Paul Simon: anti-Apartheid hero or arrogant white colonialist? The jury's out

Telegraph

30-04-2025

'I have 40 years' experience of trying to change the world through singing. It doesn't work,' said Billy Bragg on Paul Simon's Political Storm (Radio 4, Tuesday). Apart from making me wonder why Bragg didn't jack in the day job a long time before now, this statement struck me as peculiarly defeatist. A little over 40 years ago, Band Aid certainly tilted the world ever so slightly with its cloth-eared anthem Do They Know It's Christmas? (Feed the World), and the debate still rages whether the hit single helped or harmed Africa.
A little under 40 years ago, in the summer of 1986, Paul Simon released his enduring album Graceland, and Lynsey Chutel's thought-provoking documentary invited us to consider its chequered legacy. Is Simon an anti-Apartheid hero, smashing down barriers and elevating black South African musicians onto a world stage? Or is he an arrogant white colonialist, breaking the cultural boycott to pilfer black South Africa of its musical heritage? Many of the contributors to the programme saw the issue in these terms, but Chutel herself – a South African who works for the New York Times in London – brought far more nuance.
Simon recorded the album in 1985, coming off the back of a failed marriage (to Carrie Fisher) and an album (Hearts and Bones) so indifferently received that his record label assumed he would retire. In a funk, he listened to a bootleg cassette of the Boyoyo Boys, a township jive band from Soweto, and decided that making music with them would be 'a lot of fun'. You could hear the incredulity in Chutel's voice: 'Can you imagine landing in South Africa in 1985 and thinking, 'I'm here because the vibes are cool'?' Simon's first sin, it seems, was breaking the cultural boycott so flippantly.
Simon got a kicking here, not just from Bragg (the only non-African contributor to the programme) but from South African anti-Apartheid campaigner Dali Tambo, who likened Simon's actions to recording music with Jewish musicians in Warsaw during the Second World War. Tambo, son of the former ANC leader Oliver Tambo, was unequivocal: 'For me there was no difference in a person coming to exploit us for our diamonds and gold, or for our musical abilities.' Chutel pointed out the irony of naming the album after Elvis Presley's home – another artist who cheerfully mined black music to enormous success.
Yet Chutel also gently picked at the moral simplicity of Bragg and his ilk, who protested outside the Royal Albert Hall when Simon and his South African collaborators played there. Bakithi Kumalo, who played bass so memorably on Graceland, was an electrician in Soweto struggling to feed his family when Simon came calling. He reminded Chutel that black South Africans under apartheid still had music and joy in their lives, 'not just oppression and misery'. When Simon's offer came, Kumalo 'saw the gate of freedom and I walked straight to it'. And what did he make of the protestors outside the Royal Albert Hall? 'Those people did not talk to me when I was desperate and hungry,' he said. Sonti Mndebele, who sang on the Graceland tour, claimed that Simon's actions made black South African culture 'respected', a statement that sticks in the craw for those who find breaking the cultural boycott unfathomable.
The beauty of BBC Sounds is that, while searching for this programme on the app, I stumbled across a 1987 World Service report from Network Africa. In it, a journalist spoke to those outside the Royal Albert Hall, including British anti-Apartheid campaigner David Kenvyn. Simon was doing this for selfish ends, said Kenvyn, before asking the reporter and the wider world if they knew the names of any of the South African artists who played with Simon. Considering some of those included Ladysmith Black Mambazo, it's a statement that hasn't aged well. Mndebele stated that the album changed the hearts and minds of many white South Africans at the time, exposing them to a culture they had previously not known.
Ultimately, Chutel's reasonable summary was one of mild embarrassment – Graceland is a little like Band Aid, a well-meaning relic that undeniably did an enormous amount of good, even if its origins are hard to stomach. 'It's not the kind of cultural artefact passed down by black South Africans,' said music writer Setumo-Thebe Mohlomi, with some understatement, while Chutel's uncle, Stanley de Clerk, likened it to Uncle Tom's Cabin – the black experience, but made palatable for white audiences.
The success of Chutel's programme can be seen in the fact that I changed my mind on the subject a dozen times while listening to it. The emphasis on localism (and journalism) meant that the documentary came across as an extended episode of From Our Own Correspondent (and I can think of no greater praise). It was a far cry from the usual 'well-known BBC Radio voice explores their favourite artist' template. 'This is not going to be a standard rock doc,' said Chutel at the outset. It wasn't, and thank goodness for that.