In memory of Johnny Clegg

Final Journey Tour USA 2017

Facebook, @johnnycleggsa

JOHNNY CLEGG

(1953-2019)

Legendary musician Johnny Clegg obtained his Bachelor of Arts (1976) and BA Honours (1977) degrees at Wits University and lectured in the Wits Social Anthropology Department for four years. He wrote several scholarly papers on Zulu music and dance and Wits bestowed an honorary doctorate in music on him in 2007.

As a singer, songwriter, dancer, anthropologist and musical activist, he showed what it was to embrace other cultures without losing your identity. Underlying his work was the idea of “crossing boundaries and mixing competing approaches”, he said. The approach of “being a cultural handyman, fixing and changing the world with anything you have at hand, has given life and meaning to what I do.”

He was 17 when he and Sipho Mchunu formed their first band, Juluka, which performed at the first Free People’s Concert at Wits in 1971. In 1986, at the height of apartheid, he partnered with Dudu Zulu to form his second band, Savuka. He also recorded several solo albums and enjoyed international success.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2015 but continued to perform as long as possible. He leaves his wife Jenny and their sons Jesse and Jaron. At his memorial, Jesse (BA 2012, BA Hons 2013) said: “He was a vulnerable, generous and loving role model for my brother and I. He taught us to be curious about the world and to shape our lives around our passion. He believed the greatest gift that a father could give a son is a strong moral compass.”

Sources: Wits University; Roddy Quin; www. johnnyclegg.com, UKZN

WITSIES REMEMBER JOHNNY CLEGG: … Driving around the Yeoville of our ringing youth, guitars always present in the back of the car. Mons Road, Muller Street, Alpha Court, a chaotic bedroom, sticks, a shield, whitewall tyre sandals, like the ones that Bafazana Qoma would make when he finally managed to scrounge a place to sleep at the Wits compound, a concertina, umhupe bow, hand-made for the first time in someone else’s garden. The backyard room in West Street, with Sipho Mchunu, already having earned his praising as Down Below, leaping up to execute a giya, hands and stick whistling, unseeable from the unhearing house, at the sound of a Pondo scale I was playing seated on his high bed. My place in Becker Street, with the bell of Maddy Prior’s voice tolling out Long Lankin, and the Celtic echoes and snare clack that rang so resonantly with us both. Tuesday nights in the courtyard at the old Medical Research, he alive with the dancing, and its songs like Apollo 11, chronicling a unique perspective on this world and the world beyond it, tying concrete to an old night sky, and a cassette recorder misidentified as a television, at a time when such a thing could only be guessed at in South Africa. The worn dice thrown on the floors of backrooms in search of the elusive ’leven, rand notes clenched between teeth, snapped fingers and little pillars of cents scattering. The dusty comings and goings at George Goch, at Mai Mai, beer passed hand to mouth in a tin, he dancing, regardless. His demure figure seated, as yet still seated! on stage, beside me at the Wits Great Hall, evoking threads of magic from the strings of a Bellini guitar, and his harmonies sung, adding a special life to my songs, taking us away from where we had been. Sitting between the bushes at Urania Street, thinking about other things. Dark days, when you had to work hard to experience Padre Padrone, or take a real chance to see Z, or take your courage to watch The Sorrow and the Pity, or The World at War, sixteen-millimetred into a deserted Central Block Sunday night. An attempt to buy a toasted sandwich at the Doll House, after a gig, in the hope that the midnight would obscure the sight of Sipho on the back seat, so that we could eat together, and laughing at them all when we couldn’t. And that laughter – always with us – in his narrow office at Wits, on the squash courts in Hillbrow till we rolled on the floor with it, at the rakish snooker tables in miscued disbelief, at the disreputable Space Invader machines in focused astonishment, over Scrabble boards, raucous, proclaiming words invented for the spur of the moment, crying with hilarity in my bass-player Lanny’s rehearsal basement over nothing more than the sheer magic of the brand new sounds we found we could make together, and the promise of it all. And years later, with promise reaching upwards, unbridled roaring at a table in Paris. The discussions about absolutely everything, but often about endlessly beckoning irreconcilables, with Vincent Gray – not yet Professor, but going there – in the Wits staff canteen in a restaurant which in another time revolved, and where once we had seen Barney Kessel eke a different kind of infinity from just six strings. I, sleeping on his floor, he, sleeping on mine, our lives changing, and changing our lives, readying ourselves as best we could, we thought, for what happens and what does not. GaRankuwa, Duduza, ThabaNchu, Qwa Qwa, Botshabelo, Ermelo and so many other nights in so many other places, the backs of vans, the fronts of trucks, the bottom of a bridge in London, the pages of my words. … And a million other things – all till the last kiss as we parted, both of us knowing the moment for what it was, and both seeing it so clearly in that look, that look that really never had to say anything at all…

I pay tribute to one who left, alone, much too soon. I pay tribute to my friend, to a man whose boy’s heart never ceased searching, never ceased affirming life. [www.wits.ac.za/alumni/obituaries]

Paul Clingman (BA 1973)

“In September 1973, police were called into Anglo American’s Western Deep Levels Mine compound to deal with conflict. And 11 miners were shot dead by the police. With the headlines of these shootings in the newspapers, there was another round of demonstrations at Wits University. The Wits Wages Commission, headed by Steven Friedman, called a meeting intended to channel this student activism...

“A couple of dozen people signed up. One of them was Johnny Clegg, then just a junior student at Wits...

“The first project in which that group was involved related to the then NP government’s decentralisation and “border areas” policy. The work involved … standing outside factory gates, and asking workers how much they were being paid … On about three occasions, the police arrived and took the student interviewers off to the local police station for questioning. Johnny Clegg was a regular in that research and in those encounters.”

Alan Fine

“Johnny Clegg’s fluency in Zulu made him a particularly valuable new member [of the Wages Commission], and he undertook translation of articles for Umsebenzi/Abasebenzi, the worker newspaper distributed by the Wages Commission at factory gates.”

Glenn Moss (BA 1974, BAHons 1976, MA 1983) (In The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s)

“Every encounter with Johnny was memorable. It started at Wits when this offbeat anthropology lecturer was invited to give a guest lecture to our psychology class. Even in that dry academic setting, he was captivating, and his enthusiasm infectious. As a music journalist in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a privilege to get to know him intimately, yet telling his story was never ordinary. On one occasion, I went with him to the home of another pioneering musician, Paul Clingman, where Sipho Mchunu was living “illegally”, pretending to be a gardener because he was barred by the Group Areas Act from living in a white suburb. The interview was both inspiring and sobering, highlighting their struggle not only to make music together, but simply to be friends.”

Arthur Goldstuck (BA 1984)

“When the political power grid collapsed in the 1970s the country and the campuses were plunged into proverbial darkness. Hoping to find each other and a way out, many reached for isms. .. The isms, like torchlights, cast long, narrow beams, enabling us to pick out some of the central features of our collective predicament. But it was Johnny, as creative as he was intellectually independent, who invented the Clegg lamp. The Clegg lamp casts a gentler, rounder, warmer light, capable of illuminating forbidding spaces in ways that allowed us to see without squinting and to find and recognise friendly faces. … Turned up to its brightest setting, the lamp transmitted a piercing analytical light, capable of illuminating the deepest of theoretical issues with pertinent examples.”

Professor Charles van Onselen (BA Hons 1971)