South African Jazz icon,Bro Hugh Masekela, was full of mix emotions on Tuesday morning,(2017/07/04 )during the University of the Witwatersrand University Winter graduations.This comes after the University conferred on honorary Doctor of Music degree on this living music legend.
“I am deeply honoured and honesty humbled,”
Hugh Masekela has accumulated a lifetime’s worth of recognition for his artistic and activist contributions, from heads of states to his ardent grassroots fans. Prominent among his achievements are his being granted a Gold Medal of the Order of Ikhamanga in 2010 by the South African Presidency, and having March 18 proclaimed Hugh Masekela Day in the US Virgin Islands.
The university applaud bra Hugh’s achievement through bestowing his sixth honorary doctorate on him, it would be relevant to highlight the personal, artistic and political journey he made since being a nineteen-year-old trumpeter in the band of the jazz opera King Kong in the stage of the same university in 1959 to his status as a globally recognised, activist artist. His music has consistently reached beyond apartheid categories and firmly located itself within pan-African and pan-diasporic frames of reference.
Any jazz music lover and fan will testify without a doubt that bra Hugh’s work has also resonated beyond the commercial success that he has achieved and has reached audiences around the world while aligning itself with struggles for political and human rights.
Bra Hugh Masekela now Dr Hugh ‘s career is testimony to the capacity of music to animate the social and the political imagination, alongside its aesthetic potency.
The resilience with which he has pursued this in a career spanning an extraordinary seven decades merits academic recognition and a standing ovation and it is therefore befitting that the University if the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg awards an honorary doctorate degree to Hugh Ramopolo Masekela.
“The time is now for Africans to rediscover and regenerate the existing wealth of their artisanship and original design talents and skills so that we can begin to manufacture furniture, linens, cutlery, crockery, bedding, clothing, interior décor materials and fabrics and other household goods for retail and export not exclusive of traditional architecture and construction to replace the frenzied purchase of commodities from other lands.”
“Go out there and kick some booty,” he said resulting in a thundering applause from graduands
