Bongeziwe Mabandla

Zola Marcelle at Union Chapel

Bongeziwe Mabandla sings almost entirely in isiXhosa, and his audience, in Berlin, in

Vancouver, in a restored henequen plantation outside Mérida, sings every word back. That's the trick of it, and the point of it. The language is a door, not a wall.

He was born in Tsolo, a small town in the rural Eastern Cape, and raised on the soft-loud architecture of church choirs, Bantu folk songs, and a household where music was a part of every day. The guitar arrived at seventeen. Drama school in Johannesburg followed, then a quiet pivot: songs, open mics, his 2012 debut Umlilo, and a Top 10 finish at France's Prix Découvertes RFI before most South African listeners had caught up.

The real engine of the catalogue, though, is his partnership with Mozambican producer and instrumentalist Tiago Correia-Paulo. Tiago has been the architect alongside him since Mangaliso -the 2017 album that won Best Alternative at the SAMAs and established the formula that still holds: Mabandla's guitar and tenor at the centre, Correia-Paulo's electronics blooming around them. iimini (2020)- a song-cycle about a relationship's unspooling, dropped one day after South Africa's hard lockdown began, landed on American Songwriter's Top Albums of the Year and got NPR calling it "a gorgeous saving grace in trying times." amaXesha (2023) was named The Guardian's Global Album of the Month.