If there is any musical group in the world that deserves to be considered as a piece of black history, that would be Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the South African vocal group now celebrating its 50th year of making music.
They will appear at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, February 14 at Sheldon Concert Hall, in a concert appearance sandwiched between dates in Chicago and Columbia, Mo. It’s the 11th date on a U.S. tour that won’t wrap up until the end of March.
Founding member Albert Mazibuko spoke to The American from his hotel room in Ann Arbor, Michigan, just before the first date on Ladysmith’s 2010 U.S. tour.
Mazibuko said the band has been touring the U.S. for some 25 years now. They have settled into a pattern of coming to the U.S. every January – not to embrace the cold in many of our states, but to flee the heat in their sub-Saharan country.
“We spend the winter here, to escape from the heat in South Africa,” he said. “When we get back home, it is a little cooler there.”
Mazibuko is one of the cousins of band founder Joseph Shambala. Though they grew up inland in the town of Ladysmith, which lent the band its name, they came together as singers near the large coastal city of Durban. All worked as laborers – Mazibuko was a mechanic, which remains his hobby – when in 1959 Shambala began to recruit a band from within his own family, dissatisfied with the results he was getting with other singers.
“I remember when he came the first time with the idea of the band in 1959. He had a group at that time, but they had failed to learn what he was trying to teach them,” Mazibuko said of Shambala.
“He came with his brother, and I was with two of my brothers. And we said, ‘We are going to learn whatever you want to teach us.’ That was a Sunday, mid-morning. Then every evening after work, we would work on music till midnight.”
It is important to remember that five years of consistent practice and preparation came before Shambala’s famous mystical break-through, when he heard a new range of vocal harmonies in a dream in 1964.
“His dreams started to persuade him in 1964,” Mazibuko recalled.
“Every night he would go to sleep, he would hear songs in his dreams. It appears they were children. He didn’t see the colors of their skins. They would sing, and put dancing in their songs. When they would sing, they would float. He learned everything from them.”
The peculiar beauty of this singing – which would later captivate Paul Simon, then Nelson Mandela and now millions of people all over the world – immediately struck the singers who first learned to reproduce it.
Mazibuko said, “I grew up singing, but when he would teach me how to sing like the singing he heard from his dream, it was something totally different.”
It is remarkable how a style of singing learned from a dream would interact to such a large degree with human history and politics. After Nelson Mandela was released from prison, he invited Ladysmith Black Mambazo to sing at his reception of the Nobel Prize for Peace and at his inauguration as South Africa’s first black president.
“When Mandela was released, he told us he had been a fan of our music and it had been a great inspiration to him,” Mazibuko said. “It makes me amazed and very appreciative, what we have achieved and witnessed in this lifetime.”
Mazibuko and his band members also have watched with pleasure as the United States elected its first black president in Barack Obama, though they are still waiting on an invitation to perform at the White House.
He said the biggest change they noted in this country did not date from the election of Obama but from a previous, less inspirational historic event.
“The first experience we had when we first came to this country is that the people of America love their country and love themselves and are very proud to be themselves,” he said.
“Then, after 9/11, I experienced some fear in America. Even now, when we take a plane, where we used to feel free, now we have that kind of concern.”
Over the years, Ladysmith Black Mambazo has seen plenty of its own private pain, when band and family members met violent deaths. They have survived by bringing in fresh blood. “We are grooming new members in the group,” Mazibuko said. “You will see young guys in this concert.”
When he isn’t touring the world, Mazibuko still lives not far from Durban, the coastal city in South Africa where it all began. He helps his wife run a small store (“she makes me work all the time”); they have seven children.
“Life is wonderful. We are so blessed,” he said. “Since we recorded with Paul Simon, our lifestyle has improved. The place we are living now, we wouldn’t have afforded at that time. It’s a modern place – what we would call average.”
In this country, the band mostly travels by tour bus, which Mazibuko loves because it preserves the intimate family feeling at the heart of the group.
“It’s a home away from home, with its own kitchen, and we can watch TV,” Mazibuko said of life on the bus.
“Traveling in it is so wonderful. It keeps up together after the show, which we like, to talk and joke.”
Mazibuko plans to bring the St. Louis audience into this internal conversation when the band takes the Sheldon stage on February 14. He said, “I have a special song I want to sing with the audience, so if you come, be prepared to participate with Ladysmith Black Mambazo.”
For ticket information, visit www.sheldonconcerthall.org.
