12th post of My Top Tracks
Tutu
I went to see Tutu this week, a newly released film about Desmond Tutu, Anglican Bishop and Archbishop in South Africa through many of its apartheid years. Two South African journalists, Benny Goole and Roger Friedman, followed Tutu from 2000 for about 20 years filming his activities, with his blessing. The film got stored at the University of Cape Town to be dug out later. Some of the footage had been destroyed by fire but the rest was enthusiastically gathered together, combined with other coverage of Archbishop Tutu, and made into a compelling documentary. Interviews with friends and comrades of Tutu and with the filmmakers Bennie and Roger are included. It's a great film, I can't see how anyone could fail to be entranced by it, in part because of the personality of its subject Tutu, warm, exuberant, charismatic, passionate, humorous, attentive, emotional, an engaging public speaker, and committed through his life, at great risk, to the struggle against apartheid. There is a characteristic scene where a reporter tries to interview Tutu just as it had been announced that Nelson Mandela was to be released from prison, the interview happily disrupted by Tutu and his friends and family continuing to dance and celebrate. At the showing I went to, producer Johnny Webb gave a short introduction. At the end the audience applauded.
Desmond Tutu fell between a number of political and factional positions and played the role of bridge builder. He was a bold outspoken opponent of apartheid, so riling the authorities in South Africa. But he also favoured consensus and non-violence, attracting criticism from the ANC and many of its more radical members. While accepting the label of a man of peace he also emphasised he was not a pacifist and engaged positively, and with understanding, with groups involved in the armed struggle. He supported sanctions against South Africa, and civil disobedience. Tutu often acted as a mediator between anti-apartheid groups and the government and between anti-apartheid factions. After the collapse of apartheid he was put in charge of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that sought to get testimony from victims, and also perpetrators' admissions of guilt in return for possible amnesty, in an African tradition of consensus and restorative justice rather than the conflictual and punitive approach of Western and Global North law. At the commission's hearings Tutu heard disturbing testimony of brutality and torture and cried through some of it, as seen in the film. His irresistible personality comes over in the documentary, and his wife plays a key role in outlining Tutu's struggles, commenting on her husband, a strong character in her own right in the story. In later years Tutu was a campaigner for gay rights and the rights of Palestinians and a critic of post-Apartheid ANC governments.
The anti-apartheid movement
In the 1980s I was involved in the Anti-Apartheid Movement while a student in York, UK, and after that too. We attended and organised demos locally and in London. At one in London in November 1985 I heard the American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson give one of the most powerful examples of political oratory I have ever heard. Also at the protest were other key figures in anti-apartheid, Bishop Trevor Huddlestone, president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, who had been a guide to Tutu (and bought Hugh Masekela his first trumpet; more of Masekela below), and Oliver Tambo, President of the ANC in exile in the UK. We picketed local Barclays Banks, who had substantial investments in South Africa, trying to persuade people to close their accounts and support divestment. We lobbied supermarkets to stop sourcing their goods from South Africa, picketing them too, and would go and load up trolleys of South African goods, like wine and dried fruit, take them to the checkout, get them rung up, then leave without the goods or payment, pressuring the chains into boycotting apartheid. Barclays did eventually withdraw from their interests in South Africa but they seem not to have learned any lessons in moral citizenship, now being major investors into Israel and Israeli arms. Tutu later in life was a campaigner against the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, seeing the situation as involving another form of apartheid.
My friend John was a fellow activist in the anti-apartheid movement, it was his main political passion. On the way to a local anti-apartheid meeting he and I jumped a fence to take a shortcut across a park. John mistimed his drop to the other side and impaled his leg on a fence post. I had to delicately lift him up and off it. At the meeting blood started to seep on to the seat and I urged him to go to A&E. 'The struggle is more important' he said. I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn't. When blood began to drip on to the floor I managed to persuade him to go to the hospital, a bag under his leg to stop bleeding on to the taxi seat. Stitches were sewn.
One campaign was to get a local park renamed after the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. It was common those days to get streets and places in the UK named after Mandela as a way of attracting attention to the issue of apartheid. I wrote to the local paper making the case for the renaming and the letter was published with my full name and address. A few days later a note came in the post. It was was put together out of letters cut from newspapers. It accused me of being a n... lover and was hostile and scary. Not long after, I was reading a book by Ken Livingstone and in it he quoted a threatening racist letter he had received. The wording was exactly the same as mine. (I think it was a book by Livingstone but I can't find the relevant passage now, maybe it was another medium, or someone else like Tony Benn, but I think it was him). Then days after that I was coming back from a party about 3am in the morning and I saw a man with a baseball bat standing near the house I shared with two others. My first thought was to not be paranoid. It couldn't be a racist thug. It must have just been someone on their way back from a baseball game. But at 3am in the morning?! I decided to walk on down the road on the other side not looking at the man until I got to the end of the street avoiding glancing back. I stood around the corner out of sight and hidden, then peered back after a few minutes and could not see him. I went home quickly, left a note for my housemates who were out, telling them about the baseball bat man, then retreated back to the party house where I stayed the night. The cruel housemates there teased me saying I was making it up to appear a political hero.
I went to a parents evening many years later to see the teacher about my son's progress. The teacher said to me 'Jake told me about the man with the baseball bat, about your letter, and the note you got'. There had apparently been some session at the school where pupils recounted stories of their own on some theme that I now don't remember and my son had told them the letter and baseball bat story. I was struck that he had stored it away and then brought it out for the class.
A Church of England Synod was held at York University and had on the agenda a motion on apartheid, I think probably in July 1986. The motion may have been on sanctions but I can't remember for sure. John and I went and leafleted and lobbied as the Synod members went in and a TV crew was there asking us about our case for the motion. I recall they were from Channel 4 and we were interviewed by a young reporter. I believe she went on to become a Channel 4 TV news presenter. I think it was just John and I but there may have been others and my recollection is that the motion went our way.
My doubting friends on the baseball bat incident had been unfair. But I obviously had not been anywhere near even a fraction as heroic as the murdered Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, or many other participants in the struggle against apartheid. After university, I went to a demo in London against apartheid and many of us sat on the road outside the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square blocking traffic. We were alarmed to see, in the distance, mounted police starting to canter in our direction then start to gallop. In South Africa the police would have had no qualms galloping into the crowd maiming and killing. I guessed these police were trying to scare us away rather than attack us. But I knew, based on precedent, that the outcome would be us being arrested, dragged away to police vans, kept overnight in a police cell to keep us off the streets, then released the next day without charge. That was the way it worked then. After a few seconds consideration, I decided I didn't want to spend the night in a police cell. I persuaded myself it would do no positive good, but it was just cowardice. I opted to get up and run as fast as I could from the scene, along with many others who made the same decision, but leaving some courageous protestors behind to their fate. I definitely was much less brave than many other fighters against apartheid.
In 1990 I turned on the TV to watch Nelson Mandela released from imprisonment. The release was delayed by hours but I stayed glued to the television waiting, I did not want to miss this great moment. Eventually through masses of people the tall slim white haired Mandela, almost unrecognisable from the man who had gone into prison 27 years earlier, emerged hand in hand with his wife Winnie walking out to 'freedom'. I couldn't hold back the tears. He then gave a stunning but careful speech from the balcony of Cape Town city hall, all the more impressive given he had been in prison for 27 years, many in solitary confinement and so had not exactly had a lot of practice in public speaking or, for that matter, speaking to anyone. After his release he stayed for a few days with Archbishop Tutu.
I have always been angered by the embrace by liberals in the Global North of Nelson Mandela. Mandela was a member of the South African Communist Party (something he had denied but turned out to have been, and was, in any instance, a sympathiser). And he was instrumental in the military wing of the ANC and their campaign of sabotage against South African targets. Mandela did not believe that non-violent struggle (the favoured route for Tutu) would work but also that organised guerrilla war was not viable. So he focused on sabotage. In other words, he was a communist and what some would see as a terrorist (although he claimed not to be the latter). I do not say that in a condemnatory way but it made me mad that liberals who opposed communism and terrorism in other cases embraced Mandela, with no awareness of their own inconsistency and hypocrisy.
Miriam Makeba
In the 1960s my parents worked as teachers in Kenya and Zambia and we visited other countries in the region, including South Africa, many times. I was born in Kenya and when I reached six years old we came home so I could go to school in the UK. In our British homes after Africa we were surrounded by mementos of Kenya and Zambia, ornaments, craft, paintings and more, often bought from local people in markets and transported with us back to the UK. One thing we had were records by the South African singer Miriam Makeba. I don't know how many of her albums my parents had but I clearly remember her third LP 'The World of Miriam Makeba', released in 1963. We came back to the UK about 1970 and I think my parents may have purchased this record in Kenya or Zambia and brought it back, but I'm not sure. The opening bars of the first song 'Dubula' always immediately spark familiarity and memories of hearing it at home in Reading or Buckinghamshire.
Miriam's most well-known song is the irresistible Pata Pata about a South African dance where one of the partners pats or touches the other on the side as they get down. It's an infectious, danceable song. Makeba has described it as one of her most insignificant songs which is understandable as it just tells of a dance and has much less substance to it than many of her other tracks. But it's catchy, has a fantastic melody and when I listen to it I never do so in isolation. It always also makes me think of Makeba in the whole and all her other great songs, many commentaries on apartheid and the lives of black South Africans under it.
Makeba left South Africa when young to go the the USA but was not allowed back in 1960 aged 28 for her mother's funeral because of early participation in anti-apartheid culture. She lived in exile for much of the rest of her life. Miriam spoke out more fully as time went on against apartheid, including in her songs which got banned in South Africa. When she married Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers she was also made unwelcome in the USA and she and Carmichael went to live in Guinea. Her 1963 song 'Where Can I Go' seems to refer to this experience:
Lyrics to Where Can I Go
In the cities of a hundred foreign lands
Not one word of pity
Or a helping hand
I watch them as they pass me by
To a place called home
They all have somewhere that belong to them
But me I have none
Tell me where shall I go?
There is no place for me
Where to go? Where to go?
Every door is closed to me
To the left to the right
It's the same in every land
There is nowhere to go
And it's me who should know
Won't you please understand?
Now I know where to go
Where my folks proudly stand
Let me go, let me go
To that precious promised land
No more left no more right
Lift your head and see the light
I am proud can't you see?
For at last I am free
No more wandering for me
Won't you please understand?
After the fall of the Berlin Wall apartheid could do longer hide under the shadow of Eastern bloc communism and seemed the height of indefensibility in the eyes of the world. The anti-apartheid movement had made sure of that. The South African President F. W. de Klerk legalised the ANC, released Mandela, and apartheid collapsed with free elections and universal suffrage sweeping the ANC to power and black majority rule. Makeba was able to return home in her 60s.
For me, Pata Pata expresses the joy and happiness black South Africans could maintain despite brutal oppression. Others of Makeba's songs speak more directly about apartheid South Africa. The beautiful Nongqongqo (To Those We Love) is about political prisoners like Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Robert Subukwe, and Albert Luthuli. Soweto Blues, a song written by her one time husband, trumpeter Hugh Masekela, is about the Soweto uprising by schoolchildren suppressed with hundreds shot down and killed by the police. Polo Mze is about Jomo Kenyatta, anti-colonial freedom fighter and later president of independent Kenya, urging him to be patient about his imprisonment. (My dad met Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya and I have a copy of Kenyatta's PhD thesis entitled Facing Mount Kenya). Dodemnyama (Beware Verwored!) is a catchy warning to the Prime Minister of South Africa and an architect of apartheid. Like many of Makeba's songs, the lyrics have a simple pattern of repetition of the theme in two or three phrases.
Lyrics to Ndodemnyama (Beware, Verwoerd!)
Nans' indod' emnyama, Verwoerd (Here is The Black Man, Verwoerd!)
Passopa, nans indod' emnyama... (Beware, here is The Black Man...)
Yini, Verwoerd? (What is the matter, Verwoerd?)
Nans' indod' emnyama, Verwoerd! (Here is The Black Man, Verwoerd!)
Passopa, nans' indod' emnyama... (Beware, here is The Black Man...)
Yini, Verwoerd? (What the matter, Verwoerd?)
Passopa nans' indod' emnyama, Verwoerd! (Beware, here is The Black Man...)
Yini, Verwoerd? (What is the matter, Verwoerd?)
Nans' indod' emnyama, Verwoerd! (Here is The Black Man, Verwoerd!)
A promoter and musical partner of Makeba was the US singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte and their album together An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965) features some of her political and anti-apartheid songs. My parents also had Harry Belafonte albums at home - the one I remember most is Swing Dat Hammer, a collection of chain gang songs including the powerful a cappella title song. Apart from her third album which I have mentioned as one my parents had, other great LPs by Miriam are her first 'Miriam Makeba' (1960) and another early one 'Pata Pata' (1967) which features the song of the same name this post is about. She often sang in her native language of Xhosa which includes a clicking sound which my parents said they heard when speaking to Africans during their time travelling the southern parts of the continent in the 1960s. Makeba sang one catchy song called in English 'The Click Song', but really 'Qongqothwane' full of clicks others could not pronounce.
Africa is a big continent, with a long history, many parts, and many genres of music. But hearing Makeba and other African music in our family home made me interested in African music widely ever since, discussed, for instance, in my post on albums I listened to in 2025. Makeba played a big role in popularising African music more globally, despite living most of her life outside Africa and having quite worldwide influences in her songs. She died in 2008 aged 76, just after performing Pata Pata. Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, died in 2021 in Cape Town after a life fighting apartheid and trying to build consensus in that struggle.
At the time I was involved in the anti-apartheid movement, apartheid seemed to me an anachronism from the past, albeit a violent and brutally oppressive one that had to be fought against. I didn't believe in the linear progress of history but I did think apartheid would inevitably be swept aside by its opponents as human society developed. Now that seems naive, as fascist and right wing leaders and their followers worldwide would love to implement apartheid, or are in a horrific genocidal process of actually maintaining and extending it. But all history is the history of struggle and conflict and at the time of writing there are signs of a reversal against this trend, hard fought for.
English translation of the lyrics of Pata Pata
We turned and said 'look'
Here is Pata Pata
We turned and said 'look'
Here is Pata Pata
It's mama, it's mama
Here is Pata Pata
It's mama, it's mama
Here is Pata Pata
Pata Pata is the name of the dance
We go down to Johannesburg where
And everybody starts to move
As soon as Pata Pata starts to play
We turned and said 'look'
Here is Pata Pata
We turned and said 'look'
Here is Pata Pata
It's mama, it's mama
Here is Pata Pata
It's mama, it's mama
Here is Pata Pata
Every Friday and Saturday Night
It's Pata Pata time
The dance keeps going all night long
Til' the morning sun begins to shine