Selema Masekela on Hugh Masekela’s addiction, their five-year estrangement

Selema Masekela might have just given the most emotionally naked interview of his career, and the internet cannot stop talking about it.

The Emmy-nominated broadcaster and longtime X Games host sat down with the ONE54 Africa podcast in late August, in a conversation that ran for hours and touched on identity, surfing, race, rap music – and, most strikingly, his complicated bond with his father, South African jazz icon Hugh Masekela.

Clips have since spread across South African outlets, social media and YouTube, where the full episode has drawn tens of thousands of views.

‘Let me just have this man be dead’

Selema didn’t hold back on how bad things got. Hugh’s decades-long battle with alcohol and cocaine (something the trumpeter had long spoken about publicly himself) pushed his son to cut contact entirely for five years, from around age 25 to 30.

“Let me just have this man be dead so that when he dies, I’ve already got a head start,” he told podcast hosts Akbar Gbajabiamila and Godfrey Danchimah.

It’s a gutting admission, but for most of the South Africans who kept up with pop culture at the time, Hugh’s addiction was never a secret. He’d written about it in his 2004 autobiography Still Grazing, entered rehab in England in the late 1990s, and later founded the Musicians and Artists’ Assistance Programme of South Africa to help others battling the same demons.

Selema’s account allowed those familiar with Hugh’s legacy to hear, for the first time, what it actually cost his son emotionally.

The intervention, the rehab, and getting Hugh back

The turning point, as he tells it, was dramatic: his uncle had Hugh essentially “kidnapped” in South Africa in a turn of events that saw his passport taken, with him flown out barefoot to a rural English rehab facility with ties to a member of The Beatles. Hugh, ever the charmer, couldn’t talk his way out of this one and became sober around age 58.

@one54africa

“My uncle had him kidnapped inside of Africa.” – Selema Watch the full episode on One54 Africa YouTube! And listen on iHeart or wherever you stream your podcasts! @Godfrey @Akbar Gbajabiamila @selema masekela

♬ original sound – one54africa

Selema admitted he was initially furious rather than relieved, wary after watching his father relapse before. “He got right. And I was mad that he got right,” he said, noting that it ended up staying that way after that.

The reconciliation happened in a New York hotel room with five years of silence ending with a knock on a door. From there, Hugh reportedly became Selema’s “best friend on earth” – a bond that lasted until Hugh’s death from prostate cancer in 2018.

On Lupita Nyong’o

The other headline-grabber from the interview was Selema’s first-ever public comments on his relationship with Lupita Nyong’o.

The pair dated for about three years, going public around December 2022 before Lupita announced the split in October 2023, describing it on Instagram as a love “extinguished by deception”.

Selema stayed notably guarded, saying he’d made a personal promise never to reveal details of what was once private. He praised her talent, wished her well, and made clear the experience put him off high-profile romance altogether.