Gazankulu

There’s mockery and disdain behind the jaunty beat and the major-key, Shangaan-style accordion chords of “Paradise in Gazankulu,” the title song of Belafonte’s last studio album; he recorded part of it in Johannesburg.

Under apartheid — which Belafonte determinedly worked to end — Gazankulu was a so-called “homeland” created to segregate Black South Africans.

The proper homelands, Venda and Gazankulu and Transkei, were places where black people actually lived, and the government drew a border around them and said, “Stay there.”

They lived in Tzaneen, a town in Gazankulu, what had been the Tsonga homeland under apartheid.

My mother came from Gazankulu, the tribal reserve for the Tsongas in the Northeastern Transvaal.