By the time the director general gave me what he considered wonderful news, the majority of the leading artists had taken alternative engagements because they had grown weary of awaiting confirmation from us. What followed was a nightmare. We had to renegotiate with all of those artists and get them to cancel their confirmed engagements, so most of them had to be paid double or more of our original offers because they had to pay cancellation fees to their would-be promoters. Our budget ended up double its original amount.
Before this episode, I liaised with the maintenance department. Most of them were Africans, and their complaint was that their working conditions were horrendous. No one cared about their welfare, and I was the very first director ever to visit the basement and address their concerns. After promising to improve their lot and be an advocate for most of their crucial demands, I personally paid the theater’s cafeteria for a catered lunch for the entire maintenance staff. That evening I was told that ninety percent of them had been victims of food poisoning. They had been fed old meat and contracted botulism. I was furious, and raised hell. I also found out that the downstairs toilets for the staff had a special locked toilet for the whites. That toilet was out of bounds for African workers. When I raised it with the State Theatre’s executive director, he said to me, “Hugh, things have to change gradually, you know. No place is going to be perfect overnight.”
That was when I realized that even though things had changed drastically on the surface, and South Africa appeared to be a wonderful miracle in the eyes of the rest of the world, we were a long way from freedom and justice. It was going to take many generations for the majority of whites to accept reality, and for transformation to trickle down to the poor, unskilled, formerly oppressed millions. When the end of my one-year contract approached, I didn’t even bother to attempt to apply for an extension. It seemed absolutely pointless. I didn’t want to waste my time fighting the old establishment from the inside.
Nonetheless, during my short tenure I helped bring in African performers such as Rebecca Malope, Brenda Fassie, Bayete, and Don Laka, all of whom were never allowed to showcase their talents there during the apartheid years. With the help of stellar promoter Peter Tladi, we were able to bring an African character to the State Theatre, which had previously been a white preserve. My office helped organize the 1996 independence celebrations. In spite of slow-moving bureaucracy and a lot of red tape, we were able to stage a festival featuring just about all of South Africa’s leading artists. A cultural potpourri of traditional groups representing all ethnic groups marched and danced through Pretoria’s streets and parks. There were stage plays and state banquets hosted by Nelson Mandela and Vice-President Thabo Mbeki.
Early in 1995, with initiatives by the foreign affairs departments of France and our newly democratic country, Barbara organized a South African exposition in Paris, which included a large musical company that I was part of. On my return to South Africa, I found that my father’s health had deteriorated so much that he had to be hospitalized. He was released after a week, but had to remain in bed at his home in Sharpeville, where he had a relapse. I brought him and my stepmother to stay in my house so that he could have access to better medical attention. Pascal Ngakane, who had been chief medical officer of Lesotho, was now heading Johannesburg Hospital. I had him come and examine my father, and he told me afterward that it was all over. Thomas Masekela maintained his wonderful sense of humor right to the very end. He said to me, “Boy, do you mind if I linger around for the next two weeks?”
“Papa,” I replied, “I want you to get better and get your health back.”
“No, boy, it’s all over. I’m crumbling. There’s no chance. However, let me tell you I have never had so much attention in my entire life.” Then he laughed his crazy, infectious laugh.
After a week, Pascal transferred him to Johannesburg Hospital. The last time I saw him, he said to me, “Make sure you bury me quickly. You may be famous, but I’m very well known and if you wait too long, you will not be able to afford my funeral because of the crowds.” Then he laughed from deep down inside.
On April 27, he passed away. Barbara came from Paris to see him off and visited with him in the hospital before his last breath. People came from all over southern Africa to bid farewell to Tom. The speakers told us about a very generous, hard-working, dedicated, and funny community worker, who was admired and loved by all. At the funeral my cousin Ramapolo Ramokgopa, who is the premier praise-singer of our clan, came down from Pietersburg at my request and recited Thomas Selema’s praises from the time his coffin was taken from the house to church, and from the church to Sharpeville’s gigantic reception hall, which was filled to the rafters. There I played an old folk holler on my flugelhorn for the old man in between speeches. At the graveside, as the crowds were leaving, I played again while Ramapolo was reciting. Our duet was a memorable send-off for a great soldier of South Africa’s poor masses and elite alike. For many days after his burial, which was attended by thousands of mourners, people called to scold me for not letting them know in time about my father’s passing. They called from as far away as Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Botswana, Mozambique, Malawi, Europe, and America, and all over South Africa. Thomas was right. The street his house was on and the surrounding blocks were all impassable from the congestion of cars, which were parked side by side, delivering the thousands who had come to say good-bye to him. If we had waited another three days, Sharpeville would have been inaccessible.
Sony Records opened for business in South Africa and attempted to change the playing field by appointing an African manager of business affairs, Lazzie Serobe, and hiring Lindelani Mkhize as head of the artist and repertoire department. This was history in the making. Lindelani and Lazzie signed me as one of their first artists on the label. At the time I was midway into recording an album with the talented Cedric Samson as producer. This was during the period when I was seriously mixing business with pleasure. We stayed ripped during the making of Notes of Life, and I was doing it in my spare time, away from my job at the State Theatre and concert engagements. Although the results were good, Notes of Life did not prove to be a successful album, in spite of Sony’s relentless efforts at promoting and marketing it. Eight years later, I doubt very much if it has reached gold status in South Africa. A dear friend of mine, South African filmmaker Jo Menell, who has lived abroad in England, then America, since the mid-1950s, had just completed a documentary called Mandela and asked me to do the soundtrack music for most of it. Unable to oblige him because of the little time I had available, I introduced him to Cedric, who did a magnificent job and had me play on the main songs of the soundtrack. Mandela was expected to win an Oscar for best documentary and best soundtrack. Relations between Cedric and me had soured considerably after he demanded that my name be removed as co-composer of some of the music. At the Oscars, Mandela was edged out by When We Were Kings, the documentary about the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle festival, for which Stewart and I had chosen director Leon Gast and raised the money for the music and film crews from Steve Tolbert in Liberia. It was a cruel paradox that Leon had patiently outwaited the statute of limitations and gone on to score a big hit with a film that Don King had put a court injunction on after Stewart and I refused to succumb to his demands for an additional ten percent for the rights to film it, more than twenty years earlier. I have never seen either film, though Leon and I have remained friends.
Later that year, with recommendations from Komlah Amoaku and Korkor Amartefio, the directors of the National Theater, the Arts Critics and Reviewers Association of Ghana voted to award me the Music Star of Africa prize. When I arrived at the Tulip Hotel in Accra, there was a message from Elinam Cofie, the girl I had found crying at the Paris Airport in 1977. She had left a message with her phone number and a request to call her. I had last seen Elinam in 1988 at Shelley’s Manne Hole, in Hollywood, where I was appearing with some of the members from the Graceland band. At that time she was living with her sister Yealla, a
fter her divorce from a four-year marriage that had produced two beautiful sons. She gave me her phone number and asked me to call her, saying, “I suppose you won’t be so interested in me anymore because I’m old and divorced now. Anyway, call me and let’s get together for a drink or a meal. Promise?” I never did call that time—I was probably too high or drunk to remember.
This time I invited Elinam to lunch at the Tulip Hotel’s poolside, and she agreed to bring her two boys with her to meet me. We had a wonderful afternoon. Her two sons brought their swimsuits and Elinam watched the three of us frolicking in the water from the poolside. Patrick and Adam were eight and ten years old. Although I saw Elinam every day during my week-long stay, I didn’t think she might be interested in me because she only demonstrated friendship, nothing more. I was invited back to Ghana in December for the annual children’s festival, Kiddafest, where I performed with the famous Winneba Youth Choir. My old friends Francis Fuster and Okyerema Asante were both living in Ghana and helped me put a great band together for the performance. Again I saw a lot of Elinam. We became even closer and spent a lot of time together.
The problem was I was still drinking, snorting, and smoking heavily. I was very reluctant to start anything with her because she was such a good and beautiful person and I knew I was absolutely bad for her—she had a good soul that I was afraid of damaging. “When are you going to invite me to South Africa? What are you afraid of?” she kept asking, but I kept putting her off. I began to sleep only every other night, partying with several different women, snorting up ounces of cocaine, drinking cognac like a buccaneer, and smoking pound after pound of marijuana. I had finally come back home and was—after a million women—given another chance at love, but I was once again self-destructing. I didn’t know what to do.
My sister Elaine together with my nieces and nephews had helped me a great deal to raise Pula, who was not a shy little girl anymore. Confident, talkative, and funny, she had developed a loud, deep voice and a boisterous laugh. Having graduated from Phuthing, Pula was now attending Damelin College in Central Johannesburg to help raise her grades for university entrance. Pula moved in with me and Mama Johannah Mathibela, who had been my part-time housekeeper at my apartment. Although Pula had her own room in the house, she was obviously getting disturbed by all the commotion going on because of my partying. Later, Ryan, Sybil’s oldest teenage son, also came to stay with me and I began spending more of my nights at the homes of the women I partied with. I’d come home in the mornings or late afternoons to wash, change clothes, and eat a little, but I tried to keep my debauchery far away from my nephew and my daughter. Pula and I had become friends, and although she was not saying it, I knew that both she and Mama Johannah were becoming troubled by my reckless behavior.
As time went on, Pula and I started drifting apart. She had been leaving the house every morning to go to school—or so I thought. One day I went to Damelin College to pay her overdue school fees, but the principal told me that the school owed me money because Pula hadn’t been to school in months. Mama Johannah was a spiritual leader of the Zion Christian Church, yet she tolerated my madness. She knew all the women and some of the dealers who frequented 49 Honey Street, but she kept my secrets. She prayed a lot for me, laughed sadly at my follies, and tried her best to hide what was happening around our home from unsuspecting neighbors, visitors, and my relatives. However, she was expressing some of her concerns to Barbara, who obviously realized that the house was not as she had left it when she departed for Paris, even though we spruced up the place before her arrivals.
By 1997 I was really drowning. Since my return to South Africa, I had been invited to theater openings and award nights, premiers, weddings, and funerals, which I had either missed or arrived late for, or had gone to the wrong place because I was either scoring, waiting for my dealer, or recovering from the night before. I’d often wake up with strangers in my house or in my bed. On many occasions I had to come up with excuses and even blatant lies for postponing appointments or not showing up for rehearsals. I cannot recall how many times I drove women home in the morning, in peak traffic or stormy weather, high as a kite, hoping that no one would recognize me. Many people would roll down their car windows and yell, “Bra Hugh, where are you going this time of the morning?” Embarrassed, all I could do was muster a half-baked smile and explain that I was on my way to an early business meeting, rushing to the airport, or returning from an all-night recording session to drop off the background vocal singers who were half-asleep in my car. Having given Mama Johannah the day off, I would be back in bed by nine with a mind full of airtight excuses. I would then cancel meetings and appointments. Most people would believe me and understand, but the musicians I was playing with were getting tired of my lies.
Stewart, Chuck, and Johny Stirling had all been through substance-abuse therapy and were now clean for over ten years. They attempted to persuade me to do likewise, but I was totally deaf to their pleas. They were urging me to accept assistance from the Musician’s Assistance Program (MAP) based in Los Angeles, which was prepared to lend me money to enter rehabilitation at a center in England that Johny Stirling was recommending, but I was in another world. They called Barbara in Paris to voice their concerns about my condition and state of mind. I wasn’t listening. I thought I could quit on my own, and just like so many other addicts, I was reluctant to admit that I had finally hit rock bottom. Johny Stirling had sent me a registered letter from London in which he pleaded with me to lay everything down and submit to rehabilitation before it was too late.
In July, Barbara took me on a two-week vacation to Mauritius with her young son, named Selema like my own son. She urged me to submit to treatment, and I finally agreed. We called Johny from our Indian Ocean villa, and he began arrangements for me to be admitted to Clouds House, a facility for drug and alcohol abuse recovery and therapy. Stewart and Chuck coordinated with the Musician’s Assistance Program office in Los Angeles to guarantee Clouds House that my expenses would be taken care of by MAP.
I returned to Johannesburg at the beginning of August to fulfill concert and club engagements. Barbara, Stewart, and Johny had hoped I would go straight to England from Mauritius, but I had some debts to clear up and wanted to wait until my divorce from Jabu was final.
Sensing, perhaps, that I had changed my mind, Barbara wrote me a scathing letter, in which she said, “I don’t know you anymore. You have deprived me of your friendship. You have stolen my brother. You were my first friend and only brother. I will have nothing to do with you anymore.” I was ashamed and shattered. At the beginning of September I received a tearful phone call from Stewart, begging me to drop everything and get to England for treatment. He also canceled me out of his life.
I felt like shit, but sank even lower.
Sony Records was very upset at this time because I had been missing many radio, television, newspaper, and magazine interviews that were crucial to the sales of my new album, Black to the Future. Following the dismal sales generated from my previous album, Notes of Life, Sony had high hopes for this project. It had already sold more than four times as many units as Notes of Life, and they wanted it to go through the roof. My lack of cooperation had them considering dropping me. Don Laka, my producer, was ecstatic over the sales of Black to the Future, and just itching to go into the studio with me for a follow-up album.
I had recently taken a business trip to Ghana, and was very excited about the possibility of hooking up with Elinam. However, when I arrived in Accra, our mutual friend Edward Akufo-Addo, who arranged accommodations and business appointments for me, informed me that she was visiting her sister Yealla in Los Angeles. I was disappointed. I left a letter for her with Edward, in which I asked her to consider spending the rest of her life with me.
On my return to Johannesburg, I jumped back into my life of debauchery with even more gusto, for hours on end and days into nights, frustrated, lonely, unhappy, and directionless. My nightclub, Hugh Masekela’s J&B Joint, close
d down after my partners and investors realized that I was a very bad risk and they were losing a lot of money.
On December 4, 1997, my lawyer, Mncedisi Ndlovu, accompanied me to the Johannesburg Supreme Court, where I signed my final divorce decree documents before a judge. A dark cloud lifted, and so did what seemed like a very heavy weight off my drug- and alcohol-weary shoulders. I called Johny Stirling to tell him that I would be arriving in London on December 16, ready to enter Clouds House. He was absolutely elated, even though his voice betrayed a bit of disbelief, which was understandable, given my history. Mabusha had recently returned from the United States to settle permanently in South Africa. He was living with me, now thirty-two years old and working as my band manager. Pula, who had disappeared for a few months and was secretly living with Monde Twala, her future husband, had also come back to live with us. My nephew Ryan was now living in a Catholic boardinghouse in Springs, and going to a technical college there.
I had one more gig before I left: December 13 at Moretele Park in Pretoria’s Mamelodi Township. There must have been close to twenty thousand people at the Moretele Park Festival on that Sunday. Sibongile Khumalo, who was my broadcasting partner on a Sunday radio show and one of South Africa’s top jazz and opera divas, was also performing. After our radio show that morning, our last one together, I told Sibongile that I would be leaving for substance-abuse recovery in England. She was so happy for me that she jumped up and down for joy, shrieking with joy and relief. It started raining like hell just as Sibongile finished her performance. The twenty thousand people who had waited for me all day didn’t care. The rain seemed like liquid sunshine to these folks, the culmination of a whole day of listening to some of South Africa’s greatest artists. I closed the show by wishing everyone a joyous festive season, and exited stage left as the rain kept pouring down.
Still Grazing Page 49
