Samurai Sudoku
RIP Mzi Khumalo
Emeritus professor Mzilikazi Khumalo, who has died in Kagiso on the West Rand at the age of 89, was one of SA’s most celebrated and prolific composers, and a professor of African languages at Wits University. At the request of President Nelson Mandela he chaired the committee that composed the new national anthem.
Instructed to come up with something that would advance reconciliation, it was his idea to combine parts of the 19th-century hymn Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika with parts of Die Stem, sung in five of the most widely used languages, Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and English.
He arranged the first (Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika) half of the anthem. It took several meetings with Mandela before the president was satisfied.
Khumalo went to a cabinet meeting in Cape Town to sing it for them and was given a standing ovation. It was adopted in 1997.
He received a lot of flak for incorporating Die Stem from people who felt it symbolised apartheid, but was unrepentant.
He was committed to reconciliation and used choral music, which was the great love of his life, as a vehicle.
He was inspired by then Sowetan editor Aggrey Klaaste’s nation building project to create the annual Soweto Nation Building Massed Choir Festival with conductor Richard Cock. He ran it for 15 years until retiring at 75.
This was in 1989 and they were warned it was nuts to be training choirs in townships that were in flames. But for Khumalo the festival was about healing the wounds of apartheid and bringing people together.
He and Cock drove to townships all over Gauteng to find and rehearse choirs. Twenty of the best — 19 black and one white — consisting of about 1,000 choristers, came together at the annual festival in the Standard Bank Arena in Johannesburg in front of a packed audience of 3,000, who joined in singing the traditional African songs arranged by Khumalo.
He decided that the first half of every programme would be traditional African music performed to world-class standards.
A passionate Africanist, he was determined to preserve African musical traditions that he feared were being lost. He believed the best way of saving the music was to perform it.
The second half of every programme was Western choral music which he Africanised.
Although he had a wicked sense of humour and a ready chuckle, he could be fierce when it came to training choirs. He was strict and didn’t take any nonsense. He knew what he wanted and didn’t take no for an answer.
“It just won’t do, it won’t do,” he would say again and again until the singers got it right. His voice was hilariously mimicked when he wasn’t around. He knew all the voice parts and could sing them all.
Parts of his epic uShaka kaSenzangakhona were performed for the first time at the massed choir festival. As each part was written, it was performed.
When finally completed it was Wagnerian in scale with a 70-strong orchestra and more than a hundred voices.
uShaka kaSenzangakhona was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Cock, in the mid-’90s and recorded by the SABC. It was given to Sony to release.
Thereafter it was performed about 10 times in SA and also to acclaim and full houses in Europe and the US.
uShaka and his opera Princess Magogo, which premiered in 2002, were his greatest achievements.
He composed more than 50 choral works and did countless arrangements.
Princess Magogo, herself a musician, was the mother of his close friend Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
Khumalo said that when he wrote Princess Magogo, the first African opera, he had no idea what an opera was. When he learnt more about opera, he changed parts of it, for which he made no apologies.
“If you don’t know sufficient music and you write, you do make mistakes. And if you see a mistake you have to correct it, unless you are a fool,” he said.
Princess Magogo received a standing ovation at the Ravinia Festival in the US in 2004.
His first composition, Ma Ngificwa Ukufa (“When death is upon me”), a musical version of a poem by Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, was completed in 1958.
Khumalo was steeped in music from the time of his birth on June 20 1932 on a Salvation Army farm, KwaNgwelu (Mountain View) in Vryheid, KwaZuluNatal.
His love of traditional and choral music came from his parents, who were ministers in the Salvation Army.
From his mother, Ntombizodwa, whom he described as a traditional Zulu music fanatic, he got his love of traditional Zulu music and choirs.
His father Andreas conducted the Salvation Army band and taught him and his eight siblings to play musical instruments until they were good enough to form their own church band, which he conducted.
Music was his first love but it was considered impossible to make a living as a black musician in SA, so after matriculating from the Salvation Army High School in Nancefield, Soweto, in 1950 he qualified as a teacher at Mamelodi Teachers Training College.
When he began teaching he started working with school choirs. He always had a preference for male choirs. He thought nothing was more sublime than the sound of a well-trained all-male choir.
While teaching in Mamelodi in the ’60s he was accused of recruiting students for the PAC and detained for four months during which he was heavily interrogated and tortured with electric shocks.
He taught from 1956, when he graduated with a BA degree in English and Zulu from the University of SA, to 1969 when he became a tutor in African languages at Wits. He got a BA honours degree from Unisa in 1974 and a PhD from Wits where he became a professor and for many years head of the African languages department.
Although his achievements as a composer overshadowed his academic work, he made major contributions to the development and standing of the study of African languages. When he retired from Wits in 1998 he was made an emeritus professor.
He received honorary doctorates in music from Wits, Unisa and the universities of Stellenbosch, Fort Hare and Zululand.
In 2003 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Arts and Culture Trust, and another at the 2007 M-Net Literary Awards.
Khumalo, who had been suffering from dementia for seven years, died of renal failure two days after his 89th birthday. He is survived by four children.
His wife, Rose, whom he met at high school and married in 1957, died of Covid-19 in hospital on Thursday, unaware that her husband had died two days earlier.
It just won’t do, it won’t do