Resistance, rhythm and freedom: The jazz drummer who beat the odds in apartheid South Africa

Louis Tebugo Moholo-Moholo was born in St Monica’s Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa on 10 March 1940. He’d not have appreciated that introduction, once chastising an interviewer: “Ah, no! My name is this; I was born by the river? You want me to start like that? You want me to do all that stuff?”

In fact, asked by another journalist to reflect on where he came from, “he immediately slid into the power salute of the anti-apartheid movement”.

Those two responses sum up the drum master who died on June 13, 2025: a self-effacing but defiantly straight talker with a deep grasp of the politics of the music work – playing, composing, teaching – he devoted his life to.

Early years

But for the sake of the record we need to do some of that stuff. Like most South African families, his had travelled: first from neighbouring Lesotho to the diamond fields of the Free State province and then, as in his father’s case, from there to Cape Town in search of better employment.

His family wasn’t musical (though he recalls his father occasionally playing piano) but enjoyed music. His father would tune in to broadcasts for the then-British naval base at Simonstown, where the young Louis “liked what I heard – Ted Heath,...

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