Thandiswa: The Message Playlist

Joburg-originating singer Thandiswa Mazwai was in a celebratory mood as a guest on the latest episode of The Message. “I come from South Africa and I love being a South African,” she told Ebro. “It's one of the most exciting places to be and to grow up in. And it's been 30 years of our independence now, or our freedom from the violence of apartheid.” The singer, whose musical beginnings date back to the ’90s as a member of the kwaito group Bongo Maffin, had just released her latest solo project Sankofa, an album she says is an affirmation of her journey and of African unity. “I think that for the longest time, there has been a great disconnect between Africans on the continent and Africans in the rest of the diaspora,” Mazwai says. “And one of our greatest gifts as Black people has been social media, which I think really broke down a lot of these barriers of understanding where we didn't think we had similarities. My grandmother covers her couch with plastic as much as your grandmother does, or that there's a cupboard in the house with plates that never get touched, ever. What I love about what's happening now is that we're taking a lot of this cultural knowledge and bringing it together from Africa to Brazil to America—wherever Africans are, wherever Black people are. And I love that collaboration because I think it makes us more powerful.” For her The Message playlist, Mazwai compiled tracks from Black women of various eras who continue to provide inspiration for her practice, voices like Meshell Ndegeocello, Betty Davis, WILLOW and a South African icon with whom Mazwai once had a close personal relationship, Miriam Makeba. “I grew up kind of immersed in the work of Mama Miriam Makeba,” Mazwai says. “When I grew up, her music was banned. You'd secretly hear it, and you'd hear her singing songs about how we're going to shoot 'them' with these guns. So these were very radical songs that spoke directly to how we wanted to dismantle the system; the pain, the frustration, all of that. The pride of still being able to wake up every morning and be beautifully Black. I had this kind of insane privilege of, when I was 19 years old, I met Mama Miriam Makeba, and she became one of my mentors. So it's the work of these kinds of people—Steve Biko and Miriam Makeba—that kind of formed my artistic identity.”