Music is not a zero sum game with only one “best”. But if you seek to name one musician whose life embodies the South African people’s struggle for a national culture, it must be trombonist, composer and cultural activist Jonas Mosa Gwangwa, who was born on October 19, 1937 in Orlando East, Johannesburg, and died on January 23, 2021 in Johannesburg aged 83. Through 65 years on stage, Gwangwa’s playing contributed to every genre of South African jazz. Overseas, he was hailed as player, producer and composer. Yet he chose to step away from mainstream success for ten years, leading the Amandla Cultural Ensemble of the African National Congress (ANC) to win hearts for the anti apartheid struggle everywhere and present a vision of what post-apartheid national culture could be. He battled painful injury (accidents shattered the same femur three times), was hunted for his life by the regime’s forces and experienced both the heyday of South African liberation culture and the far more ambivalent times since. Throughout, he cherished a half-century-plus, love affair with his wife Violet, and brought his family — scattered across half the globe — home intact to a free South Africa. Violet’s death, only a few short weeks before his, had left him and the rest of the family devastated. The little bebopper Gwangwa started his career in the 1950s in the Father Huddleston Band at St Peter’s College in Johannesburg. When instruments were allocated, he hoped for a clarinet, but was shy to object to the offered trombone. There was music in the family, lessons at school, and from American jazzmen on the bioscope screen at the Odin Cinema in Sophiatown. From Dizzy Gillespie, the schoolboy Gwangwa borrowed his lifetime trademark: a jaunty black beret. He became, in his own words “this little bebopper”. Politics shaped Gwangwa too. The 1954 Bantu Education Act ended Father Huddleston’s St Peters, but not before the band had played at the adoption of the Freedom Charter in Kliptown. He said “Everybody shared a perspective — you didn’t even classify it as ‘being political’ … nobody separated the music from the politics.” Because trombone was a scarce sound in African jazz bands, Gwangwa’s tricky bebop chops caught the ears of the elite Jazz Dazzlers. His vision expanded with the Jazz Epistles, whose Jazz Epistles: Verse One became the first modern jazz album from a black South African band. That was the first of several firsts. Gwangwa was co-copyist for the first all-black South African stage musical, King Kong, travelling with the show to London and starting a lifelong love affair with the stage musical format: “Words, action, and music! I became fascinated with just how you … put all those pieces together.” Seven curtain calls London contacts helped Gwangwa secure a place at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. There, sharing a flat with Hugh Masekela, his meagre allowance went as often on gig tickets as food, as he imbibed mainstream classics and the new “free jazz”. Equally active in politics, he helped organise South African stude