Larry Schwartz
ONE day, when he was a small boy living on a farm on the outskirts of the Kwa Zulu-Natal town of Ladysmith, Joseph Shabalala heard his tribal-healer father prophesy his future.
“He’s the one who’s going to ride the aeroplane,” the old man said of Joseph, the eldest boy and the second eldest of the eight Shabalala children. And Joseph took it to heart. From that moment on, whenever a plane passed overhead he would run out into the fields, crane his neck skyward and cry out, “Aeroplane, one day I will be there with you”‘.
It turns out his father was right. Joseph Shabalala, founder of the Zulu vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, has hardly been off a plane since.
Among the more memorable destinations Oslo looms large. At Nelson Mandela’s urging, Shabalala took his group there to sing when the ANC leader and the then South African President F.W. de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.
He’s also been to London to perform for the Queen at the Royal Albert Hall, and to the University of California to lecture on his people’s music.
His most recent plane ride has brought him and his eight-member harmony group (it now includes his four sons, Msizi, Thulani, Thamsanqa and Sibongiseni) from Durban to Sydney. “A whole night,” he says wearily, a few hours after the flight has touched down.
It’s been a massive journey for Shabalala. On that childhood farm there were goats, sheep and donkeys – and a white man “to tell you that you must have only 10 cows, not more than 10”.
In the early years of apartheid, prospects were not good for a Zulu youngster raised in the provinces, or anywhere else in South Africa for that matter. But Shabalala’s father always sensed there was something different about his son, something that would take him out into the world of
opportunity beyond. “My aunt and my mother said, `Oh, your father loves you so much’,” he says. “But nobody else was thinking it was going to happen.”
The Shabalala household was filled with traditional song. “My mother and father used to sing for us,” he says, “because that was the better way to make the son grow up in peace.
“My father was a spiritual man who was singing and grinding medicine to heal the people, always singing deep, thinking that this was medicine.”
By the mid-’50s, he had formed his first singing groups. But it wasn’t until 1964 that the harmonic approach of Mambazo was born – in a dream. “I was just like a person who was watching a show by myself,” he recalls of his nighttime epiphany. “It was just like going to school to learn how
to put this sound together. How to breathe in and to breathe out. How to use your whole body to work together with harmony.”
With the blueprint at hand, he enlisted his brothers Headman and Jockey, two cousins and a few friends to form Ladysmith Black Mambazo. They took the name from a combination of their hometown, the black oxen (which were considered the strongest on the farm) and a Zulu word for
“axe” (which they would use, metaphorically speaking, to fell competitors in musical contests).
With their flair for bass, alto and tenor harmonies, they became the foremost practitioners of Isicathamiya, the music associated with Zulu laborers who recreated their traditional song and dance in the harsh conditions of mines far from their homelands.
“People go to the mine with their music,” Shabalala explains, “and they compose new dancing. They compose many songs because they see and they hear many things, like trains and cars.”
The group developed a strong following in South Africa but were little known beyond. Until, that is, they met Paul Simon. Simon had been given a cassette of their music by a DJ in Los Angeles, and went on to incorporate their sound in his massively successful Graceland album of 1986 in
a recording studio in Johannesburg.
It was the height of apartheid, and not everybody approved of Simon’s decision to record in Johannesburg, but Shabalala depicts his interest as a godsend.
“I used to say Paul Simon was sent by the spirits because God wants us to share what he gave us with the world,” he says. “Before Paul Simon, the doors were closed. The windows were closed. I don’t know how he heard the music. That’s why I said he was pushed by the Holy Spirit: `Go to
South Africa.’
“When he came it was not the right time. But there was no way for him to stop.”
Shabalala and his group are touring Australia on the back of a two-CD compilation called Congratulations South Africa. It’s a title he insists is apt despite alarming figures released this month on the incidence of violent deaths and the scourge of AIDS in the country.
“To heal people, you must give them hope all the time,” Shabalala says. “If somebody is sick, first of all you must remind him of the time when he was OK. To encourage him and then give him hope that he will be all right.”
As a child he hailed passing aircraft. He could not have imagined where they might take him, could not have foreseen the success that came with a Grammy in 1987 for the group’s debut US release Shaka Zulu, or their subsequent international acclaim.
He could not have foreseen his Mambazo emerge as stars alongside the artists they have accompanied, including Stevie Wonder, George Clinton and Dolly Parton.
Their work featured in Michael Jackson’s video Moonwalker and Spike Lee’s Do It A Cappella. They recorded soundtrack material for Disney’s The Lion King Part II and Eddie Murphy’s Coming To America, and for A Dry White Season and Cry The Beloved Country.
By the late 1990s, they had enjoyed top 10 hits in the UK with Heavenly and The Star and The Wiseman.
But there has been a share of sadness too. “Headman was a man who had a gift of using his baritone,” Shabalala says of his brother. He was shot dead in December 1991 by an off-duty security guard.
“I feel like he’s always with me,” he says. “From the beginning I believed that he was away from me, I felt like I’m not going to sing any more. But as the time goes, his spirit was (telling me), `Hey. What are you doing? Carry on. This is your gift. You must carry on.”
The Sunday Age, Sunday 26th of August 2001
Larry Schwartz Writer 