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The leadership of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, and all its members, and the working class in general, mourn the death of Johnny Clegg.

We extend our sincere and deepest condolences to his family, friends, comrades and, indeed to the music loving African Continent. The world has lost a genuinely great artist, a committed activist, a cultural leader, a scholar and intellectual, and an important cultural leader in the resistance to apartheid.

Johnny Clegg was no ordinary musician. His globally recognised musical gifts were just one aspect of his greatness. However, much more importantly, he was a person without prejudice in a time of deep prejudice. For many South Africans he became a living example of how to refuse racism and live as an authentic human being. He chose to live as a free man under the racist, authoritarian and violent apartheid state that worked relentlessly to divide us. He suffered repeated state harassment but his will was never broken.

Clegg’s early work, composed and performed together with Sipho Mchunu, was rooted in the experience of migrant workers. Songs like Deliwe, off the Universal Men album, and African Sky Blue off the African Litany album spoke with beauty and power about the lived experience of migrant workers. Later on, during the dark days of the state of emergency, songs like Asimbonanga, became anthems of struggle that moved millions.

To this day songs like Woza Friday, off the Ubuhle Bemvelo album, which is about a worker waiting for the end of the week, and Work for All, a song about unemployment off the album of the same name, remain favourites among the working class.

By the late 1980s Johnny Clegg had become an international superstar and was selling millions of records around the world. But Clegg, always a modest and kind man, never spoke publicly about his activism and quiet behind the scenes support for the workers’ movement. He was a close friend of Neil Aggett, the doctor and trade unionist who died in detention in 1982, performed to audiences of workers in hostels and union halls, and often translated materials into Zulu for trade union publications.

Clegg’s music and vision touched many across South Africa and around the world. In a time of deep and growing divisions in the world, and the rise of a right-wing politics organised around fear and hatred Clegg remains a symbol to us all of hope, unity and the affirmation of the most exploited in society.  

Issued by The Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party