Vusi Mahlasela Still Believes Music Can Heal

The first time I encountered Vusi Mahlasela's music was in 1997, on a compilation CD owned by my very tapped-in, musically literate father. The song, "Silang Mabele," a call for collective action against poverty, introduced me to a voice possessed of a luminous timbre, a lyricist whose words resonated deeply, and a guitarist whose nimble work was ornate and celestial.

I explain this to Mahlasela because he has misheard my question about the trajectory of his career following the song's release, and gone on a tangent about how he doesn't care for hits. "Mahlasela is not about hits. I'm ministering through my music. I'm not doing this to become a star or whatever," he fires. 

Which is fair, but for context, "Silang Mabele" won Best Song at the South African Music Awards the following year, the same ceremony at which he took home Best Male. And many more people had an experience similar to mine when the song soundtracked Gavin Hood's Academy Award-winning Tsotsi in 2005. It is not a footnote in his catalog; it is one of its cornerstones.

"[My career progressed] steadily but surely, growing gradually," he says after catching my drift. "With record labels, even when I'm doing contracts, I'll never sign a contract that says I have to do an album every year. That's not possible. I only go to the studio when I have material, when it's the right time. But my music has been growing steadily, gradually. And it stays there. And people love it, because that's the accent of Vusi Mahlasela."

It was not the only hurdle in our conversation. He also dismissed my theory about the parallels between "Silang Mabele" and Sankomota's “Now Or Never,” both songs concerned with working and tilling the field in order to survive; a call for self-reliance that also acknowledges the importance of the land.

"I don't know; that's your interpretation. When I did that song, it had [nothing to do with] Sankomota," he says. "It's more of a song that we used to sing when we were young, at kindergarten. I wrote something more to address hunger, poverty and agricultural revolution."

The theory wasn't conjured from nowhere. Toward the end of the '80s, Mahlasela became a member of the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), which exposed him to a range of artists, writers and musicians. The poet Lesego Rampolokeng became a close collaborator over time, and introduced Mahlasela to the writer Nadine Gordimer, who paid for his guitar lessons. 

In 1990, while performing at a festival in London, he was spotted by Warrick Sony, whose Shifty Records had been hired to record sound at the event. Sony told his business partner Lloyd Ross about the experience, and the two convinced Mahlasela to record his debut album, When You Come Back — initially a 500-cassette pressing, released widely after a partnership with BMG Africa. Nearly a decade earlier, Shifty had set up a mobile studio in Lesotho to record Sankomota's first album. The lineage is there, whether he claims it or not.

"When I was in school, I always wanted to become a doctor or a priest. And lately somebody told me: but you're already doing it with your music. You're preaching, you're teaching, and you're also healing with your music. That is why I say my work is more about ministering, the African evangelism of ministering different subjects that I bring through my songs," he says. 

"I'm the kind of doctor who has to diagnose problems in the society, put it through my work, sing about it, and let the people debate those issues and come up with solutions. And when it comes to healing, this has been a call that I will minister and do healing through my music. The divine center is part of it as well."

Mahlasela writes in parables — broad, prophetic strokes that interrogate the human condition, diagnose its ailments, and administer the remedy through song. His spirit leads; he follows. I have expansive empathy for him, because the context he came up in matters. An activist throughout the '80s, he was regularly on the apartheid police's watchlist, closely surveilled and scrutinized. He would have known comrades who met their deaths as a result of biased media reporting. That is one layer of the distrust, one carried by many artists and activists of his generation. There is another: he has spoken extensively, in a separate interview, about the illness that incapacitated him during COVID, and there is something that being sick steals from you.

But he refuses to stop, and shares that he’s “always writing, always doing music.” 

"I've got three singles that I've released this year," he says. "The first one is called 'Questions and Answers,' the second is called ‘Setšhu sa Ditamati,’ and the third is 'Let There Be Peace.' These are from a full album being released next month, titled Questions and Answers. If you don't understand the answers, go back to the questions. People have got a lot of questions about what is happening right now: about crime, about injustices. People need answers, and we need to get to a space where there is peace, justice and equality.”