Allen Kwela, one of South Africa’s finest and most influential jazz guitarists, died on Monday June 30 at the age of 63 of an asthma attack. He left behind his wife, Tshidi, and four children.
Kwela was born in Chesterville, Durban, and grew up on the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal. His upbringing was a hybrid of Western and traditional African ways of life and it was the fusion of these idioms that came to characterise his musical career.
His early passion for music was inspired by artists like Glen Miller and he started practising on a home-made string guitar built from an oil drum and cable wire.
In the late 1950s he moved to Johannesburg where he met and became the main composer for Spokes Mashiyane. Together they helped popularise the kwela music genre. However, Mashiyane became the figure who was predominantly associated with the form and Kwela was left with little fame or money from its success.
A feeling of frustration and unrealised potential also came to characterise his musical career, which suffered under apartheid. As Kwela told the Mail & Guardian in January this year: Â “Maybe I should’ve exiled myself, but I didn’t. The people who stayed overseas, in exile, seemed to be benefiting more than we did. They got chances of being recorded more than we did.”
After his relationship with Mashiyane ended, Kwela shifted to playing jazz, seeing the genre as a universal art form. He lived in Sophiatown and became one of South Africa’s major jazz figures, playing with the likes of Kippie Moeketsi, Barney Rachabane and Duke Makasi.
For four decades, Kwela remained in South Africa and continued to play and perform. However, he only recorded his first album in 1998 through Sheer Music, The Broken Strings of Allen Kwela. Kwela said about the album: “The title comes from the way blacks were treated in the apartheid era. The ‘broken strings’ means the broken and shattered dreams of a black man in the apartheid era … To be perfectly honest, I think some of those dreams for some of us have been permanently broken. They are irreparable.” Kwela battled to get radio play and he remained poor until his death.
However, in the months before his death, Kwela was still teaching, playing regularly and planning to record a new album. “I’m not pessimistic at all. I’m quite optimistic,” he said in January. “I think I have some very powerful music. A lot of music I’ve composed some time ago that has never been recorded. There’s a lot that’s been missed out, you know. But musically, my head is better now than it used to be. What I miss is the oomph and energy that I lost.”
Don Khaile, Sheer’s marketing manager, described Kwela’s personality as, “a bit on the cheeky side and some people label him as arrogant, but he was one of those people that opened up and talked to you straight.” — Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon
Allen Kwela, born September 11 1939, died June 30 2003