>From Paul Simon’s Graceland to the Rugby World Cup, Ladysmith Black Mambazo has brought traditional a cappella to the rest of the world, writes Lucy O’Brien
‘You can buy the biggest house in America, but it’s not home. Where the mother lives – that is home,” says Joseph Shabalala, leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He stands in front of the house he bought for his mother 10 years ago, a modest brick affair in a poor black neighbourhood on the outskirts of his home town, Ladysmith. He sighs. “She was very beautiful. She always praised me. And she was very proud of this house. She used to say, ‘I never knew I could sit in a room that had water, electricity and everything inside!'”
He clambers into his polished black Mercedes-Benz with his wife Nellie, and they drive up the rubble-strewn hill along a dirt track, past kraals and mud houses with tin roofs. People stop at the side of the road and stare. Some recognise Shabalala and wave excitedly.
“That is where I lived as a boy,” he says, pointing out a small house at the end of a dilapidated row. For the past 20 years, he and most of his group have been living two hours’ drive away in Durban, but Ladysmith remains their spiritual home. The Mercedes purrs to a halt by a clump of boulders. Shabalala’s mother, Nomandla, died earlier this year, and this is her grave, next to those of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather.
Shabalala and Nellie get out of the car. With tears in his eyes, he prays at the grave, speaking to his ancestors in a low, meditative voice. For him, Christianity doesn’t conflict with his ancestor worship.
Nomandla (Zulu for “power”) was a wise woman, a healer who sang and danced, as was his father, a herbalist, and their message was one of harmonious social equality.
On October 18, the 10-strong Ladysmith Black Mambazo released their latest album, In Harmony, which includes a single recorded with British songstress Des’ree, a version of Bill Withers’s much-covered Ain’t No Sunshine. Ladysmith’s recording career stretches back to the early Seventies, when their first album, Amabutho, became the first African record to notch up gold status for sales of 25 000. Since then, the group has recorded almost 40 albums and sold more than three million records around the world.
Hugely popular in South Africa during the Seventies and Eighties, Ladysmith burst into the global mainstream in 1986 when they featured on two tracks of Paul Simon’s Graceland album, following up with a Simon- produced album, Shaka Zulu, which won a Grammy in 1988. Since then, the group has mixed Shabalala’s compositions with gospel music and covers of Western pop like Chain Gang and Wonderful World.
Since the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, they have become South Africa’s major cultural ambassadors. Now they are ubiquitous: they have played countless festivals; the swaying vocals of their song The Star and the Wiseman have sold Heinz beans and tomato ketchup in Britain; they sang at this year’s Brits Awards; and performed at the opening of the Rugby World Cup, backed by a 1 000-voice Welsh choir. Later this year, the group will appear at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. What has cut through the smug hierarchies of Western pop are Ladysmith’s lush, robust harmonies, their version of iscathamiya, or Zulu a cappella singing, a style whose roots go back to the miners’ hostels of Natal in the Thirties. Shabalala’s evocative compositions, whose lyrics are celebrated by Zulu speakers, convey a sense of something intensely humane, in the same way that his father sang to “heal the people”.
Born in 1941, Shabalala grew up in a thatched hut on the plains of rural Natal. Part of a Zulu farming community who ploughed with oxen, Joseph remembers seeing a car maybe “once a year, once a month”. By the time he was a teenager, he was working in the local cotton factory. Every spare moment, he was singing or working out harmonies, convinced there was a way to reinterpret the traditional Zulu songs.
In 1960, he formed a group with his brothers and cousins and called it Ladysmith (after their home town), Black (referring to the strongest oxen on the farm), Mambazo (Zulu for axe, symbolising their ability to chop down the competition). But it wasn’t until the late Sixties, after a series of prophetic dreams and various line-up changes, that Shabalala had the group and the sound that he first envisaged.
Shabalala’s soft-spoken cousin Albert Mazibuko remembers when they were mechanics, composing songs while they worked on the cars. “The one on top would do the top harmony, the one lower down would do the low one. We’d play with the spanner. We’d tighten the bolt with the beat,” he recalls.
The group became an obsession, so much so that by the early Seventies they had lost their jobs and were forced to sing full-time. They took their show on the road, and despite the restrictions of apartheid, performed throughout South Africa.
It wasn’t easy. Mazibuko shows me his father’s dom pas, a photo ID that every black South African was required to carry. Stamped inside is the place where he lived, an ugly reminder that he could not work or travel outside that area without a permit.
This meant that, while they were on tour, the group were often held up by police shining torches in their faces. “We were stopped nearly every night. [Police would ask,] ‘OK, where are you going?”‘ recalls Mazibuko. “When we said we were singers, they said, ‘You’re singers? Sing for us.’ We sang for them.
“Some would get excited and let us go. Others still searched right through our bags. Sometimes, they even made us lie down.” Despite this ritual humiliation, the group carried on.
“We didn’t want to be defeated – we made a joke of everything that happened. We are paving the way for someone to follow. People can see where we’ve passed.”
Threatened by the fact that Ladysmith Black Mambazo had fans all over the country, the authorities noted that when the group’s bus drove past, rioting schoolchildren would raise their fists and shout: “Black Mambazo! Black power!” They were also worried in the early Eighties, when the group spread their message overseas by performing in Europe. In 1986, Ladysmith found themselves at the centre of controversy when Paul Simon featured them on his best-selling Graceland album, where their voices crooned along to Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes and Homeless, both co-composed with Shabalala.
Anti-apartheid activists claimed that Simon’s album and his subsequent tour were in violation of the cultural boycott. They were subsequently acquitted of the charge by the United Nations’s anti-apartheid commission.
Despite political controversy, the Graceland World Tour went ahead in 1987, and Ladysmith received a wild response wherever they went. By the time Mandela was released in 1990, Shabalala maintains his critics came to him and apologised.
>From the moment of Mandela’s release, Shabalala knew that the future for his band was wide open. “I was in New York when he was freed,” says Shabalala. “I was sitting in my hotel room watching TV when I saw him. I was alone. I was jumping up – it was just like an earthquake.” Several months later, Mandela invited the group to sing before he gave a speech in Boston. “He just called me Joseph. He knows everybody. ‘Joseph [Mandela said], you did a good job. You kept the tradition alive.”‘
Now, at a time when the country is changing rapidly, Shabalala is campaigning to keep South Africa’s tribal languages and culture intact. Of Mandela’s recently elected successor, Thabo Mbeki, he says, letting loose his mischievous cackle: “He knows my name! He is like a friend of everyone. Maybe all these politicians act like that. Still, he’s a good guy. It depends on whether the people love him. If people love you, you can help them.” For Shabalala, effective government means keeping powerful traditions alive in the face of relentless Westernisation. Keen to establish a music academy in Ladysmith, he has forged links here and abroad, and kept in close contact with KwaZulu- Natal’s Zulu society. On the day before his trip back to Ladysmith, the group performs at a cultural event at Zululand University.
Outside the venue, a cow is slaughtered in honour of the ancestors, while inside, the band perform, whipping up the young Zulu students with stomping leg kicks and a raw, rhythmic set. The show gives a sense of how iscathamiya music started out as vocal and dance contests among the rural migrants in Natal’s mines who were forced to leave their families behind and live in hostels.
The contests between hostels were responsible for the intricate routines known as “tiptoe dancing” – since men weren’t allowed to do the traditional, noisy Zulu stomp, they developed a silent, graceful style and decked themselves out in matching costumes and white shoes to accentuate its artistry.
In the dressing room after the show, the group take off their brightly coloured stage shirts, while Shabalala opens his briefcase and writes out their cheques. His approach is very hands-on. “He is our leader,” states his 27-year-old son Sibongiseni. “He gives us advice on how to behave in front of the people, especially as a musician. You must always know that people are looking up to you, whatever you do.”
At the after-show meal, Sibongiseni Shabalala sits at a table surrounded by girls. With his shaved head and confident pose, he represents the younger generation of Ladysmith. He drives a BMW listens to rap and Mary J Blige, and lives a single life in a swish apartment. Along with the urban sophistication, though, he has a keen respect for the traditions represented by Ladysmith.
His 34-year-old brother, Msisi, who acts as Shabalala’s managerial assistant, also feels the group should keep to its roots. “People run from their culture by trying to be more modernised,” he opines.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo was the first band to make a living from Zulu a cappella, and Msisi Shabalala admits that it wasn’t always easy growing up with Joseph Shabalala as a father. Now, as evidenced by the enthusiastic reaction from the Zulu students, there is a new wave of pride in what Ladysmith has achieved.
Later, we drive back to Shabalala’s house, set high above the city in a place called Kloof – Durban’s equivalent of the Hollywood hills. A pair of giant plastic swans sit on the front lawn, while inside, two large china dalmatians guard the fireplace. There is a signed photograph of Dolly Parton in a frame and gold discs on the walls. When asked about the interior decor, Shabalala waves it away, saying it is his wife’s taste, and that he isn’t a person who loves fancy things – he is happy in his trainers.
Clearly this is a man on a mission. While we are there, the phone rings constantly, and people come in and out. A church leader from Maryland is over, working with Shabalala to establish an aid programme from the United States for impoverished young South Africans. His role as cultural ambassador is uncontested. But as Ladysmith Black Mambazo gets bigger, is there a danger the group will become over- commercialised?
Shabalala smiles. He’s been asked this kind of question before, and always has an answer. “I’d not be happy if my music was taken for something like ‘beer is beautiful’. But when you talk about food, milk, sugar, all those beautiful things, take my voice there, it’s OK. It takes my voice to the people.”