Documentary filmmaker François Verster is back from New York where he picked up an Emmy award for The Lion’s Trail, his sweeping look across three continents, and six decades, at the legacy of forgotten (then remembered) composer Solomon Linda. It’s a great accolade yet he sounds slightly cynical on the phone from Cape Town: “It’s up to us how we use it, I guess. The day after we got the Emmy my producer Neil Brandt phoned broadcasters and it opened doors. It seems to have a ridiculous amount of weight in the States.”
Once through the doors, there probably were some surprises in store. His new projects aren’t necessarily as digestible to Americans as the story of Mbube, Wimoweh, or The Lion Sleeps Tonight, one of the most recorded songs in musical history that seemed to make everyone rich except its composer, Linda, who died in poverty in 1962. Verster’s new projects look at lesser-known subjects, like the life around Seapoint’s public swimming pool and youth experiences in Bonteheuwel. The latter, titled The Mother’s House, won best documentary at the Apollo Film Festival in Victoria West last week. Then there is a curious new idea about the attitudes of non-Muslims to Islam in their neighbourhood.
What Verster proposes to do here is to get an Iranian conductor to stage Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a piece of schmaltzy Orientalism based in the Thousand and One Nights (dating back to 1888).
“We’re going to use the performance by an Iranian conductor almost as a big music video. We will use documentary stories with the music. It’s kind of like an experimental film looking at a big global, political issue.”
The 55-minute Emmy award-winning work is far from experimental. It is sobering, humorous and conventional. It is a fast-moving sojourn that takes its cue from the groundbreaking journalism done by Rian Malan, who published a lengthy investigation of the early isicathamiya hit, and the subsequent plagiarism of it by various United States musicians, in Rolling Stone magazine in 2000.
Once downloaded from the net, Malan’s story fills a whopping 21 pages brimming with the antics of musical heroes and villains who have either lived off the song or struggled in poverty despite its success. A less conventional presence in the work is that of Malan himself who ambles and mumbles through real situations like the funeral of Linda’s daughter Adelaide Nelisiwe who succumbed to Aids in 2001.
This devastating loss is compounded by the fact that, as Malan puts it, had Linda’s family, bearing his original surname Ntsele, benefited from his estate her life might not have been lost. Although Malan devoted years and his own resources to trying to get a better deal for the Ntsele family, his journey shows the complexity and apparent powerlessness of advocacy journalism in the face of cast-iron entitlement. Especially where foreign courts in developed countries are involved in disputes with obscure Africans. “It’s not a question that it’s illegal. It’s just unfair,” bemoans Malan. “It’s unfair because black South Africans could not play the game that the Americans were playing.”
Today, however, Verster acknowledges that certain gains have been made and that royalties from their father’s work are getting to the Ntseles: “They are actually better off now. The film was completed four years ago so it doesn’t really acknowledge some of the battles that have been won.”
In this way The Lion’s Trail is — like many brilliant documentaries — a snapshot of a moment in time. There are humorous and touching episodes. Lead singer of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Joseph Shabalala, leads an entire township church congregation in a very holy rendition of Mbube. Shabalala was born in Ladysmith near where Linda was born in 1909. And there are period performances from the fabulous Sixties by various cheesy Americans such as Pete Seeger, Jay Seigel and George David Weiss, who took the song and made it their “own”.
Weiss, who for years was president of the Songwriters Guild of America, owns the copyright to the words “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight”. He emerges as the real villain. Verster and company didn’t manage to get him on record though, a fact that he says works in the documentary’s favour. According to Verster, “By not cooperating, Weiss almost confirmed his guilt.”