In June this year Zakes Bantwini had a pinch-me moment: the Grammy Award winner and Afro-house stalwart graduated from Harvard Business School.
“I mean, there is nobody who doesn’t know what a Grammy is. But just walking the campus at Harvard, being at Harvard Business School, it was a pinch-me moment. I have a permanent Harvard e-mail address; at no stage would I have believed it if someone said to me, when I was in KwaMashu, that one day you’ll be a Harvard alumni and you’ll have a Grammy.”
We find ourselves sharing this moment — in a surprisingly public rendering of Hot Lunch — during a delectable three-course dinner served at the Fairlawns Boutique Hotel to mark the launch of Wine & Executive Club, a new series of monthly dinners by Capriccio Lifestyle. The select audience of gourmand oenophiles tasting the wonderful cultivars from Creation Estate in Hermanus are hanging on Zakes’ every word, and, I might add, intervening with a few chirps of their own.
The second son of four children, Zakes grew up in KwaMashu. “I was born in the ’80s, so I lived nine years of my life under apartheid, and the rest I lived as a fully free guy. I grew up in a very loving family. We were so poor, we survived with just laughter and a good heart, and I still have so much love because of that.
“Music came as an escape. I could say television really saved my life. During apartheid ... we did not have electricity. So you have one hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half, depending on when you’re home. Because the battery is gonna go [flat] and batteries were quite expensive. So I would be watching music videos, and it’s like — this is the life that I want to live. I felt if I want to live like this, then I need to be a musician because I was watching music videos.”
But he went on a dancing digression first. “I started as a dancer. I had an opportunity when I was 17/18 years old. I lived in France in 1990, and I was a ballerina. I could not say that I was a ballerina because in the township being a ballerina is something else — you’re soft.
“My choreographer was the founder of the dance company I was working for. I think he knocked the love of dance out of my system. We toured more than 140 cities in Europe and West Africa. Everybody from the township knows how to dance and they know how to play football. It’s not like you’re special, you’re just doing what everybody’s doing. There’s so many people who dance. But I think for me, I was just lucky.”
I signed my first artist and three of my classmates. I made my first serious money when I was 20. At 25 I remember looking at my bank account and I was like, I’m a millionaire — because I had a million in my account.
— Zakes Bantwini
But when he returned in December from the extreme touring he decided to stay. “I was like, I am never gonna go back to the company again. What is the next thing I can do? Music, because I love being in that particular space. So I said to my mother ... I want to pursue this thing of music. And she [told me], you are going to go study that thing because you want to be different [to] the next guy. Whatever you want to do, go study.”
The UKZN jazz alumnus, who majored in piano and bass, always had a bigger picture in mind. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I remember one of my lecturers asked us, what do you guys want to do? And I said I want to be the guy who sign’s David Beckham’s cheque (he had just signed this big transfer deal). So I opened my record label in 2004, and it is 21 years old now.
“I signed my first artist and three of my classmates. I made my first serious money when I was 20. At 25 I remember looking at my bank account and I was like, I’m a millionaire — because I had a million in my account.
“But you know, the success when you’re young, all the artists then leave because I made it look so easy they thought they could do it themselves. They didn’t want to share.
“So then I was like, let me just go and record myself because I’ll never betray myself, which is what I did. And it worked out.”
It could have all turned out very differently. At 14 he became a teenage father. I asked him what he would say to that young man now.
“I would say to that boy, go to school, that’s one thing. And two is traveling. My life really changed completely when I went to Paris, and then traveling around the world. I came back as a different guy. I knew that my destiny was to go back overseas, whatever it took. And I knew that I needed to do something to get back, you know? So my whole life changed.
“For you to afford it, you have to have money. How do you get money? By working hard. It spoke to my entrepreneurial things. I knew when I went to study music, I’m not studying music for me to be a musician. I’m studying music for me to understand the business of music and sign artists. But then artists will leave my label. Then I end up saying: ‘OK, now let me sign myself’.”
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