Johnny Clegg & Savuka:
"We Have Arisen"
by j. poet
Beat Magazine, Vol. 7 #6 1988
Johnny Clegg is a white man who plays black music in an interracial rock 'n' roll band. Of course, there's nothing unusual about white people liking or playing black music, but Clegg lives in South Africa and in the country of apartheid his musical taste is almost against the law.
"Even the radio stations here are segregated," Clegg told me from his home in Johannesburg, just before the band left for their recently completed tour of the United States, "although segregated radio has been softened of late. Today you have a station like Radio Metro that plays all kinds of music, all hours of the day, the kind of music that we'll hopefully hear in a post-apartheid situation. A few years back no one would have dared to be as diverse as the are today it's a total contradiction of the way things usually operate in the apartheid system. Of course, some of the concessions the government allows are made in the hopes of taking some of the bite out of the cultural struggle. To say, 'See, we do listen to other people's ideas.'"
Clegg explained that the SABC (South African Broadcasting Co.) still runs everything and until these "reforms," which were almost forced on them by the recent unrest, the English stations didn't play Afrikaner music and Zulu stations were "unofficially" forbidden to play white music. The SABC also makes sure that the transmitters in the homelands are kept small to ensure that their signal won't be heard outside of a very short radius. It's part of a conscious plan to keep every black ethnic group separate.
This segregation of the airwaves has been a big problem for Clegg. Both of the bands he's been involved in, Juluka (Zulu for sweat), which broke up in 1984, and his current group, Savuka (which means "we have arisen"), have played a tradition-breaking hybrid of Zulu jive, South African folk music and international pop. In the 20-odd years he's been playing and recording, Clegg's music has helped break down the racially dictated musical barriers of South Africa. Long before Paul Simon's Graceland, Clegg was a cultural outlaw in South Africa. The records he cut with Juluka were among the few South African discs to feature blacks and whites playing together. When the group played in public, they often risked arrest for violating the apartheid laws.
Johnny Clegg's journey in Zulu culture had an unlikely beginning. He was born in England, but when his parents separated in the mid-60's, his mother moved to South Africa (with a year-long stopover in Rhodesia). When young Clegg heard black African music, it changed his life.
"We could get a Zulu station on the radio," Clegg recalled, "and the sounds piqued my interest. I carried a tape recorder and taped the songs I heard the black street musicians playing. The older Zulus took me under their wing and I got quite a collection of songs down on tape.
"When I was 15, I was arrested for being inside a black hostel and instead of taking me to the Charge Office, the police took me to my mother." The hostel was filled with migrant workers without official work permits. (If you're black, you can't work without a permit, but you can't get a permit without a job.) In the eyes of the police it was a hotbed of stolen goods, drug running, gun running and bootleggers. The police told Clegg his adventures were a danger to his own life. He didn't see it that way.
"I explained to my mother that there was a great deal of fighting," noted Clegg, "but that it didn't enter into the context of the dance. The fighting happened before or after the dancing, but never during. My mother was worried and we had quite a few arguments about it, but since she was a jazz singer she understood my intuitive love for the music."
In the end, Mrs. Clegg supported her son's interest in Zulu music and bailed him out of jail whenever the police arrested him for being in the company of blacks. The arrests only made Clegg's love for Zulu culture stronger.
"Street music is played in places that aren't accessible to white people," Clegg explained. "for example, the rooftops of the apartment blocks [buildings] in urban areas have houses where the servants and flat cleaners [janitors] live. On the weekends there are informal gatherings on the tops of these blocks with concertinas, violins, guitars, what have you, and I'd sneak up there to play. Inevitably there would be someone selling illegal beer and we'd get drunk and make too much noise, and the police would come and arrest me again."
At one of those informal rooftop parties Clegg met Sipho Mchunu, a "formidable guitarist" who was also 17 years old. "Sipho had an incredible sense of humor and we hit it off from our first conversation. When we started playing together, something clicked." The duo of Clegg and Mchunu was soon playing underground venues, which were basically people's homes or small halls at universities. At that time they would have risked arrest if they'd even tried to get a gig at a South African nightclub.
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