Woah-hum: a life-giving soundtrack for SA youth
Heartfelt tribute to an extraordinary South African who dreamt of a better future
● As the radio plays Johnny Clegg’s music on heavy rotation this week after the singer’s death, there’s not much I can do to avoid being transported back to the world inhabited by my seven-year-old self in 1988.
I am dressed in only a pair of shorts, unashamedly flinging my arms and legs around our lounge in Broederstroom blasting Scatterlings of Africa, in my best imitation of the singer’s signature dance moves. I mistakenly believe I’m on the road to Pelindaba (the nuclear facility a few kilometres down the road) “where the world began”.
There in the lounge I’ve forgotten about the oppressive Calvinism of my parallelmedium, Broederbond-run primary school where everyone is white and has no idea about the “mud the colour of dusty blood on the road to Mdantsane” that is the focus of a song on Juluka’s Work For All album.
The soundtrack to my life from the age of around six to 13 is dominated by Clegg songs and a vainglorious attempt to imitate his kicks and woah-hums while dancing across my lounge on the weekends.
Nobody at school knows it but my sister and I do a mean version of Impi for the benefit of our mother’s childhood nanny, phonetically mimicking the Zulu chorus without understanding a word.
Asimbonanga sends weird shivers down our spines even though we’re not exactly certain of who Mandela is and, for most of our early years, the only time we get to be in Johannesburg at night is for Savuka concerts. I have a distinct memory of a man called David Webster introducing the band on one of those nights.
I learnt of Webster, Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge, Steve Biko and others simply from their name checking in Asimbonanga .I learnt that the skyscrapers of Johannesburg and the suburbs and the roads were built on the back of black men who worked underground far from their homes in iJwanasibeki,
and I learnt that there were men like Webster and others who had died pursuing the simple right for one man to have one vote.
During this period of devotion to the man the French have dubbed Le Zoulou Blanc ,I never considered myself as being Zulu or black.
I didn’t understand the words that I was singing and while I had far more everyday experiences with black kids my own age than most of my school friends, I was a secular Jewish boy raised in the bundu, living in a bubble of racially mixed hope that other children in my immediate environment didn’t understand.
Looking back, I see that Clegg’s music allowed white liberally minded people such as me and my family to pull back a curtain and have a glimpse into another world, without having to travel out of our privileged comfort zones and go and discover it for ourselves.
That said, it also seems that when I was a child in the turbulent 1980s, living far away from the violence and political upheavals that were the beginnings of the end of apartheid, a Clegg concert provided a vision of a world where different cultures could come together and create something new and bigger than themselves for the greater good of society.
They were a small early version of the bigger, failed Rainbow Nation project that was
hailed as such a miracle.
The last Clegg album I remember listening to with any conviction was 1993’s Heart, Dust and Dreams with its plaintive anthem to the singer’s dance mentor Dudu Ndlovu, The Crossing.
It was recorded in the wake of Ndlovu’s tragic murder during the very scary IFP-ANC conflicts of the time.
After that I went on to high school, not far from the chicken farm where Clegg used to work and came up with the words for Juluka’s massive hit Woza Friday in 1982.
But by then I’d left his music behind and was on a different journey to discover all the things I’d not been exposed to while living out in the sticks.
There was no place for the pop-rocksmaskandi crossover sounds of Johnny Clegg for a teenage boy obsessed with grunge, triphop, drum’n’bass, punk and alternative music.
In 2017 I spent a week going through my record collection, pulling out the far-toomany Juluka and Savuka albums I own for an interview with Clegg ahead of what would be his final tour.
While Clegg’s music certainly became more overtly political as he progressed from Juluka to Savuka, it was always political by virtue of its defiance of the separate development tunnel-vision that the apartheid government tried to impose on a society with a vast array of cultural expressions and diversity.
As he told me then: “For most of my life I’ve just done what I’ve done but when I look back there was a wake behind me which was a cultural shift. People look back and they reconstruct it and they say, gee you guys were clever, and to be honest we were just buddies.
“I loved the guitar music, I … wanted to be the purveyor of this music style and become part of it and become like a blues guitarist, but an African version because this was my country and my culture and I wanted to belong to it.
“It was a selfish thing, it wasn’t political, it was to define who I was – I wanted to be an African.”
If nothing else, the music remains. The man who made it may be gone, but few would disagree that he succeeded in providing a vision of what it might mean to truly embrace the idea of being an African in the truest sense of the word.