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Ladysmith Black Mambazo survived apartheid to bring African a capella music to the world
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Lancaster Intelligencer, Ladysmith Black Mambazo survived apartheid to bring African a capella music to the world >>
Some journeys can't be measured in miles. Albert Mazibuki has traveled the world. As a member of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a Zulu vocal group, he has played the world's most prestigious halls, performing for kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers and even the pope.
It's a life Mazibuki could not have imagined when he was a boy living on a white man's farm near Ladysmith, a city of about 200,000 people on the banks of the Klip River in South Africa.
Mazibuki, who came of age when South Africa followed the institutional racism of apartheid, believed the color of his skin automatically robbed him of a future.
He learned when he was 8 years old that his hopes and the hopes of his family meant nothing.
"My father wanted me to go to school but the person who was in charge of the farm that we were living in, he came and said I should go to work," Mazibuki said during a telephone interview from a motel room in Pittsfield, Mass. "So I went to work in the farm. It was so sad because I didn't have time to go to school."
When Mazibuki turned 15, he moved to the port city of Durban and worked in a factory. Because of apartheid, he expected to work in that factory for the rest of his life. "It was very difficult to accept it because it was so unfair," Mazibuki said.
"It was very unfair. Life was very challenging. There was no way to avoid apartheid. No way."
Luckily for Mazibuki, his path crossed with that of Joseph Shabalala, the visionary leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which will perform Sunday at Harrisburg's Whitaker Center.
Actually, their paths crossed three times before converging.
Mazibuki, 59, was 12 when he first met Shabalala in 1960. Both led singing groups at that time. After hearing Shabalala's, Mazibuki disbanded his.
In 1967, Mazibuki hoped to join the singing group that Shabalala was fronting at that time.
"The other members, they did not accept us," Mazibuki said. "They said, 'No, there are too many, we don't need you.' So we forget about it."
Two years later, Mazibuki and his brother, Joseph, were living with their uncle when Shabalala showed up at their door. He had disbanded his group and was looking to start another.
"(Shabalala) said (to his uncle), 'I'm here to ask for you to give me these two boys,' " Mazibuki said. "I want to sing with them.
"We sang for the whole day that day and then the next day we met again and we never stopped."
Mazibuki said he never thought twice about casting his lot with Shabalala and trying to make a go of it as a singer.
"I told myself, this is something I want to dedicate my life to, I believe this is something I might want to do with my life because all the time I felt my life, it was wasted because of no opportunities."
Under Shabalala's leadership, Ladysmith, an all-male a cappella group whose music is based on a form of singing started by blacks working in South Africa's mines, became a popular act in its own country.
Ladysmith also counted white people among its fans. The group even sang at three weddings where theirs were the only black faces.
"We had to be escorted," Mazibuki said. "They would arrange with the police and then they have to meet us and escort our car to that place. Then we perform there.
"You could see these people loved to mingle with us, but because of the walls of apartheid, they couldn't. Even the food they serve us, we couldn't sit with them at the table. It's not because they didn't like us."
The singer-songwriter Paul Simon, of course, became Ladysmith's biggest fan and helped the group become a global phenomenon.
Simon, who was preparing to record his landmark album "Graceland," which wove African music deep into the fabric of its songs, recruited some of Africa's finest musicians, including the members of Ladysmith, to help him.
Mazibuki said he and the group's other members were well aware of Simon's stature as a musician and the promise the project presented.
"We pray about this," he said. "If this is God willing, it will happen. It's a great opportunity in the world. We were so excited about it."
"Graceland," which was released in 1986 and featured Ladysmith on two of its songs ("Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" and "Homeless"), was an artistic and commercial triumph, perhaps the peak of Simon's storied career.
He also brought Ladysmith to the United States, where the group toured with Simon and appeared with him on "Saturday Night Live" for an electrifying version of "Diamonds."
"We had a lot of white people as fans in South Africa at that time but they were hiding it," Mazibuki said. "They couldn't play our music openly, they couldn't enjoy our music openly.
"After we joined Paul Simon, everyone was now proud to say they had been Ladysmith Black Mambazo fans for a long time, and then they show us our records they have. Paul Simon, he's the one who broke all those walls that had been separating people."
Everything changed for the members of Ladysmith after "Graceland." Using the album as a springboard, the Grammy Award-winning group achieved international acclaim on their own.
Back home in South Africa, they watched the dismantling of apartheid in the early 1990s.
When Mazibuki considers the distance he's traveled during his life, he doesn't point to the success of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
The father of seven talks about his 19-year-old daughter. "She has an opportunity to go to school," he said. "She is going to university this year. It's something I never dreamt of."
Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Sun. 7 p.m., Sunoco Performance Theatre at the Whitaker Center, 222 Market St., Harrisburg, $35, 214-ARTS.
--by Jon Ferguson 01/25/08 >> go there
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