Transporting voice: Thandiswa Mazwai performs at the 25th Standard Bank Joy of Jazz festival, which was held in Sandton, Joburg, in September. Photo: Oupa Bopape/Getty Images
On 2 June, four days after democratic South Africa’s seventh general election, publicist Maria McCloy captured Thandiswa Mazwai’s performance at the IEC gala dinner on her phone.
The footage is an intimate portal into a nationally charged conversation. Through this pixelated technology, we hear the chords of Mazwai’s song titled emini from her fourth studio album Sankofa.
The percussive stomps of the drum call the militants to action. The country is on the cusp of a new political era, animated by the soon-to-be appointed government of national unity and Mazwai is calling us and them to attention.
She starts with a simple provocation: “If this song stings, then it is talking about you, but if not, then you will clap.â€
“Ilanga lashona emini,†sings Mazwai as she alerts us to the absurdity of the sun setting in the middle of the day.
“No fear, no fear,†she beckons to herself and her backing vocalists.
On a Zoom call late last month, Mazwai smiles: “My work seems to come out in election years, for some reason.†She continues to reflect, “You know, it’s always been like that because even with the very first group that I was with, Jack Knife, I remember that we were big the year that we went to Pretoria for the first inauguration.â€
This is unsurprising, given Mazwai’s reputation as one of the country’s most prolific and most important post-apartheid singers.
Her debut album Zabalaza was released in 2004 — 10 years after South Africa’s first general election and nine years after black people were finally recognised as legitimate citizens of South Africa.
In her second track off the album, Nizalwa Ngobani? (Do you know where you come from?), Mazwai asks a difficult question of a fairly new democracy: “Have we forgotten where we came from?â€
She prods us further in the song: “The world changes, revolutionaries die and the children forget.â€
This need to evoke collective recollection, traditions of oral resistance and political citation and critique is a key function of her music sensibility. Twenty years after the release of Zabalaza, the questions posed are still poignant and prescient.
In our Zoom call, Mazwai reflects, “I always felt that my work was for certain people — I was speaking to my generation in South Africa, grappling with the idea of what freedom would look like, what the future would look like.
“It was very specific work targeted at a very specific group of people. So, I have never thought about whether people outside of South Africa, especially with Zabalaza … I didn’t really consider whether people outside of here would care about the work.â€
I offer that her music, or perhaps the way she approaches it, is a kind of oral history. An attempt to reckon with the archive through the sonic interplay between the past, the present and the future.
It is an intellectual lineage that she probably shares with her parents — they were journalists and political activists. A home filled with reporting, political discussion, literature and debate inevitably shaped her perspective as an artist.
As our conversation continues, I realise the category I offered seems too thin. She is not just an oral historian.
Perhaps Mazwai is a vernacular intellectual in the way that South African-born professor of Africana studies and English at Cornell University in New York Grant Farred conceived. Farred writes that these intellectuals “explore and explicate the links between the popular and the politicalâ€.
He continues that we should “never underestimate the capacity of the popular to elucidate the ideological, to animate the political, never overlook the vernacular as a means of producing a subaltern or postcolonial voice that resists, subverts, disrupts, reconfigures or impacts the dominant discourseâ€.
Finally Farred writes that “for disempowered constituencies, resistance against the domination is extremely difficult without a vernacular componentâ€.
As her website tells us, Mazwai’s “music travels through the village into the ghetto and raises the roof in the cityâ€.
“Her compositions today include traditional Xhosa rhythms, mbaqanga, reggae, kwaito, funk and jazz. Through this, Thandiswa straddles the urban and the rural, effortlessly melding the traditional with the modern.â€
Still the categories do not quite fit and Mazwai defies the bounds of neat categorisation. She displaces the predictability of sonic and intellectual containers and instead invites into the popular, the profane and the sublime.
In her latest offering Sankofa, Mazwai alchemises the anxiety of migrancy and homelessness into lush soundscapes, using the voice as the technology to transport us from Dakar in Senegal, Johannesburg in South Africa and to the people of Dogon in Mali.
The diasporic communities in the Americas also form part of this futuristic transportation device, powered by her voice.
“Displacement has always been a very big part of my sense of self,†Mazwai starts carefully. “Having grown up in Soweto, I obviously had a vivid understanding of the fact that we don’t belong here.
“My mother would always talk about the Transkei and tell us that we are going home to the Transkei, so she’d let us know we are only in Soweto as a kind of migrant people.Â
“Immigrants coming into this old South Africa to work and making a living for ourselves.â€
Mazwai continues to think through ideas connected to home, the loss of home and displacement.
“In all my work, everything for me boils down to the loss of my mother and the idea of home,†she says.
“But home is a much larger idea, it is not just the loss of a mother or the township Soweto, or being umXhosa, it’s also about nationhood and it is also about belonging to the world, the universe and wherever you find yourself.â€
A few weeks later, Mazwai performed at the BMW Art Generation event at Nirox, north of Johannesburg.
When she starts Transkei Moon, I wonder if, in her singing of the song, she is able to open an intimate portal where the image of a home, animated by her late mother, still exists.
In this moment, Mazwai’s ability to transmute the personal into the political is her artistic superpower.
This year, she is one of a few South African artists who have submitted their work to the Grammy Awards.
She joins Thandi Ntuli with Carlos Niño and Asher Gamedze & The Black Lungs, among others.
With the nomination announcements approaching on 10 November, Mazwai speaks about Sankofa’s prospects.
“I’ve never been someone who puts too much emphasis on the awards and the accolades.
“I think that my work lives in a space where what matters is creating the work and then, after that, it’s my relationship with people who consume and love the work,†she explains.
“But I think with Sankofa there is something different with the work because of where and how it was recorded.
“[Sankofa] really ties together this history between all of us Africans and the diaspora [along with] the history of slavery, the history of empire and the histories of our connectivity.
“With this album, I felt that it was about a much larger group of people and it made sense for us to try for the Grammys this time around,†she continues.
This desire to enter a project of subaltern history and resistance into a global competition with a global platform is a function of the expansiveness of pan-African thought.
Congolese academic, political theorist and militant Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba offered that Pan Africanist thought offered “resistance to the accumulation and extension [of capitalism which] destroyed [the world] through wars of conquest, genocides, enslavement, colonisations, enclosures, looting, deporting, murdering, low-intensity warfare, violent destruction of self-sustaining survival systems, violence against women (mass rapes, slave breeding farms, forced sterilisation, sex tourism), imperial diseases, etcâ€.
In Sankofa we are offered a modality of pan-African thought. A need to remember and honour the past while looking for just futures.
To honour and embrace the woundedness of our past traumas while imagining worlds beyond the nation state.
Reflecting on her performance of emini at the IEC gala dinner, Mazwai says, “The song is made for a reason and it would do the song a disservice if it was never heard by the people for whom it was intended or the people about whom it has been written …
“And so, in that moment, I felt that this is a moment in time and that I need to locate this moment in my interpretation and possibly the interpretation of many South Africans … it is a lamentation on this dream deferred.â€
Mazwai’s thoughts are not dissimilar to the words of thinker Frantz Fanon, with which Mazwai is intimately familiar, or the words of South Africa’s Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe.
This call is part of an intellectual and political lineage where we reckon with the people and the systems that govern us and hold them to account for the mismanagement of our communities and societies.
Perhaps offering this album to the world through the potential popular idiom of the Grammys, and through her upcoming tour with dates in Boston, New York, Toronto and London, Mazwai is presenting aural modes of resistance at the epicentre of empire.
To rephrase the academic Pumla Dineo Gqola, Mazwai’s voice, work and “her body on stage is a canvas on and through which she plays with notions of identity, femininities, movement, Africanness and possibilityâ€.
• Thandiswa Mazwai will perform at the State Theatre in Pretoria on 7 December.
• She will also be on at the Crystal Ballroom in Boston on 13 November, Le Poisson Rouge in New York on 14 November, Koerner Hall in Toronto on 16 November, The Jazz Café in London on 22 November and The Barbican Theatre in London on 24 November.