by Heather Dugmore
Mr Hugh Masekela was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Rhodes University on the 9th of April 2015. He talks about his first flight to freedom and about the need to conserve and keep on creating South African and African culture.
“Shall we dance?” he says to the waitress as she steps aside to show him to his table at the Hyatt Hotel in Rosebank, Joburg. She smiles with delight that Mr Hugh Ramopolo Masekela himself has asked her to dance.
The Hyatt lounge is a favourite meeting place for this man born to music. It’s a short drive down Oxford Road from his home in Killarney, Joburg. He’s not often here as his touring calendar is intense. At the age of 76 he has back-to-back performances all over the world.
He’s spent quite a bit of his life on airplanes but his first ever flight remains the most memorable because it was his flight to freedom. Thirty years would pass before he returned home in 1990, following the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990.
Leaving South Africa at the age of 21
“I left South Africa at the age of 21 in the same year of Sharpeville, which happened in March 1960. After this, the apartheid government started furiously detaining all activists,” he explains. “As a musician you were automatically regarded as an activist or a communist or of breaking the Immorality Act.”
To get out of South Africa, Masekela had applied for a passport on a music ticket to study in New York. Already a successful professional musician, and a member of ‘The Jazz Epistles’ (the first African jazz group to record an LP), he had been offered a scholarship at the Manhattan School of Music, where he was to be tutored by jazz virtuoso Dizzy Gillespie.
“It was very difficult for a black person to get a passport in the 1960s. You had to get all sorts of official letters of invitation from the relevant people overseas, which I managed to do, with plenty of help, as always, from our close family friend, Trevor Huddleston.
An Anglican priest, Huddleston was a legendary activist in South Africa who was extremely well connected in political, moneyed, society and academic circles. He made a point of being connected, not for personal gain, but to help the dispossessed communities he served in South Africa, and to help bright, talented young people, like Masekela, to achieve the greatness for which they were destined.
His first trumpet at the age of 14
Huddleston was a catalyst in Masekela’s career. He used his small savings to buy a 14-year-old Masekela his first trumpet, and a few years later influenced Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong himself to send Masekela a second trumpet when he met him at a gathering in the United States.
“When my mother called me to say my passport had arrived, months of apprehension turned to excitement combined with a different form of apprehension as I wasn’t yet out of South Africa,” Masekela recalls.
An associate of Huddleston’s funded his plane ticket and he immediately headed for what was then Jan Smuts Airport, now Oliver Tambo, to get on a plane to London. From there he would fly to his new life in New York.
My heart was in my throat
“My heart was in my throat as they closed the door of the plane at Jan Smuts,” Masekela recalls. “I thought the cops would burst in any minute and remove me. It was only when we were in the air and beyond South Africa’s border that I started to relax and enjoy my first ever flight and the taste of freedom.”
Masekela pauses for a moment to order breakfast – muesli, followed by bacon and eggs - and then resumes the narrative:
“So there I was sitting on the plane and this glamorous stewardess comes up to me and says: ‘Sir, what would you like to drink?’ I nearly jumped out of my skin because I had never ordered a legal drink in my life and everyone on the plane was looking at me, the only black person on the flight.
In the shebeens where I drank
“In the shebeens where I drank, you see, one person would be assigned as the pourer, and we would then share one glass between a bunch of us and hand the brandy around. A full bottle was called a straight; a half bottle was a half jack, the next size was a nip, followed by a honey and a half nip. I wanted to ask the stewardess for a honey and two beers, but I realised that she would not know what that is.
“Fortunately I remembered a scene from a movie I had seen starring Humphrey Bogart, and I had never forgotten what he said when he ordered a drink in classic Bogart drawl, ‘Give me a triple scotch on the rocks, light on the soda’. Which is what I then ordered from the stewardess, in those exact same words and in the exact same Bogart drawl. All those people staring at me could not believe their ears!”
Arriving in London and then New York was “fantastic!” he exclaims.
Young, ambitious and very cocky
“I was young, ambitious and very cocky. I felt I could achieve anything but it still took some time before I stopped carrying my passport around with me all the time. Every time I saw a policeman I would check I still had it because you would get arrested in SA for failure to produce your ID documents on demand.”
As he tells his story, several strong messages emerge for young people setting out to make their mark on the world. It’s Masekela’s way of imparting knowledge, without lecturing.
What flutters your heart
The first message is to find out what flutters your heart in this big, wide world. This isn’t about men, women and love, because this will surely come, and sometimes go. Hugh, in his self-ironic style, says it has taken him 76 years and four divorces to find out that he was not destined for marriage.
A second message is that everyone needs a mentor or a helping hand, and, in turn, to be that for someone else. For Masekela it was Huddleston and his parents, Paulina and Thomas-Selema Masekela. His parents knew that their restless, troublesome son had to follow his musical heart and Huddleston believed in him. “He once asked me what it was that I wanted and I told him that if I could get a trumpet I wouldn’t trouble anyone anymore.”
Hold on tight to freedom
A third message is that young people need to hold on tight to the freedom they now have.
A fourth message is that you need to be brave, strong and relentless in the pursuit of what you want in this world. You also have to have a measure of cockiness or ‘chutzpah’ as the Jewish people call the combination of guts and fearlessness. It’s no surprise that one of the albums that fueled Masekela’s fame, and which includes the exquisite ‘Stimela’, was titled ‘I am not afraid’ (1974).
Uniquely South African jazz tradition
Fearlessness and an obsession with music led Masekela to develop his own uniquely South African jazz tradition, blending sounds from the African diaspora with the blues first sung by African slaves in America and icing this with unique local sound, including mbaqanga/township jive.
Since 1963 he has recorded over 40 albums and achieved world renown.
As a young man he thrived in the cosmopolitan New York jazz scene alongside other great men and women of music, including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and Miriam Makeba who was also a big love of his and they were married for a time.
While marriage hasn’t worked out for him (he and his fourth wife divorced last year), his life and career has been a triumph of music. As a trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, and singer he is without doubt one of South Africa’s most successful artists and his influence on world music has been nothing short of phenomenal.
The highs and the lows
His life is also a triumph of self, with all the highs and lows of dealing with creativity, fame and addiction, and coming through ever stronger and ever more self-ironic about his foibles.
“If you leave this world self-satisfied, I don’t think you’ll leave it with a smile,” he says.
Today, having seen a great deal of this strange and wonderful world we live in, what he is most concerned about is the destruction of the natural environment and the lack of focus on creating our own culture.
Water will probably be the last world war
“Let me start with the natural environment,” he says. “My father taught us everything about nature – and that if we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. This truth is now more important than ever. What human beings have done to the water, soil and air is scary. I don’t know if it is even possible to reverse the damage anymore. I guess we have to live with regrets and wait for the day of destruction, since we are clearly a species of self-destruction. Water will probably be the last world war.”
We don’t even know who we are anymore
“As for culture … as Africans we don’t even know who we are anymore. We imitate other cultures, yet there is no other group of people on Earth that owns a richer cultural diversity of music, dance, language, architecture and history than Africa,” he says. “My biggest fear is that when my grandchildren are 20 or 30 years old and they are asked who they are, they will say ‘We used to be African long ago’.”
Masekela emphasises that we have become a society that consumes but that by and large does not create: “Children are losing the ability to speak their mother tongue or even to sing. Instead, we are spending 100 billion dollars on fake hair and hair products.”
Keep creating culture to keep it alive
Masekela says that culture is not only something you treasure, but something that you keep creating all the time to keep it alive. Towards addressing this, he is establishing the Heritage Foundation, the aim of which is to create a living foundation of culture, language and history for South Africa.
“We need a place of higher learning where we can develop on our rich culture of music, design, writing, architecture, cuisine … In this place, higher learning will be about recognising the traditional and contemporary creativity in our midst,” he elaborates.
Ndebele professors
“For example, we need to bring in Ndebele artists who will be the ‘professors’ who teach others about the designs they create on their homes. The same with bead workers, writers, musicians, composers…”
He adds that we need to record the memories of every person over the age of 85 in this country before they are gone.
Dancing to our own tune
Masekela’s one wish before he leaves this planet “is that South African and African culture is brought back into visibility and that we start dancing to our own tune.”