The One Who Sings finds a voice through a sea change

Ursula, the famous character in The Little Mermaid, is arguably the most frightening villain because she understood something terrifying: a voice is worth more than beauty, riches or freedom. It is why she asked Ariel to surrender hers.

Zolani Mahola, however, never lost her voice. She simply spent years searching for what it was truly meant to say. The self-expression Mahola now inhabits did not arrive easily. It followed years of interrogating the very gift that first introduced her to the world as the voice of Freshlyground.

“When I left the band [in 2019] ... I was going in search of finding my voice, my individual voice,” she tells me over a video call, with a streak of sunshine beaming in her background. “It was also a purpose thing, you know – what does this voice stand for, what does it want to voice, what is my purpose? So, I did ... so much exploration of that.”

I recently watched a YouTube short explaining why humanity knows more about space than we do about the ocean floor. It boils down to pressure. The deeper you go, the greater the pressure. Broken down into five segments each with its own environmental specificities, Poseidon’s playground serves as a fitting parallel to Mahola’s journey of exploration.

Finding a voice

It began with her writing a play whose title guided her to her new moniker, The One Who Sings. “In this play, I basically ... got together a catalogue of really important figures in my life, starting from my mom and my dad, and the whole story of my mother dying young, that celebrates the love of my parents, but then her early death.”

As it is with the ocean, the deeper The One Who Sings went, the greater the pressure on herself to make sense of her wounds. “[The play included] people who were very formative to me, one of whom was my stepbrother, who sexually abused me when I was between eight and 11. So looking at those wounds, looking at the things that really informed who uZolani was in 2019, who uZolani was at age 38 at that time.”

The singer-songwriter’s greatest challenge was recovering from the sense of unworthiness that had festered because of this ordeal. Healing, she suggests, wasn’t separate from music – it became the instrument through which she reconstructed herself.

This would ultimately inform the kind of music she made and sharpen the voice she’d know better than Ariel to trade. She speaks about her 2021 release, Thetha Mama, as an illustration of the depths her voice as an instrument has experienced.

Musical muse

The deepest layer of the ocean is called the hadalpelagic zone, or simply the trenches. Only a handful of people have been, and it is believed that sea life as old as 500 years exists there. In my mind, it is ethereal, abstract and unknown. Hearing Zolani on her latest single, XhosaNostra, feels a lot like this.

Her vocals on gqom instrumentals feel like a welcome glitch in the matrix. If the Afro-soul and folk music she made with her former band felt fitting in the epipelagic (sunlight) zone of the sea, this venture sits perfectly in the deep dark sea – at least sonically.

Asked how she landed on this musical direction, she said: “The process of play and the process of being open to the magic that happens when we are creating music and being kind of open to open to receive. Music is an amazing muse, you know, it’s very spiritual, because ... it’s like you’re song catching, following your intuition, which is being guided.”

This process of exploration has also seen her collaborate with singer-songwriter Moonga K as well as producer Hannah V for her upcoming era.

Formed under pressure

What stands out in XhosaNostra is the contribution of her featured artist, the late Bravo le Roux. She takes pride in how Le Roux is immortalised in a tone and feel that is unlike anything else in his discography. “It’s almost like he’s talking from the other side already,” she utters with a sense of reverence.

If Mahola’s music searches for worth, Le Roux’s posthumous contribution feels like its affirmation, expressed beautifully in his now parting words: “Bantwana bamaXhosa, ndinibeka kweli lizwe ngenjongo (Children of the Xhosa nation, I have placed you in this land with a purpose).”

“He’s ... addressing the children of the Xhosa nation ... imparting this wisdom, and he’s just speaking it. He’s not rapping it, you know, it’s not like an MC joint.”

What makes this even more compelling is that it is built upon a subtle string arrangement of Nkosi Sikelela iAfrika in a minor key, something brought to my attention by Aron Turest-Swartz, fellow composer and long-time collaborator with The One Who Sings. The anthemic undertones are also a good foreshadowing of the upcoming album, according to the one-time Shakira collaborator.

“The name of the album is People Power and it is kind of based on that feeling we had in the early ’90s, you know, around [Nelson] Mandela’s release, the feeling of real possibility.”

If the feeling of worth is the pearl in the shell – a pearl, after all, is formed under pressure – then this feeling of possibility is the pearl of our country.

“I think that it’s a beautiful idea and a beautiful dream that we should still hold here. But now to realise that there’s work to make that rainbow come true. The [Desmond] Tutus, the Mandelas, they set a good tone, but there’s so much underneath it that we need now. We need to make decisions and come together and realise our power, know what we want to stand for, know what we want to use our voices for.”

Somewhere beneath the pressure, beneath grief, memory, trauma and expectation, Mahola discovered that a voice does not disappear. It changes shape. And like the sea itself, it always finds a way back to the surface. DM

S’bo Gyre is a musician and freelance writer.

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.