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two hours, he also launched a new independent album, Val’amehlo (Close your eyes) which will be released on iTunes on March 31.

He has a six-month-old daughter, and like many new parents without much money, he has a strong suspicion that his calling must pay for the call. “People ask me, are you underground? And I say I’m not underground, because I want money. They laugh at that. I was fine with being underground before, but now there’s nothing honourable about being broke.” DOLOMBA is six foot tall, with a bearish build that’s incongruous with his butterfly falsetto. His range is vast — he has an impressive bass that he keeps in his pocket for a rainy night — but he reveres the female voice. “Male singers are super lazy. Females go hard. Even the male singers I like have a somewhat female approach, like Bab’ Tshabalala from Ladysmith Black Mambazo.”

His stage presence contains similar paradoxes: he is charismatic but awkward, regal but self-effacing, flippant but vulnerable. All this might be explained by what happened to him after he put Mo the Monkey