“Hamba Nontsokolo”: Minister Nathi Mthethwa’s Tribute to the late “Diva of Kofifi” and Quintessintial African Dorothy Masuku
On 31 August 2018, Ministter Nathi Mthethwa penned a message of hope and well wishes to Mama Dorothy Masuku, having paid her a visit on Tuesday, 31 July 2018. Prior to this, he had been made aware of Mama Masuku’s ill health and subsequent hospitalisation.
At the time of communicating my message of well-wishes, Minister Mthethwa also visited the home of Mama Masuku to personally convey his message of hope that she will recover and gain full strength soon.
It is therefore with deep sadness that the Minister has learnt of the passing from this earthly realm of one the grand dames of African Music who is also one of the original “Divas of Kofifi”- Mama Dorothy Masuku.
Dorothy Masuku was born in 1935 and raised in Zimbabwe. A talent scout discovered her when she sang in a school concert and immediately she signed up as Troubadour. By the time she was sixteen, Mama Dorothy had become a top recording star and after running away from school several times, she was released. She arrived in Johannesburg aged twelve as a student at a Catholic boarding school and came of age just as the first great flowering of urban African culture in South Africa was getting underway in the early 1950s. At that time, a critical mass of wage-earning African migrants to the cities began to provide the financial underpinning for a variety of cultural activities of which musical entertainment was among the most prominent. Dorothy made her first record at age sixteen in 1951 and by 1953; she was already a fully-fledged professional musician.
She left for Johannesburg by train and it was during this journey that she composed the song “Hamba Nontsokolo” that launched her career as a professional musician and has since been regarded as a classic in South Africa.
Through the decades, she never lost her status as one of South Africa’s best-selling recording artists.
What is applicable to the greatest of artists throughout the world, is that they do not consider their art as art for the sake of itself. In Mama Masuku’s case, we recall how during the ‘Golden Era of Township Jazz’ in the 1950s are today regarded as African classics. As in the case of most African songs of that earlier era, Dorothy’s compositions were usually ‘message songs’, grounded in the everyday realities of urban African life and society, so it is not surprising that as she grew older and more aware, and the political atmosphere became ever more heated, Dorothy began to write songs criticising the government’s apartheid policies.
Eventually, she was advised that she had best leave South Africa before the authorities closed in on her. For several years thereafter, she used her musical talents to help support independence movements in Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi and then, shortly after settling back into her native-born Southern Rhodesia, she was forced into exile a second time when the white supremist regime of Ian Smith wrested control of the territory from England. Placed on a ‘subversives’ list, Dorothy fled to newly-independent Zambia where she spent the next sixteen years, singing and recording on occasion, but making her living as an airline hostess for Zambia Airways (during which time she survived two air crashes.)
In 1981, when the Ian Smith government was finally brought down and an independent Zimbabwe established, Dorothy returned to the country and resumed her full-time musical career. In 1992, against the backdrop of imminent political change and a general easing of apartheid era policies, Dorothy was finally allowed to come back to South Africa. She found a very different musical culture to the one she had left behind some thirty years before, but Dorothy was determined to rebuild her career and in fact, her timing was perfect: South African audiences of all ages across all the racial boundaries seemed eager to explore, or to renew an acquaintance with, an almost forgotten and suppressed chapter of the country’s musical heritage. From that time and up to the present day, Dorothy Masuku has justly taken her place as one of South Africa’s great musical veterans.
Mama Masuku was one of the “Living Legends” of the Department of Arts and Culture, whom Minister Mthethwa describes as… “These giants of our country (who) lived because they had surrendered their very beings to the people. They lived because their very beings embodied love, hope, inspiration and a vision of our collective destination.”
Through the DAC’s “Living Legends Endowment Fund the DAC has been ensuring that that these living treasures - without whose contributions South Africa would not be a country that is wealthy in Arts, Culture and Heritage- be celebrated while they are alive, ensure their livelihood and comfortable lives for as long as they live, and be given the means and resources to impart their life-honed skills and gifts to current generations for future generations’ benefit.
To quote Mama Masuku herself in a recent TV interview, “If you stop me from singing I will die. Ngingafa nya. If you tell me, ‘Dorothy, here’s triple billions, stop singing’- I will refuse. Because you are stopping me from breathing. I didn’t want sing, music wanted me to do it, yinto ephakathi egazini kimi le (this thing is in my blood).”
With Mama Dorothy’s words in mind, how do we not but mavel at the fulfilling of the words she articulated with her own words, that of never ever wishing to stop singing…until the day she dies? Indeed, that is what she did, because the only interruption to her singing, was that of her taking ill and finally taking her final breath.
This Ministry would be remiss to fail to note how Mama Dorothy was the quintessential African, completely at ease in her articulartion of the languages of Africa and her “sons and daughters”. At this stage, words truly fail, as Mama Masusku’s death reverberates throughout the country and continent as would when a great Baobab tree falls… It leaves a trail of destruction in its fall- in our case, that of broken hearts, as hers was one of the most extraordinary of all lives,. A legacy of immesurable proportions.
On behalf of the government and the people of South Africa, I wish to pass my deepest condolences to the family of this great African, her peers, and in particular the surviving “Divas of Kofifi”, her fans, and my compatriots who loved and treasured her.
Enquries:
Asanda Magaqa
Cell: 072 372 6807
E-mail: asandam@dac.gov.za
