Nzama turns up the volume on Jozi’s booming creative economy

Meet Kenny Nzama, one of the champions of Jozi My Jozi’s new creative campaign called Babize Bonke (it means “let them all come” in isiZulu), which invites people to experience the revival of the city through the eyes of its creative citizens.

“Music is the great unifier, and my instrument is the turntable,” says Nzama, more famously known as DJ Kenzhero, a pioneer of the South African hip-hop scene who has long been delighting dance floors with his delicious infusions of soul, funk and jazz.

As DJ Kenzhero, he has shared stages with artists such as Tumi & The Volume, Lebo Mashile, Blk Sonshine, Simphiwe Dana and Freshlyground. He has featured at festivals such as Oppikoppi, Rocking the Daisies, Macufe and Standard Bank Jazz, and performed at clubs like the Colour Bar, Bassline, Devine Lounge, 206 and Sidewalk Café.

“My front face is a DJ,” says Nzama, “but my back space is a whole lot of different conversations.” He is also a music producer and booking agent, and he puts bands together. He’s a creative entrepreneur who turns decks into deals and beats into business. 

We meet at Artivist in Reserve Street, an effortlessly cool spot co-founded by Nzama and Bradley Williams in the heart of Braamfontein, or as it is known, Braam. Originally a parking lot, Artivist is a bistro and gallery. A huge poster of Bra Hugh Masekela, South Africa’s most beloved jazz musicians, hangs on the feature wall, and big glass windows face Reserve Street.

More alley than street, there’s a hip little coffee- and bookshop; with students, hipsters, musos, workers passing by. Out the back and down a narrow staircase is the Untitled Basement, their funky live music venue where a combo of African and Austrian jazz musicians are practising ahead of their gig that night. “This is our heartbeat,” says Nzama.

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Rebirth of cool

Nzama is famous for his late 1990s South African mixes called Rebirth of Cool, which reimagined jazz and hip-hop classics (he also performed in a live band of the same name) – and we quickly agree that Jozi right now is having its own rebirth of cool.

The inner city’s creative economy is growing. There are studios and galleries, mural art, restaurants and hotels, collaborative spaces such as Victoria Yards in Lorentzville, 44 Stanley in Milpark and 44 Main in Marshalltown.

Is it Afro-New York? With parts Berlin and Rio? “More São Paolo,” says Nzama, who has visited all those places and more. “Jozi is also completely its own Jozi.

“What I love about Braam is that it’s pan-African. It’s so diverse. There’s academia, civil society, workers; there’s town across the bridges, the gritty city, the energy… You just want to be part of it.”

And Braam is certainly strutting its stuff. The Nelson Mandela and Queen Elizabeth bridges have been cleaned, beautified and secured. The Bannister Hotel will soon open a rooftop bar looking out across the famous Mandela mural – the purple shall govern – and Ameshoff Street has been revitalised at both ends, from the Theatre Plaza to Eland Square on Jan Smuts Avenue.

There’s a new outdoor space where the four theatres of the Joburg Theatre Complex all join, a pause area for students and office workers with comfortable benches, good lighting and tight security. A fabulous mosaic fountain is the centrepiece. It’s called the Watershed and marks Jozi’s role as a continental watershed. All rain that flows east of here ends up in the Indian Ocean, and all rain that falls west ends up in the Atlantic.

Remarkably, Nzama says, he started out his tertiary education by studying cost accounting at Wits Tech. But he always felt like something was missing in his life, and so he made a U-turn into music.

Born in Soweto in 1976, the year of the school uprisings, he says it’s the Jozi he grew up in that still inspires him. Soweto, Maboneng, Doornfontein, Hillbrow, the Carlton Centre, places he cut his teeth as a DJ, starting in poetry sessions before rising up the ranks of rhythm to stardom. DM

Bridget Hilton-Barber is a freelance writer and photographer who writes for Jozi My Jozi.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.