I was 19 years old in 1983 when I left South Africa to avoid being conscripted into the apartheid army.
My great passion was music and I had for a number of years been the head reviewer of the New Albums page of Scope magazine.
It was only once outside of South Africa however, that I encountered for the first time the music of the jazz exiles, most notably of which, The Blue Notes.
Blue Notes For Mongezi remains, for me, the most excoriating musical document ever produced by South African musicians.
I fell in love with the singing tones of the bass on that album and started to hunt down every recording that I could find by that bass player whose name was Johnny Mbizo Dyani.
By the end of 1985 I had a collection of about 40 albums which featured Johnny as a side man, as well as all of his albums as a leader. It was then that I happened to meet Lefifi Tladi, a South African in exile who had left the country after the student uprisings of 1976. Lefifi shared my passion for Johnny’s soulful music and gave me Mbizo’s phone number. “Call him”, Lefifi said, “he’d appreciate that.”
Johnny was living in Malmo, Sweden, at the time, and his subtly melodic, occasionally rasping voice reminded me of his bass playing. We talked for hours on the phone and he ended by saying “Do something man, don’t just tell me you like my music, do something!”
I was a very serious, literal-minded young man and so I organised a tour through Holland for Johnny and the Harlem-born percussionist Emmanuel Abdul Rahim, who was then living in Copenhagen. It was called the Radio Freedom Christmas tour and the money raised was used to buy studio equipment for the ANC’s Radio Freedom broadcast stations in Tanzania and Zambia.
Johnny was accompanied on the tour by a Ghanaian hi-life band, kumbi saleh, the Dutch reggae outfit Revelation Time, and British dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah. The tour was huge success, all the concerts well sold out and a lot of money was raised. Johnny and I decided to put together a group consisting of South African exiles as well as the cream of players still in the country. From the offices of the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement (where I was working at the time) we phoned Barney Rachabane and Winston Mankunku Ngozi. They were both excited by the prospect of coming out to Europe to tour with Johnny’s exile band. Tete Mbambisa would be the piano player. Then Johnny suddenly died onstage in 1987. His liver gave way.
I was devastated.
For 24 years I carried four cassettes around with me which contained an interview that I did with Mbizo on 23 December 1985 in the offices of the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement on the Lauriergracht in Amsterdam. My only question to Johnny was “tell me what you think is important.” This is the transcription of that interview. the transcript was edited by ntone edjabe of chimurenga magazine.
JOHNNY DYANI INTERVIEW 22-23 DECEMBER 1985
Johnny Dyani: This police officer asked, ‘So, are these your boys?’ Chris [McGregor] went pale. I mean when this guy asked everybody jumped and Chris’ eyes widened. And it went quiet, man. And Chris was left breathing, huh huhm huh huhm. So the guy asked again, ‘Are these your boys?’ Chris wanted to get out of the car, you know, to answer this outside. So Nick [Moyake] said, ‘Tell him! Tell him Chris!’ and Nick was laughing: ‘Go ahead Chris, tell him! Tell him who we are. Tell him!’ And Chris was pale. ‘Are these your boys?’ We were just looking at Chris and Nick was enjoying it now. Nick said, ‘Come on Chris tell him. Let’s hear gents, what he’s gonna say, come on my brother…’ And this cop is like, what’s going on here? ‘Yeah come on Chris, tell him who we are.’ And Chris nodded silently, without saying any words. So Nick said, ‘Are you saying we are your boys?’ And Nick’s at the back, ’cos this guy is standing at the front door, at the window. So Nick pushes his head out the rear window, ‘It’s not true! I’m not nobody’s boy!
This guy turns around and says, ‘What you say?’ This police officer. And so as he walks around the kombi to open the door and Chris says, ‘Oh my God Nick, why do you?!’ So Nick is arguing with Chris and we’re all saying to Nick, ‘No man, why you say that for? Why do you say that?’ Then Dudu [Pukwana] asks, ‘What side are you on Chris? Whose side are you on?’ Then Maxine [McGregor] was waking up, she says, ‘You guys, you must realise we going to go to Europe and your passports will be taken and this and this…’ We are saying, ‘Who cares!?’ They have this thing that your passport… like little boys, you know, your candy will be taken off; you won’t go and play again, some shit like this you know? And we knew this as we were going to France, everything was becoming impossible. They were watching us like hell, man. They were watching us, ’cos we were touring at that time. So this officer, what did he say? This guy said ‘Kaffir’. So Nick said, ‘Don’t ever call me that, Sir.’ And we had this thing of… Dennis [Mphale] came up with this thing… again Dennis was the influence, ’cos he called a white guy ‘Sir Baas Mister’ you know? Just by hearing it it’s like clowning, silly, naughty. So Nick says, ‘Sir Baas Mister’. The cop was amazed man, he couldn’t believe it. He says, ‘You go at once before I do anything.’ Nick came out of the kombi and said, ‘So what can you do? I’m famous than you. I’m going to France.’ That guy was wild, he took his hat (screams), you know, he was all like this, on his gun. You know it was so…dramatic! Because Nick was so cool he kept on saying, ‘You cannot do me nothing, I’m famous than you, I’m going to France. Me.’ So Dudu told him, ‘Let’s go man, leave this guy. Don’t waste your time, leave this guy man.’ So Nick gets back in the car and phew! We drive.
Now we knew when we doing a tour, the money from the group and everything, we supposed to be the band. Now the other thing, every time we are travelling with this bus, with this kombi, we’ll give somebody a lift. Now who is this somebody, we were giving all kinds of lifts to the black guys, right, I mean we knew, but Chris didn’t know, Maxine didn’t know. That the guys were into (laughs), well, the guys who were in the underground would say, ‘I want to go to PE, can you arrange a lift?’ So if you travelled with the Blue Notes everybody is safe ’cos the Blue Notes is famous right? So you can get a lift with the Blue Notes. This car was going from East London, Cape Town, we touring! These guys would say, ‘Oh yeah this is a friend of mine, Johnny, he’s playing with the Blue Notes.’ Some guy would say to me, ‘Listen my boy you gonna give someone a lift, meeting so and so a time, going to PE. Talk to Chris.’ No we don’t have to talk to Chris. It’s our band. So we just say, ‘Chris, we have to pick up so and so at so and so place.’ Maxine would say, ‘No the car is full, the car is this…’ kind of. We say, ‘No there’s a lot of space!’ We knew that some of the guys were either into that or that or that… and now we were very aware of being watched. Because when we came to East London it was strange, really strange because there, in Fifth Street, this Donald Card cop…It was about eleven o’clock at night, so everybody lived at my home, there a boarding house right? The musicians stayed there and when we arrived Chris go sleep in town, a hotel some kind of. So at night a police car comes, a detective, black policeman, at my house. Two o’clock at night, we sitting there talking, my brothers and my sisters, other guys are sleeping. So they say, ‘We came to collect your son’, they said to my mother. So my mother’s panicking. So my brother said, ‘Nah Johnny, what is it?’ So this black policeman say, ‘Tula wena!’ you know, so my brother says, ‘Hey guys shuddup man’ to this guy wearing big boots, ‘just shuddup!’ So this private, a white guy, says, ‘No, he’ll be back, we just want to talk to him in Fifth Street.’ So my mother said, ‘I’m going with him.’ ‘No, he’ll be back.’ So my brother said, ‘Then I’m going with him.’ So they said no, my mother will go. So he said no, he’ll go. Two o’clock at night. So I get in the car with my mother and as we go out this policeman says to my brother, ‘You cheeky you!’ Then I thought, ‘Oh shit!’ So anyway, we went to Fifth Street. Donald Card was there, he was in pyjamas you know. So we came in his office, he’s sitting there, ‘Yes?’ So my mother said, ‘What is this?’ Now my mother had a very good thing to humiliate them, she would say, ‘What is it my son?’ The guy just shouts, ‘I’m not your son! Don’t ever say that!’ My mother shook her head and said, ‘You know I’ve never seen such a thing. You grown up now, I know your father than you. Your father was well-behaved, and you are not behaved. If your father knew…’ And this guy just went, you know, he just went, phew! He told the officer, ‘It’s all right.’ These tactics of getting to these guys man, you know. Boers at home. This is why people like Winnie Mandela, all these people, they are not scared of the Boers. ’Cos you have to just …find a way, without pulling a fight, you just… give them these shocks because they are shocked man. If you say, ‘Look man, don’t touch me like this…’ They will accept it, but they will say, ‘Go, go…’
Aryan Kaganof: The question for me, in terms of South African so-called jazz, instrumental music, this awareness, this knowledge, this ability to survive within racism, to be culturally hip, to get the better of the oppressor, it seems to me that that is the spirit that infuses the instrumental music of South Africa?
JD: You see I’ll tell you what, where I’m coming from. The reason I say that before we left we had all this police, we had all this… even Dorkay House was bugged… So this guy in the car said, ‘I hear you’re going to Europe?’ And he tried to smooth me in, he said, ‘Oh yeah I remember you from doing my rounds, you are a good boy, the police haven’t had any trouble from you.’ He’s saying that to my mother. ‘We haven’t any problems with you, so good luck.’ And we’ve only been there half an hour man, so my mother listened to this, what he saying right, so he said, ‘Good luck, I just wanted to see you and say that.’ So my mother said, ‘You mean you calling my son and me to come here at two in the morning to talk that?’ So I’m looking at this guy and he says, ‘Yeah that’s it, that’s all I wanted to say.’ So my mother stood there, you know, she shook her head and she said, ‘You still didn’t hear what I said about your father…’ and then, because these old people, they knew man, they knew these Boers’ mentalities...
This interview continues
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