When Hugh Masekela was a boy, his grandmother put him to work as a lookout for the illegal “shebeen” she ran for black migrant workers in the Transvaal mining town that was their home. If he spotted a white policeman in the street, his instructions were to run into the bar and warn the drinkers that a raid was imminent while his grandmother hid the incriminating bottles.
It was an early lesson in the harsh realities of black life in South Africa, cruelly reinforced when one day he heard some Afrikaner children saying to their mother: “Look at that little monkey, dressed up like white folks.”
The slur was a seminal moment in his political education and the start of a journey that was to take him from township poverty into exile and international recognition as one of the world’s best-loved trumpet players and a musical ambassador for the anti-apartheid cause. “I was five years old and that was the day when I realised that the deal was bad,” he said.
The deal was to get a lot worse: by the time Masekela was nine, the National Party had come to power and the legal enforcement of white supremacy and racial segregation known as apartheid had begun.
Born Hugh Ramopolo Masekela in April 1939 in the coal-mining town of Witbank, to Thomas Selema Masekela, a health inspector, and Pauline Bowers, the daughter of a Scottish mining engineer, he was sent to St Peter’s Missionary School near Johannesburg, where his response to the injustices of apartheid was to become a junior hoodlum, modelling himself on the gangsters he saw in American films.
Advertisement
“I was one of the worst delinquents, always fighting with the teachers and going into town stealing,” he said.
A life of criminality and prison appeared his likely fate, but redemption came at the age of 14 when he saw the film Young Man With a Horn, in which Kirk Douglas played a hero based on the American jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke. Fascinated by the music, Masekela approached the noted anti-apartheid campaigner Trevor Huddleston, his school chaplain, who was fighting a losing battle to keep his teenage charges out of trouble.
Masekela offered him a deal: “If I can get a trumpet, I promise I won’t bother you any more.” Huddleston raised enough money to buy him a battered second-hand instrument and found a Salvation Army trumpeter to teach him to play. The future archbishop recalled Masekela “sitting outside the school making hideous noises”. Yet his off-key notes inspired his school friends also to ask for instruments and the Huddleston Jazz Band was formed as South Africa’s first black youth orchestra.
Huddleston left South Africa in 1956, but he remembered his trumpet-playing pupil. Shortly after, Masekela was delighted to receive a package from America: a top-of-the-range instrument that Huddleston had persuaded Louis Armstrong to donate. There’s an extraordinary photograph of Masekela taken in the township of Sophiatown on the day the trumpet arrived, leaping for joy with the instrument waved triumphantly above his head.
He was on his way to becoming a professional musician and before he turned 20 he was playing with South Africa’s finest musicians in the Jazz Epistles and in the orchestra of the musical King Kong, which starred his girlfriend Miriam Makeba, and transferred to London’s West End. However, under the hated “pass laws”, life under apartheid was becoming increasingly painful and dangerous. Makeba went into exile in 1959 and, after narrowly escaping arrest, Masekela followed her a year later.
Advertisement
The final straw in his decision was the Sharpeville massacre in which 69 anti-pass-laws protesters were shot dead. The resulting state of emergency, which banned gatherings of more than ten people, extinguished the Jazz Epistles’ ability to make a living and two months later Masekela was on a flight to London. It would be another 30 years before he was to return home.
With Yehudi Menuhin and John Dankworth as his sponsors, he enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music in London, although he never took up his place. With the support of the popular American singer Harry Belafonte, he opted instead for the Manhattan School of Music in New York, where Makeba was living. They married in 1964 and their volatile union ended in divorce two years later, although they remained lifelong friends and comrades in arms.
Masekela’s introduction to New York was intoxicating. On his first evening he managed to meet most of the city’s jazz aristocracy, visiting a club to see Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, who then took him to another nightspot to hear Charles Mingus and Max Roach. To finish off the night he stopped off at the Half Note, where John Coltrane was performing. He studied classical trumpet in New York for four years, later noting that “I knew more than most of the teachers, but I learnt classical music and composition and orchestration”. He absorbed even more outside the classroom by throwing himself into the jazz scene, where his ability to imitate all of the great horn men impressed, until Miles Davis sagely advised him to change his style.
“ ‘You’re just going to be a statistic if you play jazz,’ ” Masekela recalled him saying. “ ‘But if you put in some of the stuff you remember from Africa, you’ll be different from everybody.’ ”
The result was a glorious fusion of American jazz and lilting township rhythms, which reached its commercial apogee on Grazing in the Grass, which topped the American charts in 1968. The record sold four million copies and became part of the soundtrack of a long hot summer of civil rights protests in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Advertisement
By then Masekela had moved to California, where he was embraced by hippies protesting against the Vietnam War and by the black power movement. He performed at the Monterey pop festival on the same bill as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Who, and played the trumpet on the Byrds’ hit So You Want to Be a Rock’n’Roll Star.
His growing politicisation led him to help to found the South African Student Association to assist black scholars to escape their home country to study abroad, and he reacted furiously when the US State Department asked him to join a government sponsored trip to Africa, including a visit to apartheid South Africa.
“You’ve got a f***ing nerve asking me to visit my own country under your auspices,” he said.
He caused further headlines when he married Chris Calloway, the daughter of the jazz singer Cab Calloway, and she quit the Broadway cast of Hello Dolly! to join him in California. The out-of-court settlement for her breach of contract cost him $50,000. It was a high price to pay, given that the marriage lasted only three months, although he later said that the amount of alcohol and drug abuse involved had made it feel like 30 years.
His son, Selema Masekela, an American television sports presenter, was born in 1971 to a Haitian mother, Jessie La Pierre. A daughter, Pula Twala, who helped to manage his later career, was born in 1979.
Advertisement
He was married for a third time, to Jabu Mbatha, in 1981. They divorced in the 1990s after he had returned to South Africa and he is survived by his fourth wife, Elinam Cofie, whom he had met in her native Ghana two decades before their marriage in 1999.
Shortly after divorcing Calloway, Masekela’s Malibu house was raided for drugs. He escaped a prison sentence, but was given two years’ probation. By his own admission, he struggled to deal with the success that Grazing in the Grass had brought. “I became obsessed with the pleasures of the flesh, which only led to sleepless nights, mind-boggling immorality, dishonesty, broken hearts and hungover mornings,” he wrote in his highly readable but self-flagellating autobiography in 2004.
By then he had been clean and sober for seven years, after finally entering a rehabilitation clinic in 1997. “The book was an opportunity to apologise to the people whose heads I stepped on during my way up and through my madness,” he said.
The pain of exile, though, resulted in some wonderfully unique music. Songs such as Soweto Blues and Stimela, which recounted the hardship of black migrant workers in South Africa’s coal mines, became memorable anti-apartheid anthems.
Yet although his music spoke movingly of the struggles and sorrows of his people, at the same time it was imbued with a resilient joy and defiant passion for his country.
Advertisement
By the 1970s he was pining to return to the continent of his birth. He spent time in Guinea, Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia, and although the South African government would not let him return home, in 1980 he and Makeba played to vast audiences in Lesotho.
He moved to Botswana, where he founded a music school, set up a mobile studio and formed a new band. His stay came to an abrupt end when his neighbours, the prominent ANC supporters George and Lindi Phahle, were assassinated by a South African hit squad. Fearing for his own life, Masekela fled to London, where he appeared at anti-apartheid rallies and recorded 1987’s Bring Him Back Home, a joyous praise song to Nelson Mandela that became another ANC anthem.
Yet he provoked the anger of the ANC when, together with Makeba and the South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, he joined Paul Simon on his Graceland tour. Simon was accused of breaking the UN’s cultural boycott by recording in South Africa and when the tour reached the Royal Albert Hall in London, the concert was picketed. “It’s our music and our country,” Masekela said. “Who are these people to tell us how we should get together?”
When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Masekela’s sister Barbara became his chief of staff, and Masekela was finally able to return home. For a while he was frustrated by the corruption he saw around him and impatient that the pace of change in the new “rainbow nation” was not fast enough. However, he emerged from rehab in the late 1990s a changed man.
Now a benign and avuncular elder statesman of the post-apartheid era and universally known as Bra’ Hugh, he spent much of his time and energy mentoring younger South African artists, even while battling the cancer that was first diagnosed in 2008. “I’ve had a very rich life,” he said. “The best thing I can do now is to encourage a new generation of talented people to come through.”
Hugh Masekela, jazz trumpeter, was born on April 4, 1939. He died from cancer on January 23, 2018, aged 78