Johnny Clegg opens up on cancer
Johnny Clegg talks about his cancer and his final tour
IN JANUARY, Johnny Clegg came face to face with his own mortality. This week he announced his Final Journey tour to bid good bye to his South African fans in eight weeks’ time, followed by concerts in London and Dubai.
He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on April 8, 2015. Four days later he was under the surgeon’s knife for a Whipple operation that excised part of his stomach, pancreas, duodenum and gall bladder and then, in Clegg’s words, “put them back together”.
The 63-year-old music icon was lucky; only 15% of patients with pancreatic cancer qualify for the operation. Clegg was put on a round of chemotherapy and carried on with his busy life; delighting fans across the world with his unique brand of music and story-telling.
Six weeks after the operation, he was performing at the launch for the Springbok World Cup jersey – but sitting on a stool. He would miss only two gigs throughout chemo.
“Nobody knew. I carried on with my life. I was strong, I wasn’t suffering from the side effects. We decided not to make a fuss,” he said this week.
But then in March last year, when he returned from touring the US, his doctors detected an uptick in his tumour count. No one was concerned. Then the tumour count doubled the next month.
He was put on a second round of chemo for six months.
“They warned me,” Clegg says, “it’s like an atomic bomb, five different solutions pumped into my body. It’s so powerful you can only have two treatments a month.”
He was told there would be massive side effects – on his legendary energy levels, his ability to concentrate, his digestion. Except it didn’t.
On December 31, he finished his show and sent his oncologist footage of him leaping about the stage, dancing like a dervish. The oncologist messaged him saying he couldn’t believe him. And then reality struck. He was laid low the whole of January as everything he had been warned about, hit him with a vengeance. When he emerged, it was time to talk, honestly and frankly, with his management team.
“This chemo guarantees a year of suppressing the cancer, we’ve got a window. They said to me, ‘you don’t want to be in a space in two or three years where you don’t have the energy to say goodbye in a two and half hour show’.”
He laughs: “I overhead my driver telling his friends in Zulu, ‘my brother has lots of white ants trying to eat him inside and the hospital is trying to spray him with Doom’. It’s a brilliant metaphor.”
Clegg is chipper; thinner, gaunter, but his eyes burn with passion. There’s no sign of the rigours he’s undergone.
The price has been steep. Neuropathy has been one of the side effects. The chemo has been killing his nerve endings.
“I can’t feel my fingers, I have to look at the fret board to see where my fingers must go. If I press too hard the note would go sharp,” he says. “I feel like I’m walking on someone else’s feet.”
So, he spoke to his oncologist and the medication was changed. The feeling is returning to his fingers and he’s trying out the old dance steps in his garden, to check if he’s still got the balance to do them.
“It’s super concentration, but each week I’m getting stronger. I’m in the gym, I’m eating well.”
He’s looking forward to the Final Journey. He laughs at the term: “It’s kind of final, isn’t it?”
It’s a farewell to his fans and 40 years of performing, but not to life, not by any means. Being diagnosed with cancer was a terrible shock, he admits, a time to take stock.
“I read a lot about it, I tried to understand why I had contracted it. Was it diet, stress or just random? No one could tell me.
“There’s a Zulu saying that translates as ‘this has arrived on my plate and I must eat it’. It’s life. It’s a brand-new journey. Talking to Sipho (Mchunu, his collaborator from Juluka) also took me out of self-obsessing about my condition.”
The Final Journey tour starts at Cape Town’s Grand West on July 1, moving to Joburg the next weekend for two shows on July 7 and 8 at Montecasino, and then to Durban’s ICC Arena at the end of July. He’s scheduled to perform at the Eventim Apollo in London on August 19 and then the Dubai Opera House in late September, with dates for Europe, the US and Australia still to be added.
“It’s going to be an autobiographical show. It’s like flipping through a family photograph book, sharing a life, it’s not a commercial presentation of hit songs.
“It’s something that only South Africans will understand, because I’m a product of the South African experience. I was shaped by it.”
He’s shaped generations of South Africans with his music.
The Springboks run out onto the pitch for every Test match to the sounds of Impi, his 1981 hit single, while Asimbonanga, his 1988 hit, is a perennial favourite for documentaries about Nelson Mandela, but neither of them are his favourite tracks.
Tragedy
“Songs change their meaning often and the writer can look back and say ‘I know the young man that wrote that, but I’m older now’.”
A case in point is The Crossing/ Osiyeza, written in memory of his Savuka collaborator and long-time Zulu dance partner Dudu Ndlovhu, who was tragically gunned down while trying to mediate in a KwaZulu-Natal taxi war.
“It’s a song about a life taken prematurely – now when I sing it, it’s ironic,” he says.
Then there’s his other hit Cruel Crazy, Beautiful World, written when his son Jesse was born, or Dela, a love song about two lovers torn apart.
“All my song writing has been about wholeness, I come from a society that was fragmented.
“Apart from Nazi Germany, no other country ever legalised separation.
“That separation is something I was always writing about. It’s all about trying to close the circle to join that which was separated.”
As he prepares for the tour dates, he’s also looking beyond to after the Final Journey.
He might be stopping performing, but he won’t be lying down either; there’s his autobiography to get into shape, there are all the books he’s never had time to read and greater involvement in his other business, electronic waste recycling.
“We’ve got a factory in Midrand and branches in Pinetown and Port Elizabeth, we’re about to open in Cape Town. We recycle everything down to the smallest circuit board. I’m a businessman and an entrepreneur and this business fulfils the needs of my activist juices, being involved in something for the greater good of all. At the same time, there’s a chance to make a green buck,” he laughs.
“I’ll still keep writing music, I’ve got five new tracks that I’m working on and will release slowly.
I’ll probably do sound tracks for movies and documentaries. I’ll be open to small projects that take my fancy.”
Most of all, though, he’ll concentrate on enjoying every day. “In this frantic rush of modern life, one is always trapped in what has to be done in the future and my future is a question mark so I kind of don’t really look at that with such intensity any more, each day for me is a special thing.
“I had no ambitions as a young person, I just had an incredible curiosity. I never thought when I was growing up in the streets of Johannesburg, ducking and diving from the police with Sipho or with Charlie (Mzila, the man who taught him guitar) that a band would emerge out of this and I would have a musical career.
“I saw myself as an anthropologist who’d be working and getting a salary, teaching and discovering other cultures in a very secluded intellectual environment.
“A lot of what happened to me was the consequence of choices. I made the right choices but not for the reasons people suspect.
“I never did Zulu street guitar to make a political statement, it was the furthest thing from my mind, I wasn’t politically conscious at the age of 14, I fell in love and it became a massive musical detective story on a hunt to discover the roots of it.
“When I discovered Zulu dancing, that changed my life. At the age of 15 the whole new world of a warrior culture unfolded. The songs, the words, the movements, were a gift to me because it enabled me to shape myself, much like karate.
“My ambitions were to become an African, but not in the sense of an Afrikaner, who is also an African. I– a white person born outside Manchester in the UK – wanted to find my own personal road and in that darkest of times I discovered an African migrant community that was so open, so generous and so happy to have a white kid dancing in the hostels that they accelerated my urban adventure into a tribal world. They accelerated it with explanations and encouragement.”
Today, the success of that transition has become vital in how he deals with the challenges of overcoming and living with cancer.