Remembering late South African musician Johnny Clegg’s powerful mission
South African singer and musician Johnny Clegg on the set of the 1992 film 'The Power of One'. He worked on the film's soundtrack.As a storyteller, every journalist strives for wholeness and symmetry, for a narrative that after all its circumnavigation returns to the beginning, as if to say, “Here, enclosed, is an entire world.
Since the Times considered me too inexperienced to entrust with such an important foreign posting, I made my own plan. I would write a book about the shared tragedy of apartheid, and in 1986, I discovered an ideal scenario. A year and a half earlier, a young woman from Johannesburg had driven her maid home to the black township of Sebokeng. There her car crossed the path of a funeral procession mourning a ten-year-old boy who had been killed during random army strafing.
“Sounds great,” I told Jim Henke, the managing editor, when he called me with the assignment in December 1989. “The only problem is I probably can’t get into the country. Maybe you ought to ask Rian Malan to write this.” Still, as I debarked at Jan Smuts Airport on a glorious summer morning, I expected to be turned away at customs. Instead, I ambled through without incident and was met by Clegg’s indefatigable aide, Denzyl Fiegelson, clad in a tropical-print shirt. What was most shocking about South Africa was its ordinariness, its normalcy.
It was Johnny Clegg’s refusal to be seduced that made him such an impressive person. In America, it cost antiapartheid activists nothing to campaign for divestment or erect a shantytown, all the while ignoring their own nation’s rampant race hate. But in South Africa, holding to ideals meant paying a price – being arrested and spied upon, having songs banned and shows canceled, mourning friends murdered by the state.
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