At a gala dinner held shortly after the most disputed elections in South Africa since the end of apartheid, the singer reminded the assembled politicians how to do their jobs.

“I want to implore you to think of the people of this country and think about why you were elected,” singer Thandiswa Mazwai told the political elite at a June gala dinner organized by the Independent Electoral Commission in Johannesburg to mark the announcement of the final voting results.

Many of those listening were members of the African National Congress, the long-ruling party that had just suffered sharp losses at the polls, a rebuke from voters frustrated by corruption and mismanagement after three decades at the helm of the ANC.

Then Ms. Mazwai, after her brief speaking remarks, broke into a series of songs whose lyrics, rather than offering light entertainment, redoubled her determination to call out political malfeasance. She sang about “fools for leaders” and “thieves” who “should leave Parliament”.

Punishing her influential audience is unlikely to cost Ms Mazwai any future gigs – she is simply too popular to cancel. At 48, she has performed for South Africans – from everyday fans to Nelson Mandela – for the 30 years that the country has been a multiracial democracy.

With her music reaching a wide audience and often containing sharp social commentary, Ms. Mazwai emerged as the voice of a generation born during the violent twilight of apartheid: the first group of black South Africans to enjoy the freedoms of democratic South Africa, but also to be faced with its disappointments.

In a country that values ​​the right to protest after the crushing rule of the apartheid regime, Ms Mazwai used her mezzo-soprano voice to amplify struggles in South Africa, just as her predecessors – activist performers such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela – had done. during apartheid.

“I don’t take my job lightly,” she told politicians that evening. “My vocation is to sing the people’s joy, to sing the people’s sorrow.”

Born in 1976, the year he uprising of school children and the brutal response of the apartheid police roiled South Africa, Mrs. Mazwai’s life was marked by political turmoil.

Her singing career began in 1994, when the first democratic elections were held in South Africa. Since then, three of her four solo albums have been released during election years, a synchronicity she described as “a fluke.”

“The energy was good for me to bring my voice to it,” she said of her latest album, Sankofapublished at the beginning of this election year. The title of the album is taken from the Ghanaian Twi language and means “to return and bring back what was left behind.”

Ms. Mazwai’s music often longs for an idyllic past, unspoiled by racism and colonialism, but maintains the urgency of the present.

In “Dark Side of the Rainbow,” one of 11 tracks on the new album, she sings about leaders whose “minds are impoverished by greed” and samples audio from a chaotic session in South Africa’s parliament. The song’s title is a subversive reference to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s optimistic description of post-apartheid South Africa as a “rainbow nation”.

Ms Mazwai has not always been a critic of South African leaders. Her career took off during the euphoria of Mandela’s presidency, from 1994 to 1999, and she performed several times for Mr. Mandela.

She was among the pioneering group of young musicians who created the sound of the new democracy: rebellious dance music, known as kwaito, that drew on hip-hop, R&B and African pop. With the band Bongo Maffin, in which she was lead vocalist, Ms. Mazwai took kwaito and the new South Africa, the rest of the world.

Ms Mazwai grew up in Soweto, one of the city’s historic neighborhoods where residents tended to be middle class, marked by what she said were known locally as “big window” houses. Her parents were politically active journalists; her mother was one of the few black students at the University of the Witwatersrand. As South Africa slowly integrated, her parents enrolled her in a prestigious all-girls school in an affluent suburb of Johannesburg.

The experience was a culture shock, and not just because the young Mrs. Mazwai was looked upon with suspicion whenever a student lost something. She was the only black child in her class and teachers sometimes referred to her father’s politically charged newspaper articles. “No black child could survive that world,” she said.

She transferred to a more diverse school, one with pan-African attitudes, and then followed her mother to the University of the Witwatersrand, but dropped out to pursue her music career with Bongo Maffin.

The group, founded in 1996, quickly gained celebrity status. Ms. Mazwai’s relationship with her bandmate and the child they have. hit the headlines together. Youngsters copied her contemporary African fashion sense, wearing a turban with a formal suit or painting tribal dots on her face as part of her make-up. The band’s influence was so lasting that their music is still on party and wedding playlists across South Africa.

Miriam Makeba’s attention-grabbing copy of “Pata Pata” caught their attention the doyen of South African music. Ms. Makeba, a celebrated singer and anti-apartheid activist, effectively anointed Ms. Mazwai as her successor, but also challenged her: what kind of artist does she want to be?

Ms. Mazwai responded on her first solo album, “Zabalaza,” a Xhosa word that means rebellion or revolution. In the album, published in 2004, Ms. Mazwai stretched her vocal cords between jazz, funk and soul. The South African revolution was no longer directed against the apartheid regime, but against the HIV pandemic, against excruciating poverty and unemployment — all mismanaged by the ruling party. Ms. Mazwai’s early fame did not protect her from these ailments, so she sang about them.

“I think the role of an artist is to use their gifts intentionally to free people from suffering,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times, reflecting on her career.

Her 2009 album “Ibokwe”, or goat (an animal with ritual significance) featured another legendary South African musicianHugh Masekela. He became what Ms Mazwai described as an “industry dad”, and she regularly performed with him.

Her next album, “Belede,” the only one not released in an election year, explored grief: for her mother, Belede Mazwai, who died in 1992 and never saw a free South Africa, and for Ms. Mazwai’s other mentor, the singer Busi. Mhlongo.

“Belede” also mourned the life South Africans thought they would have but have yet to achieve, and in the song “Ndiyahamba” (“I’m Leaving”), Ms. Mazwai imagines leaving the unforgiving city life for a bucolic environment.

Despite the yearning for escapism in her songs, Ms Mazwai said she would not turn away from the troubled society. Ms Mazwai, a queer woman in a country where black lesbians still live in fear, describes her life as “political”.

“The lives of those I love are political and I cannot escape telling our shared stories,” she said.

Ms. Mazwai’s music and fashion also deliberately embraces the aesthetics of the rest of the African continent. Her last album was partly recorded in Dakar, and the cowrie shell became a fashion detail. It’s another act of defiance when South Africa is still struggling to integrate with the rest of the continent, with African immigrants often at the helm targets of attack.

That anti-immigrant animosity is driven by desperation in poor townships and poor cities where voting and protest seem to make no difference, Ms Mazwai said.

“The real indictment is on our governments,” she said. “Whether it’s the Zimbabwean government, the South African government or the Congolese government, our governments are failing us.”

Despite the seriousness of her music, her live performances are also joyful and sassy. At a packed London venue recently, a fan threw her bra on stage and Ms Mazwai wore it as a hat.

The anger and suffering of her albums are always tempered with love, and on “Sankofa,” Ms. Mazwai offers a soothing salve, the result, she says, of her own healing. Singing to his younger self – and to all of us – he sings “Kulingile”: Everything will be alright.