Thandiswa Mazwai talks upbringing and post-apartheid injustices with Ebro Darden
|Published
Proudly South African singing sensation Thandiswa Mazwai has nothing but love for her country.
The multi-award winning artist recently sat down with Apple Music’s Ebro Darden on “The Message” podcast to discuss how the country has influenced her latest album, “Sankofa”, which means to go back and fetch what has been left behind.
In the interview, she also delved into her upbringing, the injustices and the country reckoning with it’s apartheid past.
She said: “I come from South Africa, I love being a South African, it’s one of the most exciting places to be and to grow up in.
“It’s been 30 years of our freedom now. It is one of the better functioning democracies in the world.
“We have very peaceful elections and everybody has the right to vote. We have a great and robust constitution that can be challenged.
“The set up of South Africa is really beautiful, when you look at it from the outside, but I think the hardest thing, for the ordinary South African is grappling with what it means to now be free, really what it means to be free.
“What it means to interact with with people of other races, what it means to interact with people from other nations on the African continent, so it remains restless, I think freedom remains quite restless for the locals.”
The singer added: “We have freedom now for 30 years, but in the first few years we all had this euphoria, we were kind of convinced of this idea of the newness, like, ‘Oh it’s a new world’, the systems persist, so it’s just this continued dismantling of these systems.”
“And so the work of the past 30 years has been in part about reclaiming all that has been lost, stolen, erased. Our cultural identities, our spiritual identities, our land, our sense of home.
“I am also an African queer woman and that really demands that you claim and vehemently protect all that brings you peace and joy. A sense of community, history and possibility.”
Looking at the bright side, Mazwai said, “The power that is happening now is that we all black people are speaking at the same time, and so we can learn from each other in real time.”
She said the greater message was always “love”.
“Love of self, freedom, justice, knowledge, truth. The proverbial, One Love.”