Hamba kahle* Abdullah Ibrahim
A farewell to a South African jazz legend
Zohran Mamdani has famously good musical taste. At his inauguration, one of the songs that played was Mannenberg, by Abdullah Ibrahim. I can’t but imagine that Ibrahim would have been deeply pleased. He died in Bavaria on 15 June, aged ninety-one.
If you click on the YouTube link, you’ll see this text below the video: “For the first time ever, Abdullah Ibrahim, formerly known as Dollar Brand, went to Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned. All forms of music were banned. A lawyer smuggled one of Abdullah's songs into the control room, blocked the doors and played it over the loud speakers. Mandela's first sound of music in decades.” It’s worth a watch.
Ibrahim added an extra "n" when he wrote the title down; the township is spelled Manenberg. It’s one of the housing estates on the sand flats outside Cape Town where coloured families were dumped after being cleared out of District Six. (Yes, that’s why the film’s called District 9). He said later that the name stood for everyone being removed from everywhere, an erasure answered with a melody that sounded like the life the clearances were meant to destroy. It became the unofficial anthem of the anti-apartheid years by sounding like home.
In 1976, weeks after the police opened fire on schoolchildren in Soweto, he played an illegal benefit concert for the then-banned ANC. He came home to play at Mandela's inauguration in 1994. Mandela called him "our Mozart," which is the sort of thing that gets carved on plaques. The more exact compliment is that he showed dignity could be a form of defiance. He resisted a regime simply by sounding wholly and unapologetically like the people it wanted gone.
I last saw Ibrahim play two decades ago in South Africa, and listening to him in the era of Unfreedom Days pointed to the work that remains unfinished, in South Africa as everywhere where apartheid persists. Which makes hamba kahle feel like the right thing to say.
*Hamba kahle is a Zulu often said of the dead. It literally means to ‘go well’, like bon voyage but more final; like the Latin vale but kinetic; like rest in peace, but with the understanding that there’s still a journey ahead.