Sankofa

Thandiswa Mazwai burst onto the global music scene as the charismatic frontwoman of Bongo Maffin, pioneers of South African kwaito, the house music brewed in Soweto. Household names at home, popular abroad, they split after several award-winning club-aimed albums, after which Thandiswa – then just Thandiswa – released her stately, much garlanded 2005 solo project Zabalaza, an English-and-Xhosa-language recording that linked Xhosa music with pop, R&B, jazz and gospel in ways stirring and socially conscious. And while Sankofa, the fourth album by Thandiswa Mazwai, now also known as King Tha, similarly features that lovely wide-ranging voice and seamless blend of musical styles, it is a mature work, a musical tome, in which the personal, political and spiritual vie and blend to potent effect. Themes of love, heartbreak and intergenerational trauma rub alongside shout-outs to a rainbow nation riven with inequality and unemployment and (at the time of writing) facing a general election in a sorely fractured democracy. ‘Do you know where you come from?’ Mazwai sang on her Zabalaza smash hit ‘Nizalwa Ngobani?’. Here, across 11 wildly original tunes variously recorded in Johannesburg, Dakar and New York, aided by producers including Meshell Ndegeocello; educator/pianist/Blue Note-signing Nduduzo Makhathini; and guest diva du jour Thandi Ntuli – not to mention bass, guitar, horns, kit drums and piano, and crucially, samples of isiXhosa music recordings archived at Rhodes University – she probes further. Opener ‘sabela’ unfolds like a prayer, its golden guitar lines floating around psalm-like urgings to reclaim, remember, find one’s purpose. ‘Biko speaks’ references the great freedom fighter Steve Biko as it explores notions of Black emancipation, pointing out the futility of a system previously used to oppress; ‘emini’, its follow up, is a lament, an articulation of hopes raised then shattered by a Black government that never delivered: ‘Ilanga lashona emini’ (The sun set in the middle of the day) she sings, evoking a curse. The umrhubhe mouth bow of the Eastern Cape resonates across lead single ‘kulungile (feat Nduduzo Makhathini)’, a healing conversation with Mazwai’s younger self, and the truth-to-power protest song ‘kunzima: dark side of the rainbow’. The uhadi musical bow is here, too, alongside West African kora and what might be djembés, reinforcing Mazwai’s self-described pan-African identity in the process. The soaring, kora-sparkling ‘with love to Makeba’ beautifully channels the spirit of the late Mama Africa with a reinterpretation of the latter’s Guinea-dedicated ‘Moulouyame’. Vibes of the late Busi Mhlongo present on ‘Children of the Soil’, a song intended to remind the world that Africa is the Motherland, that the continent has ancient knowledge waiting, poised, to be accessed. Love songs ‘xandibona wena’ and ‘fela khona’ use effects and sentiment to run the gamut of emotions. A big-hearted album, then, that reminds, heals and rallies.