This post was originally published on The Conversation
We use the term “Renaissance man” very loosely these days, for anybody even slightly multi-talented. But Lesotho-born jazz drummer, novelist and development scholar Morabo Morojele was the genuine article.
He not only worked across multiple fields, but achieved impressively in all. Morojele died on 20 May, aged 64.
As a researcher into South African jazz, I encountered him initially through his impressive live performances. I was surprised to hear about his first novel and then – as a teacher of writing – bowled over by its literary power.
Celebrating a life such as Morojele’s matters, because a pan-African polymath like him cut against the grain of a world of narrow professional boxes, where borders are increasingly closing to “foreigners”.
This was a man who not only played the jazz changes, but wrote – and lived – the social and political ones.
The economist who loved jazz
Born on 16 September 1960 in Maseru, Lesotho, Morojele schooled at the Waterford Kamhlaba United World College in Swaziland (now Eswatini) before being accepted to study at the London School of Economics.
In London in the early 1980s the young economics student converted his longstanding jazz drumming hobby into a professional side gig. There was a vibrant African diasporic music community, respected by and often sharing stages with their British peers. Morojele worked, among others, in the bands of South African drummer Julian Bahula and Ghanaian saxophonist George Lee. With Lee’s outfit, Dadadi, he recorded Boogie Highlife Volume 1 in 1985.
Studies completed and back in Lesotho, Morojele founded the small Afro-jazz group Black Market and later the trio Afro-Blue. He worked intermittently with other Basotho music groups including Sankomota, Drizzle and Thabure while building links with visiting South African artists. For them neighbouring Lesotho provided less repressive stages than apartheid South Africa.
Morojele relocated to Johannesburg in 1995 and picked up his old playing relationship with Lee, by then also settled there. His drum prowess caught the eye of rising star saxophonist Zim Ngqawana. With bassist Herbie Tsoaeli and pianist Andile Yenana, he became part of the reedman’s regular rhythm section.
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The three rhythm players developed a close bond and a distinctive shared vision, which led to their creating a trio and an independent repertoire. Later they were joined by saxophonist Sydney Mnisi and trumpeter Marcus Wyatt to form the quintet Voice.
Voice was often the resident band at one of Johannesburg’s most important post-liberation jazz clubs: the Bassline. Although the 1994-founded venue was just a cramped little storefront in a bohemian suburb, it provided a stage for an entire new generation of indigenous jazz and pan-African music in its nine years. Voice was an important part of that identity, which is particularly audible on their second recording.
Morojele also recorded with South African jazz stars like Bheki Mseleku and McCoy Mrubata. He appeared on stage with everyone from Abdullah Ibrahim to Feya Faku.
His drum sound had a tight, disciplined, almost classical swing, punctuated visually by kinetic energy, and sonically by hoarse, breathy vocalisations. Voice playing partner Marcus Wyatt recalls:
The first time I played with you, I remember being really freaked out by those vocal sound effects coming from the drum kit behind me, but the heaviness of your swing far outweighed the heaviness of the grunting. That heavy swing was in everything you did – the way you spoke, the way you loved, the way you drank, the way you wrote, the way you lived your life.
Wyatt also recalls a gentle, humble approach to making music together, but spiced with sharp, unmuted honesty – “You always spoke your mind” – and intense, intellectual after-show conversations about much more than music.
Because Morojele had never abandoned his other life as a development scholar and consultant. He was travelling extensively and engaging with (and acutely feeling the hurt of) the injustices and inequalities of the world. Between those two vocations, a third was insinuating itself into the light: that of writer.
The accidental writer
He said in an interview:
I came to writing almost by accident … I’ve always enjoyed writing (but) I never grew up thinking I was going to be a writer.
In 2006, after what he described in interviews as a series of false starts, he produced a manuscript that simply “wrote itself”.
How We Buried Puso starts with the preparations for a brother’s funeral. The novel – set in Lesotho – reflects on the diverse personal and societal meanings of liberation in the “country neighbouring” (South Africa) and at home. How new meanings for old practices are forged, and how the personal and the political intertwine and diverge. All set to Lesotho’s lifela music. The book was shortlisted for the 2007 M-Net Literary Award.
There was an 18-year hiatus before Morojele’s second novel, 2023’s The Three Egg Dilemma. Now that he was settled again in Lesotho, music was less and less a viable source of income, and development work filled his time. “I suppose,” he said, “I forgot I was a writer.” But, in the end, that book “also wrote itself, because I didn’t have an outline … it just became what it is almost by accident.”
In 2022, a serious health emergency hit; he was transported to South Africa for urgent surgery.
The Three Egg Dilemma, unfolding against an unnamed near-future landscape that could also be Lesotho, broadens his canvas considerably.
The setting could as easily be any nation overtaken by the enforced isolation of a pandemic or the dislocation of civil war and military dictatorship, forcing individuals to rethink and re-make themselves. And complicated by the intervention of a malign ghost: a motif that Morojele said had been in his mind for a decade.
For this powerful second novel, Morojele was joint winner of the University of Johannesburg Prize for South African writing in English.
At the time of his death, he was working on his third fiction outing, a collection of short stories.
The beauty of his work lives on
Morojele’s creative career was remarkable. What wove his three identities together – musician, development worker and writer – was his conscious, committed pan-Africanism and his master craftsman’s skill with sound: the sound of his drums and the sound of his words as they rose off the page.
Through his books, and his (far too few) recordings, that beauty lives with us still. Robala ka khotso (Sleep in peace).
Gwen Ansell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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