In the summer of 1968, the number one song in America was an instrumental by a South African trumpeter who could not go home.
Hugh Masekela’s “Grazing in the Grass” topped the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1968. It was upbeat, catchy and built around a bright trumpet line and a cowbell. Most Americans dancing to it had no idea the man playing it had fled apartheid, or that he would spend almost thirty years in exile.
Leaving South Africa
Masekela was born in 1939 in Witbank, now eMalahleni, in what was then the Transvaal. He was given his first trumpet as a teenager through Father Trevor Huddleston, the anti-apartheid priest, and he played in the Huddleston Jazz Band before joining the Jazz Epistles, a group that included the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, then known as Dollar Brand.
After the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, when police killed 69 protesters, the apartheid government tightened its grip. Masekela left South Africa that year. With help from friends including Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte, he went to study in London and then New York.
The hit
“Grazing in the Grass” was written by Philemon Hou, a South African composer and actor, and recorded by Masekela in 1968. It was released as a single and climbed all the way to number one, selling millions of copies. The following year, the vocal group The Friends of Distinction had their own hit with a version that added lyrics.
The success made Masekela a star in the United States. He played the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, alongside Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding, and became a regular on the American concert circuit. He was briefly married to Makeba in the 1960s.
The political songs
Masekela’s music grew more political as the struggle in South Africa sharpened. “Soweto Blues”, sung by Makeba, was written after the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which police fired on schoolchildren protesting against being taught in Afrikaans. In 1987 he released “Bring Him Back Home (Nelson Mandela)”, which became an anthem of the campaign to free Mandela.
He spent parts of his exile in Africa too, living and working in Guinea, Liberia, Ghana, where he played with highlife musicians, and Botswana, where he set up a mobile studio close to the South African border.
Home
Mandela was released in February 1990. Masekela returned to South Africa soon afterwards and kept performing and recording for almost three more decades. He died in Johannesburg on 23 January 2018, aged 78, and was mourned as one of the fathers of South African jazz.
The song that made him famous in America was a summer party tune with no words. The songs that made him matter in South Africa had very specific ones: “Bring back Nelson Mandela, bring him back home to Soweto”.
