25 years after the release of Paul Simon's Graceland album, the singer-songwriter returned to South Africa to visit the musicians who worked with him on what many believe is his musical masterpiece. A new documentary film, Under African Skies, chronicles Simon's journey and the role that music — and artists — may have played in bringing about the end of apartheid.
This was 1985. Nelson Mandela still was in prison (on year 22 of his sentence and more than five years away from his eventual release.) Apartheid struggles and extreme racial tensions in South Africa had reached a vicious zenith. And there also was a cultural boycott in place. Artists — no matter how famous or big-hearted they might be — were supposed to stay away from the country.
Joseph Shabalala, founder and leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the South African acapella group featured on the album that Simon introduced to the American audience via a now famous performance on Saturday Night Live well before Graceland ever hit record shops, calls Simon “brother.”
“He just come to me like a baby, like, ‘Father, can you teach me something?’ And we hug. That was my first time to hug … a white man,” Shabalala recalls in the film. “When we started working together, we didn’t see black or white… He’s my brother.”
Graceland won numerous awards, including a Grammy for record of the year, and has gone on to become one of the most enduring albums in American music. Musically it did things that hadn’t been done before in popular genres, mixing traditional African tunes, sounds and rhythms, sampling bits from disparate cultures.
But the celebrated album is much more than the sum of its parts. For many of us, Graceland — rightly or wrongly — planted seeds of the beauty and joyful strength of Africa in our imaginations for the first time, which led more than a few of us to dig deeper into issues of injustice there and raise our voices on behalf of our African brothers and sisters.
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