Africa Is a Country

South Africans fought for freedom, but won democracy

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

South Africans fought for freedom, but won democracy

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

The famed South African musician Hugh Masekela has a history of speaking his mind on postapartheid politics.

Image by Jeremy Weate, via Flickr CC.

You can always count on Hugh Masekela to speak frankly. Having turned 70 this year, Masekela still has plenty to say. In London for a concert with the London Symphony Orchestra to celebrate his milestone birthday, he was interviewed by the BBC. Masekela, who spent 30 years in exile before returning to South Africa in 1990, shared his views on various topics. He discussed who truly owns the economy, likened the 1994 formation of a “unity government” with Apartheid’s rulers to Israel forming a government with the Nazis,and pointed out that while South Africans fought for freedom, what they got was merely democracy. On a more personal note, he spoke passionately about his preoccupation with reviving “traditional ethnic cultural performance” and doing so better than the Hawaiians. I’m not sure about that last part, though.

It’s worth listening to. Here.

By the way, Masekela has a history of speaking his mind on postapartheid politics.

For example, in a March 2002 interview he told the Chicago Tribune, “I’m trying to help reconstruct the glorious aspects of who we are as a people … There’s nothing apartheid worked harder for than for us to forget ourselves. We have to reclaim our social and recreational life and define ourselves to the world.”

That same year, he released an album, “Time.” It included the song, “Send Me (Thuma Mina), which, breaks with his pessimism, and is like a manifesto of sorts for how he sees his role in the new South Africa:

I wanna be there when the people start to turn it around
When they triumph over poverty
I wanna be there when the people win the battle against AIDS
I wanna lend a hand
I wanna be there for the alcoholic
I wanna be there for the drug addict
I wanna be there for the victims of violence and abuse
I wanna lend a hand
Send me 

 

Further Reading

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.

Whose game is remembered?

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.