Becoming: Bongeziwe Mabandla’s Ndingubani has been gestating for years, waiting for the courage to come into being. Photo: Christopher Saunders
The lights go down at Emperors Palace in Johannesburg and three silhouettes appear in separate pools of light.
One behind a drum kit, one behind a keyboard and one standing centre stage, directly in front of a microphone. The audience, drenched in darkness, falls silent.
Then Bongeziwe Mabandla’s distinctive voice cuts through that silence and the room erupts.
It’s the first South African stop of his world tour and from that opening moment, the evening belongs entirely to him.
Flanking Bongeziwe on either side are two Mozambican multi-instrumentalists whose contributions to his sound are anything but incidental. To his left stands Tiago Correia-Paulo — long-time musical director, principal producer and the architect of much of Bongeziwe’s distinctive electronic-infused Afro-folk sound, best known before this for his work with 340ml and Tumi and the Volume.
To his right is the younger Bruno Saranga, who also operates under the artistic moniker PizzawPineapples, a remarkably versatile musician, producer, sound engineer and visual artist. Together the three of them form something tighter than a band.
They move like a single musical organism.
Over the course of the evening, Bongeziwe pulls from across his discography, weaving familiar songs in and out of new material from his forthcoming album Ndingubani, due for release on 11 June.
The first time I saw him perform was back in 2022 at Constitution Hill, just before fellow Eastern Cape-born singer-songwriter Nakhane. I remember being struck then by the way he picked up his acoustic guitar and stepped off the stage mid-performance to walk among the audience, playing without missing a beat. The same guitar is with him again tonight at Emperors Palace, picked up and put down between songs depending on what the music requires.
He starts the evening in a black suit, elegant and composed. By the end, he has stripped down to a white vest, shorts and suspenders, dancing and jumping on stage with the joyful physicality of an artist who understands in his body what music is for. At one point, not long into the show, he calls on the seated audience to come forward and gather in front of the stage and they do, without hesitation, rising to meet him.
Before the show, I caught Bongeziwe on the phone from Maputo, Mozambique, where the African leg of his tour had begun. The tour has taken him through the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, the UK, Belgium and France. After Joburg it will take him to East London for the Umtiza Arts Festival, then Gqeberha, Durban, Stellenbosch, Cape Town and ultimately Réunion Island for both the Indian Ocean Music Market and the Sakifo Reunion Music Festival, before returning to Emperors Palace for the final show.
His international footprint is staggering. He has performed across Europe, the US, Mexico and Australia, as well as in Africa — in eSwatini at the iconic Bushfire Festival, Zambia and Cape Verde. Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon are in his sights. And not just for performances.
“I’m putting a Cameroonian artist on my album,” he tells me, with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has thought carefully about what it means to make African music that reaches across borders. All this touring, it should be said, has been done without the backing of a major label.
Bongeziwe works through his management company Black Major, with distribution handled independently through Platoon. When I ask him about the mechanics of making all this happen, he opens up about a reality that rarely makes it onto the Instagram highlight reel.
“Sometimes people don’t shed light on how much it takes to do this kind of music and tour around the world,” he says.
“People see the Instagram posts and the sold-out announcements. But I wonder if people really ever investigate what it takes for a musician to tour without support from South Africa, without government support. What does it really look like? People would be surprised how much we break our backs and ultimately sacrifice a lot of ourselves.”
His new album, Ndingubani — a title that translates roughly as “Who am I?” — arrives as both a question and an answer. It is, he says, an album that has been gestating inside him for years, waiting for the courage and the life experience to come fully into being.
“There are certain things I could only be able to write about now in my life,” he says.
“There were feelings and ideas that were always there but I didn’t have the courage or I didn’t know how to write them.
It’s only through this album that I was able to, maybe through experiencing pain deeply enough, finally piece it together.”
One of the album’s most significant songs is Ndikhulule (Depression), a track about something Bongeziwe says he understood about himself only last year. “I didn’t know last year that I’ve always been dealing with depression or feelings of depression,” he says.
“But I guess I didn’t know how to write it. How do you write a song like that? And it’s only through this album that I was able to maybe experience pain so much that I was able to finally piece it together. But it’s definitely something that was always lingering.”
The album balances that emotional weight with the sonic duality that has defined his evolution as an artist, the warmth of acoustic folk instrumentation alongside the pulsing energy of electronic production. When I ask him how he decides which direction to take a song, he dismisses the idea of any formula.
“I think it’s just from the beginning stages. You can kind of feel where a song is wanting to go,” he says simply.
That intuition has served him well. His 2020 album, iMini, released during the isolation of lockdown, opened South Africa up to him in ways his earlier work hadn’t managed.
Growing up in Tsolo in the Eastern Cape before making his way to Johannesburg, he was for a long time an artist better appreciated abroad than at home, a not uncommon experience for South African musicians operating outside the mainstream.
“South Africa has really grown for me,” he reflects. “It hasn’t always been like that. Especially with the release of iMini, it really changed my home base. And I’m so happy it did because it really opened up South Africa for me in a big way. It’s been the reward of persistence.”
The vulnerability that defines his songwriting — the willingness to lay bare grief, longing, desire and now depression — might seem like an act of courage but Mabandla says the accumulated warmth of his audiences has made it easier to go further.
“When you say something of great weight, the response is very important,” he says. “A lot of the stuff I’ve shared through my music has been received well, so now I have the comfortability to share even further.”
The intimacy does come with its complications. Being a private person at the centre of an increasingly large emotional community is something he navigates carefully.
“It’s overwhelming,” he says of the experience of fans who feel they know him through his music. “And it’s kind of difficult because I think I am that person who is usually one-on-one, you know. But sometimes I can’t. It’s like: thank you very much and then you move on.”
Despite his growing international profile and his stated ambition to plant himself firmly as a global artist, there is something in Bongeziwe’s reflections that feels less about conquest and more about presence. He is a man who has been chasing a dream for long enough to know that the chasing itself can become a way of avoiding the moment you’re in.
“I’m at this place where I realised that one day could be right now,” he tells me. “I no longer want to wait. I want to fully express myself in the moment. Some of us never know how many shows we have in us. And I just don’t want to not be present. I think time runs out if you don’t do it.”
Back at Emperors Palace, the crowd gathered in front of the stage sings back every word. Bongeziwe, now in his vest and suspenders, dances like nobody is watching and plays like everybody is.
By any definition, he is present — gloriously, completely, unambiguously present.
Whatever Ndingubani turns out to be, the man asking the question seems to know the answer.