Mahlathini Nkabinde

Simon Nkabinde was born on the twenty-seventh of January 1937 at Newcastle in the Natal Midlands of South Africa, the son of Edward Nkabinde — a Zulu mineworker — and a domestic-worker mother whose name does not appear in the surviving family record. The family moved when he was an infant to the Alexandra Township of Johannesburg in pursuit of mine-belt labour. He sang from his sixth year in the family worship choir at the Zion Christian Church congregation at Alexandra. He left the school at twelve in 1949 to work as a domestic servant in the white Johannesburg suburbs.

He was discovered at fourteen at a 1951 wedding by the choirmaster Aaron Lerole of the Alexandra Black Mambazo vocal group. The Lerole brothers' record was the founding moment of South African mbaqanga — the township urban jive that synthesised Sotho, Zulu and Xhosa rural choral traditions with the swing-jazz rhythm section of the American 1940s big bands. Mahlathini joined the Alexandra Black Mambazo in 1951 as a junior groaner — the deep-baritone male solo voice characteristic of the genre, set against the female three-part female-vocalist harmony.

He acquired the stage name Mahlathini — Zulu for the forest, given to him in reference to the depth of his vocal register — by 1959. He joined the Mahotella Queens in 1964 — the female vocal trio of Hilda Tloubatla, Nobesuthu Mbadu and Juliet Mazamisa under the Gallo Records producer West Nkosi — and recorded with them across the following thirty-five years the body of recorded work that constitutes the principal canon of South African mbaqanga.

The Mahlathini Lions of Soweto Tour of 1987 — at the height of the cultural-boycott isolation of apartheid South Africa — produced his decisive international audience and led to the 1989 American tour and the 1992 Earthworks album Stoki Stoki.

He died of diabetes-related complications at Pretoria on the twenty-seventh of July 1999, at sixty-two.

He is honored here as the Lion of Soweto.