Selema Masekela on Hugh Masekela’s addiction, their five-year estrangement
The Emmy-nominated broadcaster and longtime X Games host sat down with the ONE54 Africa podcast in late August, in a conversation that ran for hours and touched on identity, surfing, race, rap music – and, most strikingly, his complicated bond with his father, South African jazz icon Hugh Masekela.
The intervention, the rehab, and getting Hugh back The turning point, as he tells it, was dramatic: his uncle had Hugh essentially “kidnapped” in South Africa in a turn of events that saw his passport taken, with him flown out barefoot to a rural English rehab facility with ties to a member of The Beatles.
He’d written about it in his 2004 autobiography Still Grazing, entered rehab in England in the late 1990s, and later founded the Musicians and Artists’ Assistance Programme of South Africa to help others battling the same demons.
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