Still Grazing

by Hugh Masikela

  The Graceland revue opened in Germany, and for the next nine months we toured the world, playing to sold-out audiences all over Europe and the United States. Most of these people were totally ignorant of the atrocities of apartheid, and this show not only gave them the awareness, but inspired them enough to begin questioning their country’s association with the South African regime and demanding that all ties with that country be terminated. Furthermore, it helped to escalate the number of antiapartheid songs being recorded by the international music community in every corner of the world. After Graceland, it became the rule rather than the exception for every recording artist to have at least one Mandela or antiapartheid song on his or her album, without any coercion. However, pockets of activists picketed in front of many of the venues we played in the U.S.A. and the United Kingdom, claiming that the entire Graceland entourage had sold out on the principle of the cultural boycott against South Africa because Paul Simon had made a recording in that country. The cultural boycott, as we knew it, had always focused on opposing international artists performing in South Africa, but nothing had ever been said about someone who went there to record with the country’s artists. Malcolm McLaren had a huge hit with “Double Dutch,” which he had recorded the previous year in Johannesburg to nary a peep by the activist community.

  The English antiapartheid movement had even gone to the extent of banning South African artists from performing in the United Kingdom, with the hope of extending it to the rest of the world. This I found absolutely absurd. The international media jumped into the fray and began to editorialize vehemently against Graceland. Many press conferences took place, and interviews where we had very unpleasant exchanges with journalists. I had no doubt that our shows helped to raise the awareness of millions of people who had never heard of apartheid. The simple fact is that the concerts directed attention to South Africa’s oppressed millions and to the wide array of world-class talent that it was unable to promote because of the isolation, resulting from the hideous system of apartheid.

  I had furious exchanges with white South African journalists, who were the most accusatory about the tour; meanwhile, they lived privileged lives back home at the expense of the oppressed millions whose interests they claimed to be protecting. Sadly, one of my bitterest arguments was with Bishop Trevor Huddleston. He believed that artists from abroad should not perform in South Africa, nor should South African artists perform abroad. “Father,” I argued, “these artists are not able to get the recognition they deserve back home. By performing overseas they get a chance to enhance their careers and reach larger and more diverse audiences. If they are prevented from performing abroad, you are subjecting them to further oppression and poverty back home. If that makes political sense to you and your colleagues who believe in this kind of policy, then all of you should honestly ask yourselves if some of your initiatives are justifiable.”

  Huddleston only replied, “Well, creature, we can’t make any exceptions. We must stick to our principles.”

  Fortunately, our difference of opinion did not destroy our long-established friendship.

  The irony, however, is that four years later, when Paul Simon did some concerts in South Africa and Nelson Mandela hosted a reception for him, many of the people who had headed the picket lines against the Graceland show were the very ones who were now escorting Paul to the podium where Mandela was awaiting him with open arms. In the process, these “bodyguards” were rudely pushing us out of the way.

  At the end of the tour, Mbongeni arrived in New York with the cast of Sarafina after a long and successful run at Johannesburg’s famed Market Theatre. We began six weeks of rehearsals and previews, during which time Mbongeni and I spent many nights in the bar of the Mayfair Hotel on Central Park West, where we were staying with the cast. We would guzzle down triple cognacs with beer chasers till the bar closed at four in the morning. Despite our nightly ritual, and after numerous revisions, the musical opened to rave reviews at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater. We were sold out through the summer of 1988, and owing to popular demand, we moved to the Cort Theatre at Broadway and 48th Street. By now the musical was the talk of the town. Steve Backer, who had overseen the Sarafina soundtrack cast album recording, listened to some recordings I had done on my own with Morris Goldberg on saxophone, Bakithi Khumalo on bass, Tony Cedras on keyboards, Damon Duewhite on drums, John Selolwane on guitar, and Francis Fuster on percussion. Named Uptownship, the album’s highlight was a cover of the Kenny Gamble–Leon Huff composition “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” with Morris Goldberg and me playing the original vocal melody to Branice McKenzie’s improvised countermelody sung with breathtaking soul. The video for this song helped catapult the album into the top of the jazz charts in the states. “Uptownship,” the title song, was a lilting mbhaqanga groove based on the feel of the famous “Skokiaan” that I had done with Herb Alpert ten years earlier. On the background vocals, we featured singers from the cast of Sarafina.

  Uptownship is a very popular album to this day. Sarafina’s run on Broadway over two and a half years brought out a wonderful mixed audience of school kids, religious groups, tourists, and a very large African-American representation. The crowds laughed and cried and stood up to dance in the aisles when the young actors sang the finale of “Freedom Is Coming, Tomorrow.” The show went on to tour the United States for two years before the cast returned home. By the time the youngest members, who had arrived in New York at age sixteen, finally returned to South Africa in 1992, many of them were over twenty-one. Having taken high school tutorial courses during the run of the show in America, several of the cast members had graduated with high marks and went on to pursue higher education on their return home. Several of the more frugal and business-minded cast members had managed to save substantial amounts of money, enough to buy or build fine homes for their families. Almost the entire cast of Sarafina came from extremely poor households. A second company of the show opened in Vienna, Austria, two years after the Lincoln Center debut, and went on to tour Europe very successfully until 1991. A film starring Whoopi Goldberg, Miriam Makeba, and Leleti Khumalo, who had originated the title role of Sarafina, was released around 1993 to favorable reviews internationally. Unlike the stage version, the film was not a box-office smash but was still a success.

  During the Broadway run of Sarafina, Jabu and I terminated our London residence and she returned to New York, where we acquired a very beautiful little town house up the street from City College on Manhattan’s famed Sugar Hill. We also purchased a small farm with a new house outside Margaretville in upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains. I loved it up there and began to spend a great deal of time composing and writing on the farm. The downside was that I had to break up Kalahari, because I couldn’t afford to bring them to America.

  Guitarist John Selolwane stayed on in London and continued to work with Paul Simon from time to time. Rhythm guitarist Banjo Mosele registered at Goldsmith College of Music to further his studies. He eventually formed a group called Bushmen Don’t Surf. Bassist Aubrey Oaki married a Russian musician and disappeared into London’s punk community. Tsepo Tshola recruited his old partner Frank Leepa to London and they formed Sankomota, a group that would later become extremely successful back in South Africa. Pianist Bheki Mseleku began to carve out a niche for himself as an international jazz icon. Francis Fuster continued to play with me in the new band I put together with Tony Cedras on keyboards, Morris Goldberg on sax, Damon Duewhite on drums, and Chulo on bass, who was soon replaced by Bakithi Khumalo and Lawrence Matshiza on guitar.

  Life was good, except my cocaine, booze, and womanizing had kicked in again. Jabu and I discussed the possibility of my going for substance abuse recovery because I was in the habit of disappearing from time to time, only to return after a few days from a booze, sex, and cocaine binge. But somehow she would always manage to accept my lies after having worried hysterically about my whereabouts, sometimes going to the extent of reporting my disappearance to
the police. I believe that had I gone into a sanitarium for rehabilitation, Jabu and I would have had a very successful life together and probably resolved her resentment against most members of my family. I am convinced that one of the reasons this did not happen was that we drank together a lot, and she did not hold her drink too well. Her guilt about her own love for drinking made it difficult for her to insist that I do something about my addiction. In hindsight, my selfishness, greed, and self-indulgence were the reasons we were not able to salvage what was potentially a wonderful relationship.

  Sarafina was nominated for five Tony awards, but we did not win any, and despite its box office success, offstage the musical had its problems. The cast was thrown out of the Mayfair Hotel because of their riotous behavior. They played their new stereo sets at peak volume with their doors open and their televisions turned up loud while they visited one another’s rooms late at night and raced up and down the corridors and emergency exits, banging on doors, talking and laughing aloud, screaming on the telephone when calling home, and generally partying all night. These were young kids, fresh from South Africa’s troubled townships. Maintaining any kind of discipline was almost impossible. They were discovering a new world that most of them found wild and exciting. The cast was moved to the Hotel Esplanade on West End Avenue. The mayhem continued.

  We had always warned the kids never to go into Central Park at night. One Monday evening, Duma Ndlovu, who was now a resident in New York after having graduated from Hunter College, had a party at his Harlem residence for the cast. He was helping with public relations matters for the show. This was a night off, and after the party, five of the girls decided to walk through the park from 100th Street. They were chased for about thirty blocks by would-be muggers and came running into the hotel lobby with their shoes in their hands, dripping with sweat and terror-stricken. Another time I had to stop a fight between two girls as the curtain was about to go up. They were fighting over a boy who was two-timing them. We sent two boys home for coming to the show drunk and unable to perform. One girl became pregnant by one of the boys, and we had to send them home. The problems were endless. Many of the cast members’ telephone bills were astronomical because they called home every day and often asked the people on the other end to hold on while they checked on their pots on the kitchen stove or went to fetch someone else from another room to come and talk on the telephone. The damage control Mali, the company manager, and I had to apply was nerve-racking. Mbongeni was constantly shuttling between the two companies and the two of us literally had to babysit the New York cast. The European one was, by contrast, extremely well-behaved.

  In 1989 I rejoined Paul Simon for a second Graceland tour that took us to France, Spain, Australia, Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, and many parts of the United States we had not touched before. The U.S. portion of the tour was dedicated to raising funds for the poor in each city, for child education in South Africa, and for a mobile soup kitchen, which Paul Simon still continues up to this day. At Madison Square Garden, Paul Simon handed over a check for more than a quarter of a million dollars to South Africa’s great antiapartheid activist cleric, Reverend Alan Boesak, who had been sent to accept it on his behalf by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Boesak gave a rousing speech on receiving the check, prompting the entire twenty thousand-plus audience to give him a standing ovation. My nephew Mabusha was one of the road managers on the original tour. Paul invited Selema on the second leg. He came to like him a lot and thought that he had a very positive influence on his own son, Harper Simon.

  We found Russia to be surprisingly racist. In Moscow we stayed at the Hotel Rossiya, right next to the Kremlin. One afternoon, Francis Fuster, Bakithi Khumalo, and I planned to visit Patrice Lumumba University, which Nikita Khrushchev’s regime had established for the education of African students. When we told the taxi driver where we wished to go, he said, “Oh, you want to go to ze zoo, hey!” I replied, “No, we want to go to Patrice Lumumba University.”

  “Yes, the driver repeated, “Zat is ze zoo!” A scuffle ensued as we disembarked from the cab and confronted the driver over the insult. His fellow drivers sided with him. We eventually found a friendly driver who explained to us that many Russians called the institution “the zoo” because they considered Africans to be from the jungle. At the school, where we visited my niece Zanele Ngakane, students told us that some of the male African students had been murdered because they were dating Russian girls. The maid in the hotel refused to clean my suite, claiming that she could never work for a black man. Miriam and Paul’s CD players, CDs, and clothing were stolen from their VIP suites. On departure, some of the porters at the airport refused to carry our bags and equipment, and the airport staff treated us like shit. For the first time during my thirty years in exile, I preferred to be in apartheid South Africa than in racist Russia. It was the worst bigotry I had ever encountered.

  On Sunday, February 11, 1990, Jabu and I were sitting in our upstairs bedroom in our Harlem town house watching television with baited breath when Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison outside Cape Town. With tear-filled eyes we watched the gray-haired legend strut his stuff next to his wife, Winnie, their fists almost touching the sky. The parade in downtown Cape Town was sardine-can tight, people jammed shoulder-to-shoulder waiting to hear Mandela’s first public words in twenty-seven years. The crowd roared when he saluted them. The old man asked us to forgive but not to forget, to embrace our ex-oppressors, to reconcile, and to refrain from burning the country down. For some of us it was hard to digest what he was asking. He told us that his release and that of his colleagues was our victory. South Africa would never be the same. It was a new dawn. Some skeptics like me were perplexed, but our love for Mandela and his colleagues was persuasive enough to prevent any hotheaded, emotional, destructive activity. We have lived not to regret it.

  Two months later Barbara and Miriam called me and said they were in Johannesburg. I thought they were joking. Barbara said, “Hugh, go to the South African embassy and have them give you a visa in your Ghana passport. Come home, boy!”

  I was pleasantly dumbfounded. I soon got a call from Nelson Mandela. He was in Tokyo. “Hugh,” he said, “I want you to please speak to your grandmother and father on my behalf. Sincerely apologize to them for the fact they will not be seeing very much of Barbara in the next four years. I cannot function without her assistance, and our schedule is going to be extremely hectic to say the least. I am appealing to you, as the head of your family, to do this for me.” Barbara headed a staff of five women in Mandela’s office charged with managing his life during this transitional period. As chief of staff, she also traveled with him. In the months following his release, Mandela toured the world to a tumultuous universal reception such as no statesman in history had ever seen.

  That September, after thirty years, I returned to the land of my birth. After I landed and disembarked, it took forty-five minutes for the immigration officer in charge of returning exiles to clear me through customs. She had gone on her morning tea break. During my wait, I became afraid that perhaps something sinister was afoot. Outside, my father, sisters, distant relatives, old friends, and reporters were all waiting for me to emerge. When I came out, a chorus of roars and ululations pierced the air.

  Mbongeni Ngema had arranged for a welcoming party at the home of his friend Sol Pienaar, a wealthy French Afrikaner heir who was very close to the ANC leadership. It was a very strange time in South Africa. There was a great deal of manipulated political conflict in the country, which had obviously arisen from major dissatisfaction with the prospect of change by members of the white right wing, Afrikaner racist groups, and the homeland governing establishments of the artificially self-ruling autonomous regions of Venda, Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, and Kwa-Zulu, headed by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Lucas Mangope, Gabriel Ramushwana, and Oupa Gqozo. There were frequent incursions by Inkatha Freedom Party warriors into areas purported to be ANC strongholds, where the killings of many innocent people were carr
ied out. Snipers were scattered around many townships. Death squads attacked commuter trains and riddled the coaches with machine-gun fire, often leaving many Africans dead.

  Feeling that it was not safe for me to stay at my father’s house because of the ongoing clashes between ANC cadres and Inkatha Freedom Party warriors, snipers of mysterious identity, and other dangerous elements, Julius Mdluli and Barbara arranged for me to stay at Jiji Mbere’s home in Westcliff, one of Johannesburg’s luxurious suburbs. My father and stepmother were very disappointed because they had hoped that I would stay with them. But they understood. Julius chauffeured me where I needed to go and helped reorient me to the country of my birth. We went to see many childhood friends and relatives, especially in Soweto and Alexandra townships.

  It was both wonderful and increasingly sad to be back home. The population had quadrupled. The townships were overpopulated. The air was filled with violence and fear. Black militants were murdering whites. White racists were murdering Africans. Political gangs were at each other’s throats. Hundreds of people were dying daily during these conflicts as the unbanned political groups hunkered down in negotiations with the government of F. W. De Klerk to discuss the future of South Africa. It was a tense and unpredictable time. The disenfranchised in most of the townships and rural areas lived in abject poverty compared with the opulent white wealth that surrounded them. Poor white folks presented a strange irony in the face of so much privilege. They harbored deep hatred for Africans, and were easily manipulated by their racist leaders. Another group that hated Africans was the white immigrant Portuguese community, which had been forced to abandon their ill-gotten comforts in Angola and Mozambique when the new democratic dispensations were put into place there. The former Rhodesian right-wing community that had fled Zimbabwe for the same reasons was similarly hate-filled. What must have pleased these two types to no end was the ongoing government-manipulated black-on-black violence that was unfolding before their eyes every day. It was enough for them to justify their age-old belief that Africans were incapable of governing anything.