Manfred Mann's Earth Band
Somewhere in Afrika

The old Nelson Mandela has passed away, sparking a massive general sensation and a notable race among the powerful from half the world to be present on site, to spout feel-good statements, and quickly mourn a guy to whom they may never have dedicated an initiative or even two remarks in public, for the cameras or notebooks, during all those years he was in jail.

What a pity... I dare not exclaim anything else, since I am only superficially informed about Nelson's story, his virtues and his mistakes, his (evident) strength of spirit and the (less clear) effective efficacy of the today highly-touted achievements that his activism as a free man, his example as a prisoner, and finally his rehabilitated governmental roles have brought to the great African country.

Free, therefore, of servile praise and cowardly outrage, I consider in his honor the most South African thing that resides in my music library, which is an album from 1983 by the group led by the native Johannesburg keyboardist Manfred Mann, a white man (who, at the registry office, is Lubowitz) who in the sixties preferred the life of an emigrant in England, due to his profound aversion to the hateful regime and related apartheid that reigned in his home country (a bit like what's happening to many young Italians today, thanks to the treatment and prospects that presidents, secretaries, and various political leaders are reserving for them at home).

We are in 1983, so the music is full of synthetic sounds, sequences, electronic percussion. Mann, after all, is among the best performers on the synthesizer, especially when it comes to solos on the Minimoog (one of the first monophonic synthesizers, completely analog, still unsurpassed) as he has been using it since the late '60s.

Alongside the trendy electronics of the time, there are traditional rock instruments, wielded by the Earth Band quartet that accompanies the leader, but especially a massive support of choirs and invocations in the Bantu language, which, linked to electric guitars, real or electronic drums, organs, and mellotron, with singing in English by the excellent vocalist of the group Chris Thompson or guitarist Steve Waller, generate an extremely original jumble, ultimately made thrilling by the corrosively militant lyrics against racism and segregation.

Here's what happened: the band's bassist, Matt Irving, arranged to record a fair amount of traditional songs and chorales in the Bantu language directly in South Africa, as well as some percussion. Subsequently, in London, this material was examined, sectioned, and adapted, also integrated with recordings of African singers made directly in a British studio. Around this ethnic collage, the harmonic progressions, electronic sequences, rhythmic grooves, and melodies were finally constructed to form the album in question.

The beauty is that even though "Somewhere in Afrika" (notice the political kappa...) sounds decidedly different from the other works of the Manfred Mann's Earth Band, it does not compromise in the slightest the two classic tenets of their artistic production, which are the accessibility of the music, decidedly pop-rock and for the most part... danceable (gulp!), as well as the inclination to cover works by others, possibly adequately altering them. Thus parade compositions by Bob Marley, the Police, Al Stewart, Anthony Moore, interspersed with the band's native contributions.

The work is to be enjoyed in one breath, necessarily with the lyrics booklet in hand given the socially relevant topic. It is useless to distinguish between the titles and the success or lack thereof of the various compositions... the songs are separated by regular seconds of silence, but in my opinion, these forty-something minutes are to be experienced in the form of a suite. The ancestral invocations in the South African language, mixed with the shaped dynamics of electronic devices and the warm contribution of guitars, bass, and drums, form a uniqueness of great strength and depth that, despite the considerable melodic accessibility, manages to transport the listener to profoundly touching levels of experience and involvement.

It's a great record in tribute to a great country, among the most miserably governed of the modern era, long a true medieval remnant, unworthy of existence and that pulverizes(d) in front of it the miseries of Europe and the West in general, in which we are accustomed to wallow.