EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH TAMIA: A voice that belongs to time

Why Tamia’s return to South Africa is a cultural landmark

There are voices that belong to a moment, and then there are voices that belong to time. Tamia Marilyn Washington Hill known to the world simply as Tamia has spent nearly three decades proving she is the latter.

Since emerging from Windsor, Ontario in the mid-1990s with a vocal range that stopped rooms cold, the six-time Grammy-nominated singer has built a catalogue that refuses to age. Songs like 'So Into You,' 'Officially Missing You,' and 'Stranger in My House' did not just chart but they embedded themselves into the emotional architecture of a generation.

They became the soundtrack to first loves, heartbreaks, slow dances, and late-night drives across continents their creator had never visited. South Africa was one of those places. Long before algorithms decided what we should listen to, South Africans chose Tamia.

Her music found its way into township homes and suburban bedrooms alike, carried not by marketing budgets but by something far more durable, feeling. In a country that has always understood music as more than entertainment, as testimony, as medicine, as resistance, Tamia’s voice found fertile ground.

Now she returns. This August, as South Africa marks Women’s Month, Tamia will headline stages in Cape Town, Durban, and Pretoria as part of The Biggest Women’s Month Celebration Tour Experience. It is a tour that arrives at a particular moment, in a country still wrestling with what it owes its women, and in a world where the kind of artistry Tamia represents, patient, crafted, unapologetically soulful, feels increasingly like an act of defiance.

We put fifteen questions to the Canadian-born R&B icon ahead of her South African tour. She answered all of them.

Tamia: “That kind of connection is rare”

Ask Tamia about South African audiences and she does not reach for the usual diplomatic praise. Instead, she describes something more intimate, a quality of presence she says is rare in her experience.

“There’s a sincerity in South African audiences that I don’t take for granted. The way people listen, the way they sing back, the way they feel the music, it’s very present, very intentional. It’s not passive. Every time I step on stage there, I feel like I’m in a shared emotional space with the audience, not just performing to them but with them.”

It is a sentiment that carries weight when you consider how far her music has travelled to reach these shores. R&B has always had a devoted following in South Africa, often more passionate than in the genre’s North American heartland. Tamia believes the explanation is simple.

“I think authenticity travels. You don’t have to be from where the music is made to feel it. South African listeners have always embraced soul and R&B in a very deep way, and I think it’s because the themes, love, longing, vulnerability are universal,” Tamia said.

She also sees unexpected common ground between her home country and the one that keeps calling her back. Canada and South Africa, she notes, are both societies shaped by the weight of their histories and in both, music has served as a vehicle for processing what words alone cannot carry.

“Music becomes a language where words sometimes fail, it carries memory, pain, joy, and hope all at once. In that sense, it absolutely can be a form of repair,” she said.

Women’s month and a sense of responsibility

Tamia’s tour is not arriving in a vacuum. August in South Africa is Women’s Month, a commemoration that sits uneasily alongside the country’s ongoing crisis of gender-based violence. To headline a celebratory tour during this month is to occupy a space that is both joyful and loaded. Tamia is aware of the tension.

“Standing on a South African stage during Women’s Month is deeply meaningful to me. It’s not something I take lightly, especially knowing the realities many women are facing. I do feel a responsibility, not to have all the answers, but to show up with intention, with respect, and with love,” she said.

It is a measured response, and a honest one. She does not claim her presence on stage will change material conditions. But she is clear-eyed about what a moment of collective experience can offer:

“If my presence and my music can offer even a moment of strength, reflection, or healing, then that matters.”

What the old industry taught her and what it took

Tamia entered the music business in the mid-1990s, an era when record labels wielded near-absolute control over an artist’s trajectory.

The landscape she navigated as a young singer, one of deals brokered in boardrooms, of gatekeepers who decided whose voice would be heard bears almost no resemblance to today’s industry.

She speaks about that period with the clarity of someone who has had decades to weigh the trade-offs.

“That era taught me patience and resilience. You had to trust the process in a very different way because things didn’t move as quickly as they do now. But it also meant giving up a certain level of control. What it gave me was discipline and a deep respect for the craft. What it cost, at times, was autonomy,” she revealed.

The streaming era, she acknowledges, has democratised access. But she is wary of what has been sacrificed in the exchange.

“What’s being lost is the experience of living with music, sitting with it, growing with it, letting it reveal itself over time. Albums used to be journeys. Now, everything is so immediate,” she explained.

It is a concern shared by many artists of her generation, but Tamia frames it without bitterness. There is beauty in access, she concedes. The worry is about depth, about what happens when music is no longer given the time to become part of someone’s life.

Songs that outlive their era

Few artists can claim that songs written in one century still move rooms in another. Tamia can. “So Into You” and “Officially Missing You” remain staples at weddings, on playlists, and in the muscle memory of anyone who came of age with 1990s and 2000s R&B.

When asked what the longevity of those songs tells her about music itself, she responded:

“It reminds me that music isn’t about trends, it’s about truth. When you create from a real place, something honest and human, it can live far beyond the moment it was made in. Music, at its core, is connection. That never expires.”

She credits some of that understanding to the people she has worked alongside. People like Quincy Jones, Babyface, and Jermaine Dupri are not just collaborators but they were teachers who reshaped how she approached her instrument.

“Working with people like Quincy Jones or Babyface taught me the power of restraint. Sometimes it’s not about doing more, it’s about doing less and trusting the emotion in your voice,” Tamia said.

Strength, balance and evolution

Tamia has lived with multiple sclerosis since her diagnosis in 2003. In an industry that rewards relentless output and penalises absence, navigating a chronic illness has forced a reckoning with what strength actually means. She has been open about the journey, and in this conversation, she is again.

“Living with multiple sclerosis has changed everything about how I define strength. It’s taught me to listen to my body in a way I didn’t before, to honour it instead of pushing past it. Taking care of myself is not a weakness, it’s necessary. My audience deserves the best of me, and that starts with me being well,” she said.

It is a statement that quietly challenges the mythology of the tireless performer, the artist who gives everything, always, regardless of cost. Tamia has learned that the cost is real, and that protecting herself is not a betrayal of her audience but a precondition for serving them.

Motherhood, marriage, and illness arrived in her life not as interruptions to her artistry but as expansions of it, she said:

“Being a mother, a wife, and navigating my health has deepened my perspective as an artist. It’s given me more to draw from, more empathy, more understanding. It’s not always easy, but it’s made me fuller, not divided.”

Love, redefined

Tamia’s catalogue is, at its heart, a body of work about love, romantic love, self-love, love as surrender and love as endurance. After nearly thirty years of writing and singing about it, her understanding has inevitably shifted.

“When I recorded my first album, love was more about discovery and emotion. Now, it’s also about choice, commitment, grace, and resilience. It’s deeper, more layered. Love isn’t just something you feel, it’s something you build and protect,”she said.

There is a maturity in that answer that mirrors the arc of her music itself, from the breathless romance of her early records to the settled conviction of an artist who has weathered enough to know that love is a practice, not just an emotion.

Hugh Masekela, and the collaboration that never was

Asked which South African artist she would most want to collaborate with, Tamia reaches across the divide of time and said:

“Someone like Hugh Masekela would have been an absolute dream, just because of the depth and storytelling in his music. I would have loved to create something soulful and timeless, maybe a blend of jazz and R&B that speaks to both our roots and shared humanity.”

It is a telling choice. Masekela, who died in 2018, was an artist whose music was inseparable from his politics, his exile, his insistence on joy as resistance. That Tamia gravitates toward him, rather than a contemporary hitmaker, says something about where she locates herself in the tradition of music-making; not in the marketplace, but in the lineage of artists for whom craft and conscience are the same thing.

What she’d tell the girl with the hairbrush

There is a generation of young women who grew up singing Tamia’s songs into hairbrushes, imagining themselves on stages they had never seen. If one of them sat before her today and said she wanted to pursue music, what would Tamia say?

Tamia’s advice is clear:

“Know who you are before the world tries to define you. This industry will try to shape you into something, but your power is in your authenticity. Be patient with your journey, there’s no shortcut to becoming who you’re meant to be. And protect your joy. That’s something I wish someone had told me earlier.”

Protect your joy. It is perhaps the most personal thing she says in the entire interview, a piece of advice that sounds less like career guidance and more like something earned through loss.

Music as a force for unity

The world in 2026 feels fractured in ways that test even the most optimistic convictions. Asked whether she still believes music can bridge the divides, political, cultural, generational. She does not hesitate:

"I still believe in music’s power to bridge divides. I don’t think that’s romantic, I think it’s real. Music has always been one of the few spaces where people can meet each other emotionally, beyond politics or circumstance. It may not solve everything, but it can open hearts, and that’s where change begins.”

When the lights go off

And when she is not Tamia the artist? When the tour bus is quiet and there is no stage, no audience, no expectation?

“I listen to a little bit of everything, gospel, jazz, classic R&B, sometimes even silence. Artists like Stevie Wonder or Anita Baker are always grounding for me. That kind of music feeds the soul. It reminds me why I fell in love with music in the first place.”

There's something about that answer, an artist who has spent three decades feeding the world with her voice still needs to be fed herself. The sources she turns to, Stevie Wonder, Anita Baker, gospel, silence are not surprising, but they are revealing. They are the music of substance, of patience, of emotional truth over commercial calculation.

In August, when Tamia takes the stage in Cape Town, Durban, and Pretoria, she will be performing for audiences who have carried her music through decades of their own lives. She will be standing in a country that is celebrating its women while still failing too many of them. And she will be doing what she has always done, singing from a place that is honest, human, and unafraid of vulnerability.

Some voices belong to a moment. Tamia’s belongs to time.

THE BIGGEST WOMEN’S MONTH CELEBRATION TOUR EXPERIENCE

• 6 August 2026 — Grand Arena, GrandWest, Cape Town

• 7 August 2026 — Durban ICC, KwaZulu-Natal

• 10 August 2026 — SunBet Arena, Time Square, Pretoria

Tickets available via Webtickets and at Pick n Pay outlets nationwide.