Mzi & Rafiki create memorable pan-African music

Top investigative reporter Mzilikazi wa Afrika reveals his alter ego as a talented musician

The Clark Kent/Superman dichotomy is a thing many musicians go through . Like Kent, they spend their bespectacled days wandering the civilian world, planning home renovations and wondering who tailors Pravin Gordhan's suits.

Once the sun sets, however, the glasses come off, the instruments come out and the imperative to save the masses from boredom becomes their top priority. Mzilikazi wa Afrika is no different.

Chances are his name has a familiar ring: that's because Wa Afrika's day job involves hunting down all manner of villains, spending time in jail and uncovering slave rings as an investigative reporter at the Sunday Times.

Perhaps as a kind of detox from those sphincter-squeezing stresses, when he knocks off Wa Afrika dons his original persona, that of musician.

"I wrote my first song when I was 11 for my church choir. It was not great, to be honest, but people liked it and encouraged me to write more songs," he says.

At the turn of the century he moved to Johannesburg from Bushbuckridge with the suitably practical ambition of becoming a journalist.

Passions, however, tend to nag and it was not long before he found himself in a studio with Chicco Twala and Brenda Fassie.

"When I moved to Johannesburg in 1999, I asked a friend to introduce me to Chicco Twala and I asked Chicco if I could come to the studio and watch what they were doing.

"I would sit in the corner and shyly raise my hand and say, 'What about this?' and everyone would look at me funny but they would try it and when it sounded nice they would say, this boy has got a good ear."

In modern parlance, "shoot your shot" is a basketball-inspired phrase equivalent to "carpe diem" (seize the day) and in the early 2000s Wa Afrika began shooting from all over the court, with a surprising level of success.

He met music industry players, produced a hit record and signed a recording deal using little more than an affable attitude and Myspace

In 2009 the ball really started rolling. Having just finished a 31-track album with Soul Candi, Mzee, as he is known, began looking for his next big project and that is when he found his rafiki.

"I went around the country looking for new talent and discovered these young guys. One of them was called Gorden Netshi-kweta, a sound engineer by profession.

He introduced me to Julius Dlamini, who had been playing with Malaika. I called them rafiki, Swahili for 'friends'."

I told my wife I wanted to start my record label myself but I promised not to use my salary...every time I won an award I would use that money to finance the music

Thus his latest incarnation, Mzee & Rafiki, was born. Armed with his two friends and co-conspirators, Mzee felt it was time to be masters of their own destiny.

Many an independent record label owner will tell you that it is easier, and cheaper, to buy a fleet of white tigers and teach them the finer points of Olympic fencing than it is to run an independent record label.

"I told my wife I wanted to start my record label myself but I promised not to use my salary. So every time I won an award I would use that money to finance the music. Between '99 and now I've won more than 30 awards," he says without a trace of smugness.

For Mzee the stress involved in running his own label was more than worth the risk.

"You need to own your own stuff because that is where you make money and how you keep control of your talent."

More importantly, owning a label allowed him to focus more on the business of music rather than the art of being famous.

"There are two kinds of musicians: those who come to the industry to be famous and those who come to the industry to make money.

People who just come to be famous neglect the business aspect of it. I came to the industry as a businessman so whatever I do is business-driven," he says.

"I'm not in it for fame, which is why you will notice that I tend to be more behind the scenes," he says.

The business aspect is the reason he spent the past three years working on his current album, Timhamba, a contemporised blend of tribal house and sounds so African you can practically smell the dust flying off the struck djembe.

"We worked on this album in more than 10 different countries with more than 30 different artists and - boom! - the album was finally released this year," he says.

One of the 30 artists was the legendary Malian musician Salif Keita. Having been a lifelong fan of Keita's, Wa Afrika decided to track him down while in Mali. That involved arriving at the airport, asking a random cab driver to take him to Keita's house and hopefully getting a chance to meet the great man.

"I went in there and was told that he had the flu and couldn't see me," says Wa Afrika. "But I exchanged numbers with some people and after that we started talking. At first he was reluctant [to do the song] because we were doing different styles of music. So I sent him the song and the lyrics and he loved it."

From there the process snowballed into an avalanche of flights, studio time and music videos with borrowed Ferraris. Out of that endeavour blossomed a product that is both unique and accessible.

You would be hard pressed to find anything that sounds quite like Timhamba on the radio but, unlike much of the other "unique" music out there, that does not mean it has turned its nose up at mainstream sensibilities.

In many ways it reflects the man behind it. Mzilikazi wa Afrika is congenial and easy to digest but fitting him and his music cosily into a box is an exercise in futility. He is palpably different. Come to think of it, so is Superman.