Black Coffee: 'Song played a big role in liberating South Africa'

Away from the poppy Afrobeats of Nigeria and Ghana comes another breakout star of African dance music: the lugubrious, sensual house of Nathi Maphumulo, AKA Black Coffee. For years, the 40-year-old has been building a reputation with his DJ sets around the globe and BET award-winning productions, all of which are executed with one hand following a traffic accident as a teenager. We spoke to him ahead of one of his biggest UK dates so far, at the South West Four festival on bank holiday weekend.

You grew up in the 1980s in Umlazi, a township in apartheid South Africa. What was life like back then?

A township is a place strategically built by the South African government to put black people, and make sure they don’t amount to anything. Everything was limited. Townships were far away from the city, and coming to the city cost you money, but that was where the resources were. The hardest thing to do was leave and find opportunities, so kids get caught up in the township, where there’s nothing to aspire to be. The people who did well were people who stole for a living. They were the most stylish, and they were the people you’d look up to. They were the people who were having a bit of fun with their lives. So it was a far-fetched dream for me to come out and find a platform. It took so much desire, and being aggressive with that desire. I wasn’t willing to let it go.

Where did you start making music?

Everywhere. I saw every place as an institution. I was involved with the school choir. There was an after-school club for kids interested in doing music – I was first in line. I went to study at university, and I was still involved in groups. I was studying jazz, but I did a classical music play on the side. There was a music production studio, where I literally lived. Any opportunity to avail myself, I didn’t hold back.

In 1990, you were involved in an accident in which you lost the use of your left hand. What happened?

It was the morning when Nelson Mandela was coming out of jail and, obviously, given our history, there were celebrations in all the townships. The idea was to sing around the streets, gather more people, go to the stadium across from our house and camp there until the morning until he came out and we could see him on TV. A car came out of nowhere and drove straight through the crowd at high speed: 35 people got injured; two people, including the driver, died – people set him on fire on the spot.

The injuries bothered me a lot: how am I now going to be able to play records? How am I even going to be able to take them out of the covers? It was one of my nightmares. The nerves of my arm got severely damaged, and there was nothing anyone could do but wait for the nerves to grow back. We tried doing physiotherapy twice a week. I was hoping for a miracle, and I realised it was not going to happen. Mentally, I shut down that part of my life, and concentrated on my dream to be a musician. I didn’t feel sorry for myself, I didn’t think “please come tie my shoes for me, please come wash me, please come put this shirt on”. I just started finding ways of doing things. My first car was a manual, but I drove it. I never stopped. Everything I wanted to do, I went for it.

It took a lot of time to learn to DJ again – I’d spend a couple of hours after school just playing. It took a lot of time to get to the level of playing I’m on now. I knew one day I would find an opportunity, but I wanted that opportunity to find me ready. I had no residency, hardly any gigs, but I collected records with the little I could afford, and kept on practising.

How did you discover house?

At first, my cousin and his friends would DJ. They used to do birthday parties. He was also my neighbour, and on Sundays, coming back from parties, he’d connect the soundsystem in his room. Soon I started doing mixtapes for myself, trying to beatmatch the music, choosing songs I knew that, tempo-wise, were close together. But at the time there wasn’t very much house. Soul II Soul, Earth Wind and Fire, Snap, Technotronic … We used to call it “international” music. It was just danceable. This was before we started doing our own house music, called kwaito.

How did you start building up your reputation?

I couldn’t afford to study any more, and I decided to leave school. A friend of mine had a record store and they were like: if you want a job, you can come help, teach people how to DJ, and sell records. The money was not good, but it opened my mind. Then I decided: this is holding me back. I now had no income at all, but I wanted to focus on my album. I made ends meet somehow. Singles came out, I started opening for people, and making a bit of money. If you establish yourself as a DJ, you don’t need an album – you just need to be as good as your last gig.

You’ve come a long way since then – your Africa Rising concert featured an entire orchestra. What made you want to do that?

House music is more than just an underground thing. You can dress it up and expose it to a black-tie market, but still keep the essence of it. That show, I could take it anywhere – I could take it to Vegas. House music is misunderstood, and I’d like to see it beyond the level it is in South Africa, where it’s still just an undercurrent.

Why are more South Africans getting turned on to house music?

We come from a very musical place; almost everyone here can sing. Even in rioting – we don’t shout and talk when we’re rioting, we sing, we dance. South Africa wasn’t the most pleasant place for black people, and song played a very big role in liberating the country. Some artists were banned on radio, others had to change their lyrics. One of the biggest artists back in the day was Chicco, and he released a song called We Miss You Manelo, where Manelo meant Mandela. But house music was an escape. There’s not a big minimal techno scene here; soulful, vocal house songs become big, not because someone has marketed them so well, but because people just connect with them.

If house is an escape, what are today’s South Africans wanting to escape from?

The racial problems are still there, underlying. Some blacks are still angry [with apartheid]; some whites are angry that black people are in power now. The black powers are trying to do the best they can with the freedom we fought for, but not everyone is happy. So the old white political parties come back and say: “You see? We told you that you can’t do this on your own. You need us.” There’s a lot of corruption, too.

Your own tracks are definitely soulful, but there’s a melancholic mood to many of them. Where does that stem from?

I can’t explain it. I have a palette inside me, of music, and it’s just a reflection of that. Even when I try to get out of it, and start differently, in the end I always end up there. Even if I collaborate with someone else, it ends up there. It’s the most weird thing. I can’t even take credit for it. The most recent album I released was called Pieces of Me – it’s me, in different styles. But you still think: this is a Black Coffee song. Every time I sit down to make one, I get taken to the same place.

• Pieces of Me is released worldwide on 26 August by Ultra Music. Black Coffee plays South West Four, London, on 28 August.