Apartheid (Policy)

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares189 Views

    Mbongeni Ngema, Playwright Best Known for ‘Sarafina!,’ Dies at 68

    by

    Before the fall of apartheid, his plays, which also included “Woza Albert!” and “Asinamali,” challenged the South African government’s racial policies.Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist and director whose stage works, including the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!,” challenged and mocked his homeland’s longtime policy of racial apartheid, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Mbizana, South Africa, after a car accident. He was 68.Mr. Ngema was a passenger in a car that was struck head on when he was returning from a funeral in Lusikisiki, in Eastern Cape Province, according to a family statement cited in the South African news media.“His masterfully creative narration of our liberation struggle honored the humanity of oppressed South Africans and exposed the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said in a post on X after Mr. Ngema’s death.In the decade before the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid in the early ’90s, the South African system of institutionalized racism was an overwhelming concern to Mr. Ngema. During that decade he cocreated the play “Woza Albert!,” wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”“Sarafina!” evolved out of a conversation he had in the 1980s with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a prominent anti-apartheid activist who was then married to Mandela.“I was sitting with Mama Winnie Mandela, and I started thinking, ‘This country is in flames,’” he told the South African television show “The Insider SA” in 2022. “So I asked a question. I said, ‘Mama, what do you think is finally going to happen to this country?’“Mama looked at me, and she said, ‘I wish I had a big blanket to cover the faces of the little ones so they do not see that bitter end.’”Mr. Ngema soon began to envision young people, running and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a song that he would write for “Sarafina!,” a musical that follows Black high school students in the township of Soweto in 1976 during the uprising against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans, rather than Zulu, as the official language in schools.Mr. Ngema wrote the book and collaborated with the trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela on the score.Mr. Ngema, left, with former President Nelson Mandela in 2002.Lewis Moon/Agence France-Presse“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. It moved that fall to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center and then, in early 1988, to Broadway, at the Cort Theater, where it played 597 performances.In his review of the production at the Newhouse, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Ngema had “brought forth a musical that transmutes the oppression of Black townships into liberating singing and dancing that nearly raises the theater’s roof.”The score, he added, “evokes the cacophony of life in a Black society both oppressed and defiant, at once sentenced to hard labor and ignited by dreams of social justice.”“Sarafina!” received five Tony nominations, including three for Mr. Ngema: for best direction of a musical (won by Harold Prince for “The Phantom of the Opera”), best original score (won by Stephen Sondheim for “Into the Woods”) and best choreography, which he shared with Ndaba Mhlongo (won by Michael Smuin for “Anything Goes”).“Sarafina!” was also nominated for best musical and best featured actress in a musical.It was adapted as a film in 1992, starring Leleti Khumalo, who had starred in the South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational teacher and the singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mother.Mbongeni Ngema (pronounced mmm-bon-GEN-i nnn-GAY-ma) was born on June 1, 1955, in Verulam, a town north of Durban.According to his official biography for the film “Sarafina!,” he was separated from his parents at 11, then lived for a time with extended family in Zululand and later on his own in the poor neighborhoods around Durban. From age 12, he taught himself to play guitar.“When I grew up all I wanted to be was a musician, and I was influenced greatly by the Beatles,” he said on “The Insider SA.”Working in a fertilizer factory in the mid-1970s, a fellow worker asked him to play guitar to accompany a play he had written.“And then I fell in love with the part of the lead character in the play,” he told the magazine Africa Report in 1987. “When he was onstage, I would mimic him backstage — making the other musicians laugh.” One night, when the actor did not show up, he played the role.Mr. Ngema and the playwright began to collaborate, which led Mr. Ngema to start directing and writing his own small pieces. In 1979, he began working in Johannesburg with Gibson Kente, a playwright and composer, to understand the magic in his productions. After two years, he left and began working with the performer Percy Mtwa.He, Mr. Mtwa and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!,” a satire that imagines the impact of the second coming of a Christ-like figure, Morena, who arrives in South Africa on a jumbo jet from Jerusalem, through the lives of ordinary people, vigorously played over the course of 80 minutes by Mr. Ngema and Mr. Mtwa.The white government tries to exploit Morena, then labels him a Communist and locks him up on Robben Island, where Mandela and other political prisoners were incarcerated.The play opened in South Africa in 1981 and was staged over the next three years in Europe, Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater and around the United States.In The Washington Post, the critic David Richards wrote in 1984 that “Woza Albert!” “tackles such harsh realities as injustice, poverty and apartheid in South Africa, but does so with far more spirit, humor and, yes, hope, than the subject generally inspires.” He added that “with only their wonderful, wide-eyed talent,” Mr. Mtwa and Mr. Ngema “can summon up a landscape, a society, a history.”The trumpeter Hugh Masekela, third from right, with members of the cast of “Sarafina!” during a rehearsal at Lincoln Center in 1987. Mr. Masekela and Mr. Ngema collaborated on the score for the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Ngema then wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), in which five Black men in a single South African prison cell describe — through acting, dancing, singing and mime — why they were incarcerated and how they were victimized by racist laws, unemployment and police violence.The play’s name (which means “We have no money”) comes from the rallying cry of rent strikers in 1983 in the Lamontville township.Mr. Ngema said that “Asinamali!” was alarming enough to authorities in Duncan Village, in the Eastern Cape, that they arrested the audience for attending a performance.“They said it was an illegal political gathering,” Mr. Ngema said in an interview in 2017 on a South African podcast.He called “Asinamali!” a celebration of resistance.“It shows that no matter how bad things get, victory is inevitable,” he told The Times in 1986 during rehearsals before the play opened in Harlem at the New Heritage Repertory Theater. “The spirit of the people shall prevail.”Later that year, “Asinamali!” was part of a South African theater festival at Lincoln Center.Information on Mr. Ngema’s survivors was not immediately available. His marriage to Ms. Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!,” ended in divorce. Mr. Ngema, who wrote several other plays, was involved in a controversy in 1996 when his sequel to “Sarafina!,” “Sarafina 2” — commissioned by the South African Health Department to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic — led to a government corruption investigation over accusations that its cost was an excessive “unauthorized expenditure” and that its message was inadequate.He defended the show’s price tag, saying it was necessary to bring Broadway-quality shows to Black townships.“People have said it’s a waste of government money,” Mr. Ngema told The Associated Press in 1996. “It think that’s a stupid criticism.” More

    More stories

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      South African Filmmakers Move Beyond Apartheid Stories

      by

      Films about South Africa once focused on apartheid, but a new generation of directors and producers is making hits about modern life and love for global audiences.JOHANNESBURG — One of South Africa’s top film producers squinted at a monitor as a hush settled over the crew. Cameras zoomed in on an actress playing a dealer of fine art — chicly dressed in a pencil skirt made from bold African textiles — who offered a coy smile as an old flame stepped into her gallery.It’s the opening scene of a new Netflix movie about high-powered Black women, wealth and modern city life in Johannesburg — one in a flood of productions from a new generation of South African filmmakers. They are bent on telling their own stories on their own terms, eager to widen the aperture on a country after a generation of films defined by apartheid, poverty and struggle.“We call it the legacy exhaustion, the apartheid cinema, people are exhausted with it,” Bongiwe Selane, the producer, said a few days later in the editing studio. “The generation now didn’t live it, they don’t really relate to it. They want to see stories about their experiences now.”Those stories have been buoyed by recent investment from streaming services like Netflix and its South Africa-based rival, Showmax, which are racing to attract audiences across the African continent and beyond, and pouring millions into productions by African filmmakers.Bongiwe Selane, at the Usual Suspects Studios in Johannesburg. She said people want to see stories about their current experiences, not just from the apartheid era. Joao Silva/The New York TimesIn South Africa, where for decades the local film industry has been financed by and catered to the country’s white minority, the new funding has boosted Black filmmakers — a cultural moment that parallels the one playing out in Hollywood.Netflix’s first script-to-screen South African productions — the spy thriller “Queen Sono” and “Blood and Water,” a teen drama about an elite private high school — have won fans locally and topped the streaming giant’s international charts.“I know especially in the States, a lot of people were excited to see a Black, dark-skinned girl play a lead character in Netflix,” Ama Qamata, 22, a star of “Blood and Water,” said one recent afternoon in Johannesburg on set for a local soap opera.As a makeup artist touched up her merlot-red lipstick, showrunners shouted into walkie-talkies to set up the day’s scene: A woman at a funeral accidentally falls into the grave of the man she is accused of killing. “Over the top, but the audience loves it,” one line producer, Janine Wessels, quipped.Soap operas like this have been a favorite on local television for years, but many were imported from the United States. “Blood and Water” takes another familiar American genre — the teen drama — and turns the tables: It’s a story set in Cape Town, featuring mansion parties with bouncers, bartenders and infinity pools soaked in neon lights — and has been eaten up by American audiences.Often likened to “Gossip Girl,” the show was the first original African series to be ranked in Netflix’s Top Ten chart in several countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France and South Africa.“One of my proudest moments was people from the continent just saying ‘Wow, you really represented us in good light, you really showed the world the filmmaking we’re capable of,’” Ms. Qamata said.Ama Qamata on set of the series “Gomora” in April.Joao Silva/The New York TimesIn the three decades since apartheid, much of South African cinema has been shaped by its legacy.Hollywood studios have flocked to the country to film blockbusters about Nelson Mandela and the struggle’s other heroes. The South African government has promoted apartheid-focused entertainment on local television as part of the country’s own efforts to reckon with its history.Other local fare catered largely to the country’s white Afrikaans minority, who could afford cable and outings to movie theaters mostly in malls and wealthy suburbs — a long, expensive trek for many Black South Africans living in the country’s old townships.“We’ve always had the local industry and funders sort of dictating how our stories should be told,” Ms. Selane, the producer, said. “Our financiers say, you can’t say that or if you say it that way you will offend our white subscribers.”Productions about apartheid were important in documenting the country’s history and exposing the roots of an economy that remains one of the most unequal in the world, where wealth is still concentrated mostly in the hands of whites and a small Black elite.But in recent years, the country has also undergone major demographic and economic shifts. The first South Africans who grew up after apartheid are now adults, asserting their voices on social media and in professional workplaces. And a growing Black middle class has been eager to see itself reflected onscreen — and showing it with their wallets.Actors Ntobeko Sishi, Thembi Seete and Zoliza Xavula during filming of the soap opera “Gomora” in Johannesburg in April.Joao Silva/The New York TimesIn 2015, the film “Tell Me Sweet Something,” about an aspiring young writer who finds unlikely love in Johannesburg’s hipster hangout Maboeng, hit number five in South Africa, blowing the lid off box office expectations for locally made romantic comedies.A year later, “Happiness is a Four Letter Word” — the prequel to Ms. Selane’s latest film that opens with the art gallery scene — outperformed several Hollywood releases in South African movie theaters on its opening weekend.The movie revolves around three bold women navigating a new South Africa. There is Princess, a serial dater and owner of a trendy art gallery; Zaza, a glamorous housewife having an illicit love affair; and Nandi, a high-powered lawyer who gets cold feet on the cusp of her wedding.“Audiences would come up to me to tell me how they also had a guy who broke their heart and they want to see that, to watch something where apartheid is not in the foreground,” said Renate Stuurman, who plays Princess. “It can be in the background, surely, it’s what brought us here, but people were happy to be distracted.”Netflix and Showmax pounced on such stories to capture audiences in Africa, where streaming is projected to reach nearly 13 million subscriptions by 2025 — up fivefold from the end of 2019, according to Digital TV Research, an industry forecaster. For Netflix, the investment is part of a larger push to acquire a generation of Black content.Musicians rehearsing on the set of “Gomora” in Johannesburg in April. The changing demographics of South Africa have led to a shift in the cinematic offerings.Joao Silva/The New York Times“We’re aiming to become a strong part of the local ecosystem in terms of growing the capacity and talent in the market,” said Ben Amadasun, director of Africa Originals and Acquisitions at Netflix. “The basis is that we believe that stories can come from anywhere and travel everywhere.”Since 2016, the company has snapped up content from filmmakers in South Africa and Nigeria, home to the industry popularly known as Nollywood. Nigerian filmmakers have churned out thousands of movies — many produced with just a few thousand dollars and one digital camera — since the late 1990s.Nollywood films won fans across English-speaking Africa, but South Africa is chipping away at its dominance, industry leaders say.For the past two decades, South Africa has hosted major Hollywood studios drawn to its highly skilled workers and government-issued rebate on all production costs spent in the country.Cape Town’s streets were transformed into Islamabad for the fourth season of Homeland; studios constructed models of Robben Island for “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom;” and crews flew helicopters, crashed cars and set off massive explosions in downtown Johannesburg for “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” Of the roughly 400 films made in South Africa between 2008 and 2014, nearly 40 percent were foreign productions, according to the National Film and Video Foundation, a government agency.For filmmakers here, the shoots were often a source of frustration. The studios brought in their own directors and leading actors — who sometimes played South African characters — while sidelining South Africans to jobs as assistants and line producers.The productions “weren’t looking for our intellect or perspectives, they were looking for Sherpas,” said Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, a filmmaker.Jahmil X.T. Qubeka at The Bioscope cinema in Johannesburg.Joao Silva/The New York TimesBut increased investment in South Africa’s already thriving film industry means that local creatives like Mr. Qubeka have come closer to realizing their ambitions. His new production, “Blood Psalms,” a series for Showmax, employs massive sets reminiscent of “Game of Thrones,” green screens to concoct magical powers, and elaborate costumes of armor and golden crowns.Inside an editing suite in Johannesburg one recent morning, Mr. Qubeka chatted with an editor slicing together shots for the show, about a queen battling a world-ending prophecy — a plot drawn from African mythology.“The true revolution,” Mr. Qubeka said, “is that we as South Africans are being sought out for our perspective and our ideas.” More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      From a South African Slur to a Scathing Drama About Toxic Masculinity

      by

      The new film “Moffie” examines the brainwashing of a generation of white men in the twilight of the apartheid regime.“Mo-FFIES!” chant the soldiers, precisely lined up under a baking sun, as a screaming sergeant reviles two men reported to be lovers. “Mo-ffies! Mo-ffies! Mo-ffies!”The word is a homophobic slur in Afrikaans, and the scene comes about 30 minutes into Oliver Hermanus’s new film, “Moffie.” It depicts South Africa in the early 1980s, when the country’s white government saw threats from the communists at the border, terrorists at home and the anti-apartheid movement worldwide. Every white man over 16 had to do two years of military service, and “Moffie” suggests the story of a generation through the shy recruit Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer). He endures the brutal basic training designed to brainwash the young men into a paranoid, aggressive defense of the apartheid regime, and is sent to fight on the border, while quietly experiencing an awakening of sexual identity in the worst possible context.“A scarringly brilliant anatomy of white South African masculinity,” Guy Lodge wrote in Variety upon the film’s premiere at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. It was equally well reviewed in South Africa before its distribution was derailed by the pandemic. The drama is reaching American theaters and video on demand on April 9.Telling a story set in the apartheid era from a white point of view was not an obvious choice for the Cape Town-born Hermanus, 37, who is mixed race (known as “colored” in South Africa), and did not join the army.“I did wonder whether my first film set in the apartheid era could really be about white South African men as victims of apartheid,” Hermanus said in an interview in London, where he is about to begin filming an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru,” written by Kazuo Ishiguro. “It’s not quite doing Winnie or Nelson Mandela!”Kai Luke Brummer plays a South African conscript uncertain of his sexuality.IFC FilmsIt was the title that intrigued the South African-born producer Eric Abraham (“Ida”), when he chanced upon the novel “Moffie” by André Carl van der Merwe a few years ago in London. “Anyone who has grown up in South Africa knows the power of that word to hurt,” he said in an interview. “It was the most demeaning, derogatory term you could come up with, used by white people to intimidate and de-select those who they feared infecting their ideology.”Abraham and his fellow producer Jack Sidey approached Hermanus, whose 2011 film, “Beauty,” they admired. He was initially skeptical. “In South Africa, you always arrive with a racial perspective, and that’s how I first thought about ‘Moffie,’” he said. “But something about it gripped me, and I realized that it is really about shame and indoctrination.”The word, he added, is equally vicious for a straight or gay man, “because it identifies you as an outsider, a man who does not embody the qualities of the strong hypermasculine dominator.”After working with two writers, Hermanus and Sidey eventually wrote the script together, moving away from the novel’s more personal love story. “I was more interested in the hurt and indoctrination than the protagonist’s catharsis,” Hermanus said. “I didn’t want to make another gay-centric relationship drama set in the army. I wanted it to be a serious portrait of this generation.”Hermanus obliquely and subtly evokes Nicholas’s shifting emotions, as the soldier gradually forms a silent attachment to a fellow conscript, Dylan Stassen (Ryan de Villiers). The price of expressing such feelings is made clear in that early scene when the two lovers, bloodied and trembling, are taunted and humiliated. Later, we learn they have been sent to the fearsome Ward 22, where they are the subject of brutal experimental treatments intended to cure homosexuals, drug addicts and others deemed to be deviant.“It was very important to both Oliver and me that Nicholas wasn’t certain of his sexuality,” Brummer said in a video interview from Cape Town. “His focus is survival, finding out how to fit in, and in finding Dylan something in him ignites, and his understanding of the world shifts.”The deep social repression of sexuality and of otherness is evoked midway through the film in a brightly colored, sun-dappled flashback to a childhood experience of humiliation, which Hermanus drew from his own memories. It is shot in a single take, one of several unpredictable cinematic decisions that inflect the movie. “We set a lot of rules beforehand about our choices, but sometimes you just surrender to what is there,” said Jamie D. Ramsay, the director of photography, who had worked with Hermanus on two previous films. “Oliver is brave and will commit and say, ‘OK that’s the shot.’”The director was initially skeptical of a film about apartheid told from a white perspective. “In South Africa, you always arrive with a racial perspective, and that’s how I first thought about ‘Moffie,’” he said.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesHermanus, who was 11 when apartheid ended, said that he had always been obsessed with films, shooting his first movie — “a horror movie, terrible, starring my cousin” — at 13. After earning a degree in film and media studies from the University of Cape Town, he worked at a film production company (“as a slave”) eventually becoming a newspaper photographer. All the time, he said, “I wanted to be a filmmaker, and was living through a depression as a colored South African who just didn’t know how to make that happen.”A chance meeting with the director Roland Emmerich and his cinematographer, Ueli Steiger, in a Cape Town restaurant led to a friendship that changed everything. “One day Roland said to me, if you can get in to film school, I’ll give you a scholarship,” Hermanus recounted. “Somehow they saw something in me; it’s a perfect example of what it means to invest in people.”Hermanus went to the London Film School for three years, and made the full-length “Shirley Adams” as his graduation movie. “You are supposed to make a short film, but I wore them out,” Hermanus said. The film’s critical success in South Africa and abroad led to the invitation of a residency in Cannes, where he began to work on “Beauty,” a study of a gay obsession in a tight Afrikaans community.Like Hermanus’s other films, “Moffie” is the product of what he describes as “forensic” preparation. He researched the era, helped by Ramsay, who had collected images of the South African border war in the ’70s and ’80s before he was involved with the movie. And the director met regularly with the actors for months, working out their back stories, then sent them to a boot camp for a week.“Oliver created an environment in which anything was possible because we understood our characters and that world,” Hilton Pelser, who plays the terrifying Sergeant Brand, said in a video interview. “I came to understand what Brand is trying to do; in a very dark, very violent way, he is trying to save their lives.”The movie, Hermanus said, is a reflection of the crumbling of apartheid, the moment when the minority government cranked up fear and distrust because it was losing its grip. There are very few Black figures in the movie, and all are the brief subject of violence or contempt. “I wanted the film to be from the perspective of white South Africa,” Hermanus said, “and that was its reality.”Despite that perspective, Hermanus feels “Moffie” resonates in broader ways. “I see it as a portrait of the factory, how men were being made in the service of an ideology,” he said. “That relates to their treatment of women, their treatment of other races, how they potentially become the men we identify as problematic today.”Apartheid, he added, “isn’t one face. It’s a bit like World War II — there are lots of different films you could make. ‘Moffie’ is about just one facet of that history: the beginning of the end.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Sibongile Khumalo, South Africa’s ‘First Lady of Song,’ Dies at 63

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySibongile Khumalo, South Africa’s ‘First Lady of Song,’ Dies at 63Proficient across a range of genres, she had the hall-filling power of an operatic mezzo-soprano and the directness of a pop singer.The South African singer Sibongile Khumalo in performance at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn in 2007. Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesFeb. 1, 2021, 3:04 p.m. ETSibongile Khumalo, a virtuoso vocalist whose ease of motion between opera, jazz and South African popular music made her a symbol of the country’s new social order after the end of apartheid, died on Thursday. She was 63.Her family wrote on Instagram that the cause was complications of a stroke, and that she had endured a long illness. The post did not say where she died.Fleet and precise across a wide vocal range but particularly elegant in the upper register, Ms. Khumalo’s voice had the hall-filling power of an operatic mezzo-soprano and the directness of a pop singer. After making her debut as Carmen in a production in Durban, she earned wide acclaim for her roles in South African operas and plays, including “UShaka KaSenzangakhona,” “Princess Magogo KaDinuzulu” and “Gorée,” all of which toured internationally.At home she was equally known for her catchy original compositions and her renditions of South African jazz standards like the straight-ahead anthem “Yakhal’ Inkomo,” written by the saxophonist Winston Ngozi, which became a calling card.When the apartheid government fell and Nelson Mandela became the country’s first democratically elected president in 1994, Ms. Khumalo performed at his inauguration. Mandela famously referred to her as the country’s “first lady of song,” and the title stuck.The next year, when South Africa went to the Rugby World Cup — a moment of national reconciliation later immortalized in the film “Invictus” — Ms. Khumalo was invited to perform both her home country’s national anthem and that of its opponent, New Zealand. It was “the one and only time I’ve ever watched a rugby match, at any level, of any kind,” she told a television interviewer in 2017, laughing.In 1996 Sony released her debut album, “Ancient Evenings,” which included a number of originals and loosely adhered to a vocal-driven South African pop style. Over the next two decades she would release a steady stream of albums, earning four South African Music Awards. For her stage performances, she garnered three Vita Awards.In 2008 she received the Order of Ikhamanga in silver, among the country’s highest honors for contributions to the arts.Sibongile Mngoma was born in Soweto on Sept. 24, 1957, to Grace and Khabi Mngoma. Her mother was a nurse; her father was a scholar and musician who helped found the music department at the University of Zululand.Sibongile began studying at age 8 under a respected local music teacher, Emily Motsieloa, focusing on the violin. She was heavily influenced by the music of local healers and ministers at the nearby church, as well as the Western classical and pop records her parents played around the house.She also inherited her father’s passion for education and went on to earn undergraduate degrees from both Zululand and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She later received honorary doctorates from Zululand, Rhodes University and the University of South Africa.She taught at Zululand, but she also sought opportunities to reach children who lacked access to major institutions. She held teaching and administrative positions at the Federated Union of Black Artists Academy in Johannesburg and the Madimba Institute of African Music in Soweto.Ms. Khumalo’s husband, the actor and director Siphiwe Khumalo, died in 2005. The couple had two children, Ayanda and Tshepo Khumalo. A full list of survivors was not immediately available.In 1993, she won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award at the famed Grahamstown National Arts Festival, and her star rose swiftly. She had already begun turning heads with a concert program, titled “The 3 Faces of Sibongile Khumalo,” that showed off her versatility across genres. Those “faces” were jazz, opera and traditional South African music.When Ms. Khumalo was a girl, her father had brought her to see Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu, a Zulu princess and musician known for her prowess as a singer and composer. “My dad made me sit at her feet to listen to her play ugubhu and sing,” Ms. Khumalo wrote in the notes to her self-titled 2005 album, referring to a Zulu stringed instrument. “I thought he was being very unkind to me because all the other children were out in the yard playing.”But decades later, she drew upon the experience when she collaborated with the scholar Mzilikazi Khumalo (no relation) to create “Princess Magogo KaDinuzulu,” billed as the first Zulu opera, centered on the princess’s own compositions. “It must have been destiny,” she said. “In my professional years the music came back and it began to make sense.”When “Princess Magogo KaDinuzulu” traveled to the United States in 2004, Anne Midgette reviewed it for The New York Times, praising Ms. Khumalo’s “talent and versatility.” Ten years after South Africa had achieved democratic rule, Ms. Midgette noted, Ms. Khumalo seemed to represent “a symbol of its new culture.”In a 2019 interview ahead of her performance at the Joy of Jazz Festival in Johannesburg, Ms. Khumalo said that no matter the symbolism, her main commitment was to the singularity of her own voice. “While exposing yourself and opening yourself up to what is out there, it is also important to remain true to yourself, so that even when you allow yourself to be influenced by others, you retain an identity that clearly defines you,” she said.Whatever the subject matter, she added, “it is the truth in what you express, and how you express it, that is paramount.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Jonas Gwangwa, Trombonist and Anti-Apartheid Activist, Dies at 83

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJonas Gwangwa, Trombonist and Anti-Apartheid Activist, Dies at 83He became a leading light on the South African jazz scene at a young age, and went on to lead the African National Congress’s flagship ensemble.Jonas Gwangwa in concert in Johannesburg in 2007. The president of South Africa called him “a giant of our revolutionary cultural movement.”Credit…Lefty Shivambu/Getty ImagesJan. 28, 2021, 4:12 p.m. ETJonas Gwangwa, a pre-eminent South African trombonist, vocalist and composer who became a leading artistic ambassador for the anti-apartheid resistance, died on Sunday. He was 83.The office of President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the death in a statement, but did not say where he died or what the cause was. Mr. Gwangwa had been in poor health for some time.Calling him “a giant of our revolutionary cultural movement,” Mr. Ramaphosa wrote, “Jonas Gwangwa ascends to our great orchestra of musical ancestors, whose creative genius and dedication to the freedom of all South Africans inspired millions in our country and mobilized the international community against the apartheid system.”Mr. Gwangwa died exactly three years to the day after the death of the trumpeter Hugh Masekela — Mr. Gwangwa’s classmate as a youngster, his bandmate as a young adult and his fellow national hero in later years.Mr. Gwangwa’s crisp and graceful trombone playing was marked by its tightly slurred notes and peppery rhythm. By his early 20s, he had become known as the leading trombonist on the Johannesburg jazz scene: He was in the ensemble of the smash hit musical “King Kong,” South Africa’s first jazz opera, composed by the musician and writer Todd Matshikiza and based on the life of a boxing champion; and with Mr. Masekela, he helped found the Jazz Epistles, a sextet of young all-stars whose 1959 LP, “Jazz Epistle: Verse 1,” signaled a turning point in modern South African jazz.He left the country in 1961, on tour with “King Kong,” and remained in exile for 30 years. But he stayed closely involved with the anti-apartheid struggle being led by the African National Congress. In 1980, at the request of the A.N.C.’s leaders, he assembled the Amandla Cultural Ensemble, the party’s official artistic group, which toured the world, helping to build support for the movement.“It was something exciting, because everybody was ready for the gun — but this was a different gun,” Mr. Gwangwa said in a 2016 interview on South African television.“O.R. Tambo had said it: We’d been here for 20-some-odd years and everything, trying to talk to the international community about our struggle, but here Amandla does it in two hours,” he added. “Because we’re talking about the life of the people. We’re putting that onstage.”Together with George Fenton, Mr. Gwangwa composed the music for “Cry Freedom,” Richard Attenborough’s 1987 film about the South African revolutionary leader Steve Biko. The soundtrack was nominated for an Academy Award, and the film’s theme song earned both Oscar and Grammy nods.Mr. Gwangwa left South Africa in 1961 and did not return for 30 years. But he stayed closely involved with the anti-apartheid struggle being led by the African National Congress.Credit…Lefty Shivambu/Gallo ImagesJonas Mosa Gwangwa was born on Oct. 19, 1937, in Orlando East, a township of Johannesburg, and grew up surrounded by song. His parents played records around the house; one of his two older sisters was a concert pianist; the family often came together to sing hymns.He studied at St. Mary’s elementary school in Orlando and then at nearby St. Peter’s, a premier high school for Black students. In 1954, he was given his first trombone by Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican missionary and social campaigner, who also put Mr. Masekela’s first trumpet (donated by Louis Armstrong) in his hands.Jonas had hoped for a clarinet, but he made use of what he got. “I’m a self-taught musician even in just holding the instrument. I saw from a Glenn Miller picture how to hold it,” he was quoted as saying by Gwen Ansell in her book “Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Politics in South Africa” (2004).He met his future wife, Violet, when the two were teenagers. For almost 70 years, their relationship endured through exile in various countries; for extended periods they were unable to see each other. But in 1991, with apartheid toppled, they finally settled back in South Africa, surrounded by their children.Ms. Gwangwa died just weeks before her husband. Four sons, three daughters, and a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren survive.As soon as he could play, Mr. Gwangwa was swept up in the jazz boom in Sophiatown, a racially mixed Johannesburg neighborhood where a vibrant youth culture emerged in the postwar years. Together with Mr. Masekela and the saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, he journeyed to Cape Town to seek out Dollar Brand (later known as Abdullah Ibrahim), a young piano phenom whom musicians in both cities were talking about. When they found him, the Jazz Epistles were born: six blazing young talents, all fascinated by American bebop but intent on giving voice to the cosmopolitan imagination of young South Africans.In 1960, police in the Sharpeville township massacred a group of protesters against apartheid restrictions. A harsh government crackdown followed in all realms of society. After touring with “King Kong” in London, Mr. Gwangwa remained abroad, eventually moving to New York to enroll at the Manhattan School of Music.He roomed with Mr. Masekela for a time and became increasingly active in the milieu of A.N.C.-aligned expatriate artists. He helped to edit the speech that the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, an old friend, wrote for the vocalist and activist Miriam Makeba to read before the United Nations in 1963. He was the arranger of a Grammy-winning album by Ms. Makeba and Harry Belafonte, and he performed at the 1965 “Sound of Africa” concert at Carnegie Hall, alongside Mr. Masekela, Ms. Makeba and others. He also led his own ensembles, including African Explosion, which released one album, “Who?” (1969).Mr. Gwangwa’s apartment in New York became a meeting ground for fellow musicians and activists, fondly referred to as “the embassy.”In 1976, after a stint in Atlanta, Mr. Gwangwa moved with his family to Gaborone, Botswana, where he founded Shakawe, a group of exiled South African jazz musicians, and became a member of the Medu Art Ensemble, an interdisciplinary collective engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1977, he appeared in Lagos, Nigeria, at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, known as Festac, a historic gathering of representatives from around the African continent and across the diaspora. Taking in the range of talent on hand, he decided to organize the South African performers into a unified multidisciplinary production. They were a hit.He was later summoned to Angola, where he met with A.N.C. leaders and soldiers in the party’s armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe, known as M.K. They commissioned him to write a full musical telling the story of South Africans’ heritage and the continuing freedom struggle, and he assembled a cast of musicians, dancers and other performers made up of M.K. soldiers and other expatriates. It became the A.N.C.’s flagship arts ensemble, the Amandla Cultural Ensemble.Mr. Gwangwa in performance in 1996.Credit…AlamyFor the next few years Mr. Gwangwa alternated between rehearsals in Angola, tours around the world and home in Botswana. But his prominent role in the movement placed a target on his back. In 1985, the South African Defense Force staged a raid on the M.K. and organizers in Gaborone. Mr. Gwangwa’s home was bombed.He and his family moved to London, then to the United States. As the apartheid government fell, they returned home, and Mr. Gwangwa received a heroic reception. In 2010, he was awarded the Order of Ikhamanga, South Africa’s highest honor for contributions to the arts and culture. The only other recipient that year was Mr. Masekela.He released a few standout late-career albums, including “A Temporary Inconvenience” (1999). But his proudest accomplishment remained Amandla, as he told Ms. Ansell in a recent interview.“Because it involved all the things in music that excited me the most, and gave me the opportunity to bring them together,” he said, “for the most important reason possible: It was for the people.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More