Joe Mogotsi, known to friends and fans as “Kolie”, was one of the best loved figures in African music for more than half a century. He helped to found the South African close harmony group the Manhattan Brothers in the 1930s and he was still singing with them when they re-formed to sing at the celebrated Wembley Stadium concert in 1990 to mark the release from prison of Nelson Mandela.
Their appearance came at the request of Mandela himself, who often cited them as his favourite group. He repeated the honour by asking them to sing at his inauguration as President of South Africa in 1994.
In the early 1950s the unknown Miriam Makeba joined the line-up and made her first recordings singing with the Brothers. The group also appeared with Makeba in the 1959 musical King Kong. When the production transferred from South Africa to the London stage in 1961, Makeba and Mogotsi and his fellow singers all chose to remain in Britain as exiles from the brutal South African regime.
Mogotsi lived in Britain for more than 40 years, although he spent the end of his life back in South Africa. In his autobiography, He Who Survives, published in 2002, he recalled that the proudest day of his career was singing for Mandela at an event in London in 2000. After his performance, the by then former South African President took the microphone and declared: “I have known this man for 40 years. He was one of the Manhattan Brothers, who were the greatest singers and entertainers in South Africa. The Brothers were like my sons.”
Joseph Kully Mogotsi was born in 1924 in Pimville, a black township of Johannesburg built to house migrant workers in the local gold mines. He started his first singing group, the Manhattan Stars, while still at school. By 1938 they had become the Manhattan Brothers, a quartet consisting of Mogotsi, Rufus Khoza, Ronnie Majola Sehume and Nathan “Dambuzza” Mdledle. That line-up remained until 1966.
Advertisement
Influenced by black American groups such as the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers and Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, they sang on street corners and in village halls. By the end of the 1930s they were touring Lesotho and Bechuanaland (now Botswana).
In 1947 Mogotsi and the Manhattan Brothers made their first recordings for Gallo, a South African-based subsidiary of Decca, which was already making records aimed at a black audience. It was a poor deal under which they were paid merely a session fee and in return handed over all rights to their songs to the record company. More than half a century later the surviving members of the group were still in dispute with the company.
With Mogotsi handling the main composing and lyric-writing duties, the records sold in huge quantities and the Brothers became stars of South African radio. They also became fashion icons, as black male youths in the townships copied their tight, narrow-cut trousers and smart suits.
Heavily involved in fundraising for the African National Congress, they were on hand to provide the entertainment at Kliptown in 1955 when Mandela and other leaders of the liberation struggle gathered to sign the ANC’s historic Freedom Charter. By then the line-up had expanded to include a female vocalist with the addition of Miriam Makeba in 1953. Backed by the best local musicians, including the horn players Kippie Moeketsi, Hugh Masakela and Jonas Gwangwa, the Brothers were now the most famous black group in southern Africa, although they experienced repeated problems with the apartheid laws.
In 1958 Makeba and the group were all cast in the musical King Kong, about the black African boxer Ezekiel “King Kong” Dlemani. Mogotsi played a gangster and after the production had toured South Africa it transferred to the London stage in 1961. When the British run ended, the cast were offered plane tickets back to South Africa. “I remembered the way the police treated us blacks, the pass laws and all the restrictions we faced,” Mogotsi later wrote. He and many of the cast, including Makeba and the rest of the Manhattan Brothers, opted to stay in London and to apply for British citizenship.
Advertisement
The Brothers played a concert at the London Palladium and a benefit for the Movement for Colonial Freedom at the Festival Hall. They also toured Europe and recorded a brace of albums, Emergent Voices and Africa South Sings, both released in 1964. After Nathan Mdledle left the group in 1966, unable to deal with the pain of exile, the Brothers continued as a trio, before breaking up in 1970.
Mogotsi appeared in various stage productions in the early 1970s, including Porgy and Bess and Showboat and acted as producer for the Kenyan pop band Matata. But by 1974 he was working as a security guard.
In 1987 he re-emerged as a member of the choir singing on the soundtrack of Richard Attenborough’s film Cry Freedom and three years later he persuaded the four original Manhattan Brothers to reunite for the first time in 24 years to perform for Mandela.
When he retired from his day job in 1993 at the age of 69, Mogotsi devoted himself full-time again to making music, performing with the Manhattan Brothers and solo at jazz festivals in South Africa and in Britain, where he continued to live. Finally able to travel freely between the country of his birth and the land that had offered him asylum, he no longer felt like an exile and relished the new South Africa.
Interest in the Manhattan Brothers was revived when Mogotsi narrated a 2001 documentary film about the group, Songs from the Golden City. At about the same time came a CD, The Very Best of the Manhattan Brothers, Their Greatest Hits 1948-1959, after the settlement of a longstanding dispute which finally made partial recompense for the way Mogotsi and his fellow singers had been robbed of their dues half a century earlier.
Advertisement
Joe Mogotsi, singer, was born on April 14, 1924. He died on May 19, 2011, aged 87