In 1969 a young Zulu musician named Sipho Mchunu heard about a white teenager in Johannesburg who could play Zulu guitar, and went to challenge him to a contest. The teenager was Johnny Clegg. They became friends, then a duo, then Juluka, a band with black and white members who shared a stage when the law said they could not, and the song that took them furthest was “Scatterlings of Africa”, written about the idea that everyone alive traces back to the same African ground. That song now gives its name to a free day of South African music in central London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday 18 July.
The day it falls on and the square it fills each have a history with South Africa. Trafalgar Square faces South Africa House, the old South African embassy, and for four years in the late 1980s the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group kept a picket going on the pavement outside it, day and night, until the crowds gathered there to celebrate the day Mandela walked free in 1990. The day marks Nelson Mandela Day and thirty years of South Africa’s Constitution.
Scatterlings, the platform behind the day, takes its name from that Juluka song, and its line-up runs from Mchunu himself down to musicians less than half his age. Mchunu named Juluka after one of his bulls, taught Clegg the maskanda guitar style he had grown up with, and wrote and sang alongside him through the band’s run. He left in 1985 to farm cattle in KwaZulu-Natal and has recorded three solo maskanda albums since, so he arrives as both the oldest musician on the day and the only one who had a hand in writing the song it is named after.
The generation carrying it forward is led by Jesse Clegg, Johnny’s son. He is a platinum-selling singer-songwriter at home, co-wrote and produced his father’s final album King of Time in 2018, and has played rooms as far apart as Radio City Music Hall and the Isle of Wight, as well as touring for the Nelson Mandela 46664 foundation. His writing partner is Msaki, a composer from East London who moves between acoustic folk and electronic house. Her lyrics are openly political: she wrote “Blood, Guns and Revolutions” for the 34 miners shot dead by police at Marikana in 2012, “At Stake” about gender-based violence, and “Anisixabisanga” about corruption, work she has traced back to a childhood spent watching her father do pro bono law late into the night. She runs her own label and a support platform, ALTBLK, for independent artists, and titled her double album Platinumb Heart after the numbness she felt writing it, one disc acoustic and one house. Clegg and Msaki spent three years on an EP, Entropy, and Clegg has compared their partnership to his father’s with Mchunu.
The Entropy record reaches two more of the day’s names. Sjava sings a verse on “Wayside Lover“; he works in Afro-soul in isiZulu, deep-voiced and unhurried, and reached past South Africa when Kendrick Lamar put him on the Black Panther soundtrack in 2018, his 2023 album Isibuko, the isiZulu word for mirror, going to number one at home. The other is Sun-El Musician, who produced Msaki’s platinum single “Ubomi Abumanga“. He makes Afro-house at a walking pace, warm keys and rolling drums under vocals sung in isiZulu and isiXhosa, the sound of his albums Africa to the World and To the World & Beyond. He also runs the El World Music label, which brought singers like Simmy and Ami Faku through before they had names of their own.
Zakes Bantwini works the same Afro-house lineage from its pop end. He won a Grammy in 2023 for “Bayethe”, made with the flautist Wouter Kellerman and the singer Nomcebo Zikode, a year after “Osama” became the biggest dance record of the South African summer, and has carried the sound a long way from home. Thakzin has a hand in Bantwini’s catalogue too, co-producing “Mama Thula“, but his own music is a newer thing: 3 Step, which he built by dropping a kick from house music’s four-beat floor so the groove slows and tips off balance. He released his first album, Gods Window Pt. 1, in 2025.
Guitars run through the rest of the day too. Cape Town trio Beatenberg play an acoustic set of guitar-pop infused with traditional Zulu mbaqanga patterns. From Johannesburg, Mi Casa offer a brass-led contrast, pairing Mo-T‘s trumpet with J’Something‘s rhythmic acoustic guitar chords. Jazz guitar prodigy Justin-Lee Schultz adds intricate, fast-paced lead work, anchoring the afternoon in virtuosic musicianship.
This generation-spanning lineup acts as a living map of South African music. Thirty years after the adoption of the democratic constitution, the event brings the country’s musical evolution into the open air of London, tracking how the acoustic roots of the struggle grew into the electronic beats of today.
Entry is free and first-come, the site opens at midday and music runs to 9PM More info on the official event page