I cannot remember my first encounter with Princess Magogo ka Dinizulu’s music.
I have heard her name in my grandparents’ unfinished sentences that morph into multiple conversations. Her name sat on the tongues of friends and collaborators Sibonelo Gumede and Sanele Ngubane through organic, didactic and curious chats that spanned over two years.
We were drawn by her wayward orature, which manifested itself in unfinished sentences, as a way of making meaning. Waywardness that reads as unintelligible and opaque to outsiders and those of us on the fringes of insider outsider status.
Yet, this waywardness is vocally grounded in the internal choreographies of relationality.
Put differently, it is inherited generational behaviour passed down from Princess Magogo’s mother, Queen Silimo ka Mdlalose, and the Zulu royal family’s maternal lineage. We learn about this through Dr Kholeka Shange’s spectacular work on Princess Magogo.
In the midst of our intrigue and pure geekiness, my friendship with KwaZulu-Natal musician Zawadi grew through encounters that have blurred into each other through an ongoing research project of remembrance through a collective called Phoshoza — a pensive constellation of Zawadi, Sanele, Sibonelo and myself — attempting to understand the sonic frontier that Princess Magogo’s music signals.
To understand Zawadi’s stunning disinterest in restraint, it is important to begin with Princess Magogo’s practice of waywardness. It is something she inherits and transforms into her own unbridled practice.
It is an instinct that abounds in the work of luminaries like Mam’Busi Mhlongo, Thandiswa Mazwai and Simphiwe Dana, who exemplify a disinterest in restraint in different ways, through their compositional styles, distinct vocal and visual languages and through their remarkable aesthetic choices which ritualise performance.
I think it is a wonderful time to witness Zawadi’s intuitive, intelligent, referential compositional style through her new album Ngimuhle.
We have witnessed her take on the monumental task of extending Princess Magogo’s archive, walking alongside the work that Mam’Sibongile Khumalo had formidably turned into one of the most stunning teacherly interventions about how we nurture matriarchal sonic archives.
Ngimuhle lands as a continuation of this historical practice from Zawadi’s contemporary perspective that is clearly aware of how the past persists in the present.
I remember the first time Zawadi heard Princess Magogo’s original composition of Ngithethele, which is covered in her album. We were listening to, and digitising, an old vinyl recording that had the fuzziest sound typical of vinyls that have been played a lot. Of all the songs we heard from the Buthelezi family record archive, Ngithethele became that stubborn song that refused to be forgotten.
When I heard her live performance of it at Untitled Basement in Johannesburg, I remarked to Sanele that I could not believe she could finally sing that song without tears streaming down her face. In those moments, tears signalled the body’s recognition of encounters that only music has the language to express.
Zawadi has a deeply generous compositional style that travels through long-form songs which ritualise performance and stretch the parameters of what a song can do. Ngithethele is scenic and capacious, it travels and petitions across realms of feelings and every note is pushed to new grounds.
As listeners, we are thrust into a space of ephemeral disregard, abdicating the seat of self-consciousness that this material world often rewards. Instead, Zawadi’s wailing voice gestures towards another way of affirming our human selves.
It is the same beckoning, anchoring call that gave meaning to Princess Magogo’s life and music. We hear it in Ngithethelele, and we give it different names.
The album opens with Isibekizelo, featuring poet Sandiswa Zulu, which sets the tone of the album’s folkloric instincts and unapologetic roots in Nguni cosmologies as the base from which she creates her own distinct style.
There is a strange, growing obsession with the categorisation of alternative music in some sound scenes in South Africa. This pedantic insistence often distracts us from the core business of an alternative ethic.
It is the grave difference between an aesthetic that is not lived and one that erupts and is best described by bassist, composer and arranger John Jamyll Jones from World Experience Orchestra, who chants, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.”
Zawadi is in the mode of performance at all times. By the time she recorded the second song on Ngimuhle, she had long reckoned her own playful approach to beauty as an inherited, intergenerational and ancestral tradition.
In a world where young black women contend with imposed beauty standards, Ngimuhle is an affirmation of the vastness of black girlhood aesthetics. I have seen so many videos of them beaming at themselves through this song.
The horn section is something to behold. It is celebratory and reminds me of Bra Jonas Gwangwa.
Zawadi’s compositional style is both referential and bold. The first time I heard Ixoxo being recorded, it became clear that the existence of musicians like Mam’Busi Mhlongo and their contributions to folk and indigenous electronic traditions shape the novelty of this song.
I think it is such a brilliant quality to be able to open portals of hearing, listening and extending an archive while also maintaining an original sense of tone and choreography.
It is a shortsighted way to live and produce, to believe that the only way to break ground is to break paths with tradition. It is such a fine line, such a sensitive tightrope, to not find yourself on the other side of nauseating nostalgia, to not be consumed by it to the extent of losing your sense of place in the world one confronts.
Zawadi holds this line with the rigour and agile versatility embodied by a musician who honours their own instincts and curiosities.
The fixation with invention overlooks how traditions of music grow, largely through referential collaboration across generations, eras and genres of sound.
She visits the paths of musicians like Mam’Miriam Makeba, Bra Hugh Masekela and Mam’Dorothy Masuka, who were institutional figures in pan-African sonic practices, singing across borders and languages. Mama and Andoja are sung in KwiSwahili. Mama is a sketch of gratitude to motherhood and Andoja lands like the medicinal balm mothers layer over a sick child for relief.
Woza We Mvula sits in a similar sensory register. She puts down uMakhwenyane and plays the handpan, an instrument that holds a song that feels like a lullaby as a soothing and cleansing space that collaborates with us in our process of living.
Zawadi’s performance at Untitled Basement exemplified a broad artistic expression that takes seriously the importance of collective practice.
This approach is rooted in her early experiences at the Twelve Apostles Church, where she began her singing journey in a choral tradition as a young girl. She sang Jabulani Sizwe, which is the last song on the album with the Soweto Central Chorus.
She reminded us of the fugitive presence of electricity in African folk and indigenous traditions. It is fugitive in a wayward sense, meaning its existence is conditioned by the compositional choices that she makes with the bass player Lwazi Mlotshwa.
The tone and intensity of her show are a testament to the uncompromising power of relationality that produces intimacy and open form.
Her band is kind, supportive and committed to her vision. We do not need to be told this; it can be heard in moments that drift into astral improvisation that requires trust.
Sibonelo Nxumalo, pianist and producer; Buhle Hadebe on drums; Thabo Sikhakhane on trumpet; Siyalo Zulu on trombone; Adiele Mupakaidzwa on lead guitar; Menzi Cele and Mandisa Mbambo on backing vocals and Sanele Ngubane, producer, are exemplary musicians who remind us paths are made by walking but brilliant paths are made through collective vulnerability.
The generosity that she left on that stage is enough to hold up our smiles for an unquantifiable time. We are inundated by musicians who have lost — or have no concept of — performance or what it means to ritualise the mode of being inside the music with others. Zawadi’s performance showed us that music is an extension of how she lives her life.
By the time she takes the stage to play the music, she is not playing the album recording; together with her generous band, they are playing the process and journey of where they are in the life of the music.
The point of performance isn’t replication or reproducing the archive of recording, it is about pushing yourself to see where you are in the life of the music.
The recorded album is a prompt for conversations that performance brings forward. This is a shared understanding among musicians who are great performers and know how to elaborate their album recordings into other dialogues that the audiences can join.
Zawadi did this at Untitled Basement by refashioning conversations through her album that had me gasping in admiration and unrestrained awe with Sanele, exclaiming: Ay mfethu, wenzani uZawadi!