Old mates toast life of gay gangster

Music legends Sonny Pillay and Hugh Masekela have known each other since they were hard-drinking youths in the 1950s.

They are still friends, but now their drink orders are milk for crooner Pillay and honeyed rooibos tea for trumpeter Masekela.

"Nobody drank like us," said Masekela. It made them good friends, he said.

Over the years their globe-trotting paths crossed to the extent that they married the same woman: Miriam Makeba.

Pillay was her husband in 1959, when Makeba was 27 and on the brink of world fame. Masekela was married to her between 1964 and 1966 while she was shining on the world stage.

"We shared everything. We were brothers," said Pillay.

In those years the pair were part of Alfred Herbert's African Jazz and Variety programme. Through their music they portrayed the struggles and sorrows as well as the joy and passion of apartheid South Africa.

Apartheid drove them separately to the US, where they had varying degrees of success.

But they always remained in contact. When Pillay was ill in New York recently, Masekela visited him every day.

It was this bond that led to them collaborating again.

Those daily chats about the old days, the shady world of dapperly dressed thugs and apartheid security police, gave birth to Panzee, a jazz opera about a gay Durban gangster renowned for being as stylish as he was deadly.

He was a real-life figure from Pillay's childhood in the 1940s.

A casting call describes the Xhosa man from the Eastern Cape as a "slim, immensely handsome man of elegance, running away from a frightening past" who "can shoot a man in cold blood, while at the same time choosing the most beautiful flowers for the queen's state dinner".

"I didn't even know his surname," said Pillay. "He just came in and his name was Panzee ... He came to Durban and lived in my aunt's house, in a room. Panzee was the most respected man in Grey Street."

The opera about his life - exaggerated in parts - is set in Durban in the aftermath of the race riots of 1948.

In those days, members of the Mob were mainstays of the most popular jazz clubs and music lounges and were among the most generous supporters of the arts. "We loved them. They were Robin Hoods," said Masekela.

"Panzee has its own story. But it's not a safe story," said Pillay, who has been working on the script and the book on which it is based for 15 years. The brutality in the jazz opera, for which Masekela is writing the music, reflects the reality of the time, they say.

The Summer of '60 is another of their current projects, a film documenting their time together in London.

The artists are still looking for funding for Panzee and hope to stage it this year.