South Africa’s music therapy

1 ANSWERS

1. Brett
   

   “No,” Hugh Masekela said to me. “Not that way, if you get your feet wrong, then everything’s wrong.
   Legendary musician Hugh Masekela shows CNN around Johannesburg.
   Legendary musician Hugh Masekela shows CNN around Johannesburg.
   
   It’s not every day you get to do tai chi with an international music superstar, but “Bra” - “brother” Hugh, as he is known affectionately in South Africa’s streets and townships, is not a man to stand on ceremony.
   
   I was shooting an episode of “My City, My Life” on Bra Hugh and his Johannesburg and we were waiting while cameramen, Chevan Rayson and Shadley Lombard set up the lights to do a long interview with him.
   
   “Come on,” Bra Hugh said, and before I knew it, I was doing my best to follow him around the hotel room floor as he moved in a light, almost balletic series of movements. It was an impressive display for a man turning 70.
   
   I spent three nearly full days with Bra Hugh — and they were one of the highlights of my career. With humour and unstoppable enthusiasm, he showed us his Johannesburg and Soweto, with a side trip to Witbank township where he grew up. See Hugh Masekela’s Johannesburg
   
   He took us to The Bantu Men’s Social Centre, an old building in the south of downtown Johannesburg. It is an elegant brick building, erected in the 1920s and overlooked both by modern skyscrapers and the old rusting headgear of the original gold mines.
   
   ”Here,” he told us on the sidewalk. “Is where I met Miriam.” (Makeba) The two of them went on to live in exile in the US and become probably South Africa’s most famous musicians.
   
   He took us through the famous old Dorkay House. Once a smart office building where the liberal white owners allowed Hugh and other black musicians to practice and gather.
   
   Now it is a run-down slum where people live cheek-by-jowl separated by cardboard partitions. Bra Hugh looked around him sadly. “Not everything here has changed for the better,” he said. “These people’s lives have not changed much.”
   
   Amidst the joy of his music, there is a sadness in his conversation that echoes how so many people feel in South Africa today, which is beset by such a terrible crime rate. “Can music heal?” I asked him while he was rehearsing in his studio.
   
   He put down his trumpet gleaming with light. “This whole nation needs therapy,” he replied.
   
   The next day we went to where it all began. The beautiful manicured gardens of what is now St. Martin’s College. It was once called St. Peter’s and was run by the famous Archbishop Trevor Huddleston who was so outspoken against racism in South Africa.
   
   Bra Hugh gave us an hilarious demonstration of how, as a young new boy at the school, he had to rush around the dining hall clearing the older students’ plates.
   
   Then he took us to where Trevor Huddleston had given him his very first trumpet. It is a nondescript small office, but the memories of that small beginning echo as loudly as his famous songs.
   
   Bra Hugh looked fondly around the school chapel. “These were the greatest years of my life,” he said.
   
   Soon, though, the cruelty of apartheid closed in on St. Peter’s and on Bra Hugh. The school was closed and Bra Hugh went into exile.
   
   It’s been a long road for him from South Africa, to America, to Ghana and finally back home to Johannesburg. But the music has always been with him. “Where does your music come from?’ I asked him.
   
   He looked at me and smiled. “It’s not my music, music is like air. It’s there for everybody.”

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