LONDON: Archive footage shows a South African crowd in the 1980s singing the anthem Senzenina. Over and over they repeat the title in those inimitably moving harmonies, as the subtitles translate for us: “What have we done?” The second verse suggests an answer. “Is it because we are black?”

A young woman who fought in the bush with the armed wing of the ANC delicately sings the haunting funeral song with which they honoured fallen comrades. “We didn’t want the songs to be too sad,” she says. “It might have demoralized us.” Then after a silent pause, she begins to weep.

Sophie Mgcina — remembered for her 1985 London performance as the mother in Poppie Nongena — reminisces about the songs maids would sing about their white “madams”. “You ask how are your children, but do you ever ask when I last saw mine?”

The family of Vuyisile Mini — hanged in 1964 and reburied recently with a gravestone befitting the movement’s greatest composer — joyfully sing his most famous song, Watch Out, Verwoerd.

These scenes are part of Amandla, a prize-winning documentary by Lee Hirsch. Hirsch and his producer Sherry Simpson spent the better part of a decade putting it together, and the result is not just revelatory and moving, but also a consummate piece of documentary film-making.

Not even the American civil-rights movement of the 1960s could match the anti-apartheid movement for the power of its music. But the thousands who packed the Free Mandela concerts or who bought the Indestructible Beat of Soweto compilations will have little idea of the depth and power that the music has in situ. The hymns and chants that underscored the movement come from a long history of Zulu, Xhoza and Sutu singing. At its most complex and sophisticated, it has given us the harmonies of Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the elegant piano pieces of Abdullah Ibrahim. In its most vividly political form, toyi- toyi dancers mime movements from the hunt as they chant joyful threats at police holding sjamboks and machine guns.

There is often little connection between the new middle-class audiences for world music and the cultures it springs from. Visitors to Cuba, for example, are shocked to discover the contempt in which most younger Cubans hold the Buena Vista Social Club. Youth tends to side with the new against the vestiges of the past. Aficionados of musical tradition can find themselves in dodgy company. From Japan to Andalucia, there are often blurred lines between reactionary politics and a reverence for cultural traditions.

Consumers who gobbled up Ladysmith and the Indestructible Beat of Soweto in the 1980s felt they were doing their bit to support black South African culture against the oppressive Boers. But nothing is ever that simple, and in the townships it was particularly complicated. Opposition to the anti-apartheid movement came not just from whites, but from tribal power-brokers such as the Zulu prince Buthelezi and his Inkhata movement. Deals and arms were offered by the Afrikaner government: a quasi-independent Zululand and the guns to shoot at the ANC comrades who dreamed of a South Africa in which tribal politics had no place. (Buthelezi, meanwhile, was entertained in Britain by the likes of James Goldsmith, Laurens van der Post and Prince Charles.)

When British liberals purchased one of those records, they were unwittingly buying into a Zulu ideal, one opposed to the vision of Mandela’s ANC — most of whose membership actually listened to the latest imported disco music rather than the Zulu songs of Ladysmith.

The contradictions did not end there. Zululand was not unified behind Inkhata by any means, and some of the bloodiest battles of the 1980s were fought, village against village, in the hills of Natal not far from the glamour of Durban’s beaches. The last chapters of Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart describe the atmosphere of those years in Zululand. Both sides listened to Ladysmith cassettes and loved the hymns and marching songs of the struggle, much to the consternation of Inkhata officials.

Another twist was provided by Paul Simon and Graceland. When he listened to an early Zulu compilation and wrote a song based on one of the melodies, his intention was to fill one track on his new record with that glorious sound. But what he found when he went to Johannesburg convinced him that an entire album could be built around township jive.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.