John Matshikiza speaks to two members of the Manhattan Brothers who have returned to visit South Africa after 38 years in exile
`You stayed up late. I left you in the reception when I went to bed,” says Joe Mogotsi to Rufus Khoza. “What were you doing, practising your Zulu or what?”
The two old troupers are relaxing in the winter sun in the garden of the Holiday Inn in Sandton. They both have surprisingly jet-black hair, until you look closer and see traces of rust and snow around the edges. They exchange an endless stream of fond banter about this and that, a lot of it about getting old, and, in the case of that remark about practising Zulu, about being a stranger in your own country.
Zulu and Sotho are no longer the first languages that pop into their brains these days. They talk in a kind of generic argot of the musical stage, the basis being English – evidence not just of the 38 years they have spent in self-imposed exile in England, but of a dying era of South African show business. The days, as the late Peter Rezant used to say, when showbiz people were gentlemen and ladies, spoke proper, and dressed with a sense of snappy self-respect.
Khoza still has that outrageous American accent for which he was famous in the Fifties, and Mogotsi still wears his jaunty black beret, the jazz signature of those golden days.
Khoza and Mogotsi are two of the three surviving members of the original Manhattan Brothers singing quartet. The Manhattan Brothers were not big in the Forties and Fifties – they were huge. They defined dress style and the direction of popular music. They were the bridge between jazz and marabi, between the lilting isicatamiya of the countryside and the urgent din of the City of Gold.
They made hundreds of recordings of their own compositions, songs with names like Dipsy Doodle, Cement Mixer and Pesheya kwezintaba, not to mention Amampondo, Bo Tsotsi and Mamoriri.
Between 1943 and 1960, the Manhattan Brothers took the dance halls by storm. People rioted to get into their shows. They took their music live as far north as Tanganyika, before the days of Julius Nyerere. In Salisbury (now Harare) and Loreno Marques (now Maputo) everything stopped when the Manhattan Brothers came to play. And in every corner of South Africa, of course, from the big cities to the crummy locations of dorps like Queenstown and Rustenburg, the Manhattan Brothers were a household name.
In those days, live entertainment was a critical part of daily life, and groups like the Manhattan Brothers played a vital social role – one that was pretty much taken for granted.
All this, of course, was going on in the black world. In white South Africa, the Manhattan Brothers had no meaning. It was Pat Boone, Elvis Presley and Nico Carstens.
For every artist, then as now, it was the recording contracts that made a difference. Records were a craze all their own, and exposure on the radio networks, including the ubiquitous Radio Bantu that beamed out of a million rediffusion boxes in a million township houses, meant continued survival.
The trouble was the record companies didn’t give black artists contracts. It was a hand-to-mouth affair.
“In those days,” says Mogotsi, “the only contracts they’d give us were petty cash vouchers. You record, you sign, you take your money in cash, and you go.” The transaction could have been worth 2, 10s or 5, depending. There were no agents, and since the record companies were white and the guys were black, and things were as they were, there wasn’t much discussion.
In those days, no one had any notion of the world changing. The record companies thought they were doing the guys a favour, and the guys had too busy a life to be unduly worried about the long-term implications of the relationship.
The big hop at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, right there in the middle of white Johannesburg, or at Uncle Tom’s Hall out in Orlando township was real life, and the Manhattan Brothers were superstars.
“We weren’t just singers, we were promoters,” Mogotsi says. “Remember, this was the time when the big bands were breaking up. Jazz players had to regroup in small combos, and the small combos depended on the singing groups like us to survive.”
A lot of small combos came about through musicians meeting up when they were called in by the Brothers to give instrumental backing. This was the case, say Mogotsi and Khoza, with groups like the Jazz Epistles, created when trumpeter Hugh Masekela and pianist Dollar Brand (now known as Abdullah Ibrahim) met up when the Brothers were on the road in Cape Town.
“Those guys would sit together late into the night after the show and get talking,” says Mogotsi, “and eventually they quietly decided to abandon the Brothers and set up on their own. That’s how the Jazz Epistles came about.”
They also nurtured other talents, notably that of Miriam Makeba, who herself became a household name when she appeared on stage (and a couple of early recordings) as the Manhattan Brothers’s “Nut Brown Baby”.
With that level of productivity, the Manhattan Brothers were playing the kind of role that Stevie Wonder or the Artist Formerly Known As Prince have been playing in black popular music in the United States. The only difference was that, although they were making relatively large sums of money by the standards of black musicians in the 1950s in South Africa, by world standards they weren’t making a dent.
The critical factor was copyright and royalties – or rather, the fact that there weren’t any.
“When we would ask the record company about royalties,” says Khoza, “they’d look at us and ask us what we were talking about.”
And yet royalties is what really makes a difference to an artist’s bank account. For all those hours of airplay, and for record sales that are incalculable (because there were not only no contracts, but the record companies didn’t bother to keep written records in the case of black music) but certainly in excess of a million units across Southern, Central and East Africa, the Brothers and their peers got only what they were given on the spot on the day of the recording.
Then came King Kong and, eventually, exile. In 1959 the Manhattan Brothers became the core of the musical that drew together the cream of black showbiz.
“When the King Kong idea came about,” says Khoza, “they wanted people who could act and sing. Where do you start? You start at the top. We were the top. I’m not boasting – it’s the truth. You got your lead star [the late Nathan Mdledle, founder and leader of the Manhattans, who took the title role], you got your gangsters [the rest of the Brothers, with Mogotsi as a stunning gang leader], you even got Miriam Makeba, because she was part of the Manhattans. You didn’t need to go far.”
King Kong became a runaway South African hit, uniting audiences from the divided races in their excitement at its spectacle. In 1961 it went to London, and after its run ended there the Manhattan Brothers, like many of the others associated with the show, just stayed on.
It wasn’t until the release of Nelson Mandela and the cautious movement of exiles back into South Africa that the brothers thought of visiting the old country, and seeing what, in the emerging dispensation, could be done to correct the failings of the past.
Mogotsi decided to see the people at Gallo Records, the company that had exclusively released all their Forties and Fifties recordings, and revive the aborted discussion about royalties. His time in London (where he, unlike the others, has never stopped being involved in show business) had sharpened him to what kind of rights he should be demanding.
“I’ve been coming in and out since 1990,” says Mogotsi, “knocking on Gallo’s door. It’s taken nine years of tapping without results, but now, finally, things are looking better.”
According to Rob Allingham, the archivist at Gallo, Mogotsi originally demanded back royalties of about R5-million, based on an estimation of record sales to the tune of some 30-million units.
This, Gallo responded, was way beyond what could possibly have even been turned out by their record plant during that period. But the record company was nevertheless in a bit of a corner, because, not having kept any written records, they couldn’t prove how many vinyls they did put out under the Manhattan Brothers’s name.
Nine years down the line, the two parties are almost ready to sign an agreement that will award the Brothers’s an unspecified amount, and establish a copyright record for the first time. Tying up that agreement is what has brought Mogotsi and Khoza to Johannesburg.
It’s been a long road. As in other areas of the new South Africa, agreement has been made possible because of a new crop of incumbents at the record company who believe in international standards of ethics.
But in some ways the agreement already comes too late. How can anyone calculate other royalties that should have come from radio exposure? Even more critical, other artists have always freely used Manhattan Brothers’s music, live or in recording, without even giving the Brothers’s credit.
In many cases, those other artists have even claimed credit (and therefore royalties) as the composers of those songs. As Khoza puts it, some very famous people, former friends and colleagues from the good old days, have not been shy “to go into the Manhattan garden and help themselves”.
It seems like a whole new battle that the Manhattan Brothers, no longer spring chickens by their own admission, will have to take on.
But at least, with the almost concluded agreement with Gallo Records, they have secured a first and important victory.
Looking out over the towers of Sandton, a place that didn’t even exist in their heydays, Joe remembers another piece of Manhattan Brothers magic appropriated by a disrespectful world.
“Did you know that even the word tsotsi came from the Manhattan Brothers?” he says. “We took it from the trousers we used to wear: sharp, like you’d say `tso!’ as in `tsolo’. From that came tsotsi. But unfortunately the style and the idea were appropriated by gangsters, and ultimately everything that wasn’t right became tsotsi.”
It seems like the world is only just beginning to see what it owes to the Manhattan Brothers.