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I won’t begrudge Dudu Manhenga for keeping me waiting a whole hour.
She had a brilliant reason for being late: the tip of her stiletto had fallen off and so she had to have it fixed before our chat! How very considerate!
I didn’t expect an apology, and I didn’t get any.
“I got my heel stuck at the pavement of my son’s school. I had to go to Avondale to have it fixed before I met you for this chat.”
Our rendezvous was the Book Café at the Fife Avenue Shopping Centre. I am impressed by her attitude: she is the kind of woman who gets her way. Here is a real diva seated opposite me but. . .
“I am not a diva,” the jazz sensation says in a way that is not exactly self-deprecating, but she is not modest either.
She lifts her Dolce and Gabbana stiletto to show the repair.
Dudu is 29 — and delectable.
Our “chat” is full of life. I prefer to call it a verbal tennis game because the songbird is forever in a contest of words, never short of an answer for any question.
Like in any tennis match, I want an ace, to knock her off without reply. So I really go under her skin.
I ask her how she has managed to balance her deep Christian beliefs and the fact that her mother is a sangoma or traditional healer.
The blow deflated her a bit, but it was not the killer punch I had wanted.
She sighs before she smiles: “The Bible tells us to honour our parents, no matter whatever they do.
“I was brought up as an independent woman.
“I looked closely at the benefits and lack thereof of her ideology and that of the whole concept of African traditional religion.
“I decided to be a Christian.”
She says she has never consulted her mother for her services and is quick to clarify that her mother is a traditional healer and not a witchdoctor!
“She is a woman who believes in the use of African herbs.
“She can also be called a spirit medium because she can foretell events.
“She is not a witchdoctor because those can be asked to kill and do as instructed,” Dudu said.
Well done Dudu, mother’s girl.
Yet there was something to be benefitted from those nights in which a young Dudu attended the emgidweni ceremonies where ancestral spirits are invoked to deal with troubling matters.
“I played the drum. It was pleasant then and it was the birth of my love for music. I do not attend now.
“I do not even contribute any finance towards the ceremonies but they introduced me to the beauty of the African beat.”
Her first encounter with a microphone, she recalls, was when she was in the first grade through a music teacher at St Bernard’s Primary School in Bulawayo.
Predictably she was part of the school’s choir until she left for St Columbus’ High School. She was a headgirl at both schools.
That maybe explains the reason she is the chairperson of the newly formed Association for Women in Performing Arts. She is a natural leader.
It might also explain why she had a fallout with producers, last year over a 10-song piracy album after she took leadership of the production.
She bluntly told the producers of the project that the songs must be international.
“I did not snub the project. I was the one who had proposed it in 2007.
“I simply did not agree with the way the songs were being packaged.
“What sense would it have made if a person in Kenya had failed to understand it,” Dudu said.
Performing professionally since the age of 16, Dudu has emerged a leading figure on the local scene.
She has earned the respect of the music industry and audiences alike, and is active in working for the rights of artists and women.
She started off as the lead vocalist of the group Gospel Band, which was a creation of Amakhosi Theatre.
At 17 she joined Siyeza where she got mentored by the late Max Mhlanga.
“The age group was 39 to 50. I know I got a lot of help from Mr Kaitano.
“I do not remember his first name. They were all father figures I never bothered to ask their first names,” Dudu said.
She moved to Harare two years later after Busi Ncube, Dolorosa Mubvumbi and Tafara Mbaya lured her to the capital.
She was to perform at the Book Café’s famed Open Mic.
She dazzled and it came as no surprise when she was easily co-opted into Oliver Mtukudzi’s band.
Soon Tanga wekwa Sando also called for her services. She was only 19 at the time.
In 2001 she formed the group Colour Blu, along with her husband and partner, drummer Blessing Muparutsa.
They recorded their debut nine-track afro-jazz fusion album Out of the Blu in 2003, which was warmly received by jazz lovers and contained songs which became hits such as Mvura, Bengimthandile and MaDlamini.
In 2007, Dudu and Colour Blu released Jula — a Ndebele word meaning “depth” — an album which aptly describes Dudu’s musical journey, on which she has reached deep into herself to give her music an identity that is unique and distinctive.
In her own words, “The album is a synthesis of my experience so far in the music industry where I have grown from listening to various music genres, searching for my own space and identity in the industry and finally realising my individuality — where I have come from, where I am going to and who I am.”
In Manhenga’s style she always has the last word: “What I simply know is that I treat my music as a business and I am doing well.
“I know we had female artists who came and went and got nothing out of their talent.
“I am here to change that. I am a music entrepreneur,” said the mother of one daughter and three sons.
Deuce.
BY JOHN MOKWETSI
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