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:

When you govern the country
Think of those who died
When you are welcome in big city airports
Think of those who died