By John P. McLaughlin

Mission's a nice little place to visit, a river-side town of cedar mills and regular folks going about their business in the shadow of the Benedictine monks' Westminster Abbey. For long time, Mission was great berry-growing country and held a famous strawberry festival every year, but that went away when the big flood of 1948 wiped out the local lowlands.

The Eddy Match Co. had its biggest matchstick plant in the world in Mission once, but they went away in the early 1960s. Then the town had a huge soap box derby for a while but by the early 1970s, that went away, too.

Come the 1980s, a bunch of musicians decided to start up a folk festival in Mission. Led by one Francis Xavier Edwards — the monks on the hill above, we like to think, nodded in quiet approval at his name — they put on a one-day event on one stage with a $10,000 budget. In the big-city concert world, that would buy you one of Keith Richard's Rothmans. Smoked and butted.

The festival went through many ups and a few severe downs over the years but has emerged two decades later a proud and mature three-day event always held at the same location, the gorgeous and verdant Fraser River Heritage Park, site of Mission's original mission.

There's quite a lineup this year, including Canadians like the McDades and the Bills, plus Yungchen Lhamo from Tibet and Angus Lyon & Ruaridh Campbell from Scotland. For my money, one of the most fascinating acts has to be South African flugelhorn and trumpet player Hugh Masekela.

You might remember Masekela for his 1960s hit "Grazing in the Grass," but there's much more to the man. He's from the relatively prosperous, cosmopolitan coal mining town of Witbank where his grand mother operated a speakeasy to slake the thirst of migrant workers from through out Africa.

During the apartheid years, the late Anglican Bishop Trevor Huddleston was one of the few whites who constantly and loudly denounced the entrenched racist regime and absurd systemic red tape that kept the blacks — non-European South Africans, the Afrikaners called them — in a constant state of impoverishment. Huddleston gave the John P. McLaughlin young Masekela his first horn.

"He also got me a scholarship in England," says Masekela. "He was a major guy. I think he was one of the people who single-handedly helped to sustain aware ness of the South African struggle glob ally. By 1985, there wasn't an artist anywhere who recorded a CD without putting in ‘free South Africa,’ ‘free Mandela.’ And every country's population finally said, ‘Why are we friendly with this government?'"

Activist though he may be, Masekela remains at essence a musician and a brilliant one at that He can play dead-on bebop jazz or R&B, pop, whatever's called for. Among the many, many extraordinary projects he's been involved with is Paul Simon's Graceland tour 20 years ago that featured South African music and musicians.

At the time, liberal pointy heads in this part of the world and boycott literalists in Africa accused Simon of cultural appropriation, an absurdity. He wasn't appropriating, he was exposing. And he had hand in bringing down a brutal racist regime.

"The Graceland tour played to 10 million people who had never heard of apartheid before,” says Masekela. "It was, to a great extent, the most radical South African show with Miriam Makeba, myself and Ladysmith Black Mombazo and Paul singing and making people aware.

"The funniest thing is when Mandela came out of jail, one of the first people he invited to South Africa and had a big reception for was Paul Simon. And the day he had the reception, the people who were in the picket lines outside the Graceland shows were the same ones who were escorting him to the top table and pushing us all out of the way. It shows you the hypocrisy of human beings.”