Rest in peace and music. Tony Cedras 1952-2024

On Monday morning January 29, musician, composer and activist Tony Cedras passed away as a consequence of chronic emphysema, for which he had recently been hospitalised. He was 72 years old.

Cedras was born in Elsie’s River in Cape Town. Growing up, he gravitated towards music, intrigued by the brass sounds of carnival bands and by the more sonorous tones of various keyboard instruments (including the harmonium, which he later mastered) in church.

Cape Town was a setting rich in music and musicians, and by the time Cedras was in his teens, he was playing guitar, keyboards and trumpet. One of his teachers was bassist Paul Abrahams, and it was with Abrahams’ encouragement that he began working with jazz-rock innovators Pacific Express. This experience brought him into contact with both established national music heroes such as trumpeter Stompie Manana, and other players of his own generation who would become shapers of the Cape jazz scene and sound, including Robbie Jansen, Basil ‘Manenberg’ Coetzee, Jonathan Butler, Alvin Dyers and more.

The Cape Town music scene was also the focus of a proud resistance against apartheid and frustration with stereotyped musical boxes that birthed even more experimental outfits, such as Oswietie. In 1980 Jansen, pianist Ibrahim Khalil Shihab and drummer Kader Khan formed Estudio, to carry musical experimentation and defiance forward, and Cedras (along with bassist Pete Sklair) was part of the second generation of members of that group.

By the mid-1980s, Cedras was in Botswana and a member of the Medu Arts Ensemble, a cultural formation that brought together Batswana and exiled South African artists. Cedras became one – and often the most regular – of a cadre of keyboard players who worked with Jonas Gwangwa’s Shakawe, one of the two bands (the other was Hugh Masekela’s Kalahari) supported by Medu. He sometimes brought out his trumpet too, surprising many who still thought of him as a pianist with his command of the instrument. And, like many other Shakawe members, he did his time as sometime driver and mechanic (along with a verbose committee of more and less knowledgeable motoring advisers) of Shakawe’s temperamental white touring kombi, the legendary BZ233.

But Medu was never simply an organiser of performances. Cedras was an avid participant in its forums and debates about the music and what it could and should be saying, and how, as part of activism to end apartheid.

As well as playing with Shakawe, Cedras also worked with poetry and drama groups on the University of Botswana campus, and produced two piano recitals of his own compositions at the Botswana National Museum: Molelo and, the following year, Matlhasedi. He was also recruited by Gwangwa for the Brazil tour of the Amandla Cultural Ensemble of the ANC.

Medu was destroyed by a murderous SADF raid on Gaborone in June 1985.

Cedras’s path, like those of many other Shakawe musicians, took him eventually to America where, from 1987 to 2012 he was a regular member of Paul Simon’s touring band. He worked regularly with other South Africans in New York too, including old friend Butler and bassist Bakithi Khumalo.

His instrumental range, particularly on less usual instruments such as accordion and harmonium, made him a go-to session and touring accompanist for jazz artists such as Cassandra Wilson (Blue Light at Dawn; New Moon Daughter) and for other less well-documented performances with Latin American and East African stars around Brooklyn.

On trumpet with Ramon Alexander (r) in 2016.Pic: Warren Ludski

But Cedras hadn’t lost his taste for more searching, experimental music too. He featured on Pharoah Sanders’ 1998 Save Our Children, and on three albums with avant-garde saxophonist Henry Threadgill.

He continued to tour internationally even after he returned to set up home in Cape Town in 2013 and to reconnect with South African musical allies such as Sipho Hotstix Mabuse. He had already begun to release his own albums as leader, with the 1994 Vision Over People, followed in 2015 by Love Letter To Cape Town and, most recently, the 2019 River Conversations with Maciek Schebal. Back in Cape Town too, his activism continued, as he advocated for the rights and cultural heritage of the Cape’s indigenous First Peoples, and for the rights of everybody still living in the city and in close-knit, neglected communities such as the one he had grown up in.

Tony Cedras was admired internationally by more audiences and musical peers than perhaps South Africans are aware of. He was a towering talent as both a player and a composer. For those of us who worked with him in MEDU in Botswana, he was also a comrade. Condolences go to his wife Tania, to his family, friends and musical and community colleagues. Hamba Kahle. A luta continua!

FAR TOO SHORT A PLAYLIST:

Sad farewells to Andrew Tracey and David Serame

The year is barely a month old and already there are more sad deaths to mark. Professor Andrew Tracey, a musicologist indispensable to the continued growth of the International Library of African Music (ILAM), arranger, educator, mbira player, founder and leader of the Andrew Tracey Steel Band and much more, passed away on 12 January. As an international public figure in his own right, and scion of a famous music family, there have been multiple tributes; a comprehensive introduction can be found here: https://www.musicinafrica.net/magazine/revered-ethnomusicologist-andrew-tracey-dies-87

I met Andrew Tracey only occasionally and briefly when I was in Makhanda for the National Arts Festival. What I remember best is the sheer, ebullient joy he took in music-making – especially with the youngsters of the Steel Band – and how (in contrast to some figures, even today, in the traditional music establishment) he retained a bright curiosity about everything that was new in South African music too, gently interrogating me, for example about who the new jazz players were and what kinds of things they were doing. Here’s Professor Tracey, playing the instrument he loved best, in company with his son:

By contrast, there is almost no online record of the formidable life and achievements of singer, actor and library of South African showbiz history, David Serame, who passed away in London this month. I’ll try to do more research – it often takes time – and present something more comprehensive at a later date. What we do know is that Serame began his career in various youthful local singing groups, and drew enthusiastic fans in Alfred Herbert’s African Jazz and Varieties show with his version of US crooner Johnny Ray’s style: Drum journalist Bloke Modisane described him at the time as having “turned sobbing into a profitable career”. He featured in a number of movies, including Jim Comes to Joburg, about which he later talked insightfully to researchers. Yearning for more creative and human scope, he left South Africa with the cast of King Kong and built his second career as a vocalist in London. He worked with groups including Mamelang (which also included his wife Ruby, another King Kong graduate, and Joe Legwabe) and Abantu, and – among multiple recordings – featured on the Dedication Orchestra’s Ixesha and Mike Oldfield’s Millenium Bell. Even with work, however, life in exile, isn’t ever easy, and Serame always spoke of how he missed home. He was able to remind South African audiences of his powerful talent when he featured on both of harmonica player and composer Adam Glasser’s albums: the SAMA-winning Free at First and Mzansi. Here he is, on the evocative track Lesson No 1

Has anybody noticed that the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture under its current incumbent has transformed from the “Ministry of Obituaries” to the “Ministry of Only Occasionally Noticing When Our Musicians Die – and Then Only If They Are Very Famous”? While the previous posture seemed opportunistic – catching up at the graveside with people who needed accolades while they lived – this one feels just plain negligent. uMam’ Vuyiswa, Prof Tracey and David Serame (and all the others who have passed unthanked by the nation for their creative contributions) deserve better. May their spirits rest in peace and music.

Kabelo Mokhatla’s Key to Authenticity calls up the music in our air.

‘Authenticity’ is a word that gets thrown around a lot, in every context from serious cultural politics to superficial marketing fluff. When an album proudly nails the “authenticity” flag to its mast – particularly a South African jazz album – it’s clearly hoping the listener will think hard about what the word means in this sonic context, and how the music expresses it.

Kabelo ‘Boy’ Mokhatla. Pic (and below) Simon Shiffman

There’s no doubt that Kabelo “Boy” Mokhatla’s [Honesty is] The Key to Authenticity (https://music.apple.com/gb/album/the-key-to-authenticity/1689890087) comes from an authentic son of the soil. Mokhatla’s studies in the US were the fruits of his winning one of the Masekela Heritage Scholarships to the late trumpeter’s old alma mater, the Manhattan School of Music.

The Tembisa-born drummer started out at the Moses Molelekwa Arts Foundation: a reminder of just how important our now often neglected and underfunded community music education network is. He grew his skills through two stints in the Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Band at Makhanda: the youth jazz festival there is no longer supported by the bank. At the Manhattan School, his main mentor as part of a diverse and distinguished faculty has been drummer Kendrick Scott.

On the 12-track album, alongside currently US-based colleagues, his ten-piece ensemble includes another South African, operatic tenor, teacher and composer Ongama Mhlontlo, who both sings and declaims Mokhatla’s poetry, as well as contributing lyrics to two tracks.

Who decides what’s authentic?

In South African history, authenticity had a bit of a bad rap, largely because first the colonialists and then the apartheid regime through its re-tribalisation policy, appointed their white selves as the arbiters of what Black authenticity was. They legislated how gender relations should work (entrenching a patriarchy and homophobia that owed far more to Victorian England and later NGK puritanism than to anything in Africa); who community leaders should be (de-throning and often assassinating resistance figures), and much more. Those alien ideas left a two-hundred-year legacy stain on social relationships and ideas – still – about what is or isn’t “un-African”.

Jazz was for a long time considered subversive, immoral and “un-African”, until one of those arbiters, the late Dr Yvonne Huskisson, decided it was probably OK so long as it had been “learned from Whites”. Mhlontlo’s field, opera, was felt to be equally suspect for Africans:  the late Patti Nokwe had her concert song audition recordings rejected by the apartheid South African Broadcasting Corporation because she “sounded too much like a White person”.

It was all totally insane. This country lived through half a century of it. And it’s absolutely not the authenticity Kabelo Mokhatla’s album asserts.

The music in the air

The album begins with a prayer and segues into an actual psalm (143.8), acknowledging through that opening both a deep heritage of African spirituality, and church music as one of the wellsprings of the South African sonic identity across multiple genre labels. But by the time we get eight tracks in, to the two parts of Doubt, we’re in adventurous free impro territory: the stuff that began happening at Christopher Columbus Ngcukana’s Langa “fowl runs” and in the 1970s modern jazz clubs of Mamelodi – and equally part of an authentic South African sonic heritage.

Mature and empathetic: the band and friends

Mhlontlo directly faces the question of whether opera fits here in his Doubt rap “I am a formal man: an opera fan, God bless” [but I know who I am, you’re just faking, and] “you are a mess”.

It all fits squarely into the tradition, without ever retreating into cliche or stereotype. In fact, the authenticity of this sound comes from the composer, Mokhatla, drawing on the music in the air of South Africa. His sounds are old and new and from every community that’s rubbed shoulders in this country, informed by the lens of his new generation.

Maturity

Mokhatla’s vision as a composer, indeed, draws more attention to itself than his presence as a drummer. Listen, and you’ll certainly hear him: a compelling engine for pace and intensity here; a delicate fretwork of stick textures there. But he’s concerned with making the music sound good holistically, not interrupting it for some loud, showy ooh-ya solo. Drummers sometimes don’t achieve that kind of mature judgment until well into their careers. Quite early in his, he already has it.

His company shows equal maturity (and great empathy for how South African music should sound). Everybody’s worth a name-check, but I was particularly struck by pianist Cameron Campbell on the title track (whose lush theme intro I found myself humming after only one listen) and vibraphonist Luke Bacani on Breeds and his own Who Are We Doing This For?

Then there are the trumpets: Nicolaus Gelin and Stephane Clement. The brass and reed line is strong throughout, and there’s a great deal of the kind of background chorusing that’s another part of our historic sound. But the sense of deja vu you’ll feel on Simplicity is something else again. Combined with Mhlontlo’s sung lineage praises and the historic call “mayibuye iAfrika”, those horns irresistibly invoke the Jazz Ministers partnership of Victor Ndlazilwane and Johnny Mekoa, but in a 21st-Century way. It’s not a pastiche. Again, it’s music inhaled and breathed out from the air of Mokhatla’s listening and writing.

Technically, Mhlontlo’s a much more schooled singer than Ndlazilwane was, but the two have some things in common. The first is compelling passion and commitment: it matters to you to listen, because it sounds like it matters to them to sing it. The second is crystal-clear diction, something opera-trained singers (think Tutu Puoane) work hard at, with rewarding results in whatever genre. Even in the African languages I don’t know, I can hear the words and check their meaning. Diction matters when songs (as these do) have a message. Third, like Ndlazilwane, Mhlontlo has clearly thought about the dynamics of the human voice as an instrument among other instrumental voices and how to click that jigsaw-piece into place to the best effect for each song.

If you think you know what all the jazz coming from overseas-schooled young South Africans these days sounds like, think again. Key to Authenticity has a distinctive identity of its own that’ll hit you from the first notes. And alongside that, it also has the warm sound of home.

In Memoriam: Vuyiswa Rebecca Ngcwangu Mbambisa 1941-2024

uMam’ Vuyiswa performing at the Isivivana Center, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, in July 2017.Pic: Hugh Mdlalose 

I wrote last week about the difficulties of assembling a satisfactory tribute to uMam’ Vuyiswa, given the absence of material online. I’m indebted to Jonathan Eato in the UK, who did the heavy digging on assembling this one; he, in turn expresses his gratitude for the conversations he had with uMam’ Vuyiswa and family members while she was alive, and to some recollections from veteran vocalist Retsi Pule.  He also supplied the photographs: the second is by Hannah Bruce; the first from Hugh Mdlalose.  I am also indebted to Diane Thram, whose journal article Jazz in the Service of Struggle: the New Brighton story, added invaluable analytical context and has its own, wonderfully evocative collection of accompanying historical photographs.

Let’s stop and think a bit about the meaning of that gap in the kinds of records most people can access. It has meant no media coverage; no DSAC tribute; no public marking of the passing of an important figure in our music history.

And yet Vuyiswa Ngcwangu was a huge star in her day, with an enthusiastic following who gave her the nickname ‘Sis’ Viva’. The Eastern Cape, as Thram notes, was the place “where jazz first began to take on a distinctly South African character.” Though its distance from the centre of record production and Black music media coverage in Joburg meant the New Brighton scene was inadequately documented, it was the site of significant original music making. It was no means isolated from the national jazz scene. Tours and collaborations across a flourishing informal circuit were an important part of the story, and thus an important part of how SA jazz became what we know today. Names we do know – the late Dudu Pukwana, Lulu Gontsana and Zim Ngqawana, as well as trumpeter Feya Faku – attest to the richness and diversity of the scene and the talent and originality birthed there.

Among that community, bubbling with new jazz ideas and defiant cultural politics, was an even more inadequately documented cadre of formidable women singers, some of whom passed through the ranks of the Soul Jazzmen – including Vuyiswa Rebecca Ngcwangu Mbambisa.

The jazz vocalist and nurse was born on 19 June 1941 in Langa, Cape Town, to Ranta Ngcwangu and Nomahlubi Ndokotho, both of Port Alfred. She was the eldest child, with four younger brothers following. Mam’uVuyiswa stated that her musical career began when she was still at school, at the renowned Adams College, Amanzimtoti. Here she sang with a group of friends from Gqeberha (then known as Port Elizabeth) and the group was asked to perform for regular Saturday shows.

Mam’uVuyiswa experienced the parental pressure common at the time to become either a nurse or a teacher. After matriculating, she went to train as a nurse at Livingstone Hospital in Gqeberha. The accommodation for trainee nurses she stayed in was next to the Alabama Hotel, which hosted talent nights on Wednesdays.

Mam’uVuyiswa registered her name for the competition, even though there was a strict curfew in place for trainee nurses, and sang Gershwin’s Summertime, winning first prize on the night.

Mam’uVuysiwa went on to complete her nursing training, a profession she continued to practice until retiring. But while she was living and working as a nurse in Gqeberha, New Brighton promoter Monde Sikhutshwa approached her to sing with a group from Johannesburg, featuring the renowned pianist and composer Tete Mbambisa. She agreed and they met to rehearse the Rodgers & Hammerstein song It Might As Well Be Spring and Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man.

Mam’uVuyiswa recalled that Nosipho Sikutshwa stepped in to urge her to have patience with the perfectionism of the rehearsal process as Mbambisa was ‘very thorough in what he did’.

However, Mam’uVuyiswa’s parents were becoming increasingly concerned about her continuing interest in musical performance and this culminated in their demanding to know whether she wanted to concentrate on nursing or music. Mam’uVuyiswa responded: “Mama, I think music is my thing.”

Nevertheless, she continued to practice as a nurse, and married Bra Tete Mbambisa in the early 1960s. The demands of motherhood and family life alongside nursing meant that her singing had to fit around other commitments. Despite these competing calls on her time, she performed when she could with various groups, notably those including Mbambisa, such as The Soul Jazzmen, Masiye Voices, and the Tete Mbambisa Band.

Bra Retsi Pule also remembers performing with Mam’uVuyiswa in the Mdantsane-based ensemble Artistry in Rhythm. Bra Tete and Mam’uVuyiswa were living in Mdantsane at the time, and the band featured a who’s-who of Mdantsane jazz talent, including trumpeter Tex Nduluka, alto saxophonist Aubrey Simani, tenor saxophonist Tolly Goduka, and baritone saxophonist Freeman Lambatha; a line-up with striking similarities to Mbambisa’s ensemble for his iconic Tete’s Big Sound 1976 As-Shams recording.

While it is hard for those of us who weren’t present to experience much of this music-making retrospectively, a couple of live recordings – both featuring Cole Porter’s Love for Sale – do provide valuable insights.

The first was made by photographer, sound-recordist and map-maker Ian Bruce Huntley late in 1965, live at The Ambassadors School of Dancing in Woodstock, Cape Town. It remains freely available via the Ian Bruce Huntley Archive on the Electric Jive blog http://electricjive.blogspot.com/p/ibh-audio-archive-posts.html and is a fascinating piece of South African jazz history, as the band also included Nik Moyake, newly returned to South Africa from Europe and the UK where he’d been working with The Blue Notes. (See: https://electricjive.blogspot.com/2013/07/nick-moyake-and-soul-jazzmen-1965.html ) Also present at the session were trumpeter Dennis Mpale, alongside tenor saxophonist Duku Makasi and bassist Psych ‘Big T’ Ntsele, both of whom would work with Mam’uVuyiswa as part of The Soul Jazzmen.

The second live recording was initiated by promoter Ray Nkwe and was recorded at the YMCA Hall in Orlando, Johannesburg in 1968. It was released on his JAS Pride label as Mankunku Jazz Show in a very limited edition (and, despite the title, did not feature Winston Mankunku Ngozi!). It includes two tracks billed as ‘The Soul Jazzmen and Vuysiwa’, once again including Duku Makasi and Psych ‘Big T’ Ntsele. But whereas the pianist in 1965 at the Ambassadors had been Shakes Mgudlwa, the pianist at the ‘Y’ was Tete Mbambisa. (See the link to the video below:

Fortunately, for lovers of jazz music in South Africa, Mam’uVuyiswa also made a number of recordings at the SABC studios, eQonce, also with Tete Mbambisa. These transcription recordings were made for broadcast and highlight Mam’uVuyiswa’s interests in both the American songbook (e.g. Otis Blackwell’s Fever and Rube Bloom’s Give Me The Simple Life and South African originals such as Tete Mbambisa’s Mamelani, uNosiviwe and Indalo – that last an early vocal version of Mbambisa’s famous Black Heroes.

(l to r) Tete Mbambisa, Vuyiswa Ngcwangu and drummer Gilbert Matthews, University of York campus, 2015. Pic: Hannah Bruce

In 2015, Mam’uVuyiswa was invited to take part in the British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship project, ‘South African Jazz Cultures and the Archive’, at the University of York in the UK. She participated in a panel discussion exploring the role of women in South African jazz, convened by Dr Lindelwa Dalamba, and alongside author Maxine McGregor, Ogun Records founder Hazel Miller, and vocalist / lyricist Pinise Saul.

As part of the same project, she performed with Tete Mbambisa’s Big SA-UK sound at The National Centre for Early Music, and recorded two tracks, Black Heroes and Emavundleni for Mbambisa’s 2017album One for Asa. When the band later toured South Africa in 2017, Mam’uVuyiswa joined for the Cape Town performances at the Isivivana Centre, Khayelitsha and at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival.

Mam’uVuysiwa lived in Gugulethu, Cape Town, for the last 30 years of her life, and is survived by her husband and three daughters. She passed on 6 January 2024 at 5:10am. A memorial service was held on Saturday 13th January. Lala Ngoxolo

Zahara, Ngema, Magubane: how they are remembered, matters

How does the media portray and remember popular artists here in South Africa? Do we provide honest, balanced assessment? Three deaths during the time this blog took its year-end break raise the question, and suggest some challenging answers.

On 11 December, singer and composer, Bulelwa Mkutukana, whose stage name was Zahara, passed away in hospital at the tragically young age of 36. On 27 December, a head-on collision took the life of 68-year-old performer, playwright and impressario Mbongeni Ngema. And on New Year’s Day, a fortnight short of his 92nd birthday, acclaimed photo-journalist Dr Peter Sexford Magubane laid down his camera for the last time.

Zahara, who was discovered busking and rose to fame with her 2011 album, Loliwe, could so easily have been a one-hit wonder. Every year, the music industry promotes a young female singer as the “new sound”, the “next Makeba” (in Zahara’s case, Tracey Chapman) or some other equally hyperbolic and inappropriate label. Every year sees last year’s occupant of that slot discarded in favour of the next marketable vocal commodity. What’s more, it was clear from some extremely careful stage-management of her media interactions that Zahara intermittently struggled with alcohol.

Yet there was always something so compelling about the spare vocal and guitar lines Zahara composed and sang. They caught at the heartstrings and stuck in the memory.

Alcohol was the demon we as media saw. Less visible to us was her manipulative and exploitative treatment by studio bosses and producers, although her disillusionment (alongside family tragedies including the murder of her brother) undoubtedly contributed to her problems.

And yet, despite damaged health, Zahara fought back and won significant victories. When the commercial star-cycle moved on to somebody new, she continued composing and performing, consolidating her following and scoring a long-lived string of hits, touring engagements, multiple awards and consistently high record sales. She released her final album, Nqaba Yam, in 2021 and innovated with amapiano styling on this year’s single collaboration with M Jakes, Guqa Ngedolo.

Alongside that productive and consistent career, she spoke out courageously about her mistreatment by producers, alleging that DJ Sbu’s TS Records had never fully paid her the royalties her hits had earned, something the label vehemently denied. Much after-the-fact self-flagellation occurred at Zahara’s memorial service. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?

Now, we may never know the truth of the financial details. But the pattern of producers claiming ownership and royalties from the voice and creativity of a woman singer is persistent. Being asked to “just add something; your own ideas” by a producer and then receiving minimal acknowledgment and no recompense pops up everywhere, even in relation to worldwide online hits. “Just adding something” like that is called composition. It creates intellectual property and should be paid for.

But where editors ought to have demanded investigative journalism to untangle the facts at the time – as they do with other allegations of corruption – they preferred to encourage clickbait: Shwashwi-style gossip, wallowing in innuendo about the singer’s drinking.

That prurient focus was deeply gendered; we hear far less about male artists’ addiction problems or deplorable misbehaviour.

And, in general, the media shows a remarkable lack of curiosity about how the nuts and bolts of music industry finance work, and about power and gender imbalances in the studio. (How many women producers with their own studios can South Africa boast of?) Yet these are important stories, which, if published in time, might secure justice for artists like Zahara while they still live.

Allusions to his “flaws” and to the “controversies” surrounding his career appeared in the press even before Mbongeni Ngema’s funeral had taken place. In a country normally punctilious about avoiding even the mildest criticism of the deceased, that tells its own story about the true scale and prevalence of those “flaws”.

We cannot and should not erase the massive talent that co-created powerful resistance theatre pieces such as Woza Albert, Asinamali and mbaqanga hits like Stimela Saze Zola (and later, flashier commercial products like Sarafina). That loss is one we must genuinely mourn.

But what ran in parallel with the visionary talent – the physical bullying and sexual abuse of often very young cast members and his spouses – was equally a part of Ngema’s story. It wasn’t a “flaw”. It was how, for much of his career, he did business. There was more: the receipt of large sums of government money for projects that failed to materialise to brief; the authorship of a racist song, Amandiya, that came perilously close to hate speech against South Africans of Indian heritage.

None of these aspects of Ngema cancels out any other; they are part of the same seamless cloth. There’s historical context: even before him, some high-profile theatre company owners were known for dodgy book-keeping, selecting favourites and underdogs among cast members on a whim, and assuming droit de seigneur over their bodies. Ngema inherited that culture, relished it and never repudiated it. (Knowing what we do, there is something profoundly creepy about parts of the video for Stimela Sase Zola below.) To borrow a distinction from Vijay Iyer, Ngema created productions that were political: they vividly conveyed important progressive messages. But those productions did not do progressive politics: the praxis within his theatre companies was often exploitative, patriarchal and reactionary.

If (as some media and all politicians have done) we discuss Ngema now he has passed without considering all his aspects, then we falsify cultural history. When we turn a perpetrator into a stainless hero after whom airports may be named, we collude in and enable gender violence.

Dr Peter Magubane at work, defying authority to show it how it was

Dr Peter Magubane was a man whose photographs were political, and whose photographic practice consistently enacted progressive politics too. He respected his colleagues and photographic subjects. He put all his skill at the service of the truth about apartheid, and was imprisoned and brutally tortured for it. He was beaten, his nose broken by a police club. His house was burned down. He was detained for 586 days: for 120 straight hours of that forced to balance on three tottering bricks and fed strong bitter coffee until he collapsed. Yet he went back to courageous, intelligent, magnificently expressive photojournalism just the same. He wasn’t just an observer, but driven by explicit commitment: “I used my camera as my gun”, he said.

Lest we forget, amid the welter of hard-hitting political photographs now being re-published, the lensman was a skilled and sensitive maker of music photographs too. They pop up at various stages throughout his career; copy-protection means I can’t post any here, but they’re in his books and you can see some at https://african.pictures/groupitem/154/ A wonderful series of images from visiting US pianist John Mehegan’s 1959 jazz workshops, captures, among others, a fresh-faced young Sophie Mngcina in full song, and an elegant General Duze frowning in concentration over his guitar.

uMam’ Vuyiswa Ngcwangu

Not all the stories from our industry are bad and sad ones. Those who explicitly reject exploitation and oppression and refuse to let it stop them making art, give us all hope: may their great spirits rest in peace.

FOOTNOTE: As I write this, the passing of jazz singer uMam Vuyiswa “Sis’ Viva” Ngcwangu, longtime vocalist with the legendary Soul Jazzmen, has been announced. When I have researched her work to assemble a fuller account than is currently accessible, I’ll try to pay a better tribute here. Condolences to her husband, Bra’ Tete Mbambisa, to family, friends and the communities who through the years have been energised and inspired by her song. Lala Ngoxolo.

PLAYLIST

From Zahara:

From Mbongeni Ngema:

And from Peter Magubane: