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At a gala dinner held soon after South Africa\u2019s most contested election since the end of apartheid, a singer reminded the gathered politicians how to do their jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to implore you to think of the people of this country, and to think about why you have been chosen,\u201d the singer, Thandiswa Mazwai, told the political elite at the June gala, put on by the Independent Electoral Commission in Johannesburg to mark the release of the vote\u2019s final results.<\/p>\n
Many of those listening were members of the African National Congress, the long-governing party that had just suffered stinging losses at the polls, a rebuke from voters frustrated by corruption and mismanagement after three decades of the A.N.C. being in charge.<\/p>\n
Then, Ms. Mazwai, after her brief spoken remarks, burst into a set of songs whose lyrics, rather than offering light entertainment, instead doubled down on her determination to call out political malpractice. She sang of \u201cfools for leaders\u201d and \u201cthieves\u201d who \u201cshould leave Parliament.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Chastising her influential audience is unlikely to cost Ms. Mazwai any future gigs \u2014 she\u2019s simply too popular to cancel. At 48, she has performed for South Africans \u2014 from everyday fans to Nelson Mandela \u2014 for 30 years, as long as the country has been a multiracial democracy.<\/p>\n
With her music reaching a wide audience and often containing sharp social commentary, Ms. Mazwai has emerged as the voice of a generation born during apartheid\u2019s violent twilight: the first group of Black South Africans to enjoy the freedoms of a democratic South Africa but also to be confronted with its disappointments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In a country that holds dear the right to protest after the crushing rule of the apartheid regime, Ms. Mazwai has used her mezzo-soprano voice to amplify South Africa\u2019s struggles, just as her predecessors \u2014 activist performers like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela \u2014 did during apartheid.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t take my job lightly,\u201d she told the politicians that night. \u201cMy calling is to sing the people\u2019s joy, to sing the people\u2019s sadness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Born in 1976, a year when an uprising by school children<\/a> and the brutal response by the apartheid police roiled South Africa, Ms. Mazwai\u2019s life has been marked by political turmoil.<\/p>\n Her singing career began in 1994, when South Africa held its first democratic election. Since then, three of her four solo albums have been released during elections years, a synchrony which she described as \u201cserendipitous.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe energy was kind of right for me to bring my voice into it,\u201d she said of her latest album, Sankofa<\/a>, released earlier this election year. The album\u2019s title is taken from Ghana\u2019s Twi language and means \u201cto go back and fetch what has been left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Mazwai\u2019s music often longs for an idyllic past, unspoiled by racism and colonialism, but maintains the urgency of the present.<\/p>\n In the song, \u201cDark Side of the Rainbow,\u201d one of the new album\u2019s 11 tracks, she sings of leaders with \u201cminds left destitute by greed\u201d and sampled an audio recording of a chaotic session in South Africa\u2019s Parliament. The song\u2019s title is a subversive reference to Archbishop Desmond Tutu\u2019s optimistic description of post-apartheid South Africa as \u201cthe Rainbow Nation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Mazwai has not always been a critic of South Africa\u2019s leaders. Her career took off during the euphoria of the Mandela presidency, from 1994 to 1999, and she performed for Mr. Mandela several times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She was among a pioneering group of young musicians who created the sound of the new democracy: the rebellious dance music, known as kwaito, that drew on hip-hop, R&B and African pop. With the band Bongo Maffin, for which she was a lead vocalist, Ms. Mazwai took kwaito, and the new South Africa, to the rest of the world<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ms. Mazwai grew up in Soweto, in one of the historic township\u2019s neighborhoods where residents had middle-class aspirations, signified by what she said were known locally as \u201cbig window\u201d houses. Her parents were politically active journalists; her mother had been one of the few Black students at the University of the Witwatersrand. As South Africa slowly integrated, her parents enrolled her in a prestigious girls\u2019 school in Johannesburg\u2019s wealthy suburbs.<\/p>\n The experience was a culture shock, and not just because the young Ms. Mazwai was regarded with suspicion whenever another student misplaced something. She was the only Black child in her class and teachers sometimes brought up her father\u2019s politically charged newspaper articles. \u201cNo Black child could survive that world,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She transferred to a more diverse school, one with a Pan-African outlook, and then followed her mother to the University of the Witwatersrand but dropped out to pursue her music career with Bongo Maffin.<\/p>\n The group, founded in 1996, quickly garnered celebrity status. Ms. Mazwai\u2019s relationship with a bandmate and the child they. had together made headlines. Young people copied her contemporary African fashion sense, wearing a turban with a formal suit or painting tribal dots on her face as part of her makeup. The impact of the band was so enduring that their music is still on the playlist at parties and weddings all over South Africa.<\/p>\n An upbeat sample of Miriam Makeba\u2019s \u201cPata Pata\u201d brought them to the attention of the doyenne of South African music<\/a>. Ms. Makeba, the celebrated singer and anti-apartheid activist, effectively anointed Ms. Mazwai as her successor, but set her a challenge, too: What kind of artist did she want to be?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Mazwai answered in her first solo album, \u201cZabalaza,\u201d a word that means rebellion or revolution in the Xhosa language. In the album, released in 2004, Ms. Mazwai stretched her vocal cords across jazz, funk and soul. South Africa\u2019s revolution was no longer against the apartheid regime, but against the H.I.V.-pandemic, against grinding poverty and joblessness \u2014 all mismanaged by the governing party. Ms. Mazwai\u2019s early fame did not shield her from these maladies, so she sang about them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI think the role of the artist is to use their gifts intentionally to free people from suffering,\u201d she said in a recent interview with The New York Times, reflecting on her career.<\/p>\n Her 2009 album \u201cIbokwe,\u201d or goat (an animal with ritual significance) featured another legendary South African musician<\/a>, Hugh Masekela. He became what Ms. Mazwai described as her \u201cindustry dad,\u201d and she regularly performed with him.<\/p>\n Her next album, \u201cBelede,\u201d the only one not released in an election year, explored grief: for her mother Belede Mazwai, who died in 1992 and never saw a free South Africa, and for Ms. Mazwai\u2019s other mentor, the singer Busi Mhlongo.<\/p>\n \u201cBelede\u201d also grieved for the life South Africans thought they would have but have yet to attain, and in the song \u201cNdiyahamba\u201d (\u201cI\u2019m Leaving\u201d), Ms. Mazwai imagines leaving an unforgiving city life for a bucolic setting.<\/p>\n Despite this hankering for escape in her songs, Ms. Mazwai said she won\u2019t turn away from a troubled society. A queer woman in a country where Black lesbians still live in fear, Ms. Mazwai describes her life as \u201cpolitical.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe lives of those I love is political and I cannot escape the telling of our collective stories,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Ms. Mazwai\u2019s music and fashion also deliberately embrace the aesthetic of the rest of the African continent. Her latest album was partly recorded in Dakar, and the cowrie shell has become a signature accessory. It\u2019s another act of defiance when South Africa still struggles to integrate with the rest of the continent and African immigrants are often the targets of attacks<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That anti-immigrant animosity is driven by a desperation in poor townships and shanty towns where voting and protest seem to make no difference, Ms. Mazwai said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe real indictment is on our governments,\u201d she said. \u201cWhether it\u2019s the Zimbabwean government or the South African government or the Congolese government, our governments are failing us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Despite the gravity of her music, her live performances are also joyful, and cheeky. In a packed London venue recently, a fan threw a bra on the stage, and Ms. Mazwai wore it as a hat.<\/p>\n The anger and suffering of her albums are always tempered with love, and on \u201cSankofa\u201d Ms. Mazwai offers a soothing balm, the result, she said, of her own healing. Singing to her younger self \u2014 and to all of us \u2014 she sings \u201cKulungile\u201d: It\u2019s going to be all right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n