(Music) Bio
Out of the Nutshell, A Tree Growed Tall...
Africa
Mondi, Simpiwe & Cat
My 1977-1978 gap-year in the Transkei, South Africa, brought a collaboration with Kit Stone, a fellow singer/songwriter in the Bob Dylan tradition.
Together we wrote Ukumandisa, a musical.
We did our best to steer clear of apartheid politics, rejecting our first idea for the musical: a green Martian arriving in South Africa, provoking pandemonium as the white government tried to sort out whether the alien was "white," "colored," or "African."
Nevertheless, one song got us in trouble with the South African Secret Police who had started showing up, uninvited, at our hospital parties. In Ukumandisa, a professor and a psychiatrist — both musicians — are jailed for spreading joy, and bemoan their fate in "Jail Song."
Kit wrote the lyrics for "Jail Song"
Freedom's in the mind
Not the bars behind
Holding down mankind
In chains
Cast away your chains
You can end this pain
And be free again
Free again
Free again
Free again from pain!
Have 12-string, will travel
It didn't help that Steve Biko's wife worked at our hospital, and that I had attended Steve Biko's funeral in Kingwilliamstown.
We were well into Ukumandisa rehearsals and had booked a stage in Encgobo, the capital of Transkei, when the production was shut down: the (white) Secret Police approached our (African) actresses and warned them away; in a few short weeks, our cast had evaporated.
Kit and I put our best face on it all, playing impromptu gigs as we over-landed for 4 months through Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Kenya.
Naturally, we loudly sang "The Jail Song" everywhere we went!
While the script fell to pieces over the years, Kit and I did cassette-player-record all the songs.
Some years later, I wrote "Nelson Mandela's Free (Oh Steve, If You Could Only See)."
Bantu Stephen Biko
Nelson Mandela
