The Musical Diplomacy of a Landless Ambassador: Hugh Masekela between Monterey ’67 and Zaire ’74

Abstract

This essay attempts to locate the music festival known as Zaire ’74 within a continuum of Pan-African festivals by reading it as an ‘idiosyncratic laboratory’ in relation to the agency of exiled South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela. Masekela was one of the producers of the 1974 event held in Kinshasa. Yet his expertise here draws on his prior participation in the foundational Monterey International Pop Festival (1967), which helped constitute rock music as the soundtrack of choice for a predominantly white American counter-culture. In Monterey, Masekela featured as a conduit for exoticizing tropes of “African ecstasy.” While the production of Zaire ’74 was largely based on Masekela’s experiences in Monterey, it was the representation of the African continent as a musical – cultural construct that rendered Masekela’s vision of Zaire ’74 into the junction between soul power, black power, anti-imperialism, Pan-Africanism, and Zairean nationalism. The agency of Masekela in both events draws attention to the multiple roles played by exiled South African cultural agents in the transnational circulation of texts, sounds, and images against the backdrop of Cold War divisions. Musical analysis of samples from this formative period in Masekela’s career locates Zaire ’74 as a pivotal moment of maturation in his transformation from an exiled African jazzman in America into a politically committed cultural producer who played a crucial role in the international explosion of the culturally and politically entangled musical genre known as Afropop.