How black South Africans used jazz to fight apartheid

The London Jazz Festival is celebrating the legacy of the musicians who put their music – and lives – on the line to tackle racism

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Everyone knows how jazz, intertwined with the deeper sound of blues, emerged as the indomitable musical voice of black America, eventually rising to become an art form with a global reach.
Fewer know the extraordinary story of jazz in South Africa which, starting in a mood of cheerfulness, eventually became a means of resistance to a form of racism – apartheid – that became ever more pernicious and violent. Now, 30 years after majority rule came to South Africa, its jazz has taken a new direction, reaching back to its specifically African roots and out to the world – and upwards, to the spirit realm. It’s a fabulously rich scene, which is now celebrated in four concerts at this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival.
The story of South African jazz is packed full of defiance and tragedy and heartache, as well as great music. It began in a modest way as a flavour, a dash of ragtime syncopation added to an indigenous musical form to make a piano style known as marabi, which arose in the townships in the decades before the First World War. This was soon picked up by the dance bands that played in the “shebeens”, drinking dens selling illegal forms of liquor. The authorities harassed them constantly, setting a pattern of confrontation between musicians and the state that would persist for the next nine decades.
Things worsened after the victory of the Afrikaans-speaking National Party in the 1948 elections,when racism hardened into apartheid, the official ideology of South Africa. Marriage and sexual relations between races were prohibited, and from 1960 onwards millions of black Africans were uprooted from urban areas and forcibly resettled in a rural homeland called “Bantustans”. On top of all this, families were torn apart by economic pressures, with men often away from home for months on end to work in distant mines.
Clinging fiercely to their culture was a way that Black South Africans could momentarily escape the daily horror, and for many that meant indigenous forms of popular music, such as Kwela, a penny-whistle-based street music, which actually became popular in London dance clubs in the 1950s. You might imagine that in these circumstances the alien import of jazz – particularly the arty form of jazz then coming into vogue known as “bebop” – would be of no use. But for jazz musicians the fact that jazz came from America, a land where black people were also fighting for civil rights, added to its attraction.
The pianist Dollar Brand, better known by the name Abdullah Ibrahim, which he assumed after converting to Islam, told me, “Life was full of boundaries – we were not allowed to travel to certain places, go in certain sorts of venue. But the worst boundaries were the implicit ones. You were not supposed to think outside of the box, so if you were a musician you were supposed to stick to African styles, and not go beyond them. So my early compositions in a bebop style were greeted with a lot of hostility.”
Brand was one of a new generation of South African jazz musicians who came to maturity in the 1940s and 1950s, and would eventually rival the American stars they looked up to. These included Kipper Moeketsi, saxophonist and “father of South African jazz,” about whom his friend the trumpeter Hugh Masekela said “If he had lived in America Kippie would have been up there with Bird (Charlie Parker) and Trane (John Coltrane).”
Masekela – a poor township boy who eventually studied at the Guildhall School of Music in London – teamed up with Brand, Moeketsi and others in 1959 to form the short-lived but blazingly inventive Jazz Epistles, inspired by the American Jazz Messengers. The anger against the apartheid regime burns through their music, particularly the song Scullery Department, a reference to the indignity of having to use the servant’s entrance when they played for rich white clients.
But then came the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, followed by an even worse wave of repression, as well as the destruction of long-established neighbourhoods and the forceful resettlement of their inhabitants in shanty towns. These tragedies were memorialised in some of the famous recordings of the apartheid era. The destruction of Sophiatown was mourned in Sophiatown is Gone, a song composed and recorded by Miriam Makeba, the great singer who, for a while, was married to Masekela and who once featured on the cover of Time Magazine as the voice of South Africa.
By the mid-1960s, Masekela and Ibrahim had gone into exile in the US. Makeba was actually forced into exile by the government, which refused to allow her back into the country to attend her mother’s funeral. In some ways this was a liberation. Masekela knew English culture better than many English people – he read Wordsworth and watched Ealing comedies – but his real goal was America because, as he told me, “That was where the beboppers were. I was already a major practitioner with the Jazz Epistles, and now finally I could learn more at the source, which I had already studied obsessively.”
Thanks to these and other stellar musicians in exile in the US and UK, South African jazz became a focus for the global anti-apartheid movement which gathered pace during the 1970s and 1980s. When majority rule finally arrived in 1994, they could return as heroes. Masekela and Makeba are no longer with us, but Abdullah Ibrahim, now aged 90, is still active, running a studio and music school in South Africa.
However the younger jazz musicians now coming to prominence are not content to follow their elders. America is no longer the Shangri-La, and being accepted as talented practitioners of jazz is no longer their goal, even though their music undoubtedly contains many jazz elements. Siyabonga Mthembu, lead vocalist of the group The Brother Moves On, and curator of one of the South African concerts at the EFG London Jazz Festival, is keenly aware of the damage musicians such as Masekela suffered during their period of exile. “Hugh once told me that one day he sat on a bench in Central Park in New York and started speaking to himself in Tsotsitaal, which is a mix of all the township languages, with no-one to listen to him, just to remind himself of where he was from.”
In many ways, Mthembu is the archetypal “global” musician: the music that formed him ranges from Luciano Pavarotti to American jazz musician Pharoah Sanders to Anohni and the Johnsons. But he is keenly aware of multiple African roots woven into his identity, which makes him uncomfortable with the jazz label. “That’s a transatlantic identity often imposed on black people – that’s where the idea of ‘black’ comes from. The problem with this is that the real indigenous aspect of ourselves as Africans gets peripheralized. We want to go beyond those categorisations of blackness, I would say even beyond jazz, to the idea of music as a healing through sound.”
To me that doesn’t seem so far from what Moeketsi, Ibrahim and Masekela were engaged in. The musical language of these younger musicians may be more free-floating and rhapsodic, and it’s certainly very far from the jazz of their forebears. But the yearning for homeland and spiritual freedom that courses through both is unmistakable.
The concert of South African jazz curated by Siyabonga Mthembu is at the Barbican on November 24; barbican.org.uk
South African jazz is also celebrated at the EFG London Jazz Festival on 21, 22 and 23 November details: efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk
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