The Brooklyn Rail

Sankofa is a term derived from a Ghanaian proverb that has come to mean “looking back to look forward.” The symbol for it is a bird that turns its head to reach the egg placed on its back. It has been broadly adapted in part because of the sheer lovability of this image, which finds its poetic embodiment in the nurturing bird-mother figure. And it represents a profound aspiration and paradox: the desire—and in the end, the need—to go backward and forward at once. It reminds us that, until we have reckoned with the past, we haven’t truly gained the wisdom or the ability to move into the future. In this state, we are always treading on unsecured ground.

For Black South African artists, the past that needs to be reckoned with includes the intense pain, the ghosts, of apartheid. Yet it was out of this oppressed culture that there arose arguably the first major star of the genre known as world music: Miriam Makeba. When she broke through in the early sixties, after nearly a decade with vocal groups like the Manhattan Brothers and the Skylarks, she represented a vital link back to Mama Africa, as she herself became known. Her Grammy-winning album with Harry Belafonte in 1965 was hugely popular, made all the more remarkable by the fact that the traditional songs performed on it are sung in Xhosa, Zulu, and other tribal languages.

The conventional wisdom was that this would be an insurmountable barrier to English-speaking audiences, but the blazing meet-up of these two artists roared past such assumptions. Makeba, her passionate voice reaching across language barriers, made a ferocious argument for opening minds to other sounds, other realities. Her records were banned by the repressive South African government, and she spent thirty years living in exile, before returning with the end of apartheid. In that way, she embodied the sankofa; she carried her message to the world, and brought it always back to her homeland.

At the same time as her breakthroughs, an ethnomusicologist named Robert E. “Bob” Brown coined the term “world music,” and developed the music department at Wesleyan University in that direction. Makeba was known to dislike the term, feeling it was a too-easy way to tag “third-world” artists. This perspective certainly fits with the music industry’s tendency to lump together broad surveys of “other” music into one convenient category. In Brown’s original conception, though, the goal was hardly to generalize, but rather to embrace the specific systems of knowledge embodied in different forms of music. He encouraged what he called bi-musicality, the full participation in more than one culture’s music, as a path to greater understanding. Makeba embodied that, and passed it along to everyone from fellow musicians to casual listeners. She did so by way of the performer’s simple, urgent mission: she reached you, and she brought you in.

This month, the World Music Institute celebrates South African music with concerts by two of its leading exponents, vocalist Thandiswa Mazwai at (le) poisson rouge on November 14 and pianist Abdullah Ibrahim at the 92NY on November 15. Ibrahim is the elder statesman, a contemporary of Makeba who is celebrating his ninetieth birthday. Born Adolph Johannes Brand (known early on as Dollar Brand), he was brought up in Cape Town as a jazz-loving disciple of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, though he also incorporated local styles like marabi and mbaqanga into his music. In 1959, he founded a band, the Jazz Epistles, with trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who was later married to Makeba. He began to reach a wider audience in 1962 after Ellington went to hear his trio play in Zurich, was impressed, and oversaw the release of an album by them. Ibrahim moved to New York, finding a home in the extended avant-garde scene there and associating with Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, and others. The style he developed ended up incorporating folk, rock, and other influences into an idiom known as Cape Jazz, with the song “Mannenberg” becoming a kind of upbeat anthem.

Ibrahim has recorded widely over the decades, with the delicacy and natural warmth of his approach always evident. Like another Ellington/Monk acolyte, Randy Weston, he brings a soft touch to his virtuosity, never overplaying his hand. “Maraba Blue,” from 1997’s Cape Town Flowers (Tiptoe), proceeds almost like a piano exercise, simple figures gently elaborated, yet it exerts an unmistakable tidal pull. His playing has never faltered; its elegance and sense of quiet resolution remain firmly intact. Nelson Mandela called Ibrahim “our Mozart,” and the musician continues to build bridges across cultures with seeming ease.

Thandiswa Mazwai is a different kind of ambassador for her country’s music. She brings a brazen theatricality to her presentation, but she never shies away from the tragedies of her upbringing. Mazwai was born in 1976 in Soweto, Johannesburg, the very time and place of the student uprising that left hundreds of young people dead; her parents were political activists in the city at the time. It is worth remembering that the initial spark for the protests was the insistence by authorities that school instruction take place in Afrikaans, the language of the white minority. The shock of this massacre at the hands of the government helped raise global awareness of apartheid, and lead to the breakdown of that system. Growing up in the aftermath of these events, Mazwai makes establishing her own cultural identity a key facet of her larger project.

She played in bands immersed in the local kwaito style, like Jack-Knife and Bongo Maffin, and turned out some club hits before embarking on a solo career. In the last two decades, she has released a number of albums, first making a splash in 2004 with Zabalaza (Escondida Music). More recently, she has drawn on an array of increasingly popular African styles like amapiano, a form of music that has recently seen explosive growth around the world. Her efforts have culminated in the newly released Sankofa (Universal Music). On the album, she expresses her admiration for her mentor on the cut “with love to Makeba;” at the same time she mourns the loss of her mother at a very young age. She also sings a lament for Steve Biko, the South African activist who was killed in 1977 while in police custody. Mazwai is committed to moving forward, but only through acknowledging the crucible into which she was born.

Looking at the culture of South Africa from the perspective of America reminds me of the Philip Roth comparison between Prague and his native land: “There,” he said, “nothing goes and everything matters—here, everything goes and nothing matters.” Perhaps America is so large that the identities it creates don’t fully seem to stick, so that we lose sight of our common purpose, become disconnected from our ideals. Now, on the eve of the current US election, with everything at stake, I remember a photograph of Black South Africans lining up to vote after apartheid ended, waiting for hours in snaking lines for the chance to participate in their country’s future. I fervently hope we channel a small portion of that resolve in voting to celebrate our plurality and preserve our democracy.