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My wife and I usually make our Bermuda Festival selections early and book online. This year we did so. However, by the time that we booked, all the seats for all the Soweto Gospel Choir performances were gone.

Fortunately, we were able to get tickets for the special performance put on for Sunday afternoon. So we did get to see and hear that superb choir.

I would have been unhappy if I had missed them completely.

However, I have been listening to their music for some time, having discovered them about two years ago. Over the past five years, I’ve been awakening, generally, to the music of South Africa. Hugh Masekela, West Nkosi, South African gospel choirs generally, and of course Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

In 2002, I saw and thoroughly enjoyed the South African musical ‘Umoja’ during its London run. Before that, and long before Nelson Mandela’s release, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1986, I saw the South African play ‘District Six’.

There is a special vibrancy in the music coming out of South Africa. As the country metamorphosed from apartheid into the ‘Rainbow Nation’, South African music also underwent a change. The rough ‘penny whistle’ street music grew into bands and groups that stayed together and got better. Bob Marley’s reggae found its way back to Africa and was then bounced back to us in the West in the beautiful smooth sounds and powerful lyrics of Lucky Dube. Johnny Clegg burst the old banning barriers and sang songs praising Nelson Mandela. European compositions created by long dead white men, blended into ancient African styles that had been created by long dead black men and women. In their beautiful sounds, the Soweto String Quartet brought those two deep classical streams together.

I enjoyed the Soweto Gospel Choir. For me, the most intense moment in their programme was when they asked the audience to stand while they sang ‘Nkosi Sikele’ — The Rainbow Nation’s National Anthem. For me, the intensity was deepened by several previous references to the tenth anniversary of the ‘Rainbow Nation’. I recalled that ‘Nkosi Sikele’, originally the ANC’s theme song or anthem, was once a ‘banned song’ and that there was a time when the mere singing of that song would be cause for punishment. At that performance, that Sunday afternoon, those voices singing that song showed just how freedom and change do come and do flow together until they provide a beautiful new mixture.

I’d already heard that beautiful new mixture. On Sunday I saw that beautiful new mixture. I’m glad that I did.[[In-content Ad]]

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