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Description: Malaika releases the sophomore album Vuthelani to a sceptical media and entertainment industry but with the palpable weight of an expectant music-buying public. These young three musicians, for unlike in kwaito where people are musicians by virtue of a record contract, are without a doubt unequalled in the history of South African pop music that a debut album Malaika hit multiple platinum (7 in all), that is over 350 000 units sold, literally handing them major artists status who can command first-rate appearance fees and top billing at festivals. There is simply no group or artists who had ever managed such a feat with a debut album. So the weight to produce the second album that would equal, if not surpass, the debut was all the more heavy. 

The success of Malaika was a feat that was to postpone studio time for the recording of the follow-up that is Vuthelani and, interestingly, divide the South African Music Award Committee (Sama committee) and present it with the most integrity-challenging contest that it ever faced in its eventful decade-long history.


The question that the SAMA committee faced was what to do with a band whose debut album has had an unusually long lifespan in the notoriously short lifespan of South African album? But Malaika was demanding recognition as it had been the defining sound of the whole 2005 year.

To ignore it was clearly going to show how of out of touch with reality the Sama committee is and how it can, by a sheer act of the ostrich stance, wilfully defy consumer choice, the very criterion that defines pop stardom, that is, the success of a pop music star: sales. To include the album would be flouting the peculiar regulations of entry – peculiar because these are not in concert with releasing dates of record companies and consumer spending power on music.

In the end, hidebound conservative and reactionary out of sync and fearing hammering from its interest member companies it allowed Malaika to contest the lightweight but popular award category of Most Popular Artists of The Year and Most Popular Song of The Year that they won hands down.

But that was mere collection of music awards for the debut Malaika. Malaika, probably in keeping with their strange prime profile for a set of debutants, had begun contesting awards in the continental award romp Kora Awards where they easily swooped The Best Newcomer Group statuette in 2004.

In another continent-wide award ceremony Malaika fetched Best Afro-Pop Group in 2005 Channel O Music Video Awards. Before then Malaika had romped home with three worthy awards from South Africa’s leading commercial radio station’s recognition ceremony Metro FM Music Awards: Best Afro-pop album, Best Group, Best Album. Oddly enough, they were not considered for Best Newcomer, an award the group would have easily won.

This success at award ceremony was to repeat itself with the release of Vuthelani. Barely arrived on the market Vuthelani scooped the Kora for Best Southern Group last December (2005) at Kora Awards where Malaika rendered an accomplished performance amid amateurish performances by their continental peers. But these awards merely confirming what the music-buying public, the most important aspect of the recording chain, had already bestowed in the group.

Similarly, the festival organisers could not ignore the phenomenal success of Malaika. With radio play-listing of the monster hit Destiny Malaika suddenly gained top billing status at genre-collapsing festivals where a stalwart veteran such as trumpeter Hugh Masekela would find himself under-billed to these stars.

One particularly memorable festival was Hazelmere Dam, Verelum, some 35khm north of Durban, where some 130 000 eager punters waited, pantingly, until well past midnight for the band to perform that had been initially earmarked for a primetime performance. The crowd, who had to be helped by the national defence force to be able to disperse the following day, wouldn’t leave the site without seeing Malaika’s grand finale performance to what had been an extraordinarily successful year.

Malaika performed until twenty-past four in the morning. From there it had been a roller-coaster ride for the band performing from one gig to the next promoting Vuthelani so much so that they were Cape Town’s ushers to this year in the New Year when they performed a rivetingly sterling year-end concert during midnight. As usual, in this event Malaika was top-billed.

But the actual story of the formation of Malaika, among South Africa’s foremost selling groups of the 21st century’s first decade, has never been properly told. Appropriately enough for an Afro-pop trio, formed out of the ashes of the kwaito outfit Stouters [The Mischiefs], Malaika was conceived with an inalienable contribution of one of South Africa’s most under-utilised producers of hip-hop Godfrey “Guffy” Pilane.

Malaika testifies to the power of three: the trio, generally possessing peerless elemental power in the history of pop music, consists of Bongani Nchanga, Jabu Ndaba, both battle-weary and hardened former original band members of the Stouters, and Tshedi Mholo, an innocent, church-going, unspoilt debutante former school teacher in the music world. For in the Stouters, with the accent on kwaito, Nchanga and Ndaba were decent boys trying to fit into something they were clearly not. And, accordingly, as fate would have it, they would not succeed. But, in a strange way, the duo was saved by this apparent failure of gold-cast, thunder-and-lightening awe voices of Nchanga and Ndaba. For, doubtlessly licking their pride at seeing lesser talented contemporaries raking the kudos and cash flow, they would go back to their roots to find themselves in the church where singing had always been part of their lives. Here the two discovered the astonishing heavenly voice of Mholo.

Appropriately, because Malaika, an Afro-pop band, that is, a perfect blend of post-kwaito, post-mbaqanga and neo-soul, that is the quintessence of Nu Afro-pop, unashamedly melodic, harmonious, always attempting to be soulful, a good dollop of singing and musicianship, along with one or two of their contemporaries, defines the early sound of 21st century South Africa. It’s a band that has, as Nu Afro-pop took its cue from late 70s to late 80s Afro-pop, moulded English back into the mix of a black pop a la bands of the late 20th century South Africa did.

And, wouldn’t you know it, their most characteristic cross-over monster hit Destiny, a behemoth of a hit that simply ate all that was before it and was inescapably present everywhere, was utterly a simple English-only lyric song a la Brenda and The Big Dudes’ Weekend Special. But here’s the difference: whereas Weekend Special is an ambiguously pitched song of desperate loneliness and longing, Destiny is a perfectly pitched, full-bodied song of fulfilment.

At this time a similar story mirroring this blessedly gifted trio had been going on in the life of one Pilane. Essentially, an avant-garde hip-hop artist manqué and engineer-cum-producer who couldn’t succeed in breaking such a sound in the kwaito-mad mid-nineties South Africa, he had settled into producing minor hits solo albums and experimental dance side projects with his one or two similarly inclined peers.

He had been hired on a five-year contract by then Sony Music (SA) as an in-house producer but had so far failed to break any act. Interestingly, Stouters had been among his priorities at Sony Music. And the story goes that he was to concoct the mesmerising Malaika sound in his last year of the contract when the company, frustrated with him, was not to renew it. Fearing that Malaika was another dead duck, the company apparently would refuse the master and that is when Pilane took them under his Guffy Productions and released them with Sony Music handling marketing and distribution, a handsomely profitable venture aspect of the recording chain. It is then that the general music-buying public came to appreciate the talent of Pilane and Co. But all along in the print media a handful of discerning journalists had been noticing and fitfully raving about Pilane’s production prowess since he came on the entertainment scene in the mid-nineties.

Curiously, mirroring the success of Malaika has been Vuthelani’s effect on the trio going to the studio: again the group is postponing recording the third album indefinitely may be until the new year as Vuthelani still enjoys sales.

Not wanting to alienate its core fans who had discovered the band via Afro-pop staples such as Sebaka Nyana, Hamba, Mhla Uphel’ Amandla & Indoda Yempandla (Beware Verwoerd) rather than Destiny, the group released in November 2005 for radio airplay Muntuza (2Bob). In a short space of time it enjoyed a massive radio airplay and it shifted album units becoming an instant hit defining the festive sound so much so that, come end of the year, it was the preferred choice of virtually all SABC African Language Radio stations for the traditional New Year’s Eve midnight slot of the hit of the year that “breaks” in the New Year.

Not least because the cute phrase “2 Bob” was matched perfectly to the funky groove by the ingenious vocals of Nchanga and Ndaba. That’s not all what they do. Ndaba’s singing is imperiously insouciant throughout Muntuza. And Mholo, as reliable as always, renders a faultless vocal performance as well.

But within the album there lies other morsels such as the beautiful ballad Nguwe, soulful, lilting and endlessly charming as wintry raindrops on a windowpane experienced under warm, cosy bedclothes. It’s a song that one hears on late prime radio such as one driven by Eddie “The President” Zondi on Metro FM.

Paired with this gorgeous love song is the song of regret, but reminiscing of loved one, is Ngixolele. There is Fever, an image-perfect twin sister song to Destiny. It’s the kind of song one hears booming from car sounds. This dance number is accompanied by the syncopated Sajika and, as per tradition for Malaika, there is the inclusion of Busi Mhlongo’s Ting Ting, of which the trio shows irreverence by turning this upside down when they render this Busi Mhlongo staple classic into a groovy dance song. That Malaika bring an all-together refreshingly uptempo interpretation shows an imaginative dexterity.

Unlike other Afro-pop groups who hide their true inspiration, Malaika from the debut had always paid an unambiguous tribute to their forbears of the first wave of Afro-pop. One wouldn’t want to finish without mentioning the affective desolation of Baba Wami (Tribute Song), a song clearly written by Ndaba on the news and the subsequent passing away of his dearly beloved father.

Accompanied by Mholo whose voice is delicate and vitally empathetic to her colleague’s loss and grief, this ballad is one of mere handful death songs I can recall in the almost century-old South African pop – think Soul Brothers’ Ngikhumbule Lezontaba on the death of David Masondo’s loved one and Savuka’s The Crossing (O Siyeza!) on the tragic death of Savuka’s pivotal dancer.

South Africa is yet to hear anything that evokes such pathos associated with death committed on to record or CD.

Unlike Malaika that began its climb to chart status slowly but then suddenly exploded after some ten months on the market, Vuthelani detonated on the market with almost universal acclaim. It was a mammoth from the beginning that confirmed the status of this nouveau band as no one-hit wonders but a major group