1990: The Hidden Years Recording

When Madala Kunene signed to Robert Trunz’ MELT/B&W operation in 1995, the label released an album by Kunene titled King of the Zulu Guitar. It was, to be honest, poorly recorded but still provided plenty of evidence that the title was a fair description of the Durban-based virtuoso, who started busking at the age of seven with a home-made instrument built from a cooking oil tin and with fish gut for its strings. When this reviewer interviewed him in 1996 in a café in the BAT arts centre overlooking Durban’s harbour, he was gentle and unassuming and spoke so quietly that one had to strain to hear him. He also carried on his back a knapsack full of his own homegrown and rather powerful dagga (weed) and, as I was flying home that night, he insisted that I took with me a large stash of the stuff, which he obligingly wrapped up in an old newspaper. It seemed like a splendid gift but by the time I got to the airport, I realised it was a very bad idea and flushed it. Sorry, Madala. Terrible waste, I know.

This long-lost debut album, produced by Sipho Gumede, trickled out on David Marks’ 3rd Ear Music a few years before I met Kunene and was then lost. By the time it was recorded Kunene was in his fortieth year with decades of experience behind him as a street musician, playing on the streets of KwaMashu township, where he grew up, and entertaining whites on the Durban beachfront. Born in 1951 and raised by his grandmother, he began by playing Zulu folk tunes but by the age of 14, his repertoire mostly comprised The Beatles songs. “It’s the music white people liked and as we wanted to make money, we gave them what they liked,” he told me. By the 1980s he had formed the band Izanusi and was playing his own songs inspired by dreams and drawing on Zulu culture and ancestral folklore. The band never recorded but it led to this solo album which is an extraordinary example of the inventiveness of a self-taught musician absorbing everything he hears around him, from The Beatles to Zulu tribal dances, and fusing it into a unique style which he calls ‘Madala-line.’ There’s driving township jive (‘U-Gongo’), bouncing Afro bubblegum pop (‘Vumela Abaphansi’), trad folk tunes (‘Sanibonani’), Zulu children’s nursery rhymes with singalong choruses (‘U-Mata-Gota-Fri 123’) and haunting spiritual ancestral chants (‘Abangoma’). Cohesion is provided by Kunene’s singular guitar technique and an open-minded belief that tradition should be embraced but one should not be constrained by it. It’s a gem, albeit an unpolished one, and its reissue is hugely welcome.