AP

CLASS NOTES: Sipho Hotstix Mabuse looks up from his lessons during a geography class at Thaba-Jabula Secondary School in Soweto on Wednesday. At the age of 60, Mabuse is back at school to earn the matric he missed when he dropped out as a teenager for a career in rock, funk, soul and jazz. He wants the faith he is showing in learning to inspire a battered community. Picture: AP

DONNA BRYSON

The 60-year-old musician shows up five days a week to sit behind a scarred desk in a bare-bones classroom, studying for the high school diploma he missed when he dropped out to pursue a career in rock, funk, soul and jazz.

And Sipho “Hotstix” Mabuse wants the faith he is showing in learning to inspire a battered community.

Returning to school “is for me, but it’s not about me”, Mabuse says in an interview in his Soweto home, decorated with souvenirs from his European, US and Middle East travels.

Mabuse, his round, unlined face animated beneath a shaven pate, says some of his friends and fellow musicians were baffled when he told them he was going back to school for matric.

But bassist and producer Victor Masondo wasn’t surprised.

“Sipho is a perfectionist,” Masondo says. “In typical Sipho style, he wants to do the right thing.”

Mabuse often paces his tile floors as he practices his saxophone. He also plays the flute, piano and other instruments, as well as the drums that gave him his nickname.

He has performed with Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and Paul Simon, giving the latter a tour of Soweto when Simon was here to work on Graceland.

Mabuse also has sat on the boards of the National Arts Council and the Southern African Music Rights Organisation, which works to protect musicians’ intellectual property rights.

“He’s always been there for South African music,” says composer and theatre director Welcome Msomi.

With his money, Mabuse could have hired a tutor to get him through matric. With his connections, he could have found a university to take him on as a researcher. Instead, he’s enrolled in classes offered to adults after the day of learning for younger pupils is over. The government school is just around the corner from his home in Soweto, where he was born and raised.

Japie Masombuka, who runs the adult education programme at Thaba-Jabula Secondary School, says he asked his most famous pupil to give a motivational talk one afternoon. To Masombuka’s surprise, even pupils who were habitually late to class or often skipped class showed up, and now many are more responsible.

One of Mabuse’s classmates, 27-year-old Nikiwe Mpande, left high school to take a secretarial course and start work. She says the lack of a matric was keeping her from getting promotions, but she didn’t seriously consider returning to school until she heard about Mabuse.

Across SA, more than half a million members of the class of 2011 dropped out or otherwise disappeared before the 496 000 remaining took their final exams. Only a quarter of those who graduated did well enough to qualify for university study, according to government figures.

A government report released last month said public adult education programmes had not escaped the chaos. According to the report, facilities are spare, curricula unfocused, teachers weak, and most of the more than 300 000 people who enrolled in such classes along with Mabuse last year failed to progress.

In the 1960s, Mabuse’s Orlando West High School had no library or science lab. Many schools in poor black communities still lack such basics.

But Orlando West did have a respected principal, Solomon Kgokgophana Matseke, who died last year. Mabuse keeps a scrapbook on Matseke on his bookshelf, alongside biographies of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.

Matseke, himself a musician and composer, tried to persuade Mabuse to stay in school back in 1969, Mabuse says. But he and the fellow classmates who had formed a band were making money and earning admiration from girls at weekend performances. One day, his mother went looking for Mabuse at Orlando West and no one could tell her where he was. She found him and his bandmates at a tailor’s, trying on new stage costumes.

“She just said: ‘Oh, so this is your new school uniform?’” Mabuse recalls.

She dragged him back to school, where a teacher administered a beating.

When Mabuse has to miss class these days, he calls his teachers to apologise. He addresses teachers who are 20 years his junior as sir. And while the teachers might keep quiet when fellow pupils in their twenties answer their cellphones in class, Mabuse is not shy.

“I do try to instil that level of responsibility,” he says. “I would chide some of them: ‘Either you behave like schoolkids, or you behave like adults.’”

Mabuse

plans to go on to university to study musical anthropology. –

Sapa-AP