Afropop passings

Remembering four world-music giants

by Banning Eyre

Pepe Kalle

African pop music lost four noteworthy innovators in the closing months of 1998. Pepe Kalle -- the so-called Elephant of Zaire -- was a giant in more ways than one in the international soukous scene. Marks Mankwane and West Nkosi were architects of South Africa's earth-shaking township boogie, the music known as mbaqanga. And Ashton "Sugar" Chiweshe played guitar for Zimbabwe's Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, pioneers of the rootsy and rebellious chimurenga style. All four artists performed internationally. Indeed, they've all been to Boston at least once. But they lived, worked, and died in Africa, where I first met them more than a decade ago.

Premature passings in Africa inevitably raise whispers about AIDS, which currently ravages Congo (formerly Zaire), South Africa, and Zimbabwe with unchecked ferocity. These guys certainly died young. The eldest -- Mankwane -- was just shy of 60, and Kalle and Chiweshe were both under 50. But HIV seems to have played no role in these deaths. Guitarists Mankwane and Chiwheshe succumbed to sugar diabetes and liver failure respectively. Congolese superstar Pepe Kalle died from a sudden heart attack. And saxophonist/producer West Nkosi died from injuries suffered in an automobile accident that had left him paralyzed in hospital for nearly two months. The absence of HIV seems striking after so many AIDS-related death announcements from the pantheon of African pop. But in a larger sense, it makes very little difference. AIDS or not, these men were casualties of the extraordinarily harsh lives that most African musicians lead. And in the end, it is those lives, not the deaths, that bear remembering.

No one could forget an encounter with Pepe Kalle, the six-foot-tall, 300-pound leader of Empire Bakuba. Before meeting him in a Kinshasa hotel in 1987, I had become a fan of Kalle's velvety tenor voice and stylish blend of blaring guitar rumba and deep-forest, Luba rhythms from his homeland in the Zairean interior. I had also read about the man's celebrated eccentricities. Chris Stapleton and Chris May wrote in their book African All-Stars (Quartet Books, 1987), "Kalle's house is full of wonder. In a white courtyard sit a row of women and children wearing white, holding candles and chanting from prayer books. . . . Everything around him seems smaller than life -- the red Volkswagen that he drives and Emauro, the Pygmy who dances with the band."

Kalle arrived for our interview in a full-length sky-blue West African grand boubou with gold embroidery and a pair of leather slippers. He gobbled down a large steak as though it were a potato chip. When asked to sing a small ditty for the listeners of public radio's AFROPOP, he tapped out a tone on his wristwatch to get in tune and then summoned up that enormous, resonant voice. He sang with the authority of the great Franco, grandfather of all Congolese pop music, but Kalle had a vocal technique Franco couldn't touch.

Two releases -- Pepe Kalle and Nyboma (Sylart, 1986) and Bakuba Show (Sylart, 1987) -- are especially good examples of the Empire Bakuba magic and well worth tracking down. During the '90s, Kalle's music suffered from the Paris-driven hyping of the Congolese sound. Relentless drum machines, strident keyboard work, and a movement away from rumba sensuousness and toward pumped-up dance mania all suggested a flailing for originality in a style that, after years of meteoric expansion, had clearly peaked.

I caught Kalle and Empire Bakuba in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare last March. The late Emauro had been replaced by three Pygmy dancers. Despite brutally hard times in the newly named Democratic Republic of Congo, Kalle's band had sprawled to nearly 20 players. I missed his singing amid the circus theatrics and hyperactive grooves. But there was no denying the sense of community that his band generated. When Kalle coaxed a solo from his able guitarist Doris, the big convention-center crowd seemed to draw close. After the show, I heard from Zimbabweans who shared my complaints about the music -- but what Zimbabwean band could fill a convention center in Kinshasa? There was no doubting Kalle's stature. In the tradition of Franco, he was trampling stubborn cultural barriers with a joyful army of crooners and clowns.

And I'm happy to report that Kalle's final release, Coctail (ETS NDIAYE/Stern's, 1998), acquits him well. He harmonizes gloriously over subtle guitar interplay on "Pinos Kabuya." He celebrates the Malian 13th-century king in the Latin-flavored "Soundiata Keita." Rumba and roots come together in a high-tech concoction representing the passionate jumble that is modern Africa.

THE MBAQANGA SOUND that Marks Mankwane and West Nkosi helped to create in South Africa turned all of southern Africa on its head during the '60s and '70s. Two decades later, it helped to inspire Paul Simon's Graceland. Although this township style hasn't riveted the African continent the way Congolese music has, it lives on as an important and inspirational style despite its humble beginnings. Mankwane and Nkosi met in Pretoria as teenage domestic workers with musical ambitions. In 1962, they became founding members of the Makhona Tsohle ("Jack of All Trades") Band, which still backs Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, perhaps the most exciting vocal act South African has ever produced.

A tall, soft-spoken fellow with a warm smile and an easy manner, Mankwane pioneered a jangly, high-fretting guitar style that became a staple of township pop. Boisterous and cocky by comparison, the elfin Nkosi played pennywhistle and saxophone, bridging the old kwela style of the '50s with newer, more aggressive sounds -- township soul and sax jive. During the '70s, the original Mahotella Queens line-up played to fanatical crowds all over southern Africa. Along the way, both Nkosi and Mankwane began to produce promising acts, especially Nkosi, who gained the respect of the white bosses at Gallo Records for his uncanny sense of what would sell in the black-music market.

I met both artists in 1988 in Johannesburg, as the Mahotella Queens were beginning a period of revival and worldwide fame. The group had just recorded Thokozile (Earthworks/Stern's) and Paris Soweto (PolyGram), strong contenders for their best work ever. Nkosi regaled my AFROPOP colleague and me with hair-raising tales of his exploits -- as long as we kept him plied with glasses of cold duck. During subsequent tours, we met up often in Boston and New York.

Nkosi left the Makhona Tsohle Band in 1990. There were hard feelings, and sorting through them provided me with a history lesson. Apparently, back in the late '70s, mbaqanga was being all but eclipsed by emerging new styles, especially South African "disco." Nkosi was having success producing a new Zulu a cappella group called Ladysmith Black Mambazo. "The record companies were not very keen on the Mahotella Queens," Mankwane recalled in 1991. "And I must say that West was one of the guys who didn't want the group to exist. He said, `Marks, you are wasting your time on this name. It's dead.' "

Of course, Nkosi had edited out this moment of doubt, among other things, when he gave interviews while touring with the revived Mahotella Queens in the late '80s. Nkosi had a knack for making himself the central character in every story. "It has taken me 20 years to get groups in our country to understand their own culture," he once told me. "If you look at my productions, I don't have bubblegum music. I never produced that. I stuck with the original music of our country."

Although he gilded many facts in interviews, Nkosi's achievements bear out his claim. At the time of his death, he could boast nearly four decades of production credits, including major titles for Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and Amaswazi Emvelo. Two available releases of Nkosi's own sax and pennywhistle jive tell a long story in short form. Sixteen Original Sax Jive Hits (Gallo Music Productions/Stern's, 1991) compiles seminal hits from the '60s and '70s, many featuring Mankwane's fleet lead-guitar work. The music positively slams. It's tight and giddy, full of pregnant pauses, harrowing downbeats, and sax melodies that shimmy and squeal.

Nkosi's 1992 album Rhythm of Healing (Earthworks/Stern's) updates that sound masterfully, showing the producer's gift for filling out the music with modern lushness without sacrificing pump. Acoustic guitar layered with electric plus cool horn-section work beneath Nkosi's irrepressible sax help the tracks transcend the predictability of drum-machine backing. Nkosi believed in the drum machine. He listened to criticism from writers like myself, and from colleagues in his own country, but he stuck to his guns, convinced that the modern South African audience would accept nothing less than the heartbeat pounding of electronic rhythms. Nkosi produced and recorded with gusto in the new South Africa, right up to his tragic car crash along the highway that connects Johannesburg to his childhood home in the Eastern Transvaal.

IN NEIGHBORING ZIMBABWE, in a smaller way, guitarist Ashton "Sugar" Chiweshe fought his own battle to strike a balance between local and borrowed elements in his national pop music. Young Chiweshe got his big break in 1979, when the country's pre-eminent star, Thomas Mapfumo, was jailed briefly for singing political songs critical of the fading Rhodesian regime. With Mapfumo temporarily off the stage, lead-guitarist Jonah Sithole began to sing, and Chiweshe was recruited to play guitar. This began two decades of on-and-off work for Chiweshe with Mapfumo's band, the Blacks Unlimited.

Chiweshe understood the traditional basis of Mapfumo's music, but he also loved Santana and George Benson, and he worked to alloy these elements. Mapfumo ultimately banished Chiweshe from the band, in part because the guitarist's rock-like grandstanding didn't jive with the bandleader's communal vision of the music. Chiweshe certainly had his fans, though, and he went on to create his own roots-pop band, Batonga Crew. He leaves behind some memorable guitar solos sprinkled through Mapfumo's recordings, especially on the albums Corruption (Mango, 1989), Chamunorwa (Mango, 1990), and Vanhu Vetama (ZimBob, 1994).

What Chiweshe shared with Kalle, Mankwane, and Nkosi was the belief that it was possible to transform their national music styles from the inside, as well as the determination to do so. They refused to be strict traditionalists, and yet they never became sellouts to the West. All four men lived relatively short lives, but each in his own way helped to define one of the most important world-music movements in the 20th-century -- Afropop.