‘I just wanted to be me’
Zahara’s meteoric talent lit the cultural scene with blinding intensity, but all too briefly, writes
OWe had proud parents: we never went to bed without a meal. Never. Wait, maybe we did? I can’t remember. Things were tough
n hearing the news of the passing of Bulelwa Mkutukana, aka Zahara, I froze, then walked home dazed and confused. The Sunday before, I had discovered a stash of Zahara’s belongings in a box in my home, and had meant to call her and reconnect so I could hand them over. In the stash is a multicoloured bangle made of rings the size of the old half-cent coin, held together by elastic. There’s a pair of wooden earrings, a postcard-size photo of her late brother celebrating his 16th birthday, and is this guitar string hers too?
My tear ducts exploded and the levees behind my eyes broke as I walked.
As always when a star dies, rumours proliferate, street experts offer their diagnoses, and then the family releases a statement. The official report now is that Zahara died at 36 after being admitted to Charlotte Maxeke hospital. The cause is said to be liver failure. Which immediately provoked further diagnoses: it must be all that alcohol, shame, poor kid.
Some say, don’t poor kid her, she was a grown-up woman, recently married. Some say, at least she lived past the dreaded age of rock star death: 27. Some say, what a loss. Others tell us it was just a matter of time; girlfriend was on the skids. Some say she was poisoned.
I blocked my ears to the rumour mill and unsealed the box marked “Spinach”. That was her nickname. What tumbled out besides the trinkets were reams of notes for a profile I wrote for the local edition of Rolling Stone, published in January 2012.
I also found the cover template for a book with the working title Someone Like You that Zahara, then 25, and I had started collaborating on. Even back then, early in her working life, I was stirred by her raw talent and unusual story. The now-aborted book aimed to explore her work, spirit and craft and assess that unusually coarse yet so blue and vulnerable voice, to arrive at the inner marrow of her real life story.
Who was she?
Zahara dropped her debut record Loliwe, the story of a steam train, 12 years ago. I had long left formal music journalism by the time she and Rolling Stone yanked me back to the beat, kicking and screaming. I received the disc in the same week that I received one by Adele, then the biggest soul songstress on the planet.
I found parallels between the women, and an uncanny rawness in both. I yearned for Adele and longed, deeper still, to hug Zahara. Even more urgently, I was curious to hear Zahara’s story. But it would take weeks of planning and lots of travelling. I found myself on the road, on flights, in hotel rooms, stepping into wild night storms, joining her family in prayers in the old house and doing what I often can’t help doing: stalking her every move, every single eye twitch. I felt a compulsion to mine for titbits about what made her music, and Zahara herself, vibrate with so much intensity and naiveté.
On December 11 2011, exactly 12 years before her death, I was on a plane with Thembinkosi “TK” Nciza, head of TS Records, which had recently released Loliwe. “Ja, I’m telling you comrade,” he says. Loliwe had pumped more than 350,000 sales in three months; it became the second-fastest selling album in South Africa after Brenda Fassie’s Memeza.
Her commanding gospel voice has become as commonplace as the air we breathe and the water we drink. Her fresh-faced allure screams of rock’s innocence. Right there, on the surface, her metaphors give way to a fully fledged sermon. She doesn’t say it overtly but her voice says it all: Come ye sinners, ye faithful, ye harlots, come all my children, God’s kingdom is open to all of you.
Zahara’s story is the story the country had been waiting for. By tossing out the black canon of the past 60 years, and through the sheer, naked power of her unpolished voice, Zahara buried the African pop songbook’s most beguiling heroes in our hearts.
Not since Dolly Rathebe blessed the New Afrikan speakeasies with her come-git
‘When I started, and I still carry that even now, I wanted to be big. I wanted to do exactly what I am doing with my life, but with no conditions affixed’
me, whisky-soaked rasp in the late 1940s has anyone, with the possible exception of Sophie Mgcina, embraced an entire people.
ON THE ROAD WITH A STAR
On the red-eye flight from Johannesburg to East London, I am seated with Zahara, Robbie Malinga and Nciza. Zahara is napping, Malinga is on his phone.
Nciza and I are talking about God. Not that anyone in the music industry knows anything about God. At least not me. But God is everywhere in, around and hovering above Zahara’s lyrics and every sentence she utters.
It has been an ox-killing schedule this week. After nights of shows, appearances, photo sessions, video shoots, wardrobe changes and quickly snatched interviews you get to hit the sack just past midnight. This is Zahara’s schedule, and therefore ours too. We are all up by 4am, 5am at the latest if you are lucky. Today has been one of the toughest days. It has also been an eye-opening one for a rock ’n roll scribe with expired knees and a bad chest who has come out of retirement.
Chasing Zahara around the old Eastern Cape “colony” I get reacquainted with the region’s singular place in the popular imagination. This has been highly contested terrain for aeons, with slavers, stargazers, shamans, oracular cults, posers and complex figures
— cue Nongqawuse, the millenarian prophetess. Along with Zululand and some Sotho territories the Eastern Cape has fed into the identity politics that shaped the ANC, the PAC and the Black Consciousness
Movement; it has also shaped the country’s “modernist” identity. The reigning African pop divas trace their origins to a place simply known as “emaXhoseni”.
It is semi-arid, dotted with mountains, full of sad, dreamlike landscapes and even sadder-looking peasants and labourers. This is one of the original hunting grounds of the ancient people of the South: the San and the Khoi. A very old place indeed.
This is the topography that has shaped the voice, music, spirit and raw vocal stylings of the most talked-about artist this side of the Equator.
Zahara and I get to sit down in my room at the hotel before heading to her parents’ house. “My music,” she tells me, “is inspired by my people. My village. It is all about growing up in Phumlani. It is not about some deep stuff I know jerk about.” This is a snatched interview. No notes, no tapes. This is an icebreaker. We are both kaput from exhaustion. I am on the carpet and she sits on a chair, looking over my head.
Next to me on the floor are miscellaneous items: vinyl records, sneakers, CDs, books and such. She sees a copy of Pirates Choice, the 1982 album by
Senegalese band Orchestra Baobab.
“Orchestra? Is this orchestral music?” she asks. No, it’s not. It is just a name. “Oh, I also have a song called orchestra something, somewhere in my unfinished new music.”
Such innocence. I smile. Something tells me the cruel music business will soon smash all that innocence to shreds.
At first she’s chatty. Her favourite television show is Miley Cyrus’s Hannah Montana. We share an adultsfrozen-in-childhood obsession with cartoons. Which are my beloved? Bugs Bunny — What’s Up Doc? — and my man Jughead from the Archie comics.
And Zahara’s? Six cute bears. She tries to explain. Like everything in her orbit, these figurines have a purpose and carry some virtue far deeper than their comic selves. Zahara can also be exhaustively purposeful. This too, I suspect, will one day wither into deep disappointment with the world.
The conversation turns to song-writing material. Loliwe is possibly yet to be fully appreciated. The compositional skills of the young dame with a guitar merit a deeper critical acclaim than it has so far received from the mainline media.
“My parents used to tell me that the train, that old
choo-choo train, uLoliwe, used to be the only mode of transport between here and big cities. So I try to bring that in my writing,” she says.
Too modest, I think. And wonder, how long this will last?
Her hit song adds a jive back beat to the international canon of songs about trains — Last Train to Clarksville by The Monkees, Stimela by Hugh Masekela, Gospel Train by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Engine of Love by Earl Jordan, Funky Soul Train by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, or Stimela SaseZola by Mbongeni Ngema.
Rock culture’s past half-a-century is replete with more funk-noise boys who penned odes to mankind’s most enduring transport mode: Grand Funk Railroad, Ray Phiri and Stimela, the Super Rail Band from Mali. With only one song, no experience and no concern for show-business status, Zahara’s pop blast qualifies for this genre almost right away.
Later in the week a friend, a woman eight months expectant, drives me to Zahara’s family home somewhere between East London and Qonce, King William’s Town. Outside the Mkutukana household in a settlement that feels like an old missionary station, rain clouds gather.
Nearby, the Nxele bush — named for a courageous warrior woman — is blue-green in the dusk. Local villagers believe that anyone foolish or adventurous enough to venture into it, especially at night, will not be back soon. Or ever! Legend has it that the bush tries to lure passers-by to enter.
Nxele is also the name of the fabled and powerful warrior-prophet Makhanda, who led the Xhosas in the 1819 Battle of Grahamstown against the British settlers. It is said Lady Nxele died and was buried in the bush during the Difaqane. Nobody knows which regiment she fought in. Or if she was directly involved in combat, or served the fighters in more benign ways — say, through singing, preparing meals, healing the gaping wounds of fellow warriors, or all the above.
What is agreed though is that you just don’t walk into that bush for a summer picnic. I suspect something about it has entered the Mkutukana family’s most famous progeny, Bulelwa, and haunts her tear-drenched, tenor and bass blues registers. If there is a specific place her voice issues from, it is here.
We are in the living room. Zahara’s mother uMaMgocwa and I settle to talk. Her dad, self-taught bricklayer uTat’u Sthathu, is plastering one of the rooms in the house. Just like yesterday when we dined here with Zahara, washing it all down with Fanta Orange and chocolate pudding, MaMgocwa insists we say grace. She urges me to look for a passage in the Book of Ezekiel, from the Old Testament.
Now I have not touched the holy book in more than a decade and so I fumble the task. Gently she takes the book from me and reads. I do not know what this passage has got to do with the question I posed: did you ever imagine that one of your children would put the family on the map?
But then, like her daughter, for MaMgocwa a
random passage in the holy book has everything to do with everything.
“It was God’s will,” she says, finally. “This music thing is from the church. I still sing in church and so does her father. All my children, and not only Bulelwa, sang in church. They even had their family choir. It didn’t have a name. Of course we never anticipated one of them would break out so big.”
Unfortunately she has a fear of flying, so she will miss some of her daughter’s performances in “big cities around the country”.
Zahara dives into the conversation mid-stream: “At one point we didn’t even have cheap Vaseline. We would apply food oil on our bodies. I also remember that sometimes we’d go to school, even high school, without shoes at all. We simply didn’t have any. My siblings and I had the complete uniform and ties, but would be wearing these red plastic flip-flops. You know those ones, right?”
I don’t. But I nod yes.
“But there were days when we didn’t even have the red plastic flip-flops. The plastic flip-flops were becoming a luxury. But we had proud parents: we never went to bed without a meal. Never. Wait, maybe we did? I can’t remember. Things were tough,” she says, tears forming.
To commiserate, I spin a clip from my own childhood movie: how my brother, our cousin and I used to patch our worn-out, hostel-aesthetic, leopardskin undies to death.
“Hlee hleee hlee,” she laughs. That throaty roar again. With her non-singing voice, you can actually chop down an 800-year-old baobab.
“I remember those,” she says. “I also had to sew my panties, those tough cotton red, blue and black ones, and washed them every day in time for the following day. It’s our lives.”
I called her one night after the Metro FM Awards where she was named Best Female Artist and scooped Song of the Year, but missed out to AKA for the publicvoted Best Newcomer honour.
“Spinach,” I ask, “how do you feel about everything that has happened in your life thus far?”
After a long silence she responds with her throwoff banter. “Er, comrade,” she laughs. “You see, comrade ”— she is mimicking her godfather in the music business, Comrade Nciza. “Honestly, when I started, and I still carry that even now, I wanted to be big. I wanted to do exactly what I am doing with my life, but with no conditions affixed.” Further pause. “One thing is, I really never planned to be on TV. Also, and this is important: I just never planned to do interviews. I never wanted to. I just wanted to do me.”
On that Sunday 12 years later when I had planned to call her, I had wanted to recap and ask: Did you manage to do you, Sweetheart, all these years? Too late.