The Price of Passion
Johnny Clegg and his Zulu-influenced music survived tire slashings, tear gas and the forces of repression. Sometimes rock 'n' roll really does mean freedom. Johnny Clegg was just 15 when he got busted for the first time. His crime? A passion for Zulu music, the sort to be found in the black bars of Johannesburg where Clegg, a white South African, liked to hang out and where the authorities most decidedly did not want him to be.
In the 25 years since then, Clegg has paid dearly for his musical tastes. The police have broken up his concerts with tear gas, his tires have been slashed and he has been arrested repeatedly. And because of the Catch-22 that makes all South Africans pariahs no matter what their race or political sympathies Clegg has also suffered at the hands of the anti-apartheid movement. Though he has been ritually initiated by three Zulu clans, he was expelled from the British Musicians' Union for continuing to perform in South Africa and was banned from playing at "Freedomfest," the 1988 tribute to Nelson Mandela at London's Wembley Stadium, despite Winnie Mandela's pleas that he be included.
If the illogic of that treatment gave Clegg a feeling of disorientation, it would not have been the first time he felt that way. He was born in England, the son of a British father and a Lithuanian mother. Clegg's parents divorced when he was a baby, and he moved with his mother first to Rhodesia and then, when he was six, to South Africa. His first instrument was a guitar, his first teacher the black janitor whose playing turned him on to Zulu music in 1968. Two years later, at the age of 17, Clegg joined forces with a Zulu migrant worker named Sipho Mchunu in a band that eventually came to be known as Juluka. After Juluka broke up in 1985 Clegg formed another partnership, this time with Dudu Zulu. They called their mixed-race band Savuka, which in Zulu means "we have arisen."
Heat, Dust and Dreams is Clegg's fourth album
with Savuka, and it is dedicated to Dudu Zulu, who died
in 1992 in a street fight. With its surging blend of African
and Western instruments, the music is defiantly political but
never somber. "Although I come from a country characterized
by great turmoil," Clegg says, "it's also a culture
that knows how to enjoy itself, to dance, hang easy and freewheel
when things get impossible."
Source and author unknown.
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