JOHNNY CLEGG, 1953 – 2019: The dance ends for Johnny Clegg, SA’s beloved musical storyteller

was hatched and embarked on. A story-telling sound-and-light extravaganza of a concert in which he took us right back to his roots, not least the startling insight into where he in fact grew up.Everyone thinks,” he told his audience in that show, “that I was brought up on a farm in Natal.” Not so. His teenage stomping ground was peri-urban Joburg and its townships.

We can imagine if that white kid had been like most other white kids, too timid to venture to such places with his Zulu buddy; or if he’d not bothered to make a friend of Mzila, if young Johnny Clegg hadn’t had the stuff he did have – imagine what we all would have lost.

We can recall the Clegg who was arrested for contravening the Group Areas Act, because every day, he’d be somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be by law. Clegg becoming a competent Maskandi guitarist. This reputation reaching the musical ear of Sipho Mchunu and starting to make music and to record. Bringing us songs like, with the unforgettable guitar riff intro with which Mchunu, now long retired, will forever be associated. Now without Johnny.

In that final concert in iBhayi, Sipho suddenly comes out of retirement to join Johnny on stage and when he first strikes up the guitar riff intro toWe can remember that Clegg, despite all this, was also an anthropologist and that, if he had not met first Mzila and later Mchunu and this musical life had not found him, we may yet have known him as a social anthropologist. That he was an academic at Wits and the University of Natal, the precursor of UKZN, for four years.

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