Coping With The Heartache

Ayanda Ncwane opens up about being a widow, raising her sons on her own and the unbreakable bond she shares with Sfiso.

- Mpho Tshikhudo

SHE slowly makes her way down a flight of stairs, her feet seemingly as heavy as her heart, and sits down in the living room of her home, which is adorned with murals and artefacts collected from her travels with the man she thought she would spend the rest of her life with.

“He loved this house,” Ayanda Ncwane says softly, glancing at the nine SA Music Awards and handful of Crown Gospel Music awards won by her late husband, Sfiso, which are also on proud display. The couple were planning to add a recording studio to their mansion in Dainfern, the upmarket estate between Joburg and Pretoria they moved into last August with sons Ngcweti (13) and Mawenza (8).

The studio was one of many plans they had for their home – the family’s first standalone house – but this, like so many other dreams, were shattered when the celebrated muso passed away.

It’s been three months since Sfiso’s untimely death, and after going to ground for a while Ayanda (32) is finally opening up, telling in an emotion-filled interview of her heartache and longing as well as her ongoing, troubled relationship with her mother-in-law.

“I miss him a lot. The first two months [after his death] I could literally smell him all around the house,” she says.

Sfiso loved cologne, she tells us. “Even my clothes smelled of his cologne so I haven’t washed them.”

Ayanda’s world came crashing down on 5 December last year when Sfiso died suddenly from kidney failure. The 37-year-old singer had been in Limpopo to perform at the Thobela FM Praise and Worship Gospel Festival and his abrupt death shocked her to her core.

“He had complained he was tired but he didn’t look sick. I couldn’t believe he was dead – I thought he was pranking me.”