LEN KALANE
Durban, 1960. A girl named Penelope Jane Dunlop is born into a South Africa carved along colour lines so absolute that a white person needed a permit to set foot in a black township.
Nobody watching over that cradle could have guessed she would grow up to tear a hole in those lines, night after night, with nothing more than a microphone and a voice that refused to know its “place.”
By the time she died on stage — figuratively, gloriously, over and over — as PJ Powers, the woman South Africa would come to call Thandeka had done something almost no white performer of her era had dared: she had made the townships her home turf, and the townships had claimed her right back.
The girl who wouldn’t stay in her lane
Powers cut her teeth in an all-girl outfit called Pantha before finding her true vehicle in Hotline, the Afro-rock band she fronted from the early 1980s. Where most white acts of the period stuck to the safe, segregated concert circuit that apartheid had built for them, Hotline pointed itself squarely at the townships — Soweto chief among them — at a time when the law made that a genuinely fraught thing to do.
Under apartheid’s web of influx-control and area regulations, a white citizen entering a black township was, in the strictest legal sense, a visitor who was supposed to have official permission to be there. It was a system designed to keep the races physically and culturally apart. PJ Powers went anyway, again and again, until the trip to Soweto became less an act of defiance than simply what she did — a working artist showing up for the audience that loved her most.
She didn’t wait for the law to catch up with her music. She simply went where the crowd was.
That audience was electric at the Jabulani Amphitheatre, the great open-air venue in Soweto that became one of Hotline’s spiritual homes. It was there, in 1983, mid-performance, that the crowd did something extraordinary: they gave her a Zulu name. Thandeka — “the loved one.” It is widely told that the moment, and the song that carried the same swinging township energy, fed directly into “Jabulani,” the hit that would follow her for the rest of her career and that turned the amphitheatre’s name into a kind of shorthand for her entire crossover story.
Banned for singing with the “enemy”
Defiance has consequences, and in 1988 Powers’ caught up with her in the most public way possible. She had performed at a charity concert in Zimbabwe for war orphans, sharing a stage with two towering, and to the apartheid state deeply subversive, figures: Miriam Makeba, the exiled “Mama Africa” whose citizenship had been stripped years earlier for testifying against apartheid at the United Nations, and Harry Belafonte, the American star and civil-rights ally who had helped Makeba build a life in exile.
For the SABC — state broadcasting and, in effect, the government’s cultural gatekeeper — sharing a stage with Makeba and Belafonte was an unforgivable act of solidarity. Powers was banned from South African radio and television for a year. It was meant to silence her. Instead, word reached her, smuggled out from Victor Verster Prison, that Nelson Mandela himself had written to encourage her to keep singing. A prisoner who could not yet speak freely to his own country was telling a white pop star from Durban not to stop.
A banned voice, a letter from a political prisoner, and a singer who kept singing anyway.
It is hard to overstate what that moment represented. Here was a mainstream, commercially successful white artist — someone with gold and platinum discs to her name, someone who could easily have stayed inside the safe, sanctioned lane apartheid had built for white entertainers — choosing instead a path that cost her airtime, income and official favour. Few of her white contemporaries paid that price so publicly, or so early.
Ellis Park, 1985: the day the crowd stopped checking colour
Two years before that ban, on 12 January 1985, Powers and Hotline had already shown just how far the walls could bend. The Concert in the Park, staged at Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg, drew an estimated 125,000 people — a number almost unthinkable for any gathering in apartheid South Africa, let alone one that deliberately mixed artists and audiences across the colour line. Roughly twenty-two acts spanning the country’s musical and racial spectrum shared the bill that day, and PJ Powers and Hotline were among the performers who brought the crowd to its feet.
Concert in the Park, Ellis Park Stadium, 12 January 1985 — an estimated 125,000 people, black and white, under one sky.
For a single day, one of South Africa’s great cathedrals of rugby and football became something else entirely: a shared space where the manufactured separations of daily life briefly gave way to a crowd that had simply come for the music. Powers arrived at Ellis Park already carrying the credibility of Soweto behind her — a white singer who wasn’t slumming it in the townships for a photo opportunity, but who had built her name there, sung by that name there, and would go back there again.
CAPTION: P J POWERS WITH STEVE KEKANA
Not the only one crossing the line
Powers was never a lone voice in this. Her most direct partner in crossing the colour line was Steve Kekana, the blind singer and songwriter from Limpopo who became, in the words of one biographer, South Africa’s own Stevie Wonder. In 1982 Powers wrote “Feel So Strong” for the two of them to sing together as a duet — Hotline’s white frontwoman and a black man, trading lines about love and belonging on the same record. It was, quite literally, illegal territory: under the Immorality Act, even hinting at a romance across the colour bar was an offence, and the SABC’s censors made Powers change the line “your love has made me feel like I belong” to “your help has made me feel like I belong” before it could go anywhere near the radio. Photographs of the two of them holding hands above their heads on stage were cropped so that their hands never touched in the frame. The song still climbed to number six on the mostly white Springbok Radio chart and earned the pair a double gold disc.
Kekana himself put it simply: he was “crossing over” to white audiences at the very same moment Powers and Hotline were crossing over to black ones, two artists meeting from opposite directions in the same forbidden middle ground. He had already built a devoted township and pan-African following of his own by the time “Feel So Strong” made him one of the few black artists of the era with genuine reach into white living rooms — a mirror image of what Jabulani Amphitheatre had done for Powers a year earlier.
A name the townships don’t hand out lightly
To be renamed by a township crowd was not a small thing. It was recognition, earned live and in person, night after night, in front of audiences who had every reason to be suspicious of a white performer showing up in their space. Few white South African musicians of the era were embraced that completely, and fewer still made the townships a genuine home stage rather than an occasional, well-publicised gesture.
History tends to place two names at the summit of that particular kind of trust: PJ Powers and Johnny Clegg, the anthropologist-musician whose bands Juluka and Savuka fused Zulu rhythms with rock and became, in their own right, powerful symbols of a non-racial South Africa struggling to be born. Clegg’s journey began earlier than Powers’ — he and Zulu migrant worker Sipho Mchunu started performing together as teenagers in the late 1960s, and Juluka was drawing township crowds by the late 1970s, years before Powers made her name in Soweto. Clegg would later be decorated with the country’s highest civilian honours, including the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver, for bridging musical traditions and promoting understanding across the apartheid divide.
But the two stories are not quite the same dare. Juluka was, from the outset, a mixed-race band — Clegg shared the stage, the songwriting and the billing with Mchunu and, later, other black musicians, in defiance of laws that criminalised exactly that kind of on-stage partnership. Township audiences watching Juluka were in part watching one of their own, standing alongside a white collaborator who had earned his place through years of apprenticeship in Zulu music and dance. Hotline was a different proposition entirely: an all-white band, fronted by a white woman, walking into Soweto with no black bandmate on stage to share the risk or vouch for them. Powers wasn’t inducted into township culture the way Clegg was — she simply showed up, sang, and let the crowd decide. That distinction is very much part of why Jabulani Amphitheatre chose to give her a name of her own.
Taken together, Kekana and Clegg frame just how unusual Powers’ position was. Kekana proved a black artist could reach across to white audiences without losing his own; Clegg proved a mixed band could hold a stage together in open defiance of the law. Powers did something adjacent to both and identical to neither: an all-white act, led by a woman, earning an adopted name from a township crowd on the crowd’s own terms. Three different routes through the same wall, at more or less the same moment in South African music.
The voice that outlasted the system
Apartheid ended; Thandeka did not go quiet. Hotline disbanded in 1987 and Powers built a substantial solo career on the momentum of the years before, eventually racking up twelve gold discs, four platinum discs and a gold CD across her recording career. In 1995 she reached a global audience once more, lending her voice to “World in Union” alongside Ladysmith Black Mambazo for the opening of the Rugby World Cup — a fitting bookend for a career built on bringing unlikely voices together.
The honours kept coming, decades on. The South African Traditional Music Awards recognised her as Best Traditional Female Legend in 2020; the South African Music Awards handed her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021, marking more than four decades in the industry; and the Basadi in Music Awards honoured her again in 2023. Earlier still, in 2003, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation recognised her contribution to reconciliation itself — official confirmation of something township audiences had already decided about her back in 1983, on a stage in Soweto, when they gave a Durban girl a Zulu name and made it stick.
Why it still matters
It would be easy, forty years on, to file PJ Powers’ story under nostalgia — a good pop song, a colourful anecdote about a name given at a concert. But the record is more pointed than that. In a country engineered to keep people apart by law, Thandeka built a career on refusing to stay on her assigned side of the fence, took a broadcasting ban rather than disown the company she chose to keep, and did it all while topping the charts. That combination — mainstream success and genuine, costly solidarity — is rarer in South African music history than the legend suggests, which is exactly why it deserves retelling.
Penelope Jane Dunlop from Durban became Thandeka, the loved one, in a Soweto amphitheatre. South Africa has had good reason to keep calling her that ever since.
