Johnny Clegg & Savuka: "Scatterlings Of Africa" (1982)

Jonathan "Johnny" Clegg (born 7 June 1953) is a musician from South Africa, who has recorded and performed with his bands Juluka and Savuka. Sometimes called Le Zoulou Blanc ("The White Zulu"), he is an important figure in South African popular music history, with songs that mix Zulu with English lyrics, and African with various Western European (such as Celtic) music styles.

Clegg was born in Bacup, near Rochdale, Lancashire, to an English father and Rhodesian mother. Already in his youth, Johnny Clegg, a white, English-speaking person with what he called a "secular Jewish" upbringing in the UK, Israel, Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), Zambia, and South Africa, became interested in Zulu street music and took part in traditional Zulu dance competitions.

As a young man, in the early stages of his musical career, he combined his music with the study of anthropology, a subject which he also taught for a while at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he was influenced, among others, by the work of David Webster, a social anthropologist who was assassinated in 1989.

Clegg formed the first racially mixed South African band, Juluka, with gardener and Zulu musician Sipho Mchunu. Because it was illegal for racially mixed bands to perform in South Africa during the apartheid era, their first album Universal Men received no air play on the state owned SABC, but it became a word-of-mouth hit.

Juluka's / Clegg's music was both implicitly and explicitly political; not only was the fact of the success of the band (which openly celebrated African culture in a bi-racial band) a thorn in the flesh of a political system based on racial separation, the band also produced some explicitly political songs. For example, the album "Work for All" (which includes a song with the same title) picked up on South African trade union slogans in the mid-80's. Even more explicit was the later Savuka album Third World Child in 1987, with songs like "Asimbonanga" ("We haven't seen him")[2], which called for the release of Nelson Mandela, and which called out the names of three representative martyrs of the South African liberation struggle - Steve Biko, Victoria Mxenge, and Neil Aggett.

As a result, Clegg and other band members were arrested several times and concerts routinely broken up.


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- Lyrics:

Copper sun sinking low
Scatterlings and fugitives
Hooded eyes and weary brows
Seek refuge in the night

Chorus
They are the scatterlings of africa
Each uprooted one
On the road to phelamanga
Where the world began
I love the scatterlings of africa
Each and every one
In their hearts a burning hunger
Beneath the copper sun

Ancient bones from olduvai
Echoes of the very first cry
Who made me here and why
Beneath the copper sun?
African idea
African idea
Make the future clear
Make the future clear

Chorus.....

And we are the scatterlings of africa
Both you and i
We are on the road to phelamanga
Beneath a copper sky
And we are the scatterlings of africa
On a journey to the stars
Far below, we leave forever
Dreams of what we were