SCATTERLING OF AFRICA
AT FIRST many people assumed our motivation was political. After the debut of Juluka in 1979 I would spend a lot of time explaining that, initially, it had nothing to do with politics. I didn’t go looking for politics. Politics found me.
More than anything, Juluka was a concept. It was saying, there’s a black and a white experience and we’re going to have a conversation between these different styles of music and find a way to make a hybrid music.
While we may have been born in the crucible of the apartheid struggle, Juluka’s genesis did not have a political or liberation focus. It came from my own development as someone who loved Zulu music and war-dance culture without conditions.
The initial Zulu reaction, much like the white reaction, was that as I grew up to the legal age of 18, I would drift away and forget this Zulu romance. I would get reincorporated into the status quo, with my boyish years just an echo of a lost youth touched by an exotic stranger’s cultural world.
Zulus with keener eyes recognised a connection that had evolved in me through dancing, stick fighting and music which, it was clear to them, was shaping me and would define me. They saw the seeker in my eyes and the honesty in the comportment of my body as it responded to these arcane traditions.
This was lost on whites who saw me “slumming with the blacks”. Later, they
