"One of the most celebrated voices in modern South
African music has died. Singer, dancer and activist
Johnny Clegg, who co-founded two groundbreaking,
racially mixed bands during the apartheid era, died
Tuesday in Johannesburg at age 66. He had battled
pancreatic cancer since 2015.
His death was announced by his manager and family
spokesperson, Roddy Quin.
Clegg wrote his 1987 song "Asimbonanga" for Nelson
Mandela. It became an anthem for South Africa's
freedom fighters.
Johnny Clegg was born in England, but he became one
of South Africa's most creative and outspoken
cultural figures. He moved around a lot, as a white
child born to an English man and a female jazz singer
from Zimbabwe (then known as Southern Rhodesia). His
parents split up while he was still a baby; Clegg's
mother took him to Zimbabwe before she married again,
this time to a South African crime reporter, when he
was 7. The family moved north to Zambia for a couple
of years, and then settled in Johannesburg.
He discovered South Africa's music when he was a
young teenager in Johannesburg. He had been studying
classical guitar, but chafed under its strictness and
formality. When he started hearing Zulu-style guitar,
he was enchanted — and liberated.
'I stumbled on Zulu street guitar music being
performed by Zulu migrant workers, traditional
tribesmen from the rural areas,' he told NPR in a
2017 interview. 'They had taken a Western instrument
that had been developed over six, seven hundred
years, and reconceptualized the tuning. They changed
the strings around, they developed new styles of
picking, they only use the first five frets of the
guitar — they developed a totally unique genre of
guitar music, indigenous to South Africa. I found it
quite emancipating.'
He soon found a local, black teacher — who took him
into neighborhoods where whites weren't supposed to
go. He went to the migrant workers' hostels:
difficult, dangerous places where a thousand or two
young men at a time struggled to survive. But on the
weekends, they kicked back, entertaining each other
with Zulu songs and dances.
Because Clegg was so young, he was accepted in their
communities, and in those neighborhoods, he
discovered his other great passion: Zulu dance, which
he described as a kind of "warrior theater" with its
martial-style movements of high kicks, ground stamps
and pretend blows.
'The body was coded and wired — hard-wired — to carry
messages about masculinity which were pretty powerful
for a young, 16-year-old adolescent boy,' he
observed. 'They knew something about being a man,
which they could communicate physically in the way
that they danced and carried themselves. And I wanted
to be able to do the same thing. I fell in love with
it. Basically, I wanted to become a Zulu warrior. And
in a very deep sense, it offered me an African
identity.'
And even though he was white, he was welcomed into
their ranks, despite the dangers to both him and his
mentors. He was arrested multiple times for breaking
the segregation laws.
'I got into trouble with the authorities, I was
arrested for trespassing and for breaking the Group
Areas Act,' he told NPR. 'The police said, 'You're
too young to charge. We're taking you back to your
parents.'
He persuaded his mother to let him go back. And it
was through his dance team that he met one of his
longest musical collaborators: Sipho Mchunu. As a
duo, they played traditional maskanda guitar music
for about six or seven years.
'We couldn't play in public,' Clegg remembered, "so
we played in private venues, schools, churches,
university private halls. We played a lot of
embassies. We played a lot of consulates.'
Over time, they started thinking bigger; Clegg wanted
to try to meld Zulu music with rock and with Celtic
folk.
'I was exposed to Celtic folk music early on," he
told NPR. 'I never knew my dad, and music was one way
which I can connect with that country. I liked Irish,
Scottish and English folk music. I had a lot of tapes
and recordings of them. And my stepfather was a great
fan of pipe music. On Sundays, he would play an LP of
the Edinburgh Police Pipe Band.'
Clegg was sure that he heard connetions between the
rural music of South Africa's Natal province (now
known as KwaZulu-Natal) — the music that he was
learning from his black friends and teachers — and
the sounds of Britain. So Clegg and Mchunu founded a
fusion band called Juluka — 'Sweat' in Zulu.
At the time, Johnny was a professor of anthropology
at the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg; Sipho was working as a gardener. They
dreamed of getting a record deal even though they
knew they couldn't get airplay, or perform publicly
in South Africa.
It was a hard sell to labels. South African radio was
strictly segregated, and record companies refused to
believe that an album sung partly in Zulu and partly
in English would find an audience in any case. Clegg
told NPR that their songs' primary subject material
wasn't setting off any sparks with record producers,
either.
"You know, 'Who really cares about cattle? You're
singing about cattle. You know we're in Johannesburg,
dude, get your subject matter right!' Clegg recalled.
"But I was shaped by cattle culture, because all the
songs I learned were about cattle, and I was
interested. I was saying, 'There's a hidden world.
And I'd like to put it on the table.'
They got a record deal with producer Hilton
Rosenthal, who released Juluka's debut album,
Universal Men, on his own label, Rhythm Safari, in
1979. And the band managed to find an audience both
at home and abroad. One of its songs, 'Scatterlings
of Africa,' became a chart hit in the U.K."
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