
1983
Staple Diet was a four-person band that began in Johannesburg. It included acclaimed saxophonist Steve Dyer and renowned photographer and filmmaker Peter McKenzie on bass. Dyer refused the apartheid government’s military conscription in the early 1980s and went into exile in Botswana. While in Gaborone, Dyer played with the band Shakawe and has since formed his own musical groups, notably Mahube, which plays a fusion of Coltrane-style jazz and marabi, a South African jazz style originating in the 1920s.