Read an excerpt from Hugh Masekela’s autobiography, Still Grazing
More about the book!
Hugh Ramopolo Masekela died in Johannesburg on 23 January, 2018, after a long battle with prostate cancer.
The jazz legend was seventy-eight.
The Johannesburg Review of Books has shared an excerpt from Masekela’s autobiography, Still Grazing.
The book was first published in the United States in 2004, and rereleased in a new edition in South Africa for the first time in 2017 by Jacana Media.
Click on the link for more about the book!
Still Grazing begins:
I grew up in a small town in South Africa named Witbank, a one-street, redneck, right-wing Afrikaner town, surrounded by coal mines and coal trains with endless carriages and coal-packed containers crisscrossing the horizon, pulled by steam engines we called ‘Mankalanyana’, churning smoke up into the air. I remember seeing women in the mornings and at sunset running alongside the coal trains with large tin cups collecting the coal nuggets that fell from the cars. It was a tough town where African miners drank themselves stuporous to blot out memory of the blackness of the mines and the families and lands they’d left behind, often never to see again. But even when the burning coal and dust blackened out the sun, we still had music to sing our sorrow and illuminate our ecstasy. […] It was in those days in Witbank that music first captured my soul, forced me to recognise its power of possession. It hasn’t let go yet.
Categories International Non-fiction South Africa
Tags Book excerpts Book extracts Hugh Masekela Jacana Media Still Grazing
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