In 2017 filmmaker Mandla Dube released the biopic Kalushi.
Based on freedom fighter Solomon Mahlangu’s life, jazz plays a starring role in the film.
In telling Mahlangu’s life story, the film narrows and distorts what jazz meant to freedom fighters.
South Africans had specific attitudes to American jazz during the liberation struggle against apartheid. The late trumpeter Johnny Mekoa told me in an interview for my book, “Soweto Blues: jazz politics and popular music in South Africa”:
People were listening to this music at home because we felt this was our music and these are our black heroes.
For South Africans aspiring to freedom, jazz was protest music. In struggle, jazz offered shared, collective messages of black intellectual attainment – and beauty.