Clegg was born on 7 June 1953 in
Bacup, Lancashire, to an English father of Scottish descent, Dennis Clegg, and a Rhodesian mother, Muriel (Braudo). Clegg's mother's family were Jewish immigrants from
Belarus and
Poland and Clegg had a secular Jewish upbringing, learning about the
Ten Commandments but refusing to have a
bar mitzvah - until later in life, when he became a father and decided to have a "double" bar mitzvah with his son Jesse. He moved with his mother to
Southern Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe) at age 6 months, and his parents divorced soon afterwards. At age six, he moved to South Africa with his mother, also spending part of a year in
Israel during his childhood. He grew up in
Yeoville, then a predominantly Jewish inner city neighbourhood of
Johannesburg. He encountered the
demi-monde of the city's Zulu migrant workers' music and dance. Under the tutelage of Charlie Mzila, a flat cleaner by day and musician by night, Clegg mastered both the
Zulu language and the
maskandi guitar and the isishameni dance styles of the migrants. Clegg's involvement with black musicians often led to arrests for trespassing on government property and for contravening the
Group Areas Act. He was first arrested at the age of 15 for violating
apartheid-era laws in South Africa banning people of different races from congregating together after curfew hours. At the age of 16, he met
Sipho Mchunu, a Zulu migrant worker with whom he began performing music. After graduating with a
BA (Hons) in
Social Anthropology from the
University of Witwatersrand, Clegg pursued an academic career for four years where he lectured and wrote several seminal scholarly papers on
Zulu music and dance. He preceded each song with snippets of Zulu culture, information, commentary, humor and personal anecdotes relevant and unique to that song, occasionally also incorporating aspects of his Jewish roots in songs such as "Jericho", "Jarusalema" and "Warsaw 1943". ==Juluka==