South Africa was to pay tribute on Thursday to Ladysmith Black Mambazo in a concert in which they will celebrate their 42 years of a cappella Zulu melodies and the dreams that visited their legendary founder, Joseph Shabalala, in the 1960s.
Their 10 alto, tenor and bass voices remain just as much in demand now, in Japan, Britain, Germany or the United States, as when they exploded onto the international scene in 1986.
In that year, US pop star Paul Simon ignored a cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa and visited the country to listen to the Ladysmith sound after hearing them on a pirate cassette. He then cut ”Graceland” with them.
Shabalala, who will turn 62 this month, is still with the group, and retains the dreams of perfect harmony that came to him in 1964. He was then the leader of a choir in Ladysmith, an eastern town renowned for the siege of its British defenders during the Boer War.
”One night when I was sleeping I heard a soothing melodic sound,” he told AFP.
”It lasted for seven months. These people were singing between stage and sky and I started to see how to put the dancing and the harmony together.
”Their voices amazed me. They were teaching me how to put the rhythm, harmony, dance and language together,” Shabalala said, his own voice taking on a lilting cadence, half-way to singing, as though expressing his dream-voices.
”I thought, ‘this is what I want to teach to my guys’.
”I copied the melodies, and the style; the language was different, and then I started to learn how to compose in these melodies.
”They’re still with me… the music is inside me.”
But Shabalala’s choir, which he had headed for three years, was not ready to follow his quest for the musical grail, so he recruited brothers, cousins, friends, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo was born.
Mambazo, Zulu for ‘axe’, became part of the name to signify their desire to chop up the competition in choral competitions. The success of ”Graceland” saw the group go into high gear, winning five Grammy nominations and recording with singers as diverse as Dolly Parton and Stevie Wonder, as well as composing music for Spike Lee and Walt Disney films, with Shabalala experimenting constantly with barrier-breaking melanges of Zulu and
western music.
Hard-line anti-apartheid activists reproached their ecumenism, demanding that they join the fight against the white regime rather than sending messages of love and forgiveness.
”I was telling them (the apartheid authorities): ‘You guys don’t know that I love you,”’ said Shabalala, who is a pastor in an African Christian church.
Nelson Mandela — who also preached reconciliation — was among Ladysmith’s early fans.
On his release from 27 years in prison in 1990, he asked what had become of Shabalala, and took the group to Oslo in 1993 as he and South Africa’s last white president, FW de Klerk, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
They performed as Mandela became South Africa’s first black president the following year.
”We’ve got a vision, something that we want to accomplish,” Shabalala said, explaining the group’s longevity.
”We still see the need for preaching the gospel of when people were together and shared their talents … in touch with their African roots.”
The group’s musical style, known as ‘isicathamya’, is inherited from migrant black labourers at the turn of last century who expressed their hurt and their weariness in long nights of singing in their hostels.
Those mournful songs were quiet and the accompanying dancing was on tip-toe, rather than the traditional Zulu foot-stomping, because they dared not damage the floors or annoy the omnipresent security guards.
Multiple South African groups have flattered Ladysmith by copying their style, the group now runs an academy to teach it, and Shabalala lectures occasionally at the University of Natal in South Africa and the University of California, Los Angeles.
At Thursday’s concert in Johannesburg, the group will be feted for the ensemble of their work, which continues, with 40 albums to date, and a new generation of Ladysmith singers, including four of Shabalala’s sons. – Sapa-AFP