Johnny Clegg, South African Singer Who Battled With Music, Is Dead at 66

By Alan Cowell

Johnny Clegg, a British-born South African singer, songwriter and guitarist whose fusion of Western and African influences found an international audience and stood as an emblem of resistance to the apartheid authorities in his adopted land, died on Tuesday in . He was 66.

Mr. Clegg’s music crossed racial divides. In the bands (“Sweat” in the isiZulu language) and (“We have risen”) and as a solo artist, Mr. Clegg became known for songs and performances that resonated through ’s long struggle against racial separation. “We have a mission,” he told The New York Times in 1990, “which is to bring a whole collection of songs that are about the South African experience to the world.”

His song “Impi” (“Regiment”) celebrated the victory of Zulu forces over British colonial invaders at Isandhlwana in 1879. In “African Sky Blue,” Mr. Clegg and the Zulu guitarist , transposed those warriors to South Africa’s modern gold mines. “ of Africa,” reflecting the myriad dislocations of South African society, became a breakthrough commercial success in Britain and elsewhere in 1984, enabling Mr. Clegg to abandon an academic career in Johannesburg as an anthropologist and devote himself full time to his music.

The haunting lyrics of his 1987 song “” (“We have not seen him”), about the imprisoned , were so evocative of the era that in 1999, Mandela, by then a free man, joined a surprised Mr. Clegg onstage at a concert in Frankfurt during a performance of the song. With his spectacular onstage enactment of high- kicking Zulu war dances and stick fighting, Mr. Clegg was often referred to as “the White Zulu”, a nickname he said he loathed.

Throughout the apartheid era, Mr. Clegg and his bands were harassed by the authorities and occasionally detained. Their performances were often disrupted, wherever they were held. Under apartheid legislation known as the Group Areas Act, white people were not permitted to enter segregated black townships without official permits, which were often withheld, while black people were kept out of whites-only areas by nighttime curfews and a web of zoning restrictions.

Other apartheid proscriptions kept Mr. Clegg’s music off state-run radio shows. (He said he was first arrested at the age of 15.)

At the same time, he was censured by the Musicians’ Union of Britain precisely because he performed in South Africa, in contravention of an embargo that was supposed to reinforce the isolation of the apartheid regime. Despite that sanction, Mr. Clegg toured widely, securing an international following. He was particularly popular in , where he was made a Chevalier of Arts and Letters in 1991. Britain named him an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2015. In South Africa, he received the country’s highest civilian medal, the presidential Ikhamanga Award, in 2012.

Mr. Clegg received a pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2015. Two years later, when the disease was said to be in remission after chemotherapy, he embarked on what was labeled the Final Journey Tour, taking him to Britain, the , , South Africa and elsewhere.

Jonathan Paul Clegg was born on June 7, 1953, in Bacup, a onetime cotton milling town in northwest England. His parents separated when he was an infant, and he did not meet his father, Dennis, until he was 21 years old.

Mr. Clegg’s mother, Muriel, a jazz singer from a Lithuanian Jewish family, moved back from Britain to her native Rhodesia, as was known before independence in 1980. She later married a South African journalist, Dan Pienaar.

The couple broke up when Mr. Clegg was 12. But before they did, Mr. Pienaar introduced his stepson to life in segregated black townships, which were rarely if ever visited by white people.

Mr. Clegg lived briefly in and Zambia, where he attended multiracial schools at a time when education in South Africa was strictly segregated. Despite the expectations of his mother’s family that he would be raised according to Jewish traditions, he declined to have a bar mitzvah and described himself as a “secular Jew.”

Mr. Clegg’s musical journey began when he was an adolescent and met Charlie Mzila, a Zulu migrant from whom he learned a new kind of guitar playing, with the instrument tuned and strung differently than in the West.

He formed the band Juluka after meeting Sipho Mchunu, a Zulu migrant worker at the time. That band achieved international renown before it disbanded in 1985 and Mr. Mchunu returned to his farm in Zululand. It reunited briefly in the mid-1990s.

Mr. Clegg’s second band, the more rock-oriented Savuka, was formed in 1986 and was nominated for a Grammy in the category for its 1993 album, “Heat, Dust and Dreams.” But the band was dissolved that year, soon after Dudu Ndlovu, Mr. Clegg’s drummer and onstage dance partner, was shot to death, apparently while trying to mediate in a conflict between rival cabdrivers.

Mr Clegg is survived by his wife, Jenny, and two sons, Jesse and Jaron. Jesse Clegg has a successful career of his own as a singer and songwriter.

Adapted from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/arts/music/johnny-clegg- dead.html [accessed 31 July, 2019]