The Sound of Soweto - Part One
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 May 2017
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Johannesburg-based poet Thabiso Mohare looks at the musical heritage of Sophiatown, and talks to Sowetan musicians including Sibongele Khumalo and Jonas Gwangwa, about the intersection in their lives of music and politics, and their memories of streets filled with a rich mix of sounds from gramophones and radios to church choirs, workers choirs, and bands playing music from jazz, mbaqanga and soul to rock.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC World Service, The Sound of Suueto. |
| 0:07.0 | The First Sounds of Humanity were melodic, they were musical. |
| 0:10.0 | So what's left of us now, the people that you see here, the dejected still oppressed not so free people of this country. |
| 0:17.0 | We are the custodians of something precious for humanity. |
| 0:21.0 | That's why when you say Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam |
| 0:24.3 | Makeba, Humasekella, everywhere in the world they know who you're talking about. The |
| 0:29.4 | world loves South African song. They love it also because of loves that |
| 0:33.0 | African song |
| 0:33.0 | They love it also because of its story |
| 0:36.0 | because out of that kind of very bleak existential thing |
| 0:40.0 | a lot of beauty has had to come out. |
| 0:43.0 | In a two-part series, Tabizumahare tells the story of Suuetoetoeo, through its music. Soetu is made of migration and fusion |
| 1:00.0 | is made of migration and fusion and music. It's the most famous township to the outside world. |
| 1:07.0 | Maybe because of its size, its vocal residence, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tut tutu and its defiance. |
| 1:15.0 | Under apartheid, Sowethu was the epicenter of the struggle. |
| 1:21.0 | Soweto became synonymous with the suffering of a people. |
| 1:25.7 | All confusion, everybody was now running Helitos-Ckelter. We do not know which way to go. |
| 1:32.2 | And the police were still shooting? |
| 1:34.0 | They were still shooting. |
| 1:35.0 | What could I do because children were falling there |
| 1:38.0 | and there wasn't enough transported to carry them. |
| 1:41.0 | We thought we could help those, you know, who we saw getting injured. |
... |
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