By Fred Khumalo
She is frustratingly difficult to pin down. Like mercury, she slips between your fingers the moment you think you have her placed.
One moment you are convinced she is a jazz singer. Then she is collaborating with Black Coffee on his electronic productions. Just when you have settled on that, she surfaces alongside Kabza de Small, Sjava, Kelly Khumalo — and, in a pairing nobody predicted, Jesse Clegg. Then she is a judge on television. Then she appears on Rhythms of Zamunda, the soundtrack to Coming 2 America. Then she is a musical director for a theatre production about a World War I shipwreck.
Perhaps mercury is the wrong image. She is a comet. She does not orbit neatly. She cuts through.
Speaking to True Love about her Entropy EP with Clegg — released last year — she said: “The music happened, and there was no thinking about whether it fits in Jesse’s world or mine. It was just like, we’ve made these songs, they seem to fit together, and the project will sit where it sits sonically. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new sound or if it’s a sound that reflects both of us — this is its own new thing.”
That has always been her approach. It started early.
Born Asanda Lusaneni Mvana in KuGompo City in 1988, she grew up inside music before she understood what music was all about. Her father was a DJ. Her grandfather was a composer. Jazz, soul and traditional isiXhosa music filled the house. By the time she left for Rhodes University to study Visual Art and Design in the late 2000s, the music was already inside her. She was just waiting for the right moment to let it out properly.
That moment came partly in the United States, where she attended the University of North Carolina on a scholarship and immersed herself in folk and bluegrass traditions she had never encountered growing up. You can hear those influences in her music if you listen carefully — a particular way of sitting with a lyric, of letting silence do work.
Her debut EP, Nal’ ithemba, dropped in 2013. It was raw and intimate, recorded in the way first offerings sometimes are — close to the bone, not yet polished into something safe. It announced a songwriter, not just a voice.
Her first full album, Zaneliza: How the Water Moves, came out in South Africa in June 2017. It was a tribute to her late father, co-produced with pianist Nduduzo Makhathini, and it is where people began to understand the scale of what she was doing. Folk, jazz, electronics — not blended smoothly but held in deliberate tension. The offering was nominated for Best Adult Contemporary Album at the South African Music Awards. Her single Iimfama Ziyabona sat on the Metro FM charts for 19 consecutive weeks.
The collaborations that followed took her further. Wish You Were Here with Black Coffee reached listeners who had never heard of Zaneliza. Ubomi Abumanga with Sun-El Musician became something close to an anthem. She worked with Tresor, Kabza de Small, Ami Faku — each one a different conversation, a different room she walked into and made her own.
The deeper water
But it is the work on Dancing the Death Drill that reveals something else about her entirely.
The production — a theatrical adaptation of this writer’s novel about the SS Mendi disaster of 1917, in which more than 600 South African soldiers drowned when their troopship was struck in the English Channel — required a musical director who could hold grief and dignity simultaneously. Msaki did more than that. She built a soundscape that moved between haunting and hopeful without once feeling false. And she returned to Nal’ ithemba, the song that began her recorded career, and reinterpreted it into something that felt, in
the context of the production, like a candidate for a national anthem — not in the official sense, but in the truer sense: a song a country in need of hope might reach for.
Her spirituality is not incidental to any of this. She has spoken openly about her faith and her connection to isiXhosa heritage as the things that keep her anchored when the work pulls in many directions at once. For Msaki, music is not a product. It is a practice something closer to prayer than performance, though she is too grounded to use that word carelessly.
She is 36. The catalogue is already substantial. The range is already remarkable. And she shows no sign of settling into anything as predictable as a signature sound.
The train is still moving.
She is still on it.