As we pull up to Kwa Mai Mai, a traditional medicine market on the corner of Berea and Anderson streets, Zuluboy says: “Welcome to Jozi, my man. Today, a Zulu boy is taking you through Jo’burg.”
The boast is almost unwarranted. It has taken our five-person entourage a good 30 minutes to locate the bazaar in the disorienting, industrial maze that is downtown Jozi. Zulu claims to frequent the spot with maskanda band Bhambatha, who rehearse close by. He blames his difficulty in finding the place on its “mysteriousness”.
Once inside the gates of the compound, though, Zuluboy (whose real name is Mxolisi Zuma) takes centre stage, sneering at a pair of overpriced mblaselo (migrant Zulu embroidered pants) and pointing out herbs such as the spell-deflecting umathiÂthibala to the rest of us.
We turn a corner and step in to a medicine stall manned by a hefty woman who identifies herself as MaZondi. Here Zuluboy negotiates the price of a nip of imbiza (a tonic) from R50 right down to R20. “She must think I’m a tourist,” he says out of earshot.
She then tries to sell him an enema, which he refuses, saying that because he now lives in the burbs, he can’t be lugging a mail (the contraption used to administer the fluid) around. With that, she pours a spoonful of a pinkish powder on each of his down-turned fists, instructing him to swallow the mixture, so he can be protected from diseases emanating from the “evil places you boys frequent”.
Os 12, a native Canadian who shares a professional and philosophical relationship with Zuluboy, follows suit. We exit, rather strangely, to the strain of Busta Rhymes playing from a nearby compound.
“The stage is one of the most evil places to be, with everybody looking at you and shit,” says Os, justifying the ritual that just took place.
“That’s why I use impepho on stage before I perform,” chips in Zulu, as we sit at a table adjacent to a taxi rank on Berea Street, waiting for plates of pap and braaied meat. “It’s to ward off the evil energies that people might have towards me or that I might have towards something [at the show].”
Masihambisane, released in September, is easily the most unÂashamedly Zulu hip-hop album to be released on a national scale. Some of its beats creatively sample field recordings from the traditional Zulu groups that gather weekly at Soweto’s Jabulani Hostel, others incorporate maskanda elements and traditional gospel music. In a track called Hail to the Kings, King Goodwill Zwelithini’s praise singer makes an appropriate appearance to shout out the tribe’s legacy of warrior kings.
Backed by new independent label Native Rhythms, which was started last year by former Gallo deputy CEO Sipho Sithole and is distributed by “big five” major label EMI, the album — because of the resources behind it — has the potential to make a global impact, completing the circle of hip-hop’s fascination with Zulu culture.
The Universal Zulu Nation, a movement that now stands as the worldwide vanguard of hip-hop history and spirituality, started in the Seventies when hip-hop’s reigning shaman, Afrika Bambaataa, viewed warriors attacking British troops at Rorke’s Drift in the 1964 film featuring Michael Caine, Zulu.
Although our Saturday afternoon rendezvous at Mai Mai was probably a calculated aspect of the label’s marketing plan on Zulu’s behalf (to position the album as a kind of hip-hop generation answer to Busi Mhlongo’s Urban Zulu), it nonetheless reveals the “conglomeration of cultures”, as Os puts it, that drives his album and his unique brand of street philosophy.
Raised by his mother and grandmother in Ntuzuma township on the outskirts of Durban, the streets were literally Zuluboy’s father and provide most of the content on the album, which celebrates the thug mentality as a way of subverting the status quo. Okay. Nothing too groundbreaking there, but Zuluboy’s township street wisdom and rural cultural values over hip-hop beats reflect an authentically Durban township experience.
“I picked that up from my grandparents,” he says of the cultural awareness he often wears like a badge. “They were into tradition and stuff like that, and would regularly slaughter [livestock] at home. And, of course, the grandmother is always there to sit us on her lap and tell us fairytales and a bit of history.”
The “msholozi” who won over Sithole at fellow hip-hop artist Prokid’s launch in Durban last year is, however, a street soldier raised on township rites of passage and — because of the apartheid education system — strong doses of bruin funk, a form of coloured township rap unique to the coastal city.
“Bab Sithole filled in a lot of the missing gaps. He is involved in the 100-year celebration of the Bhambatha rebellion and he broke down the history of who Bhambatha was and the history of the Zulu warriors. We need to know about this stuff and celebrate it, because all we were taught at school were the 1820 settlers, [Jan] van Riebeeck and Christopher Columbus.”
Although the album represents a seismic shift locally in terms of the fusion of hip-hop culture and tribal roots, the dense and at times impenetrable slang that Zulu employs almost guarantees that it will be ignored in Jo’burg’s insular hip-hop circles. In Durban, however, the album continues to fly off the shelves. Zuluboy says Jacob Zuma, who initially could not get hold of the album in the flurry that followed its release, successfully sent out a search party of bodyguards to scour music shop shelves. What he will make of it is another story altogether. But his interest is probably a good sign, as the hip-hop nation, for the most part, has yet to put its money where its loud mouth is.
Zuluboy performs at the Nokia Jammin concert in Newtown, Jo’burg, on October 14 2006. Go to Nokiajammin.co.za