Moses Mchunu

Born in 1953, Moses Mchunu hails from the village of Nkandla in the Province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. His style of music falls into the neo-traditional form of Mbaqanga - infectious and complex four-bar sequences of acoustic guitar, vocals and harmonies, strong baselines, drums and usually an accordion and/or a fiddle. To many Black South Africans Mchunu’s music will be familiar from his hit track "Qhwayilahle" on the Indestructible Beat of Soweto album in 1985. The roots of this music echo and resonate deep into the 60’s and 70’s where lone maskandi musicians would commune with guitars or concertinas while they walked the white suburbs and industrial areas of Durban. Mchunu’s records bought mostly by migrant workers sing of matters and moments in rural traditional African life – cattle, religion, harvest, praising clans and chiefs, marriage and death – but not too obviously close to the social conditions pertaining to apartheid at the time.