{"id":97928,"date":"2017-07-13T14:47:40","date_gmt":"2017-07-13T12:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/what-the-lives-of-two-south-african-music-giants-tell-us-about-culture-under-apartheid-the-conversation\/"},"modified":"2017-07-13T14:47:40","modified_gmt":"2017-07-13T12:47:40","slug":"what-the-lives-of-two-south-african-music-giants-tell-us-about-culture-under-apartheid-the-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/what-the-lives-of-two-south-african-music-giants-tell-us-about-culture-under-apartheid-the-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"What the lives of two South African music giants tell us about culture under apartheid | The Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

What the lives of two South African music giants tell us about culture under apartheid<\/a>: <\/p>\n

South African jazz legend Ray Phiri passed away after a long battle with lung cancer.<\/span> Thuli Dlamini\/The Times<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Back in 2000, musicians interviewed for my book on music and politics in South Africa, Soweto Blues, regularly asserted:<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m not a politician.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

How could this be, the interview team wondered, when these same people had just described being tear gassed, playing at illegal gatherings and making recordings they knew could be banned? When we dug deeper, what emerged was: <\/p>\n

\n

I didn\u2019t say I wasn\u2019t political. But I\u2019m not a politician: I couldn\u2019t compare myself to somebody like Mandela. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the past 10 days, two towering figures in the history of South African music have died. Both were in their seventh decade: trumpet and flugelhorn player Johnny Mekoa was 72; guitarist Ray Chikapa Phiri, 70. Reflecting on their lives and work tells us a great deal about the intersection of black politics and culture under apartheid, and also about the ways South Africans see the music the world calls jazz.<\/p>\n

Bustling mining town<\/h2>\n

Mekoa was born on the East Rand, where gold had been discovered in 1887. By the 1940s, his birthplace of Benoni was a bustling, relatively prosperous mining town pitted by reservoirs where whites sailed and picnicked while black citizens were confined to the neighbouring townships of Daveyton and Wattville.<\/p>\n

In the townships, jazz bands abounded; Mekoa\u2019s brother Fred was already a trumpeter, and from him, in gigs, and at the central Johannesburg rehearsal and education space of Dorkay House, the young Johnny honed his chops.<\/p>\n

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Johnny Mekoa performing in Johannesburg, South Africa.<\/span> Busisiwe Mbatha\/Sowetan<\/span><\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Phiri was born in Nelspruit, an agricultural town near the Mozambican border. Phiri\u2019s father had come from Malawi: he was both a wage worker and the organiser of puppet shows that toured the area, and at which the young Raymond learned dancing and music. <\/p>\n

The metropolitan pull of Johannesburg and Soweto drew both musicians to the city.<\/p>\n

Around Dorkay House, Mekoa met up with the players with whom he founded the Jazz Ministers in 1967. The Ministers built a reputation in township clubs and at the jazz festivals launched by liquor companies after prohibition for black drinkers was ended in 1961.<\/p>\n

On a parallel track, Phiri had hooked up with drummer Isaac Mtshali and others to form The Cannibals, a Soweto Soul outfit which, with many others, was melding the feel of the US soul styles of Motown and Stax with South African roots idioms. They developed their skills playing backing for female smanje-manje<\/em> groups such as the Mahotella Queens (smanje-manje was a fast-tempo, neo-traditional women\u2019s performance style). <\/p>\n

By the 1970s, the Jazz Ministers with albums \u201cZandile\u201d and \u201cNomvula\u2019s Jazz Dance\u201d, were making sufficient waves for them to be invited to play Newport: something they finally achieved in 1976, stalled three times previously by the refusal of the authorities to grant Mekoa a visa. Their track \u201cHighland Drifter\u201d stayed on the Zimbabwe charts for 18 weeks, but was banned in South Africa.<\/p>\n

Black pride and defiance<\/h2>\n

Both, in their own musical arenas, nurtured black pride and defiance. The Ministers\u2019 jazz was the music of a non-tribal urban, black working class whose very existence apartheid denied. In America \u2013 it was Bicentennial year \u2013 they were invited to perform on the deck of a South African warship. It was 1976; they refused. On their return, they were all hauled in for questioning by the police\u2019s special branch, and remained under intermittent observation.<\/p>\n

The Cannibals morphed into what became one of South Africa\u2019s greatest bands, Stimela, joined by additional players. In both incarnations they reflected community resistance and hope. They recorded in English and the Malawian language Chichewa at a time when the apartheid regime, the recording industry, and the South African Broadcasting Corporation were insisting on a policy of \u201cretribalisation\u201d and black music sung in one African language only. <\/p>\n

The zenith of their defiance, however, came with the 1986 album \u201cLook, Listen and Decide\u201d, whose track \u201cWhispers In The Deep\/ Phinda Mzala\u201d became an anthem of resistance wherever it was played.<\/p>\n