Between bows and hymns

Zawadi honours the past and, at the same time, pushes form forward, composing music that remembers, resists and remakes meaning

- Nombuso Mathibela

I cannot remember my first encounter with Princess Magogo ka Dinizulu’s music.

I have heard her name in my grandparents' unfinished sentences that morph into multiple conversations. Her name sat on the tongues of friends and collaborators Sibonelo Gumede and Sanele Ngubane through organic, didactic and curious chats that spanned over two years.

We were drawn by her wayward orature, which manifested itself in unfinished sentences, as a way of making meaning. Waywardness that reads as unintelligible and opaque to outsiders and those of us on the fringes of insider outsider status.

Yet, this waywardness is vocally grounded in the internal choreographies of relationality.

Put differently, it is inherited generational behaviour passed down from Princess Magogo’s mother, Queen Silimo ka Mdlalose, and the Zulu royal family’s maternal lineage. We learn about this through Dr Kholeka Shange’s spectacular work on Princess Magogo.

In the midst of our intrigue and pure geekiness, my friendship with KwaZulu-Natal musician Zawadi grew through encounters that have blurred into each other through an ongoing research project of remembrance through a collective called Phoshoza — a pensive constellation of Zawadi, Sanele, Sibonelo and myself — attempting to understand the sonic frontier that Princess Magogo’s music signals.

To understand Zawadi’s stunning disinterest in restraint, it is important to begin with Princess Magogo’s practice of waywardness. It is something she inherits and transforms into her own unbridled practice.

It is an instinct that abounds in the work of luminaries like Mam’Busi Mhlongo, Thandiswa Mazwai and Simphiwe Dana, who exemplify a disinterest in restraint in different ways, through their compositional styles, distinct vocal and visual languages and through their remarkable aesthetic choices which ritualise performance.