{"id":156994,"date":"2020-02-18T14:47:39","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T12:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/dance-softly-and-carry-a-big-voice-understanding-joseph-shabalala-the-conversation\/"},"modified":"2020-02-18T14:47:39","modified_gmt":"2020-02-18T12:47:39","slug":"dance-softly-and-carry-a-big-voice-understanding-joseph-shabalala-the-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/dance-softly-and-carry-a-big-voice-understanding-joseph-shabalala-the-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Dance softly and carry a big voice: understanding Joseph Shabalala | The Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dance softly and carry a big voice: understanding Joseph Shabalala<\/a>: <\/p>\n

<\/span> Lars Baron\/Getty Images<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Joseph Bekhizizwe Shabalala passed away I stopped in my tracks and just let the sadness pull me down. And then inspiration from his beacon of a life lifted me back up. <\/p>\n

Shabalala\u2019s own response to the devastating murder of his wife Nellie in 2002 was the transcendently uplifting album by his ensemble Ladysmith Black Mambazo called Raise Your Spirit Higher. It won a Grammy in 2003. <\/p>\n

What is our response to the great artistic and spiritual hole his loss has left in South Africa? The journalistic tributes have poured in from all over, both at home and abroad. This saves me the labour of reviewing the innumerable highlights of Shabalala\u2019s extraordinary shooting star of a life and career. What does remain for us academic tortoises waddling after the journalist hares is to meditate on the quality and character of his unique personhood and achievement, and their meaning for South Africa and indeed the world. <\/p>\n

Directed by dreams<\/h2>\n

To begin at the beginning, Shabalala\u2019s parents were not simply tenant farmers in the district of Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal, but more significantly Zulu spiritual diviners and herbal doctors. The religious approach of physical and psychological healing as a single unified medical system was inculcated from birth, along with the intense outpouring of singing, drumming, and dancing such treatment requires.<\/p>\n

This is important when we consider the role of dreams in Shabalala\u2019s creative autobiography. Dreams are a vital source of inspiration and communication from the netherworld in indigenous southern African religion. <\/p>\n

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Ladysmith Black Mambazo perform at Carnegie Hall in New York.<\/span> Jack Vartoogian\/Getty Images<\/span><\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Their power carries over into African Christianity, which Shabalala took up devoutly after the early success of Ladysmith Black Mambazo in the 1970s. \u201cThe Church of Christ the Dreamer\u201d as playwright and author Athol Fugard called it in his novel Tsotsi. <\/p>\n

Shabalala\u2019s dream of a choir of children singing \u201cin perfect harmony\u201d proved formative in his ensemble\u2019s career. For the rest of his life he dreamt of new songs, new arrangements, techniques, and disciplines that the group developed and performed on stage. Directed by dreams, he was a formidable, uncompromising taskmaster in rehearsal. <\/p>\n

This submission to the spirit of musical harmony in dreams helps to explain the secret of Ladysmith Black Mambazo\u2019s success. Regardless of their highly localised genre, they were just so good, and the global audience was absolutely enchanted. I recall listening to them at New York\u2019s cavernous Carnegie Hall in 1988. For three uninterrupted hours, using only their voices and synchronous choreography, they kept the audience spellbound at the edge of their seats in awed, worshipful silence.<\/p>\n

A bridge with the West<\/h2>\n

The Africanisation of Christianity, audible in the group\u2019s isicathamiya genre, produced a blend of Christian hymnody and isiZulu male polyphonic vocal traditions. This deep synthesis provided a bridge between Zulu and Western music that Shabalala crossed and re-crossed repeatedly by a variety of routes. <\/p>\n

This explains in part the naturalness of his ability to collaborate with an astonishing range of American vocalists and composers, from Paul Simon to Stevie Wonder to Dolly Parton. Another part of the explanation was Shabalala\u2019s overwhelming humanism and dedication to social as well as musical harmony, that touched everyone he encountered.<\/p>\n