Dodging the sjambok: A glimpse of how South African musicians defied apartheid

The song went:

Hygiene's ancient capers
Wipe my ass with your newspapers
A battery of flattery and lies
Just about the size of the headlines
If you're looking for Godot
Go on down to Soweto
He's waiting there …

But Butler had forgotten that club owner David Marks was recording the whole set – and this particular song. The Market Café was, much like its owner, as visionary as it was eccentric. Malcolm Purkey, a former director of the Market Theatre, says the venue was filled with chairs of every description – including a dentist chair – and “would never have passed the safety standards that venues have to today”. Entirely hand-built, it was a place where sound people could experiment with new systems. Budding artists were nurtured, institutions, productions and careers were launched, and audiences could frequently hear acts such as Malombo, led by Philip Tabane, and Dollar Brand, who became Abdullah Ibrahim, before they were famous.

Butler wasn’t a protest artist as such, but staying quiet about what was going on in South Africa at that time was difficult for any artist with a conscience. “The mood was completely different after the ’76 Soweto uprising,” he says. Marks had a habit of recording “anything that moved or murmured”, so it's likely that Butler’s song is somewhere in Marks’ Hidden Years Music Archive Project (HYMAP). This vast collection of tapes, films, notebooks and photographs is now being ordered and archived in a mammoth undertaking (its 175 000 items weigh over seven tons) by Dr Lizabé Lambrechts and her team at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University.

A musician himself, Marks had attained notoriety with a few hit songs in the late '60s, most notably 'Master Jack', which helped to further his passion: recording, mixing live bands, filming and providing platforms for South African musicians. The aim of his record company 3rd Ear Music was “to promote, produce, protect and publish local acts deemed non-commercial or too political”. A musician who helps other musicians is not unique – think Ry Cooder and the Buena Vista Social Club – but in apartheid South Africa it was pretty much only musicians who kept the 'indie' side of music alive.

The country was at this stage, as 'Master Jack' describes it, “a very strange world” where listening to different music, let alone playing it, could land one in a whole heap of trouble. To get an idea of the oddness of the era, read about how some hippies at a pop festival were held down by Afrikaans divinity students intent on maintaining the moral order and had their locks shaved off in South Africa’s very own Homer Lee Hunnicutt moment: The 1970 Kruger Day Hair Massacre.

Recording blues 

To get a song or an album recorded in the '70s and '80s, before the advent of digital, was no mean feat. “Remember that back then recording wasn't as easy as it is today; it was expensive and restricted,” says Deon Maas, who worked for Tusk Music. Today, musicians can record at home. Back then they were at the mercy of commercial record companies. In South Africa, these companies almost never spent time and money developing local artists, preferring to promote international music that they believed was more likely to yield profits on their investments.

Local singers that sang anything vaguely derogatory about the apartheid regime were even more unlikely to be promoted, but Ian Osrin, a former producer for Teal-Trutone, says that protest messages were sometimes “disguised” in townships codes – lingos that only some could understand. For example, the song 'Love Target' by Zasha was based on the practice of some township residents chanting “targeti, targeti” as they stoned passing police cars, and had a hidden meaning that “the teal executives were totally in the dark about”. Maas says major record companies minimised the chances of getting controversial songs banned “by not printing the lyrics, or printing them very small, or in a difficult-to-read manner”.

While many artists struggled, some musical genres were selling well in South Africa, such as Gé Korsten’s Afrikaans tunes, which the apartheid authorities considered “suitable”. Kwela, mbaqanga and isicathamiya – and later kwaito and hip hop – were at varying times all huge. “Black musicians were producing and selling records by the hundreds of thousands," Marks says. "The township and rural events that I was involved with – from the late '60’s to the mid-1980s – were massive. Black record producers were swanning around in Jaguars with bodyguards and bling.”

Many black artists, however, were ignorant of copyright law and were grossly exploited by record companies. They were paid in once-off session fees, or as maskandi musician Philemon Zulu told me, taken to a general dealer store and told to fill a wheelbarrow with whatever they could find in lieu of cash. The most classic rip-off of all was that of Solomon Linda whose song 'Mbube' – later known as 'Wimoweh' and 'When the Lion Sleeps' – generated millions, of which Linda and his family obtained a mere pittance.

Western music flooded the South African market and big money went into paying local session musicians to do covers of foreign chart-toppers, perhaps most famously on the Springbok Hit Parade series. Finding somewhere to play original music wasn’t easy, says Butler: “Most venues wanted bands that played covers. Wits University was one of the few places where you could play original music.” 

The Free Peoples Concerts 

Butler got to play on one of Marks’ other platforms with a band called Benny B’Funk and the Sons of Gaddafi Barmitzvah. This was the Free Peoples Concerts, which started at Wits in 1971 after one gig in Durban and then expanded to run at various larger venues until 1986. Marks had worked with Bill Hanley doing sound at Woodstock in 1969 and brought back part of the PA, which came to be known as the 'Woodstock Bins', and these warmed the ears of grateful festival audiences across southern Africa for decades. He was able to hold the Free Peoples Concerts by exploiting a loophole in apartheid law: if the event was free and the performers played for free, there could be no restriction on who attended.

These concerts provided a sense of what a different or normal society could be like. And because they brought black and white people together, they gave the authorities “the jitters”. Wits alumnus Shaun de Waal wrote that songs like James Phillips’ 'Shot Down', 'Brain Damage' and 'Darky' “evoked the terrible emergency years and spoke directly to the hearts and minds of a youth taking a cold hard look at who they are as white South Africans.”

It may sound bizarre today, but to attend a gig and dance alongside people of other races was an extremely profound experience for people during the apartheid era. “The apartheid censors didn’t seem to grasp the power of music to bring people together – they could have policed it a lot more,” Osrin says. "Watching Johnny Clegg perform with Juluka in the '70s blew my tiny mind wide open, and I’m pretty sure he did the same for thousands of other South Africans."

Clegg, who was studying at Wits, was first recorded by 3rd Ear Music and performed regularly at the Free Peoples Concerts. During Tribal Blues – a show that Marks arranged in 1971 at the Wits Great Hall – Clegg, Sipho Mchunu and 32 waMadhlebe dancers actually “stomped their way thru the Wits Great Hall’s brand new sprung wooden stage. I was held personally liable,” recalls Marks, who also introduced Ladysmith Black Mambazo to Johannesburg’s white audiences for the first time at the Market Theatre.

Restrictions on black musicians 

Black musicians and bands of mixed races faced the constant problem of restricted movement by having to obtain permits. The had to be resourceful to get around those barriers. For example, mixed race bands put on lunchtime gigs in Johannesburg so their black members could get home before the nighttime curfew. “It was relatively easy for us whites-only, middle-class protesters to organise and then to shout the odds from the distant platforms we provided, in the suburbs and cities," Marks says. "It could’ve meant intimidation, or worse, for those musicians sneaking back into the townships after one of our protest festivals or communist-inspired concerts.” 

Black artists who were harassed by the apartheid authorities sometimes chose to “do a Pinocchio” – skip to another country illegally. According to music journalist Sam Mathe, jazzophile and blues crooner Cameron 'Pinocchio' Mokaleng started this trend after the culturally rich suburb of Sophiatown was razed in 1955. Mokaleng was followed by several members of the cast of King Kong in 1960, including Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela. They and Abdullah Ibrahim, who also chose exile, ironically became more renowned on foreign soil than in their home country. 

Black protest musicians who chose to stay could face stiff penalties. One of the most outspoken critics of apartheid, Vuyisile Mini, who wrote the song 'Ndodemnyama (Beware, Verwoerd)' was arrested in 1963 and paid the ultimate price: he was hanged, ostensibly for killing a police informer. Activist Ben Turok famously wrote that he heard from his cell how the unrepentant Mini sang freedom songs on his way to the gallows. Many white bands had the problem of their members leaving the country to avoid military conscription. 

Roger Lucey, who was uncompromisingly political, was pursued in what became a personal vendetta for Paul Erasmus of the Bureau of State Security. Erasmus ensured that Lucey couldn’t get big gigs – he would pitch at a concert and find he was no longer on the line-up – and that all his songs were banned, which effectively ended his music career at the time. The whole saga, which ends in an unexpected twist, is brilliantly outlined in the Lucey rockumentary Stopping the Music.

Erasmus describes in the film how he threw a teargas grenade into the air conditioner at a club called Mangles, another venue that Marks ran, during a Lucey gig. While this only produced some discomfort for the audience and musicians, Erasmus also reveals that he and his cop buddies used to “toss the odd petrol bomb” into Crown Mines, a Johannesburg community where Lucey and other politicos lived. Black protest artist Mzwakhe Mbuli, who was constantly harassed for speaking out, had a dud grenade thrown into his baby’s bedroom in the 1980s.

This constant pressure from the authorities, who could burst in at any moment, led Marks to give a Lucey recording the bizarre title of 'Weight Lifting for Catholics' from a cut-out lifted from Mad magazine, and to label Lefifi Tladi’s recordings 'Abba’s Greatest Hits'. These and other odd titles have made ordering the HYMAP archive more difficult for Lambrechts and her team.

There was also the issue of distrust, of pitting people against each other, that the Special Branch was very adept at sowing by way of spies and infiltration. “We mustn’t forget, try as we might, the one person we all tried so hard to forget: Maj Craig Williamson, who nobody, despite what they say today, suspected of being a spy. He was one of those who helped me organise a few Wits events. A cheerleader with a megaphone, who led those famous Jan Smuts Street protests, shouting ‘free all detainees’, with the new Rand Afrikaans University students pelting us with eggs, fruit and rocks, from behind the police lines.”

Shifty cassettes 

Among the Free Peoples audience was a young musician called Lloyd Ross, who had a hit with the soundtrack for the Afrikaans prison TV series Vyfster. Between doing sound for movies, he set up the indie label Shifty Records and decided that its first project would be to record the Lesotho band Sankomota, which he did by parking his mobile studio outside the defunct Radio Lesotho and running a cable into one of its rooms.

But no major South African record company was willing to release the album. “Firstly, they sang in different languages, which violated grand apartheid’s pipedream of keeping all languages pure and separate," Ross recalls. "Secondly, the lyrics referred to what was really happening in the country, which was of course a total no-no. And finally, the music was eclectic, a concept that has confused industry marketing departments since the invention of the gramophone.”

Over time, however, the band's self-titled debut album became an evergreen and sold more than 25 000 copies. Another big seller that Shifty recorded was Mbuli’s Change Is Pain album, but because 'the people’s poet' was an outspoken protest artist, innovative ways had to be found to distribute it. Mbuli’s first album came out on the cheap medium of cassette; these were placed unmarked in paper bags for distribution. 

Mark Bennett, who did sales for Shifty from 1983 to 1990, says he used an informal network to move Change Is Pain. “I kind of developed this hawker network: there were these guys who would come and collect stock from me, and when they had sold them, they would come back and collect some more. And then there was a guy in town on Market Street called Whiskey who had a general dealer kind of store, like a bicycle shop. He had a team of hawkers and he used to move a lot of stock for me.” Shifty stock was also sold at flea markets like Greenmarket Square in Cape Town and distributed by trade unions after Ross recorded the Fosatu choir. 

Warrick Sony, who also did a stint at Shifty, says the Kalahari Surfers’ first release was a cassette called Gross National Product, which came out in Italy where there was a big cassette movement. Shifty, which self-financed its productions, brought out most of their products on vinyl and cassette. Cassettes were a robust and inexpensive medium on which to mass produce music, and a way around the system. In a similar vein, when Western music was banned by Stalin in the early 1950s, Russian innovators made and distributed records on X-rays, which came to be known as 'bone music'.

“Every now and then Shifty would get raided,” Bennett says. “They took all of our A Naartjie in Our Sosatie and Sankomota albums, but we had these lawyers who chatted to the cops and said, "This is ridiculous," because they weren’t formally banned. I then had to go to John Vorster Square [police station], which was a very weird experience, because I had to go up to the 10th floor, and I got sent into this room where there were these three really dodgy-looking Dutchmen [Afrikaners], and there was a shopping trolley in the middle of the room with our stock in it, surrounded by piles and piles of porn. I was worried that I wouldn’t get out of there again, but I just pointed and said, ‘I’m here to fetch that stock’ and they said, ‘Sure!’ and I just walked out with the trolley!” 

Osrin, who produced “somewhere between 600 and 800 black acts” says that Teal used to release about 80% of its music on cassette, which he describes as the “predominant medium” of the time – they were cheap and mobile compared to records, which suited black buyers. “We only brought LPs out if we wanted the presence of an artist in the shops,” he says. Cassettes lasted well into the 1990s. Jonathan Handley and Dave Davies of the Radio Rats brought out over a dozen cassettes under the moniker The Glee Club between 1991 and 1999, which were sold by mail order. 

Radio airplay 

Getting radio play in South Africa was a huge challenge, as the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) dominated the airwaves and strictly enforced the Publications Act, which placed boundaries around “undesirable” material. Banned records were scratched so they could never be accidentally played by DJs. For musicians who didn’t fit into the “acceptable” box, it was a serious problem: there was no social media to promote their work, and fanzines like Palladium had limited reach. If your song wasn’t on the radio, it simply died.

Radio Freedom, the ANC’s propaganda arm, broadcast from Tanzania, Zambia, Angola and Madagascar in the '70s, and aside from providing news of the struggle, it also played exiled local musicians such as Dudu Pukwana. South Africans who tuned into it could, if caught, earn themselves a prison sentence of up to eight years. LM Radio (Lourenço Marques Radio) in Maputo helped to promote many South African bands that couldn’t get airplay from the SABC, but it closed in 1975 for the next 34 years. 

Again, ways were found around the apartheid blockade. “Protest songs were often played by Radio Bop because it had more reach than other radio stations based in countries like Swaziland, and could be accessed by residents as far afield as Soweto,” Osrin says. “The loophole that Radio Bop exploited was that Bophuthatswana was an independent homeland ­– supposedly another country – so it could play songs that the SABC couldn’t. Once it had played a song that became popular, however, demand was created, and the SABC sometimes followed suit and started playing it too. Many bands, including Juluka, also played gigs in homelands where the police were less likely to arrest musicians.”

After apartheid 

Apartheid is gone but musicians’ struggles continue. While it's simple to make a recording and place it on the Internet, there are literally millions of musicians doing this, so to be heard in the hubbub is hard, and to be paid is harder ­– if people can get their music for free, why should they fork out money for it? New methods of deriving income keep popping up, such as crowdfunding and controversial artists such as Amanda Palmer, who espouse and exploit their value.

Asked if South Africa’s record industry is still not giving artists what they need, like support for up-and-coming talent, Marks replies scornfully that those who control the record industry still only have one aim: to make a profit. 

“One has to only look – listen if you dare, there’s almost nothing that is 'musical' or 'audio' – at the state of our annual South African Music Awards circus," he says. "It may be a great media spectacle with lots of talent and fun and good times, but it has nothing to do with music. It is a record industry event and it’s being turned into a circus. Indigenous music is blown away by the countless so-called music events that the record industry, the media and the state-owned entities spend billions of taxpayers’ money producing. This has nothing to do with music or musicians.

“If only history could help us understand the vacuum, the divide between creating, making and sharing music, and the production and selling of clinically recorded video bling, bang and bombast … It’s a dogfight out there in the record industry that musicians should not be distracted or fooled by. 

“Minstrels and troubadours in Africa have been playing village to village for centuries, and surviving into old age. Then along comes the Idols industry and record label vultures, and there’s only one function or criteria, and that is to attract the numbers. Which, to a creative soul, destroys the dream. They are told, as creative people, to be practical and die doing so. Musicians today are far more valuable dead than alive, so it’s only in decomposing that we really make a living.”

Recognising Marks’ work 

Marks has been described as “difficult” and as a man “with an axe to grind” and he says he’s been “consciously omitted” from many historical accounts. He may have a point: there’s not even a Wikipedia post about 3rd Ear Music, and Wikipedia’s post about him is all of two tiny paragraphs long. This, from a man who organised the Free Peoples Concerts, set up the Splashy Fen music festival, ran several alternative venues and did sound for, recorded and brought into the limelight many musicians who are now household names. 

Has the state recognised his work? “I’ve sat in committees, at approximately 32 Department Arts and Culture tea-and-biscuit breaks, costly five-star hotel  indabas, think tanks, workshops and imbizos, where the role of 3rd Ear Music, myself and the Hidden Years collection has been discussed and lauded, and impressive resolutions were passed, and then nothing happened.” 

Now aged 76, he still waxes lyrical on the 3rd Ear Music website, but he’s given up on writing a memoir about his life’s work (after 4 000 pages) and is entrusting that Dr Lambrechts will use his archive to tell his story. “It’s all down there, recorded somewhere. I don’t see the point anymore. The music material is in Stellenbosch and the researchers must make of it what they can.” 

Lambrechts says she and her staff are past the halfway mark with the digitising process, and they’re busy developing an online platform to host the decades of HYMAP material Marks entrusted them with.

“I was once in a position to organise events, press play and record. Now I press pause, rewind and play,” Marks says.

*A sjambok is a whip made from hippo hide, and was much favoured by the apartheid police.