Later today in Cape Town, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band start off a four-date concert tour of South Africa, the first time ever Springsteen and his band will perform in South Africa. (This is not Springsteen’s first time on the continent; in 1988 he performed in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, and Harare, Zimbabwe, as part of the Human Rights Now! tour organized by Amnesty International.)

Springsteen’s Cape Town tour dates are in Bellville, a mostly white Afrikaans-speaking suburb to the north of downtown Cape Town that looks and – given Springsteen’s own cultural references – feels a lot like somewhere in New Jersey. The South African tour will end with a concert in Soweto next Saturday (in the same mega stadium where the World Cup final took place in 2010). To coincide with this historic moment, Backstreets.com, a site focusing on New Jersey music, posted the transcript of a long radio interview with Steven Van Zandt (also known as Little Steven), Springsteen’s longtime guitar player, who is also making the trip.

In the interview, Van Zandt (who younger readers know more for his role as a gangster on “The Sopranos”) recalls his longtime involvement with South Africa, and his role in uniting American musicians against Apartheid. The highlight of that work was the 1985 song “Sun City,” which featured at least 50 odd musicians, including Springsteen of course, Run-DMC, Pete Townsend, Joey Ramone and Afrika Bambataa, and which introduced a whole new generation of Americans to what was going on in South Africa. MTV and BET basically blew up the song. Commercial radio didn’t want to play it: “It was too black for white radio, too white for black radio.” A lot of this history about the song is told in the book, Sun City: The Making of the Record (1985), written by Dave Marsh, a Van Zandt collaborator.

While this all was happening, Paul Simon’s career was in decline when he discovered South African music and traveled to South Africa in defiance of the UN cultural boycott against Apartheid. There Simon met and rehearsed with South African musicians who he later flew to New York City to record his now legendary “Graceland” album. (EDIT: Elsewhere, I’ve already summarized the debate around “Graceland”; what was bad and good about its politics and mostly good about the music.)

The Backstreets.com interview is conducted by Dave Marsh. The result is that Little Stevie is quite relaxed an eager to talk. A lot gets covered in the interview, but we perked up when Van Zandt starts talking about what he made of Paul Simon’s going to South Africa for “Graceland.” That’s the section of the interview that I copied below.

Basically, the set up is this: Van Zandt, as part of his antiapartheid work, had traveled to South Africa in the mid-1980s. He met up with black activists from the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), which claimed the black consciousness mantle of Steve Biko.  AZAPO was a rival to the UDF, which dominated internal antiapartheid protest and was effectively the internal wing of the ANC of Mandela. The ANC and the UDF supported the cultural boycott too; in fact they pushed for it initially and helped it to be set up. But now they appeared to make exceptions for Simon.

For non-South Africans: Van Zandt’s description of AZAPO is a bit off; he exaggerates their impact. “They were actually on the front lines blowing shit up and stuff like that.” South Africans will laugh at this. But that doesn’t take away from his recollections. Marsh and Van Zandt are also off (you can’t blame them) about when South Africa got TV. They mention the mid-1980s. The truth is a public TV service was introduced in 1976. It was more like a state propaganda service and catered to white viewers, but it did exist. Then in the early 1980s, the government added two regional channels for black viewers.

But back to Van Zandt’s story. AZAPO comrades had taken Van Zandt around and he witnessed the effects of Apartheid first hand. In one moment, he goes to Soweto, the largest township in South Africa which is on the outskirts of Johannesburg. He is quite vivid in his recollections. Check his description of 1980s Soweto: “… you’d see, like, two or three feet of fog all over the ground. No lights.” There he meets more people and talk about the cultural boycott.

You can go read the whole thing at the source, but we decided to copy the relevant section here. The interviewer’s contributions are in bold:  The original interview is here. The excerpt starts with Little Steven telling how he linked up with AZAPO.