It’s noon at Café Prestige and Mel Mwevi wants to know what kind of efforts you have to put in to make sure there’s “not one black child at your kid’s f*cking party in this country?”
It’s one of the questions that inspired the singer-songwriter slash performance poet slash actress’ acclaimed play ‘Anna & Christelle’ after a night spent talking about a real-life white family with co-writer Ndali Mupopiwa.
The rest came to her in dream.
This idea for a story that ultimately saw a white Afrikaans woman and black architecture student fall in love before navigating the realities of enduring racism, classism and privileged white obliviousness that define post-colonial Namibia.
During ‘Anna & Christelle”s three-night run at the National Theatre of Namibia’s Backstage, there’s barely a free seat.
Mwevi’s co-star Hazel Hinda is a household name but the intriguing young artist has only just begun.
A simple Google search of Mel Mwevi’s moniker will bring up a TEDx Cape Town poetry performance. “Hear to listen like a desert that glistens with the heat of the sun…”
It’s a sprawling, clear-voiced call to action decrying racism, championing love and summoning accountability interspersed with the sporadic bursts into song that is Mwevi’s signature. The artistic form she’ll use for her incoming debut album which she hopes to release “after the wedding”.
She’s marrying photographer and multi-disciplinary artist Martin Amushendje in October. Passersby interrupt the interview to congratulate her and Mwevi manifests a friend she’s been meaning to consult about the nuptials with a burst of psychic excitement in between yelping moves from chair to chair as she tries to outrun the sun.
She’s prone to burning – her pale skin and on stages which see the likes of Miss H jumping in to jam at the first iteration of ‘Mel Mwevi Shares’ and The Ell’s inviting her to freestyle during one of their sets.
“Collaboration for me is everything,” says Mwevi, who has recently been nominated as a favourite female actor at the Simply You Magazine Lifestyle and Fashion Awards.
“Yesterday The Ell’s asked if I could come jump on their set. I know I will be able to create on the spot with them. I know that my sound will change completely every time I work with different people and I love that. Allowing things to happen very organically is actually where I find the most freedom.”
Not much of a reader, writer or movie watcher despite pursuing an honours degree in live performance for theatre and film at AFDA, Mwevi draws inspiration from what she sees and experiences.
“I don’t feel very secure with writing. I don’t necessarily feel like the most intelligent person,” says Mwevi, who explains this in light of insecurities born during her childhood.
“I didn’t want to read out loud in class. I felt slower so insecurity came around in that. But if I was somewhere and I saw something juicy, me telling my friends, yoh, I was the greatest storyteller, man. That’s where my storytelling came from; I was always on the ground with people. I love sweat. I love bodies. I don’t have much of a sense of personal space, to be honest. I like being in people’s bubbles which is why I have always been around dancing, sweating, singing so I can say my storytelling came from literally being this person who wanted to retell things in a dramatic way.”
The justified drama that has most inspired the artist is South Africa’s #FeesMustFall movement.
Studying in Cape Town at the time, Mwevi credits the movement with waking her up to realities she had never fully considered.
“It was a humbling experience. I was definitely the person who said why the statue, why not showing up at parliament instead. I was in a film school that was shallow as f*ck, people assumed that I am more educated than I am and I realised I have so much to learn,” says Mwevi, who slowly began to become aware of her white privilege and why certain things were available to her.
“#FeesMustFall did that for me. I became self-aware as a white, slender, blue-eyed, American-accented girl, female.”
It’s a self-awareness that is rare in the handful of young white born-free artists creating within the central and mainstream arts scene in Windhoek and something that the artist still grapples with alongside issues of cultural appropriation given her Oshiwambo stage name and style of music influenced by Lauryn Hill, Tracy Chapman and Erykah Badu.
Crediting her Aawambo neighbours – Tuuta and Nena – who introduced her to music, dancing and her beloved kizomba with the name she gave herself at age 16 to honour the women who birthed a significant part of her love of music, Mwevi, who has considered changing her performance tag back to her birth name of Aiff, says she always has the best intentions and a willingness to be educated.
“If you watch my full concert, you may feel a type of way at the beginning and a different way at the end,” she says, adding that she hasn’t got much pushback about her stage name, more about the way she sings and wearing a headscarf.
“I’ve gotten bashed for a lot of things. But the fact that people come to me and want to talk to me is probably one of the biggest acts of love I’ve experienced because why would you want to waste your time to speak to someone who you thought was lost?”
It’s a fortifying and illuminating perspective and Mwevi, who pauses for a second when asked whether her art made at the intersections of womanhood and queerness is activism, says yes.
“Even if I’m writing a love story, I’m talking about a healthy love story so without you knowing I’m really not objectifying any bodies in my love music. I’m talking about building spiritually with somebody. I’m talking about egos dropping and falling to the wayside because love is more important,” she says.
“So even my love songs, as lovey as they are, is activism because that’s what I want my daughter and my son, my kids and everybody to want for themselves.”
“I just want to be an artist and a storyteller. I want to do more work in creating platforms for people to tell their own stories. I want everyone to feel valid. When we are able to see why we are what we are and then choose to move away from the things that are holding us back or that are hurting others, that is when we will truly be free.”
Follow Mel Mwevi on social media.
– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook; marthamukaiwa.com
