How Art & Music Helped Liberate South Africa

In 1975, Miriam Makeba travelled to Mozambique as part of the Guinean delegation for the country's independence celebrations on 25 June. Makeba, a South African citizen, had left in 1959 and found her passport revoked the following year when she tried to return home to bury her mother. She and her husband, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), had relocated to Conakry from the United States at president Sékou Touré's invitation, after heavy FBI surveillance had stalled her American career. By 1975, Makeba was travelling on a Guinean diplomatic passport and addressing the UN General Assembly as one of Guinea's official delegates.

Mozambique had won its freedom from Portuguese colonial rule after a decade of FRELIMO's armed struggle. The slogan ringing through Maputo that month — A luta continua, vitória é certa (the struggle continues, victory is certain) — had been coined eight years earlier by Eduardo Mondlane. Following his assassination, the new nation's first president, Samora Machel, kept it alive.

"A Luta Continua," which appears on her 1989 album Welela, was a song Makeba had commissioned her daughter Bongi to write in celebration of the occasion. "And to those who have given their lives, praises to thee/ husbands and wives, all thy children shall reap what you've sown/ this continent is home," she sings mid-way through the song, liberatory Pan-Africanist prose voiced through an activist whose artistic bent was too broad to pigeonhole, a matriarch as at home on the pop charts as she was speaking truth to power at the United Nations. Toward the end of the song she does something significant, disarming: in calling for the struggle to continue in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, and Angola, she puts South Africa last. Makeba knew, intimately, that the liberation of South Africa rested on the back of the frontline states that absorbed the ANC's exiles and the SADF's reprisals, and that the apartheid regime, encircled by a united front, would be the last domino to fall.

The chain reaction reached the Atlantic side of the continent five months after FRELIMO raised its flag in Maputo. On 11 November 1975, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) proclaimed independence from Luanda. Agostinho Neto became president, and David Zé released his debut record, Mutudi Ua Ufolo/Viúvas da Liberdade, on the CDA label. The Lusophone wave was in full effect, echoing the progress of Anglophone neighbours across the region — from Lesotho to Botswana to Zambia. The redrawing of the map opened a rear corridor for the South African struggle; Angolan territory was made available almost immediately to the African National Congress (ANC). Across the next decade, training camps at Novo Catengue, Quibaxe, and Pango processed thousands of Umkhonto we Sizwe cadres into the war that would converge on Cuito Cuanavale in 1987–88, a battle the former President Nelson Mandela later called "a turning point in the struggle to free the continent and our country from the scourge of apartheid," as well as "a milestone in the history of the struggle for Southern African liberation."

Zé was kidnapped and killed in 1977, his music banned. But the country he had sung into being kept its promise to the corridor: that liberation in Maputo and Luanda was a way station, a geography that would carry the struggle through to South Africa. In 1978, on Oliver Tambo's instruction, the ANC began assembling a cultural ensemble inside those same Angolan camps. By 1980, the trombonist Jonas Gwangwa was scouting young talent, building the Amandla Cultural Ensemble into a touring force that would carry the South African case through more than forty countries across the next decade. Late in life, asked what he was proudest of, Gwangwa stated: "Amandla. Because it involved all the things in music that excited me the most, and gave me the opportunity to bring them together … for the most important reason possible: it was for the people."

He had co-founded the Medu Art Ensemble in Botswana a year before he went to Angola. Medu was the parallel cultural-collective project of South African exiles that the SADF would target in the 14 June 1985 cross-border raid on Gaborone, killing Medu members Thami Mnyele and Mike Hamlyn among twelve people in all. Six months later, SADF Special Forces re-entered Maseru and killed six South African operatives and three Basotho. This was their second invasion of Lesotho; three years earlier, an operation code-named Blanket had blasted its way through a cluster of houses around Maseru where members of the ANC were sheltering, leaving forty-two dead by morning. Thirty were South African; twelve were Basotho citizens, among them five women and two children.

Art in the Struggle: The Amandla and Medu Cultural Ensembles

The Amandla Cultural Ensemble used theatre to spread the message of South Africa's fight for liberation, while the Medu Art Ensemble worked across disciplines, running six semi-autonomous units — Publications and Research, Graphic Arts and Design, Music, Theatre, Photography, and Film — and finding its most daring, enduring voice in the silkscreened posters of its Graphic Arts unit. Where Amandla toured the world's concert halls in formal stagecraft, Medu was designing a visual grammar that slipped across the border, reappearing anonymously on township walls across South Africa.

Rangoato Hlasane — artist, scholar, and co-founder of the radical storytelling and narrative portal Keleketla! Library — has produced extensive research and artistic interventions on Medu, particularly its newsletter and its posters. Alongside Project Elo and Capital Arts Revolution, he co-founded the Botswana Azania Art Collab (BAAC) in 2015, conceived to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the SADF's raid on Medu as a multi-year, multi-site retrospective to collectively remember the Medu Art Ensemble.

"One of the first things to look at is that, while the term 'medu' is a Sepedi term, it is very close to Setswana's 'medi', and that linguistic etymological proximity makes sense why the collective named themselves in a so-called South African language: to locate themselves in terms of geo-political lineage, while also strategically emphasizing that the borders were not of the creation of Black people in Africa, in Southern Africa," he says.

"One can speculate on why they did not call themselves 'medi,' but I think there is something strategic in that naming. Botswana's a neighbour, meaning that families have been in motion before the borders. On the other hand, Botswana was part of the frontline states that were united to work hand-in-hand in defeating the monster that was apartheid."

When BLK JKS took the stage at Orlando Stadium on the night of 10 June 2010, in front of a thirty-thousand-strong crowd and a global broadcast audience on the eve of Africa's first FIFA World Cup, the song they brought was "Mzabalazo." The word, meaning ‘struggle’ in isiZulu, echoed the same idea that had fired Makeba's commissioned anthem for Mozambican independence thirty-five years earlier, and the kinship was not an accident.

"A Luta Continua" had sung the corridor's struggles forward; "Mzabalazo," delivered in a country a decade and a half into majority rule, was that future answering back. Though South Africa was no longer under apartheid, the struggles of the oppressed were still shaping the script of daily life: the unkept promises of the transition, the inequalities the negotiated settlement had left in place, the slow violence of an economy still wired to extract from the poor for the comfort of a few. The BLK JKS performance was a celebration of what had been won and a reminder that the song had not ended.

Yonela Mnana, the pianist and composer, has thought about this lineage carefully:

"We are inheritors of the same musical influences. We know that struggle songs are widely derived from church songs, or what people are now starting to call choruses. Those church songs would be a common currency that would have its words substituted — for example, where you're supposed to say 'Lord,' you put the name of a politician. Those kinds of derivations are teaching us that we have been great improvisors in that way. Black Americans have been using Tin Pan Alley songs in the early 1900s to try and innovate and mix them with other stuff to create jazz. There are, of course, political songs that are more direct. We are very wide in our assumptions of what struggle songs are," he says.

"Struggle songs are only struggle songs by intent, and we would be erring if we want to assume that there is a specific, music-centric thing that binds these songs other than its intent. I want to also go against that point to say, to play jazz is to resist, it's to struggle. The inverse is also true: the jazz genre in South Africa, as a common musical experience, has been producing struggle music just through the intent of playing it. Perhaps, again, intentionality and the fact that there are common circumstances — those are the things that would bind these so-called struggle musics together — whether it's songs articulated when people are marching, or songs sung by people like Miriam Makeba or bra Hugh Masekela."