A blurry Sunday afternoon at the end of May this year: the crowd is trickling out of the Rainbow Restaurant and Jazz Club in Pinetown with post-coital smiles. Busi Mhlongo, still wearing the sweaty sheen of her performance, is holding court near the kitchen door — while the blaze continues in the alley past the “no smoking” sign near the gas cylinders — where the musicians sometimes prepare.
Like quarts of Zamalek emptied over the naked brown body of a Zulu nubile, the stories are flowing from Ben Pretorius, founder of the Rainbow: “The Eighties were crazy times. I remember sitting here with Terror [Mosiuoa Lekota, Minister of Defence] and watching young cadres jumping over that fence. From here it was straight into exile, into MK [Umkhonto weSizwe],” said Pretorius.
“Sakhile was playing that day and there was always an electric atmosphere, with sweat dripping down the walls and this amazing sense of unity. They managed to capture the whole mood of what a new South Africa could be about. Invariably, all the concerts at the time ended with the singing of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” he said.
Politics is as interwoven into the mythology of the Rainbow as the rhythms and notes that linger in the air long after musicians such as guitarist Philip “Dr Malombo” Tabane and saxophonist Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi have cast their sorcery.
Opened in 1981 by Pretorius and businessman Billy Mthembu, it was a non-racial haven at a time when legislation still prevented people from drinking, eating and shagging across the colour line. When the apartheid oligarchy was at its most repressive and bloody, detention without trial and disappearing loved ones were everyday occurrences. The streets were lit by the fires of social unrest and “necklace” had a more sinister meaning.
Essentially a working-class tavern situated near a taxi rank and trade union offices, it was where lefties, workers, intellectuals, hippies, the struggle underground, students, commuters and drunkards met — all tracking in the same African dust.
Photographer Rafs Mayet, who has been snapping at the Rainbow since the mid-1980s, remembers the jazz club’s links to activists being so strong that Pretorius, during a brewery strike in the 1980s, refused to sell beer: “He was moving about a truck a week, but that was the sort of solidarity at the time,” said Mayet.
A disenchanted Pretorius, close to leaving the country to go into exile with his wife, Pam, opened the Rainbow with egalitarian, subversive belief, seeking to meld the protest nature of jazz music with the social vibrancy he was only finding in the townships he was frequenting. He wanted to open a “place with the kind of happiness that a rainbow conjures up”.
“I’ve never wanted to be a politician. But I could not carry on living in a society condoning a crime against humanity,” he said of the club’s beginnings.
It opened on December 17 1981, initially trading as a restaurant, with the first music gig on the same date two years later, featuring Dr Malombo’s idiosyncratic guitar.
With the state’s suffocation of protest, other means of conscientising and mobilising people were used, including the arts, music and live performances at the Rainbow.
From Basil “Mannenberg” Coetzee proclaiming “my sax is my gun” to Sakhile percussionist Mabi Thobejani mirroring the rat-a-tat-tat of AK-47 bullets, lobbing imaginary Molotov cocktails and simulating being mowed down by riot police to resurrect the ghosts of Sharpeville, Soweto. Just last week the Rainbow’s wooden floorboards creaked under the weight of a banner proclaiming “Jazz for the Struggle, the Struggle for Jazz”, which trumpeter Brian Thusi remembers being carried during the mid-1980s march down the road from the Rainbow’s old premises to its current one.
Thusi played with other musicians in that march and remembers the Rainbow fondly — for its mixed, discerning crowds and especially for its Sunday afternoon sessions. “Most jazz clubs opened at night and I was one of those musicians who sometimes ended up sleeping at bus stops after gigs because there was no transport to go home,” he laughed.
For trumpeter Feya Faku, as a young jazz music student at the then-University of Natal, the Tuesday night sessions allowed young musos and fellow students saxophonist Zim Ngqwana and bassist Lex Futshane to hone their skills in front of a live audience before tackling the Sunday afternoon sessions. Here they opened “for legendary artists like Thandie Klaasen and Pat Matshikiza”.
Saxophonist/flautist Steve Dyer, who performed there in the early 1990s with his group Southern Freeway, remembers a place where the music programme was as diverse as the crowd. The Rainbow, for Dyer, was a “classless space with no barriers between people, and where we were allowed to view ourselves as being in a free South Africa. My memories of the Rainbow are linked to the years of change in South Africa. I owe a debt of gratitude to Pam and Ben for the vision they had, in terms of music and society. On the Rainbow’s 25th anniversary, I have to wonder if that dream is brighter than the reality,” said Dyer.
Independence brought changes at the Rainbow. With the all-consuming tension of the struggle removed, people seemed to get on with their lives and the Sunday afternoon sessions were silent for a while — until Pretorius sold the jazz club to Neil Comfort in 2001, and Busi Mhlongo reopened it as a music venue on September 2 of that year. Since then the likes of Dolly Rathebe, the late Jabu Khanyile and others have followed.
The crowd is still mixed, but in 2006 the working classes are usually hanging on to the hips of European tourists when the Rainbow train starts chugging during the traditional third set at the end of a sweltering gig.
The Rainbow dream may still be shimmering brighter than reality, but it is also a place where you fall in love with music and the beautiful girl, whose name you don’t know, twirling her skirts in time to it. It is where your heart reminds you that it beats to an African rhythm.
The Vusi Mkhize Band perform at the Rainbow, 23 Stanfield Lane, Pinetown, on December 16 from 1pm. The Rainbow 25th birthday celebration on December 17 features The Melvin Peters Quartet (12.30pm to 1.30pm), Just Jazz (2pm to 3pm) and Phuzekhemisi from 3.40pm. Call (031) 702 9161 for more information