Soweto at 50 - The Children Who Changed South Africa

Fifty years after the Soweto Uprising, double-bassist and former anti-apartheid activist Leon Bosch explores how he learned to confront own trauma and speak through the voice of his instrument.

For most of its history, the double bass has been the quietest figure in Western classical music: essential but overlooked, a labouring presence at the back of the orchestra. For the celebrated British-South African bassist Leon Bosch, son of prominent anti-apartheid activist Jonas Fred Bosch, it has been the opposite. It was the instrument that carried him out of apartheid; the refuge through which he survived exile; and now, unexpectedly late in life, the voice through which he can finally express a trauma he has never spoken aloud.

This Radio 3 Documentary follows Bosch as he prepares Red Ink, an intensely personal concerto by the South African composer Shane Woodborne - Leon’s former youth-orchestra friend from the other side of apartheid’s racial divide, now an established Salzburg-based composer. Written as a gift, and commemorating the Soweto Uprising of 1976, the work becomes the lens through which Bosch revisits the uprising that shaped his generation, the activism and imprisonment that defined his youth, and the decades in which he refused all South African music because its emotional freight was too great to bear.

The documentary is the story of two boys who once played under the same cello teacher in Cape Town, whose paths split violently apart and who meet again, by chance, thirty-five years later on a Salzburg street. It is the story of a concerto that tries to translate historical pain into musical form and of a musician discovering that the lowest voice in the orchestra is the only one capable of carrying the story he has spent a lifetime running from.

Written and presented by Leon Bosch.
Producer: Fiona Clampin
Exec Producer: Steven Rajam
An Overcoat Media Production for BBC Radio 3