The Lion Sleeps Tonight: one song’s journey from 1930s South Africa to Disney money-spinner

South African music is a confluence of paths; a plethora of hands, feet and voices crossing and moving ever forward, yet still interconnected. For that reason, attempting to unravel those strands and arrive at some singular core is a dizzying prospect, but the word “mbube” was at the heart of that inextricable weave during the earliest days of the country’s popular recorded music.

Today, mbube describes a specific variety of South African choral music composed of multipart a cappella harmonies, usually sung by men, and usually in Zulu. The genre’s name is taken from the most famous song of the style.

Sung by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, Mbube was released in 1939 by South Africa’s oldest independent label, Gallo Record Company, for whom Linda worked as a packer in the pressing plant. As the story goes, Gallo’s talent scout, Griffith Motsieloa, discovered Linda’s vocal prowess on the job and invited his group into the studio, where the Evening Birds delivered what would become one of the most important records in South African history. In the recording, the group intricately balances the three-part bass harmonies of Gideon Mkhize, Samuel Mlangeni, and Owen Sikhakhane, as Boy Sibiya and Gilbert Madondo deliver honeyed middle tones and Linda himself soars over the top with an unmatched soprano. Their voices work together to call out to an mbube, the Zulu word for lion.

In 40s South Africa, Linda became a star. But the song’s long, complicated history was just beginning. In 1951, US folk singer Pete Seeger was handed a copy and decided to record a version with his band, the Weavers. In the hands of four white voices from New York City, the looped chorus of “uyimbube” (“You are a lion” in Zulu) became “wimoweh”, and the title of their cover. After spreading deeper into the US , another set of musicians, doo wop group the Tokens, added English lyrics, creating the 1961 US No 1 hit The Lion Sleeps Tonight, although Linda’s name was absent from the credits. Three decades later the song would become a centrepiece of Disney’s animated classic The Lion King.

Before being known as mbube, the genre was known to some as ingoma mbusuke, or “night music”, a domestic musical style that was heavily affected by colonial influences: missionaries and white singing troupes are credited as the first to introduce four-part vocal harmony on the continent. Religious schools that conscripted Black South Africans frequently trained students to sing American spirituals in English. Touring acts from the US “minstrel show” movement would occasionally include South Africa in their itinerary, performing to largely segregated white and Black audiences.

Gramophones, records, and radio also began shrinking the world by the 1920s; naturally, Black artists in the US were also often taking influence from African traditions, and in turn influencing African artists. With a variety of international styles available, mbube was primed to further spread African music around the world.

After a brief, swooning introduction, Linda and his bandmates lock into the main groove of Mbube. Though some say the song was improvised, there’s an intricate precision to the harmonies. Mbube is sung in Zulu and full of vocal lines meant to evoke the penny whistles rooted deeply in South African street music, yet its compositional structure bears a strong western influence. It’s that combination that gave Mbube a shot globally.

South Africa’s burgeoning recording scene facilitated that rapid connection. Gallo Record Company first churned out recordings from the Afrikaans community, but Mbube became proof that there was a large audience for music rooted in African traditions – both within South Africa and beyond. And if the Evening Birds could release a massive hit, Gallo bet that getting more groups into the studio could recreate at least a portion of that success.

US music historian and archivist Rob Allingham frequently works with Gallo Records. “The amount of material that was recorded was not only incredibly diverse, but it was vast in quantity,” he says. Gallo and his subsequent contemporaries recorded huge volumes of singles, but released each in a print run of just a few hundred copies – a number small enough that if the record were to only sell to Xhosa speakers and not Zulu, for example, or just the Afrikaans audience and not English speakers, the label might still break even. “The basis was built around these very small numbers because of how diverse the South African market was,” Allingham says. “You’ve got urban, rural and township, with all of these specialised, so-called neo-traditional styles.”

But Mbube crossed those borders, in part due to the singers’ undeniable charisma. Linda approached his band with a modern marketer’s eye. “The Evening Birds sported pinstripe three-piece suits, Florsheim shoes, and hats and indulged in a fast-paced, energetic choreography called istep that made performers look like resolute men defiantly walking the streets of the white man’s city,” Simon Frith wrote in his history of the band. While countless singles from mbube groups were produced, Linda’s intention to appeal across cultural boundaries – and to look cool doing it – propelled Mbube to hit status.

Reckoning with the interplay between that broad appeal and colonial influence can pose a bit of a headache decades later. Ethnomusicologist Sarah Weiss has described sharing mbube recordings with her students at Yale. The students blanched, asking for “real” South African music that wasn’t tainted by the influence of Christian missionaries, deeming it “a negative form of hybridisation, which, they argued, had tainted South African musics”, Weiss writes. “Some of my students drew a line between music that was ‘pure’ and music that ‘engaged the west.’”

As Weiss suggests, Mbube and the genre it gave a name to shouldn’t be considered evidence of South Africa’s corruption, but rather of domestic artists’ (and citizens generally) impressive ability to incorporate countless different threads into a unique, modern experience. Rejecting the authenticity of Mbube as South African art rejects Linda’s agency, not to mention the fact that no art or culture can exist in a vacuum without influence from others. While racist oppression was the norm long before apartheid officially encoded it, the very act of Mbube drawing from a variety of cultures is prime evidence of music holding a special place in South Africa’s history of overcoming that same oppression.

But the success of Mbube would become a pyrrhic victory for Linda – an early example of the endemic and ongoing exploitation of Black musicians by the industry. The deal appears to have been crooked from the outset. Gallo paid Linda the equivalent of just $2 for the initial run of a few hundred records.

Compare that with the $200 a week that the Weavers were earning at the Village Vanguard when Wimoweh entered their repertoire. When the group finally put the song out on record, it would earn much, much more. Other artists, from Jimmy Dorsey to the Kingston Trio, were cashing in on the Evening Birds’ release; the Tokens recorded The Lion Sleeps Tonight after receiving a $10,000 advance from RCA Victor. Decades later, The Lion King earned nearly $1bn at the box office – and then spawned the Lion King musical, the highest-grossing show in Broadway history. And the covers never stopped coming: the song would hit No 1 in the UK multiple times via multiple artists. Miriam Makeba sang it to John F Kennedy just before Marilyn Monroe’s infamous rendition of Happy Birthday; even REM and Brian Eno took their turn at the song.

In an investigation for Rolling Stone, journalist Rian Malan estimates the royalties and credit that Linda lost out on by polling copyright lawyers: “It was impossible to accurately calculate, to be sure, but no one blanched at $15m,” he wrote. “Some said 10, some said 20, but most felt that $15m was in the ballpark.”

In the decades that followed the song’s release – and Linda’s death in 1962 – his family received astonishingly little. The copyright and writing credits of the various covers and reimaginings were a tangled mess that inevitably centred on the white publishers and adapters. “It looked as if Linda’s family was receiving 12.5% t of Wimoweh royalties, and around 1% of the much larger revenues generated by The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” Malan wrote. In 2004, Linda’s daughters sued Disney and were given an undisclosed settlement.

That changed in 2019 with the live-action remake of The Lion King: in the Beyoncé-curated musical, Black Is King, it was the original Mbube that was included, not the Tokens’ version. Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles-Lawson, told the Washington Post that the project was inspired in part by Beyoncé learning Linda’s story while she was working on The Lion King.

That high-stakes battle and redemption may be the most indicative example of the tension between tradition and modernity in mbube, but it’s certainly not the only one. Despite being in its infancy, the South African recording industry gathered a vast spectrum of vocal groups in the 1930s and 1940s. And while reports of mistreatment or nonpayment at Linda’s scale aren’t readily available, it’s safe to assume that similar stories exist.

As the years passed, the grasp of missionaries and gospel movements on mbube loosened and the genre evolved under its own terms. Some mbube vocalists began working with jazz musicians, some took influence from the evolving US pop music scene and others instead preserved the influence of more traditional Zulu vocal traditions. But across all fronts, the constantly intersecting borders of Afrikaans and a variety of African tribal cultures would continue to generate a unique music in response to an equally roiling political structure.