Music playing from her grandfather’s radio is a daily wake-up call at her home. From one song to the next, her grandmother, cousins and siblings are often jamming away.
Even on days when she’s in her room, minding her own business, her mother is likely to walk into her room singing a song and dancing to it, giving a full blown one-woman private performance.
This is how much music features in Tinyiko Hilary Khoza’s life. From her grandfather’s jazz music, Hilary fell in love with music as well and auditioned to be part of the school choir. The love of music never left her.
From birth, she has been exposed to her family’s network dance sessions in which relatives would also join in with their Xitsonga traditional wear – Xibelani skirts.
Reminiscing on how far back she also joined the festivities and learned to dance with a Xibelani around her waist, she says, “I’ve been a Xibelani dancer all my life.”
The now-23-year-old, also known as Majesty Hilary or Miss Hilary, started hitting the stage as young as two years old and that’s about the time she also got her first Xibelani skirt.
In primary school when dancers would be needed for extracurricular events, she would jump at the opportunity.
Given that it was a multi-racial school, young Hilary was skeptical of her kind of dancing making the cut.
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She’d say, “I do dance but it’s not your everyday type of dance” then show them. Before she knew it, she was teaching her classmates and peers how to dance in a Xibelani for school concerts.
“In high school, that’s when I started making money [from it]. Me, my cousins, my aunt and my mom would get invitations to perform at weddings, parties and that’s when I started making my own money. At the time, I had no responsibilities, so I thought I was making a lot of money,” she says.
Around the same time, she had also secured a gig to dance for a Tsonga musician; Percy Mfana. Throughout high school, she consistently graced stages with her moves.
By 2018, her dancing career had grown as she became Sho Madjozi’s backup dancer.
Ever since then, she has worked with the likes of Rich Mnisi and Makhadzi.
“I tried every dance that was around, I did hip-hop classes at some point. When I came back from the hip-hop class, the first thing I did was put on my Xibelani and I did those moves in a Xibelani.”
That’s when she decided that “I will just learn all of these things just to put them in my Xibelani because that’s something I know I can do and even if there’s anyone who can do it better, I know they can’t do it like me.”
Even in knowing her potential in dancing, she still pursued a Bachelor of Arts degree from Unisa and a postgraduate qualification in management. The reason for the latter qualification was just so she can know the ins and outs of her brand and be able to manage it.
Just like with the dancing, studying further was inspired by how her family values education.
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Knowing that “I don’t want to be a dancer all my life”, two years ago, she started taking up the mic by recording music. She has finally decided to put music in the front seat now.
“I went a bit of the Afropop way and a bit of dance because that’s who I am. It’s a different genre, it’s the language that’s common but even the approach and the way we worked around it and the way I’m singing, it’s really different.”
The entertainer tells Drum how excited she is for the next step in her as she says, “Music and dance correlate so for me, I get to do everything I love at the same time now.”
With her music, she intends to show people that “we are one, especially as Africans” and do away with the prevalent tribalism that she, at some point, has fallen victim to.
With a six-track EP coming out soon, the Tsonga dancer and now singer will be releasing her first single called Pandza on 2 June.
In the near future, she would like to work with Maskandi artists and the likes of Malome Vector.
