Hugh Masekela’s citation for his honorary doctorate from Wits concluded: “Hugh Masekela’s career is testimony to the capacity of music to animate the social and the political imagination, alongside its aesthetic potency. The resilience with which he has pursued this in a career spanning an extraordinary seven decades merits academic recognition and a standing ovation and it is therefore befitting that the University if the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg awards an honorary doctorate degree to Hugh Ramopolo Masekela.”
At the ceremony, Dr Masekela implored graduands to become the “new pioneers of African heritage restoration”.
“We have long relegated our magnificent vernacular literature to the dust and insect-infested floors of crumbling old warehouses in favour of imported writings, hip hop, rap, and other forms of trending fashions that distance us as far as possible from our rich traditional legacy. We need to study, learn, and teach our traditional music, dance, oral literature more in our own academies and educational institutions where we can revive and redevelop what has been lost from the positive content of our glorious history,” he said.
Masekela made an everlasting, significant contribution to our society, of which we are deeply appreciative. Hamba Kahle comrade, rest in peace.
Watch Dr Hugh Masekela honoured by Wits University in 2017:
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Here is the full citation: Dr Hugh Ramopolo Masekela (2017):
Hugh Ramopolo Masekela, elder statesman of South African jazz and popular music, was born in 1939 in Kwaguqa in the then Witbank. It was there that he has recalled being exposed to the stories told by migrant mineworkers as they longed for home, and which were later to be articulated in one of his signature compositions, Stimela.
Both of his parents were social workers, and his father had ambitions as an artist, sculptor and architect. He received his first music lessons on the piano in his parents’ house, which was where he also first listened to jazz records.
After his family moved to Johannesburg, Masekela was sent to school at St Peter’s Seminary, which was directed by the noted British cleric and activist Bishop Trevor Huddleston. Still a teenager, Masekela saw the Kirk Douglas film about Bix Beiderbecke, Young Man With A Horn, which inspired him to take up the trumpet. Huddleston provided an instrument, and he joined his first ensemble, the Huddleston Jazz Band, at St Peter’s. Huddleston later famously arranged for Louis Armstrong to send Masekela a trumpet in 1955.
After Huddleston’s expulsion from South Africa for his anti-apartheid activism in 1956, and the closing of St Peter’s Seminary under the Bantu Education Act, Masekela played in various studio recording groups and performance ensembles, including the African Jazz Revue, a prominent travelling stage show that featured the young Miriam Makeba and other rising South African artists. He was a member of the orchestra in Todd Matshikiza’s landmark jazz opera King Kong, which opened on the stage of the Wits Great Hall on 2 February 1959.
Listen to Hugh Masekela’s speech as he receives his honorary doctorate:
Speech by Dr Hugh Masekela as he receives his honorary Doctorate.
The success of the venture enabled the young Masekela to move to Cape Town, where he joined the pioneering if short-lived group The Jazz Epistles. The group cultivated a modernist, bebop-oriented style, documented on a single historic recording in 1960, which came to be termed “township bop”, a designation that would subsequently be applied to Masekela’s work in the US.
In 1959, Masekela also participated in a recording project with visiting American pianist John Mehegan, professor of music at the Juilliard (later Manhattan) School of Music. The following year, Masekela travelled to London to study at the Guildhall School of Music, but soon afterwards, with the encouragement of Makeba, he transferred to the Manhattan School of Music in New York, with the support of Mehegan, Harry Belafonte, and by some accounts Dizzy Gillespie. His first solo album, Trumpet Africaine, was released in the US in 1961, and he reportedly served as musical director on Makeba’s second album recorded there.
Listen (Stimela, Hugh Masekela):