Stewart Sukuma

Mozambique-based guitarist and multilingual vocalist Stewart Sukuma, born Louis Pereira, fuses African and Brazilian rhythms into his signature brand of infectious dance music. Honored with the prestigious Ngoma Mozambique award in 1983, he has remained one of Southern Africa’s foremost performers. Born in the modest village of Cuamba in Mozambique’s Niassa state, Sukuma spent his early years in the Portuguese-influenced district known as Afrolusamerica. He acquired his first guitar during a charity event organized for children from low-income households and subsequently mastered percussion and keyboards through self-instruction. Throughout much of his professional life he performed primarily as a sideman, including a tour with Orchestra Marrabenta Star de Mozambique in the closing years of the 1980s. His first album, Afrikiti, appeared only in 1995 after being recorded in Johannesburg alongside musicians drawn from both Mozambique and South Africa; part of its earnings supported environmental causes. Sukuma maintains ongoing involvement in AIDS relief initiatives. The musical heritage of Mozambique continues to underpin his compositions. During a late-’90s interview he observed, “Our music is deeply engrained in the rhythms of the people, because we were for a long time, for different reasons, and not least by the civil war, so well cut off from the remainder of the world.” Beyond his native Portuguese, he performs in English, Coti, Chuabo, Swahili, Zulu, and Tsonga. His chosen stage name merges a Zulu term signifying “rising” with a Swahili term signifying “push.”