📍eMalahleni (Witbank), Mpumalanga, South Africa
1939 – 1953“I was born Ramapolo Hugh Masekela in April 1939 in KwaGuqa township, in Witbank, a coal-mining town in the east of South Africa, and spent my early years with my maternal grandmother, Johanna, and my little sister, Barbara. My father, Thomas, was a health inspector and sculptor, and my mother, Pauline, a social worker. My grandmother was a strict Lutheran who thought the gramophone was blasphemous, but she ran a shebeen, an illegal bar, from her house, since Black South Africans were not allowed to drink alcohol. On weekends the shebeen filled with migrant mineworkers who came to drink, dance and sing the songs of their home villages, and township bands played there; that was my first music school. An uncle played me his 78s of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller, and I learned the piano as a little boy. Later my family moved to Springs and then to Alexandra township in Johannesburg. At fourteen I saw the film Young Man with a Horn, about a trumpeter, and I wanted a trumpet more than anything. At St. Peter's school I was always in trouble, so I made a deal with the chaplain, Father Trevor Huddleston: I would behave if he got me a trumpet. He did, and found me a teacher, and soon my friends wanted instruments too, and we formed the Huddleston Jazz Band. Louis Armstrong himself sent me one of his trumpets. I played in the musical King Kong and with the Jazz Epistles, then went into exile in 1960. My song Grazing in the Grass topped the American charts, and Bring Him Back Home became an anthem for Nelson Mandela. I came home in 1990, and Witbank remembers the boy from the shebeen.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today