My African Heart

By Dave Matthews

I was born in Johannesburg, in South Africa. My family moved to the U.S. when I was two, and then we moved back to South Africa when I was 13. But then we lived back and forth between Johannesburg and Virginia.

Growing up in America, I was made hyperaware of racism. And then going to South Africa, the concept was punctuated at a pretty young age, 13 or 14. I became more and more horrified, first at the absurdity of it but then with the horror that comes of it: the power that's put into the wrong people's hands. Seeing people thrown off trains. Watching people being arrested, or people being molested by the authorities, or friends being mistreated.

One of the results of that kind of a society is that all the media, all the entertainment, are really separated. I could listen to English radio or Afrikaans radio or Zulu radio, and they didn't cross over. There was no mixing. On Afrikaans radio, all the music you listened to was Afrikaans. And then English music was mostly on the English stations. Though the English claimed to be the sort of liberal people in power, their whole identification had nothing to do with Africa. It was all Europe.

My high school in South Africa was integrated. But once I left, I realized it really wasn't that integrated. The fact that there were a couple of black kids there, a couple of Indian kids there, just meant that they were coming there to get an English-based education. It wasn't like we were coming there to learn about each other's cultures.

And that's why it was only later on, when I was traveling more around the world, that I became more aware of all the diversity in South Africa. I grew up listening to, because of my parents, Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim, knowing about Miriam Makeba. But only when I got out of high school did I start to get into the more contemporary people, people like Tananas, which was an integrated band, and Juluka, which was an integrated band. And then, from them, I became aware of the Soweto String Quartet.

I go back to South Africa at least once a year, sometimes twice, and usually for a month. And probably, I'm guessing, I'll spend more time back there as I get older.

South Africa gives me a perspective of what's real and what's not real. America's very far from a state of natural existence. In America, we're as concerned about who's pregnant on a TV show as we are about whether or not the temperature of the globe is going up. Our perspective is warped by this TV fantasy culture. One thing that worries me in the U.S. is this sort of mad attempt to somehow resegregate ourselves. There's some sort of strange fractionalization going on again. The thing that has made the music of America in many ways dominate the world is that we come from the world, and the whole world ended up here.

So I go back to South Africa to both lose myself and gain awareness of myself. Every time I go back, it doesn't take long for me to get caught into a very different thing. A very different sense of myself. It's a melting pot, southern Africa. You find these cultural collisions that result in art and music, and it's pretty amazing.