NAKHANE Say a prayer for the healing sounds of this all-giving musician and actor

Say a prayer for the healing and immortal sounds of this all-giving artist

Nakhane

On stage Nakhane glistens. Kicking off the tour for his second album, You Will Never Die, in his newly adopted home of London, it’s as if, throughout the performance, his soul is seeping out of his lean body, through his heavenly voice and out across the room to join his tender, electronic, piano-led harmonies. “I’ve sworn to myself that I want to feel like I’ve been on a ten-mile run after every show,” he confides to me the next day. “I want to collapse because I’ve given so much of myself.”

Brought up in a deeply Christian family and community in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, life was not easy for “an effeminate, obviously queer boy”. This new music confronts his traumatic adolescence spent struggling to deny his sexuality, and eventual decision to walk away from his faith and those who refused to accept him. The results are an astonishing audio catharsis dealing with desolation, vulnerability and lust. The cleansing of his emotions on songs such as ‘Presbyteria’ and the title track are palpable.

“It was difficult. I was writing about subjects I’d sworn I’d never touch. There were moments of panic and frustration,” he says of the four-year recording process. “But then I went to see a Tarot card reader who told me I needed to go back and visit all the places of my high school years, so I did. When I got home I went into a deep sleep and when I woke up I wrote ‘Teen Prayer’. I knew at that point there was nothing left inside me. I was finished.” The praise song is also fittingly the last one on the album: “Growing up we’d open the family meeting with a prayer and close with a prayer. I wanted to have that symbol as well.”

Nakhane also gave his all to his first acting job in John Trengove’s 2017 film The Wound (Inxeba), for which he won Best Actor at the Durban International Film Festival. The movie received worldwide acclaim and was shortlisted for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, but it also sparked a vicious furore among South Africa’s Xhosa community. Haters claimed it revealed too much about the sacred rite of passage ceremony that most Xhosa men go through, but the real vitriol sprung from the film’s homosexual storyline. The movie was given a pornography rating in some provinces, and Nakhane received multiple death threats, forcing him to leave the country.

“It fucked me up, I won’t lie,” he admits. “But I had to stand tall because those people didn’t deserve to see me weak. And I’m forever grateful to everyone who rallied for me on social media. That positivity around me was invaluable. If someone asked me to do it again, I’d jump at it. Xhosa is my culture and I love it, but no culture is perfect and it needs to be called out.”

Thankfully now the fuss has died down, and on Nakhane’s last visit to South Africa in December, for Afropunk Joburg, it rained love. “We played the new songs and people lost their minds,” he says. “This is an exciting time in my life. I’ve wanted to be doing this for as long as I can remember, and now I am here.”