Memories of Clegg's musical revolution

Johnny Clegg sees parallels between the haka and Zula war chanting. Picture / Richard Robinson

I was a teenager in South Africa when I first saw Johnny Clegg live on stage in the mid-1980s. It was like nothing I'd ever experienced. The music was loud, vibrant and distinctly African, but most importantly it was good - very good.

It was like Paul Simon's Graceland before Graceland took the world by storm.

And then there was the dancing - floor-stamping, sweat-dripping Zulu war dancing.

In the middle of it all was Clegg. At first glance, the skinny white man looked out of place in the line of black dancers, but it was soon clear he set the standard with his instinctive moves. He felt the music.

It was a glimpse into what South Africa could become and Clegg showed me and hundreds of other youngsters what we were missing.

With his bands Juluka (Zulu for "sweat") and then Savuka ("We have awakened"), Clegg demonstrated, through his music, that racial harmony was achievable in South Africa.

"You would come to see a Juluka show and for those two hours you lived in the future. And although you went back to your little segregated community you had in your mind a sense of an alternative and I think that is what people really responded to," Clegg says.

Since those days I have followed his career closely, bought his albums and seen first-hand his amazing popularity in France, of all places.

Twenty years later I'm in Auckland interviewing Clegg, who is on a whistlestop visit before returning for his first concert dates here.

He's 52 now but the trademark gestures and enthusiasm are still there.

Clegg's story is remarkable because he is an enigma. He is not particularly tall and he was born in England, but in his heart he is a bristling Zulu warrior.

In France he is simply known as Le Zulu Blanc - the white Zulu.

"I am a complete schizophrenic, culturally, and I am happy. I just have more tools and more ways of understanding than many other people."

For more than two decades Clegg has been drawing on his different worlds to create an eclectic blend of rock, township jive and traditional Zulu rhythms.

These days he tours with a band for about three to four months every year and is no stranger to success.

His former band Savuka's fourth album, Heat, Dust & Dreams, was nominated for a Grammy in the Best World Music category and won the Billboard award for Best World Music album in 1993.

Clegg is big in France. In 1989, on the road to Paris I was given a lift by a young French engineer, who asked me in English where I was from.

"Afrique du Sud," I replied.

His reponse was a broad smile and: "Ah, Johnny Clegg."

To get to this level of international stardom, Clegg has travelled a long road since first learning his art in the oppressive, segregated world of apartheid South Africa.

In time he became the musical conscience of a nation on the edge.

An anthropologist by training, he is fascinated by culture and uses his music to explore the impact a changing society has on culture.

As a teenager in Johannesburg, he was drawn to the tough world of the Zulu migrant workers who would leave their homesteads in the foothills of KwaZulu-Natal and journey to the City of Gold to toil in the mines.

These men, living in crowded hostels and working deep underground, created a world of their own, allowing their cultural heritage to shine through their bleak surroundings.

At weekends their singing and dancing would transport them back to the streams and misty hills of their youth.

Clegg, a middle-class white guy, was drawn to this exciting, dangerous world - unthinkable in 1960s South Africa.

Clegg soon became obsessed with Zulu culture. He was taught to play street guitar by Zulu apartment cleaner Mntonganazo Charles Mzila and immersed himself in the exciting music.

He broke strict laws preventing a white person from entering black townships without a permit.

He was arrested many times, but his musical education laid the platform for future international success.

Clegg shakes his head when recalling some of things he did in those early days. "I knew I was pushing it. I was arrested in hostels. I look back at that time and it seems like it was another life on another planet. When I think back on those feelings, I feel that we were mad.

"It was a form of madness."

Clegg regards teaming up with Sipho Mchunu, a Zulu gardener working in the posh white Johannesburg suburbs, as the critical point in his musical journey.

Together they formed Juluka, a band which broke new ground despite many obstacles. One was the ban on some Juluka songs by the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation because Zulu and English lyrics were being sung on the same song, thus breaking cultural segregation laws.

Their first album, Universal Men, bombed because it received no airplay on state radio stations.

Despite these setbacks, Juluka went on to record some of South Africa's iconic songs, including the yearning Scatterlings of Africa and the rousing Impi, which is played before Springbok games.

Where Juluka was something of a cultural experiment, Savuka - formed in 1986 after Mchunu quit to become a cattle farmer - was more of a political statement.

Clegg used his music to send out a strong anti-apartheid message and no song was more powerful than Asimbonanga, Clegg's tribute to the jailed Nelson Mandela. The song was banned in South Africa and later covered by Joan Baez.

Although Clegg's protest-song activism is no longer necessary, his passion for his music and country remains as strong.

But he does recognise the impact apartheid had on his musical development.

"The intensity of the struggle can never be duplicated in a society where all your rights are guaranteed. Cultural ferment is where any artist thrives. It brings out the best in them."

These days Clegg is happy to record songs and tour every year, while maintaining a strong interest in a variety of subjects, including genetics.

He does, however, want to try new things. Hence the tour to New Zealand and Australia. Although he will initially rely on some support from nostalgic expatriate South Africans, he believes his music will have broader appeal.

He is also interested in Maori culture.

"I am a dancer and I have seen the haka in South Africa. For me the language and chanting of the haka is very similar to Zulu war chanting. The role of the oral expression in rhythm is exactly the same, because these are war chants with a story designed to give the teller or the shouter of those chants a sense of destiny, a sense of invincibility.

"Most importantly it is physically enacted.

"It is not proclaimed like a poem, you actually do all these things."

Now it's our turn to see why Clegg has been so successful internationally.

"We are still doing a unique blend of music. No one is doing what we are doing."

WHO: Johnny Clegg, pioneering South African musician

WHERE & WHEN: ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland, Tuesday, November 29; Events Centre, Wellington, Wednesday, November 30.

WEBSITE: www.johnnyclegg.com (link below)