[needle scratches]
- [Johnny Cash singing] - [acoustic guitar playing]
[rock music playing]
- [explosion blasts] - [indistinct chatter]
MAN: You know, a song can mean a thousand different things
to different people,
and when people ask me, "What does this song mean?" I say,
"Whatever it means to you, it means."
But I'm not gonna tell you what it means to me, because...
well, it might mean I might destroy your illusions.
[playing banjo]
MAN: No two people, you know,
can agree on a definition of folk music.
My own definition is that folk music is a process that's been going on
for thousands of years.
Once upon a time, a long time ago,
a Zulu man stepped up to a microphone in the only recording studio in Africa
and sang 13 notes that went on to earn something like 15 or 16 million dollars.
Almost none of which came back to him, after he died,
to his descendants in South Africa.
[banjo tuning]
Well, there are millions of songs like this, all around the world,
and the wonderful thing is that many of them are coming here.
Here's a song I'm gonna ask you to sing with me.
It comes from South Africa.
I have this very clear memory of, um, sort of three or four years old,
and my mother is making her macaroni and cheese for our supper.
She had a bubbly, effervescent personality and quite a nice voice,
and she was jiving around going, "Wimoweh, a-wimoweh, a-wimoweh,"
as one does.
[vocalizing]
[singing "Wimoweh"]
- Try it! - [Seeger and audience vocalizing]
Hey, good!
Everyone in the world who hears that song, the hair stands up on the back of the neck
and they expect to be, like, sort of amused and entertained or something.
I mean, it's... it's kind of difficult for me to think of a song that has covered
a greater distance in both time and space.
[Seeger and audience singing "Wimoweh"]
- SEEGER: Over and over! - [audience chanting]
[vocalizing in falsetto]
[Tight Fit's "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" playing]
- [The Tokens' version playing] ♪ In the jungle ♪
♪ The mighty jungle The lion sleeps tonight ♪
♪ In the jungle ♪
♪ The quiet jungle ♪
♪ The lion sleeps tonight ♪
- [band chanting] - [singer vocalizing]
[strums banjo]
In case you're wondering what on Earth it means,
it means, "The lion is sleeping. The lion, the lion."
The legend says the lion isn't dead, he's just sleeping.
He'll wake up someday and lead us to freedom.
Looking back, it struck me as, like, amazing
and shameful that I didn't know this backstory.
I probably had gray hairs
before I actually heard what the song was and... and...
and how blind I'd been before I heard the original 1939 recording.
["Mbube" playing]
[lion growls]
[lion roars]
- [men chanting] - [lion growls]
MAN: Rian Malan, author and journalist
whose ancestors arrived in South Africa in the 17th century.
It was one of his relatives, Diaf Malan,
who was the first National Party prime minister
and was responsible for first imposing apartheid,
something he has wrestled with all his life.
MALAN: You funny little dog.
- [dog barks] - MALAN: My name is Rian Malan,
I'm a South African, I'm an Afrikaner,
I'm a writer, and I play some music,
and I drink quite a lot. Smoke cigarettes.
[sighs] Yeah, you're gonna need coffee.
When I was a kid, I felt that I was,
like, buried under this, like, sort of impossibly heavy burden
of history and guilt that came to bear on my shoulders.
The history of the Malans
was one of the factors that bore down heavily on my...
juvenile consciousness.
Dr. D.F. Malan,
he and my grandfather would have been cousins.
He was the first apartheid prime minister of South Africa in 1948.
Grand apartheid, this idea, was founded in racism and white supremacy.
Believe me, I was wrecked by guilt about apartheid
and my sense of complicity in it.
- [speaks indistinctly] - MALAN: In order to live with himself,
my father would blind himself
to the damage that apartheid was doing to black people.
NEWSCASTER: Demonstrations against the South African government's
strict apartheid policies
flare into shocking violence. All South Africa was in ferment.
MALAN: One of my earliest memories,
reading in Time Magazine about the adventures of Che Guevara.
There were all these glamorous pictures of him with his beret.
I thought this was cool.
I decided that I was a Communist as well.
And I have this memory of myself standing in the backyard,
telling Miriam Shabalala,
who was our servant,
that I was a Communist, and when I grew up we were going to get rid
of all this apartheid rubbish, and I was going to free her.
I remember sort of like...
expecting that she was gonna say thank you, or whatever.
Instead she says... she says, "Ah, suka," which is, uh,
you know, um, "Just go way. You're talking nonsense."
And she was absolutely right.
But I loved African people.
I kind of liked hanging out with them,
and I liked listening to their music on the radio.
I liked eating their food.
It's such an old African story, it's a cliché,
but I also wanted to be, like, the champion of...
black liberation, because that seemed to be quite cool to me.
- [men singing] - [acoustic guitar playing]
MALAN: One night in the early '70s,
my friends and I snuck out of our homes, and we went to write graffiti
on a giant concrete embankment along Empire Road,
which is a... is a major thoroughfare in Johannesburg.
We wrote, "Say it out loud, I'm black, and I'm proud!"
in sort of six-foot-high letters.
There was a photograph of our handiwork
in the local Afrikaans newspaper
with a caption saying
that the security police were investigating.
And in the milieu I came from, it was cool.
It just, like, struck a blow against the evil empire.
But at the end of every South African boyhood,
people like me were expected to join the army and go off
with guns over our shoulders to fight the Communist armies.
I truly did not believe in the cause. I did not believe
in the cause of apartheid.
I dodged the draft for two, three years and eventually,
when that became impossible,
on the 9th of May 1977, I got on a plane and flew off to the world of color.
[acoustic guitar music playing]
MALAN: I wound up in Los Angeles
writing rock 'n' roll reviews for small magazines
under thenom de plume Nelson Mandela.
I couldn't use my own name because I didn't have documentation.
If you'd met me when my plane landed
and said, "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"
I would have presented myself as a just white man, that I was... that I'd been...
tooth and claw against apartheid
from the moment I... I'd achieved consciousness.
But I knew exactly why I'd left South Africa.
I'd left South Africa because the racial problems seemed
to be completely unsolvable. It's impossible to sort these things out,
there's going to be a ghastly racial war in this country.
And I don't want part of it, because I'm a coward.
That's... That's the truth of the matter.
I was nearly 30 when the final struggle began
in South Africa.
That's September 1984.
The large-scale riots and the violence broke out,
and then it just, like, spread like wildfire across the country.
Mobs with stones in the streets, and police with armored cars,
and people being killed every day.
[helicopter blades whirring]
I was watching this from far away,
and I had to come back here and, uh...
[takes a deep breath] ...and face it.
I was also a journalist, and I was young and ambitious.
I had an idea for a book unlike any that had ever been written before.
[upbeat piano music plays]
My Traitor's Heart is about deep-rooted racial fear and hatred.
Rian Malan belongs to an Afrikaner clan that settled there 300 years ago.
INTERVIEWER: Ever since its publication last year, the book My Traitor's Heart
has left virtually every critic raving
about its relentless pursuit of the raw truth of South Africa.
Let me talk about that honesty.
You write, and I'm gonna quote you here, "Some whites
see danger when they see blacks.
Some see savagery, some see victims, some see revolutionary heroes,
very few of us see clearly."
How clearly do you think you were able to see?
MALAN: There were things about the experience
of being white in South Africa
that we all knew but didn't know how to say.
I'm tired of my own bullshit.
Let me tell you the truth now. My name is Malan,
I am one of them. This is what it's like inside my head.
There's nothing as pathetic as somebody who denies, like, who they really are.
I love blacks and I feared them.
I feared them, and yet lov... I loved them.
I am prey to exactly the same sort of racial psychosis
and the possibly irrational fears
that hold white South Africans together and determined our behavior at that stage.
And this is the stuff I should be writing about.
It's the only stuff that matters.
It's the only thing that I know about South Africa that was really important.
I come from a deeply complicated country.
We had to have open and honest recognition of our differences.
We had to cut out our hearts and put them on the table, and...
stare at them long enough to see if salvation awaited.
[crowd clamoring]
MALAN: Trust is all we have to hold against the darkness,
and that's the darkness in ourselves.
Southern Africa is probably best known for its struggle for freedom
and its music.
Its musical strains have captured the imagination
and interests of people throughout the world.
Here's what's happening.
[upbeat dance music playing]
MALAN: So, in 1999,
we've got this guy in South Africa called Johnny Clegg,
also known as Le Zoulou Blanc,
who's like this great crossover as a Zulu pop star.
And I met him once at what we call braaivleis in South Africa, a barbecue,
and he started telling me about this song called "Mbube"
and how it had been recorded in Johannesburg in the 1930s, et cetera.
I had sort of prided myself as this sort of fairly well-informed South African,
and I thought I was hip and cool, and it struck me as, like, amazing
and shameful that I didn't know this backstory.
So I decided to start checking that out.
This was the first time that I'd ever heard of Solomon Linda.
[distorted music plays]
["Mbube" playing]
I had actually been introduced to and contacted by Rian Malan.
He was just then sort of starting to...
dig into the story.
MALAN: The year is 1939, and we're in Johannesburg.
Solomon Linda
was a Zululand migrant worker from the deep countryside.
During the day he was guided, menial labor,
but at night he was also the lead singer of this really cool band,
The Evening Birds.
ALLINGHAM: Black people were basically being actively displaced,
so they had to leave those rural areas to come into the cities to find jobs.
As I understand it, Solomon Linda started working at the Carlton Hotel.
MALAN: The city had lit up in the middle of Africa,
and it had things like skyscrapers and electricity,
things that didn't exist where he came from.
- Yes, boy? What do you want? - MAN: Hello, ma'am.
The boss said I must give that letter for you.
ALLINGHAM: In their off hours,
the men would get together, and they would form choirs.
There's an interesting mixture of African-American roots
mixed with elements of indigenous music.
On the weekends, the choirs would compete.
Solomon, he was a man of quite extraordinary musical abilities
in terms of he was a fantastic vocalist.
So...
that obviously made him
a candidate to sort of eventually end up leading his own choir.
[choir singing]
MALAN: So they're in Gallo's recording studio,
which was the first recording studio in Africa.
[choir chanting]
MALAN: The guys in the background start the... the a cappella chant. It goes...
[singing background chant]
And the middle voices are going...
[chanting]
["Mbube" playing on record]
- [choir chanting] - [Linda vocalizing]
"Mbube" was recorded...
three times. There were three takes.
It's only on the second take, and right at the end,
the last chorus, where all of a sudden he improvises.
MALAN: And Solomon Linda steps up to the microphone,
and he sings these notes that...
change history.
- ["Mbube" continues playing] - [Solomon singing in falsetto]
MALAN: "Mbube" sold about 100,000 records.
At that time, 100,000 would've been a huge hit.
You know, within 15, 20 years
that... that entire genre of music became known as "Mbube"
because it sounded like Solomon Linda's song.
ALLINGHAM: The Mbube style continued to be popular.
It became isikhwele Jo,
and then it was cothoza mfana,
and then eventually, it became Isicathamiya.
You know, you take somebody like Joseph Shabalala,
the leader of, uh, Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
I mean,
I've heard him on numerous occasions
paying homage to Solomon Linda who's the...
the father of the genre.
[singing "Mbube"]
With his beautiful voice like a bird.
[imitates Linda's improvisation]
It's just like... [imitates Linda's improvisation]
You are the king.
[group continues singing "Mbube"]
SHABALALA: When we talk about Solomon Linda,
you talk about one of our heroes.
We are just like...
his son.
[singing "Mbube"]
MALAN: An extraordinary thing about this song
is it became the most famous melody
ever to emerge from Africa,
and also probably the most lucrative.
So in 1999, Rolling Stone asked me to pitch some stories to them.
I wrote them a five-page treatment on this stuff,
just riffing off the top of my head,
about this extraordinary transcultural saga of this song.
[group continues singing "Mbube"]
[singing "Wimoweh"]
[vocalizing]
MALAN: So when I started researching this for Rolling Stone,
at that time, the song was probably best known
'cause it had been included in, uh, Disney's hit movie The Lion King,
and then also in the Broadway musical of the same title.
♪ Of life ♪
MALAN: When I got to the end of the story,
it's, like, this fantastic story,
and I said, "Then, of course,
we also have to establish where the money went." [laughs]
Um, which is like sort of famous last words.
The music was the easier part of it to research,
and then I spent many months trying to figure out
where the money had gone.
I tracked down, uh, Solomon Linda's daughters.
I went to visit them at their home in Zola.
[rooster crows]
MALAN: I set off in the usual state of trepidation,
wondering about whether I was going to have my car stolen
or wondering whether I'd come back alive.
[engine revs]
MALAN: And I stopped outside their house, knocked on the door, and Elizabeth opens.
And it should also be said, at that time there were four sisters.
[in Zulu] We had his records and gramophone,
so that's how I heard "Mbube" being sung.
Mom would say, "That sharp voice, it's your father."
When the sound came out of the loudspeaker,
I'd lean closer, hoping that I would be able to see him inside.
[chuckles]
Just when I'd hear his voice, I'd think I would see him.
We didn't even know
that there was money in composing a song.
We were just happy to know that our dad had a song on a record,
because we were just children at the time.
MALAN: [in English] I asked, "Are you getting anything from this song?"
And they said, "All we know is...
that somebody did something outside the country
with our father's music,
but we don't know exactly what. And there's this white lawyer
in Johannesburg who sometimes gives us little pieces of money."
And then they showed me some of these pieces of scraps of paper
with a, you know, sort of handwriting on them saying, you know,
"'The Lion Sleeps Tonight, ' ASCAP ten percent, $600."
[in Zulu] We'd never had a white person visit us before.
Rian was the first.
He said that he would help us
investigate thoroughly
what had happened to my father's money.
Where did it end up?
Who took it?
So we could get what was ours.
To think that the people of The Lion King
are earning large sums of money with my father's song.
We were wounded
that the children of the songwriter go hungry,
but the Americans are fat with our father's song.
That hurt.
Until Rian told us,
we had no idea.
MALAN: [in English] I knew exactly who their father was,
and I knew the significance of what had happened
in that recording studio
in 1939, and how huge and enormous the reverberations had been.
There was a simple wrong that I had some chance of correcting.
These people have not been correctly treated,
and it's not fair, okay?
I've been in Africa, genetically, for 380 years.
Above all, I want absolution
from the sins of my forefathers,
and I want to be loved, okay? [Chuckles]
So...
in this case, I did something, I hope, to make people love me, they...
Black people love me.[laughs]
Is that the truth of me?
It's kind of... It's kind of the truth, there.
When we were right at the start of this research, I ran into opposition
from this white lawyer who'd been representing
Linda's daughters.
It seemed to me that the only way to get a hold of his file to see...
what exactly had gone on with the money side of the song, was to...
was to rope in a lawyer to replace him.
MAN: Rian came to see me,
and he said to me he was busy with an article
for the Rolling Stone magazine.
And he has uncovered certain facts that he would like to share with me,
and he believed that there was a legal case to be fought.
The sisters had given me their permission in writing to approach their lawyer
in Johannesburg and say, "Please cooperate with this man.
He's trying to figure out what's going on with our royalties."
And I had been given again the finger.
I think the ink was barely dry on the power of attorney that they gave me
when we drove over to his office.
[in Zulu] We arrived and explained that we no longer needed his services,
because we found people who could help us.
Then he said, “Is this how you are going to treat me?
After I've worked so well with your mother?
And now you come here with these people,
making me out to be a bad person?"
That's when we realized that he had information we didn't get,
and he wouldn't be able to help us.
[in English] And I said to him, "Well, here's my power of attorney.
Your mandate has been terminated.
So...
I'm here to basically pick up the file from you."
And he said, "Well, I've got very little."
And he handed me this little folder with a few pages in it.
Hanro comes out and tosses this manila folder in my lap,
and I open it up, and it's got about five pieces of paper in it,
because it had clearly been, uh, I think, redacted is the word...
Somebody had filleted it and taken out all the juicy stuff.
I felt that he was trying to hide something.
Um...
And... And not even in a manner that you could call subtle.
I took the case because, A...
primarily, I wanted to establish a name.
B...
I felt that the family had been completely abused.
And those that did the abuse thought that they could get away with it,
and they had for a long time.
I wanted to show...
the outside world, if you come here...
and deal with South Africa and South Africans,
you have to respect us.
[chickens clucking]
It's quite clear you don't come from Africa, Dennis.
No African I've ever seen plays the drum with his fists.
It's always with the open hand.
And then they teach you to move your hands in and out of the drum like that.
But it must be absolutely even.
MALAN: When I started researching this, what it turns out is
"Mbube" arrived in New York in the early 1950s
as a part of a package of records sent from Johannesburg
by the great South African musicologist Hugh Tracey.
[speaking indistinctly]
MALAN: Tracey was desperately hoping against all odds
that someone in New York could love this music as much as he did.
But as it turned out,
nobody was really interested in it
because this was weird stuff from a weird subculture.
And they were about to throw them away, when who walks into the office?
It's Alan Lomax.
We're recording here tonight. We're having a party, so come on in.
[country music playing]
MALAN: He looked at these records and said,
"Well I know somebody who'd dig this, and that's Pete Seeger.
[playing upbeat tune on banjo]
MALAN: Pete Seeger was a champion of the working class, folk singer.
He was a ubiquitous figure with his banjo and his... and his blue jeans.
Like, singing songs of justice, demanding justice for the working man.
Pete has an epiphany. He picks up the needle, he drops it down.
He's so charmed by this, he rips out, like, pieces of paper,
and he transcribes it note for note.
You're not allowed to appropriate other people's culture,
but at that stage in the early 1950s,
a traditional folk song is in the public domain.
It doesn't belong to anybody.
It's like a wild horse out on the plane.
It's like, you know, nobody knows actually who wrote it.
Who wrote "Greensleeves"? It happened 600 years ago.
So where did these New Yorkers get the idea that it was traditional?
As I pieced it together, in 1952,
when "Wimoweh" hit the top ten in America, the guys at Gallo said, "By God.
This is 'Mbube' recorded by that chap Solomon.
It's our song, by God!
We've got to get onto these New Yorkers and make them pay us!"
At that stage, at any rate,
in the infancy of copyright law in South Africa,
Zulu traditional was... [stammers]
...in the minds of these white men who ran the thing...
just, it was this sort of music that rural Africans were interested in.
And it might not even have occurred to them, exactly,
"Are these original compositions?"
'Cause they wouldn't have understood a single word of what was being sung.
It's Africans, it's what they do, it's their nature, so you know,
they do a bit of Gumboot dancing and then the singing.
They've got such a wonderful sense of rhythm.
That sort of condescending bullshit, that would've been his attitude.
So he tells these Americans... "This is a traditional song."
They didn't realize it, but they just picked up a pistol
and shot themselves in the head.
Because as soon as the New Yorkers heard this...
"Well, that means it's public domain, it's a wild horse. We can lay claim to it.
Then we grab it and we brand it." It's arranged by Paul Campbell.
But who's Paul Campbell?
There was no such person. It was a fictitious entity,
conjured up by music publishers to collect royalties on folk songs
that hadn't yet been branded.
It was a completely novel situation for a South African record company
to have a song that was in the top ten of the American hit parade.
It's probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them...
and also potentially the most lucrative.
So they said, "Let's do something about this."
I discovered in my file, my "Mbube" file, that there was indeed
a deed of assignment,
or a cession of copyright as it was called at that time,
from Solomon Linda to Gallo African Limited.
Uh, it was done in... It was dated in 1952,
which would have been, um...
at the same time that there would have been activity around "Wimoweh"
and the Weaver's version of that song.
Clearly, somebody at Gallo at that time...
realized that they didn't have...
documentation that would prove their ownership.
MALAN: So the boss summoned Linda into his office
and had him sign a piece of paper saying
"Mbube" is an original composition, and then sent it off to New York.
I suspect it was greeted with hoots of derision,
'cause they had already said it was a wild horse,
so now they were changing their minds.
By the time I came along asking questions, almost everyone had died,
but the contracts indicated they just, like, agreed to disagree.
And the Americans, they owned "Wimoweh" in the rest of the world,
and Gallo had it in South Africa and the surrounding territories, like
Rhodesia, Portuguese East Africa, and south of which...
I mean, this tiny, tiny market.
Nobody in the room had any idea what the consequences
in the long term would be.
That eventually this piece of paper would become a... [clears throat]
...exhibit number one in a series of events that generates, you know,
countless millions of dollars for the American copyright holders.
If you ask us, "Was that unfair?"
Solomon Linda, at the time, was working as a sort of a low-paid packer
in Gallo's pressing plant, packing records.
I think it's important to stress that this wasn't illegal, it wasn't fraud,
it was simply...
The power relationships between Solomon Linda
and whoever put that piece of paper in front of him
would have been such that...
Putting myself in his shoes, I'd imagine that he felt
that he had no choice other than to sign.
[in Zulu] One thing that stood out in our minds was...
that our father couldn't write.
He couldn't read. So when they got him to sign, did they make it clear to him
exactly what he was signing?
Also, an uneducated person's signature doesn't lie.
Sometimes they'll make a cross and other times a thumb print.
Show us the document my father supposedly signed,
so that we can see if the signature belonged to an uneducated person or not.
He didn't know that he could earn a living from his music.
He was just singing.
He had no idea that he was supposed to share in the profit,
because he was employed by Gallo.
MALAN: [in English] And so I guess
that deal makes it clear as the day that they didn't feel
they owed any obligation to Solomon Linda to pay him either composer royalties
or any other kind of...
share of whatever revenue stream they might have been able to...
secure from the Americans.
Paul Campbell would have made tens of thousands of dollars,
which actually would have gone to The Weavers,
and then of course to the music publishers,
who would've taken 50%.
To his credit, Pete Seeger,
he still felt he had some sort of moral obligation
to ask his publishers to...
make sure that the Zulu guy in South Africa was seeing rights.
They assured him that this would be done.
Um, it was never done, you know. There were tiny little efforts made
here... here... here and there,
but once Pete Seeger had taken the position
that he waived all claim to royalties,
the publishers and the holders of the American copyright, Folkways,
found themselves in a position
where they could make a deal that suited, well, just themselves.
As soon as Pete closed the door and left the room, they would've rolled their eyes
and sort of, like, lit up another fat cigar and said,
"Tell you what, send a few cents to, like, these... these people
out there in Africa," et cetera,
"That'll keep them happy, and we'll tell Pete we've done it."
[strumming banjo]
I don't know about you, but I say, howdy, Africa...
and may the day be forever over
when the riches that you have are stolen by other people.
And I've been enriched,
and a lot of other people like me have been enriched by your music...
and I hope you know it.
- MAN: Not great quality, but, uh... - [static crackles]
- [upbeat pop music playing] - MAN: You can tell, this is very '60s.
ANNOUNCER: Up now, Don Webster!
- [crowd cheers] - DON: Thank you...
- MAN: ...name of the song? - Oh yeah, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight." The Tokens, here we go.
- [singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"] - [vocalizing]
[all chanting]
MAN: Well, I grew up in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn.
And in Brooklyn, on the beach,
every few blocks on the beach was a different singing group,
you know, singing on the beach,
and that's how we attracted the girls, you know?
And we sang this little song called "Wimoweh"
that I heard on the radio that I taught to the guys.
But what does it mean? What does "Wimoweh" mean?
I had no idea what it meant,
so I went to the South African consulate in New York,
and I did research on "Wimoweh,"
and I found out that the word was not "wimoweh,"
it was "mbube."
So, I brought this information to our producers, Hugo and Luigi at RCA,
and they called in this lyric writer, George Weiss.
MALAN: George David Weiss this, like, you know, Julliard-educated cat
who had previously arranged for Frank Sinatra
and written songs for Elvis Presley.
He was sort of made music director of this thing.
And I told him what the song meant, and he came up with the lyric,
"In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight."
[plays introduction]
[singing background chant of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]
[woman laughs]
WOMAN: ♪ In the jungle ♪
♪ The peaceful jungle ♪
♪ The lion sleeps tonight ♪ - ♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ In the jungle, the quiet jungle The lion sleeps tonight ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa ♪ - [indistinct chatter]
Where in the world did that song come from?
Well, when I was asked to write a song for this little group called The Tokens,
uh, I looked it up. I... I didn't look up, I did research
and found out that it was a word used by Africans
when they went into the jungle.
And I... It was either going after the lions...
or coming back after they got the lions.
- I didn't know which. - [laughs]
But it gave me the idea for "in the jungle,"
and I wrote the lyric, and we did the melody.
But the point is that the word
was a word that Americans couldn't quite get.
- [muttering] Mbube, mbube... - WOMAN: Uh-huh.
So it was, you know, like, anglicized.
[laughing]
[in Zulu] "Mbube" is a lion.
[continues laughing]
But the way the song is sung,
it's sung as a song with no meaning.
It just repeats "mbube" throughout the song.
The way I see it, he was praising himself.
That he is the lion.
Because the repeated lyric is,
"You are a lion."
That's just how he was...
praising himself, you see.
[singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"]
SIEGEL: [in English] When we got into the studio,
we thought we were gonna record "Wimoweh,"
but Hugo and Luigi... Actually, I can see... see it right now...
Handed me this legal pad, a yellow legal pad,
and it had the lyric.
And I'm looking at the lyric, and we're sitting around by the piano,
and I said, "I can't fit in this lyric...
to the melody of 'Wimoweh.' It doesn't fit in."
So, what I had to do on the spot was...
create a melody to fit into the lyric, and that was the second eight bars.
[singing melody] But it was...
[singing melody in falsetto]
...in falsetto, of course.
And that's how I created the melody right there at the piano,
and that's how it became "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."
- ["The Lion Sleeps Tonight" playing] ♪ The lion sleeps tonight ♪
♪ Hey, hey ♪ - [group singing background chant]
MALAN: "Mbube" mutated into "Wimoweh,"
which has given birth to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."
In 1961,
when "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" hit number one in the American hit parade,
George David Weiss and his two producers,
they were designated the composers of the song, which meant that,
in terms of the conventions in those days, they got 50% of the songs earnings,
and then the publishing half went to Folkways.
From there, it was like throwing a match into a lake of gasoline,
and the whole thing blew up, as they say.
But once again, it's like there was not a cent,
apportioned to Solomon Linda,
who at that stage was getting quite old and dying.
He was ailing, and within a year he was dead.
Leaving precisely 151 rand in his bank account.
A hundred and fifty one rand would have been...
Let me think...
It's about ten dollars in today's terms.
I hope this doesn't sound funny, but I really believe
that I am a vessel...
through which the good Lord...
sends thoughts,
impulses, creations, through.
It comes through me. Not from me, through me.
And, uh, I... I give credit for everything that I write
to something, to someone else,
and not me.
MALAN: In the early 1990s,
there was a lawsuit called "Folkways vs. Weiss."
By that stage, the American copyright had been amended,
and it said very clearly
that both "Wimoweh" and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"
were based on the song by Solomon Linda.
What followed was this completely absurd, like, sort of legal ritual,
in which you had two teams of, like, really rich, white Americans
battling for ownership...
of a song that nobody on either side had really created.
Both... Both sides in that dispute used the word "plagiarism" frequently.
And it was just basically, well...
open admission, but there was nobody there to stand up and say,
"Uh, Your Honor, if I may. I'm here to represent the descendants
of Solomon Linda and his family.
He's the guy who was plagiarized by these two rich, white parties."
Solomon Linda's daughters
had never even heard of these proceedings until they met me.
All completely new to them. Nobody had ever informed them.
The lawyer that they had in Johannesburg was either ignorant,
or else he was complicit with the New Yorkers,
and never told them that these proceedings were underway.
If they had been told, and if they'd been in a position
to do anything about it, to participate,
their lives would've been transformed out of all recognition.
But because they were who they were, they could just ignore them completely.
PAYNTER: The irony of the story of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"
is the landmark judgment,
which gave George Weiss
the entire control of the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"...
putting him in a great position to benefit greatly.
Only after that particular point...
did the song really explode.
- [thunder rumbles] - [fire crackling]
Now... this looks familiar. Hmm...
Where have I seen this before?
At that stage, with Disney's extraordinary success
with Lion King the movie
and then Lion King the musical, which was even... even more...
I'd sit there late at night, smoking cigarettes and saying,
"Jesus, this is a lot of money."
So, when I published an article about this in Rolling Stone magazine...
all that I was really looking for was the simple stuff, like,
put Solomon Linda's name on the song
and pay his descendants a reasonable share of... of the song's enormous earnings.
At the outset, Hunter and I,
we always thought a full frontal assault was the best way to do it.
All these American lawyers were telling me that's impossible for legal reasons.
We're unsophisticated guys,
and we didn't really know what we were doing.
I was a terrible choice. Um...
I had no experience in... in copyright or intellectual property.
There were quite a few pieces of this puzzle missing.
And the players that I suspected had access to it
were not playing ball.
MALAN: The only way forward that I could see,
it was sort of a propaganda campaign.
I thought if you could focus enough light on the American copyright holders,
that they would wince and cringe
and be persuaded to make the appropriate gesture.
This is not only a South African matter.
The song was exploited all over the world.
And, um, as far as we are concerned,
we're definitely looking at opportunities to reclaim the lost royalties.
PAYNTER: When Rian came along and he did the article,
then the phone started ringing off the hook, and everyone started asking
what Gallo was gonna do about this.
From that moment on,
I went and saw the senior people at Gallo,
and I asked them if I could have the funding to take this...
to a copyright lawyer.
And... we went and saw Owen Dean.
He's a man who has basically written the South African copyright book.
And that was how the legal process started.
DEAN: I saw this "Lion Sleeps Tonight" case
as a contribution to a social cause.
My mandate was to find some way to get royalties or income to flow
to the... the, um, Solomon Linda family.
I was aware of what Rian Malan and Hanro Friedrich were doing,
what, um... paths they were following,
and, um, I knew from my own knowledge of the contracts that...
they were going nowhere, that they were clutching at straws.
I didn't, at the outset, have much hope because I knew that Solomon Linda
had assigned the copyright, and when you assign copyright,
you divest yourself entirely of your rights.
It's like selling your house.
There was no...
no possibility of arguing, on the strength of these agreements,
that some royalty had to flow back to the... the Linda family.
[women singing in Zulu]
MALAN: One day, in the early 2000s,
I got a distraught phone call from Elizabeth.
Elizabeth...
didn't beat about the bush. She said, "You know, this is like, well...
It was AIDS that took my sister."
[in Zulu] My mother had four children.
Adelaide was the one who suffered the illness, the last born.
She was HIV positive.
She suffered a long time before she passed.
She is survived by the three of us, as we are still three.
Funerals are very important for African people...
to give the spirits of the dead one, like, the correct send-off,
and... and people will bankrupt and pauperize themselves
in... in order to perform all the rituals correctly.
So I remember winding up in a tent in Soweto, and there was a...
beautiful portrait of Adelaide as she'd once been,
and many members of the extended family were there.
[group singing in Zulu and clapping to the beat]
[Malan speaking indistinctly]
FRIEDRICH: Adelaide's passing was the lowest point
we reached during the course of this case.
We couldn't go any lower.
I felt like a failure.
I really did. Um...
We... We had gone a year and more down the line,
and I had nothing to show.
If Adelaide had come from a family that had access to lawyers, and education,
and legal fees, and if they'd been able to play the intellectual property game,
their life could've been very different, but not...
if you were a poor black person in Johannesburg, so...
There was one speaker at the funeral that said
he hopes the lawyer of the family can now do something constructive
and... and force the issue through.
It was addressed to me.
I understood it,
but I was completely powerless because, even at that stage,
we had very little.
DEAN: I really was on the point of deciding
that there was nothing that could be done,
when suddenly I had a sort of a eureka moment.
And I remembered a very obscure provision in our copyright law,
which actually dated from a 1911 British copyright act.
It goes back to the days of Charles Dickens.
British copyright law at the time only allowed for lifetime plus 25 years.
At that time, Charles Dickens had recently died
and left his family in really dire financial straits,
and this was a cause of great controversy in the UK.
It was debated in the UK Parliament.
They said, "All right, we'll add another 25 years to our term of copyright,
but we will give the extra 25 years
to the heirs of the author."
[indistinct chatter]
DEAN: That put, um, the family in quite a powerful position
because they could then argue that "Wimoweh" was derived from "Mbube,"
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was derived from "Wimoweh."
Any use of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is infringement of copyright
of "Mbube," if no permission had been granted.
And of course, no permission had been granted by the Linda family
because they were totally unaware that they had these rights.
I was able to go back to Gallo and say to them,
"Well, despite my initial,
fairly gloomy, um, outlook on... on this case,
there is in fact something you can do."
And, um, I produced a written opinion.
I think it was a 20, 25-page opinion.
And when I got to the end of it,
I got this kind of, uh...
this kind of feeling coming over me
that I'd just read something that was kind of heart-stopping.
I thought to myself, "Oh F.
This is... This is amazing."
We had heard rumors that there was an opinion,
and we knew that that opinion potentially held a key...
to unlock...
this case.
[indistinct chatter]
- MALAN: Which way through? - MAN: To the right.
JENKINS: I reached out to Hanro.
And I said, "Hanro, Gallo's been sitting on an opinion from Owen Dean.
What we, as Gallo, would be prepared to do
is to... fund and sponsor Owen Dean
becoming directly involved in the case."
I think this is the time now, in the year 2002,
to get really serious about this.
Perhaps it could be said we should have done this before,
but Rian and Hanro have done a huge amount of work.
And now for the first time, we're taking all of their resources
and all of our resources, and we're putting them together
to make sure "Mbube"
becomes a pension for the family for a long time into the future.
- Mm-hmm. - This isn't the end, but I promise you,
this man, Owen Dean, that Paul introduced us to, is like...
This is a...
If anyone can really help us here, who knows and understands this thing,
and now that we've got him on our side, we can really go places.
He's the right man.
So let's just hope. We hope and pray.
ELIZABETH: Mm-hmm.
MALAN: If you're gonna do battle with these lawyered-up guys in New York,
you've got to go there with deadly weapons of your own,
and people that add real credibility to you.
We sat down with Owen, we met him...
and he started to explain to us exactly the mechanics of the opinion.
The great genius of Owen Dean is... is he took this Dickens clause
and he applied it to the Linda situation.
In 1987, the rights should have reverted to his next of kin
so that they, like Dickens' widow, had a chance
at getting a second bite of the apple,
a chance to take their rights somewhere else
and get a better deal than they'd been getting.
It never occurred to me, even remotely,
that such a fabulous ancient weapon might exist.
Gallo decided, with the concurrence of the others,
that they were really going to give this case a full go,
and they wanted it to be internationally accepted
that Solomon Linda's estate
owned the copyright in "Mbube,"
and any use of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" or "Wimoweh"
needed permission of the family.
I didn't know exactly what Owen had in mind.
Yes, you...
have a good theory in law.
But in practice, will you ever be able to pull this off?
He said, "Look, preparation's gonna be...
uh, fairly detailed. It's going to take a while...
but I want to go for Disney."
[roars]
Is that a challenge?
Temper, temper.
I wouldn't dream of challenging you.
MALAN: Disney was using Solomon Linda's music in The Lion King musical
with what Owen argued was improper legal authorization.
DEAN: It was clear that one of the largest exploiters of the song
was in fact Disney,
and that Disney was making a vast amount of money
out of the underlying musical work.
And the best new musical of 1998 is...
- The Lion King. - [audience cheers]
We had odds against us... right from the get-go,
and we understood that we were up against
a massive, massive company.
Suing Disney in the United States was just not palatable.
I mean, our national budget...
South Africa's national budget,
doesn't compare well with theirs.
We were pretty confident of our case,
but money was never really the object.
I mean, the object was to...
establish the rights and... and make a big splash.
And since we wanted the world out there to take notice,
the more prominent a target, uh, the better.
MALAN: What Owen Dean is doing,
is reaching out and grabbing Disney with all its sort of corporate might.
Gonna squeeze it really hard to do the right thing,
to bring pressure to bear on the holders of the copyright.
"For God's sake, get us out of this! We can't stand it! We didn't do anything.
They're gonna portray us as racists."
[chuckles]
[smacks lips, laughing]
[chuckles nervously]
And without any forewarning...
um... Paul Jenkins dropped a bombshell and said
that he was very sorry,
but Gallo had decided not to go ahead with the case
and that they were...
um, withdrawing from the whole project.
We were all dressed up and ready to go, and suddenly we were told
we weren't going anywhere.
JENKINS: I was aware, on the one hand, of the extent
to which Disney was prepared to go, to fight the case in the court.
I was clearly concerned about a conflict of interests
in our commercial relationships.
And so, therefore, I was clear that Gallo could not litigate this matter.
It was, you know, a... a... a...
It was a path that we didn't want to... to tread down.
We could see that there was no other way down it.
If Disney had withdrawn all the rights that Gallo held at the time,
it would have had a major impact on our earnings.
We had invested so much time and effort and emotional capital
in putting this case together,
and had become completely fired up about the righteousness,
the social righteousness of our cause,
that to just walk away from it and drop it was...
you know, just something we couldn't do.
It had gone too far. We'd sort of passed the point of...
intellectually past the point of no return. [Chuckles]
There was this huge problem. It's like, Owen Dean
is one of the most expensive lawyers in Johannesburg.
He didn't work for nothing.
And the whole case might have gone nowhere were it not for the fact
that my pal Hanro ran into the Minister of Culture
at some remote country airport.
FRIEDRICH: I was flying back to Johannesburg...
Saturday morning.
And I'm standing there at the departure lounge,
and in walks this guy...
and I looked at him, and I looked at him again, and I said...
"I've seen him on TV."
So I walked over. He was standing all by himself.
I said,
"Uh, Dr. Jordan,
my name is Hanro Friedrich.
I'm an attorney from Johannesburg. I represent Solomon Linda's family."
"Yes," he says,
"I've read about this."
It was one of those things where you sort of run into people,
and people recognize you, isn't it?
"Hey, hi!" [mumbles] "And you are..."
"Oh, here's my card, here's your card," you know,
that sort of thing.
I said to him, "Dr. Jordan,
you don't know who I am...
but this is about
a heritage.
A national heritage.
The song "Mbube" must come back,
and I cannot fight the Americans if I don't have money."
And he looked at me...
He said, "How much do you need?" I said, "A lot."
There's guys and companies there who made millions,
exploiting the artistry,
the skill, musical talent
of African people.
Lots and lots of money.
It would have set a very important precedent, legally.
The fact is that they took a decision to assist us, and that was worth gold.
[chuckles] Literally and figuratively.
FRIEDRICH: Once we got the funding,
the next step was how now do we find jurisdiction in South Africa.
If you want to sue someone who's not here in South Africa, you've got to attach
or get a lien over some property that they do own in South Africa.
I realized, it occurred to me, that Disney owns something like
250 registered trademarks in South Africa,
which are property under South African law.
So, we decided we have to attach Disney's registered trademarks,
Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck,
to give us the right to sue them here.
MALAN: I just remember thinking, "This is really genius."
South Africans sort of woke up to this novelty story:
Lawyer takes Disney trademarks hostage.
I'd really love to know how the guys in Burbank,
who run Disney, as they wake up this morning,
they find, here, somewhere on the far side of the world,
these people they've never heard of have had the temerity
to take Mickey Mouse hostage. [Chuckles]
DEAN: London Times took particular interest in it.
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, they all picked up on the article.
The big bad Disney against the poor African family...
um, made for very good media material,
and I think it put a lot of pressure on Disney.
Literally within...
I would say, four, five days...
um... Owen got a call.
Very emotive, we certainly hit a nerve.
[speaking indistinctly]
DEAN: Our argument was, "Copyright infringement took place
and damages were incurred.
We are suing you for, firstly, an injunction stopping you from
continuing to commercialize
'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' in South Africa without our permission.
And secondly, we want damages for the unauthorized use
that has taken place."
[camera shutter clicks]
And so we served these papers on Disney
and they reacted like scalded cats,
and they brought
their heavy artillery to bear on us and anything connected with us.
They were properly now before the South African court.
What Disney decided to do was they brought and urgent application
to ask the court to set aside the attachment of the trademarks.
We were dragged before the court somewhat unexpectedly
to have to answer that case.
I was extraordinarily nervous because
you realize that we've got this one throw of the dice.
If we fail with this, it's done.
DEAN: I had planned, long before this hearing came about,
to go away for a few days on holiday to a game reserve.
I went off with my wife, and we were happily viewing game
when I got a message on my cell phone to say
the judgment had been handed down,
and it'd been in our favor, which naturally overjoyed me. [Chuckles]
The court then found in our favor and said the trial must carry on.
At that point, Disney realized that this wasn't a make-believe claim
that we had... and let's talk business.
And that ultimately gave rise to the settlement discussions.
To my astonishment,
almost immediately, the Disney lawyers came up with
an offer of a lump sum settlement,
a payment of future royalties throughout the world,
and Disney made it a very strict term of the settlement
that the amount of money that was paid would never be publicly disclosed.
For me, it was the culmination of
a very...
um...
tense, stressful piece of litigation
which was successful beyond my wildest dreams.
I was elated. I mean, it was to me,
you know, a highlight of my career.
I wrote a press release announcing Owen's great triumph.
It was like, "Historic Victory for South African Lawyer.
Justice at Last for Solomon Linda."
Human beings, we just love happy endings. It's kind of like a Disney movie.
It's like all the pain and sorrows gets resolved
and justice triumphs
and the good-looking people exit and dance off
into the sunset, hand-in-hand.
It was a fairy-tale ending.
It was.
I still think back at it as a miracle.
It was such a shot in the dark.
To have conducted a case and won a case
where I really felt that it made a real difference to people,
rather than corporations who are just looking at figures
on their balance sheets,
made it a special case for me.
The publicity that we received was...
overwhelmingly in our favor,
in that we were able to push a local interest
into the public eye.
It really was an international story.
There has been an unequivocal recognition
by composers in the United States,
that exploited the song for years and years,
that the credits, in the final settlement,
make sure that the public knows that this was Solomon Linda's song.
And in a sense, for me, that means that the song has come home.
[dogs barking]
ELIZABETH: [in Zulu] In the home I grew up in in Zola...
we didn't have electricity.
And the walls and floor were not cemented. The walls were brick
and the floor was dust.
I felt excited...
that this poverty we'd had for so long
would maybe come to an end.
And we'd start a new life.
And we could also be people of better standing, with dignity.
[crying]
I don't want our children to live the lives we survived.
[sniffles]
REPORTER: [in English]: The heirs of late songwriter Solomon Linda
were victorious in their legal battle against Disney Enterprises and others
who had claimed the rights to Linda's 1939 song "Mbube."
The song was used in Disney's mega-hit movie The Lion King.
The melody reportedly generated over one hundred million rand in royalties
for its copyright holders.
The family will receive compensation for past royalties.
MALAN: So, just before the settlement was totally finalized,
Owen asked me to do him one last favor.
This idea was floating around that the family sort of trusted me,
and I suppose he wanted me to listen to his theory
of why it was a very good idea to settle the case
and then attempt to explain it to the sisters.
The big thing that needed explaining was, Owen was suing for sixty million rand,
which is about two and a quarter million dollars in that stage.
And the settlement was considerably less than that.
Part of the deal was I had to sign this nondisclosure agreement,
which maintained that
I'm not supposed to discuss this in public, which...
puts me in an impossible situation.
Anything I say beyond this point is gonna sound shifty and evasive.
I did what I was asked to do. I...
devoted some thought to the matter, and I said to them, in essence, I said,
"Look,
if this was my money...
I would settle."
The money...
It was not going to put them in Ferraris.
But it was a bird in their hand, it was something that you could count on.
I was extremely happy that the case had been settled. But...
in retrospect, at that particular moment, I was quite naive.
I had no idea of the complexities that were about to intrude.
Problems had surfaced in the settlement,
and the sisters were very unhappy about certain aspects of what was going on.
[in Zulu] It all started when there were questions
about the money.
We were being told, like children, what to do.
[in English] We were concerned about what effect
it would have on the daughters to have
a whole bundle of money suddenly being dumped on them.
Disney...
wanted, as a term of the settlement,
that the money should be paid into a trust.
What I did regard as my obligation was to ensure that
a proper trust was created
and was administered by competent, appropriate people.
I understood that we have an accountant,
Glenn Dean, because of his financial background,
we had Nick Motsatse,
another trustee because of his involvement in the way royalties flow,
and then it was me because of my connection with the family.
In the build-up of this case, especially after that attachment of Disney assets,
South Africans started believing that there's millions...
of dollars,
you know, that are going to come out of this.
DEAN: There were expectations from the sisters, from the beginning,
that they would be multimillionaires for the rest of their lives.
And it was extremely difficult to manage those expectations.
In fact, I'd say it was impossible to manage those expectations.
And there was the difficulty of language barriers as well.
And the only person that, of the trustees that could speak that language
was Nick Motsatse.
But we made very sure that, at the time,
we did make use of interpreters.
In fact, Hanro Friedrich's driver...
was Zulu and would then also translate for us.
I would have to check with them if they are okay
with whatever was being discussed. And should they have any questions,
they mustn't let us leap very far, they must just raise their hand,
ask, so that they could get clarity and a way forward.
It took quite a while for them to get their hands on the money,
meaning the trust could not just pay immediately after the settlement.
So that on its own...
didn't sit well with the ladies,
and that's when that trust...
became a bit shaky.
[in Zulu] When the trust was opened, we didn't really understand.
We didn't feel good about the whole thing.
MALAN: [in English] I was invited to sit on the trust, and I decided not to
because I felt I wasn't that kind of guy.
And I'm not, I'm not a guy to sit at a meeting and keep minutes,
I just would have let them down.
It seemed to be in competent hands,
there were powers greater than me involved:
The government, the Music Rights Organization,
one of the biggest and richest law firms in the country.
And even though it's not as much money as the family might have been expecting,
they should have had enough money to make a significant difference in their lives.
I let them down.
Yeah, I did.
[exhales]
I haven't seen Linda's daughters since, God...
nearly ten years.
I've no idea what sort of reception I'm gonna get.
If I'm regarded as one of the villains in the piece, well then...
It's 77 years now that this drama has been running.
Let's just hope we get this thing sorted before we all die.
[horn honks]
MALAN: I've been coming to Soweto my whole life.
I used to come here on occasion with my parents.
When we were dropping off servants when they were leaving on holiday
and had a lot of baggage.
[brakes squeak]
[in Afrikaans and English] Where's Madeline Peces Street?
- [horn honks] - [in English] Okay, don't worry.
It's not this one. Okay.
After the 1976 uprising...
at times of political tension, kids would see you,
and they'd see white skin, and they'd shout, "Target!"
And they'd start trying to stone you.
So, I mean, ever since then, it's like every time
I've come to Soweto, I've been...
Every time I get in a car to come to Soweto, I feel slightly nervous.
You could, if you wished, you could regard this as a story about white paranoia.
And it is that.
And the other thing is that I should remember
exactly where I am now,
'cause this is all looking very familiar to me.
[knocking on door]
[speaking Zulu]
It's been a long time.
You know why I'm here?
ELIZABETH: No.
Uh...
Listen, I'm sorry. You know...
The last time I saw you, I was getting old and my hair was gray,
and I was trying to start a different life.
And I'm very sorry that this thing has happened to you,
that your lives are still not happy,
that this thing is still going on.
[in Zulu] Not much has changed.
Things are just as you left them last time.
There are no steps forward or backward.
It's stagnant.
YOUNG WOMAN: [in English] We have questions as the family,
and we are supposed to know things.
And when we pose questions, we want to know
as far as how much was initially paid,
how much had been used,
and what would happen going forward.
So you were never given an accounting... You were never given, from the beginning,
"This is how much money has come in,
- this is how much is paid out." - ZEE: No.
It would be really nice if we could be provided with statements
from the inception of the initial trust...
- Yes. - ...that we have no access to.
MALAN: Yes. Okay, so if you remember that time, in early 2006,
they asked me to talk to your aunts and your mother
about that settlement and explain it as I understood it, okay?
What I was told, there was a cash settlement.
Hanro had worked for, from 1999,
on this case for nothing, and he was going to get 20%,
and all the rest of the money was going to come to descendants.
But then, from out of the blue,
something changed, it's like there were these massive legal fees came, too.
Like, I was told the government,
Department of Arts and Culture, was going to pay the legal fees.
And then suddenly, there came from, like, nowhere these massive claims
against the estate, coming from Owen Dean and two other lawyers
whose names I'd never... I couldn't remember.
So I said, "You can't do this.
I trusted you.
You're making the name of... This is all these white males involved.
DELPHI: Mm-hmm.
MALAN: "You're making us look like thieves. You can't do this to me."
You remember that day,
the newspaper said, "Justice at last for Solomon Linda"?
And with "at last we've done something right here."
You can't talk like that and then say at the end of the day,
"We're going to treat you like children," and me, to a certain extent as well,
that, "You're not entitled to know truth."
They did deduct from us, from the settlement.
They did deduct that money you're talking about.
- MALAN: They did? - They did.
ELIZABETH: [in Zulu] We knew we had to pay Hanro.
We didn't know money would be deducted for all the people who worked the case.
We only knew of Hanro's fee,
the one we started with.
When they took the money, they didn't even inform us,
"This is how much we will be taking."
I saw these people playing us for fools.
We felt impotent because we saw what was happening,
but we were powerless to do anything about it.
[in English] We were all compensated...
obviously.
But this was not a case
where anyone from our side was going to get rich.
Period.
It doesn't matter how much you explain. When the money rolls,
you have to explain again.
And the next time that the money rolls, you've got to explain again.
I'm going to be very frank and...
and...
we've been accused, for a long time.
The trustees were accused, for a long time,
of mismanaging their money and spending the money
and not giving it to them.
Amounts were given.
Several big figure sums of money were given.
And in one instance, we received a call from one of the sisters,
and she said... Saying she needed more money.
And we said, "But we paid you out this large sum of money.
What have you done with it?"
"I drank it out," was the reply.
The money was squandered,
misspent, and...
in some cases, just couldn't be accounted for,
a month or two after it was paid to them.
[in Zulu] I would like to know if Owen says that we're drunks who waste money.
Has he ever been to any of our houses or our childhood home in Zola?
He doesn't even know where I live.
It's also funny because
I'm the only one who drinks. They don't drink.
They brought alcohol and said, "Let's drink. It's your money. Enjoy it."
Now they're turning it around, saying that we're always drunk.
They stay drunk, we're not always drunk.
[in English] When you have a breakdown in a relationship,
there is usually finger-pointing afterwards.
Somebody's got to be blamed for something.
I certainly have...
no axe to grind with the family.
I did my best with what we had,
and I did not do anything...
which would have prejudiced them.
At a personal level, I really didn't want to make it my business
to pass judgment on whether they were managing the money or not.
You know, I was very clear in my own mind, in my own attitude,
that... it's not my place.
But who said we were the best people to guide them?
I was never a qualified financial advisor.
Yeah, apart...
Look, I made a decision to resign, and I don't remember the date,
or the time,
which I think was the right thing to do.
The family had brought in one of the family members to replace Nick.
I simply could not...
juggle it any further.
I left, I resigned.
We had done our time. I'd say we, Hanro and I, had done our time,
and I think that they would also been happy to have
other faces on it, particularly black faces.
I think there was, again, that element of mistrust.
And I was more then happy, at that stage, to step back and give the responsibility
and the role to someone else because, by then, I'd had enough.
[in Zulu] When it's time to talk money, they all resign.
How much was it?
That's the one thing that bothers us.
We can't, as beneficiaries, not be told how much was given to us.
Now that there is fighting...
They want to get away with the lion's share.
Our father had nothing.
He died with nothing.
We want the truth.
It's only when we know the truth that we'll have a complete story.
MALAN: [in English] I guess the most important thing for me
is that in this case, I tried to organize a series of events
that, for once, you're gonna see white South Africans
doing something that we could be proud of, right?
And I hate to think that that achievement is gonna be taken away from me.
There's chasms of mutual incomprehension:
I can't speak Zulu,
two of the three daughters don't speak good English.
There's constant fear of accounting terms that are basically, like, untranslatable.
This creates, like, sort of a very fertile
breeding ground for suspicions of the nastiest sort.
I'm really hoping that there are simple and honest explanations of all this,
and that...
the powers that be are going to answer these questions at last.
I think, thus far, everyone that you've spoken to
has been, to some extent, evasive.
There are things that they know that they can't tell you
because of this gag order that was imposed in the settlement back in 2006.
It...
I mean, I think the thing to do is to start the show with Owen Dean.
I mean, Owen was the captain of the ship.
He was the guy who really was instrumental in setting up the trust.
So if there's anyone who's going to be able to exercise his influence
and convince the other players that the time has come
to put all the cards on the table,
I think that Owen would be the right guy to start with.
- DEAN: Morning, Rian! - MALAN: Dr. Dean, how are you?
Help yourself, take a seat.
MALAN: So, where this whole thing seems to have broken down...
The three Linda daughters, what they're saying is,
"We don't understand what went on here.
And, yes, we have got money,
but we're not sure we've got everything we're entitled to get.
And nobody will give us straight answers."
- They don't speak English... - Let me be fair to you.
This is an exceptionally complex, complete, and complicated case.
I would say there are only a handful of lawyers who really understand the case.
How can these people be expected to understand that?
There's just no way they would understand it in a million years.
It could be that the daughters are playing us,
that they're playing me,
that they know more than they do. The other possibility...
is that the trustees and their kind have something to hide.
DEAN: I very much doubt that.
I... I... I really don't think that is the case.
I think... Well look,
if there were not a proper tracking of what happened to the money...
And I'm very sad to hear that,
because it's exactly that situation I wanted to avoid.
Um, the daughters might be dreaming up half of these problems, for all I know.
Now it must be said that these trustees were doing it for nothing,
they weren't being paid,
and it's the fact that the daughters must also bear in mind
that a hell of a lot of people went out on a limb for them in this case.
We all did it because we thought that it was a cause worth pursuing,
and a little bit of more gratitude on the part of the daughters
wouldn't have gone amiss, quite honestly.
I... I think they're actually abusing you.
I think they are trying to deflect...
their own inability to sort out their own affairs onto you,
and I think that's very unfair
because you've helped them inestimably in the past.
MALAN: It seems to me the transparency,
the truth, is the only thing that's going to set us free.
Unless everybody plays open cards,
this issue is not going to go away, we're not...
DEAN: I agree with you,
and I'm very happy to help people with copyright problems
because that's my field, and I'm confident, but don't ask me
to go and do professional work in an area
that I know nothing about. I mean, it's not gonna happen.
[thunder rumbles]
[Malan breathes deeply]
Let's just say,
every lawyer involved in it thus far has made a shitload of money,
a shitload of money, okay?
He's only going to say... "I'm selfish,
I put my own interests at paramount."
No, I don't think he's gonna say that. Which lawyer in the world does?
On the other hand, he is the best intellectual property lawyer,
certainly in South Africa. He's a consummate professional.
But it was always the case, "If you want my services, pay my fees, okay?"
And that's the hard reality that you have to live with.
So, you know, what am I gonna complain, that it's... [mutters]
In a way, it was unfair, but on the other hand...
if it hadn't been for Owen Dean, we would never have got anywhere.
MALAN: Several months have passed.
The family was able to provide us with a few bank accounts,
and, uh, I plowed...
through all the statements I was able to land my hands on
and made certain deductions, and I could not find
a single illegitimate payment leaving that account.
There are gaps in my knowledge, there's certain statements missing.
[laughs]
As a person whose lungs hunger after the fierce oxygen of truth,
I said, "I'm afraid... I'm sorry to disappoint... the family."
There simply isn't any evidence of fraud of the sort that they alleged.
[sighs]
This isn't a story of high crime. It's a story of misunderstanding
and dashed expectations. And it's probably,
given our history in South Africa,
it's possibly inevitable that it actually ended this way.
I mean, the fact of the matter is that South Africa is a country
where people of various races don't know each other well,
don't trust each other,
and where almost any dispute...
is inclined to become immediately racialized.
MALAN: The whole case seemed to be infused
with huge symbolic significance
for South Africans, for a nation that had been sort of like
on the losing side of history for such a long time.
We're still groping towards each other through this muck of confusion
and mutual misunderstanding.
Nothing in this country has really been resolved,
nothing has been forgotten or forgiven.
There are hugely deep and ancient resentments.
These primordial affairs, they're with us every day.
It sits on our shoulder.
Everyone in this country, it talks to them all the time.
The facts were so simple.
The dude wrote the song. He wrote the song.
He stood in front of the microphone, and he sang the melody
that earned sixty million dollars.
I suppose it wasn't the outcome...
exactly that I would have hoped for, or that the family hoped for, but...
[sighs]
...it was way, way better than losing.
[somber instrumental music playing]
Subtitle translation by: Claus Christophersen