Umzulu Phaqa: Singing stories, shifting culture and making music her own way

Mail & Guardian

a day ago

Making it big: Umzulu Phaqa's new single Mam'gobhozi is getting a ton of attention online.
It's a still Tuesday morning when I get through to Sphiwe Moya, better known to the world as Umzulu Phaqa.
I'm greeted not just by her voice, but by the unmistakable rural soundtrack of clucking chickens in the background.
'I'm in Thornville,' she says casually, as if this rural KwaZulu-Natal village hasn't just become the unlikely epicentre of a sonic storm sweeping social media platforms.
The buzz? Her single Mam'gobhozi.
A few seconds into the track, you realise this isn't just a song, it's a statement.
A soundbite with soul.
A storytelling session camouflaged in rhythm and resonance.
'I am not someone who is result focused,' she tells me, and it lands like a manifesto. We're living in a time obsessed with virality and algorithms, but Umzulu Phaqa? She just wants the music out.
'When I put out this song it was not mixed or mastered and there were a few politics going around about the stems. I told everyone I just want the song out there and it was released.'
The moniker Umzulu Phaqa wasn't born in a strategy meeting or cooked up in some studio in the city. It was given to her by fellow students back at university.
'When I got there, people would say, 'You are so Zulu!' and that is how the name was given to me.'
And true to her name, her music is unapologetically rooted in isiZulu, but delivered with a modern spin, a style that bends genres and time.
'Fusion artist' is what she calls herself. Not quite amapiano, not quite hip-hop. It's a sonic collage of Afro-soul, Afro-pop — even house — stitched together by lived experience and cultural legacy.
Mam'gobhozi, the title of her recent single, is a term steeped in township slang — it means someone who gossips.
You hear it whispered on street corners, muttered in queues at the spaza, shouted in jest across fences. And now, thanks to Umzulu Phaqa, you can hear it on TikTok and Instagram, with more than 47 000 views and climbing.
I tell her I've seen the video posted on someone's WhatsApp status all the way in the Eastern Cape. She chuckles, unfazed.
'We have a lifetime to make songs, we have a lifetime to make music. Just put the songs out there.'
It's not a strategy; it's an instinct. Her creativity is not driven by deadlines or data, it's spirit-led.
'With regards to my creative process, I don't have one; it all happens organically.'
Before the music existed, there were stories.
'I have always been a writer. I love writing, I love telling stories, so I transitioned from being a writer to now telling stories through my music,' she says.
It shows. There's a narrative sharpness to her lyrics, something deliberate in her turn of phrase, and a folkloric cadence that feels inherited, not taught.
For Umzulu Phaqa, music is more than melody; it's memory.
'The history and heritage of the Zulu people is very deep and very colourful. It started with our grandmothers telling tales and singing to us and they did it their own way.'
She's doing it her own way too. In jeans and beads. With beats, not bows. Yet, the soul remains unmistakably Zulu.
'Because not all of us are called to wear traditional clothes and sing maskandi songs.
'If you can, do it your way — and in a way that fits your time and your generation.'
For Umzulu Phaqa, language is not a limitation; it's liberation.
She's not worried about people understanding every word.
'There is someone out there listening to you. They may not even understand what you are saying but they can feel what is inside of you and they are connecting with it.'
Her international inspirations — Bobby McFerrin and Richard Bona — both testify to this power.
Bona sings in a language she doesn't even speak, yet she knows the words. 'That already tells me about the power of music, the power of the artist.'
Locally, her guiding star was Zahara: 'Her spirit, heart and soul was in her music.'
While her tone is gentle, her insights cut sharp. She isn't shy to critique what's happening.
'What maybe bores me about the local music scene is that it feels like we are recycling the same song over and over again.'
She yearns for deeper lyrical landscapes, for songs that dare to reimagine love, culture and history. She gives examples from the past:
'Steve Kekana said, 'Take your love and keep it' and Izingane Zoma said 'Mina ngasuk' ekhaya ngithi ng'zogana, kanti ng'zogana is'febe sendoda.''
It's this kind of textured storytelling, layered, humorous, bold, that she wants to bring back.
To her, music is sociology, philosophy and cultural anthropology wrapped in verse.
Umzulu Phaqa is unsigned.
'I have never signed to any record label … I have not received a deal that seems to work for me, so being independent only makes sense to me,' she says.
She's quick to acknowledge that independence is not glamorous. It's hard. It's admin. It's late-night uploads and self-funded visuals. But it's honest.
And make no mistake — she's picky: 'Just because I have positioned myself as a fusion artist does not mean that I am agreeable…
'That does not mean that I will hop on any beat and any song then call it a day.'
Authenticity is Umzulu Phaqa's compass, and it doesn't waver for the sake of metrics.
For the youth, especially those born in the past few decades, she is carving out a new archive.
'I also think it is important for those of us born in the 2000s to know who we are and weave that into our everyday lives.'
She's not trying to teach culture by lecture, she's embedding it in lyrics, looping it in basslines. And in doing so, she invites young people to sing themselves back into memory, to chant their surnames into the future.
Whether there's an album coming or not ('only time will tell,' she says), one thing is clear: Umzulu Phaqa is not waiting for the industry to catch up. She's already running her race, on her terms.
She laughs when I mention how Mam'gobhozi has taken over timelines.
'Music is everywhere … like listening to other people's conversations.'
And perhaps that's her magic — she listens, she translates and then she gifts us with songs that sound like ourselves.
Her mission? Simple.
'If there is one thing I want people to take from my music it is to have fun. We hold on [so tight] to wanting a particular outcome that we forget why we make music anyway.'