Independent Women Part I

Seventy years after 20,000 women marched on Pretoria’s Union Buildings carrying petitions against the pass laws, South African women still won’t be told who they’re supposed to be.

Today, though, the battleground is more melodic.

Instead of government buildings, there are recording studios. Festival stages have replaced protest marches. Spotify algorithms have become the new gatekeepers. The fight hasn’t disappeared; it’s just found a different soundtrack.

The South African Music Awards return to Sun City this year for their “Homecoming Edition”, and it’s difficult to imagine a more fitting moment to celebrate the women shaping the country’s musical identity. They arrive wearing completely different uniforms. Simphiwe Dana is regal in sculptural African silhouettes and impossible to mistake for anyone else. Zawadi YaMungu is draped in flowing fabrics and ancestral symbolism, as though performance were ceremony rather than entertainment. Lord Kez brings polished urban cool and funky styling that feels lifted from a ’90s R&B video, remixed for 2026. Babalwa M is understated, elegant and gloriously glamorous. Nia Pearl is camera-ready with the easy confidence of someone born for the stage.

Different generations, different audiences, different genres, but they share a stubborn refusal to sound – or look – like anybody else, and they won’t compromise their own identities to please a fickle market.

Nobody embodies that boldness quite like Simphiwe Dana. She’s always looked just like she sounds: African, without doubt, intellectually curious, entirely unconcerned with fashion’s passing whims. Whether wrapped in dramatic headwraps, bold prints or pared-back elegance, she carries herself with the confidence of someone who stopped asking for permission years ago, if she ever did. Even in conversation, there’s little interest in decorating an opinion to make it more palatable. She says what she means, and performs in the same way.

Two decades after her album Zandisile, Dana is again among the Sama nominees, recognised for MOYA (Best African Contemporary Album) and Female Artist of the Year. Awards, though pleasant interruptions, don’t consume the artist who’s built a career by ignoring instructions.

“I won’t change,” she says. “I don’t do music for likes. I won’t follow trends. Otherwise I definitely wouldn’t still be here 22 years into the game.”

While young artists are encouraged to think about engagement before expression and branding before biography, Dana has ignored all of it – the algorithms, playlists and songs that explode for 15 seconds on TikTok before disappearing into the digital ether. Each of her albums sounds like Simphiwe Dana and that refusal to compromise is her superpower.

MOYA, the album written after the death of her mother, became, in her words, “My saving grace, my Noah’s Ark in the flood that was my grief.” She means it. “I write what and when I’m called to,” she says. Over 22 years, Dana has patiently chipped away at a body of work that feels inseparable from who she is. “I came to Joburg not knowing what music to make. When I saw what everyone else was doing, I knew I didn’t want to do all of that.” Instead she turned to Xhosa cosmology and African spirituality, towards the sounds and stories of the Eastern Cape that had shaped her before record companies discovered her.

By commercial logic, it shouldn’t have worked, but she became one of South Africa’s most internationally celebrated musicians, collecting awards across Europe, performing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages and finding her music on the curriculum at Oxford University. “The audience that surprised me most was white people,” she laughs. “They don’t understand the language but they still love the music.” It shows that you don’t have to understand the words to get the feeling.

Still, she’s refreshingly dismissive of the expectations still placed on female artists. “I hate those interviews that ask me questions like, ‘As a mother…’ when I am a woman first before anything. You don’t see people asking men questions about fatherhood.”

She also believes women continue to carry a disproportionate burden when they choose to speak publicly. “Women face constant judgement and scrutiny when they speak up about anything,” she says. “What saved me is that I’m a firstborn. I don’t take anything at face value. I refuse to just lie down and take it.”

That same instinct runs through the work of Zawadi YaMungu. If Dana feels rooted to the earth, Zawadi floats above it. Often dressed in natural fabrics with intricate braids framing her face, she has the presence of someone who treats music like a spiritual offering. You get the sense that she would still sing exactly the same songs if there were no audience at all.

Her nominated album Ngimuhle occupies a space that’s difficult to categorise. Jazz? Indigenous music? Spiritual music? Or just Zawadi? “My voice is a bridge between ancestors and future generations,” she says. When you hear the music, you hear why. Her songs weave together indigenous traditions, Afro-jazz and contemporary arrangements without sounding like a museum exhibit or anthropological artefacts. They breathe, move and feel alive.

Though there was pressure to make the music more commercially digestible, she listened to “what my ancestors wanted me to do”.

The title Ngimuhle – I am beautiful – isn’t about appearance. “It means accepting yourself,” she says. “Being enough.”

If Zawadi leans back to carry history forward, Lord Kez looks to the future without ever losing sight of where she came from. The Joburg singer is effortlessly cool, impeccably styled and as comfortable in front of a fashion camera as she is behind a microphone. She embodies the sleek confidence of contemporary R&B while carrying echoes of the artists who shaped her.

She calls her sound “Neo Nostalgia” – a blend of the music she grew up with and the world she lives in now. “I was raised on music from the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s,” she says. “Because I was also raised in the modern age, I blend nostalgic elements with future-facing songwriting.”

You, Me & The 90’s is the project that’s earned her nominations for Best R&B/Soul Album, Female Artist of the Year, Record of the Year and Best Remix.

“I made a decision two years ago to stop being committed to being misunderstood,” she says. Some artists romanticise obscurity, wearing incomprehensibility like a badge of honour. Lord Kez decided she’d rather be understood without becoming ordinary, inviting people into her world but completely standing out in it. “I’ve managed to do that on my own terms,” she says.

For women in music today, success isn’t measured only by the songs. They need to be singers, musicians, sex symbols, entrepreneurs, fashion icons, social media personalities, creative directors, businesswomen and brands, all while staying effortlessly authentic.

Finding that balance without disappearing into performance is an art. Babalwa M seems to have mastered it. Nicknamed the “Queen of Private School Amapiano”, she’s become one of the genre’s defining voices, proving that amapiano isn’t just a soundtrack for late nights and crowded dance floors. It can be intimate, reflective, unexpectedly tender. But she’s wary of being confined by the label. “I never go into the studio thinking about a genre,” she says. “I make music that feels true to me, that’s rooted in authenticity. I’ll keep exploring different sounds as I grow.”

Her nominated album Acquiesce follows a year that included the double-platinum success of Bo Thata, while Ama Cup shows how sophisticated the genre’s storytelling has become. Looking back on Acquiesce, she describes it as “an album about growth, trusting yourself and embracing every season you’re in. As a woman, it reflects my softness, my strength and my journey.”

As a woman redefining amapiano, she hopes those following behind her will inherit an industry in which their voices are heard. The lesson she wishes she’d learnt is simple: “Confidence comes from being yourself. I’d tell young women to take up space.”

Then there’s Nia Pearl, who has the sort of charisma that makes stardom look easy. Gloriously glamorous, she moves between the worlds of amapiano, pop and fashion, one of the faces of South African music’s international rise. Her nominations for Record of the Year, Best Produced Music Video and Music Video of the Year recognise an artist redefining contemporary South African music for the global stage.

Taken together, these five women don’t fit into any single narrative. One draws from ancestral wisdom, another from church harmonies. One from 1990s R&B, another from township nightlife, yet another from amapiano’s constantly evolving pulse.

All of them share a tangible confidence in their own voices, messages, styles and looks, and arrive at the same place: authenticity.

Seventy years after the women of 1956 marched against laws designed to restrict their movement, today’s artists are still making their voices heard. The placards have become microphones, the slogans have become songs, but the message hasn’t changed: we’re here, and this is what we sound like.