By James Hall
MBABANE, Feb 26 2002 (IPS)

Henry Ndlangamandla is a singer who defines the traditional Swazi male in one respect: he is an umbutfo, a member of King Mswati’s warrior regiments.

Attired in an impala buck loin skin, and carrying a cowhide shield, he performs the duties of his age-mate regiment, the Inkhanyeti, where he is known by his warrior name Gabudzela.

At 24 years old, Ndlangamandla has the handsome good looks of a male model, which nowadays seem to be a requirement for popular singing success. His lean and well-toned warrior body is also a job necessity, particularly if you are going to appear bare-chested when you perform, as Ndlangamandla must when he wears warrior attire on stage.

He is a singer with a mission: to popularise Swazi music internationally, and to make it popular with local youth for which traditional music is passé. He intends to do this not as an archivist, or a mere reviver of traditional performance and songs, but as a moderniser.

His music is a synthesis of traditional beats and melodies and modern themes set against a pop instrumental backdrop.

“In musical categories we have Kwaito, pop, jazz, blues, hip-hop, country, reggae, and Kwasa-Kwasa from central Africa,” he lists. “As a Swazi artist, who might perform in America, there’s no use imitating American. They have their own artists. We can’t sell coal to a place that already has coal. But what I as a Swazi artist ‘sells’ is unique.”

The music Ndlangamandla and his band create is called SAMBAMBANGWANE, the neologism with a rhythm all its own that translates into “we hold onto (the culture of) Ngwane (Swaziland).” Its infectious combination of old and new is finding devotees amongst non-Swazis at the tourist venues where his band, Untonzezwe, perform.

“Swazi music has a market in all the countries in the world because they don’t have what we have in Swaziland,” he says with the confidence of one who believes in his music and his culture. “Our traditional music is our qualification to the world. We need what they have in America here, and they need what we have in Swaziland in America, in Japan . . .”

This cultural evangelical is from the country’s largely rural southern Shiselweni region. “I grew up in a more traditional part of the country,” he says. He sang first part in a boy’s choir in his early secondary school years, and then sang tenor in a mixed boys and girls choir in his latter school years. He is a tenor still, his voice rising to peaks of emotion when he performs lyrics in English and SiSwati.

“We want Swazis to be proud of us,” he says of other Sambambangwane apostles who perform their modern version of traditional music. “Most Swazi youth think our nation’s music is useless. They’re running away from their own culture. They want to hear today’s instruments in songs. So, we add the instruments to show our culture is adaptable.”

His band, Untonzezwe, was started in 1998, and has seven members. The three-member forefront consists of Ndlangamandla, the lead singer, and two backups. The instrumentalists are four South African musicians, comprising lead guitar, bass guitar, keyboard, and drums.

Ndlangamandla plays traditional drums during performances. He and his fellow Swazis may break into the national dance, sibhaca. Sibhacca is a rhythmically demanding dance where the performer, all coiled energy ready to explode, keeps the audience in suspense until he breaks into a series of high-kicking, foot stomping steps in perfect synchronisation with the beater of a large, cowhide drum.

Ndlangamandla was the secretary of the Swaziland Musicians Association, the local musicians’ guild, a duty that did not permit time for performance but allowed him to connect with record producers and promoters. The composer of Untonzezwe’s songs as well as the group’s lead singer, he is compiling songs for their first album.

One original composition has an AIDS awareness message. “As an artist, I am taking responsibility. As artists, we must respond to anything that is going on in the world, like war and disease. When there was a war in Jamaica, they asked Bob Marley to compose a song, and it helped bridge differences and brings peace. He sang, ‘One heart, one love, let’s come together and feel all right.”

An AIDS awareness message is being sewn onto his performance costume, which like Ndlangamandla’s music combines traditional style with modern sensibility.

“My music teacher in South Africa, Mzwakhe Mbuli, who is a lecturer, said I have to be original, and design my own music if I want to make it in the music world. Originality is most important,” says Ndlangamandla.

In one sense, there is nothing original about traditional Swazi music; it’s been around for a long time. But its incessant rhythms and earnest emotions will be a revelation to a world that has not heard the nation’s music before.

Untonzezwe’s traditional songs include “Mine Bengidzakiwe,” about a woman who gets drunk, leaving her husband to wander in search of other women, and “Emalombo,” about a mother’s misery when her daughter’s in-laws fail to pay promised lobola (cattle dowry).

But back to Henry Ndlangamandla’s warrior name. Gabudzela means “a long distance to water,” and refers to the time when he was undergoing an initiation rite to join his regiment.

He was required to run a distance to fetch water from a pond; water that was used to nourish a sapling that would grew into a regimental tree. The name is an apt metaphor for his current mission, to present to the world traditional Swazi music with a modern twist. The run will be a long one.

The saplings he is nourishing are his talent, his band, and an awareness of Swazi cultural music worldwide. But the warrior from the Inkhanyeti regiment is fit; talented and inspired, in good shape to go the distance.

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