Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu’s cross-cultural brotherhood

A few weeks after the winter solstice, on the afternoon of Wednesday, 17 July 2019, roughly an hour before sunset, the sound of a voice chanting in isiZulu rang out across the Jewish section of Westpark Cemetery in Johannesburg.

A small group of fewer than 30 mourners was gathered alongside a freshly dug mound of dark soil near the perimeter wall of the graveyard. The late afternoon sun filtered almost horizontally through the poplar trees, illuminating the fine dust and clods of earth next to a roughly hewn plain pine box holding the remains of Jonathan Paul Clegg, OBE, OIS. This rudimentary container was fitting for the life of passionate pragmatism, devoid of airs and graces, that had been lived by the deceased.

Beginning with a drawn-out wail and occasionally cracking with emotion, this voice called the Zulu praise names (izibongo) of Johnny Clegg: “Hawu! Umfowethu! Skeyi jikel’eshobeni …" These were the words of Sipho Mchunu, honouring his deceased musical partner of some 50 years’ standing. Those 50 years had seen the pair witness the subjugation of a populace, the fall of a system, and the birth of the rainbow nation — an event they had envisaged, anticipated and fought for.

As Sipho’s poignant eulogy ended, the males among the assembled mourners took turns using a shovel to deposit earth on the surface of the coffin, which had been lowered into the freshly dug grave. At this point, Johnny’s sons Jesse and Jaron recited the Kaddish, the Aramaic prayer for the dead, in the presence of the rabbi who was conducting the funeral proceedings: “Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di-v’ra; chirutei, v’yamlich malchutei b’chayeichon; uvyomeichon uvchayei d’chol beit yisrael, ba’agala; uvizman kariv, v’im’ru: amen"(“Magnified and sanctified is the great name of G-d throughout the world, which was created according to Divine will. May the rule of peace be established speedily in our time, unto us and unto the entire household of Israel. And let us say: Amen.”)

Here were people gathered from two communities, separated by faith, history, geography and ideology, each with their own long history of violent oppression, both claiming Johnny as their own with no hint of dissonance understood or implied in his belonging to both groups.

This was representative of Johnny’s lived reality, his multicultural or “polycultural” spirit and his search for unity and meaning through the shared human condition. He had striven throughout his life to reconcile and balance his constantly changing inner construct of a multicultural identity. This identity wound its course between numerous competing yet synergistic social realities — a uniquely and typically South African identity. This presents an interesting opportunity to look at how Johnny and Sipho’s bond came about, and what we can take from this relationship and its development. It is relevant to think of this in terms of how society in South Africa came into being and how it functions today across cultures. This chapter investigates that bond and its impact on the forces that defined their environment in the context of norms governing art and music at the time.

Hegemony, culture and power

Sipho Mchunu and Johnny Clegg’s first encounter was not a likely occurrence. They came from entirely different worlds in late 1960s South Africa. These worlds had been defined, developed and perpetuated in paradigms of power with deep roots stretching back to the early eighteenth century. These were multilayered paradigms, built with intention and purpose to undermine and neuter one set of socio-cultural systems to the advantage of another. This is “hegemony”, and hegemony is maintained through a conflation of culture and power.

There are obvious indications of the effects of hegemony in South African society, such as the unwritten requirement of fluency in English to achieve socio-economic advancement. However, hegemony also manifests its power in more subtle ways. All forms of culture in a hegemony are part of a network of power relations, and this power is evident when viewed in context. It is in power positioned against an idea or a way of life to enable its antithesis that hegemony becomes operational. Hegemony is rarely detected in the civilised, surface-level dance of the system in motion. The hegemonic system weaves an illusion of symmetry and refined calm through the machinations of its fields and apparatus. For any nascent hegemony of domination, culture is the first and last battleground. Every juxtaposition — of civilisation and barbarism, refinement and crassness, religion and superstition — is a lever of power, pulled or pushed to create tactical advantages in an overarching strategy of socio-economic domination. If we look at the relative budgets allocated to vernacular broadcast media as opposed to English- and Afrikaans-language media under apartheid, we see the drivers and effects of hegemony in promoting certain forms of art and culture over others in South Africa. Beyond the budgetary considerations, this divided system of African-language broadcasting was designed to promote and reify subcultural and linguistic separation. This hegemony, alongside the overdetermination effect of centuries of war, dispossession, proselytisation, racism and ethnocentrism, painted the reality of the world Sipho and Johnny inhabited when they first met in Johannesburg in 1969.

The apartheid government in South Africa had deployed a carefully constructed system of racial and cultural segregation. Accompanying legislation such as the Group Areas Act (No 41 of 1950) and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (No 55 of 1949), alongside the homelands policy, enforced this division. The word segregation is important here. In a model of acculturation, when groups or individuals reduce their relationship with society while maintaining their heritage culture, this is called “separation”. In apartheid South Africa, with its pseudo-liberal policy of “separate development”, the element of force was a catalyst in the acculturation process. When this occurs, “separation” comes to be termed “segregation”. In South Africa’s case, we cannot refer to this as a voluntary strategy (as originally envisaged for acculturating immigrant populations), as the acculturation process towards the dominant culture at the time was one that posited the national majority as the acculturating group, doing so under extreme duress. The acculturation process of subordinate classes modifying their cultural orientation to align with the symbolically dominant culture is a necessary feature of hegemony. However, cultural diffusion can move in more than one direction, where the proximity of cultures to one another results in two-way exchanges — precisely what occurred between Johnny and Sipho.

A meeting of minds

Sipho recalls that, as a migrant labourer, he had obtained regular employment in Houghton, an affluent suburb of Johannesburg, working in the garden of a large home in 1969. It was during the course of that year that he met Johnny through mutual acquaintances and began teaching him Zulu guitar styles. Sipho introduced Johnny to the space of the migrant labour hostels and the forms of cultural expression that existed in those places. Johnny had been attracted to the different forms of Zulu dance, and became adept in the Mzansi, Shameni and Bhaca styles, which he learned at Sipho’s home in Makhabeleni and in the hostels.

The two formed a strong bond and developed their art during their early collaborations, with the support of well-known folk duo Des and Dawn Lindberg (performing at soirées at the couple’s home in Yeoville) and mining magnate Harry Oppenheimer (taking part in performances at his Brenthurst estate). These performance opportunities were key to the development and dissemination of their music, as they could not perform together in public due to apartheid-era laws. Sipho describes this:

“We had a huge problem with the police and … Des and Dawn helped us a lot. They helped put us on the map — got us in the newspapers. At that time, we couldn’t even put food on the table. They invited us to play at their home in Yeoville…. There were these boys from Nkandla of the Shange clan. They worked at Oppenheimer’s place. I introduced Johnny to them and every Christmas we would go and perform traditional [songs and] dances [at Brenthurst].”

Johnny and Sipho’s meeting would ultimately present a direct challenge to the brutal system of apartheid that categorised and oppressed groups of people on the basis of race. The system had sought through its mechanisms to perpetuate the colonial demonisation of African beliefs, and to marginalise African culture and its struggle voices that had pushed for balance in the system, or alternatively for its destruction.

Some voices have accused Clegg of cultural appropriation and pursuing African culture for a profit motive, but Sipho speaks to the authenticity of their relationship:

“He was my age and then I was a man giving him my culture … Johnny helped me a lot. We learned how to live with each other — he [saw] the truth of my life and he liked it … I also [saw] the truth of his life and I liked it. We sensed one another. In my life I could sense him, and he also knew how to sense me.

“[Despite initial communication difficulties] we sensed one another — in the eyes. Eyes — they speak louder than anything … the feeling, [your sense of someone], is more important. Life is about sensing things. We grew up to sense one another. We understood one another.”

Censorship, power and resistance

Johnny frequently used detailed anecdotes on stage to introduce songs during his shows. He often told the story of how he had met Yvonne Huskisson, who was the head of Radio Zulu at the time (known today as Ukhozi FM), when Johnny and Sipho’s first single, Woza Friday (Come Friday), was released in 1977, under the duo name “Jonathan and Sipho”. At the meeting, according to Johnny, Huskisson informed him that Woza Friday had been censored due to a violation of the language purity rule. The fact that there were English words interspersed among the isiZulu lyrics (for example: “Woza Friday my sweetie”) was what had triggered the violation. Another objection was the patois slang introduced in the lyrics (for example: “… Friday my dali [darling]”). At the time, Johnny related, he had pointed out to her: “But that’s how people speak. They mix languages and use slang.” This apparently aggravated the matter further rather than settling it, with Huskisson telling Johnny in “no uncertain terms” that the song would not be broadcast on Radio Zulu. At this point in the tale, Johnny would conclude with a broad smile that the song went on to become a smash hit on Radio Sotho, effectively launching the live performance career of Juluka. Radio Sotho was broadcast in Sesotho — a language not mutually intelligible with isiZulu. He referred to this as a “particularly South African ironic twist”. He had always enjoyed the humorous philosophical absurdity of these kinds of situations.

Johnny and Sipho were being censored because of their practice of mixing languages and violating a rule based on classic cultural divergence theory (the idea that cultures are stable and maintain their core characteristics when interacting with other cultures). On another level, they were essentially being singled out by parts of the apartheid apparatus for finding synergy in the unification of opposites. They had gone against the stream and created new art that sat outside the realm of possible imaginings in apartheid South Africa. The culture-power construct was designed and maintained to both deride and prevent these very possibilities.

Art and music are as much weapons as rifles and bullets are when considering the “war of position” waged by the forces at play in a hegemonic system. Johnny and Sipho, in their own way, initiated a form of countercultural resistance against the National Party government. Johnny mentioned in interviews later in life that when culture is weaponised, it can be problematic, as all knowledge has an agenda — citing Jürgen Habermas’ work Knowledge and Human Interests in an interview with Higher Education Today. While Juluka’s music was not initially designed to be a form of countercultural resistance, their hybrid art came to present a direct challenge to the systematic marginalisation, disruption and destruction of indigenous culture practised by the apartheid state. The lyrical content of Juluka’s early songs focused mainly on Zulu culture and social issues such as the life challenges of migrant labourers, as can be seen in this extract from African Sky Blue: “The warrior’s now a worker and his war is underground … when the smoking rock face murmurs, he always dreams of you, African Sky Blue…”

• Innes is the former guitarist, vocalist and musical director for the Johnny Clegg Band and worked with Clegg in studio and on stage from 1992 to 2019.