Joseph Shabalala

Bhekizizwe Joseph Shabalala was born on the twenty-eighth of August 1941 on the Tugela farm near Ladysmith, in the Natal region of South Africa. The eldest of seven children of Jonathan Mluwane Shabalala, a farm labourer, he was raised in the hardship of tenant life and, after his father's death, shouldered the care of his family while still a youth. From that soil rose one of the great voices of the Zulu choral tradition.

In 1959 Shabalala gathered his brothers and cousins into a singing group, and after a season of vivid dreams he renamed them Ladysmith Black Mambazo — "Mambazo," the axe, for the way they felled every rival choir in the fiercely contested isicathamiya competitions. Under his direction the ensemble refined the soft-stepping, tightly harmonised male a cappella style into an art of extraordinary discipline and tenderness.

The world came to know that art in 1986, when Paul Simon sought Shabalala out for the album Graceland, on which the group's harmonies carried "Homeless" and "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes." Their own record Shaka Zulu won a Grammy Award in 1987, the first of five Grammys the group would earn under his guidance, alongside performances before presidents, popes, and a Nobel laureate's Oslo stage.

Joseph Shabalala died in Pretoria on the eleventh of February 2020. He left a lineage of song rooted in his homeland and carried across the earth, a keeper of Zulu harmony who taught the world to listen. May his voice be honoured as long as men gather to sing.