‘I Am Zahara'

It’s been a turbulent few years for singer Zahara, but don’t believe the rumours. She shuts down haters and opens up about her love life, her brother’s death and coming into her own as a woman.

- Qhama Dayile

​SHE looks nervous as she opens the door and mutters a short prayer before we start talking. Award-winning singer and songwriter Bulelwa “Zahara” Mkutukana wants to clear the air and address the rumours swirling about her.

People have been abuzz about what’s going on with the Loliwe hitmaker: Is she back on the booze? Has her love life fallen apart? Is she down and out after parting ways with her record company?

All these issues have been making headlines again recently – and after some toing and froing the 28-year-old eventually agrees to see us at her upmarket home in Little Falls, Roodepoort, west of Joburg, to address everything going on in her life.

Zahara admits she’s had her demons to deal with but is emphatic that alcohol and lobola were not among them.

“I am not an alcoholic and I was never in rehab,” she declares. “My rehab is church. I think very highly of myself. I am young and like many young people I drink. But I don’t drink recklessly and my drinking has never been out of control so it shouldn’t be made a big deal of.”

She tells us she has been on a “two year journey” that involved working on her image, which is something she admits she’s struggled with all her life.

Zahara says she was mocked and ridiculed by other kids because of the way she looked and how she sounded in the church choir.

“They said I looked like a boy and the fact that I always played with boys did not help,” she recalls.

“I was made fun of for my crooked teeth and they told me my voice was too big, ‘bathi ndingu Nongayindoda (I was too masculine)’.”

The bad stuff, she says, was hard to forget.