My father came to visit us from time to time and arranged a ceremony at his home in Sharpeville to introduce Jabu to our clan. My aunt Ackila, the wife of my father’s brother Bigvai, was another regular visitor. Her daughter Maphiri, who was a political exile in Tanzania, always came to our house to be with her dear mother. The great thing about Gaborone was the four-hour drive to Johannesburg. Friends and relatives visited regularly. It was also a gateway to the rest of Africa, which enabled our friends and relatives who were in exile in Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Tanzania to visit. Barbara came once from Lusaka when our grandmother Johanna was also visiting. It was a great reunion, but Barbara warned George and me: “You people must be vigilant. The Boers will come and try to kill all of you South Africans one day.” We didn’t take her words lightly.
Jabu’s sister Mpozi and her husband, Fana, had decided to send their three-year-old daughter Deliwe to his parents in Soweto while working on being more stable financially. When Jabu visited her, however, she came back distraught because the environment where she was staying was so rough. We decided to adopt Deliwe temporarily until her parents were ready to take her back. Deliwe was a pure delight, a joy to have with us, and a wonderful addition to our home. She became a major catalyst to our happiness. We enrolled her in the YMCA nursery school a short walk from our house, and in a few weeks we made great new friends who were parents of her classmates. Around this time, without any particular incident or influence, I found myself losing interest in alcohol. I just stopped drinking, and it felt absolutely wonderful. I was now quite settled in Botswana, and my marriage had become very well stabilized except for the occasional flare-up. I am convinced that we owed this stability to the fact that I stopped drinking.
In May 1983, Malombo jazz group founder Julian Bahula, who was now a budding concert promoter in London, called me with an invitation to perform at the first Mandela birthday concert. It was to be at London’s Alexandra Palace, presented in conjunction with the ANC office in that country. In London I rehearsed with a group of South African musicians led by saxophonist Dudu Pukwana. It was also a joy to see Bishop Trevor Huddleston after twenty-three years. Unfortunately we spent very little time together because the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the South African Defense and Aid Organization, both of which he headed, were directly responsible for this first celebration of Mandela. He was a very busy man. It was also the affirmation of ANC president Oliver Tambo’s campaign to promote Nelson Mandela internationally as the central symbol in South Africa’s liberation struggle, and further raised the awareness of the world concerning the outrageous barbarism of the apartheid regime.
My performance at the concert and the entire proceedings of that week were reported negatively in the South African press. My recordings were already banned on the government-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation. My participation on the seventeenth of July, the day before Mandela’s sixty-fifth birthday, only helped to exacerbate the regime’s hatred of me.
South African–born producer Clive Calder, who was just establishing Jive/Zomba Records, attended the concert and expressed his interest in signing me to his label. He decided that it would perhaps be smart to bring a mobile studio to Botswana and bring the South African musicians I needed to Gaborone. He was highly enthusiastic about the idea, and wanted to bring Stewart Levine on as producer.
Around this time, I received word from Miriam that Philemon Hou, who composed “Grazing in the Grass,” had died of kidney disease in Liberia, which devastated me. I wondered if he had not been afforded the care he required because of shortages of equipment, medicine, and personnel since the regime of Samuel Doe had resulted in a major exodus of the professional community from Liberia. I thought about our wonderful days at the Queens Road house in Los Angeles. I was crushed that one more South African had died in lonely exile, far away from his extended family.
One day in Gaborone, Tsepo Tshola, from Lesotho’s Uhuru band, showed up at my front door with his suitcases. Very surprised, I greeted him with a welcoming embrace and asked, “Are you guys playing in town this weekend?” Tsepo replied with a big smile on his beaming face, “I have come to you, Bra Hugh.” Kalahari was sizzling. Tsepo Tshola had left Uhuru and was now singing with our band. We toured extensively throughout Botswana when we were not playing gigs at the Woodpecker Inn on Friday nights, the “500” Club on Saturday nights, and poolside at the Oasis Hotel on Sunday afternoons. Then we were invited to play in Maseru, Lesotho, during the Christmas and New Year holidays.
In 1982 the South African Defense Force death squads had raided Maseru and massacred forty-two people, mostly exiled ANC members and their families. They were murdered under the guise of destroying terrorist strongholds of guerrillas that allegedly raided South Africa from time to time. South Africa’s death squads were in the habit of raiding Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Namibia, Lesotho, and Zambia, where Barbara was now working in Oliver Tambo’s office in Lusaka. South Africa supported RENAMO in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola and the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia, as well as Kamuzu Banda in Malawi, all of whom were against the “left-wing devils” in the region. The raids caused major destabilization in the entire region neighboring South Africa. Lesotho, which had been a major tourist attraction, had been quickly impoverished. Botswana had not yet suffered the same nightmare. Tsepo explained to me that Maseru had been transformed into a cultural and recreational desert. He felt that instead of rotting there, he should come and join Kalahari. “Besides,” he said in his joyously boisterous fashion, “you guys need a lead singer.”
The people of Botswana fell in love with Tsepo. Out of the blue, Valentine Pringle, whom I had met through Harry Belafonte in 1962 with guitarist Bruce Langhorne and spent such memorable “party times” with at my 82nd Street apartment, invited me and Kalahari to come and play a few shows at Maseru’s Lancer’s Inn over the 1983 year-end holidays. He was managing the establishment and was in the middle of negotiations to purchase the place.
Mpho Motloung had died along with his parents in a car accident a few months after I last saw him. When I arrived in Lesotho, by air from Botswana, the first thing I did was to visit his widow, Maggie, and their daughter Millie at their mansion, which, although as majestic as ever, was now missing the bright spark of his electric personality, his loud laughter and ever-smiling face. Maseru felt like a ghost town. Gone was the sparkling, lively chatter of its citizens. Gloom pervaded the air. Absent were the tourists and the festive character for which this beautiful mountain kingdom was famous.
Our audiences at the Lancer’s Inn during the festive season were minuscule compared to the 100,000 people who had filled the stadium when we performed there on Christmas Day in 1980. We also did a show in Mafeteng, an hour’s drive from Maseru. Jabu and Deliwe had arrived a few days earlier, and the three of us were staying with her cousin in Morija, a town halfway between Maseru and Mafeteng. After the Mafeteng gig, I ran into an old friend who invited me to his home for drinks. A few hours later I was driving to Morija when a car approached from the opposite direction with its bright beams on. I flashed my headlights and before I knew it, the car had made a U-turn and started to chase my vehicle with its siren blaring. I pulled over and two soldiers with AK-47s jumped out and stuck their weapons in my neck from both sides of my car. One jumped into the front passenger seat and the other behind me. With their weapons still pressed to my neck, they ordered me to follow the car they had been riding in. We ended up in the police station, where all my valuables and my belt and shoes were taken. I was thrown into a dank, smelly cell with a bucket half-full of shit and piss with green flies hovering around it. The cell next to mine housed two teenaged girls who told me they had been falsely arrested for prostitution. I was terrified.
I had not been officially booked, and the soldiers who had arrested me began to ram my ribs with the buts of their weapons. One of them kept punching my forehead with his long, dirty nails till he pierced the flesh and blood started dripping down my nose and onto my shirt. H
e promised to put a bullet through my head at dawn. The soldiers accused me of being an underground member of the Lesotho Liberation Front, a militant faction that was attempting to overthrow the Leabua Jonathan regime. Jonathan had founded the Basutoland National Party, which worked for separate independence from Great Britain rather than becoming a part of the Union of South Africa. He became prime minister in 1965 under a constitution that preceded Basutoland’s independence as Lesotho in 1966. He lost the national election in 1970, suspended the constitution, ruled by decree, and exiled the opposition. South Africa blockaded Lesotho when Jonathan provided sanctuary to ANC guerrillas.
Before dawn, the three soldiers returned and tried to get me to sign a confession. They refused to accept that I was in Lesotho for concert performances, and pretended not to know who I really was. At around six that morning I heard the voices of my friend with whom I had been drinking the night before, and that of my wife, her cousin, and her cousin’s husband. The policeman who had just come on duty could not find my name in the charge book, and Jabu was repeatedly crying, “Are you sure there is no Hugh Masekela here?”
I screamed through the bars of my cell, “I’m here! I’m here!”
Jabu started crying loudly, calling out, “Hughie! Where are you?”
“I’m here!” I screamed. “Don’t leave me here. They want to kill me. I’m here! I’m here!” My friend telephoned his uncle, who was the chief of Mafeteng’s police. He soon arrived, very angry to be awakened so early in the morning, cussed out the police on duty, and ordered them to release me immediately. He then called the head of the Lesotho army, who came to meet us near the prison. The general apologized profusely and gave his assurance that my money and valuables with which the soldiers had absconded would be returned to me. He begged my forgiveness and asked me not to speak to the press about the incident. I got a call from the prime minister’s office the following day with more apologies and the same request to keep the matter a secret. A few days later Jabu, Deliwe, Tsepo, John Selolwane, and I flew out of Lesotho in a private plane because Botswana Airways had just discontinued flights to Maseru. The six-seat airplane flight was like a horrible nightmare. Amazingly, little Deliwe slept throughout the entire two hours of violent turbulence. However, it felt wonderful to be out of Lesotho. My new record company had chartered the airplane because we were due to begin recording at the new mobile studio, which was parked next to the guesthouse whose lounge we would use as the recording room. This facility was part of the Woodpecker Inn, where Kalahari performed on Friday nights. Julia Helfer, the Ghanaian proprietor of the Woodpecker, who was also my attorney, was a naturalized Botswanan citizen. She was extremely accommodating in agreeing to lease us one of her guesthouses for use as a recording studio.
Stewart Levine arrived in Gaborone shortly after the engineer sent down from England by Clive Calder had spent a week wiring and setting up the equipment at the Woodpecker. After a false start, with some of the musicians in Kalahari not being able to record as well as they played live, Stewart decided that we should invite some members of the Soul Brothers, South Africa’s premier mbhaqanga band, to play on the recording. Bassist Zakes Mchunu, keyboard and organ wizard Moses Ngwenya, and drummer Bongani made all the difference. Veterans of more than twenty hit albums, their experience propelled us forward at a very fast pace. From England came programmer and Fairlight keyboard genius Peter Harris and the Nigerian percussionist Gasper Lawal.
In the blistering heat of Botswana’s midsummer, bare-chested, sun-baked, and dripping with perspiration, we finished the rhythm tracks in one week and bade farewell to our Soul Brothers colleagues. We recorded an old composition of Tsepo Tshola’s called “Pula Ea Na” (It’s Raining), a happy song exhorting the villagers to prepare to plow, the herd boys to rein up the fieldwork bulls, the women to plant the seeds, and the children to come out from under the trees where lightning usually strikes, because the rain is coming down. “Motlalepula” was a sung poem for my little daughter, Pula, who was now living in Mafikeng, South Africa, where her mother, Tshidi, was practicing medicine after recently returning from Liberia. “Motlalepula is the irrigator, the owner of the waters; her home is in the clouds. She has turned her back on us. But she will send back the water if we go down on our knees and supplicate our ancestors to send her back to us so she can bring back the water to Africa.”
At this time, Botswana was in its first year of a menacing drought that was bringing even the reptiles and the strangest-looking insects out from under the ground. At the Woodpecker Inn, which was on the banks of the Notwane River, every manner of nearby bush animal was migrating to the waterside. Giant lizards, all kinds of snakes, birds, bucks, and rodent were running to cool themselves down by the riverside. The inn manager’s pedigreed Alsatian was gobbled up by a hungry python, and one music-loving baby cobra actually perched itself up right against one of the studio windows on the outside and swayed from side to side to the rhythm of “Don’t Go Lose It, Baby,” a fast-paced disco track with a Fela-like Afro-beat rhythm and happy lyrics, “Everybody out here loves a winner, don’t go lose it, baby.” I did some rapping on this track at Stewart’s urging. “Everybody’s rappin’ in America, Hughie, let’s try some,” he said. We co-wrote the lyrics to this song and the rap went, “A winner ain’t a loser and a loser ain’t a winner. Let me tell you that’s the name of the game, when you lose you booze and when you booze you lose and then you wonder why you lose your shoes. I met a girl one day. She was on her way, to make a movie down in L.A. She said, ‘I’ll never lose!’ I said, ‘You’ll never win.’ I bet you never ever heard her name. Well, every winner’s name is in the Hall of Fame, and you’re a winner when you beat the game; you’re a winner when you beat the game.” This song went to the number-two spot in the American dance charts behind Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” helping me to bring the Kalahari band to Europe and America. We also did a disco medley to “Skokiaan,” “Grazing in the Grass,” “Mbube,” and a few other South African township favorites. After Stewart and I completed the recordings in London, the rest of Kalahari came to join me on a UK tour before we went on to the States. By the end of the summer of 1984, we had toured the East Coast and the Midwestern states to much acclaim.
Before we left London, I went to see a brilliant two-man play at the Criterion Theatre in the West End, called Woza Albert. Mbongeni Ngema and Percy Mtwa started their show with a riveting version of “Stimela,” the now-famous coal-train song I had written ten years earlier. After the show I went backstage to meet the actors, and complimented them on their brilliant arrangement of “Stimela.” Mbongeni took credit for the arrangement and told me that he was a musician. I had always wanted to do a musical, and asked him if he would be interested in collaborating on one in the future. We exchanged addresses and telephone numbers and promised to keep in touch.
Clive Calder and the rest of the Jive Records staff were very happy with the results of the Technobush album we had just recorded. Clive suggested that we go back to the Botswana studio for a second album. Stewart and I had begun an initiative for a music school in Botswana during the Technobush recording. We received enthusiastic support from the American embassy and the Botswana Music Society, and from European and American expatriate development organizations around the country. With their concerted efforts and several fund-raising concerts by Kalahari, we were able to lease a small building and buy instruments. Members of the Music Society volunteered their teaching skills, and before long the ministry of education assisted us in launching the Botswana International School of Music. Khabi Mngoma, founder of the music department at the University of Zululand, was a friend of my mother from their Jan Hofmeyer school days in the early 1940s. He guided us on how to run the school—a priceless gift to us, because he was a furiously busy man in South Africa. Nevertheless, he contributed his valuable time to get us off the ground without demanding a cent for his guidance.
Toward the end of September, Bishop Trevor Huddleston came to visit Botswana
and stayed at the home of Archbishop Makhudu, a few minutes’ walking distance from my house. Jabu and I went to have lunch with them, and Huddleston was so impressed with the Botswana International School of Music initiative that he suggested we should do a fund-raiser for the institution when I was next in London. He promised that he would give a speech on that occasion. Although Huddleston was beginning to get bent over from age, he still maintained his awe-inspiring air of dignity and was even more eloquent than ever. He told us about his wonderful experience as archbishop of Tanzania, Zanzibar, and the Indian Ocean Islands. After that, he was made archbishop of Stepney, in the rough East End of London, where he started the Human League, another music group that became world famous. He was very proud of them. Huddleston was now in retirement and stationed at St. James Church on Piccadilly in Central London.
Since 1984, many car-bomb assassinations had been targeted at exiled political activists in Europe and in the countries neighboring South Africa. After collecting the mail, Dulcie September, who headed the ANC’s Paris office, was opening the door to her office on March 29, 1988, when an assassin believed to be working for the South African hit squads shot her five times. It was written in her obituary that forty-five-year-old Dulcie, a soft-spoken, dedicated worker, had never handled anything more deadly than a pen or a typewriter. The ANC’s London office in Camden Town had also been bombed. Many liberation activists in Windhoek, Dar es Salaam, Harare, Gaborone, Maseru, Mbabane, and Luanda, and in Lusaka, Zambia, had been murdered by the apartheid regime’s death squad assassins. The South African government deployed death squads wherever it felt individuals should be eliminated.
Robben Island was overcrowded ever since the 1976 student uprisings. The exodus from South Africa of people who were eager to receive military training abroad was at an all-time high. Friends and family who visited exiles such as George and Lindi Phahle and those of us considered to be antiapartheid activists were harassed and summoned to John Vorster Square police headquarters once they returned to South Africa for interrogation. Julius Mduli, who called us a few times a week on the telephone and visited us regularly, was constantly hounded by the South African police, but he always told them that he was not about to turn his back on his friends because the government authorities objected to his visits. The police constantly terrorized our parents, siblings, close relations, and friends, and their homes were regularly ransacked by the South African Gestapo. People who were not imprisoned but deemed dangerous were placed under house arrest or banished. Winnie Mandela, Albertina Sisulu, and the families of the Robben Island prisoners were terrorized daily. The atmosphere was very tense. We were all living in fear.
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