Pop Star Joins South African Struggle
by Jeff Greenfield
June 25, 1990
He is a South African now touring America, bearing tales of injustice, suffering and hope.
But he is white, not black. While Nelson Mandela is a political martyr being treated as a pop star, Johnny Clegg really is a pop star, who came to politics by accident, out of a simple desire to celebrate the songs and dances of his fellow countrymen.
Clegg is lead singer and principal songwriter for a band called Sabuka Zulu for "We have arisen."
It features mostly black artists; its music blends South African and pop sounds and rhythms. Its songs range from love ballads to blunt political statements ("One man, one vote") to the chilling "Third World Child" ("Learn to speak a little bit of English... learn to walk in the shoes of a foreigner.")
What makes this band unique is that, under the laws of South Africa, it was committing an illegal act each time it set out to perform. The maliciously intricate web of apartheid rules, now being partially dismantled by the government, meant that Sabuka was breaking the Group Areas Act whether it played in downtown Johannesburg or in a Soweto club.
More time than Clegg can remember, his singing would be greeted not by cheers, but by a sudden police presence, warning him he had five minutes to close the show down.
This is what Clegg means when he says, "I didn't find politics; politics found me."
He was a 14-year-old child of middle-class parents who found himself captivated by the songs and dances of the Zulu culture. He would wander into black worker hostels those wretched shacks where men would live hundreds of miles from their families to eke out a living to listen and to watch.
It is an impulse common to countless young white Americans who found in jazz or blues or bebop or rock 'n' roll a magnetic appeal.
But even in the most segregated corners of the United States during the worst days of official racism, nothing could compare with the rigidity of South Africa's laws. The police, never having seen a young white where Johnny Clegg was visiting, were puzzled and outraged.
"If I was caught with black people," Clegg remembers, "I was the one the police felt was more responsible, since they treated blacks like children. 'What are you doing here?' they'd ask. 'I'm learning to dance,' I'd say. And they called me a 'nigger lover' or assumed I was there to buy drugs."
It wasn't just white hostility Clegg had to face. Many blacks felt suspicious about the motives of a white child of comfort and education wanting to learn the rhythms of tribal dances. They put him to rigorous tests.
"When I was learning stick dancing, I got the ---- beaten out of me for 18 months. It was as if they were pushing to see how honest I was."
Ironically, Clegg also faced obstacles put up by those fighting apartheid. Some years ago, the British musicians union tried to expel him from their ranks for breaking the boycott against performing in South Africa even though Clegg's performances were, but definition, acts of resistance.
Now he faces a very different world. He is genuinely awed by the steps taken by South Africa's President F.W. de Klerk.
He is also freer than he ever has been to perform in his own country and, by example, to demonstrate the possibility that the black and white cultures of South African just may have things to teach each other.
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