Citizen Clegg by Banning Eyre Twenty years ago, Johnny Clegg ignored state-imposed racism, embracing Zulu sounds. Today, he looks at a new South Africa, one filled with danger and confusion, as well as promise. Banning Eyre talks with him about his new record company, his life as a family man, and his musical plans amid such turmoil.

Singer and bandleader Johnny Clegg holds a unique perspective on changes afoot in Nelson Mandela's South Africa. Though a British citizen, Clegg spent his boyhood in southern Africa, following the dreams of his journalist father. Clegg landed in Johannesburg at twelve, with his mother, a cabaret jazz singer.

His adherence to the country's apartheid policies ended when he befriended a Zulu guitar picker on a Johannesburg street corner. Before long, Clegg found himself sneaking into Soweto at night to practice high-kicking indlamu war dances, study Zulu, and write songs with his age-mate Sipho Mchunu. "Johnny and Sipho" became an unusual duo in the folk music underground in the mid-1970s. But when they started Juluka, a mixed race, Zulu-folk-rock band, they became so popular that apartheid authorities felt obliged to shut off the power at Juluka concerts and to ban their songs from radio play.

In the mid-80s, Mchunu went back to his cattle farm, and Clegg formed his current band, the slicker, pop-oriented Savuka, with which he toured internationally through South Africa's late-'80s State of Emergency, the release of Mandela, and last year, the country's first democratic election.

During those years, Clegg danced at the elusive edge of international rock stardom. He also took some painful hits ­ the assassination of friend and anti-apartheid activist David Webster in 1989, and in 1993, the murder of his longtime dance partner, Dudu Zulu, a shining star of the Juluka and Savuka stage shows. Back home in South Africa, 42 years old, married with two kids, Clegg faces new challenges. I called him at home in Johannesburg last fall, just after he'd come off the road from a South African campus tour. He began by breathlessly explaining why he had stood me up the day before, when we had originally planned to talk.

Johnny Clegg: I had a major train-smash, avalanche, cosmic explosion in my life yesterday. You know, I've opened up a little record company here (Look South Records).

And I came off tour from Cape Town. We just played for the student union there. Sting had come down for the show, and we had dinner together. Then I got a call to say that problems had arisen with the record company related to taxes and this and that ­ basically administrative nonsense. So I arrived back [in Johannesburg] in the morning, running around trying to sort out General Sales Tax, and see accountants. It was one of those devilish days.

Other than that, how's life in the new South Africa?

You know, its the best and the worst of times. It's the most incredible social, economic, political, and cultural pudding. Starting with the negatives, we've developed a very lawless criminal class over the last four years. And because of the illegitimate status of the South African police, a campaign has started up nationally to assassinate police in the townships. We lost 250-odd last year. The South African police, on whom we all rely for some form of law and order, are essentially under siege, and the criminals are winning. We have 23 hijackings a day across the country, and of those, about 40% result in death. My mother was mugged and hijacked four days ago. She was being hustled into a car by these two guys and luckily, she was seen by another lady on a double-decker bus. They stopped the bus to chase these people away.

The problem is that the ANC doesn't want to be seen as coming down hard on its own constituency by passing draconian legislation or taking tough police measures. The wonderful thing about South Africa at the moment is that we have such an incredible mixture of idealism and pragmatism. In other areas, it works wonderfully, especially in the education field. In some schools, we have these experiments going on where you have all the various cultures and races together. It might be a Ramadan holiday where the Muslims don't come to school. Then the children at that school learn all about Ramadan that day.

That never happened before?

Never happened before. This cross-cultural interpenetration of each other's universes is very new for us. But the thing is, the economy needs to be kick-started. We have a record number of people out of work. We also have a record number of illegal immigrants from the north coming through here now. They have no commitment to South Africa per se.

Which countries do they come from?

All the front-line states. They caught a bunch of Rwandans on the border about three weeks ago. The official figure is three million. That's a hell of a bite out of a population of 40 million. It's just under eight percent. The unofficial statistic is five to seven million. So we have a developing xenophobia in some of the townships against the immigrants, which is most unfortunate.

What's the effect of all this on the music scene?

There's quite an apathy that has gripped South African musicians since the election. It's related to the fact that we are coming out of thirty years of cultural isolation. We have been performing and pursuing arts in a kind of unreal environment, without any international input or competition. So suddenly, all of these doors have been brought down and we have this flood of international music particularly, but also films and TV, books, radio. Musicians here feel swamped and overwhelmed, like second-class citizens in their own country.

I spoke to Sting about this and we agreed, on this point in any case. There's going to have to be a period of about five years where through the interventions and introduction of local content laws, a certain amount of support for local content will have to be regulated on TV and radio. South Africans have been deprived of exposure to international music. There's this ideology of internationalism that has swept through the country in the past few years. We're having wave after wave of international acts coming through here, touring. We've just had Sting. Whitney Houston is coming up. We've got UB40. We've had Dr. Albin, Aha, Christa Berg, Elton John, Queen. It's just been a huge flood. And the ticket prices for these international shows are triple the price for a local show. Unfortunately, nothing here is coordinated by the musicians' union. So musicians feel powerless. They're just waiting for the thing to die out.

Does the government support local contents laws?

Oh yeah, sure. Local content is going to come. The squabbling is over the percentage. But the thing I'm involved in right at the moment is to kick start the campus circuit. The campus circuit was a very important breeding ground for alternative music here up until about 1986. That was destroyed by the State of Emergency. The campuses fragmented from one another and you couldn't do a national campus tour. So we put one together for the first time in about eight years. We came through with 11 support bands, all South African ­ from African jazz right through to post-industrial urban angst. I think we went a long way to rekindling the campus circuit so that local music will at least have one arena.

It's basically nation building. The thing for me is I look out to a sea of faces and I realize that there is a whole generation of young people who are discovering my music in a different context. They're first-year students four years after Mandela was released, and I'm playing them songs from a previous era. It takes some ability for a writer to transcend those two epochs and for the songs to still have some kind of meaning. I've had to drop songs because they were too issue-based.

One about a township bus boycott, or "Missing", about political detainees being abducted by the apartheid regime. Those songs are now locked in an era. But that's only about 30 or 40% of my repertoire. The other stuff has transcended that period for me. And that has been one of the most wonderful homecomings for me on this campus tour. You must realize that I haven't toured South Africa since 1990.

I understand you played at Mandela's inauguration. What was that like?

Quite surrealistic I must tell you. We kept pinching ourselves. We've been waiting for this for so long. Sometimes on stage, you had 500 sangomas ­ religious and tribal diviners ­ doing their traditional dance. Other times, it was 400 people in joint choirs. And you had bands, solo performers, poets. We had 80,000 people on the grounds basically enjoying the whole thing.

What inspired you to start a record company?

I wasn't inspired. I was actually in a spiral of depression. My record Heat Dust and Dreams, which had got a Grammy nomination, had not been promoted by my record company EMI while I was away on tour. By the time I got back, they said, "Well, we realize that we could have done a bit more, but it's too late now." So I said, I will rerelease it. Give me a pressing and distribution deal and I will run with it.

Do you plan to release other bands?

Only if I get an infrastructure that can actually promote them properly. I only have one person working here full time. It's a cottage industry. There are only two albums in our catalogue at the moment, Heat Dust and Dreams and The Best Of Savuka.

If you did do there groups, what would you look for?

South African music, whatever was good.

I read that you're looking to get involved with youth empowerment programs.

I'm actually looking at getting involved in multi-media. But at the same time, I'm looking to contribute in the wider social framework. I was previously working for the Community Law Center. I was involved in voter education programs prior to the elections. But the CLC is now going into a human rights watchdog function, which is cool. But that is a secondary issue for me at the moment. I'm not really interested in documenting and cataloguing reams of human rights abuses. We have a huge youth population who look with dismal eyes at the future. More than 50% of our population is under twenty-one. The promises of the election are going to take ten years to fulfill themselves, at which time they will already be in the job market, or not. So I feel that somewhere along the line, I will be involved in youth empowerment. I'm still searching for that particular niche.

Speaking of your niche, what is your current status with old friends in the Zulu community?

Well, I am no longer a member of the traditional dance team. The dancing is very intermittent. There's a lot of internal faction fighting amongst the tribal members. I think there is going to be trouble among the Zulus, not only with Inkatha and ANC, but between Buthelezi and the King.

What's happening to me, I must say, is I'm really getting on with my life. I know there's a bigger picture, but I have a family now. I have two kids, I want to be able to work on small, meaningful projects. Taking on the whole country and trying to contribute at a national level is a very daunting task. I live in Johannesburg. I don't live in Zululand. Zulus I know in Johannesburg have tried to introduce all the rural problems into the city without much success. To try to get their problems in the rural areas resolved they've come to the city. In the new South Africa, you're starting to see the development of very powerful regionalism and local level sentiment. It's from the bottom up. There's a big conflict in the ANC between the national and the regional representatives in government.

What are your musical plans?

I don't have a label at the moment. I'm going through Rhythm Safari [in the U.S.] and I will be negotiating for a new deal at some point next year. So I'm in limbo, which I like. I hope to be able to release a bunch of new stuff. I'm doing a ten-year retrospective with Sipho which we hope to release in April. We've put together five tracks, rearranged from the old Johnny and Sipho time, plus five new songs.

Will you use Savuka?

No. Different musicians. It's a different project. Savuka will probably come to an end at some point. Our drummer is now living in Canada. I had to fire one of the keyboard players. He didn't pitch up for the inauguration. He was drunk and he was involved in some unsavory stuff, just caught up in the township gangster lifestyle. So I've landed up with two original members, Keith the keyboard player and Solly the bass player. I'm looking at getting a new sound and a new vision, and starting another project altogether.

At the moment, I'm still diving into an ocean of current music and sound, both local and international. When I surface, I'll know what I like.

Anything particularly strike you lately?

I'm very attracted to rai music. I played with Khaled in France last year. I just think the rhythms and the arrangements are incredible. Killer.

Last time I saw you, you were threatening to give up music and write novels.

Well, that's also there. Sipho and I are writing a manuscript, a book about the whole Juluka period, which could threaten to turn into a movie at some point.

Sounds like you're spending a lot of time with Sipho these days.

Oh yeah. We had a very special ceremony about three months ago for my son. You know, I was made a member of Sipho's family when I was seventeen. That's more than 20 years ago. So we had a special ritual to make Jesse part of the family as well. He's six. They slaughtered a goat for him and he was incorporated into the clan. He had the gall bladder of the goat poured all over his leg and arm. He wasn't impressed. It was hard for him to understand. Afterwards, I explained it to him and he really got into it. I told him that the life of the goat would bind him to the clan so that his life could be part of the Mchunu people.

He's growing up in a country so different from the one you knew. He won't even remember the experience of apartheid.

It's no longer primary. It will just be a little halo effect in his life, whereas in mine, it was a fundamental core.

Banning Eyre writes about world music for the Boston Phoenix. Billboard, and Guitar Player. He co-authored Afropop! An Illustrated Guide to African Popular Music. Also a guitarist, he plays Zairean soukous and West African Folk in Boston-based groups.

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