Joseph Shabalala

Bhekizizwe Joseph Shabalala was born on the twenty-eighth of August 1941 at the village of Tugela near Ladysmith in the Natal Midlands of South Africa, the eldest of six children of Jonathan Shabalala — a small-scale Zulu tenant farmer — and Topi Shabalala, a homemaker. He attended the village primary school through his eighth year and left at fourteen to work on the family farm and at the Ladysmith road-construction works. He sang from his sixth year in the Zion Christian Church choir of his father's congregation.

He was conscripted at fifteen to the migrant-labour gold-mining barracks at the Welkom and Carletonville Free State mines under the apartheid pass-law system. The Zulu male migrant-labour culture of the gold-mine compounds had since the early twentieth century developed the all-male a cappella choral genre called isicathamiya — Zulu for “walk softly” — sung in the Saturday-night dance competitions at the mine-compound dance halls and the Sunday-morning church services. Shabalala sang isicathamiya from his sixteenth year at the Welkom compound and led from his eighteenth year his own informal choral group at Welkom.

He returned to the Ladysmith district in 1960 and founded the choral ensemble he named Ezimnyama — the Black Ones — that would be renamed Ladysmith Black Mambazo (after the Zulu black axe used in the Welkom gold-mine compound to behead competing choirs at the Saturday-night isicathamiya choir competitions) in 1964. The ensemble's first commercial recording for the Mavuthela division of Gallo Records — Amabutho of 1973 — sold over one hundred thousand copies in the South African Black market.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo under his leadership across the following five decades produced over fifty studio albums. The 1986 collaboration with the American musician Paul Simon — the Graceland album, recorded in part at the Ovation studios of Johannesburg in February 1985 — brought the ensemble international audience.

Shabalala personally received five Grammy Awards over his career.

He died of complications of multiple chronic conditions at Pretoria on the eleventh of February 2020, at seventy-eight.

He is honored here as the founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.