Zolani Mahola takes my call while driving. Hands-free, she assures me, so we’re in business. By
the time we say goodbye she has pulled into her rehearsal room, fresh from a morning dive in the ocean.
Her new album, People Power, has 12 tracks and I’ve heard every one. She’s been road-testing them live, most recently at Mamashaka & Friends in Johannesburg, and next week she takes the stage at Artscape in Cape Town. You, however, will have to wait until 2027 to hear the whole thing.
Why make the people wait? Because Zolani is fed up with music being treated as disposable.
“Music has become so disposable in a way. You spend so much time crafting a work and, honestly, so much money and then you have one moment of releasing an album and it’s out there in the ether.”
The singles are trickling out across the year: XhosaNostra in July, AmaXhosa last week and A Good Time on 16 October.
The gaps are deliberate. She wants each song to get time and space, and to use those moments to talk about “the world of the singles”.
I can relate. We reminisce about the months of anticipation that used to precede an album and the trek to the record store to hand over your own money for an actual CD.
Now albums just land indifferently on your phone with no sense of ceremony. Music felt more special before streaming.
There’s a second motive.
“A lot of people are still very much stuck in Zolani from Freshlyground. It’s like I’m cemented, like in resin, stuck in album two of seven. I’d like to shatter that and say: ‘We as artists, evolve and we aren’t actually just stuck in that moment that you remember.’”
Seven years after she last fronted the band, with a solo album and a slew of notable singles to her name as a solo artist, she still feels like she needs to remind people: “I’m here.”
The word that jumped out at me on my first listen was joyful. People Power is stacked with anthemic pop, soaring vocals and sticky hooks, with influences running from gqom to Afro soul. It was produced by Grammy-nominated Hannah V, who’s worked with artists like Rihanna, Eminem, Jessie J and Stormzy.
It’s a long way from Zolani’s mellow, contemplative first solo album, Thetha Mama.
The joy was hard won. This is her first project since separating from her husband of 13 years, with whom she shares two children.
“You picked a good time to meet me because of a lot of internal work I had been doing in the years preceding this record, including the end of a marriage and all the stuff that comes around it.
“The reckoning. The inner work a person should do when there’s a separation, examining your part, both good and bad, and restoring your sense of self and identity after that.
“It was hot on the heels of the end of my marriage, but also a few years post Freshlyground, really investigating what my identity and purpose is. That very much influences the joyfulness and the kind of reclamation which comes through on the album.”
The title track, she says, is the real central point of the album and it evokes the slogan “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free”, first made famous by civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer.
“The power of the individual voice comes from the work of self-examination. Coming to a place of really understanding your voice and your purpose and using it for the good. And that individual voice joins the collective voice.
“When I think people power, I’m thinking of my uncles and that generation that were involved in the struggle to end apartheid. That energy that fought for the rights that so many of us enjoy today. That spirit of when we come together and we stand for something, we can make a difference.”
Halala honours the pupils who died protesting against the apartheid government on June 16, 1976. Zolani loves the juxtaposition of a celebratory title on a song about bloodshed.
“It’s saying: ‘Remember those children. Remember the power of those children and let’s look towards the children of the now. Us as the adults in the room.’”
I ask whether, looking at South Africa today, she thinks we’re able to see one another as people. Her response is poignant.
“There’s no one truth about us as South Africans. We’re such a massive, diverse country that the answer is yes and the answer is no. There
are pockets where we absolutely do see each other. But there’s more work to do. What makes me say that is the numbers of the harms we perpetrate on each other: sexually, robbery, murder. In many spaces in our country, life is not valued as much as it should be.
“And we’ve still got so many people living in very undignified circumstances, so many years after the fall of apartheid.
“It makes me question whether we are seen as people by so many of our leaders who steal from us. The scourge of corruption and the depth of it makes me really wonder whether they see us. It’s so discouraging. It’s so hurtful.
“Ninety-five percent of my family still live in townships around
the country, and uniformly we all have this experience of even our policemen not really seeing our humanity. It weighs very heavily on me and I think it should on most of us. When we don’t invest in the majority, I don’t know what kind of society we’re expecting to reap. I don’t know.”
She doesn’t stop there. “There are people doing the work to uplift each other, to foster peace. We just need to amplify that.”
There’s a thread of Zolani reconnecting with her ancestry that runs through the album on songs like AmaXhosa and XhosaNostra. It began after her last Freshlyground show in 2019, when she wasn’t sure what came next.
Craig Foster, the man at the heart of Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher, invited her to write a song about kelp forests, and then took her scuba diving.
“In the course of my diving I began to remember these rituals and
ancestral practices that my father had taught me in the Eastern Cape. Then I started doing these practices at the sea and it really fostered a very strong reconnection for me with my ancestors.
“We go to our ancestors not as a replacement for God but in our traditions they can be intercessors. They can affect the course of our lives.
“When we talk to our ancestors,
we often are thanking or we are asking. I found a lot of guidance from that connection and particularly having that connection through nature. It really restored something in me and for me.”
The film’s director, Pippa Ehrlich, became a close friend. Together they made a podcast, Back to the Water, which won an award at the Tribeca Film Festival. Ehrlich has spent six years filming a documentary about Zolani’s reconnection, due in 2027.
That reconnection runs straight into Sondela, the most personal song on the album. It is the sequel to her 2003 hit Nomvula, which was about the death of her mother. Aron Halevi, Freshlyground’s founder, her longtime collaborator and the executive producer of People Power, co-wrote the original with her.
“Aron and I wrote Nomvula on a very rainy day in Cape Town in the early 2000s. He encouraged me to dig deep, which needed to happen to write a part two. That story is about me as a child. The death of my mother and then our father raising us as kids after that.
“So, part two is this grown-up Zolani and some of the challenges and life lessons, but in a poetic way, that I faced in this season of my life.”
Part one was a child’s grief. Part two is a woman taking stock of her own life and reaching back to her family line to do it.
If Sondela is Zolani looking back at the women who shaped her, Feminine Force is the women she has gathered around her since.
It’s the all-femme collective she started after leaving Freshlyground. Members played on the album and the group featured on last month’s Masiyembo. She calls it a “soft landing” for women newer to the industry, a space “to sing together and cry together if need be”. Working among women, she says, “one feels really free in a different kind of way.”
Zolani will perform music from People Power, backed by Feminine Force, at Artscape Theatre in Cape Town on 10 October. Expect the Zolani Youth Choir (“no relation to me”), Freshlyground favourites and songs about children, for the adults in the room.
“Please let the people know,” she told me from rehearsal.
Consider it done.