The Lions Share

You know, a song can mean a thousand different things

to different people,

and when people ask me, "What does this song mean?" I say,

"Whatever it means to you, it means."

But I'm not gonna tell you what it means to me, because...

well, it might mean I might destroy your illusions.

No two people, you know,

can agree on a definition of folk music.

My own definition is that folk music is a process that's been going on

for thousands of years.

Once upon a time, a long time ago,

a Zulu man stepped up to a microphone in the only recording studio in Africa

and sang 13 notes that went on to earn something like 15 or 16 million dollars.

Almost none of which came back to him, after he died,

to his descendants in South Africa.

Well, there are millions of songs like this, all around the world,

and the wonderful thing is that many of them are coming here.

Here's a song I'm gonna ask you to sing with me.

It comes from South Africa.

I have this very clear memory of, um, sort of three or four years old,

and my mother is making her macaroni and cheese for our supper.

She had a bubbly, effervescent personality and quite a nice voice,

and she was jiving around going, "Wimoweh, a-wimoweh, a-wimoweh,"

as one does.

Try it!

Hey, good!

Everyone in the world who hears that song, the hair stands up on the back of the neck

and they expect to be, like, sort of amused and entertained or something.

I mean, it's... it's kind of difficult for me to think of a song that has covered

a greater distance in both time and space.

Over and over!

In case you're wondering what on Earth it means,

it means, "The lion is sleeping. The lion, the lion."

The legend says the lion isn't dead, he's just sleeping.

He'll wake up someday and lead us to freedom.

Looking back, it struck me as, like, amazing

and shameful that I didn't know this backstory.

I probably had gray hairs

before I actually heard what the song was and... and...

and how blind I'd been before I heard the original 1939 recording.

Rian Malan, author and journalist

whose ancestors arrived in South Africa in the 17th century.

It was one of his relatives, Diaf Malan,

who was the first National Party prime minister

and was responsible for first imposing apartheid,

something he has wrestled with all his life.

You funny little dog.

My name is Rian Malan,

I'm a South African, I'm an Afrikaner,

I'm a writer, and I play some music,

and I drink quite a lot. Smoke cigarettes.

Yeah, you're gonna need coffee.

When I was a kid, I felt that I was,

like, buried under this, like, sort of impossibly heavy burden

of history and guilt that came to bear on my shoulders.

The history of the Malans

was one of the factors that bore down heavily on my...

juvenile consciousness.

Dr. D.F. Malan,

he and my grandfather would have been cousins.

He was the first apartheid prime minister of South Africa in 1948.

Grand apartheid, this idea, was founded in racism and white supremacy.

Believe me, I was wrecked by guilt about apartheid

and my sense of complicity in it.

In order to live with himself,

my father would blind himself

to the damage that apartheid was doing to black people.

Demonstrations against the South African government's

strict apartheid policies

flare into shocking violence. All South Africa was in ferment.

One of my earliest memories,

reading in Time Magazine about the adventures of Che Guevara.

There were all these glamorous pictures of him with his beret.

I thought this was cool.

I decided that I was a Communist as well.

And I have this memory of myself standing in the backyard,

telling Miriam Shabalala,

who was our servant,

that I was a Communist, and when I grew up we were going to get rid

of all this apartheid rubbish, and I was going to free her.

I remember sort of like...

expecting that she was gonna say thank you, or whatever.

Instead she says... she says, "Ah, suka," which is, uh,

you know, um, "Just go way. You're talking nonsense."

And she was absolutely right.

But I loved African people.

I kind of liked hanging out with them,

and I liked listening to their music on the radio.

I liked eating their food.

It's such an old African story, it's a cliché,

but I also wanted to be, like, the champion of...

black liberation, because that seemed to be quite cool to me.

One night in the early '70s,

my friends and I snuck out of our homes, and we went to write graffiti

on a giant concrete embankment along Empire Road,

which is a... is a major thoroughfare in Johannesburg.

We wrote, "Say it out loud, I'm black, and I'm proud!"

in sort of six-foot-high letters.

There was a photograph of our handiwork

in the local Afrikaans newspaper

with a caption saying

that the security police were investigating.

And in the milieu I came from, it was cool.

It just, like, struck a blow against the evil empire.

But at the end of every South African boyhood,

people like me were expected to join the army and go off

with guns over our shoulders to fight the Communist armies.

I truly did not believe in the cause. I did not believe

in the cause of apartheid.

I dodged the draft for two, three years and eventually,

when that became impossible,

on the 9th of May 1977, I got on a plane and flew off to the world of color.

I wound up in Los Angeles

writing rock 'n' roll reviews for small magazines

under thenom de plume Nelson Mandela.

I couldn't use my own name because I didn't have documentation.

If you'd met me when my plane landed

and said, "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

I would have presented myself as a just white man, that I was... that I'd been...

tooth and claw against apartheid

from the moment I... I'd achieved consciousness.

But I knew exactly why I'd left South Africa.

I'd left South Africa because the racial problems seemed

to be completely unsolvable. It's impossible to sort these things out,

there's going to be a ghastly racial war in this country.

And I don't want part of it, because I'm a coward.

That's... That's the truth of the matter.

I was nearly 30 when the final struggle began

in South Africa.

That's September 1984.

The large-scale riots and the violence broke out,

and then it just, like, spread like wildfire across the country.

Mobs with stones in the streets, and police with armored cars,

and people being killed every day.

I was watching this from far away,

and I had to come back here and, uh...

...and face it.

I was also a journalist, and I was young and ambitious.

I had an idea for a book unlike any that had ever been written before.

My Traitor's Heart is about deep-rooted racial fear and hatred.

Rian Malan belongs to an Afrikaner clan that settled there 300 years ago.

Ever since its publication last year, the book My Traitor's Heart

has left virtually every critic raving

about its relentless pursuit of the raw truth of South Africa.

Let me talk about that honesty.

You write, and I'm gonna quote you here, "Some whites

see danger when they see blacks.

Some see savagery, some see victims, some see revolutionary heroes,

very few of us see clearly."

How clearly do you think you were able to see?

There were things about the experience

of being white in South Africa

that we all knew but didn't know how to say.

I'm tired of my own bullshit.

Let me tell you the truth now. My name is Malan,

I am one of them. This is what it's like inside my head.

There's nothing as pathetic as somebody who denies, like, who they really are.

I love blacks and I feared them.

I feared them, and yet lov... I loved them.

I am prey to exactly the same sort of racial psychosis

and the possibly irrational fears

that hold white South Africans together and determined our behavior at that stage.

And this is the stuff I should be writing about.

It's the only stuff that matters.

It's the only thing that I know about South Africa that was really important.

I come from a deeply complicated country.

We had to have open and honest recognition of our differences.

We had to cut out our hearts and put them on the table, and...

stare at them long enough to see if salvation awaited.

Trust is all we have to hold against the darkness,

and that's the darkness in ourselves.

Southern Africa is probably best known for its struggle for freedom

and its music.

Its musical strains have captured the imagination

and interests of people throughout the world.

Here's what's happening.

So, in 1999,

we've got this guy in South Africa called Johnny Clegg,

also known as Le Zoulou Blanc,

who's like this great crossover as a Zulu pop star.

And I met him once at what we call braaivleis in South Africa, a barbecue,

and he started telling me about this song called "Mbube"

and how it had been recorded in Johannesburg in the 1930s, et cetera.

I had sort of prided myself as this sort of fairly well-informed South African,

and I thought I was hip and cool, and it struck me as, like, amazing

and shameful that I didn't know this backstory.

So I decided to start checking that out.

This was the first time that I'd ever heard of Solomon Linda.

I had actually been introduced to and contacted by Rian Malan.

He was just then sort of starting to...

dig into the story.

The year is 1939, and we're in Johannesburg.

Solomon Linda

was a Zululand migrant worker from the deep countryside.

During the day he was guided, menial labor,

but at night he was also the lead singer of this really cool band,

The Evening Birds.

Black people were basically being actively displaced,

so they had to leave those rural areas to come into the cities to find jobs.

As I understand it, Solomon Linda started working at the Carlton Hotel.