Vusi Mahlasela has never stopped singing for change

There is a line in one of Vusi Mahlasela’s most beloved songs, When You Come Back, about climbing mountains and reaching for the top of Africa’s days, that’s a mixture of poetry and prophecy. 

Because that is exactly what he has spent his life doing. 

From Mamelodi township, where he taught himself to play guitar as a boy, to the stage at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration, to the arenas of North America alongside Dave Matthews and Paul Simon, Mahlasela has climbed steadily without once losing sight of where he came from or why he started singing.

They call him “The Voice”. Not just because of the raw, arresting power of his instrument, though that is reason enough but because of what he has consistently chosen to do with it. 

In a country wrestling with the ghosts of apartheid and the unfulfilled promises of democracy, Mahlasela has spent more than three decades using song as a form
of diagnosis. 

“I’m like a doctor who has to diagnose problems in society,” he says, “and give it to the people through the subject matter of my songs, so that people can listen and debate those issues and come up with solutions.”

It’s a calling that has never let him go.

Born and raised in Mamelodi, a sprawling township north-east of Pretoria, Mahlasela came of age in a community defined by both oppression and extraordinary creative resilience. He became a singer-songwriter and poet-activist almost as a matter of necessity, joining the Congress of South African Writers and channelling the political urgency of his surroundings into music that was as hopeful as it was honest. 

His 1992 debut on BMG Africa, When You Come Back, announced a voice that the country had been waiting for without knowing it. Two years later, Mandela was free, apartheid was over and Mahlasela was performing at the inauguration of a new South Africa.

But even then, he understood that the work was not done.

Today, sitting on the eve of a new album — Questions and Answers, from which the singles Setshu Sa Ditamati and the forthcoming Let There Be Peace have been drawn — Mahlasela speaks with the measured intensity of a man who has earned the right to his convictions. 

Setshu Sa Ditamati, sung in Sepedi, is a meditation on food sovereignty, on the quiet violence of being made dependent on seedless, corporate-engineered produce that cannot regenerate itself. 

“We’ve been putting people in a bubble,” he says, with a gravity that makes you sit up straighter. “This is spiritual warfare. They’ve attacked us through other things. Now they’re coming through food.”

It’s exactly the kind of subject matter that separates Mahlasela from the pack — not just in South Africa but globally. Where other artists pivot toward comfort, he pivots toward the wound that needs attention. Let There Be Peace, the third single, continues in that vein. 

Written against the backdrop of conflicts that have consumed the world’s attention, the song asks a simple question: “Why is peace so far away? Why are solutions so difficult to find?” 

There is no easy answer and Mahlasela is not in the business of offering one. What he offers instead is the question itself.

He has been doing this for so long now that the milestones blur together, though not in a way that diminishes them. 

Nine albums. Honorary doctorates from both Rhodes University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. A Sama Lifetime Achievement Award. The National Order of Ikhamanga. President Ramaphosa’s Ubuntu and Culture award. 

The theme song for ITV’s South African World Cup coverage in 2010, the year he helped ring in the tournament at Orlando Stadium in Soweto before what felt like the whole world watching. A record deal with ATO Records, signed personally by Dave Matthews in 2003 — a fellow South African by love, if not birth — that brought Mahlasela’s music to North American audiences hungry for exactly the kind of soul he was carrying.

Through all of it, Mamelodi. Always Mamelodi.

“Mamelodi is my family,” he says simply, when asked why he has never left the township that raised him, even as the world opened its arms. “It’s a place where you don’t die of loneliness.” 

He speaks of it the way others speak of a country — vast, historical, teeming with the kind of inspiration that expensive postcodes simply cannot provide. 

For Mahlasela, remaining rooted is not a sacrifice. It is the source. He is, as he describes himself, a global citizen. He has shaken hands with kings and queens, shared stages with legends, stayed with families across continents but Mamelodi is where the music comes from. He knows better than to sever that connection.

Not that the road has been without its tension. Mahlasela is acutely aware that South African music is changing, that the youth are carving out new genres like amapiano and its siblings and finding their own languages for their own realities. He doesn’t dismiss this. But he does issue a quiet challenge. 

“What is important in music is the subject matter,” he says. “To be able to teach people and to give hope to people so that they shouldn’t despair.” He reaches, in this moment, for the late Ngugi wa Thiong’o, one of his favourite African writers and a line that has clearly lived with him for years: “Africa, teach your children ancient songs so that they should glorify the spirit of collective good.” He lets it land before adding: “Not the spirit that glorifies money.”

It is a generational challenge but not a generational attack. Mahlasela believes in the shared stage as much as the shared struggle. Before his headline performance at Baseline Festival, a celebration of 20 years of “Say Africa” at the historic Constitution Hill, he is looking forward to sharing the bill with younger artists like Ami Faku, Maleh and Yugen Blakrok. 

“When they look up to you and to the road that you’ve travelled, it gives them inspiration,” he says. “But you also get rejuvenation from them, because of the shared spirit.” He pauses, then adds, with a smile in his voice: “We artists can do it. Unlike politicians. If politicians could do the same thing and collaborate, this world would be a better place.”

When Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Laureate, literary giant and one of Mahlasela’s most celebrated champions, described him by saying “Vusi sings as a bird does, in total response to being alive,” she captured something essential about what makes him irreplaceable. 

It’s not just technique, though the technique is formidable. It’s not just the biography, though the biography is remarkable. It is the aliveness of it. The sense, when you listen to him, that the music is a true calling.

“We’ve come through those political storms,” Mahlasela says when asked what being alive in South Africa sounds like to him today, “and we’re still facing some heavy ones again.” 

He speaks of food, of truth, of people who have been blinded and must learn to see clearly again. “This is the time where we have to live in the principles of truth.”

There is no easy resolution, no neat bow at the end of the story. Just the next song, the next stage, the next question that needs to be asked loudly enough for an entire nation to hear it. That, it turns out, is what “The Voice” does. It always has been.