LA Times: Johnny Clegg, South African artist who fought apartheid with music, dies

South African musician Johnny Clegg championed human rights in music that blended African tradition and Western rock for more than 40 years

By RANDY LEWIS, STAFF WRITER, JULY 16, 2019 4:12 PM

South African musician Johnny Clegg, who formed one of the first rock bands with black and white musicians that performed together when apartheid was still the law of the land, has died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 66.

Clegg died at his home in Johannesburg, his manager, Roddy Quin, confirmed in a statement.

Clegg was part of a community that brought Afro pop music to a global audience in the 1980s, along with Nigeria’s King Sunny Ade, Tabu Ley Rochereau from Congo as well as Western musicians such as Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel.

Through recordings with his first band, Juluka (the Zulu word for “sweat”), which he and black musician Sipho Mchunu formed in the late 1970s, and its successor, Savuka (meaning “awakening” or “we have arisen”), Clegg wedded Zulu rhythms and lyrics to Celtic folk and Western rock and pop music in a string of albums, the most successful of which helped him build a solid following in the U.S. He made stateside tours in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

In 2017, during a respite between cancer treatments, he mounted a “Final Journey” tour through Europe and the U.S. during a period when he felt healthy enough to take on extensive travels, uncertain about what the future held for him.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen — nobody knows,” he told The Times in 2017. “But while I’m strong and able to do stuff, I wanted to do a nice, big ‘Final Journey’ tour.”

In part it was a way of connecting with the cadre of fans he’d established over nearly four decades as well as a form of therapy, despite the toll his highly kinetic live show took on him.

“But when I get onstage, something switches all those messages off,” he said.

One of Clegg’s breakthrough moments came in 1997 when his song “Dela” was featured prominently in the live-action comedy film “George of the Jungle.”

When Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison in 1990, he joined Clegg onstage during a performance of Clegg’s song “Asimbonanga,” written in protest of Mandela’s imprisonment by the ruling white government, which banned the song from radio airwaves upon its release in 1987.

Clegg subsequently performed at four AIDS benefit concerts held in Mandela’s honor and was part of the all-star lineup at a 90th birthday celebration for Mandela in London’s Hyde Park.

Yet he shied away from embracing the moniker of political activist.

“For me,” he told the Sunday Times in Britain in 1989, “a political activist is someone who has committed himself to a particular ideology. I don’t belong to any political party. I stand for human rights.”

Jonathan Paul Clegg was born June 7, 1953, in Bacup, Lancashire, England, but moved as a child to Africa with his mother, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland.

They moved first to Rhodesia (which became Zimbabwe), and then South Africa when Clegg was 6. Like many white youths in the U.S. and England who later became musicians, Clegg was captivated as a boy by the sounds he overheard whenever he was in proximity to black communities. He was initially introduced to those communities by his mother, who was a cabaret and jazz singer, and his stepfather, a journalist.

Despite the nation’s institutional segregation, Clegg often sneaked into music and dance events, running afoul of the laws and occasionally landing in jail, the first time when he was 15.

“To me, they were fun things,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1993, “things I wanted to be a part of: dancing with Africans at a migrant workers’ hostel, playing with them at night on the roofs where they live, and things I wasn’t allowed, because of the apartheid laws, to do.”

Those experiences not only later informed the music he created with Mchunu and other black musicians, but fed his companion career as a cultural anthropologist, which earned him teaching posts at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Natal.

An eloquent and educated speaker, Clegg would often combine the two careers during his concerts, enlightening audiences as to the different traditions from which the choreography and musical elements he incorporated originated.

He formed Savuka in 1985 after Juluka disbanded when Mchunu decided to stop performing to focus on his family. His key foils in the new band became percussionist and dancer Dudu Zulu and singers Mandisa Dlanga, who remained with him through the end of his performing career, and Solly Letwaba.

The political and social revolution that saw Mandela transformed from political prisoner to South Africa’s president was tumultuous. Even as there was much to celebrate, Clegg experienced ongoing tensions personally when Dudu Zulu was killed in 1992 while attempting to mediate a dispute between feuding clans. Clegg disbanded Savuka shortly thereafter, later resuming touring and recording as a solo act.

“It’s the pain of living,” Clegg told The Times shortly after Zulu’s death, as he was embarking on his latest U.S. tour. “You get the beautiful moments, you get the painful moments.”

Among the moments he delved into on his 1989 album, “Cruel, Crazy Beautiful World,” was the birth of his son Jesse, to whom he acknowledged his finite time on Earth: “It’s a cruel, crazy, beautiful world/One day when you wake up I will have to say goodbye/Goodbye/It’s your world so live in it!”

Jesse Clegg in turn has become a pop star in South Africa, working to follow in his father’s footsteps to expand his audience beyond his native land. He joined his father on his most recent European and U.S. tours, performing as a member of his band and delivering opening sets featuring his own music.

Clegg took a philosophical view strongly influenced by his associations with indigenous people into his journey with cancer in the last few years, and continued to look to his role as an artist to help guide him.

What turned out to be his final public performance came Oct. 13 on the island of Mauritius off South Africa.

“It’s just a matter of human beings making meaning,” he said in 2017. “That’s what makes great artists, what makes great painters, great choreographers — that in the time that you are given, you make connections, and those connections are manufactured. They’re not in the real world; they are in your imagination. And if you have a strong imagination, you can get over anything.”

Clegg is survived by his wife of 31 years, Jenny, and their sons Jesse and Jaron.

Johnny Clegg

Jonathan "Johnny" Clegg was born near Manchester, England in Bacup, Lancashire (or in Rochdale, sources differ) on June 7, 1953. His mother's parents were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, who had settled in Rhodesia, where his mother was born. His father was a Royal Air Force pilot.

Clegg speaks fluent Zulu, married his wife in a traditional white Christian church ceremony ­ and also followed Zulu custom, "marrying" her again after she gave birth to their son, a ritual documented on the joyful Moliva.

"It wasn't a political act or a media event," Clegg says. "It was a celebration of my son's birth with the community I grew up with."

Johnny Clegg's son, Jesse, is today a musician also.

His father left when he was a baby and his mother took him back to Rhodesia in late 1953 and he was brought up there on his grandfather's farm. Interestingly, she had been a volunteer in the War of Independence in Israel in 1948 and after Clegg Senior left them, she first made aliyah (immigrated) to Israel with baby Jonathan, but soon left to return to her parents farm.

An important figure in South African music, he is sometimes called "The White Zulu". Clegg has recorded and performed with his bands Juluka and Savuka, with songs that mix Zulu with English lyrics, and African with various Western European (such as Celtic) music styles. He may be best known outside of South Africa for the song he wrote with his band Juluku, Asimbonanga (Mandela), which was on their 1987 album Universal Men and was popularized by Joan Baez.

Clegg learned Ndebele from the farm labourers on his grandparents' farm. When his mother moved to Johannesburg to work as a nightclub singer, he became interested in Zulu music and dance.

Charlie Mzale, from Kwazulu, became his teacher. "One evening my mother sent me out to do some shopping and I met Charlie, playing guitar on the corner. His skill was so amazing, I just asked him right out if he would be my teacher." He also introduced Clegg to the migrant workers' hostels where he was drawn to Zulu dance. "The hostel really came to life at weekends. That's when everybody would drink huge quantities of alcohol, listen to music, dance and fight. On Sundays there were contests between various Zulu dance teams." Clegg was only 14 or 15 years old and defied police and joined one of the hostels' dance teams and took part in the contests. During this time, his mother enrolled him in a Zulu language course at the University of Johannesburg.

Clegg also spent ten years as a student and teacher of anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. In his first year, he studied social anthropology, politics, Zulu (where all the students were white and the lecturers were black), and phonetics and linguistics, which he dropped for English. “Zulu was the only one I passed,” he said in a recent interview. In 1971, he was the only white person in South Africa to write Zulu as a matric subject, passing
with ease.

He formed the first prominent racially mixed South African band, Juluka, with gardener and Zulu musician Sipho Mchunu during the time of apartheid. It was illegal for racially mixed bands to perform in South Africa, so their first album Universal Men received no official radio air play, but it became a word-of-mouth hit.

Clegg spoke about the early days of Juluka in Jeremy Marre’s film Rhythm of Resistance:

"Originally, it was very difficult to play together in public, the laws being as they are: a black and a white not being allowed to play on a stage, or to a mixed audience. Things are starting to ease up slowly. … We’ve got a few sort of little hidden venues where everybody can come together and enjoy each others’ music." In an interview with Chris Stapleton that appeared in African All-Stars: The Pop Music of a Continent, Clegg reflected on the group’s success. "Juluka appeared at a time when black people were buying up records by the [American pop-soul group the] O’Jays in the hundreds and thousands. … We went back to our roots. A cult fashion began, with people playing roots music. You had something similar in 1970, and again in 1976 with the black-consciousness movement, an attempt to recapture and to stress African roots and origins."

Albums and CDs

• Universal Men 1979 (with Juluka)
• Third World Child 1987 (with Savuka)
• One Life 2007
• Human 2010

"Impi" - Johnny Clegg & Savuka

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0edeDy5yZ-s

Chorus:

Impi! wo nans impi iyeza (A battle regiment is coming)

Obani bengathinta amabhubesi? (Who can touch the lions?)

All along the river Chelmsford's army lay asleep

Come to crush the children of Mageba

Come to exact the realm's price for peace

And in the morning as they saddled up to ride

Their eyes shone with the fire and the steel

The general told them of the task that lay ahead

To bring the people of the sky to heel

Chorus

Mud and sweat on polished leather

Warm rain seeping to the bone

They rode through the season's wet weather

Straining for a glimpse of the foe

Hopeless battalion destined to die

Broken by the benders of kings

Vainglorious general and Victorian pride

Would cost him and eight hundred men their lives

Chorus

They came to the side of the mountain

Scouts rode out to spy the land

Even as the realm's soldiers lay resting

Mageba's forces were at hand

And by the evening the vultures were wheeling

Above the ruins where the fallen lay

An ancient song as old as the ashes

Echoed as Mageba's warriors marched away

Chorus

"Scatterlings Of Africa - Johnny Clegg & Savuka

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtO5d5WKo-M

Copper sun sinking low

Scatterlings and fugitives

Hooded eyes and weary brows

Seek refuge in the night

Chorus

They are the scatterlings of Africa

Each uprooted one

On the road to Phelamanga

Where the world began

I love the scatterlings of Africa

Each and every one

In their hearts a burning hunger

Beneath the copper sun

Ancient bones from Olduvai

Echoes of the very first cry

"Who made me here and why

Beneath the copper sun?"

African idea

African idea

Make the future clear

Make the future clear

Chorus.....

And we are the scatterlings of Africa

Both you and I

We are on the road to Phelamanga

Beneath a copper sky

And we are the scatterlings of Africa

On a journey to the stars

Far below, we leave forever

Dreams of what we were

Source

• Liner notes from the CD Johnny Clegg & Sipho Mchunu (Duo Juluka)/Ladysmith Black Mambazo
• Wikipedia article on Johnny Clegg
• Johnny Clegg: A South African Story By Robyn Sassen in Pop Matters.
• WITS Review, July 2008 Interview with Johnny Clegg, his mother and cousin upon the occasion of his receiving an honorary doctorate in music.
• answers.com Johnny Clegg
• Stars of David: rock'n'roll's Jewish stories by Scott R. Benarde. UPNE, 2003.

ג'ונתן ג'וני קלג (7 June 1953 – 16 July 2019) היה מוסיקאי, זמר ורקדן וממובילי המחאה נגד האפרטהייד בדרום אפריקה. אין בויקיפדיה דף בעברית עליו וגם לא מצאתי מידע אחר בעברית עליו.