I Have My Voice Back

Singer Simphiwe Dana opens up about her vocal cord surgery, battling anxiety and depression and using music to heal her pain

- Khosi Biyela

IT STARTED slowly. She woke up one morning and her voice wasn’t as smooth and sweet as it used to be.

Simphiwe Dana put her husky voice down to having given it her all on stage when she performed at Mam’ Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s memorial at Bassline last year.

She wasn’t singing out of tune, but “my voice wasn’t going where I wanted it to”, she says. She knew something was wrong and wasted no time getting a professional medical opinion.

Simphiwe (39) was stunned when doctors diagnosed her with vocal dysphonia, a disorder in which the muscles that generate a person’s voice go into periods of spasm.

“I thought I was going to lose my voice forever,” she tells DRUM.

Vocal dysphonia, doctors told her, is caused by voice misuse such as not warming up the voice properly before singing.

“I’d been straining my voice for years and ended up with holes in my vocal muscles.”

Simphiwe has always sung her heart out. “When I perform my spirit takes over and I’m in a different space, I don’t even see people,” she says.

Her instrument was damaged, but luckily it was not beyond repair. Simphiwe needed surgery, but was worried about how it would affect her vocal range.

“It wasn’t nodules like Whitney Houston and Brenda Fassie had. Once you have nodules your voice will never be the same again, even after surgery. But it was quite an intense surgery. I was freaked out.”

She says she thought she wasn’t going to make it through the two-hour operation. I even sent my friends instructions on what to do in case I don’t make it out alive,” she says with a laugh.