At a gala dinner held soon after South Africa’s most contested election since the end of apartheid, a singer reminded the gathered politicians how to do their jobs.
“I want to implore you to think of the people of this country, and to think about why you have been chosen,” the singer, Thandiswa Mazwai, told the political elite at the June gala, put on by the Independent Electoral Commission in Johannesburg to mark the release of the vote’s final results.
Many of those listening were members of the African National Congress, the long-governing party that had just suffered stinging losses at the polls, a rebuke from voters frustrated by corruption and mismanagement after three decades of the A.N.C. being in charge.
Then, Ms. Mazwai, after her brief spoken remarks, burst into a set of songs whose lyrics, rather than offering light entertainment, instead doubled down on her determination to call out political malpractice. She sang of “fools for leaders” and “thieves” who “should leave Parliament.”
Chastising her influential audience is unlikely to cost Ms. Mazwai any future gigs — she’s simply too popular to cancel. At 48, she has performed for South Africans — from everyday fans to Nelson Mandela — for 30 years, as long as the country has been a multiracial democracy.
With her music reaching a wide audience and often containing sharp social commentary, Ms. Mazwai has emerged as the voice of a generation born during apartheid’s violent twilight: the first group of Black South Africans to enjoy the freedoms of a democratic South Africa but also to be confronted with its disappointments.
In a country that holds dear the right to protest after the crushing rule of the apartheid regime, Ms. Mazwai has used her mezzo-soprano voice to amplify South Africa’s struggles, just as her predecessors — activist performers like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela — did during apartheid.
“I don’t take my job lightly,” she told the politicians that night. “My calling is to sing the people’s joy, to sing the people’s sadness.”
Born in 1976, a year when an uprising by school children and the brutal response by the apartheid police roiled South Africa, Ms. Mazwai’s life has been marked by political turmoil.
Her singing career began in 1994, when South Africa held its first democratic election. Since then, three of her four solo albums have been released during elections years, a synchrony which she described as “serendipitous.”
“The energy was kind of right for me to bring my voice into it,” she said of her latest album, Sankofa, released earlier this election year. The album’s title is taken from Ghana’s Twi language and means “to go back and fetch what has been left behind.”
Ms. Mazwai’s music often longs for an idyllic past, unspoiled by racism and colonialism, but maintains the urgency of the present.
In the song, “Dark Side of the Rainbow,” one of the new album’s 11 tracks, she sings of leaders with “minds left destitute by greed” and sampled an audio recording of a chaotic session in South Africa’s Parliament. The song’s title is a subversive reference to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s optimistic description of post-apartheid South Africa as “the Rainbow Nation.”
Ms. Mazwai has not always been a critic of South Africa’s leaders. Her career took off during the euphoria of the Mandela presidency, from 1994 to 1999, and she performed for Mr. Mandela several times.
She was among a pioneering group of young musicians who created the sound of the new democracy: the rebellious dance music, known as kwaito, that drew on hip-hop, R&B and African pop. With the band Bongo Maffin, for which she was a lead vocalist, Ms. Mazwai took kwaito, and the new South Africa, to the rest of the world.
Ms. Mazwai grew up in Soweto, in one of the historic township’s neighborhoods where residents had middle-class aspirations, signified by what she said were known locally as “big window” houses. Her parents were politically active journalists; her mother had been one of the few Black students at the University of the Witwatersrand. As South Africa slowly integrated, her parents enrolled her in a prestigious girls’ school in Johannesburg’s wealthy suburbs.
The experience was a culture shock, and not just because the young Ms. Mazwai was regarded with suspicion whenever another student misplaced something. She was the only Black child in her class and teachers sometimes brought up her father’s politically charged newspaper articles. “No Black child could survive that world,” she said.
She transferred to a more diverse school, one with a Pan-African outlook, and then followed her mother to the University of the Witwatersrand but dropped out to pursue her music career with Bongo Maffin.
The group, founded in 1996, quickly garnered celebrity status. Ms. Mazwai’s relationship with a bandmate and the child they. had together made headlines. Young people copied her contemporary African fashion sense, wearing a turban with a formal suit or painting tribal dots on her face as part of her makeup. The impact of the band was so enduring that their music is still on the playlist at parties and weddings all over South Africa.
An upbeat sample of Miriam Makeba’s “Pata Pata” brought them to the attention of the doyenne of South African music. Ms. Makeba, the celebrated singer and anti-apartheid activist, effectively anointed Ms. Mazwai as her successor, but set her a challenge, too: What kind of artist did she want to be?
Ms. Mazwai answered in her first solo album, “Zabalaza,” a word that means rebellion or revolution in the Xhosa language. In the album, released in 2004, Ms. Mazwai stretched her vocal cords across jazz, funk and soul. South Africa’s revolution was no longer against the apartheid regime, but against the H.I.V.-pandemic, against grinding poverty and joblessness — all mismanaged by the governing party. Ms. Mazwai’s early fame did not shield her from these maladies, so she sang about them.
“I think the role of the artist is to use their gifts intentionally to free people from suffering,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times, reflecting on her career.
Her 2009 album “Ibokwe,” or goat (an animal with ritual significance) featured another legendary South African musician, Hugh Masekela. He became what Ms. Mazwai described as her “industry dad,” and she regularly performed with him.
Her next album, “Belede,” the only one not released in an election year, explored grief: for her mother Belede Mazwai, who died in 1992 and never saw a free South Africa, and for Ms. Mazwai’s other mentor, the singer Busi Mhlongo.
“Belede” also grieved for the life South Africans thought they would have but have yet to attain, and in the song “Ndiyahamba” (“I’m Leaving”), Ms. Mazwai imagines leaving an unforgiving city life for a bucolic setting.
Despite this hankering for escape in her songs, Ms. Mazwai said she won’t turn away from a troubled society. A queer woman in a country where Black lesbians still live in fear, Ms. Mazwai describes her life as “political.”
“The lives of those I love is political and I cannot escape the telling of our collective stories,” she said.
Ms. Mazwai’s music and fashion also deliberately embrace the aesthetic of the rest of the African continent. Her latest album was partly recorded in Dakar, and the cowrie shell has become a signature accessory. It’s another act of defiance when South Africa still struggles to integrate with the rest of the continent and African immigrants are often the targets of attacks.
That anti-immigrant animosity is driven by a desperation in poor townships and shanty towns where voting and protest seem to make no difference, Ms. Mazwai said.
“The real indictment is on our governments,” she said. “Whether it’s the Zimbabwean government or the South African government or the Congolese government, our governments are failing us.”
Despite the gravity of her music, her live performances are also joyful, and cheeky. In a packed London venue recently, a fan threw a bra on the stage, and Ms. Mazwai wore it as a hat.
The anger and suffering of her albums are always tempered with love, and on “Sankofa” Ms. Mazwai offers a soothing balm, the result, she said, of her own healing. Singing to her younger self — and to all of us — she sings “Kulungile”: It’s going to be all right.
