Dorothy Masuka first blossomed as a singer at school concerts. She also discovered popular music at this time and developed a particular ear for American jazz. It wasn't long before she realised that great things were happening in the music scene around her as well. Her break came a few years later when she was invited to audition for a new record label called Troubadour. She got the job, earning, as she recalls, five or ten pounds for her first recording!
At sixteen, she became swept up in the music scene, She ran away from her School to join Philemon Mogotsi's African Ink Spots in Durban. She was soon apprehended and returned to Johannesburg, but quickly made off again, this time back to Bulawayo, where she struck up with a young jazz group called the Golden Rhythm Crooners.
Dorothy also along with Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela performed in the travelling road show African Jazz and Variety and in the South African Broadway-style musical King Kong.
Her song "Dr. Malan" - which included the line "Dr. Malan has difficult laws." - earned the attention of South Africa's feared Special Branch, which paid her a visit and promptly banned the record. When she sang for Lumumba, the fallen hero of Congolese independence, in 1961, the Special Branch seized the master and all copies of the record they could find. As it happened, Masuka had returned to Bulawayo, and the label advised her to stay there until things settled down.
She was exiled from South Africa for 31 years, during which time she worked in Malawi and Tanzania. She then settled in Zambia where she spent an anonymous existence as a flight attendant until Zimbabwean independence in 1981. With the release of Nelson Mandela she was in 1992, allowed to return to South Africa.
Dorothy continues to tour and record today.
