At a gala dinner held on the heels of South Africa’s most competitive election since the end of apartheid, a singer reminded the assembled politicians how they do their jobs.
“I want them to think about the people of this country and why they were elected,” singer Thandiswa Mazwai told political elites at a celebration held by the Independent Electoral Commission in Johannesburg in June. He spoke to the following people. To commemorate the announcement of the final results of the vote.
Many of those listening were members of the African National Congress. The African National Congress, the long-term ruling party, had just suffered a painful defeat in the polls, a rebuke from voters who were unhappy with corruption and mismanagement after 30 years in power by the ANC.
Mazwai then gave a short speech and then burst into a series of songs. The lyrics redoubled her determination not to provide light entertainment but instead to denounce political wrongdoing. She sang about “fools in leadership” and “thieves” who “should leave Congress.”
Blaming the influential audience is unlikely to cost Mazwai any future gigs. Because she’s too popular to cancel. The 48-year-old has been performing for South Africans, from everyday fans to Nelson Mandela, for as long as the country has been a multi-ethnic democracy for 30 years.
Ms. Mazwai’s music reaches a wide audience and often contains sharp social commentary, and she has emerged as the voice of a generation born during the violent twilight of apartheid. They were the first black South African group to enjoy the freedoms of a democratic South Africa, but they also faced its disappointments.
In a country that cherishes the right to protest against the tyranny of the apartheid regime, Mazwai uses her mezzo-soprano voice to fight for South Africa’s struggle, just as her activist predecessors like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela did. has expanded. apartheid era.
“I don’t take my job lightly,” she told politicians that night. “My mission is to sing of people’s joys and sing of their sorrows.”
Born in 1976, Mazwai’s life has been marked by political turmoil, a year when riots by school children and a brutal response by apartheid police roiled South Africa.
Her singing career began in 1994, the year South Africa held its first democratic elections. Since then, three of her four solo albums have been released in election years, a coincidence she described as “coincidence.”
“That energy was perfect for bringing my voice to this song,” she said of her latest album. Sankofareleased earlier this election year. The album’s title is taken from the Ghanaian Twi language and means “to go back and pick up what was left behind.”
Mazwai’s music often evokes nostalgia for an idyllic past untainted by racism and colonialism, but it also maintains a sense of present urgency.
In “Dark Side of the Rainbow,” one of the new album’s 11 songs, she sings of leaders “devoid of spirit by greed” and describes the chaotic proceedings of South Africa’s parliament. Audio recordings were sampled. The song’s title is a subversive reference to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s optimistic description of post-apartheid South Africa as a “Rainbow Nation”.
Mazwai has not always been critical of South Africa’s leaders. Her career began during the euphoria of President Mandela’s government from 1994 to 1999, and she performed for him several times.
She was among a group of pioneering young musicians who created the sound of a new democracy: kwaito, a rebellious dance music that incorporated hip-hop, R&B, and African pop. Together with the band Bongo Muffin, in which Mazwai was the lead vocalist, he took kwaito and the new South Africa to the world.
Mazwai grew up in Soweto. Soweto, she says, is known locally as the “big window” house, a historic district whose residents harbored middle-class aspirations. Her parents were politically active journalists. Her mother was one of the few black students at the University of the Witwatersrand. As South Africa gradually integrated, her parents enrolled her in a prestigious girls’ school in a wealthy suburb of Johannesburg.
This experience was a culture shock. It wasn’t just because young Mazwai was looked at with suspicion whenever other students forgot something. She was the only black child in her class, and her teachers sometimes brought up her father’s politically charged newspaper articles. “No black child would survive in that world,” she said.
She transferred to a more diverse school with a Pan-African perspective and followed her mother to the University of the Witwatersrand, but dropped out to pursue a music career with Bongo Muffin.
Founded in 1996, the group quickly achieved celebrity status. Ms. Mazwai’s relationship with her bandmates and the child they had together made headlines. Young people imitated her modern African fashion sense, wearing formal suits with turbans and wearing tribal dots on their faces as part of their makeup. The band’s influence has been so long-lasting that their music is still on playlists at parties and weddings across South Africa.
A bright sample of Miriam Makeba’s “Pata Pata” brought them to the attention of South African music heavyweights. Makeba, a well-known singer and anti-apartheid activist, effectively appointed Mazwai as his successor, but also gave her challenges. It was about what kind of artist she wanted to be.
Mazwai responded with his first solo album, “Zabalaza.” This is a Xhosa word that means rebellion or revolution. On the album released in 2004, Ms. Mazwai expanded her vocal chords into jazz, funk, and soul. South Africa’s revolution was no longer against the apartheid regime, but against the HIV pandemic, severe poverty and unemployment, all against mismanagement by the ruling party. Ms. Mazwai’s early fame could not protect her from these diseases, so she sang about them.
“I think the role of an artist is to intentionally use their talents to free people from suffering,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times, reflecting on her career.
Her 2009 album ‘Ibokwe’, or goat (an animal with ritual significance), features another legendary South African musician, Hugh Masekela. He became what Mazwai calls her “father in the industry,” and she performed with him regularly.
Her next album, Belede, was the only album not released in the year of the election, and was written in memory of her mother, Belede Mazwai, who died in 1992 and never saw a free South Africa, and Mazwai’s death. The theme was sadness for one of his mentors, the singer Bushi. Mhlongo.
Belede also laments the life South Africans thought they could have but have yet to achieve. And in the song “Ndiyahamba” (“I’m Leaving”), Mazwai imagines leaving the unforgiving city life behind and finding herself in an idyllic setting.
Despite this desire for escape in his songs, Mazwai said he has no intention of turning his back on society’s troubles. Mazwai, a queer woman living in a country where black lesbians still live in fear, describes her life as “political.”
“The lives of those I love are political, and we cannot escape from telling our collective story,” she said.
Mazwai’s music and fashion also intentionally incorporate aesthetics from other parts of the African continent. Part of her latest album was recorded in Dakar, and the cowrie shell has become an iconic accessory. It’s another act of defiance at a time when South Africa is still struggling to integrate with the rest of the continent and African immigrants are often targeted for attack.
Mazwai said anti-immigrant hostility is driven by a sense of hopelessness in poor towns and slums, where voting and protesting mean nothing.
“The real accusation lies with our government,” she said. “Our governments are betraying us, whether it’s the Zimbabwean government, the South African government or the Congolese government.”
Despite the weight of her music, her live performances are also fun and sassy. Recently, a fan threw a bra on stage at a packed London venue, and Mazwai wore it as a hat.
The anger and pain in her albums is always tempered by love, and on “Sankofa,” Ms. Mazwai offers a comforting balm that she says is the result of her own healing. She sings “Kurungile” to her younger self and to all of us. “It’s okay, I’m sure it’ll be okay.”
