Yakhal’ inKomo – a classic South African jazz

album
By Tony McGregor
July 2008
"I once saw Mankunku Ngozi blowing his saxophone. Yakhal' inkomo. His
face was inflated like a balloon, it was wet with sweat, his eyes huge and
red. He grew tall, shrank, coiled into himself, uncoiled and the cry came
out of his horn.
"That is the meaning of Yakhal' inkomo." - Mongane Wally Serote: from the
introduction to his collection of poetry entitled Yakhal' inKomo, published
by Renoster Books in 1972.
From the first deep,
broad notes of
Agrippa Magwaza's
bass one knows that
this is a special
album. The title
track, Yakhal'
inKomo, starts with
Magwaza and pianist
Lionel Pillay laying
down a funky groove
with a two-note bass
ostinato until the
soulful tenor of
Winston Mankunku
Ngozi comes in
about four and a half
bars later to lay
down the main
theme.
This theme came to
be one of the most
1 Cover of the CD re-releaseinstantly recognisable in all of South African jazz.
Fans at jazz gigs unfailingly greet these bars with
shouts and cries of recognition. This composition by the man
affectionately, and almost universally, known to jazz fans simply as
"Mankunku" was taken into the hearts and consciousness of people from
its first release in 1968, to the extent that it sold around 50 000 copies in
its first two years. This is an incredible figure in South African jazz
recording history, and made it the biggest jazz album ever released here,
a position it still holds against some pretty stiff competition.
When this album was recorded apartheid was exactly 20 years old and
many of Mankunku's peers had gone into exile and those who stayed had
to endure what jazz writer Gwen Ansell, in Soweto Blues (New York:
Yakhal’ inKomo Page 1
Continuum, 2004), called "symbolic annihilation" which "became part of
the hegemonic staging and broadcasting of jazz," because "the white
authorities found it unacceptable that black musicians should be
acknowledged as capable of playing such 'sophisticated' music."
Ansell goes to relate how "Playing behind a screen at Cape Town City Hall
while a white musician mimed his notes, reedman Winston Mankunku
Ngozi was billed as Winston Mann."
Poet John Hendrickse, who knew a thing or two about jazz and South
Africa, must have had this in mind in his poem “Remember” (in Khoi,
1990):
Where did you steal that culture
Where did you steal that suit
Fear gave him that sinking feeling
He’d been stealing dignity

His fingers minuet the music

Anger rises up inside of him
The warrior walks through the white menace
The music stumbles in staccato phrases

In a 2003 interview with Gwen Ansell, quoted in her book, Mankunku said:
“Yakhal’ inKomo was an odd tune. Things were tough then – but don’t ask
me about all of that, I don’t want to discuss it. You had to have a pass; you
got thrown out; the police would stop you, you know? I was about 22. I
threw my pass away; wouldn’t carry it. We had it tough. I was always
being arrested and a lot of my friends and I thought it was so tough for
black people and put that into the song. So it was The Bellowing Bull: for
the black man’s pain. And a lot of people would come up to me and say
quietly: “Don’t worry bra’. We understand what you are playing about.”

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 An interesting story of the
composition of Yakhal’ inKomo
comes from Lars Rasmussen’s
great book Jazz People of Cape
Town (The Booktrader, 2003) in
an interview Rasmussen
recorded with pianist Roger Koza,
2 Mankunku in photo by Tony McGregor who recalled:
“...I started the whole theme,
with chords and all that, and
Winston came in, he was a
professional, and started building
it up, and we used to call it
another name...”
Koza continued: “So Winston
came back from Jo’burg with this
tune and I said, Hey, this is our
tune! Listen to this tune! It was
no more called Khale, it’s called
Yakhal’ inKomo. I said, Who
called it Yakhal’ inKomo? And he
said, No, it was Pat Matshikiza.”
This story of tunes being
swapped between musicians is a
common theme in South African
jazz. It seems to be part of the
struggle musicians have to
survive and goes along with the
recurring themes of unscrupulous promoters and exploitative recording
companies. In the twilight zone that jazz had to occupy during the
apartheid era this is not surprising. As Mankunku said, things were tough
for black musicians in South Africa.
Whatever the truth of the birth of this iconic jazz piece, it struck chords
deep in the psyche of black South Africans at a time when the pain of
apartheid was searing. As Serote wrote in another place about Mankunku:
“He just went deep, right down to the floor of despair, and reached the
rim of fear and hatred. He just spread and spread out and out in
meditation, with his horn, Mankunku, Ngozi, that guy from the shores of
South Africa, and he said: “That was it.” For that is what he was doing with
his horn, Yakhal’ inKomo...” (Quoted in Michael Titlestad’s Making the
Changes, Unisa Press, 2004).

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 In his introduction to
his collection of
poems called Yakhal’
inKomo from which I
quoted at the
beginning of this
piece Serote also
quotes artist Dumile
Feni as an
explanation of the
title:
“Dumile, the
sculptor, told me
that once in the
country he saw a
cow being killed. In
the kraal cattle were
looking on. They
were crying for their
like, dying at the
hands of human
beings. Yakhal’
inkomo. Dumile held
3 Musicianaire by Dumile Feni the left side of his
chest and said that
is where the cry of
the cattle hit
him...Yakhal’ inkomo.
The cattle raged and
fought, they became
a terror to
themselves; the
twisted poles of the
kraal rattled and
shook. The cattle
saw blood flow into
the ground.”
It is not too difficult to see the historical significance of these words in the
midst of apartheid South Africa.
Writing about the representation of jazz in South Africa and the charcoal
drawing by Dumile Feni called Musicianaire Michael Titlestad (Making the
Changes, Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2004) writes: “... the
saxophone has the capacity, as an instrument of witness, to give voice to
the irruptive sorrow of oppression...”
The rest of the album is taken up with Mankunku’s Dedication (to Daddy
Trane and Brother Silver), Silver’s Doodlin’ and Coltrane’s Bessie’s Blues,
Dedication at more than 10 minutes the longest track of the four.

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As Rob Allingham wrote in the sleeve notes to the 1996 re-issue of
Yakhal’ inKomo (issued with the five tracks of another album called Spring,
recorded within four months of Yakhal’) Mankunku’s recordings
“beautifully melded a distinctly South African style of jazz with what was
then the cutting edge of the contemporary jazz scene in the US.”
Allingham told me in an email response to my questions about this album,
Yakhal’ inKomohas been “...more or less continuously in print ever since it
was first released”, testimony to its enduring popularity and status among
aficionados both in South Africa and beyond.
This is an album of beautiful music that still stirs emotional responses by
its expression of human pain and endurance, remembrance and
invocation – Yakhal inKomo!

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