Answering a call, with passion and flair
Pilani Bubu could barely make sense of the world when Nelson Mandela first cast his vote for a new South Africa but she very clearly remembers her parents singing and celebrating this new world into being.
It was a significant experience and has informed her work for the past decade. What that work entails is an efflorescence of creative practice.
Pilani is a musician, singer, storyteller, festival organiser and general beacon for what it means to make sense of our time through the prism of our past.
She is also damned stylish, with a flair for design which she has articulated for 11 seasons on her own show on the Home Channel.
She suggests lunch at Gaucho in Linden and, for people sitting in a steak joint, we are behaving immensely counter-intuitively and ordering salmon in two iterations ceviche and tacos and some bubbles to celebrate.
She is on her way to Paris where she launched her latest album this week, Nay’Indaba, a collaboration with French band Marthe.
“So this French band came to visit me in South Africa. They heard me on the radio in France and they did an eight minute chronicle of my life and they were like ‘we want to work with her’. So they came here we started writing at Constitution Hill. And that was inspired by the women’s jail and looking at South Africa’s complex social history through the lens of strong South African women.
“So yeah, it addresses issues of inequality, unemployment, the plight of the street kids and drugs. It addresses the legacy of apartheid and the history of colonialism and what that result is. Yeah, it’s a bit intense!”
She laughs as she reveals that Le Monde, a major national paper in France, reviewed the album.
“They said it’s really intense but radically bright or something like that. It’s intense but it’s got such playful rhythms and great stories. It’s also an ode to the 1956 women, looking at things from that dynamic and kind of declaring that the future is female, and then possibly if women were leading the world we wouldn’t be in two wars simultaneously.”
What we would all be is incredibly busy if we were in any way following in her footsteps. She is a twin and seemed destined for a corporate life. She studied for an LLB and worked in marketing and still wins Loeries for her work. But her heart and her spirit demanded that she pivot to music and creative practice and once she took the leap she never looked back.
“In December, I released a project called Folklore. I started an album series in 2019. It’s a whole community project around culture and heritage and is looking at ways in which we can archive and preserve some of our stories. And I started doing it in music and then just kind of expanding out into spoken word and I am busy writing children’s books.
“And essentially what happened was after travelling the world (she has a global following) and sharing a lot of my projects mostly in English and mostly through the medium of jazz it just became so important as an African woman going out into the world and as a black African woman who had a rich history and culture and stories, to start telling those stories instead of just like the love songs and my own pursuits.
“So there was a greater call and, essentially, I started taking and using indigenous folk music and weaving it into my music a kind of contemporary folk, and expanding those stories to give them meaning, and writing beyond the rhythms and how fun and playful that music can be, but also giving a little more depth and meaning so that we can sit with the ‘why’ and so the younger generation can take it on.
“And then I realised that just one album is not enough and it is a bigger conversation to try and have on my own. So I will do five chapters and then move into some compilations so I released chapter two in December.”
The folklore project grew organically into a much bigger project.
“With the folklore community we launched a festival in 2022. We did our second edition in 2023 and we’re doing our third in September, at the National School of the Arts. This year we’re going to decentralise and have an interdisciplinary festival. It leads with music on the main stage [and] we have a book fair, a crafts market and a food market. And a lot of workshops and master classes just to expose people to the kind of stuff that one has to engage with during Heritage Month. We’re going to do film screenings of some award-winning documentaries as the theme of study is 30 years of democracy.”
I am inspired by her energy and positive passion.
“I must say that the positive spirit is like genetic. And the ambition is definitely taken from my parents, my grandparents. I can’t account for my capacity. But I suppose I watched my parents and I’m like my capacity makes sense because they’ve all been hard workers and they’ve all been driven. But from my side, I think quitting my corporate job was a good idea. Yeah, because when I was in corporate, I’d be working like five projects plus, so I think entrepreneurship comes with balancing out the projects you’re working on.
“And the only thing that keeps you really excited about it is the passion and the vision that you have. Because in the passion is like this insurmountable energy that you can’t really calculate, so it’s constantly getting you to do things to zero. So I think it’s because I’m like right in the seat of my soul doing what I love, and no one day is the same.”