Zawadi Yamungu: The African Dramaturg

In her closing keynote on courage and collectivism at the recent Australian Progress Conference, Sisonke Msimang said: “Love — watered by rage — is a powerful impulse.” I read these words on her sub- stack more than two weeks after seeing Zawadi Yamungu at the Market Theatre. Finally, I think to myself, here is a phrase that captures a show that spoke to the Anthropocene, nationhood along with reconfiguring ancient texts for contemporary political realities. Zawadi’s performance teeters between immense rage watered with great stores of ancestral grief and rage.

This is what Nkosingiphile Mpanza, who has adopted the moniker Zawadi Yamungu, which is a Swahili name meaning “Gift from God”, imbues in her cultural work. In his book,The Land is sung: Zulu performances and the politics of place, Thomas M Pooley discusses the notion of an ethnoscape. The notion, refers in part, to a set of sonic identities that are culturally embedded over time and space.

Pooley notes that “the keynotes to a soundscape are its fundamental tones carved out by its geography and climate; water, wind, forests, plains, birds, insects and animals”. He says “many of these sounds possess archetypal significance; that is they may have imprinted themselves so deeply on the people hearing them that life without them would be sensed as a distinct impoverishment”. “Ukuphi: Where are you?” I ask Zawadi as our wi-fi connection falters.

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She giggles. Home,” she exclaims. Home could be anywhere for Zawadi.

This is similar to jazz. It makes and remakes itself across the world in different tongues and permutations. Zawadi’s jazz trill sounds like she is calling on shamanic tongues or perhaps speaking in biblical tongues.

She sits at the intersection of vocalist, composer, arranger, dramaturg and an adept indigenous instrumentalist with a repertoire that includesumakhweyanabow player and the Swedish hand pan. She teaches both us and the children she has commissioned to perform with her how to play and harmonise to the old technologies of sound. In 2020, Zawadi released a debut album,Magogo School of Thought, as she was paying tribute to Princess Magogo.

On the album, she worked with Mbuso Khoza of the African Heritage Ensemble and Nduduzo Makhathini who was the producer of the album. “Umcimbi,” I burst out laughing! Zawadi laughs.

We are both overjoyed because we both know the significations of the Zulu word which is not quite translatable into the flatness of English.Umcimbidenotes an event or more appropriately, in this instance, an event led by matriarchs. We giggle, exhale, marvel and think deeply about how her most recent performance in Johannesburg was reminiscent of this exact notion. Pinnafores, doeks and takkies took centre stage in the style choices of the audiences.

Her most recent album,Ngimuhle, which came out in 2025, is a meditation on the poetics of Zulu matrilineal heritage. The album includes the songIsibikezelo, featuring praise poet Sindiswa Zulu, which is an example of a decolonial counter-history.

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