Sangoma

"Sangoma" announces Yvonne Chaka Chaka at the height of her reign as South Africa's Princess of Africa, a bright bolt of 1980s Johannesburg bubblegum and mbaqanga. The groove is irresistibly buoyant — chiming synth stabs, a springy electric bassline, the four-on-the-floor township disco pulse, and the rolling, syncopated guitar lines that descend from earlier mbaqanga. Over it Chaka Chaka rides with a clear, joyous, slightly grainy mezzo, trading lines with a tight backing chorus in the call-and-response that anchors so much South African pop. A sangoma is a traditional Zulu healer and diviner, a channel to the ancestors, and the song invokes that figure with affection and reverence even as the production is gleamingly modern — a characteristic tension of apartheid-era township music, which fused electronic dancefloor sheen with deeply indigenous reference. Sung partly in Zulu, it carries the coded resilience of Black urban life under apartheid, where a danceable hit could also quietly affirm cultural identity the regime sought to erase. The mood is celebratory, communal, defiant in its sheer pleasure. It's a song for a packed shebeen or a wedding, bodies moving in unison, but listen closely and you hear a people insisting on their own spirits, their own healers, their own joy.