Entry Point 1: A Doorway to Africa

A lifelong love starts with one problematic choice

In 1986, the government of South Africa was targeted with sanctions by much of the rest of the world over their Apartheid system. Specifically, UN General Assembly Resolution 35/206 (16 December 1980) stated: “The United Nations General Assembly request all states to prevent all cultural, academic, sporting and other exchanges with South Africa. Appeals to writers, artists, musicians and other personalities to boycott South Africa. Urges all academic and cultural institutions to terminate all links with South Africa.”

When Paul Simon went to South Africa and recorded his monumental Graceland album, he sparked a controversy that still divides people. On one side, numerous activists both inside South Africa and around the world felt that Simon was undermining the unified pressure on South Africa’s government to change. Jerry Dammers, keyboard player for the ska band The Specials, who was heavily involved with Artists Against Apartheid, spoke out, saying: “Who does he think he is? He’s helping maybe 30 people and he’s damaging solidarity over sanctions. He thinks he’s helping the cause of freedom, but he’s naive. He’s doing far more harm than good.”

Robin Denselow, writing for the Guardian in 2012 for the 25th anniversary of Graceland and its world tour, recalled pressing Simon to defend his choice:

“Personally, I feel I’m with the musicians,” he said. “I’m with the artists. I didn’t ask the permission of the ANC. I didn’t ask permission of Buthelezi, or Desmond Tutu, or the Pretoria government. And to tell you the truth, I have a feeling that when there are radical transfers of power on either the left or the right, the artists always get screwed. The guys with the guns say, ‘This is important’, and the guys with guitars don’t have a chance.” I remember him looking round the hall as he added: “I haven’t said that before.”

• Denselow, The Guardian, “Paul Simon's Graceland: the acclaim and the outrage”, 19 April 2012.

Determining whether Simon’s good intentions outweigh the damage he was doing to the cause of ending apartheid from my perspective 40 years in the future is still difficult. Mark Beaumont summed up Simon’s point of view in The Independent in 2021. Having suffered several personal, commercial, and artistic flops in the two years after his famous Concert in New York’s Central Park with Art Garfunkel, Simon was at a low point in 1985:

While producing a singer-songwriter called Heidi Berg, she’d handed him a label-less bootleg tape of mbaqanga street music from Soweto, entitled Gumboots: Accordion Jive, Volume Two. Already aware of the South African sounds of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, he was instantly entranced by this “summer music, happy music” that reminded him of the Atlantic records rhythm and blues hits of his Fifties youth. Scatting his own melodies over the tape while driving, he vowed to track down the artists, initially intending to buy the rights to the track “Gumboots” to write his own song over, as he had with his 1970 Peruvian folk single “El Condor Pasa”. Then, after hearing further tapes from South African producer Hilton Rosenthal, and with Warner paying him little attention as a lost cause, he decided to travel to Johannesburg to record with them in person. The sort of devotional odyssey which, within the confines of America, might usually have been made to Elvis Presley’s Memphis homestead.

• Beaumont, The Independent, “Graceland at 35: How Paul Simon recorded a masterpiece in apartheid South Africa“, 24 August 2021.

In the end, apartheid was ended in South Africa between 1990 (when the law supporting it was repealed) and 1993 (when a new constitution enfranchising the Black population was adopted). I was an empty-headed high school graduate and didn’t understand the controversy. All I knew was that I loved the music on the Graceland album enough to dig into the liner notes and learn everything I could about the musicians Simon was working with.

As it happened, I moved into an apartment with a classmate from South Africa - a skinny white kid who grew up with a journalist father critical of the social injustices of the Apartheid system. He was bemused by my obsession with Graceland, but he shared several tapes by Johnny Clegg and Savuka and by Juluka.

This one I found on my own - a compilation album that still spends as much time in my ears as Simon’s album:

If you forced me to state “which side” I am on in the controversy over Simon’s decision to record Graceland without getting support from the anti-apartheid activists inside and outside of South Africa, I would have to come down on Simon’s side, if only for the impact it had on me. I knew the Blues, of course, and had been told all my life that they “came from Africa” - but discovering, as Simon did, this “summer music, happy music” was an absolute revelation to me.

I can understand the reaction of the late Jonas Gwangwa, the South African trombonist who led the ANC’s cultural group Amandla, when it was suggested to him that Simon should be praised for bringing black South African music to the world stage: “So, it has taken another white man to discover my people?” That reaction is certainly valid, and it speaks to a centuries-old frustration with white Europeans “discovering” things that had long existed without their interference.

But without Simon’s discovery, I don’t know that I would have found my way to this music. That is both tragic and unfair - but today, we have a wide-open opportunity to find music from around the world and from outside our individual, local traditions.

I plan on talking about more of my favorite African musicians and what they have meant to me, but you would be doing yourself a huge favor if you went ahead and subscribed to these folks on Substack: