Bafana Khumalo on Rebecca Malope
`I always wanted to be singer, ever since I was a child,” she responds to my first question as she stretches her black leather-clad legs across to the coffee table in front of us in the offices of her record company.
She is Rebecca Malope and this always “wanting to be a singer ever since I was a child” was to prove to be a pretty long and tough journey for the now-reigning queen of pop gospel.
So where does the queen hail from? She was born 28 years ago in Nelspruit and that dream to be a singer brought her to Johannesburg in the mid 1980s. She and her sister lived in a shack in somebody’s backyard. Their lot in life was not exactly rosy there because they couldn’t sleep when it rained. “The roof leaked so badly that we had to get up and wait until it stopped,” she says.
A band, Savuka – not the Johnny Clegg one – needed singers and took them both aboard. Savuka entered the 1985 Shell Road to Fame Talent Search competition. This was not exactly the stuff of legend where she immediately knocked the socks off the judges. “We actually failed at the beginning,” she admits.
But this failure was not the end of the dream because among the judges was one Sizwe Zako, who saw something in the young Rebecca. “Afterwards he called her over and said that we should not feel bad and that perhaps the problem was that the song that we were singing did not suit my voice,” she explains. This pep talk was followed by the dream-making telephone number for the young singer to call so that further work on the dream could be done. It was not that simple – Malope and her sister were so down-and- out they couldn’t even scrape up the money for a phone call.
A year was to elapse until another chance meeting with Zako, at the offices of another record company, where they had gone to flog their talent to another producer. “We didn’t recognise each other immediately, but when we realised he said he’d been looking for me for quite some time.”
>From this point on the dream started to take shape as Zako took Rebecca and her sister under his wing, arranging for them to move to better lodgings and composing a song that was to make them at the 1987 Shell Road to Fame Talent Search Competition, a gospel tune, Shine on. This was a winner and a recording contract was part of the prize.
The first recording after this momentous event was not that much of a success. A song that was punted on the then TV2 and TV3 Ama G-Man was not one of the greatest ever recorded. She was, after all, taking on the established queens of pop – the Mercy Pakelas and the Brenda Fassies. It didn’t go anywhere. “The record company wanted us to record that song,” she says, not particularly proud of that page in her scrapbook.
>From a professionally cynical point of view, the change-over to gospel was probably conceived in a boardroom, not in the singer’s conversion to wanting to serve god. “Although I did sing disco, in every album I recorded I included at least one gospel tune, because I always wanted to serve the Lord,” she says, explaining that she only recorded other genres at her record company’s insistence.
The first gospel album she recorded was in 1990 and this was produced by the man who produced her, Zako. It was the most successful album of that year,” she says, a matter-of-factly self-satisfied smile hovering on her mouth.
She can be satisfied with her achievements because in the record industry many people agree that “she is the best,” as one rival record company executive describes her.
Her popularity stems from her ability to fuse traditional religious rhythms with pop riffs. “She has the ability to put across on stage the spiritual experience she truly is having,” says another.
What is perhaps the irony of this gospel performer’s life is that hers is not a career that is limited to plying the gospel festival and prayer revival circuit. She can whip revellers at a Kool and the Gang concert to a frenzy. Here the customary whooping it up will be replaced by people doing, quite seriously, a Zionist Christian Church shuffle, dancing around in circles and feigning possession by the holy spirit.
Wanting to prove that hers is not a religious crusade but a pop one, I query this. “I see nothing wrong with converting people to the word of god in places like that. There are a lot of gospel singers who would want to be where I am, but God has chosen me. For that I am grateful.”
She is on top of the heap, planning to set up a studio at her Buccleugh home “so that I can produce other young up and coming artists”.
In the recording studio and on stage her life seems to be charmed. But outside of the those confines she has had to deal with real life issues, like her mother, then her sister dying. How did she deal with that? “I prayed and the Lord helped me through it.” She wasn’t lying.
Rebecca Malope is the focus of the second Market concert. She sings this weekend