There is a black-and-white photograph of Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela that immediately arrests as one enters the home of multi-award-winning singer Thandiswa Mazwai.
It was taken in 1990 at a London press conference two months after Mandela’s release from prison. Mandela’s eyes are closed and crinkled at the sides with laughter — but the viewer cannot see his smile. For Madikizela-Mandela’s palm is clasped over her husband’s mouth as she gags him and giggles.
“It’s a photograph which has so many layers to it,” says Mazwai. The playful affection and fragile tenderness between lovers reunited as strangers is obvious. But there is more ambiguity: Mazwai comments on the picture’s inherent reversal of a history that has sought to silence Madikizela-Mandela while foregrounding her husband.
Silencing the black female voice, xenophobia, the corruption-ridden rainbow nation that has betrayed political ancestors and contemporary youth, the increasingly ethnic nature of political discourse: Mazwai has confronted these kinds of issues head on in her music and her life. Her fourth solo album, Sankofa, released earlier this year is no different.
Sankofa includes collaborations with, and production by, fellow artists such as local pianist Nduduzo Makhathini and US bassist and singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello. It also includes samples of indigenous Xhosa music recorded in the field over several decades at the International Library of African Music (Ilam) at Rhodes University. Ilam had sent Mazwai a catalogue of recordings in 2009, but it was during the “silence” of the Covid-19 lockdown that she returned to listen to them with intent.
Mazwai says her musical vision has become “much clearer” with Sankofa, an album she admits is the only one that she can listen to when other people are in the room. “I’ve become much more aware of the importance of collaboration, how collaboration really pushes the work forward. I think that as a woman, sometimes you really want to fight for your own place, your own voice being heard, and so you sometimes don’t think about collaborating. You think about just being seen, being heard, and having your particular authentic voice heard.
“But over time, I’ve loosened up a lot about a lot of things. Now that I’m almost 50, I’m not as hard-core as I used to be, and I’ve become so much more sentimental about friendships. This album was really about working with people that I’ve loved for the longest time and people who represented really deep friendships to me. Like Nduduzo. I love him. I just love him. And Meshell, same thing, I just love them as artists, and they fascinate me as people.”
What sets Sanfoka apart from her previous work, including 2004’s double-platinum Zabalaza, which won four SA Music Awards (including best album)? “I feel like I did all the things I would have wanted to do and whatever is left out are things I surrendered. It’s not like, ‘Damn, I wish I could fix that.’ Which sometimes I feel when I listen to my older stuff,” she says about an album that took three years to make. The 48-year-old says the process of “chiselling away” has helped her accept her approach as “an artist who takes time”, and she is finally OK with that.
We are sitting over lunch in the front garden of Mazwai’s home in a leafy Johannesburg suburb. The choice of venue feels as if it were determined by her fame — and the need for uninterrupted privacy during our interview. She would be inundated with requests for Instagram or TikTok content were we to venture to any of the restaurants a few blocks away for a long lunch.
Mazwai has laid out a spread that is all “Johburg slay-glam”: a mound of Chicken Licken Hotwings and a platter of fruit and cheese, washed down with Black Elephant Vintners and Company Brut Méthode Cap Classique. The chicken wings and champers combo is a personal favourite of both of us.
We both giggle as we tuck in and joke about growing “older, not old”, as Mazwai qualifies. During lunch, we wisecrack often about our ageing bodies clinging on to our still youthful minds with their “delinquent” instincts. She has certainly retained her impish smile and the young-at-heart’s curiosity for life.
I remind Mazwai that the last time we sat down for a formal profile interview was two decades ago, when Zabalaza was released.
Much has changed in the music industry since then. Mazwai is no longer signed to a major record label. Record companies barely exist today. She has been advised that TikTok is the new radio, “if your music isn’t there, it doesn’t exist, apparently”. She now organises, and pays for, everything: from album launches to concerts to potential collaborations.
Technology also means music can be more easily stolen or mimicked. There are no master recordings that are copyrighted and “now someone can take my song, put it into some app that will separate all the musical elements for them and show them exactly what I put into the song and they can make something similar”.
“It’s a different world. It’s a world of content creation [rather than making art or music],” says Mazwai who rose to initial celebrity with Bongo Maffin in the heady post-1990 days of liberation, which was set to a kwaito soundtrack.
“It’s a world which is about being so much more accessible, whereas in my time [in the 1990s and 2000s] it was about not being accessible — people shouldn’t know too much about you. But now people must know that I had Chicken Licken and champagne. They must know, it’s important. They must know what toothbrush I use. They have to know which holiday destination I went to. So it’s a really strange experience.”
That strangeness extends to growing old. Mazwai recounts an amusing incident on X recently when someone asked a “really silly question about being queer ... something that you could Google and something that they should know at their age, but I answered it. Something dumb like, what is being queer? And then another kid went, ‘Why does King Tha explain to these people?’ And somebody else said, ‘Because she’s 50. She is an elder, now.’”
Being considered an elder does have some perks, Mazwai observes, especially when she confronts bigotry and hypocrisy through her music and pan-African politics. Mazwai says audiences have been “polite” when she has been provocative. Such as when an audience demanded Zabalaza at a show: “I said I’ll do Zabalaza but then I’ll have to say something. So there I am talking about this Afrophobia/xenophobia thing and I can see some of the audience members wanting to boo. But a very strange thing has happened in the past couple of years where people are, like, really respectful.”
Really? But not when they’re attacking foreigners in the streets. “No, I’m saying to me they’re very respectful. They’re like, ‘Yeah, Tha is legit’. It’s weird. So they’re not booing me, but I can see it in their faces that they want to say something and they’ll probably say it at home, but they’re not going to say it to my face, which is weird. It makes me feel old. It’s like, they’re going: ‘Oh, no, don’t disagree with the elders.’”
Mazwai’s pan-African politics is drawn from her father, Thami, and mother, Belede — both journalists and activists. Her mother died when Mazwai was 15.
We are meeting on the day that various national ministers have called a press conference to address the deaths of six children from Naledi, Soweto, after they ingested an organophosphate. Since the children’s deaths South Africans have engaged in frenzied xenophobia aimed at immigrants owning spaza shops. Health minister Aaron Motsoaledi confirmed that no trace of the poison was found in the snacks the children bought at one of the shops.
What most dissatisfies Mazwai about this country right now. Politicians’ immorality, their greed and “desire to have more than what’s yours”, which means ordinary South Africans’ lives “remain pretty much the same”, she says.
“The worst thing for me is the disregard for the future of the country and the children’s experience of being a South African. I think that young people feel quite despondent. They feel quite hopeless.
“I have a 25 year-old daughter and I know how they feel. There’s no access to anything for them. It was different in our time because we felt ‘alive with possibility’”, she says, riffing off an old SA Tourism slogan from the 2000s. We kind of fell for that idea in a way which really pushed us to do things. I don’t think they have that; they feel lost and like there isn’t opportunity for them here at home.”
Mazwai adds that a toxic mix of a substandard education system and high youth unemployment has led to another social problem which is being ignored: the drug pandemic. “It’s either nyaope or it’s alcohol, and if it’s not those two, it’s just a very, very deep depression that comes from being unemployed.”
The spicy tingle on our tongues is no longer from the Hotwings, so I press on. The government appears to have failed queer people? She agrees that government has “failed queer people, women, poor people” because of “a real lack of radical imagination around how to take these really progressive laws and turn them into people’s everyday experience.”
Queers are “still fighting for our own physical safety, just the safety of your own body, let alone just having the ability to be visible, to be loud, to say what you really think as a queer person, your ideas”.
She concedes that SA is “progressive in terms of queerness and queer rights … I feel very safe as a queer person in SA. But I also know that is an economic thing. It’s because of where I am and where I live.”
Our lunch is winding down and we fire up a spliff of Slurricane, an indica strain. It is a baton of a joint. It is also a nod to our attempts to remain youthful.
With her hair clasped by shells and her neck and arms bedecked in jewellery from the Global South, there is a regal quality to Mazwai as she lounges on her padded seat.
I wonder about her choice of album title. Sankofa is a Ghanaian Twi word which translates literally into “go back and get” while the Sankofa bird moves forward by looking back.
Does this moment of environmental and political conflict require us to return to the indigenous knowledge systems and practices of the past from which we have become partitioned, so as to ensure our futures? Mazwai agrees: “To save the future,” she says, “we must return to what black and brown people have always been doing in the past.”
• Mazwai performs at the State Theatre in Pretoria as part of the Mzansi Fela Festival on December 7.
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