police measures. The wonderful thing about South Africa at the moment is
that we have such an incredible mixture of idealism and pragmatism. In other
areas, it works wonderfully, especially in the education field. In some schools,
we have these experiments going on where you have all the various cultures and
races together. It might be a Ramadan holiday where the Muslims don't come to
school. Then the children at that school learn all about Ramadan that day.
That never happened before?
Never happened before. This cross-cultural interpenetration of
each other's universes is very new for us. But the thing is, the economy needs
to be kick-started. We have a record number of people out of work. We also have
a record number of illegal immigrants from the north coming through here now.
They have no commitment to South Africa per se.
Which countries do they come from?
All the front-line states. They caught a bunch of Rwandans on
the border about three weeks ago. The official figure is three million. That's a
hell of a bite out of a population of 40 million. It's just under eight percent.
The unofficial statistic is five to seven million. So we have a developing
xenophobia in some of the townships against the immigrants, which is most
unfortunate.
What's the effect of all this on the music scene?
There's quite an apathy that has gripped South African
musicians since the election. It's related to the fact that we are coming out of
thirty years of cultural isolation. We have been performing and pursuing arts in
a kind of unreal environment, without any international input or competition. So
suddenly, all of these doors have been brought down and we have this flood of
international music particularly, but also films and TV, books, radio. Musicians
here feel swamped and overwhelmed, like second-class citizens in their own
country.
I spoke to Sting about this and we agreed, on this point in
any case. There's going to have to be a period of about five years where through
the interventions and introduction of local content laws, a certain amount of
support for local content will have to be regulated on TV and radio. South
Africans have been deprived of exposure to international music. There's this
ideology of internationalism that has swept through the country in the past few
years. We're having wave after wave of international acts coming through here,
touring. We've just had Sting. Whitney Houston is coming up. We've got UB40.
We've had Dr. Albin, Aha, Christa Berg, Elton John, Queen. It's just been a huge
flood. And the ticket prices for these international shows are triple the price
for a local show. Unfortunately, nothing here is coordinated by the musicians'
union. So musicians feel powerless. They're just waiting for the thing to die
out.
Does the government support local contents laws?
Oh yeah, sure. Local content is going to come. The squabbling
is over the percentage. But the thing I'm involved in right at the moment is to
kick start the campus circuit. The campus circuit was a very important breeding
ground for alternative music here up until about 1986. That was destroyed by the
State of Emergency. The campuses fragmented from one another and you couldn't do
a national campus tour. So we put one together for the first time in about eight
years. We came through with 11 support bands, all South African from African
jazz right through to post-industrial urban angst. I think we went a long way to
rekindling the campus circuit so that local music will at least have one arena.
It's basically nation building. The thing for me is I look out
to a sea of faces and I realize that there is a whole generation of young people
who are discovering my music in a different context. They're first-year students
four years after Mandela was released, and I'm playing them songs from a
previous era. It takes some ability for a writer to transcend those two epochs
and for the songs to still have some kind of meaning. I've had to drop songs
because they were too issue-based.
One about a township bus boycott, or "Missing", about
political detainees being abducted by the apartheid regime. Those songs are now
locked in an era. But that's only about 30 or 40% of my repertoire. The other
stuff has transcended that period for me. And that has been one of the most
wonderful homecomings for me on this campus tour. You must realize that I
haven't toured South Africa since 1990.
I understand you played at Mandela's inauguration. What
was that like?
Quite surrealistic I must tell you. We kept pinching
ourselves. We've been waiting for this for so long. Sometimes on stage, you had
500 sangomas religious and tribal diviners doing their traditional dance.
Other times, it was 400 people in joint choirs. And you had bands, solo
performers, poets. We had 80,000 people on the grounds basically enjoying the
whole thing.
What inspired you to start a record company?
I wasn't inspired. I was actually in a spiral of depression.
My record Heat Dust and Dreams, which had got a Grammy nomination,
had not been promoted by my record company EMI while I was away on tour. By the
time I got back, they said, "Well, we realize that we could have done a bit
more, but it's too late now." So I said, I will rerelease it. Give me a pressing
and distribution deal and I will run with it.
Do you plan to release other bands?
Only if I get an infrastructure that can actually promote them
properly. I only have one person working here full time. It's a cottage
industry. There are only two albums in our catalogue at the moment, Heat Dust
and Dreams and The Best Of Savuka.
If you did do there groups, what would you look for?
South African music, whatever was good.
I read that you're looking to get involved with youth
empowerment programs.
I'm actually looking at getting involved in multi-media. But
at the same time, I'm looking to contribute in the wider social framework. I was
previously working for the Community Law Center. I was involved in voter
education programs prior to the elections. But the CLC is now going into a human
rights watchdog function, which is cool. But that is a secondary issue for me at
the moment. I'm not really interested in documenting and cataloguing reams of
human rights abuses. We have a huge youth population who look with dismal eyes
at the future. More than 50% of our population is under twenty-one. The promises
of the election are going to take ten years to fulfill themselves, at which time
they will already be in the job market, or not. So I feel that somewhere along
the line, I will be involved in youth empowerment. I'm still searching for that
particular niche.
Speaking of your niche, what is your current status with
old friends in the Zulu community?
Well, I am no longer a member of the traditional dance team.
The dancing is very intermittent. There's a lot of internal faction fighting
amongst the tribal members. I think there is going to be trouble among the
Zulus, not only with Inkatha and ANC, but between Buthelezi and the King.
What's happening to me, I must say, is I'm really getting on
with my life. I know there's a bigger picture, but I have a family now. I have
two kids, I want to be able to work on small, meaningful projects. Taking on the
whole country and trying to contribute at a national level is a very daunting
task. I live in Johannesburg. I don't live in Zululand. Zulus I know in
Johannesburg have tried to introduce all the rural problems into the city
without much success. To try to get their problems in the rural areas resolved
they've come to the city. In the new South Africa, you're starting to see the
development of very powerful regionalism and local level sentiment. It's from
the bottom up. There's a big conflict in the ANC between the national and the
regional representatives in government.
What are your musical plans?
I don't have a label at the moment. I'm going through Rhythm
Safari [in the U.S.] and I will be negotiating for a new deal at some point next
year. So I'm in limbo, which I like. I hope to be able to release a bunch of new
stuff. I'm doing a ten-year retrospective with Sipho which we hope to release in
April. We've put together five tracks, rearranged from the old Johnny and Sipho
time, plus five new songs.
Will you use Savuka?
No. Different musicians. It's a different project. Savuka will
probably come to an end at some point. Our drummer is now living in Canada. I
had to fire one of the keyboard players. He didn't pitch up for the inauguration.
He was drunk and he was involved in some unsavory stuff, just caught up in the
township gangster lifestyle. So I've landed up with two original members, Keith
the keyboard player and Solly the bass player. I'm looking at getting a new
sound and a new vision, and starting another project altogether.
At the moment, I'm still diving into an ocean of current music
and sound, both local and international. When I surface, I'll know what I like.
Anything particularly strike you lately?
I'm very attracted to rai music. I played with Khaled in
France last year. I just think the rhythms and the arrangements are incredible.
Killer.
Last time I saw you, you were threatening to give up
music and write novels.
Well, that's also there. Sipho and I are writing a manuscript,
a book about the whole Juluka period, which could threaten to turn into a movie
at some point.
Sounds like you're spending a lot of time with Sipho
these days.
Oh yeah. We had a very special ceremony about three months ago
for my son. You know, I was made a member of Sipho's family when I was seventeen.
That's more than 20 years ago. So we had a special ritual to make Jesse part of
the family as well. He's six. They slaughtered a goat for him and he was
incorporated into the clan. He had the gall bladder of the goat poured all over
his leg and arm. He wasn't impressed. It was hard for him to understand.
Afterwards, I explained it to him and he really got into it. I told him that the
life of the goat would bind him to the clan so that his life could be part of
the Mchunu people.
He's growing up in a country so different from the one you
knew. He won't even remember the experience of apartheid.
It's no longer primary. It will just be a little halo effect
in his life, whereas in mine, it was a fundamental core.
Johnny Clegg as guest D J; host, David
Dye (18 Juni 1993 ?????)
Transcribed by ALE 11/08/03. Transcription notes: I edited out a
bunch, although not all, of the ums, ers, you
knows, and interruptions. Also Clegg in particular tended to talk in one long
sentence, so I stuck in random
punctuation som etimes when I got tired of typing long sentences. Also I may
have made errors here and
there. This took long enough that I didn’t feel like listening to the whole tape
again to double-check it. :-) THIS
TRANSCRIPTION IS FOR PERSONAL USE OF SCATTERLINGS LISTMEMBERS ONLY AND IS NOT TO
BE PUBLISHED IN ANY WAY OR POSTED ON A WEBSITE ANYWHERE. Thanks. -ALE
DD: It’s Musician’s Day on the World Café, Johnny Clegg joins me
this hour as guest DJ, made possible
through the support of Musician’s Magazine.
DD: Clegg grew up in South Africa, his career began with Juluka, in the mid-80s
he formed Savuka, a great
blend of South African music, international rock, and even some Celtic
influences. They’re still going strong.
[A bunch of promo material about the program and station.]
DD: Johnny Clegg, the DJ on the World Café. Johnny joins us shortly. His new
album is Heat, Dust, and
Dreams, produced by Hilton Rosenthal, who helped Paul Simon organize the
sessions for Graceland. From
that album Heat, Dust, and Dreams, this is “These Days”.
plays “These Days”
DD: Hello W orld Café, it’s time once again for our Musician Magazine Musician
of the Month, our guest DJ.
We’re very happy that Johnny Clegg has joined us to pick the music fo r this
hour. And it’s always interesting
to see influences of people, things they like, things that have been influencing
them currently, and I think
you’ve got a little bit of everything –
JC: Yeah.
DD: – in this list here today.
JC: Yeah, it’s a really wide bunch of music.
DD: W ell, let’s play some Bob Marley to start off with, ‘cause I saw it at the
top of your list. You’ve seen, you
must have seen Marley perform at some time?
JC: Not live, no.
DD: Really? Interesting.
JC: No. He was a kind of a very popular underground artist in South Africa. A
lot of his stuff was banned.
This particular song was heavily banned in South Africa at the time, but there
were a lot of, you know, tapes
and stuff flying or floating around, and now and again people would get up and
sing it at shows and stuff.
DD: He would be somebody who would never have been allowed to play in the
townships or anywhere?
JC: Yeah, yeah.
DD: This is “G et Up, Stand Up”, Bob Marley.
plays “Get Up, Stand Up”
DD: On the World Café, Bob Marley with “Get Up, Stand Up”. Our guest is Johnny
Clegg, his new album just
out with Savuka is Heat, Dust, and Dreams, which was recorded mostly here?
JC: Yeah.
DD: In recording your albums, have you been mostly – you’ve done most of the
newer ones in the States?
JC: That’s right, yeah.
DD: Any reason?
JC: W ell basically I think to get a kind of a decent, to give us a competitive
edge technically, you know, it’s
been a very important decision. We had to leave recording in South Africa
basically because there’s an import
tax of some 60% on any new digital equipment coming into the country. It’s a
complete mess. And also I
think that there seems to be a bigger community of technical people who are
keeping up to date, you know,
on a monthly basis on what’s going on in that, and it’s just so nice coming here
and having that extra kind of
hand, you know, in the production.
DD: Let’s go back to some of the things you’ve picked here, I know were
influences on you early on when you
first started songwriting. You picked a Jackson Browne record out.
JC: Yeah, Jackson Browne was quite a, I really admired his songwriting ability,
the lyrics, the ability to kind
of nail em otions and nail things that we all go through, but from a very nice
vantage point, angle, that he
angles down on I thought was like really excellent. And I think in the early
Juluka, my previous band, songs
that like directly affected by some of his work. So I’d like to play you “The
Deluge”.
plays “The Deluge”, followed immediately by Jethro Tull, “With You There to Help
Me”
DD: Any excuse to play Jethro Tull on the World Café, and Johnny Clegg has
picked out Benefit as an
influential album of his. Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull? I can see that somewhat in
the arrangements with Juluka
–
JC: Yes. The thing about the Tull for me is that they were one of the first
interesting crossover bands,
drawing on Celtic folk m usic, traditional English folk music, and then mixing
it with rock and jazz influences,
and doing it in a very very unique way, and some of m y early stuff as well had
that feel.
DD: Everybody talks about, it’s true of a lot of the early Juluka records, the
Celtic-Zulu –
JC: Yes, yes, right.
DD: – mix was totally unheard of.
JC: That’s right.
DD: W as this an inspiration? You said –
JC: This directly. That the man! That’s the one!
DD: Thank you Ian Anderson for –
JC: Thank you Ian Anderson!
DD: And before that Jackson Browne. Johnny Clegg’s the DJ, be back in a mom ent
here on the W orld Café.
DD: Johnny Clegg is picking out the music here on Musician’s Day in the W orld
Café. There wasn’t a lot of
South African music on this list –
JC: I didn’t know whether you had the ones I wanted. You know, the other
influences that I experienced, the
top major influences, were people like Phuzushukela, who is a Zulu street
musician whose recordings are
quite difficult to obtain, so I kind of said, well let me rather look at the
more international influences, but people
like John Bhengu (Phuzushukela, the sugar drinker), very famous street
guitarist, he did about, he m ust have
recorded about 20, 22 albums of Zulu street guitar music, he was the first to
tak e it from the acoustic to the
electric, kind of Bob Dylan crossover, and he died round about 12 years, 13
years ago, a pauper, he was still
a flat cleaner, you know, working in apartment. And he, other people like Moses
Mchunu, street musicians,
were very influential in just – these were street musicians who literally
recorded in the street, and becam e part
of the archives of the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
DD: W hat time period? From the 60s, 50s?
JC: I’m talking 69, 68, 69, 70, around about that period, yeah.
DD: W ell one of the pieces of music you’ve picked out here is Nusrat Fateh Ali
Khan, a piece called “Mustt
Mustt”, which is another one of these great fusions of different cultures.
JC: Yeah, yeah, when I heard that I freaked out. W ow, that’s incredible, it’s
one of m y son’s favorite songs
as well. He says, “Dad, you must play ‘I must, I must’!”
DD: How old is your son?
JC: He’s four and a half.
DD: W e’ll do this for him .
JC: Okay.
plays “M ustt M ustt”, followed immediately by Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”
DD: “Mercy Street” and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan before that, with “Mustt Mustt”, a
couple of choices from our
guest here, Johnny Clegg, who’s stopped by to be our guest DJ today. W e’re
really happy he could take over,
I’m happy that you’re pick ing the music, getting me off the hook here. The new
record, Heat, Dust, and
Dreams, has a really nice fe el to it, it sounds a little bit different than the
last Savuka record, and more – was
that–?
JC – Mmmm – it’s more organic.
DD. Yeah.
JC: W hich was a conscious choice, you know. W hat happened is, we decided – I
write on guitar, and I take
my songs to the band, and I have two keyboard players, and they kind of compete,
you know? to arrange the
stuff and put in their different kind of influences, and the songs usually
change into a keyboard kind of
arrangement, and the guitar gets lost. And we decided that this tim e if it was
written on guitar, we’d keep it
guitar, keep it acoustic. And keep it organic in the sense that, use instruments
which use the vibration of air
as a principle: piano, any stringed instrument –
DD: As opposed to –
JC: – violin, we’ve got mandolin, guitar, bagpipes, you know, all of that stuff.
DD: Yeah, I saw that.
JC: It breathes a lot, this album.
DD: Definitely. W ell, you picked out a C all record here, saying it influenced
you in the sound of this record?
JC: W hen I’m influenced from a song, or by a song, I’m influenced mainly by the
feeling it gives me. You
know, it leaves me with a mood, or an ache, or an up or a down, whatever kind of
song it is. And that for me
is a kind of a dynamo, it gives me, generates, you know, the energy to write and
the energy to focus. And I,
you know, jus t for atmosphere and for mood, the Call are, there’s very few
bands to equal that intensity.
plays “W ith or W ithout Reason”, followed immediately by “The Crossing
(Osiyeza) ” from Heat, Dust, and
Dreams
DD: That’s “The Crossing” from Heat, Dust, and Dreams, the new Johnny Clegg and
Savuka album, and
before that The Call. You’re making me very happy because you’re playing some of
my favorite groups today
that I haven’t played in a while. Johnny Clegg is our DJ, we’ve got time for a
few more things. I was looking
down the list of things you’ve picked out – you had a Big Country song, and
you’re picking all these big,
passionate-sounding records.
JC: W ell, also, you know, they I think are a modern kind of growth of the
Celtic-rock crossover again. I’m
interested in crossover sounds, that’s why I like The Police as well. There’s a
band that took rock and reggae,
trying to find, you know, a m eeting point. The bands that have kind of striven
to get a hybridized new form
of music, you know, I think is a passion of mine, I like those bands, I like
having those experim ents. Even if
sometimes they don’t pull them off that well, the courage to do that is for me
something which I think is noble.
DD: W ell, let’s listen to a couple more experiments then, I guess. Big Country,
“In a Big Country”, and then
we’ll hear “Fragile” from Sting.
plays “In a Big Country”, followed immediately by “Fragile”
DD: That’s Sting on the World Café, Johnny Clegg is our guest. Where are you
spending most of your time
now?
JC: I live in Johannesburg.
DD: W hat is radio like there, in terms of –
JC: Radio’s very good, you know, it’s very current, in fact it’s in a way too
international for my liking. W e don’t
have sufficient support, you know, related to local industry and the local
musicians. I think this is changing
now, there’s a big move to get the South African Broadcasting Corporation to
accept a quota, a percentage,
much like the Australians did.
DD: And the Canadians too.
JC: And the Canadians too? I didn’t know that.
DD: Yeah.
JC: Just to give the local guys a bit of a punt, you know? The industry’s very
depressed at the moment, and
the country’s going through many changes.
DD: W ell, when people hear a new record from South Africa they’re sometimes
surprised that it will sound
more western –
JC: Yeah.
DD: – than African. I guess everybody wants to sell records throughout the
world, I guess that has a lot to do
with it?
JC: Well sure, you know, the western economies are, you know, structured around
a certain musical
aesthetic, and if you want to make a living and reach an international audience,
you know, a lot of artists would
like to at least address some aspect of that aesthetic, although, maybe sing in
their own language or, you
know, a mixture of English and Nigerian, or whatever it is. Yeah, it’s very
tough, I’ve been on the outside of
that things for all my life, for me, this is my fourth album with Savuka, but I
did, you know, another nine albums
previously –
DD: Right.
JC: – this is my thirteenth album. I’ve been making music for fifteen years, and
I’ve always been on the
peripheral edge of the, you know, sort of the western, sort of straight music
scene. And it gets a bit irritating
sometimes, because, you know, I’ve met German artists, Italian artists, French
artists, who are really good
songwriters, you know, really do well, but it’s a language thing, you know, they
can’t kind of cross over into
the international world until they sing something in English. And that, it’s a
kind of a language hegemony, you
know –
DD: Yeah, yeah, right, right.
JC: – which you have to actually get over if you are coming from that side, and,
you know, that’s why I’ve done
Zulu albums, I’ve done three or four just Zulu albums, which are, you know,
obtainable on, what’s the record
label, Rhythm Safari, you know, for those people who want that genuine sort of
thing . But in order to maintain
and to pay for and to pay my way, you know, we have to sing in English a lot of
the time. So on this album
there’s a lot of, what we do is we use simple Zulu idiomatic expression as –
DD: Zulu choruses throughout?
JC: Yeah, Zulu choruses, just little idioms, sort of punctuating the music, so
that somebody in, who speaks
Zulu at least, can understand what’s going on, and also to give people an idea
of how , just, kind of, a different
way of presenting that music.
DD: Are you and Savuka going to do an American tour?
JC: Yeah, we have quite a big tour, 42 shows across Am erica, starting in the
Midwest.
DD: Great. W ell, we will urge people throughout the country to get a chance to
see Johnny Clegg and
Savuka if you have not done that yet. It is quite possibly the greatest live
show out there. So we appreciate
you stopping by and playing some music for us.
JC: Thanks so much.
DD: Thanks again to Johnny Clegg for being our Musician Magazine’s Musician of
the Month and for picking
some great music this hour.
[a bunch m ore prom o stuff]
Perhaps you had to grow up in South Africa under apartheid to
really appreciate the musical and social significance of Johnny Clegg. From the
early days in the 1970s when the white, secular, Jewish immigrant college
student and the black migrant laborer and traditional tribal farmer Sipho Mchunu
began playing and dancing together, formed Juluka and threw down a cultural
challenge to the white establishment, Clegg has always seen, represented and
spoken to what could be possible for the country. Even in 1976, during the
uprising that followed the terrible Sharpeville massacre, their unity and
friendship gave the lie to the official policies of segregation and suppression.
Seeing them on stage, you knew apartheid was just plain wrong. When you were a
part of the crowd at their shows, the truth was evident before your eyes. The
joy and energy of the music was infectious. People got arrested at their
concerts, the events and songs got banned. These 'African ideas' were a threat
to the white regime. The songs & the society that developed around them bridged
cultural and racial divides. Color, language and ideas melted together in a
synergy that was instrumental in the genesis of post-apartheid South Africa's
'human rainbow'.
The last time I was lucky enough to catch Johnny Clegg, Andy Innes and Mandisa
Dlanga on stage together, Nelson Mandela had been out of prison just one month.
It was March of 1990 and the State of Emergency that had seared South Africa
since 1986 was still in full force, detention without charge or trial for 180
days was still 'normal.' The anti-apartheid struggle was reaching its zenith on
the streets and close to 100 000 people gathered under the banner of the United
Democratic Front (UDF) for the Human Rainbow Concert at Ellis Park rugby stadium
in Johannesburg. Mr Mandela himself was promised to be there for this concert in
his honor.
I remember still the crowds, riot police patrolling among them, snarling dogs
tightly leashed. Despite the 'security presence' there was a sense of destiny in
the air. The multiracial crowd shared food and jokes, the only hostility I could
sense was toward the cops but even that was subdued. Madiba Mandela was out of
prison and with him free at last one knew that the rest of the country could not
be far behind. Mixed in with the heady scents of sweat and foods and sweet
smoke, I could smell the change wafting across the nation that day.
A whole lot of water, clear and muddy, has passed under the bridge in the last
fourteen years. Today South Africa offers proof that a divided nation can come
together and make change work. The country stands as a model for conflict
resolution and peaceful change, a challenged yet vibrant and powerful emerging
democracy in sub-saharan Africa. In a short ten years, a nation of activists and
their old enemies have had to come together, confess, forgive and learn to
become nation builders. Despite the daunting obstacles of AIDS, massive
unemployment, rampant crime and a still massive gap between rich and poor, South
Africans remain remarkably upbeat, positively willing to give the fledgling
democracy every chance to succeed.
The country has now seen three successive, fully democratic and peaceful
elections, a successful transfer of the presidency from Mandela to Thabo M'Beki
and despite the myriad issues facing the nation including a 40% unemployment
rate, more than 80 % of eligible voters show up on polling day. Look at the 97%
of the electorate, some of whom stood in line for days to vote in the first
fully democratic election in 1994, and consider the potency of democracy next
time you are sitting at home on election day, wondering about the value of your
vote.
Remember that scene in Rainman where Dustin Hoffman & Tom Cruise are driving
across the south western desert past all those spinning wind turbines? Listen
carefully to the music in the background. Clegg's song Scatterlings plays:
"We are the Scatterlings of Africa, both you and I,
on the road to Pelamanga, beneath the copper sky."
In Ann Arbor this July to see The Johnny Clegg Band at The Ark, I catch him in
the wings at the side of the stage before the sound check. "The last time I saw
you was at Ellis Park," I say by way of introduction, my South African accent
thickening up a little, years of linguistic habit picked up in New York and
Detroit falling away as I feel again, quite suddenly, home.
Clegg looks at me closely, "For the concert that was banned?"
"Yeah," I give him a long look back.
"Geez, that was a long time ago."
He is just off the phone to his son Jesse, so I enquire after his family. Still
married to Jenny, Clegg's youngest child is now nine. Jesse is fifteen.
Privately I wonder where all that time went. Johnny barely looks a year older
than the last time I had seen him. The elemental vibrancy which saturates his
sound keeps him young. I smile as we look at each other, remembering the
anti-apartheid days, the lumps we'd all taken and how far we have all come. I'd
arranged through his tour manager for an interview later but as he heads out to
the bus, I ask, "So where is Pelamanga?"
Clegg looked at me seriously, "It's at the end of illusion."
He slips away to prepare, so I wander back up to the stage where Brendan Ross (sax
/ keyboard) and Andy Innes (guitar) are trying to get a South African zip drive
to work with American wiring. More on technology later.
Concorde Nkabinde comes out laughing and smiling to check his bass sound,
grinning from ear to ear I yell, "Sawubona, Concorde!"
"Sawubona m'gani," comes the friendly reply. Blacks and whites speaking each
other's languages, offering understanding and acceptance, equality and dignity,
that's the promise of the ‘New South Africa’. That's why people are doing their
level best to make the country work. Right now, I'm just happy to be among my
tribe again.
A soldering iron, an old adapter and some duct tape fix the problem with the
wiring. They have an old Dutch saying in South Africa, "n Boer maak 'n plan." It
means, "a farmer will come up with a solution." It's new world ingenuity at work.
I find myself a strategic seat, save two more for friends I've bought tickets
for, turn on my tape recorder and settle back to listen nostalgically to my
first sound check with the band in about 15 years. Zulu guitar still moves the
African in me as ever the bagpipes did the Scot, and Johnny's sound encompasses
both. From the traditional African influences of Juluka to the Zulu / Celtic /
Hindi melange of Savuka's later work and now the more rock-oriented strains of
the new album New World Survivor, the music, like the man's message, crosses
cultures and times, reminding us that deeper down we are all Universal Men.
The crowd rolls in, my friends among them. They're turned onto the music and
it's their first show. We settle into our row, two back from the front, dead
center. I give instructions on camera operation. As Abdel Wright comes on to
begin the opening set, a hand rests on my shoulder and I look up at Greg
Johnstone, tour manager extraordinaire,
"You wanted that interview right?" he asks dryly in his thick English accent. A
competent tour manager is good shepherd, negotiator, dictator and mother hen all
rolled into one. Greg's proved himself outstanding. I grab my recorder and notes
and scurry after him, praying that my mates don't screw up and actually manage
to get Abdel on video.
We jog out the back door and across the lot to Ashley street. Locals are used to
tour busses taking up the spots across from the Fleetwood on an evening. They
complain about it along with having to dodge the crowds lined up outside the
Ark. The locals like to complain, I say, "Deal with it. It's part of being what
Governor Granholm would call a cool Michigan city”.
Johnny's waiting at the bus. "You're on in a half hour," Greg warns.
We settle onto a comfy built-in sofa up front, Johnny & I, stretched out facing
each other, sitting down in Ann Arbor to tea and dreams. We figure out that we
had lived about a mile apart in Johannesburg and talk about the old neighborhood.
Get to know each other a bit. I set my recorder between us motioning, "Do you
mind?"
Clegg waves me on, "No, of course!"
JC: "So, where did we leave off?"
RFW: "We were talking about what has changed the most in South Africa. About how
activists have had to become nation builders. How long will it take South Africa
to become what we want it to be? Is it going there? Can it get there?"
JC: " I think that we've achieved some major accomplishments in the last 10
years. Just from a political point of view, I think that being able to ease into
a multi-racial, multi-cultural, unitary state after a period of fifty years of
division and homelands and you know... all that stuff, has been a tremendous
achievement."
Johnny takes his time. His face as expressive as Jim Carey's, he chews through
the issues as he answers.
"I think that we have done extraordinarily well at the political level. I think
that our real issue is economics." That thoughtful pause again.
"I think our issue now is in finding a way to create employment - if we're
really going to alleviate poverty - and to deal with the challenges of an
emerging democratic culture. Also, what is our national character? How do we
perceive ourselves as a nation? Can we be a nation? These are the issues that
are now raising their heads. We've got 11 official languages. We are basically
trying to find a place for everybody in the constitution and the country. There
are certain minimal guarantees that have been offered out BUT, it is really up
to South Africans to make it work. And my real concern, and I think most
people's concern, is whether the country can survive and grow as an economic
entity for ALL of its peoples!
We have 40% unemployment which in a political scientist's terms is a
revolutionary figure. That causes revolutions. But because there is such a huge
promise still hanging in the air in terms of black empowerment and in terms of
slightly ameliorating the conditions in the country, which has happened, there
is an amazing willingness and desire among the people to give the country time
to work. In the past decade we've also seen a massive exodus from the rural
areas into the urban areas, which exacerbates the urban problems. The petty
crime is huge and these are all things which we're now going to have to deal
with."
RFW: "How are conditions in the country now? Are people becoming conditioned to
violence?"
JC: Ironically, "Ja, it seems everyone has had some experience of low level
crime and danger. Political violence isn't such a factor anymore. But, look, you
know, you survive, you adapt and move on. I think that there is, like in Brazil,
an incredible affluence at the level of the elite of whatever race; white, black,
coloured or Indian. And then you have this huge sea of people who are living in
squatter camps and don't have fresh water, proper ablutions, none of the basic
moderate infrastructure."
RFW: "Do you think this is something South Africans have to deal with themselves
or do you think this is something that the outside world should be helping with?
In other words, how, working here, can we be useful over there? Would you even
like to see South Africa receiving more international assistance?"
JC: "I don't believe in aid."
RFW: "'k."
JC: "What I believe in is investment!" Clegg's emphatic and positive.
RFW: "Right!"
JC: "Because investment means that South Africans have to get up and do
something themselves! If you put out the begging bowl and get given something,
it's only a temporary fix, the condition of poverty isn't ameliorated.
"Also there's a huge aid trap. I mean, most development theorists are against
aid now. Because normally it comes with huge political strings attached to it
and secondly, it often comes with outdated or unresearched models which are
foreign to the country. Obviously each country's got its own specific ideas and
experiences and culture. For example, when you want to implement birth control
or a specialized farming model, it has to be researched and you have to find a
way that it can be made to work for the local people that have to implement it.”
“So, I think that what we need is investment. We need to build infrastructure.
We need to get people to see that South Africa can be a springboard into the
rest of Africa - a development platform. We have a very sophisticated economy,
an excellent infrastructure, telecommunications, roads, transport, air travel.
They're busy revamping the whole of TransNet, so the railway system is really
quite something!"
RFW: "Are there parallels between where South Africa is now and where America
was after the American Revolution? You know, a new country looking for its place
on a continent?"
JC: "No. You know, the thing for me is that the American Revolution was really
about colonists. Colonists revolting against their brethren. You know what I
mean? South Africa was really a unique moment in that it was indigenous people
fighting against a system imposed on them by the descendants of settlers, who
are themselves Africans. They are white Africans and have a right to be there.
They were born there, their fathers and their fathers’ fathers were born there.
They are now white Africans, and that is quite a novel situation."
"You know,” Johnny laughs and leans in close, his voice low and conspiratorial,
"What has been one of the most spectacular moments this year..." His voice
trails off for a moment. "If you had ever said to me when I was in the UDF back
in 1986, that the old National Party(NP) would join, actually merge, with the
ANC, I would have said 'You're mad!!'"
The UDF or United Democratic Front was an umbrella organization for the various
anti-apartheid forces inside South Africa while the African National Congress
was still banned.
RFW: "Yeah, I remember that time well. I went in the army in '86. I won't forget
it."
JC: He sighs. "Ja, those were bad days, hey! But now that very thing is on the
table. They want to disband the NP and join with the ANC!" There is incredulity
in his voice. "Can you believe it! That is such an irony! And it is something
which changes the whole base of where we've come from."
RFW: "Yeah, that entirely shifts the dynamic of power in the country, rearranges
the balances."
JC: "Yes!
RFW: "But I think that's a good thing! At least in terms of where I’d like to
see the country head."
JC: "Yes! It's a great thing. It's incredible, in just ten years to have come so
far!"
RFW: "Is there a downside?"
JC: "Well, you know, there is in a way. We have children born after 1990 who
don't remember the apartheid days. They cannot understand what life was like
then and as a consequence, they are losing touch with some of the traditional
elements of their culture. Their interests seem to tend towards hip hop nation,
rather than traditional aspects of where they've come from. That’s something of
a universal problem, but I think that it would be a tremendous loss. And just
like in other emerging cultures, upper class blacks in South Africa have lost
all clue about traditional African tribal people and their lives."
RFW: "You had another child since I saw you last."
JC: "Ja. I talked to Jesse just before the concert. He was complaining about
exams at school. It's hard for them. I am away from home for two months right
now, which makes it tough on the family."
RFW: "Do you see parallels between your roles as a father raising kids in South
Africa and your role as a spokesman for the change that is happening there?"
JC: "Seriously! Raising children is a highly specialized business!"
RFW: Laughing loud, "Oh yeah?!"
JC: "Because most families are inherently dysfunctional, I believe. I think that
all families have a level of dysfunctionality because all human beings
accumulate damage at some point; emotional and psychological trauma happens
along the way. As a parent, that's why I believe people should have children
when they're much older, because it enables you to realize where not to go, what
not to say and also how to deal with certain things. And that for me has been a
‘good mistake’ I made because I had my first kid when I was 38."
RFW: "I fully agree. I'm 36, haven't had any yet.”
Johnny smiles, his eyes showing something somewhere between understanding and
empathy.
RFW: "So, how's the view?"
He looks at me quizzically, then nods.
JC: "From Pelamanga?" I smile as he thinks about his answer, glad we're on the
same wavelength.
"It's a bit of a cold place, you know. When you come to the realization that
what you have thought was true in the world, isn't. It's a hard understanding to
come to, but it's an honest place. It is a place of self examination and new
perspective. It can be the beginning of change or it can take you to despair. It
will show you what you are made of."
I turn off the tape recorder and we chat privately about old times, friends in
common, what happened to whom. Greg comes back hurried and insistent, "Come on
Johnny, we've got to get on!" As Johnstone leads him away by the arm, Clegg
looks back over his shoulder yelling "Robin, sorry man! We'll talk more later,
ok?"
I smile and wave, thinking to myself, "Of course it's ok, Johnny Clegg, you just
made my summer!"
I rejoin my friends inside the concert as Abdel finishes his last song and
strategically place my sound gear near Clegg's main monitor, 'for the record.'
The band steps out to raucous applause. As Johnny walks on, I hear calls in
Zulu, Afrikaans, English and French and recognize that I'm standing again in the
human rainbow, just like at all of his shows. He tinkers with his guitar as the
crowd quiets, steps up to the mike and softly sings, "Take my heart away..."
The crowd erupts into rapturous applause and my own heart fills to bursting.
There is something so much more intense about music you love when it's live and
that close and it's been that long. I remember sending cassette tapes home from
the army in '86 to my sweetheart in Johannesburg, I'd add some music at the
beginning before my voiceover. More than one started with Savuka's "Take my
heart away." I grab my camera and using the privileges of my well worn press
pass, roam the Ark's cavern & capture the moment, wondering that this day the
mountain had come to me. So many memories wash over me during the opening number,
I remember it less than any other of the show. Live and immediate again, the
music takes me across the miles and the years like nothing else has.
In this age of our teleconnected and ever shrinking planet, how do we define ‘home’?
I can pull out my cell phone any second, speak a name and be connected almost
instantly to friends and family on several continents. Anytime of day and night,
someone I love is awake, somewhere in the world. Many of them I haven't seen in
years and yet we are still intimately engaged in each other's lives. While I
also have family and roots here in Michigan now, a part of me is endlessly
somewhere else, yearning at some level for some atavistic tribal belonging. No
matter how long I live away, a part of me will always be essentially African,
and Clegg's music, more than any other will always represent the country to me.
Will bring back in an instant the old days of protest and resistance, of pushing
for the change which finally came. When I hear that music I remember that it is
people that change the world.
It takes a while for the applause to die down at the end. Clegg yells over the
noise. "Thank you and welcome!"
"Sawubona, Johnny!" Comes the call.
Clegg grins, "Sawubona!" He holds up the replacement concertina hastily flown in
just before the show. The band had equipment stolen on the Canadian leg of the
2004 tour and that had limited the set list for their previous concert in
Montreal. They'd had to fly one in from South Africa, the western equivalent
won't do.
He explains, "These instruments, the guitar and concertina, were often taken and
reconfigured. So you would buy one for three or four hundred dollars, and then
pay another fifty dollars for somebody in the migrant labor hostel to take it
apart and change all the buttons around so it would play Zulu music. That man's
job is a 'concertina button changer, that's how he pays his rent."
Clegg turns to the sound engineer as he motions at the concertina handle, "Dave,
I think this is going to come off in a minute. D'you want to bring some more
tape?" He turns back to the crowd, "Excuse us. We have had a few technical
difficulties, as you can see." The crowd erupts as Dave Newton wraps the
contraption in a little more duct tape.
Unlike the massive outdoor show earlier on the tour when the band played to 55
000 fans at the Montreal Jazz Festival, the small town feel of Ann Arbor and the
intimacy of the Ark lend themselves more easily to conversation and tonight
Johnny is open and chatty. At the Montreal show the band was a good 20 feet
above and 15 feet from the audience with an enormous tv screen providing the
best view. At the Ark, Clegg is 5 feet in front of me and just above eye level.
He relaxes into his gig, tells stories around the songs, explaining the context,
the times and the Zulu lines, reminiscing one moment, looking forward the next.
There is something to be said for a smaller venue, the artist can get more
intimate with the crowd. Songs roll into stories, back into songs.
No longer constrained by missing equipment, the band ranges far and wide across
Clegg’s song book. With two guitars, bass, drums, concertina, keyboard and sax
on stage, there's plenty of music to pick from among Clegg's nineteen albums
over the last three decades. He plays most of my favorites, many of them older
songs, not the biggest hits, each in turn takes me back.
In every country that experienced some form of colonialism, the indigenous
cultures would incorporate aspects of the colonial power's culture into their
own, adapting styles of dress, cooking and music with a bit of local twisting.
This hybrid becomes after a time a cross-over culture of its own. Clegg draws
his musical tradition from those cross cultural roots. Zulu choruses, English
verses and a blend of western rock with African melody speak to the
multi-cultured world citizen in me.
"I saw the Berlin Wall fall.
I saw Mandela walk free.
I saw a dream whose time has come.
Changed my history."
The band breaks into Gunship Ghetto and closing my eyes, I'm back on the streets
of Soweto watching soldiers patrol the townships in armored vehicles, protesters
challenging them. There's a marked similarity between my mental images and the
pictures coming out of Iraq right now, soldiers patrolling heated, dusty streets.
Johnny's music holds up across cultures and times, speaking to universal
challenges. It strikes me that he is just as relevant now as he was during the
apartheid days, it's only the context and the players that have changed. For me
the power in the sound comes from the courage to speak out and use the music for
so much more than entertainment. It took courage to start Juluka in South Africa
when Johnny and Sipho did. You probably saw them performing traditional Zulu
dances to the music on The Tonight Show, but realize that in South Africa a lot
of their performances were actually illegal.
There was a lot less freedom under apartheid than there is in America, even in
this post 9/11 age of terror threats and heightened security. Standing up and
speaking out in that day and age took real balls. Much of music and many
musicians seem to have lost the idea of music as social comment, forgotten the
power of protest in song. It takes a courage that for the most part seems sorely
absent from the current scene. I'm still on this train of thought when Clegg
segues into Africa (What Made You So Strong?)
"I light a candle for the innocent ones,
A candle for our love.
I say a prayer for some peace on earth,
For the daughters and the sons.
And while your life unfolds
Like a cheap street fight,
You're just smiling in the dark,
Oh, what made you so strong?"
As the song ends, I yell out Bullets for Bafazane, my personal favorite. He
sneaks a look at me and smiles.
"Ok," he tells the crowd, "This is the last story."
The place erupts in a chorus of "NO!" They're loving every word and would stay
all night. Clegg tells the story of Bafazane, a proud Zulu warrior. 'Bafazane'
means "they spit at each other," it's a good warrior's name. The man is a long
time personal friend of Clegg's and has been the production manager for the band
for close on 25 years. But he'd been a shinga (warrior) before that and when
Johnny met him, was getting by making Zulu dancing shoes out of discarded truck
tires for migrant laborers at a worker's hostel near Johannesburg.
The song was Juluka's first major hit in South Africa. It made it onto radio
only because it was one of the few in the band's repertoire that was completely
in English. Apartheid's segregation worked on two levels, both racial and
cultural. Music broadcast by the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation (SABC)
had to be in only one language and got played on that language's own station.
Cross-pollination wasn't merely frowned upon, it was actually outlawed as part
of the apartheid government's policy of "divide & rule".
"He's got iron in his soul, he's got a smile in his eyes,
He makes dancing shoes from old car tires,
And it's the sky up above that he loves."
Johnny and Mandy dance, the band plays on, following Bafazane with the simple
tribal melody of African Sky Blue and the colonial commentary of Third World
Child. The evening begins to draw down. The show picks up that vibe that
concerts can get sometimes when you realize that all beautiful things will have
their end. Clegg launches into his last speech:
"This a rare, more futuristic song, it's from the new album, New World Survivor."
"Yes!" comes an enthusiastic response.
"Somebody's heard of the new album, that's amazing!" More laughter, " I'm
astonished!"
"Well, to bring it down to it's bottom line, we're moving into an epoch that is
being called Post-Human, or in its gentler form Trans-Human." Nervous laughter
this time. Humanity doesn't sound like it's altogether ready for that.
"Essentially what they are arguing is that within thirty to forty years, human
beings will have made a definite convergence with the technology we make. We'll
be wired and micro chipped to death, so that your five senses will be able to
extend beyond the organic base of the human body. This is a very important
moment in the evolution of our species, and how we deal with it has major
political and social implications. Spiritual too, I suppose."
"Anyway, your grandson, or your son in fact, when he is in his 40s or whatever,
will no longer have to worry about it when someone breaks into his car, because
the alarm will go off inside his body. He will BE his cell phone.” I hear the
laughter of people recognizing their own behaviors.
"Convergence darling, that's what they call it! What we are converging to, I'm
not entirely certain, and sometimes it's troubling because we trust what we know,
we are afraid of what we don't know. Civilization is nine or ten thousand years
old. That is, groups of people living together, social laws, regulations,
farming, investing in the future with certain guarantees - the bargain that
society creates for us. It's really very short, this social contract, only 10
000 years old at the end of the day. And now here we are in 2004, contemplating
a whole new set of things."
"Now where does this come from? It comes from our imagination, from the very
genetic construction that we are going in and pulling out and looking at. We are
now evolving and stretching ourselves into a completely new....
This is hardly a bottom line hey!" The audience erupts again, loving him,
lapping it up.
"Sorry, I feel quite passionate about this, please forgive me." They already had.
"So what do I feel? I feel good. I feel strong. Whatever comes, I feel that this
is where we are supposed to go. I think that this is part of the natural
evolution of homo sapiens, a species that has gotten so conscious, and has got
such a powerful mind that it has gone inside it's own body and pulled out and
analyzed its genetic structure and is now deciding what to do with it. Which is
an inevitable consequence of being homo sapiens. And this is the new song, "Into
the Picture."
Barry van Zyl taps on a cymbal and the band breaks into Clegg's latest tune.
Just like in 1990, I get chills down my spine and emotion wells up. Our world
has changed so much these past 14 years, sweeping us along with it. Johnny’s
older, but the vibrancy and enthusiasm still ring out clarion clear. His
engagement with life and his vision of the possible still have the power to move
one, or many. At 53, the man, the music and the message still sound strong.
“Do you see the picture?
Do you feel strong?
Can you see that river
Flowing on and on?"
... Blue electric oceans
Information streams
Webs and nets in motion
Connecting you and me."
His subject has become less political and more universal. The music always was.
The revolution is now digital rather than South African but Clegg’s still
standing at the leading edge of change and speaking to our collective future.
He's still conscious of the power of music to move people to politics. The
concertina handle comes loose and Dave runs on stage with more duct tape. "And
this is an extension of that sentiment..." Clegg jokes as the new world solution
gets applied to the problem one last time. They’ll have it fixed properly
tomorrow. You can bet on that.
Of all the reasons I give when asked why I choose to live in Ann Arbor, the
city's ability to serendipitously deliver the occasional magical night is
probably the truest. Don't let anyone kid you, it's a small place, but with the
intimacy, the city gets a big sprinkling of fairy dust over its nightlife. There
was the late Saturday I walked out the backdoor of the Earle and summoned
directly into the Firefly Club, got to watch Wynton Marsalis and his band trot
out an easy going, intimate, post Michigan Theatre show jam session for a
privileged hundred-odd other lucky souls. And then there was that night Eminem
showed up at The Touchdown Cafe with Obie Trice and played a couple of numbers.
That stuff happens less in bigger cities. The odds aren't as favorable. I've
always been a fan of Johnny Clegg, respected the man and resonated with the
music, but this Saturday in Ann Arbor I got to make a friend of him. That's the
beauty of this place. Those things happen here.
"Sometimes I feel that you really you know me"
The show over, I head backstage, dispatching our group to latch onto various
Africans as they dispersed around the neighborhood. The Fleetwood and Old Town
refuse to feed our happy & hungry band of 18 at short notice, so Barry van Zyl,
Mandy Dlanga and I negotiate with the large and jolly owner of the Parthenon
Greek Restaurant on Main at Liberty who kindly agrees to keep his kitchen open
and sets us up outside on the patio on Main Street. I call down to my friends
and use technology to do a body count and place entree orders before the kitchen
closes.
A steady stream of stragglers show up by twos and threes, eventually Johnny and
Andy arrive. Seeing me at the far end of the table curled up next to Mandy,
Clegg exclaims, "Rob! I was wondering where you went! Was that you ordering me
food?" I raise my phone and wave it at him. He smiles, satisfied, "Good work
young man!"
“Young and not so young,” I think quietly. “Thanks Johnny," I smile, then again
quietly, "Anytime!"
As the food arrives I excuse myself to Mandy and Barry, wander down to the other
end of our impromptu banquet table and squeeze in between my friends to talk one
more time with the man whose music kept my chin up on some of the darkest of the
old days. We get the occasional interruption from concert goers, but they're
brief, stopping only to reflect the joy of the evening and thank the man for
that beautiful music of his. We talk long and deep, anthropology (Clegg has a
master's degree), sociology, genetics, South Africa, touring, the changes in the
music industry and politics. Most of all we talk about people processing change.
Midnight comes and goes, nobody notices. Clegg looks at our empty beer glasses
and someone orders more Heinekens.
"Drink my beer in a state of fear," I joke, quoting his own words back at him.
Johnny laughs and turns to Andy Innes. "He's quoting Berlin Wall now!" Clegg
says, motioning at me and referencing one of the old anti-apartheid songs.
"That takes you back a while, hey!"
Clegg negotiates with the Parthenon's owner, seeking his customary triple
espresso. We settle for sweet rich Greek coffees which disappear fast. Suddenly
it's really late, the tour bus leaves promptly at two. Even the best of days
will end. We settle on and around the bus on a beautiful, muggy summer night.
It's almost 2am and still 70 degrees out. I laugh as Concorde, Barry and Dave
compare the finer points of this year’s tour bus over their past experiences.
Not the sort of conversation one hears every day around A2. The driver arrives
and with the band's July 4th Milwaukee Summer Fest show waiting, we bid last
farewells but few goodbyes. The show will go on. They'll be back in a year and
until then we carry them with their music in our hearts.
"I don't know where you are
my eyes are fixed upon your star
I know that at the journey's end
I will see your face again."
Hamba kahle, Johnny, m'gani. I'll see and hear you again.
- - o – xx – o - - 5955 words
websites: www.johnnyclegg.com
Glossary:
Sawubona - ‘Hello” or ‘good to see you’
M’gani - ‘my friend’
Hamba Kahle - “fare well”
UDF - The United Democratic Front (An umbrella organization for the various
anti-apartheid forces
while the African National Congress was still banned)
NP - National Party (The Party of Apartheid)
Author: Robin France Watson
+++++++++++++
I've been waiting awhile to post this story, but have had some
very positive feedback and figure, "what the hell, why not now." As Andy pointed
out to me, American readers might need more background about me.
I'm an expatriot south african, born in cape town, raised in Johannesburg. I was
in the sa army from 1986-88 and then a reporter from 89 to 94 in Joburg and very
active against the apartheid government. Currently a resident of Ann Arbor,
Michigan.
Feel free to write or call with comments or just post the to Scats.
The story, which is close on 6000 words follows and is also attached as a clean
Word.doc for those who might prefer it.
regards
robin.
Posted by
Robin F. Watson 24.08.2004 21:08
robinfw@aol.com
Tim Modise: 'Welcome to a special edition of Talk with Tim. Tonight, instead
of bringing you Carte Blanche viewers' choice, we will be indulging in a
discussion about the documentary that went out on Sunday night - 'So Where Do We
Come From?' '
Tim: 'With me in the studio to give their opinions are two people known for
their controversial and outspoken views: veteran journalist and author, Max Du
Preez and Xolela Mangcu, who is the executive director of the Steve Biko
Foundation and associate editor of the Sunday Independent. Then we have Johnny
Clegg of Juluka and Savuka fame, who is also an anthropologist and historian.
Johnny, welcome!
And finally, with us tonight we have the person who did the research into where
we came from. Dr Himla Soodyall, welcome
But before we get into the discussion, here is a short excerpt from the
programme to refresh your memory...'
Tim: 'Well, question is, what is the point of all this? Are we really all
brothers and sisters under the skin? Dr. Soodyall, you conducted the research,
what did you set out to achieve? What was your objective when you took this
project on?'
Dr. Himla Soodyall (Medical Research Council): 'Well, we wanted to show that by
using DNA as a tool we would be able to reconstruct histories of people. We all
know that we have parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on, but
ultimately we all connect to that same family tree, to that same tree of
evolution. And we hear stories about ancestry, genealogy, but the DNA is such a
powerful method to use to find these connections that, by using this tool, my
goal is to unify people from all parts of the world into realising that we are
one species; we are one family from the same tree of life, but some of us may be
placed on different branches. So that's the story of our genetic heritage. It's
locked in every single cell that we carry, and we're walking parts of the big
puzzle of life.'
Tim: 'But are there any particular results that surprised you?'
Himla: 'Not really because, to me, I understand that patterns of genes are
transmitted in a particular way. Some of us may retain these genetic profiles
and some of them may be lost purely due to chance, and so we have a means now of
recapturing the lines that have survived through thousands of years of genetic
evolution. And the issues of why you have a particular skin colour; why is it
that discrimination may occur because of these features, of how you look - they
are sometimes not all correlated with a genetic profile. And this is the power
of DNA.'
Tim: 'Well scientifically it may make sense, but emotionally, intellectually and
otherwise, a lot of people are going to find it difficult to handle. Your
initial response to this, Max, when you saw the documentary?'
Max du Preez (author/journalist): 'Well, a couple. First is that it redefines
the concept of African diaspora because we are all members of that African
diaspora. Second is, anybody who's seen this and is a racist after this, will be
a fool because hell now there's absolutely no basis to be a racist. You can be
an ethnic chauvinist, I suppose, but this means that racism is so illogical and
actually very stupid. It redefines us as a nation too. If we take this in, if we
take this very seriously, it will redefine relationships; it will redefine who
we are as a nation, and a lot of contemporary stuff that we hear from the new
government we'll have to take with a pinch of salt.'
Tim: 'Now for you, Xolela... what was your initial response when you saw this? I
mean, Max has just suggested that this is an accepted truth; but it isn't,
despite the evidence that has been presented in the documentary.'
Xolelo Mangcu (Steve Biko Foundation): 'My initial reaction was, 'So what?' The
science is very nice; the science tells us that we go back 150 000 years. The
politics tell us - and I was doing mathematics earlier on - that in 000,1% of
that 150 000 years, a group of white people said, 'Well, none of that stuff
matters.' They recreated the world in less than 1% of that time, and that is the
social construction of reality that we live with. So, the science is very, very
informative. It's very good, but the science has to pursue it and change the
social construction of reality, especially as Max was saying...'
Tim: 'So that 000,1% of the world is much more influential, than this construct
that you spoke about - than that which over what we had the documentary about on
Sunday?'
Xolela: 'It's amazing how in that small time the white population all over the
world, not just in South Africa, has totally recaptured the history of humanity
and given us a totally distorted history despite the science that's....'
Tim: 'We'll come to this in a short while... But Johnny, I just want to go back
to your song - I think recorded in 1982 - 'Scatterlings of Africa'. But the
message in the song ... really not many people paid attention to that.'
Johnny Clegg (musician /anthropologist): 'Well the song was about the fact that,
as humans, Homo sapiens as a species originated in Africa. Africa is the
birthplace and the cradle of mankind, and from there scattered to the rest of
the world. So the song celebrates the fact that every human being can claim
African origins.'
Tim: 'But to you it may have made sense to write that song at the time, but did
it make sense to your audience and to your students who you lectured to?'
Johnny: 'Well, the song came out of frustration, because I was lecturing to
students - I was lecturing at Wits University from 1978 until 1982 - and as
anthropologists, we had to do a course on race and racism. At that time, it was
a 98% white university and we had 300 kids who came out of an apartheid state
education, apartheid church, apartheid family, and they had very distorted ideas
about race and about culture. So what we had to really deal with is, what is
race and what is culture? I think that those two things were the building blocks
of apartheid, and we still have a lot of problems in confusing the two because
we not only had racial segregation, we had cultural segregation in South Africa,
which people forget. We had homelands where people were forced through
designation of language to go and live. You had Bophutatswana, you had Transkei,
you had Ciskei and you had KwaZulu Natal, you had Tshongaland, and all of these
cultural separations of culture, of black people from one another -forced on
them by the apartheid policy. So there is a great issue here to debate - the
relationship between culture, which is learnt behaviour; and race, which is your
biology.'
Tim: 'Yes, but this isn't in a South African context. To go back to what Xolela
said, the attitude seems to be the same - the attitude of racism seems to be the
same across the world. Why's that, where people did not have the same kind of
system that you referred to?'
Johnny: 'Well, these are all learnt behaviours that you learn when you grow up.
And what you learn is your culture; it's not your genes, it's what you're
taught, and that distinction is very important. You don't have any behaviour
which is genetically determined, except for fight or flight... all those, your
adrenalin, which is in your species programme, but all the other behaviour is
learnt, all learnt behaviour. So as an anthropologist, we were trying to get
people to say, 'Your position is what you learnt at school, it was taught to
you. How about another paradigm? Have a look at it from another perspective.'
Race was used in the early 60s by the apartheid government to find a biological
pseudo-scientific justification for the separation of races because they were
arguing at the time that humans, that Homo sapiens as a species, had separated
at least three times into the Peking man, which was the yellow race; Neanderthal
man, which was the Caucasoid race; and Australopithecus for separating them.'
Tim: 'All right, we'll pick up that discussion in a short while. Stay with us
for more fascinating opinions and discussions.'
BREAK
Tim: 'Welcome back as we continue to discuss the documentary 'So Where Do We
Come From?' And Johnny Clegg, you were in the middle of something riveting
there, talking about the three types of mankind that the apartheid system came
up with, probably riding on the back of whatever scientific evidence they had at
the time.'
Johnny: 'Well they just had, at the time, hominid remains and they developed a
whole theory around that.'
Max: 'It was the same in the 1930s in Nazi Germany.'
Johnny: 'Correct, yes.'
Max: 'It may be a European thing! Also they pretended that that was science,
that you understand human beings according to race.'
Himla: 'But even prior to that, before colour became an issue, evidence of
dissent between groups [was] already there. I mean, why is it, between the
English and the Irish there were conflicts? I mean we're talking about the same
colour people. So there's evidence in human behaviour where concepts like
dominance come up. So I think this is where the social construct that we have to
dissect and understand a little bit more comes into focus. What is it that
drives it? What is it that economic barriers separate people? You could be the
same colour...'
Tim: 'But Dr Soodyall, why is it that the differences in race, for example, are
more entrenched in terms of the attitudes that people display towards one
another? Discrimination on racial basis is probably the most entrenched in terms
of discriminatory practices around the world.'
Himla: 'The point I was making is that, the concept of racism we know it as
today started off probably not based on colour. There were other sources of
dynamics that came into play and then, when people started to travel across
wider geographic distances, encountering different peoples, this is where the
colour issue started to predominate in the concept of race and racism.'
Max: 'It may be because we, as a species, are so ... as explained in the
documentary... are so set upon the visual. You see a different colour and that
makes them different.'
Himla: 'You see differences, you may have different skills of superiority, and
this is what aggravates the concept of being discriminatory.'
Max: 'Racism is a very primitive reaction.'
Himla: 'Yes.'
Xolela: 'You see, I don't look at this as just a matter of the personal
affinity, or the human affinity to discriminate. As a student of politics I see
this as based on a political system that has sustained itself throughout the
world. Actually, there is a nice concept by a historian called Alex
Hobbesborough?? He calls it the 'Euro-megalomania' which has basically run the
world over the past 500 years, and has been the basis of the distribution of
resources and has sustained itself.'
Tim: 'But if we are all thinking and reasonable human beings, Xolela, right
across all races and cultures, what is it that makes that construct so
compelling to people who buy into it, who support it?'
Xolela: 'It's interest, it's resources, it's livelihoods that have been
organised around skin colour. So it's not just about people having an affinity
to discriminate; it's people whose entire destinies are dependent on the social
construction. And so the science can come - and for that matter, people have
known about this stuff for a very long time. In fact, even in philosophy, people
have been writing about the sources of civilization. It hasn't changed, however,
how white people, how Europe has thought about Africa or about African people.
So there's a tension here. Yes, this stuff is important but, to get it to the
point - to the threshold of changing social prejudice, that is the challenge. -
Max: 'There's a South African dynamic here. As I watched this documentary, I
thought... and you saw Pieter Dirk Uys and Naas Botha and so on... I thought
that most Afrikaners - let me speak on behalf of my own little group - would
welcome to see that there is some Khoi[san] or some slave, because it
legitimises their African-ness - and it makes them have a bigger claim. I
thought that there would be a lot of black people in South Africa who would feel
uneasy to know that they had a European ancestor. So isn't this programme more
of a shock to black South Africans than it is to white South Africans? Mr
Modise, how did you feel to hear that your paternal ancestors came from Europe?
It wasn't a nice feeling , was it?'
Tim: 'Well...'
Xolela: 'I think that black people were less troubled by that than white people
because, you know, black people don't have a whole lot of stuff that depends on
those identities. We don't have a system that we need to defend, we don't have
gold mines and resources that depend on how we look.'
Max: 'We're talking about a few white people who own the mines.'
Xolela: 'And secondly, just talking about a few white people, prejudices run
very, very deep, so you can put down all the rational scientific evidence you
have. You have to get people to shift. I mean people are going to watch this
programme, but...'
Tim: 'But then what does it do to the new constructs then, Xolela? Constructs
like black consciousness now... I mean, if we're talking about us saying that
people...'
Johnny: 'Ten years ago we had a racist genocide between the Tutsi and the Hutu.
These are genetically and biologically groups of people who have intermarried
biologically and genetically, but who have a false construct about one another
culturally. So, the cultural... the manipulation of the cultural identity...
forced these people to find a way in which to identify each other, and kill each
other. And the role...what you're talking about is the ideological role... of
either cultural or racial discrimination. I don't think that you can only just
put it down to Euro-centric activity. I think that there is something in the way
that we construct ourselves as homo sapiens; we have a natural propensity to
want to be in an 'in group', and there's an 'out group'...'
Tim: 'But just to go back to the question...'
Xolela: 'It's the Belgians who were actually responsible for instilling those
differences between the Tutsis and the Hutus. The Europeans constructed those
differences, so it wasn't due to cultural differences.'
Tim: 'And at the end of the day, it's down to the Hutus and the Tutsis to
reconcile those differences.'
Xolela: 'For sure, but it's in a broader context.'
Tim: 'Now I want to go back to the question that Max asked me about my European
origins. In response to your question, you see, it was very fascinating for me
to learn that. It was a pleasant surprise. Bt then, what difference does it make
in my case, because, as matters stand, I am a black South African; an African
who has been discriminated against. So what claims can I make anyway, anyhow? So
it doesn't mean anything beyond that. I don't know how to feel.'
Max: 'But isn't it interesting that we as South Africans are fascinated by this
because we're still striving for identity - we're still trying to define who we
are.'
Tim: 'I'll tell you one thing though that I found very interesting - that Mark
Lottering is seemingly more European than Pieter Dirk Uys, for instance, but
would obviously be treated differently in this society. So what are we to make
of this nonsense anyway?'
Johnny: 'I think you're right. It is academic. I think our real issue - not only
in South Africa, but around the world - especially with globalisation and other
forces at play, is the issue of identity. Who are we at a cultural level? How do
we construct ourselves as a nation? You know, how do we fit in, and how does our
culture enable us to survive in this changing world?'
Tim: 'Here then is a challenge for particularly South Africans, right? Because
we bought into these constructs that you referred to, these biological
constructs came into being masquerading as science and the social construct
based on that in the South African context. What do you do now when we sit here
as white South Africans, black South Africans, coloured South Africans, Asian or
Indian South Africans? Who are we in that context? How do we construct a new
cultural identity given the space and relations that we have, the political
economic relations that we have today?'
Max: 'What we do not do is to say, 'This makes us all equal and the same,' and
then we forget the injustices and the history, and that is where your point
[turning to Xolela] is perfectly valid. I mean it is a starting point in our
minds. We have to approach, we have to take this in, and take it seriously - all
south Africans, and that's your philosophical premise. That's where you start,
but you don't forget apartheid; you don't forget that we had the dompas [pass
law] and forced removals. That's what cultural groups did against other cultural
groups, and that's still...'
Tim: 'And you know, as I know, that that's still the dominant thinking - at
least in the white community in South Africa is that,' let's forget about the
past; people have got the vote, what more do they want?' '
Max: 'Yes, it's a very human reaction. It's wrong, but it's a human reaction.
Everyone wants to forget about the important stuff.'
Tim: 'Now, for the viewer at home, Dr Soodyall, who watched the documentary and
said, 'You know what, this is not different to the pseudo-science that was used
as the bedrock for the apartheid argument, this is mere propaganda.' How do you
respond to that?'
Himla: 'Well, I mean, this is a very interesting question as we are talking
about issues of identity and just in this little panel already have various
views on what identity is. It seems as if we're pulling it out more as a social
cultural construct, but there are so many other facets of our lives that
champion how we identify ourselves - not as a cultural unit, but as individuals.
So you have this individual complexity to identity; you have the group, or
ethnic, or cultural complexity to identity; and as you say, Max, the history we
cannot forget - so identity is a very complex issue. So suddenly now the new
kids on the block - DNA - come into the picture, and they're supposed to fix
everything, so you're asking questions to the point of almost, 'Well, now we
have this fascinating tool, how do we use it to fix the past to make for a
better future?'
Tim: 'Well, let's probe that question in a short while. Stay with us for more
Talk With Tim.'
BREAK
Tim: 'Well, scientists have presented us with overwhelming evidence that
humanity after all originated here in Africa, but that is going to be a
mission-and-a-half to convince the average citizen of the world that they belong
to mankind, that racial differences are definitely superficial. So, let's go
back to that initial response, Xolela.'
Xolela: 'You know what I would suggest, Tim, is that science - all science, I
think, -can only make sense or be useful or meaningful, only in the extent to
which it obtains within a democratic order. You know that, in the end, people
will pay attention to these findings and do something about them only to the
extent, really, that they can do other things that have to do with their
destinies; that have something to do with economic and political justice. So all
of these have to be part of this bigger project.'
Tim: 'But Johnny, you've had this understanding for a very long time, right? To
you, there's nothing new in this. But then, how do you help change the mind, the
attitude of the average South African?'
Johnny: 'I just think that it helps to situate their sense of space and identity
in a very broad sense; that although they might be Portuguese, born in
Johannesburg, actually, some 150 000 years ago, the original Eve - who was their
great great great great great great grandmother - came out of Africa. All it
does is that it adds another layer round their identity and it softens this very
'in group' feeling. 'I'm Portuguese South African. I'm living in South Africa
and you know what? My first mom was African.' It helps to break that, that's all
it does. It's also the first real scientific evidence giving us a sense of the
role that race, or the role that genetics and biology has played in the
dispersion of Homo sapiens. I think it's also very important to remember also
that there's a cultural interplay with race.'
Tim: 'Right, let's go back to culture and religion. Max, you remember Prof.
Floors van Jaarsveld who got tarred and feathered in the 80s for trying to
suggest some of the stuff that we are discussing here today?'
Max: 'Ja, I think it would be a shock to many white South Africans because, as
we said earlier, the whole ideology was based on race and difference, and God
made it like that, so now we know...'
Tim: 'Now, when you refer to God, then Dr Soodyall and her colleagues become
irrelevant...'
Max: 'No, I'm saying that they were told that it was God's will. Now we know
that that is not true. So, I think the point about this programme, I think, is
that while it's not brand new stuff for us, it has not been popularised, and
that makes it very important - and more specifically to South Africans. I mean,
we saw Naas Botha and Mark Lottering and stuff. There are certain things that
thinking or self-respecting South Africans who have seen this cannot say after
this programme, because now we know that there is a different way of starting
any conversation with regard[s] to identity. The second point, shortly, that I
want to make is that we can't sit back and think, 'Oh, 150 000 years ago,' we've
also got to concentrate and make that more real for now. And the one way is, we
should try now and develop and engender a sense of a common shared history
within Southern Africa.'
Tim: 'Xolela, you wanted to say something?'
Xolela: 'I just wanted to say that Max underestimates the capacity of South
Africans to deny - especially white South Africans. You can give them all the
evidence about apartheid, about human origins, about the science, but people
[who] will deny things for a whole lot of reasons including their destinies.'
Max: 'We're all individual human beings, though.'
Xolela: 'But in terms of the history of South Africa, denial - despite all the
evidence of apartheid and of science - will really disillusion people.'
Tim: 'Dr Soodyall, will they make that connection between the evidence, the
facts and our entrenched views?'
Himla: 'We can only hope that we have this humanitarian quality within us to
change what has been bad, whether it is ideas of apartheid discrimination
against our fellow humans, we, after all, are from the same tree of life - maybe
on different branches - and, you know, the bottom line is that humanity has the
capacity to utilise good and we should use the genetics only as the flavouring
to the meal. It's not the meal, so no- one's going to take the genetics and run
with it as the all, the known, that gives us all the answers. But we could use
it as we do other facets of our life.'
Max [To Tim]: 'It's going to be interesting for Moffetti to know he's your
cousin!'
Johnny: 'We come from a very strong political exclusionist tradition of
separation, and what this says is that it is inclusivist. It says that we all
belong together, that we all came from the same group of ancestors that left
Africa 150 000 years ago and migrated up from Kenya and Tanzania.'
Tim: 'Do you feel vindicated yourself?'
Johnny: 'I feel absolutely vindicated. It's great to have a scientific basis for
'Scatterlings of Africa'.'
Xolela: 'Tim, you know what? For my children's sake, for my children's sake, I
hope people embrace this evidence.'
Tim: 'Now in your eyes, Xolela, from what you saw in the documentary, does it
make me less African now than before?'
Xolela: 'No. I think that in the African community, in the black community,
that's always been an embrasive culture of people's identity because we never
had much to hang our identities around in terms of resources and things like
that, so we're not very exclusionary.'
Tim: 'Black consciousness people?'
Xolela: 'Black consciousness people were actually very, very embrasive. If you
actually read what Steve Biko was about, they were very embrasive. Savuka was
very embrasive. In fact Robert Savuku was one of the first people to say that we
were non racial, so what we need...'
Tim: 'But I want us to help the individual who wants to make that leap of faith.
What, how does one deal with this evidence? The next thing we say, 'Okay, I
accept this, but what do I do now?' What do you think the next step should be?'
Max: 'Well, I think that it's a very individual, it's a very personal thing. Go
into your room, get into your bed, get onto your knees, and think. Rethink
everything you've thought before, and then look at everybody around you and say,
'That is truly my cousin'. Because, as we say, 70/80 000 years is a short time.
We are indeed close cousins and that's got to change your personal philosophy.'
Xolela: 'I just hope that the children will cause revolutions because of this
stuff, but I bet you that the powers who've grown up with this stuff, whose
resources are organised around identity, are going to resist. But for the
children and the schools, this stuff should be made widely available throughout
this country. The thread here... the next generation... is the children.'
Tim: 'Right. Well thanks very much to my cousins! We invite you to visit our
website to find out how you can win a cop of Steven Oppenheimer's book 'Out of
Africa's Eden', courtesy of Jonathon Ball Publishers. You can trace your
ancestors, build your family tree and find out how to have your DNA tested on
the website www.mwebancestry.co.za,
And that's all we have time for. I'm sure you agree that that was food for
thought. After all, that is what Talk with Tim is all about and thank you for
being with us tonight. From us, goodnight.'
Johnny Clegg's
reputation as one of the foremost South African musicians, if not one of the
most important South Africans of his generation, has been won over several
decades of struggle and hard work. A cursory glance over his biography will
reveal a remarkable story; the formation of multiracial bands Juluka and Savuka
in his apartheid-ridden country showed great courage and prices were paid. The
incorporation of Zulu lyrics into his songs must have frustrated his government
as much as it delighted those with minds open enough to appreciate the cultural
subtext, and ears open enough to enjoy the rhythmic and powerful music he has
created through the years.
Even in a post-apartheid world, Clegg finds plenty to focus on and sing
about, especially in the field of genetics. For the very first time, Clegg is
touring Australia in late 2005, and the following interview took place to
promote the Adelaide gig.
[Editor's note: Michael Hunter's questions appear in boldface, Johnny
Clegg's responses are unbolded.]
I talked to you nearly ten years ago when there was the chance of your
first Australian tour happening but it fell through.
Johnny Clegg: "Yeah, and also there was a WOMAD thing as well."
You're not tricking us this time?
No no, this is a full-blown one. What normally happens is, I live so far away
from the centre of the universe, I'm at the tip of Africa and if I do a tour in
Europe, I have to do a minimum of like ten or fifteen shows to make it
worthwhile. Otherwise, all the etiquettes of the massive expense and eleven
hours of flying and the hotels and the travelling -- it's not the same as living
in France and doing some shows in England, where you just hop across the road.
So if I come to Australia, I have to put a much bigger tour together so we've
got New Zealand and Australia and we do like five dates in Australia and two in
New Zealand and maybe double dates if things go really well.
Will the new CD be available in time for the tour?
The new CD will not be available but there is a live CD which will be available
of a previous concert that was recorded in South Africa.
Is that much the same band that you'll be touring with here?
Exactly the same band.
Is it possible to describe the new CD in terms of previous material -- are
there similar themes?
There's about four or five songs tied in, and they are a mixture of rhythmic
hip-hop rhythms but also very much within the traditional music I grew up with
as a war dancer, because we did a lot of call and response singing, and the
harmonies there are always for me very powerful. So those pentatonic or fifth
harmonies are a trademark of the vocal chanting that I use, so there's a lot of
that stuff on the new album as well.
Sounds like quite an intriguing mixture of the ancient and the modern.
What about lyrically, bearing in mind there are plenty of themes to talk about
in a post-apartheid era...
Sure. There's some nostalgic songs which refer back to a time thirty years ago
when I first went to a place called Makabeleni which is where Sipho (Mchunu,
co-founder of Juluka) lived, the song will probably be the single off the new
album, all sung entirely in Zulu. It's a song to parents 'cause when I got
there, everybody belonged to everybody. All children belonged to all parents and
it was a wonderful, very connected, networked village. Sipho called everybody
older than him in a certain age "father" and "mother" and that's all kind of
died out in a way in the new South Africa. There's a whole new modern, urban
chic which the young tribesmen when they come to the city, they want to pass for
modern and progressive and sophisticated, so they drop a lot of the old
traditions. So this song is really saying I remember that I went to Makabeleni
and I remember that there were mothers and fathers who were everybody's mothers
and fathers and it is sad for me because I have left that home, I've left that
time behind me. So it's kind of a nostalgic song.
And then there's a song about war children, the child soldier. It's a problem
in Africa with using children in political games and in warfare -- and South
America, all over. And then just songs about survival, struggling to put bread
on the table. We forget that somewhere in Africa, people are getting up and just
battling the day to put some bread on the table. So there's another set of
realities. So you know really, just a broader not so political, but just songs
of the day, simple songs of simple people in the day in the life of somebody
living in Africa.
So still very African based?
Oh, yeah.
Because with the world the way it is, there would be plenty to draw from
that too but there's obviously more than enough to draw from in your home
country.
Sure. Completely.
Here's my clever question for the interview. If you were writing "Cruel
Crazy Beautiful World" today, would you add any other adjectives to the title?
[laughs] I'd probably mention environment. I've actually been watching the
environment and if you know from a few lines of songs in the last Savuka album,
it was already appearing, where we're talking about snow in the summer and all
the seasons are upside down. Referring to the fact that there is some hidden
hand which is changing our world but the real problem is that we're the one
driving that hand. It's linked to another song which we're putting on the album
called "Wander As A Nomad" which is a reworking of an old Juluka song. It's a
song about how nature reflects the problems in culture. If we look at the
droughts and the pestilences, it happens in countries where there is some kind
of social injustice.
There's a kind of African idea that 'no rain means no justice' and so we have
to reorganise society so that we can bring back the rain. In that very kind of
organic way, traditional African sight is: watch very carefully because nature
is a barometer of the conduct of people and the maintenance of true social
exchange and true social relations. When they become broken down, then nature
basically punishes us with locusts or floods or whatever. So that song is on the
album, so there is quite a strong environmental component in two or three songs
as well.
I still really enjoy the
Live And More
DVD. Was a lot of it hard to source, particularly the earlier material?
I didn't do that. It was in my producer's archives, he was jealously guarding
it. It's like a time release capsule, they'll come out every two or three years.
I was never able to see some of the earlier clips like "December African
Rain" on whatever TV show they may be from.
Oh that's, what, 1982 or something. God. That was ABC, like a $300...
(laughs)... We didn't really understand what videos were in those days, you
know. There was no format, we didn't know what you had to do. We just knew you
had to make pictures with music.
I love the energy and the enthusiasm that comes through, particularly on
the live section.
Completely.
Which I assume is still...
Oh yes! I'll be dancing off the walls. I've got three new young guys plus two
old cohorts of mine from Savuka: Andi (Mandisa Dianga) you know, the girl. She's
still with me eighteen years now and Andy (Innes) the guitarist who joined
Savuka in '93 and then we stopped a year later. He's basically been with me for
fourteen years now.
You must be terribly fit, that's all I can say.
I try, sir. I keep in shape.
Doing that every night would keep you in shape.
"No it does, you're right. I've lost some kilograms in the last six weeks
touring the States.
So when you're playing nearby, why must people come to the show?
I think they must be there because otherwise they will miss a smorgasbord of
culture and anecdotes and stories that they will feel enriched by. You know,
it's really rare to go to a movie or to a play or to a moment of music where you
come out with like three or four very powerful moments which you take away with
you and which may even be moments of very deep reflection and enable you to get
into a particular style of music, or genre of movie.
I think what we've done in most of our shows is we've catalysed a lot of
interest in other people's mythologies, their ideas, their world views, stemming
out of Africa but also I talk about other things on stage. I talk about genetic
engineering; I talk about a lot of issues, which are close to my heart at the
moment. We get around, we do the full sort of gamut of the academic corridors,
from the social sciences into the hardcore science.
If you're getting into so many deep areas, lyrically and musically every
night, does it affect you just as deeply every time?
It does because I don't have a script. I have a set of points that I talk to in
the song, and the song itself is the template for the discussion, so
'Scatterlings Of Africa' is really a song about the origin of man and that all
human beings are essentially African. 'Cause 160,000 years ago, the first homo
sapiens migrated from Africa up into the Middle East. If you watch the BBC
documentary, you'll see exactly how the migration worked. This has all been
tracked back through genetics. Population genetics has actually been a
vindication for me as somebody who is promoting the idea of African origins as
early as 1982. Then we were just looking at old bones and paleontological
evidence.
So the show ranges very widely across these issues. There's a certain amount
of anthropology as art, there's a certain amount of discussion about dance
movement, what the movements mean, all that kind of stuff. For the audience,
it's an exposure to a perspective on music and dance and origins and culture
which will be very novel for them.
Speaking of 'Scatterlings," the version on the Anthology compilation CD is
longer than the one I was familiar with.
That's the Juluka version, is it not? That's a very important moment because
that middle verse is the key to the debate which we're involved in now, and that
is if we are on the cusp of conscious evolution and we are going to go into
ourselves and reorganise our genetic material, we are going to be true masters
of our destiny and we will evolve according to our choices. But in that moment,
the verse says,
"Broken wall, bicycle wheel,
African song forging steel singing
The magic machine cannot match a human being a human being..."
The issue about technology versus what we are today is going to
be a major discourse. I think it's going to be not only a technical one but a
political one. So it's prefigured in those lines and it's something which I feel
very strongly about. In fact, I've primed my kids already for the coming
politics of genetic engineering. There are huge, major issues I find in Africa
which filter into my work, and have filtered into my work long before the
situation today.
***
(The interview was conducted for dB Magazine.)
An Australian who writes for the Green Man Review website got the
opportunity to interview Johnny in September, and the interview was posted
online yesterday.
Posted by Scott 06.12.2005 00:13
JOHNNY CLEGG: South Africa's original protest singer.
What are you listening to at the moment?
I'm interested in BHANGRA and bought this collection of Bollywood hits called
WORLD OF INDIAN GROOVES. At one stage I was thinking of doing one of these
grooves on my album. I've been developing this sound as a Zulu crossover.
And your favourite sit-down-and-listen record?
SO by PETER GABRIEL. I was attracted to it when I was touring a lot. It's a very
poignant, introspective album.
And your all-time favourite record?
The first album by Californian three-part rock band, Crosby, Stills and Nash,
who emerged in the 60s and 70s. They talk about everything from bringing up kids
to the various stages in life.
What's the most memorable gig you've been to or played at?
Nelson Mandela's birthday concert at Wembley in 1987. I did an acoustic set with
Jackson Brown called "One Hope, One Vote". The other was playing in Stuttgart in
1999 and performing "Asimbonanga", a song that had been banned on South African
radio in 1988.
What young, new artist should we know about?
Ayo, a black singer-songwriter from Germany. I was given her music by my last
road manager and she has an urban reggae feel with good arrangements - certainly
a developing talent.
If you weren't a musician, what career would you like to have had?
I actually taught anthropology for four years at university, but gave it up when
I scored a hit in the UK in 1982. I still lecture on African music and try to
keep abreast of what's going on. Sharing knowledge - I greatly enjoy that.
Gazette reporter Bernard Perusse interviewed Johnny Clegg, a musician from
South Africa, on the occasion of his Feb. 23, 2007 concert at Montreal's
Metropolis. Here is the full transcript of the interview.
Gazette: Your father took you into the
townships when you were 9. What was it about that culture that you seemed to
connect with at such a young age? Clegg: It was more the way he connected
with it. He was a crime reporter and he had connected with the most crazy,
colourful groups of people in the underworld, but also connected to music,
connected to key figures of the community, so he operated as a journalist,
writing and interacting with these people. And he was also somebody who wanted
to communicate that people were living these amazing lives in the townships.
These lives were absolutely incredible - the intensity, the colour, the texture,
the paradoxes, the inability to resolve conflicting loyalties. All of this stuff
was communicated to me at the age of 7, 8, 9, 10. I became, I suppose, infected
with the same passion and interest. It was about real people struggling to
overcome real problems, real contradictions. And South Africa was such a
contradictory society in the 60s. It was forcefully separated on the one hand,
but on the other hand, people would meet at drinking houses, at clubs ...
The African population itself was going through a huge transformation from the
rural, tribal world to the modern, urban Western world. And all of these
fascinating paradoxes .... part of apartheid's huge negative image abroad was
the government's attempt to stop urbanization. They didn't want black people in
the cities. They wanted to have what they called feeder locations outside of the
white areas. So a southwest township, which later became Soweto, was one of
these big feeder populations, which were not supposed to be permanent. They were
supposed to be returned...every 11 months, you had to go back to the rural area
where you came, get a new labour contract and come back again to Johannesburg.
The only problem is, you had people born in Soweto, who never, ever ... you had
second and third generation Sowetans, and the government had to accept that this
was now permanent dwellings, a permanent city.
These are all the contradictions and all the ironies that the country threw up,
and (my father) was interested in that. And he was also a bit of a lunatic,
because he would take me to places that were just ...I remember once going with
him to...he was covering a feud between two groups in an African church. A young
preacher had broken away from the main preacher. I have a very clear
recollection of these two groups standing dressed in their Sunday best with
rocks in their hands, ready to throw stones. And my dad put me into a police van
while he went out to take photographs. And the police guy said to him, "Are you
mad? How can you bring a 9-year-old kid?" And my dad was just a total newshound.
He said "Don't worry, don't worry. You can sit him in the van. He's done this
before. He knows what's going on. You do your job. I'll do my job. You're
sitting in the police van. It's no big deal. I'm not going to take this kid back
and lose the story." And he just talked his way through it. And I sat in a van
and watched these events unfold and how the police went in and separated the
groups and he got his story, he got his photographs - and, in a way, I felt like
this curtain was always being moved away for me to see the other side of South
Africa - by him. It was always this magic ... these moments. And then the
curtain was closed because you'd go back into a white area, back into a white
school, back into ... you know ... during the week. And so I think I always knew
that there was another reality on the other side of town, which, I think, most
white kids didn't know. And they didn't care. Gazette: What about Charlie Mzila? What
was so magical about the sound of the Bellini steel string guitar? Clegg: The sound! It was a very hard,
piercing, steel sound. And it was so cheap. You know when you have a guitar that
resonates too much? You play one string and you play another string and the two
notes will try and find a harmony. On the Bellini guitar, the notes ... it was
such a badly-built guitar that the notes ended very quickly. So it wouldn't go
"duhhnnnnnn." It would go "dun." (laughs). There was no real resonance. So it
was very good for Zulu music, because with Zulu music, you have to play every
beat in the bar. You have to go "Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun," (sings the notes
very quickly) so the short, struck notes would sound good on a Bellini. Gazette: When you left a hostel dance
team to join Sipho (Mchunu, co-founder of Juluka), it almost started a war .... Clegg: ... between Charlie's group and
Sipho's group, yeah. Gazette: What was it that allowed you, as
a white person, to be accepted into Zulu culture?
Clegg: It was that I was able, at an early age, to find a way to learn the
physical coding that a tribal Zulu male learns when he's young: body
comportment, the way to dance. When I danced. I danced using exactly the same
body awareness. You have vertical and horizontal space that you manipulate. In
Zulu culture, like all traditional cultures, the body is a communicative device
- much more than in Western society. And I learned that at an early age. So when
I danced, it was like I had been rooted in that society because, physically, I
could communicate at times better than I could speak. So I learned stick
fighting and I learned war dancing, different styles. So that was a breakthrough
and a lot of Zulus understood that. Here was a white kid who could articulate it
himself inside their world. And the most important thing out of all of this was
that he enjoyed it. I could sense my deep enjoyment in being able to do that.
And we shared a common enjoyment at being able to express ourselves physically
in the dance. Gazette: Working within multiracial
musical concepts over your career has certainly got you into hot water more than
once. What gave you the strength to face down that kind of danger? Clegg: The key, actually, was that I
didn't do this initially for any political reasons. The key was that I was a
kid, fascinated, who had been quickly shown something that closed again. And you
think,"There's something there that I had a glimpse of, which was either very
exotic or very weird. I don't know what it is." So it's a fundamental deep
curiosity about "the other." About the other life, the other world, the other
truth, the other horizon. So there were at least two ways that you could
confront apartheid as a teenager, as a youngster. You could say "There's a
fence." And you could either say "This is a weird place to put a fence," or the
intelligent thing to say: "Why is there a fence here? Why am I being prevented
from going forward?" I wasn't smart enough to ask that question. Mine was the
other perspective which was "There's a fence. I'm sure there's a hole here
somewhere. Let's find the hole." I never questioned the actual existence of the
fence, initially. I found all the holes, and I got through them. It was only
later on when I got to university and I got arrested and appeared in court that
I started to say "You know what? I'm getting tired of finding the holes and I'm
tired of hiding. I'm tired of being criminalized and feeling like a criminal and
having to pretend. Why is there a fence? Why am I being prevented from going
into a black area? What is the reason for this? And why, when I'm with blacks,
am I always searched for drugs?" There was always an attitude by the police that
the only reason a white person could be with a black person was for some
criminal or nefarious or dark reason. You couldn't be there because you wanted
to drink, listen to music, play some music, dance. It was incomprehensible to
the police that you could actually, as a white person, have any real deep
enjoyment or pleasure being with black people. It was incomprehensible. It was
out of the realm of their understanding. So I did political science at
university and anthropology and I majored in both of those. And so I got
involved in this trade union movement, I became politicized and I got arrested
as a student doing various trade union activities.
However, the world of politics for me was a bit too tough and a bit too
Machiavellian, and I realized that actually, I'm an artist. I'm a cultural
worker. I'm somebody who is best when I'm involved in cultural activity. So I
moved out of trade union work into cultural work, started to develop my own
ideas about how to find meeting points between Zulu and English culture. And
that became an absorbing fascination for a long, long time. Also, having my
shows closed by police and having to deal with that stuff, but that was easier.
When you do a show, and you see the support that people give you, but the police
come and they mess with it. There's nothing the police can do to make you feel
bad about what you're doing. The audience loved it. If we had not had any
reaction from the people and the police closed the show, I think you'd say "OK,
I've got to give up. The people don't like it, the police don't like it. Nobody
wants this thing so..." Then you move on, you know? But it wasn't like that. We
had huge support from the student population, huge support from the migrant
labour population. We played in the townships, we packed the halls. People
thought this was the most wonderful thing they'd ever seen. And then there would
be trouble. The promoter would be arrested and we would have our equipment
impounded, all that stuff. Gazette: Was there some kind of inner
thing you drew on to get through those tough times, which would make a lot of
people want to give up? Clegg: South Africa is not a place for
sissies. You grow up tough. We knew that for anything to happen .... Let me put
it this way: in a traditional Zulu world view, anything that happens too easy,
you've got to be very suspicious of. If it don't come hard and it don't come
through a bit of a struggle, you've got to be careful. There's something not
right. That was Sipho's idea and it kind of stuck to me. And it's part of the
migrant worker's world view. When we played in europe, we couldn't believe how
easy it was. Everything was just there for you. The sound was brilliant. There
was food in the change room. The electricity worked! You know what I mean?
People came to the show, they were polite and they sat down and they didn't
throw bottles at each other. There wasn't faction fighting or tribal warfare.
We would do shows (in Africa) where we'd spend an hour looking for the earth at
a show ground in the bush. We had to go to borrow implements to dig up the
ground to find where we could connect our sound system to. Everything was hard.
There was nothing really easy. The distances you traveled. You also slept in a
combi or you slept at the promoter's house in the township. And the promoter was
a poor guy. So you had sleeping bags and you had your old mattress and eight of
you slept in the same room. But you were young and you were hungry and it had
its own tough romance. And you sensed that you'd achieved something. It was so
hard to get there. People didn't believe you were coming. That was the other
thing. We would go play 400 kilometres into the bush in this little civic
theatre. We had to arrive a day early and drive around the area with a
loudspeaker because people didn't believe the white guy with his band was coming
here. Why would he come here? But we went there because the promoter raised
money, he paid us and we'd come and do the gig. There'd be nobody and then by 6
o'clock, there'd be huge crowds ...(laughing) ...coming out of the bush to see
the show.
It was all hard. Nothing was easy. The other thing was that the promoter had to
promote by word of mouth. You couldn't put it in a newspaper because the police
would close the show. If you put up banners, you had to put them up out of the
main area. And the police didn't realize that Juluka, a Zulu word...they didn't
know what it was. It was only as we started to become more and more and more
famous that cops realized "OK." So you know what they did? They said "Right, let
them in." They let us in, they let us play for three songs. The promoter takes
the money, he ducks the people sitting there. The third song, they come on stage
with tear gas, dogs. So the people would say "You know, we love you, but we only
get to see three songs, (laughs). It's not worth it." It was that kind of thing,
We had 20, 30 per cent of our shows closed down like that when they caught us.
We were not major on the security list. They were fighting against the ANC's
military wing. That was their main concern. They were all fighting against the
trade union movement, they were fighting against the church movement, fighting
against the student movement, against the civic associations. There were five
pillars in the struggle in South Africa: the church, the civic associations, the
student movement, the trade union movement and the ANC. We were just musicians -
as far as they were concerned, breaking the law and all that, so when they
could, they did. But they were mainly focused on other stuff. So we got through.
It was a crazy time. Gazette: My first real consciousness of
your music was with the release of Shadow Man in 1988... Clegg: Ah.... OK. Gazette: By then it seemed as if the rock
audience was really ready to embrace world music. What are your memories of the
musical climate around that time? Clegg: World music had a real chance to
establish itself in the mid-80s. The problem was, it was too fragmented for it
to be like a single genre, like reggae. Reggae established itself as a genre. It
started in little small, exile groups in England. And it started to build up a
following. But you had
so many different styles of music coming across. You had mbaqanga, you had
soukous, you had rai music, you had Senegalese dance music, you had Chinese, you
had the Bulgarian Women's State Radio Choir. This was all called world music.
How do you market something that is so broad? The real issue, I think, was `86.
Paul Simon was an important facilitator in that what he did made it hip. And
then we had a number of smash hits coming out of Europe: Yeke Yeke by Mory Kant,
you had Salif Keita, you had Youssou N'Dour, you had Tour Kunda, you had Johnny
Clegg. All of these were coming up between `86 and `88, `89. Around those four
years. The only problem was that nobody really consolidated on their success. It
was like the Latin fad that happened and then it disappears and it comes back
again 10 years later.
The only thing I did, which enabled me to have some longevity, is that I worked
my fan base. I kept coming back every year to all the summer festivals in Europe
and expanded, did shows, did interviews. I worked it because I realized that, as
a world musician, you're marginalized inherently by what you do. You will never
be mainstream, mainly because you sing in foreign languages, whether it's
Senegalese or Zulu or Afrikaans or French in terms of the Anglo-Saxon
stranglehold on the music industry. Ninety-four per cent of all copyright in
popular music is held by England and America. And that's a startling figure. So
when you were invited to perform on a big rock festival, you were always a fish
out of water. And so what happened is that we started to develop our own little
touring circuits. We started to play together - the African groups, the Latin
groups ... and anything that was not accepted in the main framework of the music
industry as being pop or rock or commercial. We'd join other festivals -and
these festivals began to get a lot of credibility. So by 1990, you had festivals
in Switzerland, which were just world-music oriented, with rai music and African
music, Arab music. And I played in all of them. I was always there. Gazette: You touched on this before, but
I just wanted to nail it down: were more traditional politics ever an attraction
for you? People must have thought, as such an important musical ambassador, that
maybe you should move into more traditional .... Clegg: I get told that every year: Johnny
for president, all that stuff. But I'm more interested in things where I can be
more directly responsible for my own choices and actions. I've moved a little
bit into the environment now. I have a company, which I've invested in in the
last three and a half
years. It's an electronic waste recycling plant - the first of its kind in
South Africa - called African Sky. We recycle all the high-end electronics. We
can recycle a computer 97 per cent. We do all the cell phone companies, their
second-hand equipment that they want destroyed and recycled. We do all that for
them. And it's a very important model for me. We made a virtuous triangle: at
the top we have environmental compliance, in the left-hand corner we have wealth
creation and in the right-hand corner we have job creation. And we undertook not
to employ any high-tech equipment. We have a ratio of profits to job creation
that we keep, so our aim is to create wealth through huge turnover - small
margins, huge turnover and job creation. And that's with a very strong
environmental bias. It's something that I think is a future model for the whole
of Africa. I think Africa can become the recycling continent for the world if we
keep away from all this advanced technology - the shredders and all that stuff.
Because if you use labour, we can dismantle a computer in six minutes. The
separation of all of this electronic equipment is critical in the safe recycling
of electronics. When you shred something, you mix it up so you'll find that you
won't be able to work out how much beryllium there is, how much mercury. It's
all just been shredded. What we do is export the printed circuit boards to a
plant here in Canada called Noranda and to another one in Malaysia, so we have a
number of international partners we're working with. Also, what's exciting is
the job-creation aspect of it in a country where we have 35 per cent
unemployment. Gazette: When people talk about Juluka
and Savuka, is there something more fundamentally different between those two
bands besides the Celtic flavour in Savuka's music? Clegg: Savuka was more political.
Asimbonanga is the first song is the first song that uses Nelson Mandela's name,
released in South Africa in 1986. It was banned, but it was the first song. We
launched in the middle of the state of emergency. So we couldn't ignore it.
Every album had allusions - direct or indirect - reflections on that. Savuka was
also two keyboards and one guitar and Juluka was two guitars and one keyboard.
We had a harder sound in Savuka, more of a rock sound. Also Savuka was more
experimental in...I looked farther north, I went to Zimbabwe, looked at
Zimbabwean music, I looked at Zairean music at that time. And also Indian music. Gazette: You mentioned Zimbabwe, which
leads me to mention The Revolution Will Eat Its Children, from the new album,
about Robert Mugabe. Can you talk a bit about that song? Clegg: My writing has always been around
two issues: power and what I call completion, or the search for the whole.
Writing in a fragmented country, the idea of wholeness or totality is a very
attractive notion. So a lot of my love songs are about finding completion -
either political completion or spiritual completion, finding moments of totality
and wholeness and connectedness. The other side of the equation is what prevents
us from becoming whole and complete - negative forms of power. So power also
became a major source of analysis for me. I was reflecting on it a lot. This
song was influenced by a very famous speech Mugabe gave, about, I think seven
years ago, where he got up and he said "Tony Blair can keep his England and I
will keep my Zimbabwe." And I was struck by the possessive pronoun - that
somebody could regard a country as his personal property. And so as things got
worse ... we have 2 million refugees from Zimbabwe. They are also a very, very
annoying source of crime and 90 per cent of our cash-in-transit heists are
Zimbabweans. And a lot of them are highly-trained officers in the Zimbabwean
army, who are not being paid and who sneak across the border. Their fingerprints
are not part of our system for police recognition. A lot of the government's
vacillation and prevarication on dealing with Zimbabwe also was a stimulus for
me to actually say something, because people say this in the boardrooms and in
clubs, but nobody says it in public, and I just thought "I've always spoken what
I've felt and thought, so I will put this song out." And I even went so far as
to release it as my first single in South Africa, but it was totally ignored -
for political reasons, I would assume - by the South African Broadcasting
Corporation. Gazette: How about the music? How would
you say One Life distinguishes itself from the rest of your work? Clegg: One Life is a far more open-ended
mixture of different cultures and styles - from Latin to pop rhythms, rai music,
my own inventions of rhythms that I came up with in the actual songs. Influences
from all over the world, really, but relying very heavily on two different
singing styles coming out of traditional tribal Zulu music, called isishameni
and umzansi. These are war dances, which are accompanied by very, very powerful
singing choir traditions. All of the vocals that you hear on the album in Zulu
are either shameni or umzansi, which I've always regarded as a key part of my
musical identity and roots.
Gazette: We didn't get a chance to talk when you were last here in 2004, at the
Montreal International Jazz Festival1s show celebrating the 10th anniversary of
the end of apartheid. What kind of thoughts were going through your head when
you performed that night? Clegg: Ten years is not different from
eight. It's not different from 12. It was just, I suppose, the idea of a decade,
because we live in a decimal system and that's how we like to work things
through. I was happy to be part of the celebrations, because I was in America
and Canada and also in Europe as part of the government's cultural expression of
its arrival as a very young member in the family of nations - proud that it had
a very modern, advanced constitution, proud that it had more women on Parliament
than in England or in America, proud that it had a three to four per cent growth
per annum. And proud that it was the country that had (Africa's) first spaceman,
the country that has the most developed infrastructure and, at the same time,
having 11 official languages and a country also which was, up to a point,
willing to talk about some of its shortcomings. Unemployment is a serious and a
real concern for the government and they're very, very forthright about it. What
they're not forthright about is the AIDS situation and crime - although they
will link crime to poverty, which is exacerbated by unemployment.
So on the scorecard, I thought we were doing pretty well, because when I came,
when I look at eastern Europe and I look at the collapse of the Soviet Union,
which is also a totalitarian society, like South Africa - and people don't like
me saying South Africa was totalitarian, but it was. A totalitarian society is a
society that totalizes your life. By totalizing your life, it takes away your
choices. You have no choice. We had no choice in South Africa - where we could
send our children to school, where we could live, what taxi we could drive in,
what entrance or exit we could use, what toilet facility, what restaurant. We
had no choice. And what happens to a person when their choice is taken away is
that the choice-making mechanism and muscle and the psyche of choice-making is
destroyed. Any society that requires individual liberty must have an emphasis on
choice, because that is the essence of freedom. So when Russia collapsed - and I
compare their collapse to our collapse- when I saw the collapse of Yugoslavia,
and saw the terrible crime in Russia, with the crime bosses and the mafia and
the blowing up of people, the murder of bankers and intellectuals, I compared it
to South Africa after 1994. And we were doing so incredibly well, comparatively
speaking. So thinking about the 10th, my feelings were - and I spoke quite
strongly about that - you can't talk about South Africa in a vacuum. You have to
have some comparison. You have to compare like things with like things. When I
compare the countries in a similar transition, I have to look at totalitarian
states, because South Africa was a totalitarian society. And I think that we did
pretty well. Gazette: Was there a live event in your
career that had a huge impact on you? Clegg: There were moments. I remember
playing in Le Havre to 200,000 people. It was a free show. We were the
headlining act, and then flying by helicopter to Paris on the same day to do a
similar huge show. I think the biggest impact I had in Savuka was the first show
we did in Brest. We did 10,000 people. The record was 11,000 with Dire Straits.
We did our show and we did an encore, Asimbonanga, and the crowd sang the song
louder than the band. And the promoter came on stage and he was in tears. He
hugged me and he said "You know, that's the first time French children have sung
in Zulu. You should be proud. These are bretons. They were singing in English
and in Zulu with you. Those kinds of moments were many, but that was the first
show. It's always the first time you remember. There were also many other
moments similar to that along the way. Gazette: What can you tell us about the
live show that will be here at the Metropolis on Friday? Clegg: It's really a broad spectrum of
material, from Savuka hits right through to the new Johnny Clegg material, so
you1ll get a good dose of the songs you know, plus all the songs that I like on
the new album. Gazette: What's the size of the band? Clegg: There are seven of us on stage. Gazette: Is there anything we missed that
you wanted to talk about? Clegg: Yeah, I think there's a real issue
about the music industry itself. I think that we are in a deep moment of
transformation as an industry and as an art form. The Internet, the reduction
of the magic of culture in general through the ubiquitous presence of all kinds
of communication platforms, the information culture as a wave of at times
pointless and baseless information has reduced the value of most cultural
activities, basically, to misdirection, distraction and weakening the ability of
people to give meaning to things. You will always hear on an ad or on the
Internet - it's not good enough to give you information, but it1s also huge
attempts to make you see the information in a certain way. A certain laziness
sits in. So if you are confronted with a work of art or a work of craftsmanship
or a good movie or a challenging dance theatre piece, or a good piece of
writing, it's much harder for young people. My son has got six distinctions in
matric, he's done very well. But I see him battling to deal with anything that's
more challenging. It takes him a lot more effort than it used to take us,
because his training and his exposure to easy information ... Easy, glib,
bottom-line culture has, I think, very corrosive effects on culture and art in
general. The music industry now competes with Sony Playstations, with XBox,
competes with stuff it never had to compete with. Its stature has been reduced.
Its position in society has been hugely undermined - to the extent that, at one
point, I remember huge debates going on whether music would become a value-added
service. If you bought a McDonald's hamburger, you'd get a free CD or whatever.
So we live in strange times when it comes to music. There's also, obviously, a
huge terror running though the music industry, which forces it now to only
produce clearly discernable, commercially viable music. And that also destroys
the lifeblood of music, which is innovation, all of these traditional forms that
are outside the industry structures. That's the only thing that's missing in the
interview. Gazette: Amen to that! Clegg: Amen!
ELUSIVE FIGURE: Johnny Clegg is a tad older, much wiser but still has the
energy of a teenager.
‘I’ve been on all four 46664 concerts, and I think that one of the issues
which was controversial for the South African government was that Nelson Mandela
had said at the first concert in Cape Town that, this (Aids) is not a health
issue, but a human rights issue.’ — Clegg By SIMON MARCUS
JOHNNY Clegg is, in many respects, the quintessential icon of the new South
Africa.
He has won the hearts of millions worldwide with his eclectic music, used his
talents as a weapon against apartheid and traversed racial stereotypes when it
mattered most.
Yet he is also something of an elusive figure, and does not easily fit into the
celebrity mould.
Clegg’s new album, One Life, is clever and eminently listenable.
It bears his signature-sound, but will appeal to newer audiences too.
On it, he recognises the ways in which cultures and languages interact, notably
in Jongosi.
There’s even a bit of Afrikaans in the mix this time. The title and chorus of
Jongosi comes from the Afrikaans “jong os” – young ox – and pays tribute to the
fighting spirit inside us.
Clegg’s other songs on the album deal with relationships, the beauty of
transformation and make some astute cultural observations.
Simon Marcus: What were your thoughts on the 46664 concerts?
Johnny Clegg: I’ve been on all four 46664 concerts, and I think that one of the
issues which was controversial for the South African government was that Nelson
Mandela had said at the first concert in Cape Town that this (Aids) is not a
health issue but a human rights issue.
It was transformed from being simply an argument about the medical merits or
demerits of antiretrovirals to a completely new level.
What I enjoyed about this last concert was that it moved away from an
in-your-face human rights position, to one where it said: “It’s in your hands,
and this is a partnership.” There isn’t any finger-pointing. At the moment when
you decide you’re going to sleep with somebody, the government, the doctors and
the human rights activists aren’t there. This is your choice, buddy. There’s a
certain amount of responsibility for your lifestyle that you have to take.
SM: Your music career is one which is intimately involved in politics,
specifically the anti-apartheid struggle. What are your politics now? Are there
new struggles?
JC: There are many issues still on which to nourish one’s activist muscles.
There are issues relating to Aids, issues relating to poverty, and issues
relating to the situation in a new democracy as well as the politics of what
we’re going through at the moment.
The struggle we were involved with was to free up a new political layer which
would be more representative in the country. And we succeeded.
We now have to assess their performance, and in terms of that performance they
have been found wanting. Yet many of the things we are dealing with are the
normal issues of development.
The environment is a huge and growing area for activism. I have been involved in
electronic waste management for years now. I’m a director of a company which
recycles the iron found in electronics, and does this in a way which creates
employment. We have a depot in Benoni and a large factory near Durban, and we
have clients from all over the world.
A lot of electronics contain toxins. We have developed techniques to disassemble
them manually, separate them out and recycle what can be recycled. That for me
is a form of activism which has enabled me to pay the rent and be engaged in an
area which is going to be of growing importance.
SM: You clearly have interests and concerns which extend further than music.What
fascinates you today?
JC: My only deep regret is that I won’t be here in 20 years’ time to see how
homo sapiens evolve.
How are we going to look, reshape and reinvent ourselves? The 21st century is
the cusp, the reinvention of the world from the molecular level to the political
level.
All of these things are going to interact to form new kinds of social alliances,
new political allegiances, new value systems, new ways of behaviour and new ways
of interpreting behaviour.
SM:Your trade as a musician operates in the public sphere yet you do not live
the life of a bubblegum pop star or a carefree rocker. Where do you fit in?
JC: I tend to keep to myself. I don’t engage in celebrity lifestyle. It’s not
important to me; I’d prefer to stay home and read a book. I’m watching my kids
grow up – I have a boy of 12 and a boy of 19. Jesse, my 19-year-old, is to
release his first album this year.
I had a beautiful moment with him at a concert of mine last year in Brussels –
it was in front of 15000 people in a big tent. I invited Jesse to come on stage
with me to sing African Dream. It was a wonderful moment for me – and for him,
to share a moment with your father of something that he’s done for so many
years.
In my life I’ve always been on stage, been performing, but now in a way I’m in
the audience watching my children grow up, go out there and perform. I’ve had a
blessed life. There are many people who love me and care for me, and many people
whom I love.
This article appeared first in Business Day’s The Weekender
Yet another controversy has hit the SABC over claims that the broadcaster
demands payola from musicians.
A number of musicians from Mzwakhe Mbuli and Johnny Clegg to hip-hop artist
HHP have blasted the national broadcaster’s officials for demanding that local
artists plump down up to R3000 a minute for on-air interviews.
They say the controversial policy harms the music industry and is open to
abuse by unscrupulous DJs, producers and programme managers.
The musicians aren’t sure how much of the money goes to the broadcaster and
how much lines DJs’ pockets.
SABC spokesman Kaizer Kganyago denies that musicians must pay to be
interviewed on the public broadcaster’s airwaves and says musicians only pay to
advertise their CDs. Denials notwithstanding, investigations are underway in at
least two of South Africa’s biggest radio stations.
“Though I personally have not been asked for money, I have heard there is
something called payola whereby people on radio are given money to play certain
music,” said HHP.
“What I know for sure, and what I condemn, is the policy of the SABC
requiring artists to pay for interviews. This is wrong because artists from
overseas are not required to pay.”
The enraged artist said musicians had recently been turning to African
language stations to promote their music. But these stations wanted to see the
colour of the musicians’ cash before conducting an interview.
The scandal has also left People’s Poet Mzwakhe Mbuli flaming mad: “I don’t
understand how the public broadcaster could come up with such a policy, which
applies only to artists in the country. Overseas artists visiting South Africa
do not pay for interviews.”
In April, Ukhozi FM interviewed the maskandi veteran Johnny Clegg at the
station’s studio in Durban before the musician performed at a local gig.
“The interview lasted five minutes and I have never heard any of my songs
played on the station,” Clegg said.
But his manager was told to cough up R14 000 for the interview.
Manager Patric Meyer corroborated Clegg’ s experience with Ukhozi.
Meyer said though Clegg’s promoters knew they were not paying for airplay at
the station, they had assumed the station would play one or two of his new songs
after the interview.
“Johnny has four Zulu songs on his album. They have never played one, not
even once,” said Meyer.
Kganyago said he would have to know all the facts before investigating the
matter.
He confirmed that the SABC was investigating Ukhozi FM for allegedly taking
bribes from musicians.
“But I don’t know the issues, so I can’t say what was happening there,” he
said.
Jazzz pianist Don Laka said he was shocked by the SABC’s recent policy of
charging artists who are interviewed on air.
“I think this is the only country in the world that requires musicians to pay
for an interview. ”
SA is generating vast quantities of electronic
waste; however, the impact
of e-waste in the country is hidden.
According to Johnny Clegg, local musician and
e-waste evangelist, delivering a keynote address at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo
2008, in Cape Town, there is a close connection between the dumping of e-waste
and poverty.
Clegg said the large quantities of scrap metal
that PCs produce created a new sector within the informal economy, known as
metal and PC board scavengers. "The metal that people can salvage from the
computer parts represents cash in hand for them. When they turn in a hard drive
or metal to a dealer, they can at least put food on the table."
While SA has better regulation to protect against
the illegal dumping of electronic goods, there are still those who are dumping,
burning and shredding in areas that are not designated for these activities, he
said.
Clegg`s presentation illustrated
several dumping grounds in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria, which are close
to agricultural areas and are affecting drinking water and food production.
While SA`s legal system does not specifically
qualify the law around e-waste, it does provide for the disposal and destruction
of toxic elements, he noted. "People have been and will continue to be
prosecuted for illegal disposal."
Companies that are caught dumping illegally could
be fined, which in turn will bring bad publicity, he added. "If companies are
listed, they will experience falling stock prices."
It`s a goldmine
Clegg commented that part of the disposal
opportunities for PC motherboards comes in the form of "shredding". When people
shred mainboards, the toxins contained in them are mixed and released into the
environment.
According to him, the process is also often used
for illegal gold and platinum production. While one ton of excavation will
produce one ounce of gold, one ton of e-waste can produce up to six ounces of
gold. "The gold is then exported along with the shredded waste and a market is
created for it."
Copper is also a large local market and is often
associated with the burning of the waste, said Clegg. He added that people could
get around R20 for 1kg of copper.
While many African countries, like Ghana and
Nigeria, are being affected by dumping from Europe and the US, disguised as
donations, SA has managed to escape this. The country also does not export
e-waste into other African countries, he said.
According to Clegg`s figures, SA is estimated to
produce around 50 000 tons of e-waste a year. The US produces 2.5 million tons
and Europe around 10 million tons. Of that, around 95% can be recycled, but the
problem is the cost, he explained.
However, the more the e-waste recycling and
disposal industry grows, the less it will cost, he concluded.
Although eWaste only accounts for 2% to 3% of the substance of landfills it
contributes about 60% of the toxicity of landfill sites. This is according to
African Sky's Johnny Clegg who was speaking at the Gartner Symposium in Cape
Town yesterday.
Clegg, the famous South Africa singer, said that there were many
misconceptions about eWaste and its consequences. Among these, he said, was that
companies would not be held liable for illegal dumping of old IT equipment.
Clegg said that just because old IT equipment had been handed over to a
"recycler", companies were obliged to ensure that equipment was correctly and
safely recycled.
Clegg said that in South Africa there was a lack of proper recycling
facilities. He said that recyclers locally were in fact separators and not
recyclers. What this meant for companies, he said, was that they must find out
where the separated IT equipment went once it left local shores. He said
countries such as China and parts of Europe had proper recycling facilities.
Clegg also said that the eWaste sector often attracted criminal elements and
organised crime. He said that while the mining industry typically extracted one
ounce of gold from one ton of rock, one ton of PC boards yielded as much as six
ounces of gold. This made illegal recycling attractive to criminal elements who
were able to export the raw waste and import the profits, said Clegg.
Clegg said that one of the other problems with eWaste was that manufacturers
did not build a recycling cost into their costs. He said that in European
countries PC makers were obliged to include a recycling cost in their production
costs to cover the end-of-life disposal of their products.
Technology recycling opportunities are starting to take off in South
Africa
Environmental considerations are becoming increasingly important for
technology users, be they multinationals looking to improve their public image
or consumers worried about their personal carbon footprint. But, in both cases
buying "greener" technology is just half the equation. An equally important part
is the disposal of hardware when it reaches the end of its useful life, and
until recently that was a largely ignored problem.
IT analyst Gartner estimates that as many as 460 000 PCs reach "end of life"
every day around the world. Another 550 million mobile phones are estimated to
be dumped for a new one every year. Which adds up to a lot of toxic waste that
needs to be dealt with.
South African musician turned e-waste recycler, Johnny Clegg, says that as much
as 60% of the toxicity in waste dump sites in directly related to e-waste and
yet e-waste accounts for just 2% to 3% of the actually waste in a typical waste
site.
The problem that exists, however, is that e-waste recycling is a specialised
service and South Africa doesn't yet have the facilities to recycle the entire
e-waste package. Typically, South African waste recyclers will salvage the
obvious materials from PCs - the metal casings and plastics - and then crush the
motherboards for shipment to overseas recyclers, usually in China or Europe.
Technology dump
With current techniques, as much as 98% of a normal PC can be recycled, says
Clegg, but the problem locally is that consumers and businesses don't know where
to dispose of their old hardware.
Fortunately this is starting to improve with a number of initiatives launched
recently. One of these is the joint Makro-FujitsuSiemens collection points at a
number of Makro stores. The Woodmead branch of Makro in Gauteng launched its
collection point in August this year and collected 3.7 tons of e-waste in the
first month. Collection points are also being set up in other provinces.
Another, more recent, initiative is
one by Nokia
which will soon be available in at least 20 locations around the country. The
sites will provide boxes for owners of old mobile phones to deposit them for
recycling. Nokia at this point won't recycle the phones locally but will ship
them overseas for processing.
At the other end of the scale, Sun Microsystems South Africa also offers a
recycling opportunity to its customers. Sun server hardware tends to be big and
very expensive so instead the hardware gathering dust in a corner Sun covers the
costs of removing the hardware and shipping it overseas for recycling. And
because customers have invested significant money in the old hardware, Sun
negotiates a discount on new Sun hardware in exchange for the old hardware.
Interestingly, Sun will remove and recycle any server hardware - irrespective of
brand - when it is replaced with Sun servers.
Der „weiße Zulu“
und erbitterte Gegner der Apartheid erzählt aus seinem Leben.
Bevor Johnny Clegg zum engsten Mitstreiter
Mandelas wurde, war er Touristenführer im Busch. Damals lernte er von
den Zulus die
berühmten Tanzsprünge, die ihn weltweit berühmt gemacht haben.
Nach Aufenthalten in England, Israel und Rhodesien kam Johnny mit fünf
Jahren nach Südafrika. Mit neun Jahren begleitete er seinen Stiefvater,
einen Journalisten für Vermischtes, zum ersten Mal in die Townships und
entdeckte dort, wie die gleichaltrigen Kinder der Schwarzen lebten. Ein
Schock!
1966 nahm ihn einer seiner schwarzen Freunde auf ein traditionelles
Zulu-Fest in einen Hinterhof mit. Dort erlebte der kleine Weiße seinen
zweiten Schock.
Johnny Clegg : Sie waren alle in einem Hof inmitten der Häuser,
dadurch hallten die Töne viel stärker. Man hörte ein „Bum“, und der Boden
bebte. Und ich habe gedacht: Das ist wie eine riesige Maschine, die eben
angeworfen wurde. Das war fantastisch. In dem Moment habe ich gespürt, wie
sich mir eine Welt auftat.
Wenig später weigerte sich Johnny, seine Bar-Mizwa abzulegen, und riss aus.
Drei Wochen verbrachte er im Busch. Als er von der Polizei aufgegriffen
wurde, war es zu spät – der Zauber hatte gewirkt: Johnny war ein richtiger
Zulu geworden.
Mit einem jungen Zulu aus seinem Stadtviertel gründete Johnny „Juluka“,
die erste südafrikanische Band, die englische Texte zu Zulu-Musik sang.
Fünf Jahre später gründete Johnny die engagierte Anti-Apartheid-Band „Savuka“.
Johnny Clegg gehört zu den wenigen Künstlern, denen es immer wieder gelang,
Brücken zwischen den verschiedenen Ethnien und Bevölkerungsgruppen zu
schlagen.
Johnny Clegg : Nach den Rassentrennungsgesetzen durfte man nur
vor Angehörigen der eigenen Rasse spielen. In Durban spielte eine schwarze
Jazzband hinter einem Vorhang für weißes Publikum. Überall gab es diese
dämlichen Regeln. Wir waren eine gemischte Band, wir spielten zusammen –
entweder für ein rein schwarzes Publikum oder für Studenten aller
Hauptfarben. Immer wieder kam die Polizei und ließ die Bühne räumen.
Johnny ist ein Aktivist mit Leib und Seele. In den schlimmsten Zeiten der
Apartheid wird er Mitglied des von Nelson Mandela geleiteten Afrikanischen
Nationalkongresses (ANC). Seine Aufgabe war es, Beweise dafür zu sammeln,
dass die Multis ihren Arbeitern weniger als den gesetzlichen Mindestlohn
zahlten.
Auch in seinem neuen Album „Spirit is the Journey“, das im Mai 2010 heraus
kam, engagiert sich Johnny Clegg für das Miteinander der Menschen. Denn dass
die Apartheid heute Geschichte ist, heißt noch lange nicht, dass es für ihn
nichts mehr zu tun gibt.
Johnny Clegg : Die Weißen sagen: „Wir haben so viel über Bord
geworfen, und nichts ist passiert.“ Die Schwarzen sagen: „Wir haben jetzt 20
Jahre gewartet, und es passiert nichts.“ Wir haben viele Schwierigkeiten.
Die Townships haben Versorgungsprobleme. Und die Leute klagen über die
positive Diskriminierung der Schwarzen. Ich habe dazu einen Song
geschrieben, denn das sind ganz aktuelle Probleme.
Tracks
Dienstag 22. Juni 2010 um 05.00 Uhr
Keine Wiederholungen
(Frankreich, 2010, 52mn)
ARTE F
Bei der Diskussion aktueller Themen des Weltgeschehens entsteht dabei
jeweils auch ein facettenreiches Porträt ihres Gesprächspartners.
Er war 11 Jahre alt, als er 1964 nach einem zweijährigen
Sambia-Aufenthalt nach Südafrika zurückkam. Was er sah, schockierte ihn
zutiefst: Unter dem Namen Apartheid war inzwischen der Rassimus zur
Regierungsform erhoben worden. Im selben Jahr wurde Nelson Mandela
eingekerkert, für 27 Jahre, Häftlingsnummer 466.
Schon als Jugendlicher besuchte Johnny Clegg im Schutz seiner schwarzen
Freunde die Ghettos, zu denen Weiße normalerweise keinen Zutritt hatten,
er lernte Gitarre sowie die Tänze und die Sprache der Zulu. Zusammen mit
seinem Freund Sipho Mchunu gründete er die Band Juluka. Asimbonanga,
sein Song zu Ehren des politischen Häftlings mit der längsten Haftzeit
des Jahrhunderts, wurde ein Welterfolg.
Erst der Fall des Apartheid-Regimes 1991 und Mandelas Freilassung
veranlassten den Briten aus Manchester, die südafrikanische
Staatsbürgerschaft anzunehmen.
Auch heute steht nicht alles zum besten in Südafrika: Gewalt,
Arbeitslosigkeit und Krise bestimmen den Alltag. Nach dem Ende der
Fußball-WM am 11. Juli wird das Land, das jetzt im Rampenlicht steht,
höchstwahrscheinlich wieder in Vergessenheit geraten; Illusion und
Schein werden wieder die Oberhand gewinnen…
Doch Johnny Clegg wird seinen Kampf unbeirrt fortsetzen. Ein
unverbesserlicher Optimist?
Die Wortmeldungen stammen von Olivier Ray und Pierre Lescure
Olivier Ray: schrieb zusammen mit Jean-Michel Sévérino ein
Sachbuch über Afrika: Le Temps de l'Afrique (nur in französischer Sprache), 2010
ISBN-10: 2738123279
ISBN-13: 978-2738123275 Inhalt: Das 21. Jahrhundert wird Afrika gehören. Der als zurückgeblieben
und ländlich geltende Kontinent entpuppt sich heute, nach 50 Jahren
Unabhängigkeit, als vital und urban und verfügt trotz aller
Konflikte über eine dynamische Wirtschaft und eine wachsende
Mittelklasse. Europa hat diesen Wandlungsprozess zu spät erkannt, und Afrika
hat sich bereits neuen Partnerschaften zugewandt. Wie sieht dieses neue Afrika aus? Worin bestehen seine Stärken?
Was sind die Risiken des aktuellen Wandels?
Pierre Lescure ist der französische Spezialist für Rockmusik und
Herausgeber von Rock Critics, einem umfangreichen Werk über die
französische Rockmusik (2010 in französischer Sprache erschienen).
NÜRNBERG - Johnny Clegg hat neben Peter Gabriel wie kein anderer
Weißer den Begriff Weltmusik geprägt. Der 1953 im englischen Manchester
geborene Sänger, Gitarrist und Songschreiber lebt seit 1960 in
Südafrika. Trotz der Rassentrennung kam er früh mit schwarzafrikanischer
Kultur in Berührung und gründete mit Juluka die erste gemischtrassige
Band am Kap.
Mister Clegg, rechtzeitig zur Fußballweltmeisterschaft in Ihrer
Heimat ist Ihr neues Best-Of-Doppelalbum »Spirit Is The Journey«
erschienen. Wie sind Sie als Weißer – Sohn eines Engländers und einer
Simbabwerin – zur Straßenmusik der südafrikanischen Zulu gekommen?
Johnny Clegg: Meine Eltern gingen mit mir nach Afrika, als ich
noch ein Baby war. Unsere Stationen waren Simbabwe, Sambia und
schließlich Südafrika. Meine Mutter war Jazz-Sängerin, mein Stiefvater
Kriminalreporter. Während der Apartheid durfte ich ihn in die Townships
von Johannesburg begleiten. Ich interessierte mich für keltischen Folk
und war auf der Suche nach meiner Identität. Mit 14 sah ich auf der
Straße einen Zulu-Gitarristen. Hier wurde ein europäisches Instrument
auf verblüffende Weise afrikanisiert. Ich bat diesen Mann, mich in
traditioneller Zulu-Musik zu unterrichten. Ich wollte selbst ein Zulu
werden, in meiner romantischen Vorstellung waren das faszinierende
Krieger. Heute ist Zulu meine zweite Sprache.
Die weißen, burischen Südafrikaner sahen sich als »Herrenrasse«.
Wurden Sie als Weißer von den Schwarzen sofort akzeptiert?
Clegg: Ich war jung, naiv und besessen von der afrikanischen
Kultur. Man konnte mir ansehen, dass ich mit der Apartheid nichts am Hut
hatte. Die Zulu-Gastarbeiter in Johannesburg waren sehr offen. Sie
brachten mir ihre traditionellen Tänze bei und im Lauf der Zeit wurde
ich in vier verschiedene Stämme aufgenommen.
Während der Apartheid war es den verschiedenen Ethnien untersagt,
sich untereinander zu treffen. Wie haben Sie einen Weg gefunden, die
strengen Rassengesetze zu umgehen?
Clegg: Ich habe sie einfach ignoriert und bin in die Unterkünfte der
Zulu-Gastarbeiter gegangen. Dafür wurde ich oft von der Polizei
einkassiert. Aufgrund meiner Jugend kam ich aber nicht ins Gefängnis,
sondern erhielt eine Standpauke und wurde nach Hause gebracht. Später
wurde es jedoch schwieriger. Da ich glaubhaft vermitteln konnte, dass es
mir um Musik und nicht um ANC-Politik ging, fielen die Strafen meist
glimpflich aus. Ich habe einfach vor dem Richter Zulu-Lieder gesungen
und so wurde ich zum Idioten erklärt.
Mit der Zeit erlangten Sie in Südafrika immer größere Popularität.
Wie hat das Apartheid-Regime darauf reagiert?
Clegg: Die Polizei hat damals rund ein Drittel der Konzerte meiner
gemischtrassigen Band Juluka verhindert. Zuerst erlaubten sie den Leuten
in den Townships, sich Tickets zu kaufen, aber die Show wurde nach drei
Songs gewaltsam beendet. Um das zu umgehen, haben wir unsere Auftritte
in die weniger bewachten Vororte von Johannesburg verlegt oder sie
kurzfristig per Megafon angekündigt.
Erst im April wurde der Führer der rechtsextremen Burengruppierung
Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) von zwei Schwarzen ermordet.
Befürchten Sie neue Rassenunruhen?
Clegg: Nein. Bei uns wird es immer weiße Extremisten geben. Aber
sie sind nur eine Minderheit ohne politische Macht. Heute argumentieren
die Rechten nicht mehr aus ethnischer Perspektive heraus, sondern aus
kultureller. Sie behaupten, die südafrikanische Kultur sei nicht
ausgewogen im Radio oder im Parlament repräsentiert. Ein anderes Problem
ist die wachsende Fremdenfeindlichkeit unter der schwarzen Bevölkerung.
In Südafrika läuft derzeit die Weltmeisterschaft. Kann der Fußball
die gespaltene Gesellschaft heilen?
Clegg: Ach wissen Sie, es gibt doch in jeder Industrienation
ethnische Spannungen. In Amerika sind es die Mexikaner, in Deutschland
die Türken. Es gibt dafür keine Pauschallösungen. Politik ist ein
fortlaufender Prozess. Sie hat die Aufgabe, einen Dialog zu moderieren,
an dem jeder teilhaben kann.
As Johnny Clegg kicked off a tour of Europe and South
Africa, he talked exclusively to SA-People about his message,
his exercise regime and what you’ll find at the top of a
mountain.
Together with Jaluka, and then Savuka, Johnny sang of freedom, equality
and cultural unity in a time when our country was drowning in apartheid. He
gave packed halls of university students and migrant labourers a sense of
hope that the dream of one (hu)man, one vote could become a reality in SA.
1. You’ve had such courage during your career, to stand up for
your beliefs and convictions. In the words of one of your songs -- Africa (What
made you so strong?) -- what made you so strong?
The people around me. A sense of irony, humour and emotional stamina.
The power of music -- connecting to audiences who supported what I was
doing. Strong feelings about justice and being in a broad movement that
began resisting segregation, and then apartheid, since 1912.
2. You had such a powerful message for so many of us in the
’80s/’90s -- particularly ‘one man one vote’ -- and it came true. What would
be your message for South Africans today?
Ethnic and cultural tensions are increasing
around the world and South Africa has also experienced tribal tensions
both within the ANC alliance as well as xenophobia in the general
population. I have always promoted the crossing over of culture and the
idea that there is space for all cultural voices to be heard
and expressed. That is the constant message that underlies what I do.
3. During your tour you’ll be
performing songs from your 30-year commemoration album -- “Spirit is the
Journey” (songs like Impi, Great Heart, Scatterlings of Africa, African Sky
Blue) -- and sharing anecdotes and memories of the incredible events that
have shaped your life. You’ll also be promoting your next album “The World
is Calling”. Please tell us a little about it.
The inspiration behind “The World is
Calling” is finding new interesting cross-over points musically in
different musical traditions -- from Zulu, Bhaca and Zimbabwean
influence -- to rock, latin and reggae…These all pepper the album with
unique mixtures. The album will be released in October.
4.The tour includes the UK, Belgium,
Tunisia, Finland, France, Germany and Switzerland. Which is your favourite
country to visit outside of South Africa?
France.
5. Because?
…of the support it has given me over the
past 25 years and the culture and the people. [Editor's Note: The French
called Johnny the 'zoulou blanc' (white Zulu) and even knighted him!]
6. Success usually comes with sacrifice.
What’s been the biggest cost/sacrifice for you?
Being away from family and friends.
7. I was at your Brisbane show in
Australia last year. There was a standing ovation at the end of the show. Is
this normal at most of your expat shows? And is it humbling or great for the
ego?
It is a deep connection and recognition that we were all
shaped by the same experiences in South Arica. At that level it
makes me feel at home so far away from home… but there are also
non-South Africans who do the same from time to time, and they
are also connecting with a basic human recognition of the
“dots” I manage to connect for them in a show.
8. Your shows have always been
filled with such energy and passion. And even now -- at 57 -- you’re
still dancing energetically on stage. How do you keep so fit? Any
particular exercise regime?
Gym, eating right…not too much
alchohol – ye know… all the regular stuff
9. Best advice you ever
received?
The only insight you find on top of
a mountain is the one you take up with you.
10. Please finish:
One day I plan to…
run a hundred meters in 13 secs.
11. Please complete the
sentences:
a) South Africans are so…
full of energy b) South Africa has made me… everything I am
"AJN deputy editor Lexi Landsman chats with iconic South African musician Johnny
Clegg ahead of his tour Down Under at the End of May 2009. Clegg broke through
South Africa's racial and political barriers during the apartheid with his
crossover music - a blend of western pop and African Zulu rhyhtms."
Johnny Clegg explores the contradictions of human
nature in new album Human. In his 15th studio album Clegg, who is known as Le
Zoulou Blanc (the White Zulu) in France, touches on Gaza, the Democratic
Republic of Congo and the struggles of modern day South Africa.
Cover of Johnny Clegg's new album (Sleeve design: Anthony Serres/Photo: Claude
Gassian)
Johnny Clegg doesn’t seem to age, he looks pretty
much the same as the energetic activist of his Asimbonanga (the song called for
the release of Nelson Mandela) days in the 80s.
When I told him that he reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Dorian Gray, he
raised his hands in mock horror, asking if I was referring to the picture in the
attic which showed the dark side of Wilde’s character.
In more or less the same way, Clegg’s album Human seeks to explore the hidden
side of human nature.
“There’s a saying in English, ‘he’s only human’, here the word human means frail
or unable to meet expectations. On the other side, when you say ‘that’s
inhuman’, you’re actually saying that this is not how a human being should act,
since being human is a very positive thing, it’s caring, sensitive … so you have
two composite pictures here, one which is positive and one which is frail,” says
Clegg.
In his latest album, he sets out to examine the paradox of our actions as humans
within the context of politics as well as in intimate relationships.
Clegg says that some of the inspiration for his songs stems from personal
experiences. For instance when pondering about love he questions, “is it the
power of love or the love of power?”
The 57-year-old musician has developed a dualist idea of relationships over the
years.
“I think you fall in love sometimes with a person whose qualities you would like
to have and you think that if you could just be like them, you could be happy.
Then there’s the other side, you’re subconsciously attracted to somebody who has
the same damage as you, whom you feel more comfortable with because they will
know your pain.”
When talking about power, Clegg considers how the sentiment is expressed in
various aspects of life, whether in the family or between siblings, whether it
is power between couples or between headmaster and children. He believes that
humans are always subverted by power.
“We like to deceive ourselves, we like to pretend that the power relationships
don’t exist, whether between individuals or groups or classes. That is like the
weak, dark side of us.”
In that regard, the English born musician feels that the most revolutionary and
most radical art is the one which questions our choices.
“As a young activist in Africa during the late 70s we were all shaped by those
questions. As I travelled and read widely across cultures, I discovered Czeslaw
Milosz (the Polish writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature) and other east
European writers who went through the Nazi occupation and the Soviet occupation.
I found that they had the same arguments.”
“All these special moments which I thought were uniquely South African were in
fact global and came out of similar arguments, ‘is art a cultural weapon?’ Of
course it’s not, otherwise it’s not art, its propaganda!”
He also discovered a resonance in artists from South America like Pablo Neruda
who were faced with the same kind of oppression and troubled by the same issues.
Question such as, “how do you keep your individuality in a struggle and how do
you find a way to be objective when people are being shot in the streets?”
Asilazi, the fourth track on the album, discusses modern day South Africa and
its new struggles. Sixteen years after apartheid, South Africans are a battling
for a new kind freedom, an economic one.
The recent wave of strikes, including the public sector one, point to the
economic discrepancies of the rainbow nation.
“During the Mbeki-era, a difficult choice had to be made whether to create a
black middle class or go for a worker orientated poverty alleviation programme.
Mbeki [chose] a black middle class which can create an economy and move us
forward. The antagonisms that we see today in the Zuma presidency are really a
legacy of Mbeki’s [period], we’ve seen such a strong split between the workers’
alliance and the nationalist middle-class bourgeois components in the ANC
(African National Congress).”
The musician says he is not worried by the turmoil South Africa is going through.
He calls them “little hiccups”, normal stages of development after liberation.
“Politics, generally speaking, attracts the mediocre. You will find one or two
exceptional leaders from time to time. Whatever is happening at the political
level, underneath all the surface froth, you have a very strong business economy
that is driving the country forward.”
He is confident that the country’s strong economic backbone will see it through.
South Africa’s leading information technology sector, its armament industry, the
commodity market all contribute to positioning South Africa as a leading
emerging power. For him, the real big problem facing South Africa is Aids, the
27 per cent unemployment rate and crime.
After 30 years in the music business what keeps Clegg going is probably an
innate curiosity. He has an attraction to digging under the skin, to unravelling
what is hidden. That kicks-off his inspiration as a lyricist.
In this photo of Wednesday Nov.
3, 2010 South African musician Johnny Clegg looks on during an interview with
the Associated Press at his house in Johannesburg, South Africa. Clegg, later
dubbed the "white Zulu," was sure his song's message would be lost. At the time,
his new genre of music, a blend of Western pop and Zulu rhythms, was banned from
the radio _ as Mandela's photo was banned from newspapers. Clegg's concerts were
routinely broken up, and he and other members of his multiracial band had been
arrested several times for challenging a South African law meant to keep whites
and blacks apart.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — In a rehearsal studio one afternoon in 1986, a white
South African musician wrote an international hit — partly in Zulu, the language
of the largest ethnic group in the country.
"Asimbonanga," which means "we've never seen him," the song refers to the
generation of South Africans who grew up under apartheid and had never even seen
a photograph of Nelson Mandela, the country's hope for reconciliation who was
imprisoned under South Africa's apartheid regime.
Johnny Clegg, later dubbed the "white Zulu," was sure his song's message would
be lost. At the time, his new genre of music, a blend of Western pop and Zulu
rhythms, was banned from the radio — as Mandela's photo was banned from
newspapers. Clegg's concerts were routinely broken up, and he and other members
of his multiracial band had been arrested several times for challenging a South
African law meant to keep whites and blacks apart.
"Asimbonanga," in which the names of Mandela and other prisoners are spoken
aloud in defiance of state radio rules of the time, was released in South Africa
in 1986 and abroad a year later. The South African government immediately banned
the video and restricted the song from radio programming, so most South Africans
only got to hear it a few years after its release. They embraced it.
For the 57-year-old Clegg, the pinnacle of his career occurred while performing
in Frankfurt a few years after Mandela was released and became the country's
first black president in 1994. Clegg began to sing "Asimbonanga," which had
quickly risen to the top of the charts. In the middle of the song, the Frankfurt
crowd started cheering loudly. Clegg turned around and to his surprise, saw
Mandela dancing on the stage.
"I was taken by a wave of such amazing emotions," Clegg told The Associated
Press. "I wrote that in 1986, knowing it was going to be banned and not knowing
he (Mandela) was ever going to be released because we were in the middle of a
civil war. Eleven years later, in a new South Africa, I'm playing the song, and
the very man I wrote it for walks on stage and sings it with me."
Clegg celebrates his 30 years as a musician — with the bands Juluka and Savuka
and later as a solo act — in a concert in Johannesburg Saturday. He calls the
performance "a kind of validation that the body of work that I and my band and
other co-songwriters put together in that early time under incredible
difficulties managed to survive and is being celebrated in the new country."
Thousands of people streamed into the concert grounds near Johannesburg's
botanical gardens early Saturday evening, with the multiracial crowd sitting on
picnic blankets on the grass.
Concertgoer Jeremy Stewart, 32, said he remembers his parents taking him and his
sister to hear Clegg at the Market Theatre, then the home of anti-apartheid
protest theater in Johannesburg, in 1985.
"He's added another dimension to bringing people together and breaking down
boundaries between races," he said.
Kaizer Moyane, 38, of Johannesburg, said of Clegg: "I think his music speaks to
everyone in the country. He's a hero."
Sipho Mchunu, Clegg's musical partner from the days of their legenday Juluka
band, will join him Saturday. Juluka ended in 1985, when Mchunu returned to his
Zulu homeland in eastern South Africa to take up cattle farming.
Under the South Africa's racially segregated regime, Clegg's multiracial band
performed in small spaces such as churches, university halls and private homes
because laws prohibited blacks from performing in white areas and whites from
performing in black areas.
"If you were a mixed band like we were trying to be, you were in trouble
immediately," Clegg said.
Radio disc jockeys were banned from playing Clegg's music, but the live
performances spread like wildfire. The band, which mixed traditional Zulu high
kicks and warrior dress as well as musical elements with Western styles, began
to perform unannounced in the townships so that authorities wouldn't have time
to ban shows.
Outside of South Africa, the music became an instant hit, and the band toured
extensively through North America and Europe during the height of racial
tensions in South Africa.
Clegg's African rock stemmed from his childhood when he noticed how a street
musician had "Africanized" a guitar, a European instrument: He was immediately
hooked. As a student he began to experiment with the cross of English words and
Zulu rhythms.
"Everybody thought it was absolutely ridiculous in the beginning, apart from
migrants and students who thought it was really weird, but because it was weird
it was cool," he said.
Clegg was born in England and lived in Israel, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Zambia
during his childhood, attending six primary schools in five years. He called
himself a loner.
"I felt like a migrant," he said. "So when I met migrant workers — Zulu migrant
workers — there was something about them that I intuitively connected with
because they were also establishing these tenuous connections with different
places."
Clegg spent years in Zulu communities, learning the culture, dance and language.
"Nobody moves like me because I'm coded and wired with that tradition, and that
was something which a lot of people found quite fascinating," he said.
In his life and career, he has answered a question he poses in the lyrics to
Asimbonanga: "Who has the words to close the distance between you and me?"
"I discovered that through music, I could connect very deeply and profoundly in
a continuous way," Clegg said. "And that for me was kind of a salvation."
He is one of South Africa's celebrated sons. Performer Johnny Clegg is a singer,
songwriter and dancer who might also be described, without irony, as an
anthropologist and a musical activist. Host Michel Martin speaks with the man
who popularized the fusion of Western pop and African Zulu rhythms about his
latest CD titled "Human."
TRANSCRIPT
MICHEL MARTIN, host:
I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.
Coming up, my weekly Can I Just Tell You commentary about the calls for change
in Egypt, but mostly about human dignity. But, first...
(Soundbite of song, "Asimbonanga")
Mr. JOHNNY CLEGG (Musician): (Singing in foreign language)
MARTIN: That is Johnny Clegg singing a song he penned in 1986 for the
then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Asimbonanga means: We have not seen him. In this
1999 performance, though, Johnny Clegg did see Nelson Mandela. He danced slowly
but surely onto the stage accompanied by another singer and then demanded that
band repeat this song to ensure that everybody heard it and was dancing.
Mr. NELSON MANDELA (Former President, South Africa): Well, it is music and
dancing that makes me at peace with the world.
(Soundbite of cheering)
MARTIN: That, again, was Nelson Mandela on stage with Johnny Clegg. He is a
musician, dancer, Zulu scholar and human rights activist who has built a
following in the U.S., Europe and around the world. And now there is a new CD,
the first in quite a while - it is called, simply, "Human." And he's with us now
from the studios of South Africa Broadcasting Corporation in Johannesburg.
Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
Mr. CLEGG: Thank you. Thanks a lot.
MARTIN: Retrospectives can be bittersweet. When you look back over the course of
your career, you can enjoy sort of the moments where you think, wow, that was
great, you know, I did that. But then sometimes there's a sort of a sadness that
people aren't connecting to some of the things that you love in perhaps the same
way that you wish they were.
I'm thinking about the fact that I've seen you talk about in some interviews
that some of the traditional music forms that you grew up with, Zulu dancing, a
lot of that now is sort of being pushed into sort of the early morning hour of
programming and things of that sort. Will you talk a little bit about that, if
you would?
Mr. CLEGG: Yeah, sure. What happened, obviously, during the period of cultural
segregation, I'm talking 40 years ago, is that a lot of the traditions were kind
of frozen in their - in a kind of a cultural straightjacket, which had both a
good and a bad aspect to it. The actual real raw mother lode of dance tradition
and of course all the various styles of music whether it was concertina, guitar
or violin, that has all disappeared. The hostels no longer have an incredible
cultural carpet that they would throw out on the weekends onto the street.
Also, the opening up of South Africa as an acceptable member of the family of
nations globally, saw the end of the cultural boycott. And the generation that
was born in the '80s, they said, you know, we want to take our rightful place in
the global youth culture. And we're tired of being boycotted and we're tired of
being this little sort of bad place where our music and our dance, it should be,
you know, sort of segregated from the rest of the world. And we saw a flood of
hip hop, rap, dance, house music coming to South Africa. And, slowly, you know,
traditional music has really taken a backseat. And if you really...
MARTIN: Well, you can't object, though, to opening up to the world, right?
Mr. CLEGG: No. I - all I was noting was the fact that this music has disappeared.
It's not that it's, you know, niche, it's actually, you don't see it anymore.
It's hard to get a hold of. You know, I understand it's the way of the world.
Things change, things move on. And those traditions are things that shaped me.
I'm really saying that what I was shaped by is now passing away. I still use
those forms. I still celebrate those forms. And I still incorporate them into my
music.
MARTIN: OK. Well, tell me about the new CD. What was on your mind as you were
developing it?
Mr. CLEGG: Well, if you notice on the cover, we have these very extreme figures.
It's an artist in South Africa who developed this style of carving and painting
and creating these weird expressions of conflict and paradox in the human
condition.
And I think what - with "Human," the album - that its title. What "Human" is
trying to do is to really look at more deeper issues of paradox. How do we deal
with contradiction? How do we deal with conflict? Because it's out of those
things that we are really shaped as individuals. And I think there's two or
three songs on the album which look at some of the more darker aspects of those
dynamics of being human.
MARTIN: Do you feel up to playing one for us?
Mr. CLEGG: Yeah. I can give you a traditional Zulu street song if you want, or I
can give you a song from the album, "Love in the Time of Gaza."
MARTIN: Well, how about this, how about this: Since we were talking about the
traditional Zulu songs, the music that has influenced you so profoundly, why
don't you give us the traditional Zulu song first?
Mr. CLEGG: OK.
MARTIN: And then we'll give you a little bit of a rest, and then you can tell us
about the second piece - which, is again, like, is another example of how you're
continuing to sort of stay engaged in the world.
Mr. CLEGG: Yes.
MARTIN: OK?
Mr. CLEGG: Yeah. Cool.
MARTIN: So let's have the first one.
Mr. CLEGG: OK.
(Soundbite of a guitar)
MARTIN: Tell us a little bit about it. OK.
Mr. CLEGG: This song, I like very much. The Zulu are a, you know, they're a
military culture, and so they have many war songs, some of them very graphic.
But this one is a song which has got this kind of paradox which I'm telling you
is part and parcel of what I was exploring in the album "Human." It says that we
are coming to attack a particular area. But then there's this kind of other
appeal to say: But do you see our children? Do you see our young people who are
still blossoming? Would you be so kind as not to hurt them at all? And it's one
of the few songs which I discovered on the street which had this kind of paradox
in it. So I'd like to play for you.
MARTIN: OK. Here it is.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. CLEGG: (Singing) (Foreign language spoken)
MARTIN: Thank you.
If you're just joining us, this is TELL ME MORE, from NPR News. I'm speaking
with Johnny Clegg, the musician, songwriter, activist, and we're talking about
his new CD, "Human," and whatever else is on his mind.
You know, there's another song I wanted to ask you about. It's the first song on
the CD, "Love in the Time of Gaza." Will you tell us a little bit about that?
Mr. CLEGG: Yeah. I was watching, in January last year, the aftermath of the Gaza
attack. And I don't even know which program I was watching. I was lying in my
bed and watching - idly looking at these pictures that were just, you know,
quite shattering. And one of the interviewers is talking to a chap about a
particular incident. And I saw, in the back, a young boy of about 17. And
there's smoke rising around, and it was just carnage everywhere and helicopter
gunships flying overhead. And he was looking at this girl. And she was shyly
looking back, and he was - I could see that they weren't aware of the camera.
They weren't aware of anything. They were actually focused on each other. And I
thought that's an amazing moment, that in this time of absolute carnage, this
young person is, you know, is interested in the girl.
I wanted to say something about that, but I didn't know how to do it. It came
out much later, months and months later, where I was just standing and I was
strumming in the studio, and I found this chord progression, which I like. And I
found a melody, and then the line came out, ooh these are my father's people.
And then this is where the human tree once grew. Sorry. We are the children of
the new world. You've got a new dream pushing through.
And I realized that when I finished writing those four lines, that I was talking
about that young guy. So it was, for me, a very powerful moment, because it's a
very difficult subject to write about, you know, the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. And to find an angle which can just release something a lot more
deeper and - of all this flat(ph), you know, that we get in the media. And so
that song, that's how that happened.
MARTIN: Uh-huh. Well, thank you. Here it is: "Love in the Time of Gaza."
(Soundbite of song, "Love in the Time of Gaza")
Mr. CLEGG: (Singing) I was born inside the rain on a day of wonder, dark inside
my brain, memories of thunder. I was born a refugee, my life not fixed or free.
I know the world's not to blame, 'cause everybody carries my name.
Ooh, these are my fathers' people. Ooh, this is where the human tree once grew.
Ooh, we are the children of�a new world. Ooh, we have a new dream pushing
through.
The sky is black with gunships, but I'm dreaming of a girl. In her eyes love and
friendship, but will she understand my world? Now I'm like a windswept sea, hope
and fear crashing over me. Will she think my world is cruel when I share my
point of view?
Ooh, these are my fathers' people. Ooh, we are the children of�the new world.
Ooh, this is where the human tree once grew. Ooh, we have a new dream pushing
through.
MARTIN: Well, thank you so much for joining us, particularly after you've been
working so hard. And it was really kind of you to come and spend some time with
us.
Mr. CLEGG: Thanks a lot.
MARTIN: So before we let you go, what shall we bid farewell on? Is there a song
from the album that you'd like us to play as we say goodbye?
Mr. CLEGG: How about "Give Me the Wonder"?
MARTIN: All right. "Give Me the Wonder." It's from Johnny Clegg's new CD
"Human," and he was with us from Johannesburg.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Mr. CLEGG: Pleasure.
(Soundbite of song, "Give Me the Wonder")
Mr. CLEGG: (Singing) Tell me new words and break this thirst. Sing me iron songs.
Let me be strong. Give me right. Give me wrong. So I know where I belong. Give
me dark. Give me light.
Long before Paul
Simon teamed up with South Africa's Ladysmith Black Mambazo, there was Johnny
Clegg.
As a teenager in Johannesburg, Clegg sought out Zulu migrant workers and learned
their traditional songs and dances. In the 1970s, he started a band, Juluka,
which brought black and white musicians together on stage. That was illegal
under Apartheid, and so the group was harassed and banned from the radio.
Still, a few years later, Clegg became famous beyond South Africa with an anthem
to Nelson Mandela called "Asimbonanga." Mandela was still in prison when that
song came out, but everything changed in 1994, when elections brought the black
majority to power.
Now, Clegg is releasing his first album on an American label in 17 years, titled
Human. He tells Morning Edition's Renee Montagne that his music did change after
Mandela's rise as a political hero and leader, but that the guiding principle
behind it remained the same.
"The central theme of my music is finding a crossover between different cultures,
languages, music forms," Clegg says. "That aspect of my music has always been
steadfast. The political side of it did come to an end. After the 1994 election,
we were still left with the issue of, 'What does it mean to be a South African?
How do we find a common identity?' "
In "Asilazi," a song from the new album, Clegg looks at how that uncertainty
still lingers in South African economics.
"There's been some really major developments: 46 percent of all home ownership
now is in black hands, which is quite a remarkable statistic. But people in the
township believe very strongly that economic freedom has not come with political
freedom," he says. "On the white side, there are verses about young white people
who feel that they've been excluded now from the economy because of what you
might call affirmative action — where the government jobs are only going to
black companies."
Still, Clegg says the country did reach a level of unity unprecedented since
1994 last summer, when it welcomed half a million soccer enthusiasts for the
World Cup.
"In this welcoming ritual that was unfolding in every town, in every city, South
Africans just rubbed shoulders in a different way," he says, "and found a new
way of being together."
Banning Eyre talks with him about his new record
company, his life as a family man, and his musical plans amid such turmoil.
Long before Paul
Simon teamed up with South Africa's Ladysmith Black Mambazo, there was Johnny
Clegg.