Doing My Thing
The Return of Saitana
“He was one remarkable person. He was in the right career and doing the right thing. Heart, mind, body and soul - he was a musician through and through.” - Alec Khaoli
In the late 1960s, a fundraising performance by a high school band in Soweto changed the course of popular music in South Africa. By the late 1970s, the group Harari were a mainstream juggernaut in the vanguard of South African pop and the offshoots and solo careers that followed in the 1980s were a driving force through the rapidly shifty landscape of another fertile musical decade. The high school band were called the Beaters during that fateful gig but had yet to coalesce as a fully fledged founding quartet. Guitarist Monty Ndimande (who later adopted the name Saitana for his solo career) and multi-instrumentalist Selby Ntuli had met via their older brothers, who had come up with the Beaters name and bequeathed the embryonic enterprise along with their instruments to their younger brothers when they left home. While Saitana was studying carpentry at a vocational college, Ntuli attended Orlando West High School and befriended classmate Alec Khaoli, who joined on bass. Drummer Sipho Mabuse, who was a year younger, emerged in the wake of the band’s legendary debut.
Riffing on the name Beatles, the young quartet became subject to a mania that was comparable in spirit, albeit obviously not in scale, to their Liverpudlian namesake. “At the time, in the Soweto music scene, we were the main thing. There were always gigs around Soweto halls,” recalls Alec Khaoli. “People would require us to perform every weekend.” They immersed themselves in a devoted practice regime and often rehearsed at Saitana’s house on Chalker Avenue in Soweto’s Dube neighborhood, home also to talent scout and promoter Ray Nkwe, who produced the band’s first LP Soul A-Go-Go for the City Special label in 1969. Under the wing of CBS producer Hamilton Nzimande, the LPs Hot Dogs and Lost Memories followed quickly thereafter, packed with groovy, garage soul instrumentals written almost entirely by the band.
Saitana was a particularly productive songwriter. “After we rehearsed, he would stay in his bedroom and compose and every day we would find him playing a new song,” remembers Khaoli. “But he had his own personality and he really wanted to push his own agenda as much as possible. Not in a way that was uncomfortable for us. He was deep. He probably felt he needed his own space.” With the Beaters star in its ascendancy, Saitana’s announcement that he was quitting the band in the early 1970s came as a surprise. Yet the output that followed suggests that the move was written in the stars. The Beaters went on to record for the independent As-Shams/The Sun label, discovering a new, mature Afrocentric sound and transitioning into Harari in the process. Concurrently, Saitana released two exquisite solo albums that received less mainstream attention but that showcased his unique talent and reflected the compelling light and dark aspects of his personality.
Saitana’s debut Baby Don’t Go in 1976 saw him return to the producer of the Beaters first album, Ray Nkwe, whose JAS Pride label, a subsidiary of Gallo Records, was undergoing a mid-70s boom. In contrast with the mod sensibilities of the early Beaters, Saitana came out of the gate with a completely new look to suit the times, sporting an impressive Afro, an embroidered dashiki and an amicable grin on the album’s cover. The album opener “Rufaro” set the tone with a light-hearted, old-timey, marabi jazz groove. From the Shona word meaning happiness, the track tapped into the revolutionary zeitgeist around the nascent nation of Zimbabwe on its path to independence in 1980. Coincidentally, Saitana’s former bandmates had a song of the same name as the title track of their first release as Harari, demonstrating that they were still creatively aligned while making music independently. Other themes from Saitana’s first offering touch on love as well as the burgeoning disco scene and paint Soweto as a crucible of hip style and good vibes despite the anti-apartheid social and political unrest that was brewing.
In contrast, 1977’s Jenakuru, released on Gallo and self-produced on this occasion, reveals a slightly darker, somewhat introspective and perhaps more vulnerable side to the seemingly happy-go-lucky Saitana. This impression is no doubt implanted by journalist Vusi Khumalo’s brief liner notes, evoking Saitana’s sophomore outing as “the heart-throbbing trials and tribulations of a lonely man and his guitar.” The mood of Baby Don’t Go has doubtlessly shifted on tracks like “Friends” and “Doing My Thing” and Saitana depicted as a pick-axe wielding labourer on the back of the sleeve brought home the township-dwelling working class hero image expressed in lyrics like “I’m not a superstar, I’m just a simple man.” Notable too is that the Zulu language track “Sonke” on Side A is presented in a Sotho language translation as “Kaufela” on Side B so that the track could get airplay for different language groups on South Africa's linguistically segregated broadcasting services.
Khaoli recalls that Saitana, who was a great admirer of Jimi Hendrix, often performed solo during this period. “It was really unheard of at the time to perform without a band. He would wave his guitar around and was such a good dancer. He could entertain people like that and a lot of people loved him because he was such a character.” There was also an increasingly Dionysian aspect to Saitana’s routine as a performer - a gradual advance into drunken showmanship akin to Jim Morrison that was thrilling to observe yet likely contributed to his declining mental state and productivity. The “luny character” reputation that Vusi Khumalo evokes in his notes for Jenakuru is a well-known rock archetype and most accounts suggest that Saitana slowly fell prey to self-destructive impulses in the course of serving his art. Saitana emerged with a new boogie sound on Love Fever in 1984. With Stevie Wonder braids, mirror glasses and a sequinned veneer, the EP was a welcome return to form after a long leave of absence but sadly turned out to be his swansong. The full circumstances surrounding his untimely death in 1985 remain unknown.
“He was one remarkable person,” is Khaoli’s enduring recollection. “He was in the right career and doing the right thing. Heart, mind, body and soul - he was a musician through and through. He could have been a big star if he was anywhere else in the world but he was locked in a very small corner of the world and kept secret there.” Saitana’s two 1970s albums have been restored from master tapes and are being reissued on vinyl in September 2021 for the very first time since their initial South African release.