Scenes don’t survive on venues and streaming numbers alone. They survive on transmission, one player putting something into the hands of the next, over years, with no certificate at the end of it.
Dr Madala Kunene is the Durban guitarist revered as the king of Zulu guitar, a maskandi-rooted elder who spent decades building a style entirely his own. Sibusile Xaba is a guitarist and singer a generation younger, one of the more adventurous voices working in that tradition today. Kunene took him on as a protégé years ago, and mentor and mentee have since become collaborators. Xaba’s decade alongside him is one of the clearest examples of that we have.
