One of South Africa’s greatest musicians — a hero of the struggle against apartheid — believes that he is no longer welcome as a performer in his own country.

The virtuoso trumpeter Hugh Masekela claims that many of the talented musicians whose voices became symbols of protest against white domination are finding it hard to get bookings in South Africa because the ruling ANC is “terrified” of music as an agent of change.

Masekela, 68, who has written the score for Truth in Translation, one of the most talked-about shows on the Edinburgh Fringe, argues that mediocrity is being promoted in the arts in South Africa because music and theatre are seen as “catalysts” in the destruction of apartheid, and might equally shake confidence in the present regime.

“The administration of South Africa today are terrified of music. They deny it,” he told The Times. “They know that a musical commentary can put them at a disadvantage. They are not afraid of print and journalists, that is considered freedom of speech, but they are very comfortable with the absence of music.

“I am not bitter. I am disgusted. And I am lucky – I can work all over the world. Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ibrahim, they spend most of their time abroad, because they can hardly play at home. What about those other musicians in South Africa? How do they make a living?”

Masekela accused the ANC and opposition parties of bringing an end to all-white rule only by conniving in a “business deal” that had entrenched the power of the elite, but left the bulk of the population in poverty. “We ended up with less than 2 per cent of the economy, less than 5 per cent of the land. We are a free but poor people,” he said.

Truth in Translation is a dramatisation of the lives of the young translators who revealed the barbaric crimes of the country’s former rulers to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. According to its American writer, Michael Lessac, the show demonstrates South Africa’s ability “to forgive the past, to survive the future”. Masekela, however, argued that neither the play nor the political reality in South Africa had achieved any such reconciliation.

“At the end of the play you still wonder whether reconciliation is going to work. What is amazing is how the perpetrators almost reluctantly apologised – ‘I’m sorry, forgive me’ — because a deal was there. It’s the same old story. After the Allies overran Germany you couldn’t find anybody who supported Nazism. It’s the same thing in South Africa. You can’t find anyone who supported apartheid.”

Masekela fled after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre and established an international reputation as a jazz musician. His 1987 hit Bring Him Back Home became an anthem for the movement to free Nelson Mandela. In the early 1990s he returned to Johannesburg but, though he felt a momentary sense of elation when apartheid was dismantled in 1994, he said that the settlement had been a compromise, a hard negotiation. “Amnesia always sets in after freedom. People fight for freedom and then they forget and oppress their own people.”