There is a hymn inTinsimu Ta Vakreste, hymn 288, titledVonani, wa ta, Hosi Yesu— behold, the Lord Jesus is coming back. It is one of those hymns we sing so often it risks becoming muscle memory. The words leave the mouth, the harmony lands where it should but the meaning sometimes stays behind.
Faith, like routine, can dull itself when repetition is left uninterrogated. We sing because we know the song, not because we are still listening to what it is asking of us. The first song played at Simphiwe Dana’s album release gathering isMombathise— “cover her”.
And suddenly that old hymn finds its way back, uninvited but necessary. As the song unfolds, I find myself silently singingVonani, wa ta, Hosi Yesu. Not because I plan to but because something in the song calls something older to the surface.
Read Full Article on Mail & Guardian
[paywall]
Spirit recognises spirit. Memory answers memory. The sacred does not always arrive announced; sometimes it simply sits beside you and waits.
It is only later, last Thursday at Jazzworks Studios in Bryanston, that the song fully arrives. The room is filled with people who know music, who have heard brilliance before, who are not easily moved. This is not an audience prone to spectacle.
And yet whenMombathisefinishes playing, there is silence. Not the awkward kind that begs to be filled. The holy kind that insists on being honoured.
After it played there was a moment of silence. People were sighing. The song touched a nerve.
It made people feel something. It moved the room. Not in a dramatic way but in the way grief moves quietly, deeply, without permission.
Mombathiseis an ascension song. Dana tells us it is for her late mother: “a song to tell her to go and rest and be at peace.” A song of release, even though release itself has not come easily. There is a tenderness in the way she speaks about it, also restraint.
She does not dramatise loss. She respects it. “Well, it was my way of saying I intend to let you go,” she explains, “because I have not let her go yet.” There is no performance in her voice when she says this.
No poetry for effect. Just truth, spoken plainly. She speaks of dreaming of her mother because she wants her to be happy, because her life was hard.
“I want you to be happy… perhaps now you finally can.” Dana goes on to describe the prayer inside the song. “I was imploring God, my ancestors to cover her… to cover her with holiness, to cover her with peace, the peace that she never had.” This is where Moya begins to distinguish itself. It is not grief dressed up as art.
It is grief processed through ritual, ancestry and faith. The song does not ask the listener to witness pain; it asks them to witness surrender. Her mother’s story is one of early loss and lifelong sacrifice.
“My mom lost her mother when she was 16,” Dana shares. “She couldn’t feel her mother… she carried that.” And yet, she was an angel. “She would give you her last cent, she would rather go without shoes for you.” A nurse by profession, her passing left colleagues devastated.
“The nurses were inconsolable because she was so loved.” Dana lets that sentence stand on its own, allowing the weight of that love to do the work. Moya— spirit, breath, wind, is the only possible title for this album. It is carried by ancestry, grief, devotion and an uncompromising belief in excellence as a form of respect.
This is not an album chasing relevance. It is an album anchored in intention.
[/paywall]
