Farm boy behind Africa’s best-selling group and Paul Simon’s Graceland
The first time Joseph Shabalala went into a recording studio with Ladysmith Black Mambazo he was afraid that the machines were ‘‘stealing’’ their voices. Hailing from a rural village in KwaZuluNatal and steeped in traditional tribal beliefs and customs, Shabalala had little experience of modern technology. Singing was something you did spontaneously, whether in church or in the fields. ‘‘We thought the voices on the radio were the voices of people who had passed away,’’ he said. ‘‘We were farm boys, we were afraid.’’
Yet Shabalala, who has died aged 78, was a swift learner. Hearing his group’s a cappella harmonies through the studio’s machines may have been a shock, but it was also a revelation.
Shabalala and
Ladysmith Black
Mambazo went on to record more than 40 albums, taking their glorious singing to a global audience.
Paul Simon recruited the group to sing on
Graceland, the best-selling album of his solo career. Shabalala co-wrote two of the album’s
best compositions, Homeless and Diamonds on
the Soles of Her Shoes, and Graceland won album of the year at the Grammys in 1987.
The next year Ladysmith Black Mambazo won their own Grammy after Simon had returned the compliment and produced their album Shaka Zulu. ‘‘We were on tour and the Grammy was sent home to South Africa,’’ Shabalala recalled. ‘‘When we arrived back, people were curious to know what it was, and we said that we didn’t know.’’
Ladysmith Black Mambazo went on to win four more Grammys over the next three decades. In addition to Simon, the group recorded with Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Stevie Wonder and others.
Gentle and softly spoken, Shabalala believed that singing was a gift from God and was shocked when he was plunged into political controversy over his collaboration with Simon, who in travelling to South Africa to record with local musicians was deemed to have breached the UN’s cultural boycott.
Horrified to find himself blacklisted, Shabalala was nevertheless unrepentant. He gave Simon the Zulu name Vulindlela, meaning ‘‘he who opens the door’’. Their first meeting was, he revealed, the first time he had been permitted ‘‘to hug a white man’’.
Sitting in his cell on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela refused to join the condemnation. On his release, he told Shabalala that his music had inspired him in prison and declared that his group were to become ‘‘cultural ambassadors’’ for the Rainbow Nation.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo sang at the ceremony in Oslo when Mandela was awarded the Nobel peace prize and they sang at his inauguration as president. They accompanied him on state visits to the Vatican, where they sang for Pope John Paul II, and to Britain, where they performed for the Queen at the Albert Hall.
Like most black South Africans of his generation, the systematic humiliation of apartheid left indelible scars on Shabalala’s life and he suffered a deep personal tragedy when his brother and fellow group member Headman Shabalala was killed in a racially motivated murder in 1991.
There was further tragedy in 2002 when Nellie, his wife of 30 years, was murdered outside their Durban home by a masked gunman. That same year their 30-year-old daughter Nomhlanhla died of an undiagnosed illness. Two years later another brother and group member, Ben Shabalala, was shot and killed while driving his children to school.
Six months after his first wife’s death, he married again to Thokozile (nee Maduna), who ran a shop that he frequented near his home. She survives him with four sons, all of whom sing with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and took over the group on their father’s retirement in 2014.
He was born Bhekizizwe Joseph Siphatimandla Mxoveni Mshengu Bigboy Shabalala near the town of Ladysmith. His parents were farm workers employed by a rich white landowner, but his mother was also a sangoma (traditional Zulu healer) and his father a soothsayer.
‘‘Music was in my blood from my childhood,’’ he recalled. ‘‘We take our music from our ancestors. We sang songs about catching a bird, songs for calling the goats and oxen and cattle, songs asking for the sun if it was too cold, or for clouds if it was too hot.’’
He had wanted to become ‘‘an educated person, maybe a teacher, doctor or something like that’’, but after his father died when he was 12, he left school to work on the farm.
To support his mother and six younger siblings he moved to Durban aged 17, working as a motor mechanic by day and singing at night with other black migrant workers in hostels. As there were no women in the hostels, men sang the full range of harmonies from bass to the sweeter alto notes, accompanied by a light-footed choreography of head-high kicks.
By 1960 he was back in Ladysmith where he started a group with some of his brothers and cousins. Four years later he had a ‘‘beautiful dream’’ to reshape the group with an a cappella style that blended traditional Zulu singing with the softer textures of the choral church music introduced to South Africa by the white settlers.
The name of the new group also came to him in a dream – Ladysmith to indicate their geographical location; Black, not for its most obvious connotation but because it was the colour of the ox, ‘‘the strongest animal on the farm’’; and Mambazo, the Zulu word for ‘‘axe’’, suggesting the group would cut down its competitors in the singing competitions they entered.
After his retirement, Shabalala continued to teach children to sing via the musical academy he established as a charitable foundation with the group’s substantial royalties.
‘‘Singing cleanses the soul,’’ he said. ‘‘It is my prayer and my comfort. There is nothing else.’’
‘‘We were on tour and the Grammy was sent home to South Africa. When we arrived back, people were curious to know what it was, and we said that we didn’t know.’’