What can one say about Hugh Masekela? He, along with Makeba, Mapfumo, Fela, and Baaba Maal (if only for Dengalem) have done more through their music to clue the clueless West about African politics than any one of our "all the news thats fit to print" media.

My first introduction to Masekela was as a young small-town girl living in AM radio America. Four Tops, Temptations, Stax, Chess battled with bubble-gum pop, bad Elvis, and wholesome offerings from the Carpenters. The new psychedelic music scene was sounding like just too much bad poetry. Alternative FM radio was just starting to find its audience, and the world as we knew it was turning into a ball of confusion. For a girl raised on Motown and Memphis, the last thing I wanted to hear was some song about cakes melting in the rain.

Set this against a time when strikes and riots loomed in the shadows of public consciousness; the Summer of Love was still in its extended Spring and some of us were just waiting for Malcolm's chickens to hatch more eggs.

Blasting through the daily countdown of the top 40, comes Masekelas 1968 pop hit, Grazin in the Grass. For two weeks, it was the number one song in the countdown. Fast forward to the 1980s. Was there any party worth its name where Bring Him Back Home (Mandela) was not played? If, in the 60s you couldnt be bothered to find out more about Apartheid, you had to be really deep in the heartless heartland of America not to be involved by the 1980s.

Born in Witbank, South Africa on April 4, 1939, Masekela began his musical career while still a child. At 14, he took up the trumpet. Influenced by American jazz, he and his classmates formed the Huddleston Jazz Band, South Africas first youth orchestra. By 1958, he was playing for South Africa's first record-breaking musical, King Kong, which toured the country for one year before appearing on London's West-End. This musical starred Miriam Makeba, whom he would later marry in 1963. In another first, Masekela's immensely popular 1959 jazz group, The Jazz Epistles, formed with Abdullah Ibrahim and others, was the first African jazz group to record an LP.

Following the March 21, 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, where 69 South Africans were gunned down, the ensuing Apartheid government policies revealed the full evil of its racist intentions. Masekela had no choice but to leave. With the help of his former headmaster, Trevor Huddleston, who had himself been deported in 1955 for his militancy, Masekela emigrated to the United States. After enrolling in the Manhattan School of Music through the support of Huddleston and Harry Belafonte, Masekela started on his stateside musical career. Masakela began to record again, and with the strong support of Belafonte and Makeba, recorded a series of albums, including the 1968 Promise of a Future, from which the hit single Grazin in the Grass was released.

In the 1970s, when he returned to the continent, he met Fela, who in turn introduced him to the Ghanaian band, Hedzoleh Sounds. He continued to compose, record and perform including a 1980 Christmas Day Coming Home concert in Lesotho to an audience of 75, 000. His return, after a twenty-year exile, was again cut short in 1985. Following the massacre of sixteen anti-apartheid activists, including his friends George and Lindi Phahle, Masakela was again forced to leave, this time for England.

There, he and Mbongeni Ngema conceived the musical Sarafina, which went on to receive several Tony Awards in 1988. If, after Sarafina, the music and life of Hugh Masakela were still unknown to the American public, his tour with Paul Simon's Graceland, which also included Makeba and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, has made his music, if not his history, a significant part of the American landscape.

Following the long fought for release of Nelson Mandela and the dissolution of the Apartheid government, Masekela returned home. Since then, he has made his home in South Africa, where in addition to continuing his creative output, and completing his autobiography, he supports young artists through his label, Chissa Records.

Masekela has continued to tour, where his most recent Hugh Masekela and Friends at Carnegie Hall on April 4, 2003 packed the Hall's 2800 seats, and as Afro-pop's Banning Eyre writes, "delivered a star-studded, all-out, spirit-soaring night of music that lasted nearly three hours and left the place elated and buzzing."