******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times, July 17, 2019
Johnny Clegg, South African Singer Who Battled Apartheid With Music, Is
Dead at 66
By Alan Cowell
Johnny Clegg, a British-born South African singer, songwriter and
guitarist whose fusion of Western and African influences found an
international audience and stood as an emblem of resistance to the
apartheid authorities in his adopted land, died on Tuesday in
Johannesburg. He was 66.
His manager, Roddy Quin, announced the death. Mr. Clegg learned in 2015
that he had pancreatic cancer.
From his teenage years onward, Mr. Clegg ventured with ever greater
boldness across racial lines. He spent time in the gritty,
violence-prone hostels reserved for migrant black mineworkers that were
formally off limits to most of his fellow white South Africans. His
music crossed racial lines as well.
In the bands Juluka (“Sweat” in the isiZulu language) and Savuka (“We
have risen”) and as a solo artist, Mr. Clegg became known for songs and
performances that resonated through South Africa’s long struggle against
racial separation.
“We have a mission,” he told The New York Times in 1990, “which is to
bring a whole collection of songs that are about the South African
experience to the world.”
His song “Impi” (“Regiment”), from Juluka’s album “African Litany”
(1981), celebrated the victory of Zulu forces over British colonial
invaders at Isandhlwana in 1879. In “African Sky Blue,” on the same
album, Mr. Clegg and the Zulu guitarist Sipho Mchunu, transposed those
warriors to South Africa’s modern gold mines.
“The warrior’s now a worker, and his war is underground,” Mr. Clegg
sang. “With cordite in the darkness he milks the bleeding veins of gold.”
“Scatterlings of Africa,” reflecting the myriad dislocations of South
African society, became a breakthrough commercial success in Britain and
elsewhere in 1984, enabling Mr. Clegg to abandon an academic career in
Johannesburg as an anthropologist and devote himself full time to his music.
The cover of the album by Mr. Clegg’s band Juluka that became a
breakthrough commercial success in Britain and elsewhere in 1984.
The haunting lyrics of his 1987 song “Asimbonanga” (“We have not seen
him”), about the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, were so evocative of the era
that in 1999, Mandela, by then a free man, joined a surprised Mr. Clegg
onstage at a concert in Frankfurt during a performance of the song.
The moment had a particular poignancy: When “Asimbonanga” was written,
Mandela was incarcerated and all but invisible beyond the prison walls
under apartheid laws that prevented his image and utterances from being
published.
With his spectacular onstage enactment of high-kicking Zulu war dances
and stick fighting, Mr. Clegg was often referred to as “the White Zulu.”
It was a nickname he said he loathed, but it nonetheless reflected the
racial contortions and obsessions of South Africa both before and after
the elections in 1994, which brought Mandela to power as the country’s
first black president after his release from prison in 1990.
The South African government said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr.
Clegg’s music “had the ability to unite people across the races,” and
that he had “made an indelible mark in the music industry and the hearts
of the people.”
Throughout the apartheid era, Mr. Clegg and his bands were harassed by
the authorities and occasionally detained. Their performances were often
disrupted, wherever they were held. Under apartheid legislation known as
the Group Areas Act, white people were not permitted to enter segregated
black townships without official permits, which were often withheld,
while black people were kept out of whites-only areas by nighttime
curfews and a web of zoning restrictions.
Other apartheid proscriptions kept Mr. Clegg’s music off state-run radio
shows. (He said he was first arrested at the age of 15.)
At the same time, he was censured by the Musicians’ Union of Britain
precisely because he performed in South Africa, in contravention of an
embargo that was supposed to reinforce the isolation of the apartheid
regime.
Despite that sanction, Mr. Clegg toured widely, securing an
international following. He was particularly popular in France, where he
was made a Chevalier of Arts and Letters in 1991. Britain named him an
officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2015. In South Africa, he
received the country’s highest civilian medal, the presidential
Ikhamanga Award, in 2012.
Mr. Clegg received his cancer diagnosis in 2015. Two years later, when
the disease was said to be in remission after chemotherapy, he embarked
on what was labeled the Final Journey Tour, taking him to Britain, the
United States, Canada, South Africa and elsewhere.
“Johnny Clegg is not exactly a household name in Britain,” the British
newspaper The Guardian reported after he performed in London. “But back
home in South Africa he has the status of a national treasure, and it
seems that every (predominantly white) South African in town has turned
out to see him.”
Jonathan Paul Clegg was born on June 7, 1953, in Bacup, a onetime cotton
milling town in northwest England. His parents separated when he was an
infant, and he did not meet his father, Dennis, until he was 21 years
old, according to biographical notes in “Learning Zulu: A Secret History
of Language in South Africa,” a 2016 study by Mark Sanders, a professor
of comparative literature at New York University.
The couple broke up when Mr. Clegg was 12. But before they did, Mr.
Pienaar introduced his stepson to life in segregated black townships,
which were rarely if ever visited by white people.
Mr. Clegg lived briefly in Israel and Zambia, where he attended
multiracial schools at a time when education in South Africa was
strictly segregated. In South Africa, “I felt like a migrant,” he said
in an interview with the South African newspaper The Mail & Guardian in
2010. “So when I met migrant workers — Zulu migrant workers — there was
something about them that I intuitively connected with, because they
were also establishing these tenuous connections with different places.”
Despite the expectations of his mother’s family that he would be raised
according to Jewish traditions, he declined to have a bar mitzvah and
described himself as a “secular Jew.”
Survivors include his wife, Jenny, and two sons, Jesse and Jaron. Jesse
Clegg has a successful career of his own as a singer and songwriter.
Mr. Clegg’s musical journey began when he was an adolescent and met
Charlie Mzila, a Zulu migrant who cleaned apartments by day and played
guitar by night. From him, Mr. Clegg often said, he learned a new kind
of guitar playing, with the instrument tuned and strung differently than
in the West.
He formed the band Juluka after meeting Sipho Mchunu, a Zulu migrant
worker at the time. That band, which blended traditional Zulu music with
influences as diverse as Celtic folk groups like the Chieftains and
American singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne, achieved international
renown before it disbanded in 1985 and Mr. Mchunu returned to his farm
in Zululand. It reunited briefly in the mid-1990s.
Mr. Clegg’s second band, the more rock-oriented Savuka, was formed in
1986 and was nominated for a Grammy in the world music category for its
1993 album, “Heat, Dust and Dreams.” But the band was dissolved that
year, soon after Dudu Ndlovu, Mr. Clegg’s drummer and onstage dance
partner, was shot to death, apparently while trying to mediate in a
conflict between rival cabdrivers.
Mr. Clegg dedicated a song, “Osiyeza” (“We are coming”), to Mr. Ndlovu.
“It’s only you that remains with me,” the lyrics said in part. “Clear as
the light of day.”
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
