Africa’s Abdullah Ibrahim, one of the finest musicians of our time, turns ninety-one on Thursday October 9, the very day that Uganda celebrates its birth as an independent country. I will spend the day reflecting on my beloved homeland and overdosing on Abdullah Ibrahim’s exceptionally beautiful musical offerings that have accompanied me throughout most of my adulthood. 

I will allow my mind to imagine what the 32-year-old Dollar Brand, for that was Abdullah Ibrahim’s name at the time, felt on that day. Newly arrived in Europe, an exile from Apartheid South Africa, the news of another African country gaining independence must have been sweeter than the music that he had so effortlessly written and performed to great public acclaim. Surely the great speech that British Prime Minister Sir Harold MacMillan had delivered in the South African Parliament in Cape Town on February 3, 1960, must have come alive in Dollar Brand’s mind. 

It was in that speech that MacMillan had told an incredulous European minority in South Africa: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” MacMillan added: “As a fellow member of the Commonwealth it is our earnest desire to give South Africa our support and encouragement, but I hope you won't mind my saying frankly that there are some aspects of your policies which make it impossible for us to do this without being false to our own deep convictions about the political destinies of free men to which in our own territories we are trying to give effect.”

Notwithstanding the worsening of Apartheid, Dollar Brand probably believed that the wind, now coursing through East Africa, was targeting his homeland. Uganda’s independence brought our elders cheer and probably gave South Africans some hope. The words of the new Uganda National Anthem must have been a delicious treat for his musical ear and may have energised him as it did our parents and others who understood such things. 

We sang the great words that spoke of laying our future in Uganda’s hands and pledged to always stand united in our collective embrace of freedom. We pledged to live in peace and friendship with all our neighbours, even as we left no doubt that we would always stand for our own dear land, the Pearl of Africa’s Crown. The emotion of the moment must have enabled the adults to believe that a bright future lay ahead, and our journey would be an unstoppable sprint towards well-earned prosperity in a democratic and just society.

It has been sixty-two years of a bumpy ride up the mountains of hope and renewal, and down the valleys of darkness and despair. Uganda has been envied and admired by neighbours and distant nations in the 1960s, despised and abandoned in the 1970s, declared dead before our miraculous revival in the 1980s, and praised as a beacon of hope during our celebrated recovery in the 1990s. Things have since veered off course, and our political headlights cannot see through the fog that deters one from peering into the future. 

However, like Abdullah Ibrahim, we hold on to hope for better days ahead. That is what sustained him through the darkness that had engulfed his homeland. He had spent his years in exile fighting through music and song, through speech and representation, with a singular focus on Ekaya, home, and frequent mention of Ekapa, the name that his people called Cape Town, his city of birth. Together with Sathima Bea Benjamin, his late wife who was also a gifted musician, the couple had employed their international fame to bring South Africa’s story to the world and had used music to mobilize and encourage their people back home in their shared goal of freedom.

But not even Abdullah Ibrahim could have predicted what was about to happen when he visited Cape Town to record music in 1974. During a break between scheduled recording at a studio, he started improvising a tune on a piano, with no score and no prior rehearsal with the band. This band consisted of Abdullah Ibrahim (piano), Paul Michaels (bass), Monty Weber (drums), Basil Coetzee (tenor saxophone & flute), and Robbie Jansen (alto saxophone). The tape was rolling when Ibrahim started playing. The bassist joined in, then the drummer, then the alto saxophonist, followed by the tenor saxophonist whose long solo brought the theme together and spoke a wordless protest declaring a resolute resistance to the injustice. 

They were reading from an invisible score, informed by their outstanding musicianship, and their long experience of the dehumanizing conditions in which they had been held on account of their skin colour. Sixteen minutes later, a masterpiece had been created in a single take. They produced one of the most beautiful songs in Abdullah Ibrahim’s vast canon, and laid claim to being among the leaders of the peaceful resistance. 

The song without words was named “Mannenberg,” after a suburban area of Cape Town into which the Apartheid regime had forced people of mixed racial heritage to relocate under the infamous Group Areas Act. The improvised song was so popular that it became the anthem of the resistance against racial injustice. It was released on the album “Mannenberg – Is Where It’s Happening” in 1974.

In the years since Mannenberg, Abdullah Ibrahim has become one of the most important composers and performers of Jazz music in the world, blending African and American elements to create something that is uniquely his. He has received high international awards and honours. A British music critic referred to him as the “African Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.” A very high honour indeed, for Ellington and Monk were the foremost American musical innovators of their time.

Nelson Mandela called Abdullah Ibrahim South Africa’s answer to Mozart. And one need only listen to just a few of Ibrahim’s more than seventy albums to appreciate Mandela’s verdict. The world knows Abdullah Ibrahim as a giant of the piano, a great composer, the man who brought South African music and African American jazz into a happy marriage. I know him as poet of freedom, an unabashed protector of our culture and identity, an author of music so beautiful that it invariably triggers in me a great longing for a time and friendships that are irretrievably sealed off by a huge mist that that my feeble brain and eyes cannot penetrate. 

So, I call him “The Unique Abdullah Ibrahim,” a genius and grand sage that communicates through music. He started playing the piano at age seven. Eighty-four years later, he remains a master of the instrument, living mostly in Munich Germany, but a citizen of a free and democratic South Africa.  

I invite you to join me in celebrating this great and unique African. I will listen to his music on hod special day, with titles like “Banyana,” “The Mountain,” “The Wedding,” “Water From an Ancient Well,” “Mandela,” and, of course, “Mannenberg” getting replays throughout the day. I will let the emotions take me where they may. 

A very happy birthday Brother Abdullah Ibrahim. Thank you for the joy that you have brought us over the decades.

© Muniini K. Mulera

Listen to Mannenberg (1974)