Thandiswa Mazwai is a bit of an archeologist. Yes, she entertains, but she also excavates, digging as she decorates our aural universe, and treating sound as history with a pulse. At the very end of 2025, the South African Music Awards caught up with this reality. Sankofa won four SAMAs, including Best Female Artist and Best Produced Album, quite a sweep, as Mazwai herself acknowledges.
But she resists the language of triumph and self satisfaction. “Awards feel like a spotlight on the invisible labour — the hours spent shaping the sound until it felt just right,” she says, framing the wins not as validation of celebrity but as recognition of craft. The engineering award mattered to her because it acknowledged what she calls “the technical side and the often ignored parts of making an album”. In an industry that still prefers to mythologise a sort of individual genius rather than celebrate the actual hard work, this was no small thing.
She’s especially delighted that the accolades have shone a light on her collaborator behind the desk. “I’m so happy for the maestro Peter Pearlson to get his flowers because without his mastery this all could have sounded very different,” she says. The phrase “get his flowers” feels right. Sankofa blooms because of discipline, not accident. Its richness is earned, layered slowly and deliberately, with months spent convening over textures, frequencies, and silence.
What surprised Mazwai most, though, wasn’t the industry’s response but the public’s. “What I didn’t expect was how deeply Kulungile would resonate with audiences,” she admits. The song was born, she says, “out of a need to acknowledge childhood wounds”, a private reckoning rather than a calculated single. Somehow, it escaped the confines of autobiography and became communal. “It ultimately became a hymn of healing to so many,” she says. That kind of personal revelation travelling so far has altered her relationship with her listeners. “That intimacy reaching the world is humbling and has strengthened our bond as the artist and the audience.”
The album’s title isn’t decorative. Sankofa — the idea of returning to retrieve what’s been left behind — operates as both political philosophy and personal instruction. “On a political note there’s still much that needs to be returned to the African child,” Mazwai says, listing land, tradition, ancient knowledge systems and pride as unfinished business. But there’s also a quieter retrieval at work. “On a personal note I had to reclaim the joy of my childhood self, the child who walked barefoot in the rain, before death left its mark on my innocence.”
After more than three decades in music, now approaching 50, Mazwai’s understanding of success has calcified into something durable. “I’ve never been someone concerned with fame or riches,” she says. Instead, she was taught early that music is obligation as much as it’s bestowed. “From a young age I was taught that this is a gift that I must honour.” Mentorship played a decisive role. Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba encouraged her to think in decades, not singles. One letter from Masekela has become talismanic. “Bra Hugh wrote me a letter 30 years ago… saying, ‘you have the potential to become the most important artist of your generation if you respect your gift and keep a level head.’” She pauses on that memory. “These words spoke life into my future.”
Listening to Sankofa, what strikes you is how ancient it sounds though it completely fits into our times. This isn’t heritage music sealed behind glass. Mazwai is explicit about how she avoids nostalgia. “Tradition is an ever changing thing and so I let the ancestors guide the rhythm while technology interjects with contemporary ideas,” she says. Then she offers the same thesis refined: “Nostalgia is memory and evolution is movement. Sankofa is both these things.”
The SAMA wins for production and engineering underline something else Mazwai cares deeply about: authority. “Sound is sovereignty,” she says. “Too often, women are seen as voices, not architects.” On this album, she was determined to control the blueprint. “I wanted to own the layers, the frequencies, the silences. Every sound is intentional, every texture… is deliberate.” She and Pearlson laboured for months, not chasing perfection but looking to communicate meaning. The result is music that feels authored but not overly academic.
Sankofa doesn’t end when the album stops spinning. It spills outward into the Sankofa Festival, which Mazwai describes as something more than entertainment. “Festivals are living archives,” she says. “They create space for communion — for strangers to become a chorus. When the music erupts in a space, it’s more than performance; it’s ritual.” The spirit of the festival, she says, is “one of love, healing and joy”.
In a country still shaped by historical and contemporary trauma, Mazwai is realistic about what music can and can’t do. “Music deals with the spirit,” she says. “It goes right to the essence of who we are and speaks directly to it.” She becomes almost mystical when describing its effects — its ability to connect us to nature, God, uMdali. But she draws a firm boundary. “Music can’t legislate justice — it can only inspire it.” Healing, she insists, must travel beyond the heart. “It must move into policy, into action.”
Her belief in artist-curated festivals grows from this same ethic. “They are important in fostering community and collaboration within the arts,” she says, especially when they are “less about profit margins and more about a certain purpose”. Sankofa Fest, she explains simply, “is my offering to that movement”.
Mazwai remains unusually attentive to younger artists, perhaps because she remembers being one. Today’s emerging musicians, she believes, are both empowered and vulnerable. “There are so many things that have over the years shifted into the hands of artists,” she says, pointing to platforms like TikTok. But her advice is sober. “All I can suggest is that they learn more about what rights belong to them and how to create lifelong careers out of this.” Sankofa, in this reading, isn’t just an album but a manual for endurance.
She hopes listeners carry a message after the applause fades: “That we’re not fragments — we’re ancient stories. That culture isn’t costume; it’s soul.” Then, the closing instruction: “To be human now means to remember, to resist and to love fiercely.”
As for the future, there’s no slowing down. 2026 will bring Sankofa Fest, the completion of her memoir, a retrospective exhibition, and travel “in search of the next idea”. The voice that remembers is still walking barefoot in the rain — only now, the world is listening closely, hearing each step.
SIDEBAR
The Sankofa Heritage Festival is dedicated to preserving and celebrating indigenous African music, It will be held at Carnival City, Joburg on February 28.
Mazwai says: “I’m so excited to have my dear friends Somi and Msaki as co-headliners for the inaugural year of Sankofa fest.
They’ve been sisters to me for years and we’ve been appearing at each others events all over the world. Somi is an Ugandan musician who centres archive in her work. We’ve worked together on her album dedicated to Miriam Makeba. Msaki is a musician and cultural worker who’s activated many young artist careers. For Sankofa fest she’ll perform with an ensamble including artists from Sudan and Kenya.”
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