Trumpeter, singer and composer Hugh Ramopolo Masekela,
commonly and affectionately known as Bra Hugh, is the first of three musicians
to be featured on 21 Icons South Africa. He graces the screen with his
trademark wit, philosophical depth and innate talent for storytelling tomorrow (September
29) on SABC3 at 18h57.
A two-time Grammy award nominee, Masekela left South Africa
shortly after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 to pursue music studies in the
UK and at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, US. He received enormous
assistance from another South African musical icon, the late Miriam Makeba, who
was already living in the US and introduced the 21-year-old musician to
international stars such as Harry Belafonte, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.
By the time he was ready to return to South Africa four
years later to teach others what he had learnt, Nelson Mandela and other
anti-apartheid activists had been incarcerated, the country had become a brutal
police state and for Masekela it had become “impenetrable”, as he writes in his
biography, Still Grazing: The Musical
Journey of Hugh Masekela.
He tells the 21 Icons team: “I couldn’t come back anymore
because I’d been hanging out with Belafonte and Miriam, who were banned from
South Africa, and they’d done an album called An evening with Belafonte and Makeba with all the protest songs of
those days that we got from the students in exile who came into town. And, of
course, Miriam had addressed the UN in 1963 and that was the first time the
world really ever heard about what was really happening in South Africa. So I
wanted to come home — I was ready to come back home then, but my passport had
been at the South African embassy for two years and it was obvious they were
not going to renew it.”
Masekela ended up staying in New York for another 26 years
and would only return to South Africa after Mandela’s release in the early 90s.
While in exile, in 1968, he recorded his smash hit Grazing in the Grass, which was released in the US and topped the
Billboard Hot 100 charts at number one, selling four million copies. In the 21
Icons South Africa short film, he describes with his telltale sense of humour,
a concert in Detroit where 30,000 people danced to the irresistible tune and
insisted on three encores of it: “People were dancing like fools, so when we
came backstage I said to (record executive) Russ Regan, Did you see that?
What’s that all about? He said: ‘Stupid, that’s the number one record in the
world.’”
However, Masekela had had a brief moment of fame much
earlier, as a schoolboy in Johannesburg, when his band received an instrument
from the legendary Satchmo – jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong. He
describes it thus in 21 Icons South Africa: “I was already crazy about Louis
Armstrong; we sang all his songs. Trevor Huddleston, who had been the school
chaplain, met Louis Armstrong and told him about the band and Armstrong sent us
his trumpet and we became famous here in South Africa. We even appeared on the cover
of The Farmer’s Weekly - Black Boys get
Louis’s Trumpet.”
Stories such as these, however, can mask the haunting pain
of being exiled and far away from home, and viewers get a poignant taste of the
latter when Masekela describes his fear of losing his ability to speak South
African languages. “I used to have a place in Central Park where I would go to
talk to my imaginary friends. I was terrified that I was going to lose my
language. So I would go there and I would start to speak in Sotho first, and I
would change from that to Zulu and then to Xhosa and then I would go into
tsotsi Afrikaans.”
When Mandela was finally released, Masekela cried as he
watched him on television walking out of Victor Verster Prison. “We just looked
at this … we didn’t even know we were crying, but it was tears of joy because I
knew that day that I would be able to come home after 30 years.”
In 1991, Masekela launched his first tour of South Africa,
which was sold out throughout the country's major cities. Since then he has
made Johannesburg his home but he continues to enthral audiences worldwide and
will celebrate his 75th birthday next year with a concert in March in the Walt
Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California.
A career spanning almost 30 albums and too many appearances
to mention are testament to Masekela’s belief that, to paraphrase the German
philosopher Nietzsche, “life without music would be hell”. And claiming one’s
heritage proudly remains his passion.
Describing the time the 21 Icons team spent with this
legendary and world-famous musician, filmmaker and photographer Adrian Steirn
says: “There’s no-one quite like Hugh Masekela. He’s got this presence that
made us all feel like we were musical, for three hours. He’s the coolest man
you’ll ever meet.”
Steirn’s portrait of Masekela, signed by the musician, will
be auctioned at the end of the series and the money donated to a charity of
Masekela’s choice. Readers of the Sunday Times can get their own copy of the
portrait in the September 29 edition of the newspaper, on sale countrywide.
Join the conversation on Twitter: @21icons; www.21icons.com
and www.facebook.com/21icons.
21 ICONS South Africa is proudly sponsored by Mercedes-Benz
South Africa, Nikon and Deloitte and supported by The Department of Arts &
Culture as a nation-building initiative.
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