Mzilikazi James Khumalo leaves the podium for the final time

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Mzilikazi Khumalo was born on 20 June 1932 into a deeply religious family of pastors, then living on a KwaZulu-Natal farm owned by the Salvation Army, as the eldest in a family of seven children. In that family, each child learnt to play musical instruments and, over the years, he studied music through the Royal School graded lessons and examinations as well. 

In her published tribute in City Press this past weekend, his sister, journalist Nomavenda Mathiane, wrote of her brother: “My life with him began in the early 1950s, when we were living in Western Native Township, where our parents sojourned while in charge of the Salvation Army church. Cramped in this tiny, two-bedroomed township house, life seemed to be a perpetual struggle. We watched our parents battle to make ends meet on a meagre church salary. However, in hindsight, those were the best times of our lives as a family. We enjoyed many evenings of song, laughter and breaking bread.

“At that time, Mzilikazi had completed training as a teacher at the Pretoria Normal College, where he studied with Desmond Tutu, [and writers] Doc Bikitsha, Stan Motjuwadi and Casey Motsisi, to mention but a few. Bhuti was an all-rounder. He was not only an academic, but a sportsperson who played tennis and cricket – and boy, did he look great in his white cricket outfit!

“He then taught at Wallmansthal Secondary School while studying for a BA at Unisa. In the tiny Western Native Township, Mzilikazi was one of the few to acquire a degree.” 

In conversation, Mathiane added that as the family expanded and as he grew up, Mzilikazi Khumalo naturally came to exercise a kind of parental responsibility over his younger siblings. In his adult years, he regularly paid close attention to the welfare of all the members of his extended family. Mathiane said her sibling always showed great familial pride in each person’s accomplishments, regardless of whether they were scholarly achievements or their work as a carpenter.

Given the realities of apartheid South Africa, an intellectually curious Khumalo directed his ambitions towards becoming a teacher. Then, after teaching in a township high school, he eventually moved on to the University of the Witwatersrand where he became a language instructor (and eventually professor) in isiZulu as well as other African languages. His postgraduate research and writing concerned tonology, an aspect of the discipline of linguistics that focuses on the interplay between intonation and meaning in spoken language – a topic that may have had some special relevance in exploring a fuller understanding of the texture of communication in the various African languages he knew, and in many cases, the distinctive clicks that formed elements in the aural landscape.  

Then, in the early 1970s, he became a special Fulbright lecturer in the US at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Illinois, for their African languages programme, and I first met him shortly after his return to Johannesburg. A few months later, one of the tasks for our embassy office was to interview and recommend applicants for the national slate of Fulbright scholarship awards for postgraduate degree studies in America. A key step for would-be candidates was a screening interview conducted by a panel of South African former Fulbrighters. 

Given 1970s South Africa, the country’s racial realities would almost inevitably have meant such panels would only consist of white academics. But having now met Khumalo, and having learned of his US university teaching experiences, it seemed entirely appropriate to ask him to serve on our screening panel. But that encounter with him actually gave me no hint of Mzilikazi Khumalo’s life in music, let alone how just important that role would be for the nation.

In a nation that seemed headed towards open conflict, for many participating choristers, black and white, it was the first time they had joined together in a musical activity with people of different races.

By the time Mzilikazi Khumalo had become a university lecturer, he had already had a long engagement with choral music, including his first compositions and leading his own choir. But his musical efforts became increasingly important for the country because of his central role in the “Nation Building” Choral Festivals. A brainchild of the late Aggrey Klaaste, the editor of The Sowetan in 1989, the festivals became a musical contribution towards healing rifts in a troubled nation in the final years of apartheid, at a time when it seemed entirely possible a real civil war might well erupt.

Klaaste had brought Khumalo together with classical and choral conductor Richard Cock and another conductor, Danny Pooe, to create the festivals. Describing those efforts, Cock explained how seriously Khumalo had taken on this responsibility – the two men travelled around the countryside, despite the difficult conditions of that time, to audition potential choirs for the festival. Thereafter, Khumalo would visit each of the choirs chosen for the festival, before they all came together in Johannesburg for the performances, to ensure every choir was correctly preparing the music he had selected which all the choirs would sing in unison with their hundreds of voices.

In a nation that seemed headed towards open conflict, for many participating choristers, black and white, it was the first time they had joined together in a musical activity with people of different races. Those divisions Khumalo and his colleagues had sought to erase through music was also a response to the way earlier nonracial and multiracial cultural activities in the country that had been forced to wither under apartheid. 

Along the way, Khumalo also came to have an increasingly influential role in the South African Music Rights Organisation (Samro). One such project, again in association with Cock, was a series of carefully edited compilations of traditional and composed melodies, along with full piano accompaniments. They were printed with the notes for the singers in both Western-style staff notation and, significantly, tonic solfa notation. The latter is the syllabically based notation – do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do and other related syllables for sharps and flats – African choirs and singers have traditionally used as the notation they sang from, rather than that lesser-known staff notation. For Prof Khumalo (and by now, everyone called him that), it was crucial to have both forms on the pages together to ensure the nation’s music would be accessible to everyone who wished to perform it, regardless or whether they had been exposed to staff notation.

Andre le Roux, who had worked closely with Mzilikazi Khumalo while Le Roux was a senior officer at the Samro Foundation, said of the older man’s presence there: “When I started at Samro in 2006 he was there and firmly entrenched as Samro vice-chairman, Samro Endowment for the National Arts vice-chairman, composer in residence of sorts and authority on all things choral, musical, African and indigenous. He was the wise man of music that many came to see and drink from his cup of wisdom. The difficult discussions we had were numerous but entertaining and I often felt like a student in his presence being gently mentored and at times castigated.” But never ignored.

Then, following the establishment of the nation’s nonracial democracy, Khumalo also became an active participant in the special commission that created the country’s new national anthem, drawing the nation’s anthem of struggle and hope, Nkosi Sikelel’ Africa, with Die Stem, the official theme music of the apartheid regime. The new, combined anthem had multilingual lyrics and a musical bridge to bring the two songs together into one combined anthem. While the new anthem remains controversial for some, for most South Africans it has become a tangible musical symbol of national reconciliation.

Of course, all along the way, Khumalo had also been working on his own composing. His first composition was Ma Ngificwa Ukufa in 1959 followed by other works for voice and choir such as Five African Songs that included a setting of the traditional melody, Bawo Thixo Somandla, further arranged for orchestra by Peter Louis van Dijk.