What a Masekela record says about South Africa's migrants
An essay in Daily Maverick reads the credits of two 1970s albums as a record of what the rest of Africa gave South Africans in exile.
Johannesburg — The names printed on the sleeves of two Hugh Masekela records from the 1970s are a reminder of what the rest of Africa once gave South Africans, the historian Kofi Adjepong-Boateng argues in an essay for Daily Maverick, written as anti-migrant marches spread through South African cities.
The records
Masekela left South Africa in 1960, after the Sharpeville massacre, and did not return for 30 years. In early 1973 he was in Accra, at a club run by Faisal Helwani, a Ghanaian of Lebanese descent, where he heard a band called Hedzoleh Soundz. The name is a Ga word meaning freedom.
That July they recorded an album together at EMI's studio in Lagos. Six of its eight compositions were by the Ghanaian band.
In March 1974, in a Hollywood studio, Masekela recorded Stimela, his song about the coal train that carried migrant miners to Johannesburg. The essay counts the players: seven Ghanaian musicians and two Americans from the Crusaders. A South African anthem about migrant labour, in other words, was made by migrants and their hosts.
Miriam Makeba's story runs alongside. South Africa cancelled her passport in 1960 and her citizenship in 1963, and Guinea took her in.
The present
The essay sets that history against the present. It reports that on 17 August, southern African leaders meeting in Durban told President Cyril Ramaphosa they were hurt by the treatment of their citizens, while marchers outside demanded that governments come and collect their nationals.
It cites figures:
- 42% of South Africans told a 2025 survey by the Human Sciences Research Council that they wanted no immigrants at all;
- the share who would welcome all immigrants fell from 43% in 2008 to 15% in 2025;
- the conflict monitor ACLED has recorded 148 fatal attacks on migrants since 2022;
- migrants are about 3 million people, roughly 5% of the population, by a government survey.
Not only South Africa
Mr Adjepong-Boateng does not let the rest of the continent off. Ghana expelled foreigners under its Aliens Compliance Order of 1969, and Nigeria ordered undocumented foreigners out in 1983, when about two million people left, as many as 1.2 million of them Ghanaians.
His argument is that shelter creates a debt, and that the debt is easily forgotten. Masekela, who died in Johannesburg in 2018 aged 78, seems to have remembered: in 2014 he asked the Zimbabwean musician Oliver Mtukudzi to give the first lecture held in his name.
This report is based on an essay by Kofi Adjepong-Boateng in Daily Maverick.
