Plans to save the planet will fail if they ignore the traditions of developing cultures, says South African musician Johnny Clegg, who won the nickname of the "White Zulu" during the days of apartheid.
Clegg (48) is also a well-known anthropologist who livens up his concerts with Zulu dancing and anecdotes about his experiences of the warlike culture, which rejects western notions of self-control and predictability for men.
He told reporters at the conference that delegates to the Earth Summit should tailor schemes for clean water, farming and other forms of sustainable development to blend with traditions in the communities they are aimed at.
"You can't come in with a technically sound system of water management without understanding that the community you are dealing with has a cultural notion of water which goes beyond water," he told.
"It can be part of a religion, part of marriage, part of how beer is brewed - it even enables a system of courtship where young men ambush the women who go to fetch water to talk to them. All of these issues have to be looked at." Clegg thinks it will be tough for the global summit, billed as the biggest UN gathering in history, to put together finely defined positions on the environment and poverty eradication, given the failure of a previous one in Rio 10 years ago.
But he is hoping it will help put Africa more squarely on the global map.
"I think it's really going to be a secondary moment, but it's important in that I think Africans will be able to articulate their issues in a far more powerful way than previously," he said.
Clegg has put together a show which will run throughout the entire summit between August 26th and September 4th, which tells the moving story of his own "cross-over" to Zulu culture at a time when racial mixing was against the law in South Africa.
Born into a secular Jewish family in Rochedale, near Manchester in the UK in 1953, Clegg had the kind of unconventional upbringing which made him an ideal candidate for cultural "cross-over" - a central theme in his music. He was brought up in Zimbabwe and put into a boarding school at the age of six when his mother Murial, a jazz singer, went touring in the country. They moved to South Africa after she married a South African journalist, and spent a few years in Zambia before returning to Johannesburg.
Clegg met a Zulu guitarist who showed him an "Africanised" version of the instrument and taught him how to play it when he was 14. Charlie, a cleaner, introduced Clegg to other musicians at informal jamborees on roof-tops in the city.
Eventually Clegg was taken to watch a Zulu dance team which introduced him to his real passion. He began to take part in Zulu dance competitions, where men kick and stomp in an important and acceptable outlet for traditional aggression.
"I just had the sense they knew something about being a man and they were communicating that very strongly," he said. "My culture was far more worried about being in control . . . and giving off messages to show behaviour is predictable." In his show, Clegg hits this message home with a story of the proper way to drink tea with Zulu men - noisily. He also shows film clips of stick fights between Zulu boys and men --- early outlets for competitive behaviour, monitored by an older "referee".
In between rousing renditions of songs dating back to when his first mixed band "Juluka" started in 1979, followed by the more conventional rock group "Savuka" in 1986, Clegg tells his stories, interspersed with Zulu phrases and their translation.- (Reuters)