Knowing About Juluka’s Biography, Age, Career

Knowing About Juluka’s Biography, Age, Career

ABOUT JULUKA

Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu established the South African band Juluka. Juluka, which translates to “sweat” in Zulu, was Mchunu’s bull’s name. The band had a tight relationship to the large-scale anti-apartheid struggle.

JULUKA’S CAREER

Clegg learned Zulu music and dancing from street musician Charlie Mzila, whom he met when he was 14 years old, over the course of the next two years. Johnny Clegg first met Sipho Mchunu in 1969 while the young man was looking for job in Johannesburg. After challenging 16-year-old Clegg to a guitar competition, 18-year-old Mchunu and Clegg become close. Before long, the band was playing in public spaces such as streets and other unofficial venues that were safe for a mixed-race band to perform during racism.

They were compelled to maintain a low profile, and rather than traditional attention reputation contributed to their success. For his actions as well as the lyrics of the band, Clegg was repeatedly detained and physically assaulted by the authorities. Some pundits believed that Juluka was the band that most successfully opposed Apartheid’s racial discrimination policies. When the band performed, members who were black and white would both enter the stage dressed in traditional Zulu attire, dance together in the traditional manner, and sing in both Zulu and English. First released as Johnny & Sipho in 1976, Clegg and Mnchunu’s initial single “Woza Friday” was followed three years later by the highly regarded Universal Men, the debut album by Juluka. Pablo Neruda, Jean-Paul Sartre, and John Berger’s A Seventh Man all had a significant influence on the album’s beautiful lyrics. They became a quintet and in late 1981 put out African Litany, their second album. With its sharply political songs about the Zulus defeating the colonial British army at the Battle of Isandlwana, the album’s first track “Impi” was banned by South African radio but went on to become a concealed hit. It is frequently connected to South Africa’s national sports teams in modern times. They received their first worldwide recognition for the record, and in 1982 and 1983 they went on a successful European and North American tour. However, the Musicians Union first barred them because “it would not be possible to approve one of our bands working in South Africa, there is no possibility of an exchange,” according to an article published in June 1983 in the British music magazine NME. After some time, the group donated their fees to charity and the ban was eventually lifted.

Because Clegg’s attempts were perceived as “an insult to the Zulu and their culture,” Radio Bantu, a government-approved radio station for the black community in South Africa, allegedly refused to play Juluka’s songs. As a result, Juluka was also prohibited from playing. When Mchunu returned to the farm where he was born in Natal to care for his family, the group broke up in 1985. After that, Clegg started a new band called Savuka, with which he had even more success abroad. But in 1997, the two buddies reunited for their last album, which became Crocodile Love and was subsequently published as Ya Vuka Inkunzi. The critical praise that earlier Juluka albums like Universal Men, African Litany, Work for All, and Scatterlings garnered was not extended to it.