HENNING MELBERON 28 JANUARY, the voice of Sibongile Khumalo was silenced. South Africans mourned the passing of another symbol of pride and dignity leaving this world far too early.
Born in Soweto on 24 September 1957, Khumalo grew up in a family who loved music. Her father Khabi Mngoma led a choir in which she sang and played the violin. He later established a music department at the University of Zululand, going on to become a professor there.
As she recalled in an interview in Afripop! on her 60th birthday: “Music to me is life. It is an intrinsic part of who I am and what I do, so much so that one almost takes it for granted. I do not know if I would have done anything else with my life because I was really never exposed to anything else as a child. The curious thing is that we never spent family moments making music. It was like breathing … pervasive, ever present yet unobtrusive.”
For an article in the British Independent, she explained: “Since everything was communal, we all heard each other’s music: Some neighbours held church services in their yard, some played drums, some – like my elder brother – played jazz, so I grew up surrounded by myriad sounds.”
At eight, Khumalo started to learn violin, singing, drama and dance. Preparing for a career as a music teacher, she obtained a BA in music at the University of Zululand and a BA Hons from the University of the Witwatersrand.
In the early 1990s, she became a full-time artist. Her repertoire was mainly classical, specialising initially in Lieder by Schubert and Brahms. Her opera debut came as Carmen. In 1995, she sang in Händel’s Messiah under conductor Yehudi Menuhin. At the same time, she performed in clubs as a jazz singer.
While Western art music was originally a big musical influence, African music traditions became increasingly important. In 1996, she released ‘Ancient Evenings’, her first album. “I knew,” she told The Independent, “when I came to record my first album, it wouldn’t be of European art songs, even though I’d studied them and could do them well because that music didn’t express who I am.” The record, with African hymns mainly in indigenous languages, was an immediate success.
It won the South African Music Awards (SAMAs) for Best Female Vocal Performance and Best Adult Contemporary Performance. With ‘Live at the Market Theatre’ (1998), ‘Immortal Secrets’ (2000), ‘Quest’ (2002), and ‘Breath of Life’ (2016) followed more solo albums and more SAMAs awards.
She consolidated her reputation as one of the most influential local female vocalists, trained in the classical genre while transcending cultural confinements by being able to fuse elements of jazz and traditional African music to a special South Africa brand adding spice to the mainstream entertainment sector.
Sibongile Khumalo defined herself as a performer who was a storyteller, a messenger. As she explained: “I have a greater awareness as a contemporary African woman of the need to not only speak [as an] African but to practise and live African. My spirituality is very much an expression of being an African as I understand it today.”
She was awarded several honorary doctorates for her contributions to music as well as The Order of Ikhamanga in Silver by the South African Presidency for “her excellent contribution to the development of South African art and culture in the musical fields of jazz and opera”.
Khumalo stands in the front row of contemporary female South African vocalists. Her repertoire contributes to an African music tradition inspired by both global and local influences. She represents the dignity and pride that an apartheid system was unable to annihilate. By making her voice heard, she articulated the spirit of self-respect, which the most humiliating and oppressive forms of rule could not silence.
“We often equate leaving a legacy with putting up physical structures. … yet unless those structures are imbued with a certain quality or value, they will not really mean that much to those for whom they are intended,” she told Afripop!.
Hamba Rahle, Sibongile Khumalo.
