Leo Africanus / Africa is a Country

I wrote a piece for the Middle East newspaper, The National, on postapartheid South African music culture. Here’s how it was sold: “Sean Jacobs returns to South Africa and ponders what remains of the country’s once-great jazz scene.”

In the article I submitted I listed some of the good music that seem to thrive in the hard-to-find live scene, but most of it was cut because of space considerations, so I’ll repeat it here: the Prisoners of Strange, drummer Kesivan Naidoo’s bands Babu and Restless Natives, 21-year old piano player Kyle Shepherd, the commercialy savvy Simphiwe Dana, the irrepressible Mac McKenzie and the Goema Captains of Cape Town (which included the late Alex van Heerden), and Zolani Mahola (as a solo artist).

Here’s the piece (it has British spelling):

In the mid-1990s Manenberg’s Jazz Cafe, a small second-story club at the top end of Adderley Street in the heart of central Cape Town’s commercial district, was the epicentre of post-apartheid live music culture. The club – founded by two local DJs in 1994, shortly after the first democratic elections – took its name from a coloured township on the city’s windy flatlands. Many of the suburb’s black inhabitants had been forcibly moved there in the Sixties and Seventies, and it has always been emblematic of apartheid’s social costs.

During its heyday, Manenberg’s played host to musicians returning from exile after making careers outside of South Africa (Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Jonas Gwangwa and Mahlatini and the Mahotela Queens), local favourites (Robbie Jansen and Basil “Manenberg” Coetzee) and a crop of new South African musicians (the pianist Moses Molekekwa and the saxophonist Zim Ngqawana). The cafe’s patrons – activists, students from Cape Town and Western Cape universities, journalists like myself and aid workers – were, in the parlance of the time, “non-racial”. Every night they embodied and celebrated the boisterous energy of a new country. Cape Town’s city centre shut down at night – a lingering consequence of apartheid-era city-planning laws – but Manenberg’s somehow stayed open.

Manenberg’s shut down in 1997, 21 years after Abdullah Ibrahim’s hit single Manenberg became synonymous with the Soweto student uprising. Unfortunately, by then the club had become synonymous with new political power: cabinet ministers, diplomats and members of the new black bourgeoisie seemed to regularly outnumber the activities, journalists and students.

In 2002, Manenberg’s reopened at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, a massive retail and tourism complex built next to the city’s harbour and policed by private security police. I never visited the new Manenberg’s; on my most recent trip home, I learnt it was closed.

Even if it had been open, I wouldn’t gave gone there. Over time, the club had become synonymous not only with South Africa’s new elite, but also with the “smooth jazz” that passes for the genre in South Africa. Retro-Ronnie Jordan and George Benson. Easy melodies and crowd-friendly arrangements, all geared to the pop-sensibilities of commercial radio and large festivals. Smooth jazz went got big in the late 1990s, when it served as a mainstream reflection of the country’s celebratory mood.

Older musicians, some of whom had returned to South Africa to live out their twilight years, often found they had to tour more than ever to make a living (Miriam Makeba died onstage in Italy earlier this year) – or settle for playing background music in hotels or at corporate and government functions. This remains the fate of serious jazz musicians, even young ones, in South Africa to this day. I remember a book launch two years ago at then-President Thabo Mbeki’s official guesthouse in Pretoria: the audience blithely talked over a performance by the award-winning vocalist Siphokhazi and her band.

I go home once a year now, and every year it gets harder to find live jazz. There’s less of it, and it’s hidden in harder-to-find places. Once I stumbled upon the guitarist Mac Mckenzie and the Goema Captains of Cape Town playing on a hotel terrace. Another time I saw Robbie Jansen lead a band at the District Six Museum. Perhaps most memorably, I heard a freewheeling group of old school musicians jam at a New Year’s Eve Party.

Jazz is increasingly associated with middle class comfort, and it has been replaced by hybrid pop genres like kwaito (a postapartheid invention that draws on deep house, hip-hop, trip hop and other electronic genres) as the sound of South Africa. Jazz lovers have little choice but to wait for the annual Cape Town International Jazz Festival, which features more and more “safe”, crowd-pleasing acts every year. This is a far cry from just ten years ago, where an innovative, uniquely “South African jazz” cooked up from American jazz, South African Mbaqanga and kwela dance music enjoyed a wide, cross-generational following. Much of it was, despite its complexity, playful, danceable and uplifting. As Dizzy Gillespie told Hugh Masekela in the 1970s: “I would like to be part of your revolution because the people always seem to be singing and dancing.”

Perhaps my disappointment is a sign of my age – or my increasing distance from South Africa. Though I miss the kind of South African jazz that played for a while at Manenberg’s, I know there is no shortage of younger artists who are blending genres to create new sounds. Last weekend, in New York City, I went to see BLK JKS, a Johannesburg rock group (often unfairly labelled “alt-rock”) perform in lower Manhattan. Some of the attention paid to the group probably stems from the fact that they are black. But, like the greats of South African jazz, they don’t explicitly market themselves or their music as “South African”. Instead, they simply set about redefining the way we think about South African music. As I stood listening to them mix reggae, Eighties grunge, migrant Zulu music and jazz, among other genres, I kept wondering if I was listening to the next Abdullah Ibrahim.

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