KAREN DAVIES finds out what Yvonne Chaka Chaka has been up to between starting a limo-hire service and receiving a songstress of Africa award in Zaire
SHE was chosen above Madonna to launch Pepsi in Nigeria. Flowers were strewn on the road from Entebbe Airport to Kampala in Uganda for her visit there and she has just been to Zaire to collect an Ngwomo Award — the grand prix Africain de la chanson. Yvonne Chaka Chaka, the Princess of Africa, has come a long way from the little schoolgirl who often didn’t have enough lunch money.
The front door of her Bryanston home is one huge rhino carving; a stuffed lynx and what we think is a serval cat lie in her entrance hall. Pictures of her family with President Mandela — in her home — are on the walls. Outside are luxury minibuses and a limousine — her new car-hire business. She also used to have two Vonny’s Hair Salons, but she closed them down because they demanded too much time, she says.
She gives me happy snaps of herself, her husband and Michael Jackson at a Lost City dinner recently. “Ooooh, he’s so nice. So shy. He looks down when you speak to him. He’s so kind too, he just signed things for everybody and he stayed at the dinner a full two hours. We expected him to just be there for 10 minutes.” She swears there were no strange lines or wrinkles on his face, as British gutter press reports would have us believe.
It’s light years from the matchbox house in Dobsonville where little Yvonne Ntombizodwa Machaka was brought up. And although the family was poor, there was clearly lots of love. Her father, Rex, a driver, died when she was a child and she still adores him. Her mother, Sophie, worked as a domestic to bring up her three daughters.
And Yvonne, who sang in church choirs as a child, became one of South Africa’s top- selling pop artists with such songs such as I’m In Love With the DJ; I’m Burning Up; I Cry for Freedom; Stimela, and probably her most popular song of all, Umqombothi. Musically, it’s her most “African” song; it’s all about traditional beer, but the rest of Africa has completely appropriated it and changed its meaning. In Uganda the word approximated one for “freedom fighter” and in Tanzania it sounded like the word for one who believes in God. She is indeed the Princess of Africa and for that reason is considering reissuing some of her older songs in Lingala (a Zairean language), French and Swahili.
But her fame at home these days lags somewhat behind that on the rest of the continent. “I’m bigger in Africa than in South Africa now. People are used to me here and I’ve performed a lot here. I’m just pleased I managed to break into Africa, I’m going for Europe next. In Zaire just now (where Miriam Makeba also won an award) so many promoters wanted me to go over on my own and I’d love to do it.” She has performed in Paris and London before, but in mixed concerts, not solo.
Right now, she’s supposed to be in the studio starting her next album. Last year’s Power of Africa represented a big break, in that she produced and financed it herself. “It was wonderful. It was one of my best LPs and the media response was good, but it didn’t sell well … I guess I’m going to be working with Teal (her old label) again on the next album.”
What music will she be doing? “I just love music that’s good for everybody. People sometimes say this is too black or this is too white. That makes me sick. I hate it. Music is just music.”
Her attention is diverted by three-year- old Mandla, sitting on the piano stool in his dressing gown and very seriously watching proceedings. “Go and wash, Mandla.”
“Noooo,” he whines. But he does.
Yvonne is mother to four boys, ranging from three to 15, a somewhat ironic position for someone called Ntombizodwa (“girls only”) because her mother had three daughters.
She nearly lost one of her sons though, when she went to Zaire in 1989. Six months pregnant, her water broke before she left. “Because of the contract, I had to go, the doctor wanted me to stay at home for two months.” Her husband, a GP, flew up to be with her and enforced three days’ rest. But the shows, all eight of them, went on. “They were packed, packed. But at one stage I just wanted to kill myself, I felt so bad.”
Still, she loves performing in Africa. “It’s amazing, I love it, knowing that 60 000 to 70 000 people have come to see you alone. In Lubumbashi once it was 150 000.” It was figures like these that persuaded Pepsi to use Yvonne rather than Madonna to launch their drink in Nigeria. Perhaps local business should take note of local star power and dump the bland models they often settle for.
Of course, she’s not the only queen on the scene. Yvonne has always been an admirer of pop star Brenda Fassie, from the time she was at school, so she’s a little impatient with the idea that they’re enemies. “She’s never been my rival. It’s the press and other people who say that. We’re different. Whenever we meet, she says she didn’t say what was reported.”
However, Fassie in 1992 told Mail & Guardian arts editor Charl Blignaut, then working for Vrye Weekblad, that Yvonne “thinks she’s white. She says: ‘I stay next door to the Oppenheimers.’ Who the fuck wants to know that. I’m married to a doctor. Who wants to know that? Call Brenda Fassie, I’ll tell you who I fucked last night.”
All Yvonne will say though, is that she can’t comment, that she hasn’t got the time or the energy to waste on this kind of thing. Right now, the limo business is working very well, so well that they’re considering opening a branch in Cape Town.
There’s a new record in the pipeline, the concerts are still thriving and she’s taking French lessons, the better to communicate with Francophone Africa. Yvonne’s always been a believer in self- improvement — when she found herself with a hit record, she went for singing and drama lessons.
It’s a long way from her original dream of being a lawyer (she applied for 15 bursaries to go to university back in the 1980s and didn’t get one), but hey, now she employs them.