Mbube Wimoweh is a traditional Zulu song. The locals encourage themselves with this song at the campfire in the evening: the longer they sing, the more confident they are that the lion is sleeping and they have nothing to fear from the king of the jungle.

No one knows exactly how it happened, but in the fifties the song, translated as Mbube Wimoweh and briefly called Wimoweh, traveled across the Atlantic and was recorded by the Weavers and Karl Denver, among others. In 1961, the American Toke...