Early Life and Career
Clegg was born in Bacup, Lancashire, to an English father and a Rhodesian mother. Clegg's mother's family were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Poland, and Clegg had a "secular Jewish" upbringing. Already in his youth, Clegg, a white, English-speaking person who was raised in the U.K., 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.
In 1969, Clegg formed the first prominent 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"), 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.
Read more about this topic: Johnny Clegg
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