Hugh Masekela - Musician and Activist HARDtalk

Welcome to HARDtalk,

with me, Zeinab Badawi.

My guest is South African jazz

legend and political activist Hugh

Masekela.

His life and music have reflected

the struggles of the anti-apartheid

hero, and the years

of black majority rule.

So, why does he now describe

South Africa as "fast turning

into a rubbish dump,

and becoming removed

from its authentic African culture"?

Hugh Masekela, welcome to HARDtalk.

Thank you, thank you, Zeinab.

You were born in 1939 in Witbank,

100 miles east of Johannesburg.

You said "if I have a trumpet,

I won't bother anybody".

You say music is your religion?

Well, I was obsessed...

I was actually bewitched

by music from infancy.

When I was five years old,

my parents had to get me away

from the gramophone and help me play

the piano, with piano lessons.

Nine years later, I saw a movie

about a trumpet player.

It was a biopic, called

"The Young Man with the Horn".

I had to play the trumpet.

In fact, it was a man of religion,

Father Trevor Huddlestone,

who gave you your first trumpet?

He was a chaplain of my boarding

school, St Peters in Johannesburg.

Yes, he was interested in everybody.

He knew my parents,

he knew everyone's parents.

He was especially interested

in restless people, like I was!

I was in bed with a

cold, I had bad flu.

He said, what would make you happy?

I was always in trouble

with the authorities.

When you're expelled in those days,

there are no other chances.

I said Father, if I could get

a trumpet, I would not bother

anybody any more!

He said, are you sure?

I said I was positive!

And with his last £15...

With his last £15?

Yes, he sent me with a note

to the music store.

He knew everybody.

The manager of the store

was a Scotsman, he said

he was crazy, £15 for a trumpet?

But he put in his

own money to do it.

Everybody really respected him.

That one act of kindness.

And he was a great anti-apartheid

activist, wasn't he?

He got me a trumpet teacher.

I already knew the rudiments

of music as a piano player.

I learned quickly.

So we have Trevor Huddlestone

is to thank for your legions of fans

throughout the decades,

for bringing us the work and music

of Hugh Masekela?

He was an amazing man.

When he was deported

from South Africa, he fought

apartheid harder than

anybody at the time.

He was obsessed with

the freedom of South Africa.

He started the anti-apartheid

movement when I came here.

For 20 years, we had

Trafalgar Square, where

South Africa House is, was occupied.

Let's see a clip of you performing.

Sadly not with your trumpet,

but you're singing Stimela

at a venue in Johannesburg

about five years ago.

OK, should I watch?

Yeah!

(SINGING).

I love those special

effects you did there.

Swaying slightly in my seat, I was!

You have been performing

of course for five decades,

you played the trumpet,

the horn, the cornet,

and you've been

composing and singing.

But it was a tough path

to success for you?

Yes, few people are successful

at success, especially

in this business.

To survive yourself,

that is one of the greatest

successes of success

in my profession.

Your music is a fusion

of jazz with traditional

South African influences.

Why I say it was tough

for you is because as apartheid

began to advance, we found

that there were no music schools

or music lessons for black

South Africans, and a little bit

later, in the early 50s,

there was the Bantu Education Act,

which limited black South Africans

to three hours of schooling per day.

That was very difficult.

You said you knew your place

and you never looked forward

to getting anywhere in the world.

That is tragic.

Yes, in South Africa, it was not

only for the indigenous child.

Any humane person was against

the law in South Africa,

the paradox is the greatest activity

in music in South Africa happens

during the apartheid era.

Great musicians came out of that

era, like the great Miriam Makeba,

partly because the environment

was very safe, there were police

coming out of the walls,

and the trees, and everything.

It made the environment safer

for the entertainment business.

The police were not there to protect

them, but to perpetrate apartheid

as much as possible.

But it created...

That is where we all came up.

There was never any music

schools for Africans.

There was not any lessons.

Myself, I learned in Johannesburg.

Me and my cousin came out

of the Harrison Band to play

with professionals as teenagers.

The people we learned

from were in their 30s and 40s,

it was a hard time.

Almost everybody I learned

from died from booze.

Yes, you mention booze.

You were brought up

by your grandmother who ran

an illegal drinking den.

People all around you were drinking,

including you yourself.

You started drinking at 14?

13.

13?

There you are.

It is documented in your

own autobiography.

Your struggle against alcoholism.

You were an alcoholic

by the time you were 20, 21?

I did not know it.

It was a respectable thing

to be a great drinker.

When it was illegal,

it was one of the biggest business

industries.

among Africans.

South Africa is probably

like the biggest drinking country

in the world today,

because of that legacy.

But, if you were a great drinker,

you got major respect.

It was a form of defiance.

If your papers were right,

you could walk up to a policeman

as drunk as hell, as long

as there was evidence,

just say "would you

like to see my papers?"

Just about everybody I learned music

from died from booze.

On my mother's family's side,

except my grandmother,

my mother and her aunt,

everyone died from booze.

You said even today,

drinking is such a culture

in South Africa that people don't

realise what it is doing to them?

I don't know if you've ever seen

the holiday statistics,

at the end of the year.

More than 17,000 people die a year

in road accidents in South Africa.

And you are quite outspoken?

As a critic of heavy

drinking, obviously

because of your experiences...

Everybody is.

There's a major government

initiative called "Arrive Alive",

nobody listens

because it is a habit.

People have to be, if they leave

the house, they have to drink...

But you've battled it, and you've

defeated your drink daemons.

I've battled it and drug addiction.

When I came to the States,

it was a time in the music business

of major drugging.

When I moved to Los Angeles,

there was the time of flower power.

Free love.

It was a common past time.

You moved to the US

in 1960, the early 1960s.

You were helped by friends

of the international community.

You married in the mid-1960s,

the late great Miriam Makeba.

I was brought to the stage by Miriam

and Harry Belafonte.

I grew up with Miriam.

You married in the mid- 60s?

We married in 1964.

I produced a lot of her records.

We wrote quite a few songs.

We worked together for over

40 years on and off.

And you enrolled at

the Manhattan School of Music,

and enjoyed the tutelage

of Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong,

and that's when you began

to develop your own unique style

of Afro jazz.

I went to the stage as a bebopper.

I was a jazz musician,

but everybody said hey,

you will be a statistic

if you came here for jazz,

but we would like to hear some

of your African stuff.

I was hoping to play with the best.

Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan,

Donald Byrd, Kenny Doran.

All of the great trumpet players.

And saxophonists,

they came from there.

They said, form your own group,

we want to hear African stuff!

Dizzy said the same.

Of course, Belafonte and Miriam did.

That was the only way I got noticed.

Otherwise you would not stand out...

You think it was a result

of your exile from South Africa that

you became the renowned

musician that you are?

No, I think...

I never looked for fame.

I wanted to learn, I went

to classical music school.

I wanted to teach in South Africa.

Having been in the company of major

activists, Belafonte was the biggest

fundraiser for the civil

rights movement involved

in all of the fundraising.

I learned from him more

than anybody else.

If you come from people underfoot,

and you get your juice from them...

If you don't talk about them,

there's something wrong with you.

You said on Channel 4 News

here in the UK five years

ago "my music was never meant to be

political or even campaigning,

I just sought to connect".

But we all know Hugh Masekela

as an activist, an anti-apartheid

voice, as much as

you are a musician.

Well I came from an

activist community.

As children, we grew up

in boycotts and rallies.

We saw people like Nelson Mandela.

They were in their 20s at rallies.

We grew up with them.

There were more than 30

million people underfoot.

I think that the biggest liberators

for South Africa were those who made

South Africa ungovernable,

and the ones who lost their lives.

They were never mentioned.

But, we grew up in an

atmosphere of protest.

Again, in an interview in 2012,

when you were asked what the best

experience of your career was,

you said returning home after 30

years of exile and having a second

chance to start life in the arm

of my folks has been great for me.

But why were you away

from South Africa for 30 years?

I couldn't go back after 1964,

our passports were taken away.

I travelled on a Guinean passport

and Liberian passport.

So it was not self-imposed exile,

you were not allowed

back until 1990?

My mother died in 1978,

and my sister and I could not go

and bury her.

Miriam's mother died three months

after she left South Africa.

The earliest you could

go back was 1990.

You often talk about imposed exile.

You say you could not have

gone back before 1990.

No.

I could have but I would have...

The government was crazy.

I could have gone to jail

and who knows what else.

You felt that was not worth taking?

There were many others who went

to jail and returned.

In 1963, when I finished my studies,

I said goodbye to Miriam and I said

that I was going back home,

and I came here to England on my way

back home and Harry called me

because Miriam was very sick

in hospital, and said,

before you go...

Anyway, to make a long

story short, Harry said,

look, if you go back

to South Africa, nobody knows

you in the upper

echelons of government.

All they know is you have been

hanging out with us.

You are going to disappear.

If you stay here and make

a name for yourself,

you can talk about your country

and garner support for it.

You heeded that advice and returned

in 1990 when the ANC was no longer

banned and then we saw...

All the political

parties were banned.

Black majority rule came in in 1994.

Nelson Mandela, with the Truth

and Reconciliation Commission,

extending his hand to

South African whites...

You said you didn't think

you have the power to forgive white

people, that's what you told

the Observer newspaper in 2012.

Do you still stand by that?

What powers do I have

to forgive anybody?

I am not a god.

Within yourself, do you not

have the power to forgive?

I have the right

to keep what I feel.

I was not able to bury my mother.

I lost a lot of friends

and relatives.

More than that, there has never been

a time in the history of human

beings when colonising

or occupational forces apologised

and say, sorry that we took your

land and we took all your minerals

and we made these billions

from your backs and we still have

our businesses here,

but here is £500 trillion to show

you how sorry we are.

When you see students

at the University of Cape Town

removing the statue of Cecil Rhodes,

do you back them in that kind of...

It was removed after it

was damaged, defaced.

Personally, I think the issues that

should be dealt with is the fact

that nothing much has changed

in South Africa except that we vote.

Economically, we don't

own the country as a people,

we are oppressed.

We own less than 3% of land.

We don't own any of

the businesses or the economy.

The few Africans who have been taken

to be part of the business are drop

in the ocean.

That is the reality

of the situation.

Economic, apartheid still exists

whereby economic wealth

in South Africa is concentrated

in the hands of white South

Africans?

Not only.

Community planning.

Architectural apartheid.

In fact, I normally joke,

if we are going to legitimise

everything, maybe we should also,

instead of outlawing apartheid,

we should legitimise it,

because it is still here.

There are many, Trevor Manuel,

former government minister in 2013,

he says you cannot undo those

decades of apartheid in a short

space of time.

It is not possible.

He says you are a magician,

the legacy of apartheid runs too

deep to reverse in the short period.

I am not a minister.

Do you agree that it will take more

than 20 years to reverse apartheid?

I don't think the onus will come

from the administration.

I think the political industry

will have to come from those people

who monopolise the economy

of South Africa.

If the goodwill doesn't come

from them, it has been

a one-sided reconciliation.

What do you make of the record

of the ANC with 20 years in power.

It was the most...

Inequality has expanded

under the ANC.

Most liberation movements

are fantastic during liberation.

But when it comes to governing,

we always have to ask,

can you remember any liberation

movement that is governed well?

I don't remember any.

Because it is two different things.

They inherit the power

and from there you hope

for the best.

So far, we haven't seen it

in South Africa, not with Mandela,

not with the present government.

Is that why you said this

year that we have crime,

corruption and a country

that is fast turning into a rubbish

dump, that is very strong language.

Very strong.

I think it is much worse.

If you are free and you can't walk

around at night in your own country,

then what kind of freedom is it?

There is a constitution,

human rights, enshrined,

gay rights and so on.

It is all paper.

There are gay rights but gay people

have a rough time in the townships.

You can write stuff down and you can

decree laws but are they real?

There are problems in England,

and England is thousands of years

old, but it has its fair

share of everything

from xenophobia to poverty.

You have mentioned xenophobia.

We saw that ugly face,

well, not xenophobia,

but Afrophobia, where Africans

turned on other Africans,

be they Nigerian or Somali,

they trashed their property

and businesses and people

were fearful for their lives.

What did you feel?

That song we played earlier

is about migrant workers.

It is a legacy of Cecil Rhodes

and British colonialism,

originally when they brought

indigenous Africans to South Africa,

they could only come

in as endangered servants of migrant

labour and they were segregated

from the south African indigenous

population, living in

single men's hostels.

The community was manipulated

into thinking otherwise.

You blame the old apartheid system

and white colonial rule

for the attacks that we saw?

Because that might not

wash with everyone.

I blame them for chaos

across the world.

You have said Africa's

problems are cultural.

In 20 years, when my grandchildren

ask who I am, I will say,

it is rumoured we were

once Africans long ago.

You feel Africans are

denigrating their own culture?

The conquest and defeat

of Africans over the years,

urbanisation, mis-education,

politics and religion,

have made Africans think their own

heritage is backwards and primitive

and savage and barbaric and pagan.

The colonials don't have

to do the job anymore,

Africans do it for them.

Basically, Africans have no

idea of their history.

It will create a situation

where the new African academies can

sprout up all over the world,

where we can really learn the true

history of Africa, the kingdoms,

how and why we were fragmented.

When it comes to music you have also

said all that is new and considered

new today is electronic.

There is no new music

in South Africa.

In Africa, period.

There is plenty of...?

The most recognised African

musicians internationally are those

that come from heritage music.

That doesn't mean there are not

people sticking to their traditions

in their music.

There are plenty playing

on the continent who are popular.

You accept that?

If you can give me an example.

Miriam Macaba's daughter,

she sticks hard to local music

in South Africa.

There are people who are singing

in Zulu and whatever.

I mean don't get played

on the radio, like hip-hop artists

and DJs, that is

what has taken over.

If you sang a song today,

would it be a happy or sad song?

A happy or sad song for Africa?

If I had to sing a song for Africa

it would be a song of wish and it

would be down with the borders

of 1886, that would be my song.

Hugh Masekela, thank you very much

for coming on HARDtalk.

I don't shake hands,

do you mind if I hug you?

LAUGHS.

Yeah, sure.