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

Introduction

On Tuesday 23 January 2018, the South African Trumpeter Hugh Masekela passed away after his struggle with prostate cancer. Masekela was 78 years old. As a youth in Johannesburg, South Africa, Masekela had helped form a crucial cultural front against apartheid as a member of the Jazz Epistles and as an active participant in the New African Movement and the Sophiatown Renaissance. The New African Movement of South Africa should not be confused with the New Afrikanism of North American Black Power Politics. The late African scholar Ntongela Masilela pioneered the research on the New African Movement, which stretched from the late 19th century to the Sharpeville Massacre of 21 March 1960. As Masilela notes, in this movement: “writers, political and religious leaders, artists, teachers, scientists … called themselves New Africans, specifically New African intellectuals, to distinguish themselves from the Old Africans since they were engaged with creating knowledge of modernity … rather than finding consolation in old ways of traditional societies” (Masilela 2013, back cover). The Sophiatown Renaissance was a subset of the New African Movement situated in the African cultural hub of Sophiatown, Johannesburg, during the 1950s. Sophiatown had long been an established African community but Africans in Sophiatown were forcibly removed and the area was razed to facilitate the expansion of the white settler population.

The Jazz Epistles were a bebop jazz band in South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As a cultural formation, the Jazz Epistles were important to anti-apartheid and anticolonial struggle in South Africa. Understood as the first “Black” jazz group, they united the communities deemed as “coloured” and “native” by South African domestic colonial policy. The Jazz Epistles were inspired by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and consisted of Masekela, Kippie Moeketsi, Jonas Gwangwa, Johnny Gertze, Makaya Ntshoko, and Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim. Brand is responsible for naming the band. The Jazz Epistles played important venues in Cape Town’s District Six and Johannesburg’s Sophiatown (Masekela and Cheers 2004, 102–105). In 1959, the Jazz Epistles released their only album, Jazz Epistle, Verse 1, which included a number of important tracks that would be re-recorded in later years such as “Gafsa” and “Blues for Hughie”. The album also had the mournful track “I Remember Billy”, which was a possible ode to Billie Holiday, who had died in 1959. The final track on the album was “Scullery Department”. In the United States, a scullery would be best described as a dishroom. “Scullery Department” criticised apartheid policy that allowed the Jazz Epistles to play for white guests in hotels but only permitted them to eat their meals in the dishroom (Ansell 2005, 118–120).

The Jazz Epistles reflected an All-African politics defined by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and the Pan-Africanist Congress and subsequently the Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement. These same All-African politics existed in Masekela’s music. Masekela synthesised music of the African world, performed in Black Vernacular English, SeSotho, isiXhosa, isiZulu, and many other Southern African and West African languages. Masekela’s music underscored the universally shared conditions of African people as colonial subjects. Following the Sharpeville Massacre of March 1960, Masekela and thousands of other activists, cultural workers, students, and colonial subjects emigrated from South Africa.

Mainstream media coverage of Masekela’s death overlooked the importance of his internationalist politics and the crucial time he spent in Los Angeles, at the height of the Black Power Movement. The obituary penned by Jon Blistein at Rolling Stone follows the pattern of most biographies of Masekela. Blistein noted Masekela’s emigration to New York and his crossover hits in the late 1960s, “Up Up and Away” and “Grazing in the Grass”. After mentioning Masekela’s collaboration with important figures of African diasporic movement, Blistein then moves to the centrality of Masekela to the anti-apartheid struggle between 1976 and 1994 (Blistein 2018a). The approximate ten years Masekela spent producing music in Los Angeles is omitted from Rolling Stone and most other periodicals. Masekela’s time in Los Angeles was only briefly mentioned in the Los Angeles Times obituary (Blistein 2018b).

In this essay, I excavate the importance of Masekela’s formative years in Los Angeles. For Masekela and other African musicians in exile, life in Los Angeles deepened their bonds with Black culture in the United States, bridged the space between African liberation and Black Power, and more importantly sustained the anti-apartheid movement following the incarceration of its leaders such as Sobukwe and PAC leaders following Sharpeville and Nelson Mandela and African National Congress leaders in subsequent years. By the mid-1970s, anti-apartheid direct action had resurged internationally. Yet, before the highly publicised Soweto Uprising, the death of Steve Biko, and even the Sports and Cultural Boycott organised by poet Dennis Brutus, the cultural work of Africans in exile kept the spirit of the struggle alive by bridging the gap between Africans from South Africa and other people of the African diaspora.

This essay is influenced by the theory and practice of African Internationalism. African Internationalism is a historical and dialectical materialist worldview of the African working class. African Internationalism “recognizes that European wealth and African impoverishment occurred as a result of the European attack on Africa, the division of Africa, African slavery and dispersal, colonialism and neocolonialism and the imperialist created capitalist economic system” (“Uhuru Buzz Words”). Masekela’s musical and political trajectory represents a form of African Internationalism. I begin this essay by underscoring the importance of Masekela’s anticolonial and internationalist politics to the study of African life in Southern California and Southern Africa. This is a story that directly impacts my own family’s story. Masekela’s life and music exposes the global network of colonial-capitalism as a single system of anti-Black oppression. It also elucidates the shared struggle of African people. Subsequently, in various segments, I explore Masekela’s political and musical developments. This essay is, however, as much a story about Masekela as it is about the people and places that created him.

In this essay, the use of terms like African-American and South African to describe members of the dispersed African community is not a reflection of the author’s personal beliefs. They are a reflection of the disciplinary restrictions. I strongly believe that all African people are one people. This is a sentiment that was made commonplace by Marcus Mosiah Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey famously forwarded the phrase, “Africa for the Africans … those at home and those abroad”. It is my understanding that Garvey understood Africans to be one people and that the true liberation of African people could only be achieved through the removal of the colonial borders that divided African people. This anti-colonial project for the liberation and unification of all-African people was later advanced by civil rights, anti-apartheid, and Black power advocates such as Malcolm X, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Steven Biko, and Omali Yeshitela.

The late-scholar Cedric Robinson has written of what he termed “the creation of the negro”. In short, the colonial enslavement of African people stripped Africans of their identity, culture, and history. It is for this reason that an embracement of African national identity begins the process of negating the colonisation of Africa and African people. Terms such as African-American and South African, in fact, represent the division of African people and thus are forms of false national consciousness. If we consider the intervention of Cedric Robinson and Omali Yeshitela’s assertion that “African Identity is Key” we therefore understand that African national identity is not nationalism in the traditional sense (Robinson 2000, 4; Yeshitela 2006, 75). African Identity is in fact a form of “internationalism”. Therefore, I believe that the embrace of African identity begins “the process of the withering away of nations” (Yeshitela 2014, 152). I believe that this view of African identity is reflected in the political and cultural journey of Hugh Masekela.

Hugh Masekela and the colonial mode of production

Hugh Masekela, as well as other artists from South Africa such as Miriam Makeba and Letta Mbulu, made a direct impact on my family history. Masekela found his largest success amongst the Black youth of Los Angeles following the Watts Rebellion of 1965. Some of those youth were my parents, Michael Odom and Maria Kersee Odom. Before making what could be described as crossover success, Black working class youth embraced Masekela’s sound. Masekela played to a crowd of thousands of Black youth at the inaugural Watts Summer Festival on 9 August 1966. Masekela noted, “The crowd loved us so much they wouldn’t let us off the stage. They sang along on most of our songs … After the show, I called Peter Davidson and told him I doubted we would be returning to New York anytime soon” (Masekela and Cheers, 182). Masekela played local venues in the heart of South Los Angeles and found success on local radio stations.

As a youth, I was aware of the impact that Masekela, Makeba, and others had on my parents and their generation. Masekela’s hits, such as “Grazing in the Grass”, were on constant rotation during the weekend drives my father loved to take along the Southern California coast. I remember coming across my father’s worn and aged “Grazing in the Grass” single when I was beginning this research project. Plenty of young Black girls of my generation were named Makeba. The music of Letta Mbulu was a favourite of my mother. Masekela and other African performers helped facilitate an African pride amongst the Black working class communities in Los Angeles and surely influenced my own naming. At birth, I was given the name Matsemela-Ali. My father was an avid reader and music fan. Matsemela is SeSotho for roots and Ali is exalted in KiSwahili. As a child, my father held, or exalted, me and my older sister Mosi, KiSwahili for first born, up to the sky and stated, “behold the only thing greater than yourself” as was done in the book and miniseries Roots. The score for Roots was co-produced by Caiphus Semanya, the colleague and friend of Masekela (Jones 1977). I have taken the name Matsemela-Ali, or “exalted roots”, to mean that I descend from a noble heritage despite the conditions we have been forced to endure in the Black communities of Southern California.

A study of Hugh Masekela’s time in Los Angeles highlights what Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, has termed the “colonial mode of production”. In short, Yeshitela has argued that it was colonialism that rescued Europe from feudalism. Europe created a better life for itself at the expense of the African and Indigenous people of the world. The colonial mode of production produced “the legal system, culture, white sense of sameness and political institutions” of the white world (Yeshitela 2022, 49). Even before the concurrent movements of the Sharpeville campaign in South Africa and sit-ins by Black students in the US during the spring of 1960, cultural production had brought the Black liberation struggle in the US and South Africa into close proximity – even in Southern California. Engaging the work of cultural historian George Lipsitz, I argue that African people generated what I termed a Black global spatial imaginary. The Black global spatial imaginary is a cultural contact zone that linked Southern California to African liberation fronts in common struggle against a global hegemony that bound white North Americans with white settler regimes in Africa: the white global spatial imaginary (Lipsitz, 1–21). Despite American post-war racial liberal legislation the material conditions Black people in the United States experienced in Southern California represented what the journalist Alexander Saxton defined as a genteel apartheid in 1961 (HoSang 2010, 5).¹ Unevenly structured economies, vigilante and state violence, forced relocations, and intensified housing segregation likened Black Southern Californian communities to the South African Black and Coloured populations. A representation of the colonial mode of production, this heightened segregation became the material base for the construction of a translocal white spatial imaginary. This shared experience is revealed in the simultaneous destruction of African American cultural districts such as the Central Avenue music scene in Los Angeles or the South African cultural enclaves such as District Six in Cape Town or Sophiatown in Johannesburg. Bound by a shared lineage to New Orleanian musical traditions, the expressive culture of Southern California and Southern Africa generated a crucial challenge to white supremacy. For this reason, these zones were literally bulldozed to allow the expansion of the white spatial imaginary.

In Southern California, the destruction of Central Avenue whitened and, often, depoliticised Jazz as the centre of live music shifted from South Los Angeles to the segregated coastal towns and Hollywood. RCA created the 45 RPM single vinyl record in 1949. The Seeburg Corporation introduced the M100B, the first jukebox that played 45 RPM records in 1950 (Young and Young, William 2010, 429). These shifts in music production allowed whites to enjoy Black music without the presence of Black people. This colonial imaginary has been sustained well into the 21st century as represented in the award-winning motion picture La La Land (Chazelle 2016). This dynamic differentiated the post-war West Coast Cool Jazz scene from the hardbop and avante garde traditions generated by East Coast Jazz musicians. This is revealed in the album art, photography, and sound of West Coast Jazz artists. As historian Daniel Widener observes, “the West Coast sound was playful and airy” and the visual images often “featured musicians sailing, emerging in scuba gear from the surf, strolling across golf fairways, or playing their instruments astride a merry-go-round … And it was white” (Widener 2010, 62). Comparatively, hard bop fused modern jazz with soulful and bluesy melodies of African American folk and popular traditions. Hard bop’s emergence paralleled the acceleration of African anticolonial struggles globally including the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and the Black Power Movement. On their album covers, hard bop artists were captured at work, serious, rarely smiling, and holding their instruments in their hands–their tools of the trade. For hard bop artists, their sound and images represented Black self-determination.

The quintessential example of the revolutionary hard bop aesthetic was Max Roach We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (Roach, 1960). Freedom Now Suite was produced in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre and the student sit-ins in the American South. It was also released on the eve of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. The cover of Freedom Now Suite depicts three Black men at a Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in. However, this time, the Black men defiantly look into the camera while the white worker has his head lowered and looks seemingly confused. Freedom Now Suite connected emancipation from chattel slavery to the contemporary struggles for African liberation with songs like “Driva Man”, “Freedom Day”, “All Africa”, and “Tears for Johannesburg” (Turner, 2021 150–152). Hard Bop’s African Internationalist character was not by accident. It was the direct result of political organisation. Max Roach, his wife Abbey Lincoln, John Coltrane and others had been members of the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS). AJASS was formed in 1956 by Elombe Brath, his brother Kwame Brathwaite, and others “to reclaim jazz as an authentically African art form”. AJASS expanded in defence of a broader array of African culture as well as the promotion of Garveyism. Elombe and Kwame were members of the African National Pioneers Movement. In 1975, Brath co-founded the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, an anticolonial and African Internationalist organisation (Aiello, 2021, 19–27).

Masekela was influenced by Max Roach and his associates, including the trumpeter Clifford Brown who died in 1956. In 1956, while he was still in South Africa, Masekela had purchased the album Clifford Brown Max Roach Quintet. Masekela noted that he had “damn near played it to death, memorizing every single note on the album, including all of Max Roach’s mind-blowing drum solos” (Masekela and Cheers, 80). Once he was in the United States, Dizzy Gillespie, a mentor of Masekela’s, introduced Masekela to Roach at the New York Jazz club, the Five Spot Cafe. Roach was a comrade of Pan-Africanist Congress organiser Vusi Make; at that time Make was married to Maya Angelou. Amongst Roach’s first words to Masekela were: “Welcome to New York. We’re gonna win in South Africa, and soon!” (Masekela and Cheers, 124–125). Masekela attended events organised by Roach and Lincoln, namely one in honour of Make and Angelou. This aided in Masekela’s political and artistic advancement.

Secret agent double-O Bwana: the African modernity and resistance in Hugh Masekela’s album covers

Masekela was exiled from South Africa following the Sharpeville Massacre. Masekela had first gone to London but with the help of Harry Belafonte, under the advice of Miriam Makeba, Masekela moved to New York and studied at the Manhattan School of Music (MSM). Masekela remembered the importance of his days in New York:

Harlem has always gripped my soul in a kindred kind of way. It reminded me of the communal vibes I experienced in Sophiatown and Alexandra. Just as the townships were cultural kaleidoscopes and key political meeting places for the ANC in South Africa, Harlem, a black metropolis, was the magnet for intellectuals, artists, musicians, black nationalists, and Pan-Africanists. (Masekela and Cheers, 137)

During his time in New York, Masekela had met important figures such as Sam Nujoma of Namibia, Professor John Henrik Clarke, and author Louis Lomax (Masekela and Cheers, 136). Masekela studied at MSM from 1960 to 1964. Some of his classmates at MSM were Herbie Hancock, Donald Byrd, and Ron Carter. A self-taught trumpeter, at MSM, Masekela studied music theory, sight-singing, music literature, brass ensemble, and chorus. Yet, Masekela also received a classical education studying French, literature, psychology and history. As part of his instruction, Masekela studied African American liberation movements, leaders, and writers. As well, they discussed African revolutionary philosophies (Masekela and Cheers 2004, 132–133). Masekela “was branded a Communist” by one of his teachers. In school, he studied Fidel Castro, Russia, Malcolm X, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and Patrice Lumumba. Masekela even performed at a SNCC fundraiser, alongside Belafonte. “As part of the large group of Africans immigrating to the United States to study”, Masekela noted, “I was getting a first-class education in and outside the classroom” (Ibid, 133–134).

Masekela and other South African performers challenged the white global spatial imaginary and crafted their own musical style and cultural aesthetic which Masekela respectively termed Ooga Booga and Double-O Bwana (Ibid, 173). A sharp criticism of the popular depiction of African people as backwards, rural, and uncivilised, Masekela performed postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has famously termed colonial mimicry. In his book Location of Culture, Bhabha a postcolonial theorist describes colonial mimicry as a tool used to disrupt notions of the coloniser’s superiority – and the savageness of the colonised (Perry 2004, 109; Bhabha 1993).

In the early 20th century, Tarzan films played a central role in the colonial superstructure. Historian James Meriwether noted the negative impact that Tarzan films had on African American concepts of Africa. The white global spatial imaginary’s depictions of the African savage caused Black people in the United States to disidentify with Africa (Meriwether 2002, 17–18). Yet, South African sociologist Bernard Magubane helps us contextualise this argument. In Ties That Bind: African American Consciousness of Africa, Magubane, who also lived in Los Angeles during the 1960s, argues that Black people in the US never rejected Africa but “instead rejected the negative image imposed on his motherland by his captors” (Magubane 1987, viii). Masekela notes that Africans were equally impacted by these colonial depictions. In the liner notes to his third album, The Americanisation of Ooga Booga, Masekela argued that when he visited the theatres as a child the only depictions of Africa were in Tarzan films. Masekela writes, “Even then it would bug me to hear Hollywood Africans say things like ‘Ooga Booga Bwana!” In the 1960s, that fictionalised African persisted in the white global spatial imaginary “so, when one of those gushing types at a cocktail party twists my arm to say something in African, I just say, ‘Ooga Booga’ … and they dig it” (Masekela 1965). For South African artists in exile, Ooga Booga became vernacular for their cultural rebellion. Complicating the divisions between modernity and traditions, Masekela notes that “The Americanization of Ooga Booga” synthesised South African sounds, such as a South African township music known as Mbaqanga, with American jazz sounds and therefore became what the cultural historian Stephan Palmie calls Atlantic Modernity (Palmie 2002, 15). Often referred to as “traditional” and even “tribal” music, the South African sound originated amidst the New African Movement and Sophiatown Renaissance.

The covers of Masekela’s two albums Americanisation and Hugh Masekela’s Next Album, represented the rebellious aesthetic Masekela and his contemporaries crafted by depicting what I have termed Secret Agent Double-O Bwana. At the height of the Cold War, a prominent symbol of Anglo-American post-war modernity, political power, and the white global spatial imaginary was “James Bond, that overarmed agent of US-UK imperialism”, as Vijay Prashad notes (Prashad 2001, 131) Consider Dr. No, the first James Bond film, released in 1962 (Young 1962). In Dr. No, James Bond is dispatched to Jamaica to prevent revolution in the colonised world. On Americanisation, Masekela is pictured barefooted in a fabricated jungle wearing a suit, holding in one hand the Wall Street Journal, and in the other a fedora and briefcase. On the cover of the Next Album, Masekela is pictured resting upon a stuffed zebra, barefooted clutching a spear in his left hand and a trumpet in his right hand, while his briefcase and fedora rest by his side in the middle of a Manhattan street (Masekela, 1966a). Moving African humanity from object to subject of post-war history, the jungle and zebra challenged the fictional Africa and Hollywood Africans that Tarzan films and the post-war jazz genre exotica had popularised. The briefcase and newspaper clearly represent Masekela’s emigration and exile from South Africa to the United States as business. The trumpet and spear in turn appear as symbolised two wings of the anti-apartheid movement and African Liberation Struggle: cultural work and armed resistance. Following the Sharpeville Massacre, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa had moved to armed resistance. In 1961, members of the Pan-African Congress formed the Poqo, later renamed the African People’s Liberation Army. Later that year, in December, the African National Congress formed the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) which translated to “Spear of the Nation”. The trumpet was Masekela’s individual weapon and tool of trade.

California freedom dreams: Masekela’s move west

On the Next Album, Hugh Masekela covered the Mamas and Papas hit, “California Dreamin” (Masekela 1966a). “California Dreamin” was not merely a cover song, it also signalled Masekela’s residential and political shift to Los Angeles. The Watts Rebellion of August 1965 and the local Black Power movement had placed Black Los Angeles on the radar of global anticolonial struggle and cultural “re-Africanization”. Since the early 1960s, Los Angeles had been home to a budding Black cultural movement. College campuses such as the University of California Los Angeles and California State University Los Angeles, South Los Angeles night classes at Fremont High School and radical study groups held by the Afro-American Association and the subsequent Us Organization at community spaces such Aquarian Books and the Watts Happening Coffee House became important learning communities.² Black South Los Angeles residents studied Southern African languages, took Southern African names, studied Southern African song and dance. Throughout Southern California, Black peoplehad begun to merge their civil rights and Black power protest traditions with anti-apartheid struggles. Masekela had concluded his studies at MSM. During his time in New York, Masekela produced his debut album Trumpet Africaine, helped arrange Miriam Makeba’s albums, and performed with Makeba and Harry Belafonte. Makeba, Masekela, and other South African musicians like Letta Mbulu had found their largest following in Los Angeles as they played local colleges and clubs. ‘My confidence in recording The Americanisation of Ooga Booga began to crystallise into reality. [Music producer] Tom Wilson called one day to tell me the album was breaking out big in Los Angeles”, Masekela remembered (Masekela and Cheers, 179).

In the spring of 1966, Masekela made his move to Los Angeles, his home for much of the next decade. Masekela politics, poetics, and aesthetics were changed by life in Black Los Angeles. As well, he and other African performers changed the character of Black culture in Southern California in return. In New York, Masekela had experienced paternalist and even racist treatment from record executives at Mercury and MGM record companies. Masekela remembered an encounter with Mort Nasatir, president of MGM Records: “He said, ‘Your music will never sell, Hugh. It’s pointless wasting funds to push it. People just cannot get with your type of music.’ I left his office pissed off and determined that if MGM wouldn’t push the product, I would do it myself” (Masekela and Cheers, 181). As Masekela played the Southern California scene, the result of Masekela’s confrontation with MGM was the transitioning from his production company Double-O Bwana to what can only be described as a Black Power and pan-African record label. In late 1966, Masekela and his roommate Stewart Levine formed Chisa Records. With multiple translations in Zulu, Xhosa, and other Southern Bantu languages, Masekela translated Chisa as “to swing” (Lucas 1967). Eventually promoted as “The Home of Afro-American Music”, Chisa signed a number of African and African American artists and collaborated with dozens more. Between 1966 and 1976, Chisa produced a multidirectional diasporic sound which challenged the white global spatial imaginary and fortified bonds between Southern California and Southern Africa. It cannot be understated that Chisa artists helped produce a radical practice of internationalism in Southern California that sustained the anti-apartheid movement and solidified African American bonds with African liberation struggles.

Challenging the sonic divide

Once in Southern California, Masekela challenged the post-war shift in Southern California music culture since the dissolution of Central Avenue. As Masekela played venues in predominantly white coastal Los Angeles and Hollywood, Masekela frequented South Los Angeles bars and concert halls such as the Dooto Music Center on Central Avenue in Compton. Only in California for a few weeks, Masekela acknowledged he had received his largest break when he was invited to play the inaugural Watts Summer Festival Jazz Concert held at Jordan High School in Watts on 9 August 1966 (Masekela and Cheers, 182). The inaugural celebration of Black self-determination a year after the rebellion, the Watts Summer Festival was organised by local Black Power activist and Us Organization founding member Tommy Jacquette, was secured by the Community Alert Patrol, instead of the Los Angeles Police Department, and featured a Ms. Watts competition (Betty Pleasant, 1966a). That evening, Masekela performed to 10,000 people. “No group had ever played in South Central Los Angeles that could bring together ordinary people of all colors from every part of the country to a neighborhood that had just endured a massive disturbance”, Masekela recalled (Masekela and Cheers, 182). At the same time, Masekela performed at the Tropicana, Shelly’s Manne-Hole, the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and other venues in predominantly white areas. Masekela’s great challenge to the sonic divide in Southern California came with his regular performances at the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood: “We were a smashing success, with lines stretching way up Sunset Boulevard. The club had always been a white preserve where rock groups broke in their acts, and the home of rock royalty … .My group was only the second black outfit to play the club, shortly after Otis Redding … .The open doors of the Whiskey led to the first influx of African-American clientele into the Sunset Strip” (Ibid, 189).

Chisa artists and associates such as Masekela, Caiphus Semenaya, Letta Mbulu, and Miriam Makeba had a profound impact on the development of Black Power as they operated closely with the Us Organization and other Kawaida cultural nationalist formations such as Amiri Baraka’s CFUN in New Jersey. Black cultural nationalists adopted South African politics, dances, such as the gumboot dance, clothing, names, and songs. Importantly, mentorship from Mbulu and Makeba challenged the heteropatriarchal notions of “traditional” gender roles Us Organization advocates had previously been taught by Maulana Karenga (Brown, 57). Black Southern California altered the Chisa sound, aesthetics, and politics. No longer Agent Double O Bwana, Masekela adopted the fashion and cool of Black Los Angeles. Dark shades, denim, athletic sneakers, crew neck shirts, leather jackets, peacoats, and a defiant headcock defined Masekela’s new personal style. It was also in Los Angeles where Masekela first donned his trademark apple cap, a defining piece of headwear amongst Black Los Angeles youth. This localised aesthetic also informed Masekela’s music. Incredibly diasporic, Masekela’s four initial LPs fused mbaqanga, modal jazz, and even Afro-Latin rhythms with jazz covers of popular American rock singles. However, in Los Angeles Masekela’s performance became much more soulful and a reflection of his absorption of the everyday life of Black Los Angeles.

Sonically, Masekela’s debut album on Chisa Records, The Emancipation of Hugh Masekela, synthesised mbaqanga with West Coast soul (Masekela 1966b). Masekela’s instrumentation, lyrics, and tones reflected his acculturation in Black Los Angeles. This is most evident in his tracks “Why Are You Blowing My Mind?” “What is Wrong With Groovin?” and “Child of the Earth” which were all performed in English. Still, aided by deeply soulful instrumentation, even though the tracks “She Doesn’t Write” and “Ha Lese Le Di Khanna” were performed completely in SeSotho, they effectively fuse African American vernacular and speech patterns in their, for all other purposes, grammatically correct lyrics. This is witnessed with the elongated “sweet language” and call and response on “She Doesn’t Write”.³ As well, in “Ha Lese Le Di Khanna”, Masekela begins with a deep cry, “He le seeeeee le di khanna” and follows two bass notes with “Hlokomela li sa welwe ke serame” performed in a flow that is deeply legible to the fans of 1960s soul and proto-funk music, even if they were incapable of speaking Southern Bantu languages. There are other times in the song where the line “Kgomo tse ke tsa bohadi”, which warns young herdsmen that the cattle they are transporting were for the purpose of a wedding dowry or bohadi, became “Kgomo tse ke tsa bo-ah-ah!” performed in a tonal onomatopoeia mimicking a drum or baseline that one would expect more from James Brown than a South African Jazz musician. As well, there is “Son of Ice Bag” from the 1967 album Hugh Masekela is Alive and Well at the Whisky. A coded reference to a popular strain of hash Masekela’s band favoured, the hard and fast-paced, yet soulful, track captured the sound of South Los Angeles nightlife and shares many characteristics with the underground hit “House on Elm Street” by the local favourite Harold Johnson Sextet. Son of Ice Bag was a commercial success in the Billboard charts.

Reminiscent of Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, Masekela’s Chisa albums also combined African American and Southern African political history with Masekela’s own biography and exposed his political development. In an interview with the African American newspaper, the Los Angeles Sentinel, Masekela described himself as “too lazy” to be an activist (Pleasant 1966b). Masekela believed that he was less politically active than his lifelong friend and former wife Miriam Makeba. Makeba had married Stokely Carmichael, befriended Sekou Toure and Kwame Nkrumah. However, his unity with the Black working class and the political content of his music and album cover reveal the multitude of his political impact. Following his break with MGM, Masekela’s inaugural Chisa album was titled The Emancipation of Hugh Masekela featured the artist costumed as Abraham Lincoln (Masekela 1966b). The liner notes state it was not about Civil Rights nor the Civil War but another form of freedom. The “other freedom” was a direct reference to his departure from MGM. Masekela inevitably brought the Civil War, Civil Rights, and anti-apartheid into conversation with each other. After finishing a distribution deal with Universal City Records, Masekela’s first album with his new Motown distribution was titled Reconstruction in 1970. During the American bicentennial, Masekela’s 1976 album Colonial Man playfully condemned European imperialism from the Americas to Africa and was dedicated to African liberation.

If there’s anybody out there: social alienation and resistance

Black Power-era Black Los Angeles shifted the life and politics of a variety of African cultural workers. Fela Kuti is one of those cultural workers. The creation of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat music and African anticolonial politics is owing to Fela’s time in Los Angeles. Sandra Smith-Izsadore, lover and mentor to Fela Ransome-Kuti, remembered the acute apolitical nature of Fela’s music during his ten-month stay in Los Angeles in 1969. With Izsadore’s influence Fela immersed himself in the Black Power movement, studying the writings of Malcolm X and the music of James Brown. Fela abandoned his British surname, embraced African spirituality, and developed a cultural politics that positioned him in opposition to Western imperialism, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and Black neocolonial rule in Nigeria (Tewksbury 2011). Fela’s time in Los Angeles had a profound influence on the trajectory of Black music and anticolonial struggle. Fela’s musical turn influenced Masekela’s development and the two eventually recorded together.

In 1968, Masekela’s musical production took its sharpest political turn to date. Masekela’s music reflected his engagement with the Black Power Movement in the United States and the growing Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa (Ansell, 231–232). As noted, Masekela and Chisa artists had developed working relationships with local Black Power organisations. By 1968, Los Angeles, and Southern California, had become home to a wide array of Black Power activity with profound cultural and political elements. There was the Us Organization and the Black Panther Party. There was also the SNCC West Coast Chapter and various cultural formations such as the Watts Writers Workshop and Horace Tapscott’s Underground Musicians and Artists Association (eventually named the Pan-Afrikan People’s Arkestra). As Daniel Widener shows in Black Arts West, Jazz artists made explicit bonds with the Black Power organisations. During this same period, Horace Tapscott produced and arranged the two studio albums of leading Black Panther member Elaine Brown. James Mtume, Herbie Hancock and others joined to produce the album Kawaida for the Us Organization (“The Arms of Criticism”, Widener 2010, 187–218). Letta Mbulu and Caiphus Semanya were close associates of the Us Organization and helped found the successful Taifa Dance Troupe (Widener, 210 and Brown, 2003 132–136). Likewise, Masekela developed working relationships with Black Power formations. Masekela developed a relationship with Amiri Baraka who had cadres in Southern California, namely the National Involvement Association/Nia Cultural Organization of San Diego.

The colonial state recognised the political activity in Los Angeles and set its sights on organisers and artists alike. Widener notes, “The FBI followed more than one hundred organizations in Los Angeles alone, and police officers and informants implemented a well-documented program of surveillance, infiltration, intimidation harassment, false conviction, and even assassassination against local political activists” (Widener, 151). Masekela was amongst those artists and activists who were targeted by the state. Masekela experienced US-South African state-sponsored surveillance and counterinsurgency. In October 1968, Hugh Masekela was arrested on six counts of felony drug possession following a raid on his Malibu mansion. Masekela faced serious prison time and possible deportation, if convicted (“Masekela Guilty on Drug Rap”, 6/18/70, A1). Depressed and in his eighth year of exile, Masekela had developed a serious drug habit which had serious impacts on his music career and the stability of his record label. Still, Masekela was hardly the only entertainer in Southern California abusing drugs. In fact, Masekela suspected more likely motives for his arrest – his frequent sexual relationships with white women and external influence from the South African government. “Everytime I appeared for a hearing, there was a seedy, middle-aged wire service reporter present who I suspected worked for” South Africa, Masekela noted (Masekela and Cheers 2004, 223).

In 1968, Masekela recorded The Promise of a Future and the self-titled album Masekela. Recorded only months apart, the two albums represented Masekela’s increased radicalisation. Recorded in March 1968, The Promise of A Future reflected Masekela’s tragicomic hopefulness for a post-war, antiracist, and even anticapitalist world. “Vuca (Wake Up)” protested colonialism and neocolonialism, and called for African unity. “The spring and summer of 1968 turned out to be one of the most insane periods of my life”, Masekela remembered (Ibid, 196). The stress of life in exile had worsened Masekela’s drug addiction. The assassination of Dr King and riots at the Chicago Convention further depressed Masekela. As a result, Masekela produced his most radical album to date, and arguably of all. Produced without any liner notes, the back cover simply stated, “The music contained herein speaks for itself. Nothing more needs to be added. All there remains to do is to do” (Masekela 1968).

Beginning with “Mace and Grenades” and ending with “Riot”, Masekela collapsed the distance between South Africa and Black America. The album contained an homage to the recently deceased Otis Redding as well as the track “Sobukwe”. “Sobukwe” was an ode to the incarcerated head of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania Robert Sobukwe. In the 1960s, the bulk of organising and solidarity work that Masekela, Makeba and others had done was in support of the PAC and Sobukwe. “Sobukwe” revealed Masekela’s allegiance to African self-determination and the Pan-Africanist position in South Africa. Masekela followed the track with “Blues for Huey”. Recorded multiple times over Masekela’s 60-plus year career, the track was originally titled “Blues for Hughie” by Kippie Moeketsi, Masekela’s nickname, when it was recorded in 1959 by Masekela and the Jazz Epistles. Following “Sobukwe”, though it was not stated, the altered spelling of the title was an undoubted reference to the jailed Black Panther Party Chairman Huey Newton. Together both tracks represent Masekela’s intervention into Black Power politics in Southern California where pan-Africanists and Revolutionary Nationalists had been at odds. Masekela closed the album with “If There’s Anybody Out There”. Recorded following Masekela’s binge on cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol, Masekela’s hangover captured the alienation of Black life in Southern California and Southern Africa:

In this lovely, lovely, lonely place that we’re living in, there’s a whole lot of jiving going on … There are brothers and sisters who think how you look is all it is/There are cities where people never say hello/There are men who think they built this world and can destroy it/They have puppets pulling water pistols on the toys. (“If There’s Anybody Out There” Masekela 1968)

As noted, Masekela and Chisa inked the Motown distribution deal in 1970. Released in July 1970, Reconstruction was the first album released on that deal. Reconstruction is an extremely soulful album. The fast-paced “Leave Us Alone” is the political highlight of the album. On “Leave Us Alone”, the background singers, including Caiphus Semenya, decry “Siyekele, sekudala nisiphethe nzima, siyekeleni” which can be translated as “Leave us alone, it’s been too long, you have been ruling us badly”. That same year, Mbulu released her self-titled album which had success on the soul charts and the Jazz Crusaders released their first of many Chisa Albums: Old Socks, New Shoes.

In 1971 Masekela, Caiphus Semenya and Masekela’s cousin Jonas Gwangwa released Hugh Masekela & The Union of South Africa. The Union of South Africa was a short-lived endeavour but impactful. The name of the band boldly imagined African self-government in South Africa. Yet, the band also represented an effort at African unity in its configuration and musical arrangement. Joe Sample, Wilton Fedler, and Artheru Adams of the Jazz Crusaders played a role in the production. As well, young up-and-comers such as Lannie Johnson and Ndugu Chanceler, who had played with the Harold Johnson Sextet, also contributed. Hugh Masekela and the Union of South Africa blended negro spirituals, mbanqanga, blues and soul music. Caiphus Semenya blended traditional Pedi and Tsonga rhythms on the album. “Shebeen” was based on a traditional Xhosa groove (Masekela and Cheers 2004, 232–233). Union of South Africa only recorded on album and disbanded. In his autobiography, Masekela took personal responsibility for the collapse of the band (Ibid, 235). However, the disbandment of the Union of South Africa must be understood amongst the decline of a multitude of Black political formations at the hands of Western counterinsurgency campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1972, Masekela released Home is Where the Music Is, produced in Los Angeles but partially recorded in England. Masekela’s performances and politics had begun to take him beyond Southern California. Masekela and Chisa artists had great success with their Motown partnership. Still, in 1972, Masekela’s distribution deal with Motown had ended. That year, Chisa entered into a new deal with the Los Angeles-based Blue Thumb Records which had a dynamic cast of acts including Ike and Tina Turner, Sun Ra, and Joao Donato. Masekela’s 1973 and 1974 productions, Introducing Hedzoleh and I Am Not Afraid, fused jazz and Afrobeat rhythms, were recorded in West Africa, and featured a diasporic cast of performers, including the Ghanaian band Hedzoleh Soundz and members of The Crusaders, formerly known as the Jazz Crusaders.

Masekela’s music had become emblematic of the changes in Black radical traditions. As well, it represented the character of South African diasporic music. As jazz scholar Gwen Ansell has noted, “There was another South Africa outside South Africa. It was composed of memories and dreams–sometimes prophetic visions–as much as realities. It was more effectively pan-African in vision and action than the geographical South Africa” (Ansell 2005, 221). In Southern California history, historians have often identified the government-influenced sectarian violence between the Black Panther Party and the Us Organization during 1969 as the end, or at least beginning of the end, of the Black Power movement. Indeed a paradigm shifting moment, this ignores the local pan-African, Black Internationalist, and African solidarity work in Southern California during the 1970s. With the 1970 formation of Baraka’s Congress of African People, African American activists began to articulate a politics that Masekela had already conveyed in his music. It was at this moment that former members of Karenga’s Us Organization drifted to the Baraka’s Black Power formation. One such group, the National Involvement Association/Nia Cultural Organization in San Diego became the West Coast cadre for CAP. Continuing the cultural and political links that Black Nationalists in Southern California maintained with Masekela, Mbulu, Semanaya, and other South African entertainers, Hugh Masekela and the Union of South Africa became the headliners for the 1971 Congress of African People Western Regional Conference.

By 1973, Masekela had spent increasing time in West Africa. Miriam Makeba and her husband Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture had migrated to the country of Guinea-Conakry headed by the beloved pan-Africanist and socialist revolutionary Ahmed Sekou Toure. Despite the opposition African revolutionaries had to Joseph Mobutu’s dictatorship in Zaire, Toure had encouraged Masekela to organise the Zaire 74 musical festival. Conducted as a promotional build-up to the Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, Zaire 74 was organised by Masekela and Levine and brought exiled South African performers, African musicians, Afro-Latinx and African Americans musicians in direct contact with each other including the Crusaders, James Brown, Celia Cruz, Miriam Makeba, and Tabu Ley Rochereau.

Conclusion

Masekela’s last record with Chisa was in 1974, I Am Not Afraid. Though he frequently toured Los Angeles, even appearing on Soul Train with Hedzoleh Soundz, Masekela’s next albums were recorded in New York, Chicago, and Lagos, Nigeria, under contract with Casablanca Records. Meanwhile, The Crusaders continued to release albums under the Chisa label, produced by Levine. The Sixth Pan-African Congress of 1974, Soweto Uprising of 1976, and the popularity of African Liberation Day and the African Liberation Support Committee brought a resurgence in pan-Africanist and African Internationalist direct action. Local fights against the police violence and the international struggle to free political prisoners such as Dessie X. Woods brought back the mass character to the African Liberation Movement in the United States. Released in January 1976, Masekela’s 18th studio album Colonial Man exposed the contradictions of the American bicentennial and wittingly pictured Masekela as a ship’s captain at the head of an 18th-century sailing vessel. With tracks such as “A Song for Brazil”, “Vasco Da Gama”, “Colonial Man”, “Cecil Rhodes”, and “Whitch Doctor”, Masekela honoured the history of anticolonial struggle linking the African diaspora.

What is more, Masekela, once again, challenged the objectification of Africans by the white spatial imaginary. As Stephan Palmie explained in his study of Afro-Cuban religion, Wizards and Scientists, though African religious and medicinal practice have been demeaningly regarded as witchcraft. African descended religious traditions, he argues, are in fact sciences based on hundreds of years of trial and error and discovery. Palmie argues that it was Western colonial rule that represented witchcraft with the ability to change the direction of Black life by mere decrees. “Whitch Doctor” chronicled the exploration of Southern and Central Africa by David Livingston and Henry Stanley. On the track, Masekela sings:

Stanley got a letter from King Leopoldo/Summoning Stanley, to his house in Brusselo/Riding in a coach, from his house in Portobello/Sailing in boat, to see the king he did go./Stanley, said the king, you’re going down to the Congo/Where there’s ivory, at the end of the rainbow./I sent the doctor there, not so very long ago/Bring the ivory, and bring geography!/Bring the doctor back - he’s lost in the Congo./Which Doctor? Livingstone, I Presume.

Ending with Stanley’s supposed greeting of Livingstone, Masekela identifies Livingstone specifically and Western colonialism generally as embodying the deviant qualities once embodied by Hollywood Africans.

During the height of anti-apartheid struggle, the cultural work of South African, and African American entertainers was an essential front. Southern California, especially, became home to, arguably, the most radical cultural boycott activism outside of New York as activists directly linked the local political economy to the support for South Africa’s ruling class. In the interim between the incarceration of South Africa’s leading activists in 1964 and the Soweto Uprising in 1976, the cultural work and lived experience of African entertainers in Southern California played an important role in forwarding African liberation and African entertainers helped progress African American life and culture.

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.

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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.

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.