Moonchild Sanelly: “I’m looking for my coin, my power and what I can do with that”

Moonchild Sanelly, by her own admission, was born to stand out. Her sex-positive “future ghetto funk” is enriched with the self-confidence her mother instilled in her. Now, in the wake of third album, Full Moon, and a run of high-profile features for the likes of Little Simz and Self Esteem, it seems the self-made prophecy is coming true

“I feel like my mom knew the magic she birthed, because when she had me, her tubes were tied. She was 39, just fucking around with my 30-year-old dad while they were doing criminal activities. When I was born, it was kind of the first time I busted down a door.” 

This is the kind of statement that is par for the course during a conversation with Moonchild Sanelly. When the South African pop star, pro dancer and sex-positive feminist logs into our Zoom call from her smartphone, she immediately starts chatting a mile a minute, her signature aqua-blue braided mop-top hairstyle almost taking up the entire frame. It feels like picking up a conversation with a close friend that started yesterday. The difference is, we’re here to talk about Moonchild’s third album, Full Moon – a collection of bombastically booty-bouncing and surprisingly emotional tracks that define the one-woman genre she has coined “future ghetto funk”. When I asked her to take me back to the beginning, I didn’t think she’d go quite that far.

In her 37 years, Moonchild has evolved from ballroom-dancing child star to spoken-word performer to global icon, all while weaving a thread of devil-may-care attitude and fierce advocacy throughout. A deal with the UK label Transgressive Records ensured the serotonin-boosting blend of sparkly electro-pop, high-octane hip-hop and buoyant amapiano of her 2015 debut Rabulapha! found an international audience. Since then, she’s racked up high-profile collaborations with everyone from Gorillaz (who took her on their 2022 world tour) to Beyoncé (who called on her to contribute a verse in her native Xhosa on MY POWER from the The Lion King: The Gift soundtrack). While it’s fair to say these features helped put Moonchild on the map, Full Moon, as its title suggests, is one hundred percent her – the most realised version of her creative expression to date, with songs ranging from ass-shaking party anthems to introspective odes to self-discovery.

Moonchild was born Sanelisiwe Twisha in Gqeberha, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape region, to a mother who was a jazz singer and performer. During her childhood, her mum entered her in local pageants and contests, where she excelled at ballroom and Latin dancing. “When I was doing talent shows, I’d be singing, dancing, all that jazz,” she says. “I don’t know if I necessarily knew it would become a career, I just knew I could express myself with all the different artistic mediums I was exposed to.”

Moonchild talks about her mum a lot, and it’s obvious that her influence had a massive impact on her creative output. “I always say my mom bred me, because she was so intentional about how I was raised,” Moonchild says. “I’m completely fine with just being myself. When you’re a kid and you’re different, you get bullied, but she would make it a point to say: ‘You’re not like them. Don’t bring everybody else up by putting yourself down.’ If she saw me walking behind a group of friends, I would get scolded more for that than for coming home after dark. She’d be like, ‘Never be a follower.’ These were things that didn’t make sense when I was young, but they stuck. My natural rebellious state was definitely groomed.”

Tragically, Moonchild’s mother died suddenly when she was 17, kicking off a turbulent era in her life that would see her running away from home after experiencing sexual assault at the hands of a family member. She eventually crash-landed in Durban and enrolled in fashion school, where she fell into the local arts and culture scene, seeking out the stage once again by performing poetry at local open mics. At the time, she didn’t have any objective in mind; she was just trying to tap into something pure – the star power that was evident to her mother. “My style wasn’t like anything else I’d seen,” she says. “Especially since I tend to write how I speak. It was after my first year of fashion school, around 2006, when I went to my first open mic. I started reading my poems at school, and they would just gather during lunch breaks and be like, ‘This is the shit!’ So I was like, ‘OK, this is the thing.’ Once I started regularly going to open mics, I began incorporating music into my performances. After doing that for a while, I added another part: the liberation.”

While life in Durban could be rough – she once wrote lyrics for a reggae band in exchange for accommodation – she poured what was going on around her into her art. Her unflinching approach is what helped her stand out. “All the girls who were poets were victims. When I was growing up, the women I was surrounded by were hustlers. My mom knew all my dad’s side chicks, because they were all friends doing shady shit together… So the women who were at these open mics, and the things they were describing, I just couldn’t relate. So then, consciously, I said, ‘Oh, no. We’re absolutely not doing this. We are going to liberate the pussy.’”

This stance is radical now, let alone in the mid 2000s, when a woman acknowledging her desire would have opened herself up to scrutiny. For Moonchild, being a wallflower was not an option. As she discovered her sexuality, her poems took on a more explicit tone, and she realised that sex positivity would become a cornerstone of her writing. “I went back to school, I was horny, and I wrote the most explicit description of sex I could think of. It was called Cloud Nine. Everyone was shook.” When she set Cloud Nine to music, it became one of her early successes in Durban – a pivotal moment where Moonchild transcended the slam poetry scene and set the foundation for the musician she would become. “Carve your name in his dick with your teeth/ Make him your bitch,” she flows over a woozy, mid-tempo beat. Aside from their sheer gumption, lyrics like these showed that Moonchild was a force to be reckoned with: “Once I clocked the fact that I shocked people, it was like, ‘Fantastic. I love it.’”

Moonchild has never let go of that desire to outrage or assert her viewpoint. On Big Booty, a fiery, revved-up track on Full Moon, she sings “If I had a big, big booty I’d fuck up the world/ Oh, I do, and I already am.” Boom opens with a firecracker of a line: “Rich n*gga dick don’t hit like a broke n*gga dick.” Bucking the ‘I need a rich man’ trend in female hip-hop, she raps over pulsating electronic breakbeats about the virtues of fucking below one’s financial status. 

“I’m the rich n*gga. I’m Cher,” Moonchild says, referencing Cher’s iconic 1996 Dateline interview, where she proclaimed, “I am a rich man!” “I want to tell women, ‘Get your money, get your shit together.’ No n*gga’s Ferrari is going to be picking me up when I’m at the club with my bitches because I didn’t come home on time. Absolutely not. I don’t want to be controlled. So fuck a rich n*gga. I’m looking for my coin, my power and what I can do with that. How I can make a change for other women that are growing up.”

Power doesn’t only come from outrage, though. Alongside the dancefloor energy, there are tender slices of life on Full Moon – songs that find their strength precisely because of their fragility. On I Was the Biggest Curse, Moonchild talks candidly about her personal history with abortion and the choices she made for her career. “There’s levels of vulnerability in this record because I was focused on myself,” she says. The track is far from sad, although there is a solemnity to its glitchy synth melodies. Mntanami, Xhosa for ‘My Child’, sees Moonchild tackle a subject it has taken her a lifetime to process – her relationship with her father. Sung from the perspective of a parent seeking forgiveness, the song illustrates exactly what it’s like to be on the receiving end of an apology that may be too little, too late. It’s as if we’re eavesdropping on one of Moonchild’s therapy sessions, and the emotions are running high. 

“Mntanami came from me having had the same therapist for eight years,” she explains. “I’m playing the role of the guy who has taken responsibility. It’s showing my relationship with my dad now, where, by me choosing to forgive him, I’ve gotten to meet the man – and the man is hilarious. When I was done writing the album, I took almost two months of just chilling in bed, like I could literally feel the process of letting go. I think that’s why I’m able to speak about the album properly now. I was sure something bigger was going to come from it, because there’s no way I’m going through all that for nothing.”

She may have cleared many personal and professional hurdles to arrive at the full-circle moment that is Full Moon, but she’s not exactly resting on her laurels. Moonchild has linked up with two other artists-of-the-moment, most recently on the raucous Little Simz track Flood, but also on Big Man, a tongue-in-cheek duet about deadbeat boyfriends with Self Esteem. “The song came so easy,” Moonchild laughs. “We could relate so well to one another, to the bullshit we’ve dealt with. It’s almost like we’ve dated the same men – I mean, they’re sucking from the same tit, I promise you, because these motherfuckers are strangers, but they got the same script!”  

Full Moon is a testament to that, too – a collection of songs from a survivor who has made saying exactly what she means her calling card. Only now, she’s in a place where she can thrive at her own pace. “This album, and this phase in my life, was possible because of all the work I’ve done on myself. I’m here, I’m present. The beginning of my career was a party, and so much was happening so fast. But now, I feel the achievement. I don’t just take it and go. I feel it.”