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This piece originally appeared in The Village Voice in July, 1992. A slightly condensed version appears in Robert Christgau's Grown Up All Wrong: 75 Great Rock and Pop Artists from Vaudeville to Techno, published by Harvard University Press in 1998. Copyright V.V. Publishing Corporation, reprinted by permission of The Village Voice.
Although the music business |
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Music was an afterthought for Mbuli, but an inevitable one. He was born in 1959 in Sophiatown, the teeming Johannesburg neighborhood that was the center of black South African culture from the 1920s until it was razed to make way for a white settlement called Triomf, and grew up with his seven brothers and sisters in a part of Soweto picturesquely nicknamed "Sub A." His father was a Zulu who worked as a long-distance driver and met his Xhosa mother on the Cape.
As his father's favorite, Mzwakhe was treated to an especially strict Zulu upbringing, denied shoes to build character and immersed in the culture's choral tradition at the all-night mbube competitions his father loved. Politics was never discussed, radio listening limited to mbube, yet the young man's questioning spirit was spurred by a pass arrest when he was thirteen, and by the time of the Soweto uprising in 1976, his father was dead, and politics were unavoidable. For two years Soweto's schools were on strike, and after Mbuli returned to complete his matric he also participated in a cultural group that continued the semiformal Afrocentric education of the strike period. There he was encouraged to write poetry. In 1981 he got up to recite at a funeral, and soon he was performing his poems of praise, pride, and defiance at weddings, cultural days, union meetings, May Day rallies, and funerals, many more funerals.
Mbuli's charisma came naturally. He's tall--almost seven feet according to some stunned reports, about six-five by my five-ten. His voice is distinct, resonant, wise, shaped by timbres and cadences that tinge moral zest with bitter irony whether you understand the language or not. Even unaccompanied, his mobile face, strong hands, and hunched shoulders pour on the body English, and his words cut deep. In his cultural guerrilla days, of course, voice, body and words were all he had. As a poet rather than an orator he could exploit Pretoria's putatitive tolerance for art, a sop abrogated by the 1986 State of Emergency. His unrhymed, rhythm-charged verse was rife with historical analysis, humanistic exhortation, and racial pride--with politics. But like all poetry it was concrete, structured, given to reverie and drama and lyric celebration. The names of the living and the dead--martyrs of apartheid, African rulers, ANC exiles, deportees-- recapitulated Zulu praise-poem tradition, and the Latinate diction recalled the fellowship and inspiration of the classroom and the Marxist study group rather than their pretensions:
In 1986, South Africa's bravest independent label--called Shifty because it recorded on the run, in a sound truck--matched Mbuli with an integrated backup group featuring Kenyan guitarist Simba Morri. The banned tape became a literal underground hit in South Africa, where Shifty sold it as unmarked contraband, and surfaced in the United States on Rounder Records as Change is Pain. Much of the music, a rough avant-trad potpourri that owed dub and Philip Tabane's black-consciousness band Malombo, had to be created in Mbuli's absence, though he joined the final sessions.
The collectively conceived music on Unbroken Spirit seems wholer, with touches of sax jive and mbube-style female chorus, and though for the most part Mbuli once again intones over backup, occasionally he sings as if he's been doing it all his life, which of course he has. It went gold with no help from the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
This was after De Klerk's thaw, which made life somewhat easier for troublemakers like Mbuli, but no simpler. It took the efforts of thirteen embassies to get him a visa to play Europe with a newly formed band, The Equals. A weapons charge wasn't dismissed unitl 1991. And he became controversial on the typically fractious and exceptionally puritanical South African left, where some charged that he was a rogue, a self-promoter, and--based on his work with the UDF cultural desk and the South African Musicians Alliance--a "cultural commissar." It's difficult to judge such squabbles at a distance. But remember that the charismatic are often accused of roguishness and self-promotion, which even if it's true says next to nothing about their courage or their creative juice, and that the South African struggle has been complicated by the return of exiled heroes who expect and deserve their power back. Mbuli was probably too hard on Shifty. I'd guess that he overreached himself administratively--at one point he opposed an Abdullah Ibrahim appearance because he hadn't gone through channels. But the sad doubts about his creative juice expressed by several South African observers prove only what we already knew--that the winds of fashion blow no more reliably on the left than they do anywhere else. Artistically, he's still on it.
Shortly after Mzwakhe exited his UDF post, he embarked upon a career as a pop star--"poet-musician" is his term. He developed a live act, with intros and codas that free him to play congas or dance with a high-stepping muscularity that's pure Zulu and a self-depracating postmacho that's all his own; his Resistance is Defence is the first A&R venture for South African expatriate Trevor Herman, whose Earthworks label made its name with compilations. Although Mbuli has international ambitions--he sees his themes as "universal," "not confined to the South African situation"--Resistance is Defence is less Euro than its predecessors. As before, most of the lyrics are in his richly accentuated, almost tonal English, but there's a lot of Zulu and Xhosa and Venda, and the Equals hit a township groove that blocks off blocky mbaqanga beats with the jazzier swing of the older, more urbane marabi style. I know why some hear Resistance is Defence as mbaqanga Sarafina!-style, and there's probably a sense in which the edgy awkwardness of the Shifty albums better evokes South African bifurcation. But this is one gorgeous piece of music. Keyed to Tswana guitarist Floyd Manana, the multicultural Equals can play with any South African band from Mahlathini's Makgona Tsohle to Ray Phirri's Stimela. The poems have not just arrangements but tunes, often created from remembered snatches of mbube. Mbuli sings their intros and choruses with conviction, affection, and skillful ease. And he recites better than ever.
After all, there was nothing wrong with Sarafina!'s music that a little focus couldn't cure, and rarely has the black South African genius for jubilation under dire circumstances been put in sharper relief. "Lusaka," a shaggy dog song about political certainty as a function of political privilege, and "Land Deal," a quietly sarcastic skewering of apartheid doublespeak, achieve a head-scratching universality few universalists would think worthy of their grand designs. And while some South Africans suggest that the praise-poem tactic has outlived its usefulness, I find "Stalwarts" as gripping as Yeats's "Easter 1916," which also names a bunch of people I know nothing about, and fail to see how "Tshipfinga" will date:
For Mbuli, the inevitability of victory is by no means equivalent to its imminence, and unlike most of the South Africans I spoke to, he's feeling no relief. The thaw hasn't melted the habitual contempt of police, politicians, and talking heads. The Inkatha violence is as horrific as any other. Homelessness is epidemic. And the vigilance of the people has by most accounts diminished, putting protest culture in decline. Barely noticed as an import, Resistance is Defence will be released by EMI under Mbuli's own imprint this month. (Editor's note: 1992) But though he remains a draw at stadiums and universities from Cape Town to the Transvaal, the new terrorism renders touring risky business indeed. So there's no knowing whether the phenomenal success of "Papa Stop the War," a 1991 collaboration ordered by township-disco hitmaker Chicco, means Mbuli has pop legs of his own. And whatever jealous South Africans imagine, he wasn't getting rich overseas. Watching him, his band, and two amazing female singer-dancers rouse a half-filled weeknight S.O.B.'s or wolf down dinner from a hot dog cart before a late sound check at Fort Greene Park, he looked to me like one more struggling world-beat hero--the symbolic kind, this time.
Symbolic heroes who are political at all specialize in struggle once removed. They do more comforting and fortifying--and maybe, if they're as good as Mbuli, clarifying--than inciting to revolution. And though Mbuli is right to say his relevance transcends South Africa-- he talks about the Irish mother who came up to thank him for helping her mourn her lost loved ones--it's certainly rooted there. So I couldn't help asking whether he'd go into exile if the boot came down once again.
I was a little sorry to hear it. But I can't say I was surprised.
Let my mind interpret my dreams of Mount Kilimanjaro
Let my brain-power interpret the last struggle in Africa
Unless human rights are embarked in the statute books
Loyalty shall mean vengeance
Obedience shall mean rebellion
Conformity a bluff
And happiness a sign of danger
And Africa shall know no peace
Until we in the South are freeWhen you govern the country
Think of those who died
When you are welcome in big city airports
Think of those who died
"This time, yes--once bitten, twice shy.
Unless I'm experimenting with my life,
I can't wait for death--just to be a
sitting target. So I will be the one leaving."
Please see our Petition of Support for Mzwakhe Mbuli.