Paradoxically, a lot of anti-apartheid activists can't stand that the South African Zulu singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo has become a hit in America. The unexpected triumph of this black, all-male a capella chorale in its spring 1987 tour created such demand that it had to schedule another visit in the fall, which was also enormously successful. Its presence has opened a window on black South Africa that shatters many of the activists' cherished stereotypes of oppression. The group is also a musical phenomenon of the first order.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo is one of the freshest and, literally, most inspired examples of the rich South African musical tradition now reaching the public through the unlikely medium of veteran soft-rocker Paul Simon. When Simon first heard this music on some small-label releases, he couldn't identify it, but he became so entranced that he traveled to Johannesburg. With some of the country's leading black musicians, including Ladysmith Black Mambazo, he recorded the Warner Brothers Album Graceland, the Grammy award winner for outstanding album of 1986.
Simon was denounced by the Left for the album's lack of overt political content. He has been on and off the blacklist of the United Nations Center against Apartheid. But, without a major hit single, Graceland stayed in the top of the charts for more than a year and sold more than eight million copies worldwide.
By embracing this album, the public in effect repudiated the narrow fanaticism of its antiapartheid critics, but the zealots were even more confounded when the musicians themselves began to arrive in the United States. They turned out to have a far richer range of personalities and human concerns than the political rhetoric of any persuasion was willing to allow them.
Consider Joseph Shabalala, a genuine musical genius who founded Ladysmith Black Mambazo and composes its melodic and rhythmically intricate chants. A burly figure with a warm and totally open smile, Shabalala shuns all political talk, but eagerly speaks about his rich spiritual life. He has been an ordained minister since 1981, the culmination of a series of visions and miraculous healings.
Shabalala, now in his late forties, dates his awakening to 1975: "Then I start to write spiritual songs." A dream came to him, telling him to fast for four days. "A voice said, 'By doing that, you'll defeat your enemy,'" he recalls. He did it, he says, even though he had never fasted before, "even for one day." But something was missing, until two or three weeks later when a mysterious illness struck his wife and two brothers. "I took them to physical doctors," he says. "I took them to the ananya, the witch doctors." But neither could cure them. Then he had two visitors, a pastor and his wife from a Durban church. Says Shabalala, "They went to my wife and laid their hands on her head. They said, 'Bad spirit, get out of here in the name of Jesus.' After that, I saw something like a shadow, a dark thing, moving away from my wife. I asked her how she was. She says, 'I'm better.'"
When his brothers were cured too, Shabalala began to worship in the Church of God of Prophecy, the church of his visitors. "In 1976, I remember it was January 16, I raise up my hands. Even now I worship with them." Says Shabalala, "I realized everything I had came from God. Before
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