There is a moment near the end of “Asimbonanga (Mandela)” where the crowd on the live recording seems to understand something before the song is finished — you can hear it, that collective intake, that recognition — and if you’ve ever felt music do something that politics couldn’t quite manage alone, Umkhulu is the record you’ve been circling without knowing it.
Johnny Clegg had already done the unlikely thing once. As a white South African kid who’d grown up learning Zulu street dance from migrant workers in Johannesburg, he’d co-founded Juluka with Sipho Mchunu in 1969 and made genuinely integrated music at a time when apartheid made that not just unfashionable but illegal. By 1986, Mchunu had returned to his family’s farm in KwaZulu, and Clegg had assembled Savuka — a word meaning “we have risen” — to push harder, louder, and more explicitly into the confrontation.
The Sound of a Country Being Argued With
Umkhulu was recorded at Powerhouse Studios in Johannesburg with engineer Philip Miller, who had the unenviable task of capturing an eight-piece band that was essentially two musical traditions arguing and then embracing in the same room. The rhythm section — bassist Derek de Beer and drummer Barry van Zyl — had to hold a groove that could accommodate both a Western rock sensibility and the syncopated pulse of Zulu maskanda and isicathamiya.
Van Zyl in particular deserves a sentence or two. He was twenty-two years old on these sessions and already playing like someone who’d absorbed every South African percussion tradition available. His work on “Dela” is restrained where you’d expect bombast, which is exactly right.
Dudu Zulu handled percussion and vocal harmonies, and he is the record’s emotional spine. His presence on stage with Clegg — a Zulu man and a white man, dancing together, singing together, in apartheid South Africa — was the argument made physical.
Asimbonanga
The track that stopped the world, or at least shook it a little. “Asimbonanga” means “we have not seen him” in Zulu, and it is a direct lament for Nelson Mandela, then 24 years into his imprisonment on Robben Island. The song was banned on South African state radio immediately. It was played constantly everywhere else.
What Clegg understood, and what the song demonstrates completely, is that political music fails when it lectures. “Asimbonanga” is a dirge that moves like it wants to dance. It grieves and it insists at the same time. When Mandela was finally released in 1990 and Clegg performed it for him, Mandela walked onstage mid-song and danced. That footage exists. Watch it when you need to remember what music is for.
The rest of the album holds up, which is the thing that gets undersold. “Great Heart” is propulsive and joyful in a way that makes you realize how rare actual joy is in serious music. “Take My Heart Away” reaches for something almost pastoral. “Berlin Wall” is a little obvious in its metaphor but earns its keep on pure energy.
Clegg produced the album himself alongside colleague Hilton Rosenthal, who had shepherded much of Juluka’s catalog and understood that the thing to do with this band was mostly get out of the way and let the arrangements breathe.
Umkhulu means “the great one” in Zulu. It’s a title that could sound like hubris on a lesser record. Here it just sounds accurate.