Hugh Masekela

Hugh Ramapolo Masekela was born in KwaGuqa Township, Witbank, South Africa, on the fourth of April 1939. He took up the trumpet at fourteen on a chance gift from the chaplain at the Saint Peter's Secondary School (Father Trevor Huddleston, who arranged the instrument). He joined the Father Huddleston Jazz Band as its first trumpeter and was one of the founding members, at seventeen, of the Jazz Epistles — the first South African jazz quintet to record an album (Verse 1, 1959).

He left South Africa in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre. He studied at the Guildhall School of Music in London and the Manhattan School of Music in New York through the early 1960s and entered the New York jazz scene through Harry Belafonte's patronage.

He recorded thirty-eight studio albums across his career. His 1968 instrumental "Grazing in the Grass" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 — among the first instrumental tracks by an African artist to do so on the American chart. He toured internationally with Miriam Makeba (his wife from 1964 to 1966 and his political comrade throughout her life; also placed in this archive), with Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (also placed in this archive), and with the touring company of the 1986 Paul Simon Graceland album — though Masekela's participation in that project was politically contested by the United Democratic Front's cultural boycott of South Africa.

His song "Bring Him Back Home" (1987), written for Nelson Mandela on the imprisoned president's seventieth birthday, became the principal musical anthem of the international anti-apartheid movement. Mandela embraced Masekela publicly on the platform at the 1990 Wembley Stadium tribute concert immediately following the singing of the song.

Masekela returned to South Africa in 1990. He died in Johannesburg on the twenty-third of January 2018, age seventy-eight.

He is honored here as the trumpeter whose horn called the apartheid president home.