The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu , Sunday Life Reporter
FOR most Zimbabweans growing up in the 80s and 90s, the sight of Johnny Clegg would have perhaps been a bit strange to digest at first.
When Johnny Clegg came to Matobo to record the video for his smash hit, Scatterlings of Africa, Zimbabwe had already been a free country for over seven years.
That trip was therefore a trek back for Clegg whose mother was Zimbabwean. It was also the country where he had spent part of his childhood.
Despite the fact that Clegg was coming to a country that had obliterated the lines that separated people along colour lines with the declaration of independence on 18 April 1980, the sight of Clegg on national TV would have still been surprising and perhaps unsettling.
In those years when the first of the Born Frees were perhaps starting to make sense of the world around them, the sight of Clegg decked out in traditional attire and kicking up dust as his feet thundered up and down as he gave his rendition of indlamu, would perhaps have been greeted with a mixture of surprise and shock.
“For most of us that were born during the colonial era, we only knew white people as supervisors, oFolomani,” said arts doyen and cultural activist Cont Mhlanga. “They were people who only associated with us because they needed to instruct us or when they needed our labour. So in instances in which they had to speak our language, it was usually only because they needed to instruct us,” he said.
For years before and after independence, Mhlanga’s recollection was perhaps the sum of the interactions between black and white people first in Rhodesia then in Zimbabwe.
So when Clegg started gracing local screens in videos like Scatterlings of Africa, it represented a cross over that broke stubborn racial and cultural boundaries. It was an act of rebellion in a world that was still perhaps still trying too hard to hold on to its bad old ways. While a lot has changed since the 80s, the invisible lines and boundaries that ruled people back then are perhaps still governing them now.
Bulawayo, separated clearly between its western and eastern suburbs, perhaps gives the clearest indication of this. The sight of a white person was and still is rare in the western half of the city and it is bound to attract the inquisitive stares of adults and a crowd of excited children.
For those that live in the western suburbs, this is a common enough sight whenever one dares crosses the invisible lines that divide a city for whatever reasons. When he appeared before their black and white television sets surrounded by and seemingly enjoying the company of black people, Clegg perhaps stole the hearts of millions who knew white people as an occasional public spectacle when they visited or their bosses whenever they made the journey to western parts of the city at the break of dawn.
“He crossed the lines that had been set down by the powers that were at the time. He was one of those rare people who didn’t ‘totem’ themselves as a white person but as someone who was grounded in the environment that he was situated in,” Mhlanga said.
Of course it was not enough for Clegg to dress himself in traditional regalia and assume that he would gain the approval of the people whose culture he was trying to become a part of. Instead he went the extra mile, living and breathing every part of his adopted culture at a time that it was not popular to do so.
While some black people have been at pains to purge their tongues of any traces of the local dialects they grew up speaking, Clegg moved in the opposite direction, becoming so adept at the Zulu language that his song-writing was perhaps better in his adopted language.
His mixture of pop and other elements with traditional rhythms and instruments was nothing short of phenomenal. The song These Days for example opens with a Celtic horn with the Zulu chant, “yash’ imbawula’ playing over it. Later on, thumping dreams and an electric guitar take over with Clegg’s despairing voice lamenting the darkness of “these days”.
This was Clegg’s music in a nutshell: a musical cocktail whose ingredients were borrowed from different cultures and united into one by a master song-maker.
“He fused elements from Southern African music with what some might call modern styles and gave it a global appeal,” said Mhlanga.
“He gave much ignored musical elements relevance and the mixture of black and white elevated Southern African to a global audience that might not have been aware of the richness of our music.
It took him over 15 years to come with that sound. It was something that he came up with on his own and for that I doff my hat off to him as a creative force. He created something new and was not like some of our young musicians that are copying what is already there.”
In a world now referred to as a global village, Clegg was perhaps a reminder that the little villages that African people come from, the small homesteads that are part of the bigger global picture, are rich in culture, colour and beauty.
