In the 1950s, the jazz age was on in the cities of South Africa, and a beautiful young singer from Bulawayo--in today's Zimbabwe--came to Johannesburg to try her luck. Masuka's father was hotel chef, originally from Zambia, and her mother a Zulu woman whose ancestors had trekked from Natal to Bulawayo around 1875, just as Cecil Rhodes was beginning his fateful incursions into the Matebele Kingdom. The fourth of seven children, Dorothy came of age in Southern Rhodesia. When her father left the family home for Port Elizabeth, South Africa, she was in Catholic primary school, a good turn for her, as many African Rhodesians were denied any real education. Masuka's own move to South Africa originally had nothing to do with musical ambitions. She was in poor health, and the family thought the dry southern climate would be good for her. She was just twelve years old.

At St. Thomas, a Catholic boarding school in Johannesburg, Masuka blossomed as a singer at school concerts. She also discovered popular music, and developed a particular ear for American jazz. Louis Jordan was an early favorite. It wasn't long before she realized that great things were happening in the music scene around her as well. Dolly Rathebe became the rage after her singing role in the 1949 film "Jim Comes to Jo'burg." Masuka managed to meet and impress Rathebe, but her real break came a few years later when she was invited to audition for a new record label called Troubadour. She got the job, earning, as she recalls, five or ten pounds for her first recording.

Launched in 1951, Troubadour was an expression of the new urban black culture that was sprouting through the cracks in the apartheid system. At sixteen, Masuka became swept up in the scene, fleeing the confines of St. Thomas to join Philemon Mogotsi's African Ink Spots in Durban. She was soon apprehended and returned to Johannesburg, but quickly made off again, this time back to Bulawayo, where she struck up with a young jazz group called the Golden Rhythm Crooners, a group would exert a major musical influence on the young Thomas Mapfumo a few years later.

At this point, Masuka's family, school and record label came to an agreement. There was no denying it any longer. This girl was going to be a singer. Troubadour's Stewart Cook went to Bulawayo to record the Golden Rhythm Crooners for the label, and return with the fledgling star in tow. On the train from Bulawayo to Johannesburg, Masuka wrote "Hamba Notsokolo," one of the biggest South African hits of the 1950s, and still a staple in her songbook. In 1954, not yet 20-years-old, Masuka found herself touring South Africa with the likes of the Harlem Swingsters and Dolly Rathebe, and appearing on the covers of magazines. That year, she sang in the Johannesburg concert that led directly to African Jazz and Variety, a hugely successful touring black musical revue that played to both black and white audiences. An article in the magazine Zonk wrote that Masuka could outsell Bing Crosby.

During her years with Troubadour, Masuka befriended and began working with another talented young singer, Miriam Makeba. Masuka saw herself as a composer at least as much as a singer, and she naturally began to take on serious themes in her songs. Her song "Dr. Malan"--which included the line "Dr. Malan has difficult laws."--earned the attention of South Africa's feared Special Branch, which paid Masuka a visit and promptly banned the record. When she sang for Lumumba, the fallen hero of Congolese independence, in 1961, the Special Branch seized the master and all copies of the record they could find. As it happened, Masuka had returned to Bulawayo, and the label advised her to stay there until things settled down. That took 31 years.

During those difficult years of exile, Masuka worked in Malawi and Tanzania, singing for independence era presidents Hastings Banda and Julius Nyerere. Her return to Bulawayo in 1965 created a stir, both musically and politically. Ian Smith had just declared Southern Rhodesia's independence from England, and the country was digging in for fifteen years of struggle to achieve real independence. Faced with the prospect of arrest, Masuka fled again, not to return home until the nation of Zimbabwe was established in 1980. At last back in Bulawayo, she resumed composing and recording. Her 1990 album Pata Pata (Mango) recognized new realities, mixing her customary jazz songs with more contemporary sounds, including Shona traditional pop.

In 1992, Masuka at last returned to the city she loves most, Johannesburg. There she found a world transformed in every way, but she set right about fitting into it, producing another ground breaking album, Magumede. In 2001, Masuka released what may be her most mature and powerful recordings to date. Mzilikazi takes its name from the founding king of the Matabele Kingdom, the land to which Masuka's grandfather trekked in 1875. In many ways, it marks both a return and a new arrival for one of Africa's most venerable singers. By Banning Eyre, with enormous help from Candice Blignaut's sleeve notes for Mzilikazi.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre