Johnny Clegg, the South African musician, best known for his band Juluka, died at his home in Johannesburg on July 16. Most people know Clegg from his album Scatterlings (1982), which can still be found in the “world music” section of most second-hand music shops, or from his 1986 anti-apartheid song “Asimbonanga,” which pays tribute to Mandela and fallen struggle heroes. He was also a trained anthropologist, who used his training to develop a unique hybridized sound that challenged the apartheid state’s political manipulation of culture.

Growing up in middle-class white South Africa in the late 1990s, Clegg’s music was the background to my childhood and captured much of the optimism of the time. Understandably, as one of the few white musicians who performed in an African language, his music has been associated with the “rainbowism” of this period. While his songs do celebrate a non-racial humanism, they also capture the violent colonial histories that lurk beneath rolling hills and open veldt.

In the song “Mdantsane (Mud Coloured Dusty),” for example, he is asked:

Why don’t you sing about the African moon?
Why don’t you sing about the leaves and the dreams?
Why don’t you sing about the rain and the birds?

In the next verse, he answers. Because, while on the road to the township of Mdantsane, he saw, “mud coloured dusty blood/ bare feet on a burning bus/ broken teeth and rifle butt.” Mdantsane is a township in the Eastern Cape outside East London, established in the early 1960s under the Group Areas Act to house black residents evicted from urban townships in the city. As a child, I grew up driving along the same road, usually to go to the beach on family trips. Blinkered by the myopia and cultural provincialism of white South Africa, it would take me years to understand the violence embedded in these landscapes. In a sense, this was the aim of Clegg’s music, to not merely celebrate the natural beauty of South Africa but to situate it in relation to histories of war, migration and hope for a better future.