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And the downbeat goes on
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Ottawa Citizen, And the downbeat goes on >>
The South Africa musician who wrote an anthem for Mandela's release says he wakes up many days 'ashamed to be human,' writes Amanda Latour.
Greedy. Selfish. Corrupt. Sitting in his hotel room in Cleveland, the legendary South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela is counting out what he calls the "defining characteristics" of humanity. "Cruel," he exclaims. "I forgot cruel."
The defining characteristics? Masekela looks up and gives a throaty laugh.
"They are," he insists. "When I say that, it's not a blanket statement. But the people who fight injustice, who do charitable work, or who have goodwill-they're always regarded as oddballs."
Masekela, who performs in Ottawa tomorrow, thinks for a moment and then decides on another tack.
"Look at what we have done to the water and the Earth and the music. We destroy everything we come into contact with. I wake up many days feeling ashamed to be a human being."
"I would rather be a dog," he says emphatically, "or a bird."
Here in Cleveland, the 68-year-old Masekela should have everything to smile about. Near the end of a well-received U.S. tour, he's looking forward to a few days of quality time with his three sons, who live in southern California.
Then he hopes to fly to London, where Truth in Translation has reopened to ecstatic reviews. He wrote the music for Michaels Lessac's chilling stage drama about the lives of the young translators who revealed the barbaric crimes of the apartheid regime to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The production has gripped British audiences as much as it transfixed people when it premiered in Johnannesburg in 2006. But Masekela is remorselessly downbeat. Partly it is the common cold which has brought him low. Throughout the conversation, he sucks noisily at a bit of ginger root-"it helps to break down the mucus" he says.
But it is the discussion about Truth in Translation that has really ignited his ill humour.
Lessac has told the British media that the show demonstrates South Africa's ability "to forgive the past, to survive the future."
Maskela, who first began to workshop the music for the show back in 2005, takes the opposite view and believes passionately that neither the play nor the political reality in South Africa has achieved any such reconciliation.
"At the end of the play you still wonder whether reconciliation is going to work," he says. "What is amazing is how the perpetrators almost reluctantly apologized-'I'm sorry, forgive me'-because a deal was there. It's the same old story. After the Allies overran Germany you couldn't find anybody who supported Nazism. It's the same thing in South Africa. You can't find anyone who supported apartheid.
"The thing is that apartheid is there, even now. You can't disconnect with it. Because of the damage it did, it will take ages to heal."
There are plenty of ironies in the situation, says Masekela, who fled the country after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. For a time it was people like his mentor Archbishop Trevor Huddleston who led the fight against apartheid.
But eventually music-including his own-came to the fore, a "major catalyst" in regime change, he believes.
"By 1985 there was nobody recording without having a song on their CD, which said either 'Free Nelson Mandela,' 'Free South Africa' or 'down with Apartheid.'"
His own song, Bring Him Back Home, became an international anthem for Mandela's release, and the musician himself returned to South Africa in the early 1990s ready to let the good times roll. Fifteen years later, he sees only mediocrity in the arts, a few opportunities for corporate gigs and perhaps a handful or one-night stands on home soil.
"The government today are terrified of music," he growls. "They know that a musical commentary can put them at a disadvantage. They are not afraid of print and journalists, that is considered freedom of speech, but they are very comfortable with the absence of music."
For decades, he has been an itinerant, though his home base is Johannesburg where he lives with his wife Elinam. Masekela owns his own entertainment group, publishing and reocrding music, which he runs with his 29-year-old daughter Pula Twala.
"We (blacks) ended up with less than two per cent of the economy, less than five per cent of the land. We are free but poor people," he says. "Amnesia always sets in after freedom. People go from discrimination and oppression to dictatorship. It has happened in Angola, Congo, it is happening now in Darfur, in Somalia, in Zimbabwe.
"It's human nature. People fight for freedom and then they forget and opress their own people. There are people in South Africa who have abandoned their communities."
But surely he has felt elation, at least when apartheid crumbled? On the day of the 1994 election Archbishop Desmond Tutut was asked by the BBC to describe his feelings and his response was, "Yippee!"
Didn't Masekela have a yippee moment? He takes a mighty suck on his ginger root. "I had that sense of it. But it was momentary. Because 'Yippee' doesn't change the way that bastards really feel.
Even Mandela, whom he lists among his heroes, ultimately couldn't change things in the ways he wanted.
"Mandela was bad for business because he was too interested in the quality of life for the poor and that wasn't good for economics. It threatened all those people who had big properties," says Maskela.
Are there any grounds at all for optimism? Well he has his heroes, Masekela replies. He still admires Tutu, who has the ability to "call the shots" of the government in South Africa. In the wider world he is drawn to the impeturbable dignity of the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
"At one time I used to admire Mutgabe," he muses. "When I meet him again, if he will talk to me, I'm going to ask him, 'What the f--k happened to you, man?"
He pauses, weighing up another list, the great musicians who can still lighten his gloom. He counts them out on his fingers: Makeba. Belafonte. Dylan. Marley.
"I admired Miles David very much because he never bit his tongue-he always said what he felt. These are all figures who are not universally popular with powerful people. I admire the people the establishment hate. And I am not a favourite of the establishment."
Is that a good sign?
"I hope so," he says, standing. He has a gig to prepare for and no more time to talk. "Sorry to bring you down." 02/13/08 >> go there
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