The home of Afro-American music: Los Angeles and the creation of Hugh Masekela’s anticolonial sound

ABSTRACT

In this paper, using an African Internationalist framework, I examine the life and cultural work of Hugh Masekela and his record label Chisa Records during his time in Los Angeles, from 1966 to 1976. From the wake of the Watts Rebellion and to the eve of the Soweto Uprising, for Masekela and other African musicians in exile, life in Los Angeles deepened their bonds with African American culture. Life in Los Angeles bridged the space between African liberation and Black Power. More importantly it sustained the anti-apartheid movement in exile. Masekela’s record label was promoted as the “Home of Afro-American Music”. Masekela and his label challenged what I call the collective culture settler colonialism that I define as the white global spatial imaginary. Masekela and other Chisa artists, both South African and African American, generated an internationalist and anticolonial cultural practice that I call the Black global spatial imaginary. In sound, aesthetics, and political practice the Black global spatial imaginary linked Black liberation struggles in Southern California to those in Southern Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• anti-apartheid
• colonialism
• Black Internationalism
• New African Movement
• Black Los Angeles
• Black Power
• Chisa Records

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Tafarie Mugeri, Director of Organization for the African Socialist International Africa Region, for his help in translating some of the lyrics that are cited in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The term “genteel apartheid” first appeared in Alexander Saxton’s 1961 article “Genteel Apartheid” in Frontier Magazine and is cited in Daniel Martinez HoSang’s Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Post-War California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 5.

2. For more information on this time, read Widener’s (2010) Black Arts West; Scott Brown’s (2003) Fighting for Us: Maluana Karenga, the Us Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism, and Gerald Horne’s (1997) Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s.

3. Maya Angelou describes the sweet language in this interview: “The Great Depression; Interview with Arnold Forster. Part 3; Interview with Maya Angelou. Part 1,” Film and Media Archive, Washington University in St. Louis, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed 7 May 2022, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-151-4746q1sx6j.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mychal Matsemela-Ali Odom

Mychal Matsemela-Ali Odom is a lecturer in Africana Studies at San Diego State University. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California San Diego. His research examines the political and cultural connections between African Liberation Movements in Southern Africa and Black Freedom Struggles in Southern California between 1960 and 1994. His recent publications have examined the cultural boycott against apartheid in Los Angeles and South African student activism in Los Angeles during the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement.