LIKE MANY POWERFUL STORIES, this one starts in a black South African township. One day in the early 1950s, a boy was photographed jumping for joy.

Much later – this week in fact – the boy died, by then a world-renowned troubadour called Hugh Masakela. Fans everywhere mourned his death from prostate cancer at 78 years of age.     In South Africa he was dubbed Bra Hu (‘Brother Hugh’) a comradely designation earned largely for the activist tilt of his work.

While sometimes the most sophisticated and even arcane of jazz musicians, and of course a leading early proponent of Afro-Jazz, he also wrote and performed a truly anthemic piece of pop-music, the protest-song “Bring Him Back Home”. It called for the freeing of Nelson Mandela from jail.

The song was released and promoted internationally in 1986, when Mandela had reached the 22nd year of his life-imprisonment sentence for trying to overthrow the government, a sentence served out initially on the notorious Alcatraz-style jail of Robben Island.

In the end, as history now knows, Mandela was transferred to the mainland’s Pollsmoor Prison by the white-supremacist government, as it came under increasing international pressure and mounting country-wide protests … negotiations were secretly opened between the white authorities and Mandela himself … and in 1990 Mandela had his jubilant release. Four years of formal and often tense negotiations then followed between Mandela’s movement, the African National Congress (ANC) and the white authorities … until in 1994 the country held its first free, democratic, non-racial elections.

Thus Mandela became the country’s first black President. For one term only – at his own democratically-minded insistence.

Also in 1986, with Masakela’s insistent, melodic demands sounding out over the airwaves, and Mandela still in prison, I was making a television documentary for a UK network in which I traced the ANC’s history. It was the culmination of work over several years, as I’d long been intrigued by the party’s special place as the oldest liberation movement in Africa – and the one that was, for a variety of politico-economic reasons, taking the longest to achieve its aim.

WE INTERVIEWED MANY ANC members of different generations, some in exile and others filmed covertly inside South Africa (it was of course still a “banned organization”) and for a time we accompanied a small battalion of the party’s armed wing, which was waging a guerrilla war against South African forces. That wing was called Umkhonto we Sizwe – in literal translation “Spear of the Nation”, which served as the title of our film. At the time he was imprisoned, Mandela had been Commander in Chief of this military force.

One of the struggle’s veterans I interviewed was Archbishop Trevor Huddleston (left, with Mandela in the 1990s) president of the Anti-Apartheid organization, based in the UK but operating worldwide. Hugh Masakela came up during our time together, because as a young Anglican priest serving in Johannesburg’s black township of Sophiatown, Huddleston had formed a youth jazz band. The early teenaged Masakela was a member, blowing on a battered old trumpet. They all played the best they could with what they had – and Masakela deeply impressed Huddleston with his talent and verve.

Huddleston’s campaigning against white repression made him an irritant to the apartheid regime, and his religious order recalled him to England. He wrote a powerful book, “Naught For Your Comfort”, which became a clarion-call for liberation.

On a consciousness-raising trip (selling books, too) across the United States, he met with Louis Armstrong (right). He told him about the young band he had encouraged back in South Africa, its brilliant burgeoning trumpeter and his aged, less-than-stellar instrument. Satchmo promptly handed over his own well-used horn, saying “Give him this from me”.

Not permitted to travel back into South Africa, Huddleston shipped the trumpet to his former protégé. The jumping-boy photograph at the top of this column shows what effect the instrument’s arrival in Sophiatown had.

The picture was taken by Alf Kumalo, who went on to become one of the country’s preeminent photographers, a faithful recordist of everyday township life who also captured the atrocities of apartheid and the all-too-frequent massacring of protestors.

But Masakela said then, and repeated later: “I hated the picture – because it was so square and unhip” – he was after all by then a fifteen-year old, and ambitious to be a hep cat. Kumalo knew better, though, and told him “Hugh, this is going to be a very famous picture, you’ll see”.

Sure enough, record distributors in many countries put it on the cover of his albums and CDs, and Masakela himself eventually relented, allowing Random House to use it as jacket illustration for his 2005 autobiography “Still Grazing” (left), an echo of his breakout instrumental hit in 1968, “Grazing in the Grass”).

EVERY STORY HAS AN UNTOLD SIDE. I want now to add another dimension to this tale – this journey of a hero in musicianship and in activism – by footnoting Masakela’s alcohol-and-drugs addiction.

The addiction grew so severe by the 1990s that it was crippling his career and entire life.

His unreliability cost him, for instance, the chance to compose the score for my friend Jo Menell’s seminal, Oscar-nominated documentary “Mandela” in 1996. And it almost destroyed a friendship that had lasted since Jo was 17 and Hugh 16. (At right: the two pictured much more recently.)

In fact, though, Jo – with the help of other friends – organized an intervention … and (cutting the long story short) Hugh got – and remained – clean and sober. Anyone who crawls out of the pit of addiction and stays out is a hero to me.

So I will leave the last words to Jo Menell, as he spoke to the listening millions of Radio KAYA fm 95.9 in South Africa yesterday: (Streamed in full here.)

“[Hugh became] a changed man, not in his musical prowess, not in his commitment to human rights – far from it – but as a changed individual. And I admire that more than anything else in Hugh’s life … It was a huge battle, that Hugh won – and I was in awe of him for doing that.”