Remembering another giant on Mandela Day

By Phakamisa Mayaba

One cat who never sulked over most of it was Hugh Masekela. Never clutched at the usual excuses, or milked the tropes to make a hero or — for that matter – a victim of himself. No matter how the news anchor tried to spin the narrative or harangue him into another moping soliloquy around the godforsaken years, Bra Hugh wasn’t biting.

Mostly, he regarded himself as the master of his own destiny, preferring to see beyond the leg irons and the nastiness. Pretty much like that famous line from one of Mandela’s favourite poems – Invictus – by William Ernest Henley that speaks about an ‘unconquerable soul,’ and of somewhere ‘beyond this place of wrath and tears’.

‘The greatest activity in music in South Africa,’ he told the BBC Hardtalk host Zeinab Badawi, ‘happened during the apartheid era. … the great Miriam Makeba, the Manhattan Brothers, the musical King Kong, and the great musicians came out of that era. Partly because the environment was very safe in that there were police coming out of the walls and the trees and everything.’

Hugh Masekela’s Hard Talk interview in 2015. Source: YouTube.

Whether in a pulled-down poorboy cap or fedora, bermuda shorts, or loose-fitting cardigan, Bra Hugh was a cool, sharp-witted spiv, perpetually ‘dripped out’ because that’s how he kept it ever since being a laaitie raised in a speakeasy. Among washerwomen, low-wage miners, messelaars and a bootlegging grandma who kept the takings from the ‘illicit drinking den’ in her bosom – Masekela suckled on the essentials of survival so early that he couldn’t get rid of them not even when the chips were down in exile.

He dug the ‘jewish’ – colloquial for clothing, the finest of which was usually bought from a Jewish-owned store in Egoli – the City of Gold. Was dead set (and if anybody tells you otherwise, they obviously have it in for you) that the dream always came first, often before God. So, this means you ignore Sunday mass or dribbling the tattered soccer ball along the hot gravel and become the plump-cheeked trumpeter blowing in dance-crazed beer halls in the company of old-timers who equate their drinking to some glorious act of mettle. And who respect anyone capable of knocking back the hot stuff like they can, something that you evidently take up very young and so regularly that it will come back to haunt you in later years.

It is the sheer restless madness of his story that has us getting way ahead of ourselves. So many wows! And big names along the way that the humble beginnings pale in comparison. Like at home, where Masekela first heard the gramophone spinning and realising that ‘I was bewitched by music from infancy’. Again at St Peter’s, bedridden and probably guilty of some infraction, and the anti-apartheid school chaplain Trevor Huddleston unsure of how to whip the reprobate back into line. ‘Father,’ promised the student, ‘if I can get a trumpet, I won’t bother anybody anymore.’

With 15 pounds from Huddleston, and Bob Hill, the Scottish manager of the music store on Eloff Street, chipping in, the budding muso walked out with his second-hand instrument. Although ‘there was never any music schools for Africans’, the school’s Huddleston Band offered the rudiments. And the cleric himself kept the boys motivated, even getting Louis Armstrong to ship one of his old trumpets to the school, a gesture that put them on the front page of the local rag.

Another B-grade interview that Masekela turns into a gem. Source: YouTube.

Over the school holidays, Masekela and his cousin, the highly celebrated Jonas Gwangwa, soon found themselves on the road, gigging with the Merry Makers and curating the sorts of memories that left their peers envious and the girls giggling. (These tales are beautifully, sometimes crassly, rendered in Masekela’s unputdownable autobiography, Grazing in the Grass.)

But this was also a ‘hard time’, because ‘almost everybody I learnt from died from booze’. He’d started drinking at 13, was ‘arguably’ an alcoholic by 21, and in 1961 found himself in the States, courtesy of Huddleston and Miriam Makeba, the African darling of the times whom he would later marry. Enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music, Bra Hugh would enjoy the tutelage of the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.

But there was just one kink:  as a regular bebopper, he was just a drop in a sea of talent in the US and would likely end up just another sideman. That’s when Miles Davis – whose ‘every other word was ”s**t” – advised him: ‘You wanna be a jazz musician? There’s thousands of us, you’re just gonna be a statistic. But you put some of that s**t from your home in the s**t you’re doing now … you’re gonna be bad! Then we’re gonna learn something from you.’

Three albums that gained some recognition followed, but it was the chart-topping Grazing in the Grass that vindicated Davis’s counsel, catapulting Bra Hugh up in the charts and into real stardom. By now he was experimenting wildly, reinvigorating old African folk songs with jazz and kwela, borrowing from artists such as the extraordinary Dorothy Masuku – in my book, the queen of township good-time sorrow and jive.

A performance by Hugh Masekela. Source: YouTube.

In between, and in the company of Harry Belafonte, Masekela found himself embroiled in a struggle not too dissimilar from the one he’d left behind at home: the Civil Rights Movement. The awards came, he toured, he wrote music for some of the best (Eric Clapton quipped how he wished he could sing just like him), then the Grammy nomination in 1968. Then came the monsters of proper fame; more women, wild nights, liquor and drugs.

Reflected Masekela: ‘Very few people are successful at success. I think to survive yourself is one of the greatest successes of success in my profession.’ He’s worked on iconic musicals, and married at least four times, but the memory that solidified his unwavering belief that true artistic creation is deeply spiritual happened in Botswana on 4 April 1985.

Two decades into his incarceration, Nelson Mandela had sent him a birthday card with some inspired words from Pollsmoor Prison. ‘I’m saying,’ recalled Masekela, ‘here’s a guy who’s in jail and is encouraging me who’s outside. You know, that’s not even generous, it’s weird, right? And it made me feel so bad for him that I started crying, and I went to the piano and started singing this song word for word.’

Bring him back home, one of the anthems that would form the soundtrack of the worldwide Free Nelson Mandela campaign, was born. The equally popular Stimela (The Coal Train) descended on him at a party in Woodstock where Bra Hugh found himself rushing over to the piano and playing while constantly telling his friends – who were curious as to when he’d written this one – to ‘sshhh, it’s coming in, shut the F- up.’

His humility would not even allow him to consider his own music as really his own, instead of an extension of the creativity of and birthright thrust upon him by his forebears. ‘Art,’ he maintained, ‘is for sharing.’

Dis this tenacious disposition make him indifferent? Not at all — on the contrary, it saw him walking the Mandela-like path of a saint who’s actually really a sinner that keeps on trying. For him, the real heroes were those who were ‘underfoot’: ‘The people who really struggled, who freed us, are those people who are still struggling, from the poor underclass of South Africa. They are the ones who got shot at, who got whipped, who got killed.’

As for Mandela, Masekela said, ‘his name was almost abused, and too much pressure was put on him. It was as if he achieved the South African struggle alone, but it’s a four hundred year struggle that he came at the end of … and he was chosen as a symbol by his organisation.’

Being unable to return home to bury his mother remained a wound that would not heal, that kept him from fully letting bygones be bygones. He spoke against dispossession and marginalisation, and called for reparation and economic redress, but was also quick to say, ‘we have crime, corruption, and a country that is fast turning into a rubbish dump.’

Up until his death – in Johannesburg, on 23 January 2018 — Masekela remained a purist who stood by heritage music and could not stomach electronic influences on African sound. He held no brief for anything or anyone he could not reconcile with his conscience. Dogged in his pursuits, eloquent in expression, there was in him those captivating Madiba logics. The deep love for his country, the ability to see everyone regardless of station, and a weakness for beautiful women.

On Mandela Day, Bra Hugh’s scorched voice played on a loop through the small speaker in the Mayaba household.

The Americanization of Ooga Booga … The Emancipation of Hugh Masekela … Can you dig it, brother?

Featured image: Hugh Masekela performing in 2011. (Jacob Crawfurd, Wikipedia)