muller_spirit of africa

Capturing the "Spirit of Africa" in the Jazz Singing of South African-BornSathima Bea Benjamin

Muller, Carol Ann.

Research in African Literatures, Volume 32, Number 2, Summer 2001,pp. 133-152 (Article)

Published by Indiana University PressDOI: 10.1353/ral.2001.0055

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Capturing the “Spirit of Africa” in theJazz Singing of South African-BornSathima Bea Benjamin1

Carol Muller

For the image [of Africa]—as identification—marks the site of an ambivalence.Its representation is always spatially split—its makes present something thatis absent—and temporally deferred: it is the representation of a time that isalways elsewhere, a repetition.

—Homi Bhabha, Interrogating Identity 51 (original emphasis)

I think the basis of everything I do is Africa. There’s a sense of rhythm that, ifyou really listen carefully, is there.

—personal communication, Sathima Bea Benjamin, April 1990

In May 1961, one of Drum Magazine’s reporters described the Sundaynight jazz scene in Cape Town, South Africa.2 The Sunday night gath-erings had been initiated by Cape Town-born jazz pianist Dollar Brand.

Dollar was not his real name. It was the nickname given to the youngBrand to reference his American exchanges. These were the friendshipshe fostered with African American sailors when their ships arrived in theCape Town harbor in the 1950s. He would change his name once morewhen he later converted to Islam. Though some people in Cape Townstubbornly hold onto the more familiar “Dollar Brand,” Abdullah Ibrahimis the name by which he is known internationally. In the early 1960s, Dollarwas the center of the Cape jazz scene:

The naked light bulb, like the mood, is blue. The only other illu-mination in the place comes from the glowing ends of cigarettes,or maybe a stray moonbeam filtering down the slopes of TableMountain and in through a back window.

The chairs are arranged carefully, like pews, and the congre-gation is as devout as any other Sunday night gathering. In thedarkened corner the tall, thin guy with the tight jeans and the size12 army boots is leading his group through an original composi-tion. The long, bony fingers slide or thump, caress or squeeze thenotes out, and the horn, the bass, and the drums, catch the mes-sage and pass it on.

Dark as it is, the Dollar is gleaming tonight. This is the realstuff, the pulse beat of the jazz world in the Cape, and DollarBrand and his group are pumping it out—though this is theirnight off from six days of cafe-capers with the beatnik gang.3

From this center of the jazz scene, which is up an iron stair-case near where the Cape’s trolley buses get their nightly wash andbrush-up, the music world stretches far down the Peninsula, andevery other month some new guy with a horn or an alto sax or abass is coming up from the shadows to catch the ear of the peoplewho know their music.

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In the past few years, the Cape has taken over as THE placefor music, snatching the laurel from the backrooms and cellars athousand miles north in [Johannesburg]. Dollar was in at the startof the move south, but he doesn’t understand how it happened.Anyone who has been around the Cape long enough to know his musicremembers the Big Band age just after the war. But they were all African,fifteen or more, beating it out like ebony Dorseys and Goodmans. Maybeit’s the changing mood of South Africa that African music—Cape-wards, anyhow—has faded to no more than a township tinlid. So the Coloreds have taken over, and the mood is softer, sweeter, andmore serious.

Dollar and his group are the lone wolves of the Cape Tin PanAlley, dedicated jazz men all. They play it their way—and if the cus-tomers don’t like it then that’s tough on the customers.[ . . .] “Jazzis the real classics,” he says. “It’s all here, at the Cape. The place isdripping with talent and I’m not sure I ever want to be anywhereelse.” (Drum May 1961:46, emphasis added)

The place the Drum writer is describing is a club that was called TheAmbassadors. Dollar/Abdullah’s wife, Sathima, recalled:

The guy who owned [The Ambassadors] was Dave Saunders, andhe was a friend of Abdullah’s. He had this lovely space inWoodstock. You had to climb these stairs. He had this space andhe had a piano. And Abdullah started. We had thirteen people thefirst week, we used to do it only on Sunday nights. And after a cou-ple of weeks, we couldn’t contain all the people. It was just a placewhere you went and you sat down and listened. There was nodancing, no food, nothing. And, as I said, there was too muchmixing going on at the time when they didn’t want people to bemixing. So we had to close that down(Sathima Bea Benjamin, pers. comm., Apr. 1988)

Despite his desire to stay in South Africa, less than two years laterDollar Brand realized that his beloved Cape Town had become hostile toall jazz performed not only by people of African but also of mixed racialdescent. Dollar and his partner jazz singer Beatty Benjamin (who latermarried Dollar, and changed her name to Sathima Bea Benjamin) wouldhave to move a long way from the intimacy and warmth of the Cape Townjazz community described above. In 1962, as the Afrikaner Nationalist gov-ernment clamped down on jazz performances by people like Dollar andBeatty, who were of mixed racial heritage, these two artists realized that ifthey were to survive as performers they would have to leave the country.4After a farewell concert at The Ambassadors on 21 January 1962,5 Dollarand Beatty followed several South Africans who had left before them,including singer Miriam Makeba, trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and lesserknown Ben “Satch” Masinga. Dollar and Beatty went to Europe. It wasthere, in Switzerland, in early February 1963, that Beatty heard DukeEllington was performing in the neighborhood. Through a remarkable,

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and what Sathima believes to be a “magical,” turn of events, DukeEllington scheduled Dollar and Beatty to perform on the morning of 23February 1963 in the now defunct Barclay Recording Studio in Paris.These two young South African jazz musicians joined American jazz greatsDuke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, to record together. The sessionresulted in the release of an LP shortly after that entitled “Duke EllingtonPresents the Dollar Brand Trio.” This launched the international career ofthe South African pianist.

It took another 34 years before a compact disc recording of Sathima’ssinging in Paris was released. Nonetheless, in February 1963 it was clear forthese two South African artists that jazz performance, in either itsAmerican or Cape Town inflections, would be their passports to member-ship of an international community of musicians. As it was for several otherSouth Africans, jazz became their means of survival in more than threedecades of political exile from South Africa. More specifically in thisperiod, it was their knowledge of American popular and jazz music, andseveral fortuitous encounters with African American jazz musicians thatenabled several South Africans to settle in England, and the United Statesin particular. Among others, Miriam Makeba was taken under the wing ofHarry Belafonte,6 and both Hugh Masekela and Ben “Satchmo” Masingawere guided by Louis Armstrong.7 Abdullah Ibrahim and Sathima BeaBenjamin were greatly assisted by Duke Ellington.

While Abdullah and Sathima both started off their musical lives inCape Town, South Africa, over the past 40 years, they have developed twoquite distinctive jazz styles. These emerged initially out of the ways in whichthey integrated the memories of their individual experiences living in CapeTown, the southernmost city in Africa, into the mediated sounds ofAmerican jazz that were central to life in the Cape from the 1930s to theearly 1960s. Classified by the state as “colored” (mixed race) in the early1950s, both Sathima and Abdullah brought to their musical compositionand performance a peculiar set of experiences that had been shaped by fac-tors of gender, language, class, educational opportunity, exposure to inter-national media, and family history. Perhaps one of the most powerfulfactors in molding their musical styles and compositional output was theexperience of being people of color living first inside, and then outside ofSouth Africa for more than three decades (see Muller, “Sathima BeaBenjamin,” and Wicomb). In this state of alienation and for a period oftime out of an individual and collective need to perform for political liber-ation, jazz performance became the vehicle for invoking a sense of homefor Abdullah and a spirit of love and community for Sathima. Throughoutthis period of movement, Abdullah called his jazz ensemble “Ekaya,” whichmeans “at or from home,” and Sathima named hers “Windsong,” a site ofwarmth and understanding she remembers feeling in the strong winds ofthe Cape southeaster. Similarly, in the late 1970s they established a recordcompany based in New York City, which they called “Ekapa” meaning “at orfrom the Cape.” Ekapa elicits memories of a particular place and kind ofexperience in the southern part of Africa that their brands of jazz perfor-mance continually reference and are derived from.

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This paper focuses on the jazz singing and composition of SathimaBea Benjamin (though it occasionally juxtaposes some input fromAbdullah to try to avoid facile generalizations about “colored” identity andmusical performance). It examines how she has articulated her memoriesof, and relationship to, the southern part of the African continent in hersound, style, compositional process, and ideas about jazz performance asit was framed by African American jazz singers from the 1940s and ’50s.The embedding of cultural memory in musical performance is not new tojazz historians. Sam Floyd has taken the lead in suggesting that the powerof black music in the United States is located in an aesthetic that is embed-ded in an “African cultural memory.” This memory derived from themovement of slaves from the western parts of the African continent to theAmericas,8 and it became encoded in the oral transmission of AfricanAmerican performances from the earliest spirituals, the HarlemRenaissance, and contemporary popular styles. Floyd discusses specificmusical characteristics that suggest historic and stylistic connections withmusic of the African continent. These include the use of microtonal inflec-tions, rough vocal timbres, vocal grunts and ululations, an easy transitionfrom speech to singing, hand clapping and foot stomping accompani-ment, and the incorporation of clever figures of speech into a call-and-response format (56).

Sathima similarly believes that jazz emerged out of the experience andmemory of cultural and material separation and loss, and the attemptthrough a particular aesthetic of jazz performance, to return to a sense ofhome. But her narrative relocates that experience of people of color backto the continent of Africa in the twentieth century, and more specificallyto South Africa. With the movement of South African jazz musicians, likeSathima and Abdullah, away from that country, and into exile in the USAand Europe in the 1960s, the contemporary connections in jazz historyand performance to the African continent necessarily take on a shape andstyle different from that outlined by Floyd for African American perfor-mance.9 In Sathima’s case, jazz came to articulate a particular kind ofregional, historical, and gendered experience and relationship—betweenpeople of color from the southernmost part of Africa and those in thesouthern United States. She connects the two spaces through an aestheticof performance she calls the “southern touch.”

This paper is divided into four small vignettes, each of which is shapedout of what I think are key moments in Sathima’s personal narrative andcreative output. Each, I hope, will point to an evolving sense of a “spirit ofSouth Africanness” Sathima infuses into her jazz singing. A central part ofeach of these definitions of “South Africanness” is, ironically, injected witha shot of live or mediated, primarily African American popular song. Thefirst moment provides some discussion of formative experiences in herpath towards jazz singing, particularly as this young woman interfaced withlive and mediated jazz and dance band performance in Cape Town in the1950s. The second section describes her meeting with Duke Ellington andthe subsequent recording, with its intriguing history of disappearance andretrieval, the timing of which has served to keep the memory of Duke alive


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for Sathima through much of her life. The third section briefly outlinesher life “in retreat” in New York City, a retreat from apartheid South Africaand, for Sathima, into physically mothering two children and establishingEkapa, her own record label. The fourth section is a cursory discussion oftwo elements of Sathima’s compositional output and musical style. I focuson the “spirit of South Africanness” in two performances. The first is a jazzperformance of early twentieth-century American Tin Pan Alley, “LovelessLove” (WC Handy) /“Careless Love” (Spencer Williams), which she singsto a “Cape Town beat.” The other is a set of her own compositions, calledThe Liberation Suite, a combination of three separate songs: “Nations in Me-New Nation a Comin’,” “Children of Soweto,” and “Africa.”10 I includea brief discussion of how race, class, gender, and the specific politicalmoment have intersected in her life to produce a very particular sense ofmusical style and performance persona as a woman singer. I suggest thather style and spirit of South Africanness are tied to her memories of life inCape Town. These are embodied in the historical and aesthetic connec-tions she imagines between her own experience coming from southernAfrica and those of African slaves who were taken to the southern part ofthe United States.

Sathima Bea[trice] Benjamin was born to Edward Benjamin andEvelyn Henry in Johannesburg on 17 October 1936. Her father Edwardhad gone to Johannesburg to find work, and though she was 7 1/2 monthspregnant, Evelyn boarded the train in Cape Town and headed north. BabyBeatty arrived more than a month early. “You were born like Jesus,”Beatty’s mother later told her. “We had no clothes for you.” The womanwho ran the boarding house where Evelyn was staying had torn a sheet intolong strips and wrapped the newborn baby in swaddling clothes.

Beatty’s father’s family had arrived on boats in the Cape Town harborfrom the Island of St. Helena. Her ancestors came from Britain, thePhilippines, and Mauritius. Orphaned at a young age, Sathima’s mothermarried twice and from the two marriages had several children. WhenMrs. Benjamin married her second husband, Beatty and her sister, Joan,lived with their father and his new wife for a few years. Most of their child-hood was spent with their father’s mother, lovingly remembered as MaBenjamin. In 1986 Sathima told Francis Davis of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

My parents were separated by the time I was 5, and I was raised bymy grandmother who was very strict, very strict, very proper, veryBritish in her ways, though she was quite dark, quite African-look-ing. I was a very lonely child, and music was my solace, along withdaydreaming which I indulged in constantly. (Davis, 19 Nov. 1986)

Sathima added to these memories in 1990: “My grandmother [. . .]drummed certain things into me, to be very submissive around men. I hadto fight that. It took a long time” (pers. comm., 26 Mar. 1990). One of themost profound memories of her years living with Ma Benjamin was the daythe young Beatty signed away her identity as St. Helenian (or as her birthcertificate indicates, of “mixed St. Helenian” descent) and replaced it with

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the government category called “Coloured.” Beatty was at home with MaBenjamin the day a census official came around to the house and requiredMa Benjamin to sign that she agreed to be classified as “Coloured” in whatwas becoming an increasingly divided society. Ma Benjamin could not doit. She came in tears to the young Beatty, and asked her to please sign thepiece of paper. The official told them that there would be no more “St.Helenians,” that everyone would now be part of a larger category called“Coloured.” Proud of her ancestry, Beatty’s grandmother had tried toexplain to the official, who refused to listen. Young Beatty did not fullyunderstand the complexity of the issue at the time. She was already livingin a “Coloured” neighborhood, and attending a school for “Coloured”children anyway. So she dutifully signed the piece of paper. Under thePopulation Registration Act (1950), the St. Helenian side of the family offi-cially became “Coloured.” From that time onwards they were also requiredto carry identity cards that identified them as such.

Not all of her childhood memories are traumatic ones. Sathima hasfond memories of singing in the school choir. She recalls that she evenwent for voice lessons to learn how to sing opera, though she did not carefor the particular style, which used too much vibrato for her tastes. Despiteher training, she came to realize that she was never asked to perform solosin the choir. One day she plucked up the courage and asked why this wasso. She was told that she scooped too much with her voice. Playing aroundwith the pitch was just the game Sathima loved to play as she sang in thegroup. Fortunately, the choir director realized how much Beatty loved tosing in the choir, so he never excluded her from performing. Later, whenshe met up with Abdullah Ibrahim and started to listen seriously to record-ings of African American jazz singers and instrumentalists, she would iden-tify her sound and playfulness most powerfully with the music of BillieHoliday. It was not that she tried to imitate Billie’s voice, but rather thatshe heard in her sound and expressive quality that gave this young girlfrom Cape Town a point of reference.11 Beatty, as she is warmly remem-bered by family and friends in Cape Town, has several other memories ofher youth, each of which facilitated a most natural, and for some time onlyimagined, connection for her and others, with American popular culture.She vividly recalls gatherings in the early 1950s, in which family memberssang the popular songs of the 1920s,12 accompanied on the piano by hergrandmother. Sathima’s own mother was “a bit of a rebel” and a ragtimepianist in Cape Town. In her teens in the 1940s, the young BeattyBenjamin spent every weekend dancing in local community spaces with aspecial dance partner. The waltz, the foxtrot, and the samba were justthree of the dance styles played by live bands whose rhythms shaped hersophisticated and quite relaxed sense of musical time.

The young Beatty Benjamin learned the American jazz and Tin PanAlley repertory that characterized her youth, through secondary orality—by listening to the radio in particular. She recalls how she used to keep apen and notebook hidden in her grandmother’s wind-up Victrola. As ayoung woman in the early ’50s, Bea kept the pen and paper handy so thatwhenever she heard a tune she really liked playing on the radio, she could


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easily write down the words. She could not afford to buy the sheet musicor fakebooks herself. Instead she would listen to a song over and over, untilshe was able to get all the words. This was in the years before the radiomoved from commercial to state-control. These were the days when,according to Ms. Benjamin, radio stations used to play all the music youheard in America. You could hear it in South Africa. Through the radioshe listened to American popular music and jazz by the likes of DukeEllington, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day, and Billie Holiday.During the week, the young Bea memorized the words, and over the week-end she learnt the melody as played by the band with which she moon-lighted. It was from listening to the singing of Nat King Cole that shelearnt to articulate the words of her songs so clearly. In this manner sheimprinted into her memory a repertory of melodies and words that shecontinues to draw on and recreate in performance:

You see, one thing about these melodies from the ’20s and ’30s,they were wonderful melodies. [. . .] Having grown up in CapeTown, where I heard these melodies being played, you see, themelodies were so real with me. They played in my head. I used tofollow the dance bands and was always hearing the saxophone. So the melodies stayed, but I didn’t always know the words. [Now]I do research [in the libraries in New York City] and I find theseold things. And then it’s a question of running the words over inmy head and seeing what I want to do with them, but still trying to recapture, you know, those moments I felt in the dance hall,listening to the melody. (SBB, pers. comm., 9 Apr. 1990)

These experiences have become an integral part of Sathima’s perfor-mance style and persona. She sings constantly of memories and dreams, ofsolitude, of the desire for love between a man and woman, and of the cen-tral place of music in shaping her sense of individual voice and identity.

When Beatty completed high school she did two years of teacher train-ing at a local teachers training college, after which she began teaching atan elementary school in Cape Town. During the week she would be themodel teacher, but over the weekends, she moonlighted at social eventsand community dances and in jazz clubs. It was in this period that shewould spend every evening in the local library reading about the AfricanAmerican experience. She even found an early biography of Billie Holiday,before the Nationalist government banned it. “I didn’t know why I wasdoing this. [. . .] I wasn’t planning to come to this country. I never evendreamt about it,” Sathima recalled (pers. comm., 29 Apr. 1990). Thelifestyle did not last long. On one occasion a reporter arrived at the schoollooking for the young jazz singer, because he wanted to write an article onher performance. The report angered the school principal who sum-moned Beatty to his office and reprimanded her for her club singing. Heinformed her that she would have to make a choice between teaching andsinging, because the two were inappropriate together. Nice [middle-class,colored women] teachers did not sing in clubs.13 So Bea Benjamin choseperformance.

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In 1957, at the age of 21, the young Benjamin had joined ArthurKlugman’s traveling show as a singer.14 In 1959, she became a member ofCape jazz aficionado Harold Jephthah’s trio and sang in white nightclubsin the Cape Town area. These were the places where black and coloredmusicians performed (though it would later be prohibited), although theyspent the intermissions with the staff in the kitchen “just like blackAmerican musicians I had read about [including Billie Holiday] had to doin the South,” Sathima commented in November 1986.15 This was aboutthe time she met up with Abdullah, who by this stage was firmly into thepath of jazz as an art form.16 In 1960, she became more intimately associ-ated with then Dollar Brand when she joined his trio as a vocalist. And in1961, she performed with Dollar Brand’s legendary group, the JazzEpistles. Only a year later, both Dollar and Beatty scrambled their bagstogether and flew to Europe to begin the next phase in their lives as jazzmusicians.

A radio journalist once asked Abdullah Ibrahim if he heard Africanelements in the American jazz he listened to in Cape Town in the 1950s.Abdullah’s reply is poignant. He believes that jazz is “Africa-based.” For thisjazz pianist there was an inherent connection between the sounds of jazzand the music of contemporary Africa: “For us [in Cape Town], Ellingtonwas never an American. He was just the grand old man in the Village.”Similarly, Duke Ellington is reported to have remarked on his arrival inDakar, Senegal, in 1966, “After writing African music for 35 years, here Iam at last in Africa!”17 Sathima has a keen sense of the connectionsbetween African American experience in the USA and African experi-ences in South Africa, and jazz performed by people of African descent.She defines jazz in this way:

All I can say is that jazz came out of a very painful experience. Itstarted with black people being ripped away, and then innately try-ing to go back [. . .] They were denied so many things, and wererepressed. So the music came out of that. And that we [SouthAfricans] were drawn to it, it just seems natural to me . . .. Okay,we weren’t ripped away from our continent, but our continent wasripped away from us. And that’s why I say it is similar, but not thesame. (pers. comm., Mar. 1990)

Because she sensed a connection between Cape musicians and AfricanAmerican jazz performers, it is not surprising that with their knowledge ofhis music, the young Beatty Benjamin determined to invite the great DukeEllington to hear Dollar Brand perform when they were all in Switzerlandin February 1963.

The story is quite a remarkable one. After leaving South Africa in 1962,Dollar and Beatty ended up performing in a variety of clubs in Switzerland.One night, when Dollar had his trio at the Club Africana, Beattie heard thatDuke Ellington was in the neighborhood. She went to his performance,going backstage to try to meet him. Ms. Benjamin was lucky that night.Ellington suggested that she wait backstage until the end of the show, which


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she did. He was taken by more than her sheer tenacity. Prior to meeting her,he had been asked by the US State Department to travel to South Africa.Duke Ellington had refused when he had been told he would have to per-form before segregated audiences (Sathima Bea Benjamin, pers. comm.,Apr. 1997). His meeting up with these two South African jazz musicians,who knew his music so intimately, was clearly a fortuitous moment for all.Duke agreed to hear the Dollar Brand Trio. He stayed for a couple of items,and then turned to the young Benjamin:

“And what is it that you do?” Ellington asked Benjamin. “Are youthe manager?” “No,” she answered. “But I sing sometimes.” “Then you must sing,” said Ellington with matter-of-fact insistence.“Go and sing.”(Hajdu, liner notes)

The following day, Ellington met with the two South Africans in his hotelin Zurich. At the time he was both a performer and producer for FrankSinatra at Reprise Records in Paris.18 He arranged to meet Beatty and theDollar Brand Trio in Paris three days later. Performing with Dollar Brandwere South Africans Johnny Gentze on bass and Makaya Ntshoko ondrums. They played six instrumental pieces that were later released as“Duke Ellington Introduces the Dollar Brand Trio.”

The other thirty tracks were never released in Ellington’s lifetime.Sathima sings on twelve tracks accompanied on piano by Ellington, BillyStrayhorn or Dollar Brand, and Swedish pizzicato violinist, SvendAsmussen. Ellington had told Sathima afterwards that the record companyhad thought the pieces were not “commercial” enough. Never havingheard the recordings, Sathima came to believe that they had been lost ordestroyed. That was until July 1994, when Strayhorn biographer DavidHajdu played a cassette copy of the recording to her in New York City.While doing research for his book on Billy Strayhorn, Hajdu had met upwith Gerhard Lehner, the studio engineer who was working in BarclayStudios in Paris on 23 February 1963. Lehner had been a soldier in theNazi army during the Second World War when American soldiers capturedhim in Russia. Taken prisoner of war by the Americans, he had been per-suaded to work for the US Armed Services Radio Service in Munich. Hewas subsequently hired as the chief engineer at the Barclay Studios andhad been involved with the recording of many of Duke Ellington and BillyStrayhorn’s musical sessions.

Lehner had been particularly taken with the recording sessionStrayhorn and Ellington had with the young South Africans. In fact,because he liked the sound of Sathima’s voice so much, he had illegallymade a second copy of the morning’s work. This was the music thatSathima heard playing in her apartment in July 1994. It would take morethan two years before Sathima was able to release twelve tracks of that his-toric morning in Paris on a compact disc she has called A Morning in Paris.The compact disc includes twelve American jazz vocal standards, like “DarnThat Dream,” “Solitude,” “I’m Glad There Is You,” and “A Nightingale Sang

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in Berkeley Square.” The Benjamin-Ellington compact disc was launched ata live performance Sathima did with several New York musicians and aPhiladelphia jazz violinist, John Blake, in the Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.Present in the front row were Duke Ellington’s flamboyant sister, RuthEllington, as well as several members of the Duke Ellington Society. Whenthis recording was finally released in 1997 in New York City and Paris,Lehner was in the audience at the club in Paris where Sathima performedin December of that year.

Like much of Sathima’s vocal repertory, many of the songs for thatrecording focus on the subject of joys and sorrows of love between a manand woman. Her knowledge of the music of Ellington, Strayhorn, andother standard repertory enabled her to perform several more times withDuke Ellington over the next few years, the highlight of which was anappearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965. In the mid-1960s herrecorded output and live performances were consistent with that of otherwomen jazz vocalists of the period—mostly jazz standards. Sathima beganto include in her repertory jazz standards and her own compositions in thelate 1970s and early 1980s, in tandem with the birth of her two children,and her involvement in the anti-apartheid movement in exile, particularlyin the United States.

Sathima and Abdullah used Zurich as their base from which theymoved around Europe, to the United States, and even returning to SouthAfrica where they returned for the birth of both of their children. Sathimainsisted that they had to be born on African soil. They returned quite easilyto South Africa until the Soweto and related uprisings in 1976. This trau-matic event, which had local manifestations throughout South Africa, waswhat finally caused Sathima and Abdullah to make public their support ofthe then banned African National Congress, the organization at the fore-front of the struggle against apartheid. Abdullah tells a remarkable storyabout two tunes that he performed in Cape Town in 1976. These becamethe anthems of children in the streets of the city. They were the tunes“Mannenberg” (named after a township in Cape Town that is parallel in sig-nificance to Soweto in Johannesburg) and “Soweto.” The saxophone soloswere being sung to words all over the country, as anthems of anger andresistance to the apartheid regime. Just a few months after the recordingsof these tunes were released, the Soweto uprisings occurred. This was theturning point in South African history, when the South African securityforces gunned down school children who were protesting against languageinstruction in schools. For Sathima, a mother with two children, this was thepoint of no return. Once they left South Africa for the United States, theydeclared their total support to the movement against apartheid. This expe-rience, coupled with a deep sense of the pain caused to both Sathima andAbdullah by racial categorization and discrimination, resulted in two origi-nal compositions that Sathima recorded on her own label in the early1980s. I shall return to these in the final section of the paper.

Sathima and Abdullah decided after about fifteen years of constantmovement between Europe, the United States, and South Africa to settle


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in New York City. With two small children and an internationally recog-nized pianist for a husband, Sathima withdrew from the very public natureof jazz performance into the more private domain of her home in thefamous Chelsea Hotel (where she still lives) and the intimacy of therecording studio. I have written elsewhere about the close relationship sheperceives between the birthing of children and a song repertory (“SathimaBea Benjamin”). Suffice to say that in order to go into a recording studio,she needed to establish her own record label and company. In 1979, withthe help of Abdullah, Sathima established the Ekapa label, primarily forthe production and distribution of her own jazz recordings. She remem-bers how it came about:

It occurred to me that I could make a record. . . . I really didn’tknow anything about it. I decided to do an album of Ellingtonsongs because I figured, well, they don’t know me here. Let me dosomething that is familiar. I was very unsteady with my own com-positions, and I was very shy about [them]. Then I did it. I wentinto the studio. I did it.

And then I sat there with a couple thousand LP’s and I said,“What am I going to do with all this?” So I had to get the courageand say, now who are all the critics in this jazz music business? I amgoing to write a little note, package it, and send it to them. Theycan either look at it and throw it in the bin, or what, I don’t know.I waited six months. I got feedback. I almost fell off my feet. It wasso positive, I couldn’t believe it. . . . I always say I have this littlerecord company. I’m the President, I’m the musician, I’m the mes-senger, I go to the post office. I do absolutely everything. (pers.comm., Oct. 1990)

From 1979 through 1999, Sathima produced nine Long Playing records orcompact discs of her own performance. These include a combination ofher very personal interpretations of Tin Pan Alley, show tunes, and jazzstandards, as well as several of her original compositions that speak to herown vision of jazz, Africa, and its relationship to a sense of SouthAfricanness.

I suggested earlier that a large proportion of Sathima’s recorded out-put quite typically focused on the subject of sentimental love: “In aSentimental Mood,” “Till There Was You,” and “You Don’t Know What LoveIs” are just three examples. These were the songs made popular in the1940s and ’50s, a time in the United States, for instance, when there weretwo separate wider cultural trends. In the early 1940s, female singers cameto the fore in American popular culture as what Burton W. Peretti calls“symbols of the wholesome American womanhood for which GI’s fought toreturn home” (90). With the return of men from the military in the late1940s and early 1950s, about the time that Sathima was listening so avidlyto American jazz in South Africa, there was a marked shift in the gendereddivision of jazz labor. In this period, jazz in America was “affected by the Cold War’s spirit of machismo” (116). In response or reaction to the

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independence of women afforded by men who joined the military, this was a period in the popular imagination when women were portrayed asvulnerable “sex kittens” needing protection. Men were glamorized in termsof male control and brute force. These images were absorbed and reinter-preted in South Africa by the young Sathima in terms of the iron will of astrict, morally guarded grandmother who required that she be ready toserve the men in her family. For a young girl who had known few warm, sup-portive relationships, daydreams of the romantic love of a man providedsome respite. This is the innocence that one hears in Sathima’s vocal ren-ditions with Duke Ellington in Paris in 1963.

By the mid-1970s, after years of inner struggle, isolation, and travel, themore mature Sathima realized that she held within herself poetry andmusic that was uniquely her own. She began to understand that her musicwas a highly individual response to the whole process of life itself. Thisincluded being a woman of mixed racial heritage who grew up in a dividedand violent society, and was continuously on the move. She was also awoman who found solace and healing in the natural sounds of the wind,the ocean, the birds, and of the music peculiar to the city of Cape Townitself. One of the first original pieces that came to Sathima was the song“Africa,” which she composed in 1974. Both the poetry and the musical per-formance speak to a particular spirit and memory of Africanness that shebegan to long for once she had left South Africa. The text of the song is asfollows:

I’ve been gone much too longAnd I’m glad to sayThat I’m home,I’m home to stay.Africa, Africa.I’ve come home, I’ve come homeTo feel my people’s warmth,To shelter ’neath your trees,To catch the summer breeze.Africa, Africa, Africa.I’ve come home, I’ve come home.I’m home to smell your earthTo laugh with your childrenTo feel your sun shining down on me.Africa, Africa.I’ve come home, I’ve come home.

Sathima recalled, however, that when she sang the song in Cape Town inthe mid-1970s,

[s]omebody wrote in a review, “Well, we don’t know exactly whatAfrica she’s singing about.” And I said to Abdullah, “Now, I knowone thing, it is time to leave. It is definitely time to leave.”

And then I could come here [to New York] and sing it andpeople understand, you know. So, it’s just funny the way the thingswork out. (pers. comm., Apr. 1990)


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The disjuncture between Sathima’s ideas of Africanness, that of otherSouth Africans in the 1970s, and the understanding of Africa she experi-enced in the United States speaks to a complex interface between theidentification of place and cultural and individual memory and imagina-tion as it pertains to “Africa.” Although this is the song that Sathima toldme she would sing when she returned to South Africa, it is perhaps ironicthat Sathima’s “Africa” is one whose presence is identified in terms of animage that does not truly exist. It is an image of Africa articulated asabsence and deferral (see Bhabha).

Having witnessed the horrors of the 1976 Soweto uprisings, Sathima’s“memories and dreams” were no longer the whimsical imaginings and day-dreaming of young girls. Instead, her personal responses began to shift toengage directly with the larger political moment. It was at this time that herdreams of a new [South African] nation, a political vision and hope for anew South Africa were powerfully articulated in her own melodic and poet-ic invention. The result was a three-part performance called the LiberationSuite, which she recorded in 1983 on an album called Memories and Dreams.With remarkable ingenuity, Sathima crafts her “Africa” composition into anintegral part of the suite. Like her singing, the composition is a personalresponse to a historical moment. She articulates the complexity of mixedrace identity, an identity that has caused considerable pain for both herselfand Abdullah. She foregrounds this identity with an original piece she calls “Nations in Me/New Nation a’coming.” The text provides a poignantportrayal of Sathima’s experience and hope:

I have so many nations in meLooking at my family treeI see that I’m the fruit of their loveNations in meI have so many nations in meLooking at my family treeI see that I’m the fruit of their love.In the land of my birthYou’re told you’ve no worthIf you are black, or have nations in youSo much humiliation and painBut we know it’s their loss and our gain,For our struggle will not be in vain.For there’s a new nation a comin’Yes, there’s a new nation a comin’There’ll be no talk about colorWe won’t be concerned about raceFor we’re building a new nationWith just one beautiful face.New nation, I’m coming.

The second piece, entitled “Children of Soweto,” is again, a personalresponse to the trauma of the tragic historical moment in South Africanhistory:

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ChildrenChildren of SowetoWe’re proud of all that you doYoung LiberatorsBrave freedom fighters.

Children Children of tomorrowYou know we feel the pain with youThe struggle continuesThe fight for what is rightAnd music continuesFor we see better days in sightYes, we see better days in sightFreedom, Freedom, Freedom.

Let all our children singAnd love be in their hearsFreedom, Freedom, Freedom.

In a bold gesture, and in response to the question “What Africa is she talk-ing about?” Sathima completes her vision of a new nation, and her placein it, by firmly locating it on the continent of Africa, the kind of Africa thatshe likes to remember.

Despite these courageous musical statements, her active involvementwith the anti-apartheid movement in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, aswell as her husband Abdullah Ibrahim’s quite prominent place in thestruggle for liberation abroad, Sathima was consistently excluded from theinner circles of the anti-apartheid movement. The reason: because she wasperceived to play American music with African American musicians. It wasfelt that her music was not sufficiently “African.” Despite her very strongidentification with, and vivid memory of, “Africa” embodied in her soundand texts, some of her compatriots failed to recognize the connection.

Deeply traumatized by these responses to her music, Sathima has, onceagain, turned the pain to creative effect. She has called one of her morerecent compact disc releases Southern Touch:

I’m calling it “Southern Touch” because, there seems to be a vocalconnection between the deep South and the beginnings of thismusic. . . . I’ve proved beyond a doubt that there is a vocal con-nection. Cape Town is the southernmost point . . . and this musicthat we’re busy with, comes from the deepest south. But those people came from Africa, that’s where it all began. (pers. comm.,16 Mar. 1990)

The album is a collection of songs she remembers her grandmothersinging, songs from American Tin Pan Alley, light opera, and jazz. Theopening track is a combination of two of the early songs: W.C. Handy’s“Loveless Love” and “Careless Love.” Her version of these two old AfricanAmerican tunes is played by three of America’s finest jazz musicians, pianistKenny Barron, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer Billy Higgins. The


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entire track is performed over what Sathima calls the “Cape Town rhythm,”something like a samba, but not quite. It is a rhythmic pattern that com-bines the “Latin” rhythmic feel that went from Angola with the slaves toBrazil and then returned to Cape Town. Sathima Bea Benjamin hopes that somehow she will be able to come full circle and reconnect with herold home at the southern tip of Africa. She dreams of doing it through themusical aesthetic and historical connections she perceives between thepeople of the southernmost part of Africa and those from the southernUnited States.

Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospec-tion. It is painful re-membering, a putting together of the dis-membered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.(Bhabha 63)

What then is the “spirit of Africa” in the jazz performances of SouthAfrican-born Sathima Bea Benjamin? It is a spirit intimately entwined withindividual and collective memory and desire. In her own words, Sathima’sAfrica is a space of longing. It evokes images of home, warmth, earthysmells, the innocent laughter of children, and of trees and summer breezes.This is at its most obvious, though she takes it further. In Sathima’s imagin-ing of Africa, she re-members the continent without racial categorizationand discrimination. Her Africa inhabits an enormous space that articulatesa powerful sense of community and, indeed, of freedom. These kinds of ref-erences to the continent are not uncommon in discourses about Africancultural memory. Think, for example, of the words of Brazilian jazz artistFlora Purim’s song, also called “Africa”:

Now take me back to Africa Where the fathers and sons get together, When my people are running free, Take me back to Africa, And see all the love I can give, The rhythm will make me strong.

Certainly, in Sathima’s sound, one recognizes the qualities that Sam Floydsuggests reference an African cultural memory—her inflection of pitch,sophisticated rhythmic interplay, the stress upon the percussive and tim-bral qualities of sound over those of pitch, and all in a call-and-responseformat.

It seems to me, however, that Sathima’s musical and verbal discourseson her life in jazz suggest a far more complex understanding of the notionof “Africanness.” It is a diasporic position of Africanness, but perhaps a lessconventional one. This is because her memories of a “spirit of Africa” arethose of a fairly recent part of African history—that of the southernmostpart of the continent in the mid-twentieth century. In addition to the ratheridealized timeless vision of Africa in her song text, Sathima suggests thatSouth Africanness invokes American popular music in a Cape Town physi-cal environment and community at a particular historical period—the1940s and 1950s. In this time, American popular music was inextricably

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interwoven into local experience and cultural practice in the city of CapeTown, South Africa. In the memory of this historical moment, Africanness,or at least South Africanness, speaks of a multiplicity of experiences. It iden-tifies with the pain and trauma of colonialism and racial discrimination asshe hears it conveyed through the sounds of African American jazz. It allowsfor the imagining of a freedom of expression—a playful re-membering, andfor saying old things in new ways:

It is through image and fantasy—those orders that figure trans-gressively on the borders of history and the unconscious—that[like] Fanon [Sathima Bea Benjamin] most profoundly evokes thecolonial condition. (Bhabha 43; my interpolations)

Perhaps most significantly for Sathima, the “spirit of Africa” in jazz is anambivalent signifier because it is identified primarily in movement. Thisoccurs at several levels. Traditional sounds are integrated into new struc-tures. Sathima and Abdullah use jazz and its connection to Africa, perhapsironically, to move out of Africa and into exile. The ambivalence of suchmovement, nevertheless, is the pain of inbetweeness that political exile,mixed racial identity, and hybrid cultural practices engender. Sathima’s“spirit of [South] Africanness” speaks to this sense of inbetweeness. She isa South African woman singing American jazz, albeit in her own style. Likeher racial classification, she and her music are neither black enough, norsufficiently white. As with her passing back and forth between SouthAfrica, Europe, and the United States, her sound is not African enough,nor is she fully American. South African-American is the way she likes toidentify herself and her music.

What remains to be thought is the repetitious desire to recognizeourselves doubly, as, at once, decentered in the solidary processesof the political group, and yet, ourself as a consciously committed,even individuated, agent of change—the bearer of belief.(Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity” 65)

NOTES

1. An article entitled “Sathima Bea Benjamin Finds Cape Jazz to Be Her HomeWithin,” which has contains some content overlap with the present article,appears in Sathima Bea Benjamin: Embracing Jazz, edited and published by LarsRasmussen, who has ceded all rights for this article to Indiana University Press,as has Carol Muller.

2. Quoting from Lewis Nkosi’s Home and Exile and other Selections (8), Rob Nixondescribes Drum Magazine as follows:

Drum magazine, the principal outlet for Sophia[town] writing, project-ed an expressly cosmopolitan target audience—“the new African cutadrift from the tribal reserve—urbanised, eager, fast-talking and brash.”(15-16)


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3. This is an intriguing reference to the Beat movement in Greenwich Village,New York. The relationship between the jazz avant-garde of African Americanmusicians and the Beat movement in the Village is explored in Jon Panish’sThe Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar America. This was one ofnumerous connections between South African musicians and those in theUnited States that some South African scholarship has begun to explore. Seefor example, Ballantine; Erlmann; and Coplan.

4. Positioning a history of South African jazz alongside that of the United Statesintroduces a provocative set of contrasting explanations for changes in reper-tory and performance possibilities. When American jazz history explains styl-istic shifts in the 1950s and 1960s, it conventionally argues that Cold Waranxieties, African American anger against social injustice articulated in be-bopand the introduction of a television culture changed jazz. From a “mainstream”social dance form, it became a highly sophisticated, technically demanding artform (see Peretti, for example). These explanations are markedly differentfrom those in South African jazz history. While Cold War anxiety was certainlyreflected in contemporary South African English language newspapers, televi-sion was not introduced into the country until 1976. The rise of rock’n’roll inSouth Africa is sometimes cited as a reason for the change from dance bandsand small avant garde ensembles. In the minds of South Africans the forcesthat squashed the live performance culture associated with commercial and artforms of jazz were to be found in more immediate repression of the Nationalistgovernment. The tangible evidence of forced removals, security forces, policeraids, constant harassment, and ultimately political and cultural exile offeredmore compelling reasons for shifts in the community based culture of jazz per-formance remembered by Sathima and Abdullah, among many others. Thisrequires more detailed historical analysis.

5. Cape Argus, 12 Jan. 1962. A small advertisement was placed in the Cape news-paper announcing the concert and imminent departure to Europe of the twomusicians.

6. Makeba’s travels in Europe and the USA are discussed quite frequently inDrum; see for example an article by Lewis Nkosi (Drum April 1962: 17, 19, 21,23) in which Miriam Makeba’s experiences are described through text andpictures.

7. Ben “Satch” Masinga first met Louis Armstrong when both were touring inZimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in 1960. Ben was with African Jazz and Variety(Drum May 1962:46-47).

8. This is a useful concept for understanding an aesthetic of African Americanstyle, but it is less helpful for discussions of contemporary Africa, because itsuggests that “Africanness” is just a memory and not a living reality. I shall haveto flesh this out in a subsequent publication.

9. I am certainly not the first to write about South African jazz. David Coplan’s InTownship Tonight! (1985) is perhaps the first substantial exploration of the jazzscene in South Africa. Christopher Ballantine’s Marabi Nights (1993) makes animportant contribution to the early history of black South African jazz andvaudeville, mostly from the Johannesburg area (though this is not explicitlystated). Several MA theses have been written on popular and jazz performancein Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. These include Allen (1993),Gassert (1988), Jeppie (1990), Layne (1995), and Lunn (1986). Michael Nixon(1995) has written a short piece on jazz in inner Cape Town, and Gary Baines

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(1996) on jazz in the eastern Cape, the university town of Grahamstown specif-ically. Miriam Makeba’s autobiography (1987) provides a couple of chapters onher involvement with the jazz scene in Johannesburg in the mid-late 1950s.

10. Sathima recorded these two as a single item on her compact disc entitledSouthern Touch on 14 Dec. 1989. The disc was released in 1992 by Enja Records,Munich Germany. The Liberation Suite was recorded on 7 Oct. 1983 on analbum called Memories and Dreams, on the Ekapa label.

11. I have realized that there are striking parallels between the life stories ofSathima and Billie Holiday. This became particularly poignant for me in read-ing Stuart Nicholson’s recently published biography, Billie Holiday. Sathimatold me on one occasion that she had read Billie Holiday’s autobiography afterit was published in the mid-1950s. She had found it in a neighborhood libraryin Cape Town before it was banned in South Africa.

12. This practice paralleled a resurgence of nostalgia for 1920s music in theUnited States at about the same time (Peretti 120).

13. Miriam Makeba describes similar community retribution for her participationas a female vocalist in a jazz band, though she remarks that it had been herfather’s desire that she go into music and she received the full support of hermother . It was the wider community who whispered about her:

“So-and-so’s daughter is a whore because she is on stage.” I can imaginewhat they are saying about me: “She left her husband to show herself onstage! Why isn’t she at home raising her child, instead of having hermother do it so she can sing?” (Makeba 46-47)

14. Arthur Klugman’s Coloured Jazz and Variety was a parallel, though less visible andsuccessful production to African Jazz and Variety. There are numerous articles inthe African press in the late 1950s on African Jazz and Variety. Robert Kavanaghdiscusses it briefly, explaining that white impressario Alf Herbert became con-vinced in the early 1950s that there was plenty of talent in the African andmixed race communities, a talent he sought to harness. One of the results ofthis was the creation of the traveling show called African Jazz and Variety.(Musicians who performed in this show have commented to me recently thatthere was almost nothing that was “African” in this show, besides the actorsthemselves. Nevertheless, South African jazz singer Dolly Rathebe’s perform-ing career was considerably enhanced by her star roles in AJ and V in the1950s.) Following the success of African Jazz and Variety, the newly formedUnion of Southern African Artists organized the now well-known TownshipJazz concerts in white areas (recordings of these sessions have been reissued byGallo Records (South Africa). African Follies, Drums of Africa, and the Golden CityDixies were three other productions popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s.Subsequent to the success of the African Jazz and Variety and Township Jazz stageproductions, the King Kong musical was written and produced. It toured SouthAfrica and ultimately went to London for a good run. A trip had also beenplanned for New York City, but, characteristic of these productions, they ranout of money and so disbanded in London. Several South Africans decided notto return to South Africa, but to stay abroad. Miriam Makeba was one of these.

15. See Francis Davis, Phildelphia Inquirer 19. Nov. 1986.16. Both Sathima and Abdullah’s formative musical experiences began in the

home. Abdullah recalls that his earliest moments with music took place in hishome: his grandmother was a founding member of the African MethodistEpiscopal church in District Six in Cape Town. (Ironically, the AME was an


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American-based church organization). His grandmother was the pianist in herchurch, so from an early age, Dollar Brand was exposed to African Americanbishops and missionaries, spirituals, and the Alexander Hymnal. Once hemoved out of his home, he listened to American jazz on radios playing in hishome community. And as a young boy, he heard Malay choirs and traditionalXhosa and Sotho music and he participated in the large groups of musiciansin the New Year parades of mixed race music and dance colloquially known asthe “Coon Carnival” (see Martin). Finally, this gifted musician spent manyhours playing for social dances, known in the Cape as langarm dance (see Nixonand Layne).

17. Qtd. from Will Friedwald in an article entitled “Missing Links”(Village Voice 22Apr. 1997).

18. There is an additional connection between Frank Sinatra and South Africans atthis time. The Cape Argus ran several articles on engagement of South African-born Juliet Prowse and Frank Sinatra in 1962, including a piece on Sinatra’s visitto South Africa to meet Ms. Prowse’s parents. See for example, The Cape Argus8 Jan. 1962, “S.A. film actress spurns politics”; 9 Jan. 1962, “Juliet is a wondergirl, says Sinatra: wedding day undecided”; 20 Jan. 1962, “What is it aboutSinatra?”; and 8 Feb. 1962, “No more work for Juliet, says Sinatra.”

WORKS CITED

Allen, Lara. “Pennyswhistle Kwela: A Musical, Historical, and Socio-PoliticalAnalysis.” U of Natal, MMus Thesis, 1993.

Ballantine, Christopher. Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville.Johannesburg: Ravan, 1993.

Baines, Gary. “The Little Jazz Town: The Social History and Musical Styles of BlackGrahamstown in the 1950s and 1960s.” Papers Presented at the Symposium onEthnomusicology 14. Ed. Andrew Tracey. Grahamstown: ILAM, 1996.

Bhabha, Homi. “Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the PostcolonialPrerogative.” The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995. 40-65.

Chapman, Michael, ed. The “Drum” Decade: Stories from the 1950s. Pietermaritzburg:U of Natal P, 1989.

Coplan, David. In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theater. NewYork: Longmans, 1985.

Davis, Peter. In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema’s South Africa.Athens: Ohio UP, 1996.

Erlmann, Veit. Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West.New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

. African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

Floyd, Samuel. The Power of Black Music:Interpreting its History from Africa to the UnitedStates. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Gassert, Richard. Bop Till You Drop: An Oral Study of Popular Musical Cultures in CapeTown from the Late 1940s to the Early 1960s. History III Long Essay, U of CapeTown, 1988.

Hajdu, David. Liner Notes. Sathima Bea Benjamin: A Morning in Paris. Munich: EnjaRecords, 1997. ENJ- 9309 2.

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. Lushlife: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn. New York: Farrar, 1996.Jeppie, Shamiel. “Aspects of Popular Culture and Class Expression in Inner Cape

Town ca. 1939-1959.” Unpublished MA Thesis. U of Cape Town, 1990.Kavanagh, Robert. Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa. London:Zed, 1985.Layne, V. “A History of Dance and Jazz Band Performance in the Western Cape in

the Post-1945 Era.” Unpublished MA Thesis. U of Cape Town, 1995.Lunn, H. “Antecedents of the Music and Popular Culture of the African Post-1976

Generation.” MA Thesis. U of the Witwatersrand, 1986.Makeba, Miriam. Makeba: My Story. With James Hall. New York: New American

Library, 1987.Martin, Denis-Constant. Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past and Present. Cape

Town: David Philip, 1999.Molefe, ZB, and Mike Mzileni. A Common Hunger to Sing: A Tribute to South Africa’s

Black Women of Song, 1950-90. Cape Town: Kwela, 1997.Muller, Carol, with Sathima Bea Benjamin. A Home Within: Cape Vocal Jazz in Exile.

With Compact Disc. (Forthcoming)Muller, Carol. “Sathima Bea Benjamin, Exile, and the ‘Southern Touch’ in Jazz

Creation and Performance.” African Languages and Cultures 9.2 (1996): 127-43.Nicholson, Stuart. Billie Holiday. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1995.Nixon, Michael. “The World of Jazz in Inner Cape Town, 1940-60.” Papers Presented

at the Symposium on Ethnomusicology 13. Ed. Andrew Tracey. Grahamstown:ILAM, 1995.

Nixon, Rob. Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African Culture and the WorldBeyond. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Nkosi, Lewis. Home and Exile and Other Selections. London: Longmans, 1983.Panish, Jon. The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture.

Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997.Peretti, Burton W. Jazz in American Culture. American Ways Series. Chicago: Ivan

Dee, 1997.Placksin, Sally. “Sathima: Music Is the Spirit within You.” Women and Performance: A

Journal of Feminist Theory 2.3 (1984): 21-31.Purim, Flora. Fourth World. Worthing, UK: B & W Music, 1993. BW 030.

. Abdullah Ibrahim: A Discography. Copenhagen: The Book Trader, 1999.Rasmussen, Lars, ed. Sathima Bea Benjamin: Embracing Jazz. Copenhagen: The Book

Trader, 1999.Wicomb, Zoe. “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa.”

Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-95. Ed. DerekAttridge and Rosemary Jolly. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 91-107.

Most Recent Recordings (except for Cape Town Love, these are distributed by Enja):

Sathima Bea Benjamin. Lovelight. Enja Records, 1988. R 27905.. Southern Touch. Enja Records, 1989. ENJ-7015 2.. A Morning in Paris. Enja Records, 1997. ENJ-93092.. Cape Town Love. Cape Town: Ekapa Records, 1999. SA 001.


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