David Beresford: Tribute to Basil Coetzee
It’s hard to say a last goodbye to a musician; harder still when his gaunt face is in a coffin on a linoleum floor, his tenor saxophone – its silver patina worn through by his once-busy fingers – resolutely silent in its place of honour up on the stage. No more encores for Basil Coetzee.
Cape Town tried its best for South Africa’s greatest sax player last weekend, crowding into the Tabernacle of Life at the Full Gospel Church in Rocklands; businessmen in suits, women in their Sunday best, actors, musicians and radio executives, mothers c lutching babies, children impatient in the aisles, a poet in his beret, the mayor in her jacket, the cabinet minister in his caftan shirt …
Basil had come back to Jesus, the preachers said, and there was no gainsaying that. “It was in October that Basil Coetzee first stepped into this building,” recalled Pastor Stafford Petersen. “He stood up from where he was seated and walked to the front, tears rolling down his face, committing his life to the Lord.”
By then, of course, the cancer was tearing apart the lungs that powered his music. And as the congregation sang of “the friend we have in Jesus”, and one of his sons sent his own sax dancing about the words and soaring above the voices, one could not hel p but wonder at the pain that had torn his instrument from his lips, driven him into the arms of his Saviour and delivered his corpse to the gospe l singers.
Death, they say, mocks the living. “Sister Mary, Basil is healed,” said the pastor, leaning urgently across the lectern to the weeping widow. And it will no longer be heard, that haunting, raunchy sound that was Basil “Manenberg” Coetzee blowing up a sto rm.
Strangely, it was not played, that heart-breaking anthem of the exile years. Instead Abdullah Ibrahim used a projector to show a video of himself playing The Wedding in Switzerland last year. That, too, seemed to mock. Ghostly images flickering on a wall in the bright morning’s light. Earnest members of the European Youth Orchestra playing the music of the Cape Flats in the land of the cuckoo cloc
k.
In the end it was the Cabinet minister who brought it all home. The irony was inescapable: Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel, still flush from the triumph of a successful budget, delivering an oration over the body of a man who had died so poor they had to make a special appeal to mourners for donations to keep his family going.
For a moment death seemed at its mocking worst. But, Cabinet minister or not, it was the voice of the Cape Flats that was heard as Manuel spoke. He had come, he said, to say thanks to Basil. Thanks for sound of his sax in those bad times when a voice wa s needed and speech was not enough. Thanks for the Cape Town riff, that sound those who did not feel the pain of District Six could never conjure out of a horn, or any other instrument for that matter.
Others had gone before, of course, dying in isolation and poverty. But Basil’s illness had brought home how hard life was for those who played, split the take in a gig and moved on without a bank account, without a policy, without the other things that o thers had in life. It was time the country recommitted itself to doing something about those who gave so much joy, but left nothing for themselves
And so the coffin and the mourners made their desultory way to the cemetery where they sang another hymn and took turns shovelling the soil into the gave until a small mound of earth was the last trace on earth of Basil Coetzee. That and the music of a m uch-loved sax player.