Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
African legend
Hugh Masekela fought against injustice, writes KEVIN RITCHIE Soweto youth builds robots from rubbish Page 18 Still no justice for anti-apartheid hero Ashley Kriel Page 23
IN 2015, Hugh Masekela received an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University – the third of five he would be awarded – and promptly sparked a furore over the hairstyle of another graduate who wanted her picture taken with him. Her crime? She had weaves.
Masekela was unrepentant. No one should interview him if they didn’t have any pride in their own heritage. It wasn’t the first time he’d fight for Africans to be proud, it wouldn’t be the last.
He died this week, succumbing to an almost 10-year battle with prostate cancer. He was 78. It didn’t matter, it still felt like he’d been taken too soon, even though he’d seen more, achieved more, lost more, created more and destroyed more, loved more and hated more in one lifetime than others could manage in 10.
Born in Witbank’s KwaGuqa township, he was brought up by his maternal grandmother, a fiercely religious shebeen queen. His grandfather, her husband, was a Scottish miner and bootlegger who abandoned her to spawn two other families. Polina, Masekela’s mother, was a teacher and social worker classified as coloured. She faced the brunt of apartheid’s racism her entire life – from her own people, never black enough to fit in, never white enough to benefit. Masekela’s father Thomas was a self-made man, a sculptor who counted Gerard Sekoto as a friend. An angry man.
Masekela, nicknamed Minkie Mouse by his grandmother, joined his parents with one of his sisters Barbara, when they moved to Payneville, Springs. There his fascination with music, sparked at the age of four, took off. He spent so much time at his parents’ record player that they finally relented and arranged piano lessons.
His teacher caught him improvising and reported Masekela to his parents, warning that boogie woogie was music for “drunkards, harlots, sinners and gangsters”. His parents were undeterred.
They had a difficult marriage, one that boiled over when Masekela senior qualified as one of the first African health inspectors, and was offered a posting to Alexandra township. Polina refused to go; “Dark City”, as Alex was known, was one of the most lawless places in the country. Her husband, a big, physical man, beat her to a pulp.
The couple reconciled and moved.
There Masekela attended St Michael’s Primary School where Thabo Mbeki’s future wife, Zanele, was a school mate, before going to Rosettenville to attend St Peter’s, a boarding school that counted Oliver Tambo, Duma Nokwe and Es’kia Mphahlele among its old boys. It was a seminal moment. The school chaplain was Trevor Huddleston, the fiery Anglican priest who would play a massive role in Masekela’s life.
By his second year at St Peter’s, crazy about girls but still singing soprano solos, Masekela decided to take matters into his own hands, so he started smoking, dropped his voice to a bass – and then started shoplifting from white stores to feed his habit. He was forced to repeat his second year. One Saturday afternoon in September 1953, he and a friend bunked out to the movies. There he saw Kirk Douglas playing Rick Martin in Young Man With a Horn, a story about a jazz genius who would die at 26 from too much gin and other sin. (The movie was adapted from Dorothy Baker’s 1938 novel of the same name, which was loosely based on the real life of jazz trumpeter Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke, who died at 28.) He came away determined to become a jazz trumpeter.
Huddleston got him a second-hand trumpet, which became a catalyst for the Huddleston Jazz Band, the coolest kids in the school attracting all the girls. They started playing gigs outside Rosettenville – and it was at one of them, a reception for the homecoming of Commonwealth flyweight boxing champion Jake Ntuli, that he fell in love with the woman who he would marry and divorce and but love his entire life; Miriam Makeba.
“She was breathtakingly beautiful… a body sculpted by the ancestors. Her stunning physical attributes were only matched by the beauty of her voice,” he remembered in Still Grazing, his 2004 autobiography that was first published in South Africa two years ago.
The apartheid repression was moving into gear, eradicating “black spots” like Payneville. Masekela’s paternal grandparents were thrown off their farm in Limpopo, rendering his grandfather a shell. The mission schools, especially those determined to fight Hendrik Verwoerd’s dictum of turning out semi-educated labourers, were targeted.
Huddleston refused to be cowed, so St Peter’s was closed. Masekela had to find another school, but shortly after starting his year, he dropped out to play music professionally.
He pestered the priest relentlessly to get him a scholarship to study music overseas.
Huddleston was in the US on a book tour and managed instead to get Louis Armstrong to donate one of his old trumpets which was duly sent out to South Africa – where the news made it into two editions of The Star. “It was a day my direction in life was cemented,” Masekela remembered.
It was a helter-skelter time that would see him teaming up with Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) with the Manhattan Brothers, followed by a short, hated, interlude as an interpreter/housing clerk at Germiston City council’s Natalspruit offices. He was saved by the musical King Kong and when that finished, joined up with Ibrahim to form the Jazz Epistles, moving to Cape Town, masquerading as a painter to doss down in a flat in Camps Bay, donated by a white admirer.
It was only after the Sharpeville massacre that Masekela finally managed to leave for Britain. Huddleston had arranged a scholarship for him at the Guildhall School of Music, but Makeba and her mentor Harry Belafonte managed to organise a place at the Manhattan
School of Music instead. Masekela headed for New York, where he studied classical trumpet, fell back in love with Makeba, met with all his music heroes – and Malcolm X.
Miles Davis encouraged him to follow his own musical route, rather than be a jazz statistic. It was great advice. Masekela’s success led to a US billboard number 1 hit with Grazing in the Grass in 1968, a move to Los Angeles, a fiendish drug consumption problem and hangingout with the hippest movie and music stars of the era.
He would party with lothario Marvin Gaye, getting so stoned he missed his flight to Zambia and a chance to meet Kenneth Kaunda. He would party with Jimi
Hendrix – who would die two years later from an overdose. At one stage, Masekela was unable to leave the US for two years because of a drug conviction – and the plea bargain that he destroyed in the dock, high as a kite. He would start a record company, get nominated for a Grammy, have insane love affairs and father a child with a Swedish woman, whom he would never see. He would even discuss a plan with Marlon Brando to break imprisoned Pan Africanist president Robert Sobukwe out of Robben Island.
After 12 years in the US, he was nearing rock bottom. He was saved by Africa after a meeting with Nigerian icon Fela Kuti. He arrived in Guinea in 1972 with an airline ticket that went as far as the then Zaire and $1 000 in travellers’ cheques. He would bob around West Africa for several years before finally hooking up with Kuti in Lagos; partying hard as a military coup unfolded about him, fall out with Don King in Kinshasa over the concert for Muhammad Ali’s much-storied Rumble in the Jungle and almost get involved in a racket smuggling gold and dagga to Europe.
By the mid-’80s, he had cleaned up his act, started the Botswana International School of Music. He survived the SADF’s infamous raid on ANC safe houses in Gaborone, which killed some of his school friends. He went back into exile, touring alongside Paul Simon on the Graceland tour, and Mbongeni Ngema on Sarafina, and appearing at the famous Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday concert in Wembley in 1988, before finally returning home in 1990 when Madiba was released.
He’d been in exile for 30 years. It was a bitter sweet homecoming. He was appointed deputy director of the performing arts council, but found himself frustrated at the underlying intransigence of the white public servants who remained. He would start a nightclub which would fail.
By 1997, he’d faced up to his demons and finally entered rehab in the UK. He’d recorded 37 albums and sold more than five million copies, been nominated for three Grammys and several Tonys, After the first week, he picked up his trumpet to play, “it was the first time I’d played sober since I was 16,” he remembered.
He was 58. One of his proudest legacies was to create the Musicians and Artists Programme of South Africa to help others recover from their addictions.
In 2010, Masekela headlined the concert to herald post-apartheid South Africa’s finest moment, the hosting of Fifa World Cup – joined by Kuti, but he never stopped fighting against injustice.
As early as 2006, he was bemoaning the political infighting that preceded Polokwane, immortalised in the introduction to the live recording of his hit Mandela (Bring him Back Home!).
Last year, Masekela received the last of his honorary doctorates, from Wits – in the same hall he’d played in the opening concert for King Kong as a 19-year-old. He urged the graduates to restore their heritage, before they were swallowed by the West and the East. He warned them they’d lose their mother tongues in the next 20 years. And after the sturm und drang, he dismissed them thus: “Go out there and kick some booty!”
It was vintage Bra Hugh.
Ramapolo Hugh Masekela, born Witbank April 4, 1939 – died Johannesburg January 23, 2018.