Clegg, Johnny (1953-2019), was an English-born South African pop musician and anthropologist . He was the leader of two popular multiracial bands that played a form of pop music based on Zulu traditional material. As a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and performer on a number of African instruments, Clegg became a major influence in the type of South African music known as “township pop” or “township jive.”
Jonathan Paul Clegg was born on July 13, 1953, in Rochdale, Lancashire. He moved with his family to South Africa in 1959. The family settled in Johannesburg. As a teenager, Clegg came to love the rhythms and sounds he heard from Zulu street musicians, especially the street performer Mntonanazo Mzila. In the early 1970’s, while Clegg was studying social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, he met a migrant worker named Sipho Mchunu. The two worked initially as a duo, Johnny and Sipho, and from 1976 as part of a full electric band named Juluka (the Zulu word for sweat).
Juluka reflected an exciting blend of traditional and new music. It was founded upon a highly rhythmic Zulu musical form called mbaqanga, but incorporated innovations by Clegg and Mchunu derived from international (largely Western) rock themes. Juluka was popular among black South Africans. But during the 1970’s and 1980’s, a white minority government ruled South Africa and practiced a policy of rigid racial segregation called apartheid (separateness). This made multiracial gatherings virtually illegal. Nevertheless, Juluka scored a hit with its first single “Woza Friday” (1978) and, in the early 1980’s, the group toured Europe and the United States.
Juluka made seven albums, including Universal Men (1979), a journey in music through the life of a Zulu migrant worker, and Scatterlings of Africa (1982), whose title song became a breakthrough hit in the United Kingdom and other countries. In 1985, Mchunu left Johannesburg to work on his family’s small cattle farm, and Juluka disbanded. In 1986, Clegg and some of the band’s members formed another group, called Savuka (meaning We Have Awoken). This new band built upon the foundation laid by Juluka, producing a more hard-edged blend of mbaqanga and Westernized rock. Savuka also toured outside South Africa. The band’s albums included Shadow Man (1988), Cruel Crazy Beautiful World (1989), and Heat, Dust & Dreams (1993). Clegg also recorded an internationally popular solo album, Third World Child (1986).
Clegg wrote several works on South African music, culture, and dance, including the paper “The Music of Zulu Immigrant Workers in Johannesburg” (1981) and the book Ukubuyisa Isidumbu (1981), which analyzed the ideology of vengeance in two rural South African locations. In 1991, the French government made Clegg a Chevalier of Arts and Letters. In 2012, Clegg received the Order of Ikhamanga, Silver, from the South African government, the highest honor a civilian can receive in that country. In 2015, he was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire. Clegg died on July 16, 2019. His son Jesse Clegg also became a popular rock performer in South Africa.
