Restless lions in Johannesburg
By Fergal Keane
BBC, Johannesburg
During the 1950s, jazz music became increasingly popular among South Africa's black community. Johannesburg became one of the jazz capitals of the world, but some benefited from it more than others.
I walked through downtown with Alf Kumalo.
He was remembering the days when jazz pulsed through the night from clubs and bars, when young black men and women dressed in their finest clothes flocked to hear the music of Solomon Linda and his Songbirds or Dollar Brand.
"Music was all we had," Alf told me.
"It made you forget the fact that you were oppressed."
'City of Gold'
Alf is in his sixties now, a strongly built man who still wears a camera hung around his neck.
Back in the 1950s he was a photographer on Drum Magazine, a trail-blazing publication that covered the emerging black culture.
We walked on down President Street, Plein, Commissioner, Rissik.
The streets are narrow. The buildings are tall. Not skyscrapers, more like the buildings of a medium-sized American city of the 1950s.
Which is what the people who built the modern Johannesburg had in mind.
An African city that did not look remotely African.
Except for the black faces you met. Thousands of them. Flocking towards the township trains as the sun slid behind the mine dumps, showering the downtown streets with a spray of golden light.
When modern Johannesburg was built the idea was to keep blacks and their culture out.
To create upon the African veld a city that looked across the Atlantic, or else north to Europe for its artistic inspiration.
This would be a city where the opera house, art galleries, theatres would scrupulously avoid any contamination by the wild rhythms or the brash, bright shades of Africa.
But Johannesburg, or Egoli, the City of Gold, would become one of the jazz capitals of the world, played by black musicians for black audiences.
As the city grew, black migrant workers flocked there from all over South Africa.
Some lived in migrant hostels, others in shanties that clung to the city's edges, others in the vast townships, like Soweto, constructed to house the city's labour pool.
Another culture insinuated itself into the streets and back lanes of Johannesburg.
It played an African jazz that vibrated with passion, and despite the oppressive circumstances, uninhibited joy.
Sleeping lions
Solomon Linda came here with the tunes of his native Zululand still humming in his memory.
But it was a tune he wrote himself that should have immortalised the black musician and made Johannesburg a famous jazz city.
Solomon had a vocal group with several other young Zulus.
In the photograph his daughter keeps he is a dignified figure on the far left of the group.
Tall, confident looking, dressed like the others in a pinstripe suit with a broad-brimmed hat pulled jauntily to the right side of his head.
They look like young men who are really going somewhere.
Solomon's song was called Mbubye, but generations of music lovers will know it best as Wimowe, or The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
Most recently it has been used in the Disney film The Lion King.
The problem for Solomon Linda, and now for his family, is that the vast fortunes earned in royalties down the years never went to them.
In white ruled South Africa, in the days of apartheid, a black man took what he was given
Desperate for cash he sold the rights to a white-owned music publishing company in Johannesburg.
He was a migrant labourer without education, without the means to hire a lawyer.
In the days of apartheid, a black man took what he was given.
Nor did Linda ever imagine that his song would become so famous.
He died in the 1960s, penniless.
His wife did manage to get a comparatively small sum, from one publishing company.
But she too would die in poverty in the same small house where she had raised her family in Soweto.
But now there is a chance that the family - and the memory of Solomon Linda - will win restitution.
They are in the process of suing Disney and another company for hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost royalties.
Disney and the music publisher deny liability.
Disney said: "Solomon Linda's widow assigned all rights in Mbube to [a music publisher] more than 20 years ago and did so with the assistance of legal counsel.
"The estate's effort to cancel that assignment by waging a lawsuit and publicity campaign against Disney is both inappropriate and misdirected."
Musical contribution
I met Solomon's daughter, Elizabeth, at the old family home.
She did not try to pretend that the prospect of coming into so much money did not excite the family.
Money would change their lives dramatically.
It would mean proper housing, a guarantee of a proper education for their children, health care and money to tide them over in old age.
But I also believe Elizabeth is driven by a deeper imperative.
"I hear his voice all the time in that song," she said. "He's not dead while the music plays."
The black jazz movement, of which Solomon Linda was a part, was eventually driven out of Johannesburg under apartheid.
Rigid segregation and the brutal political crackdowns of the 1960s and 70s pushed music out or else underground.
Now, according to Elizabeth, is the time to recognise the cultural contribution of her father and so many of the musicians of that era.
In pursuing the lawsuit Elizabeth believes she is not only keeping faith with Solomon Linda's flickering spirit, but with all those lost voices of the city of gold.
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pag...nt/4065835.stm
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