The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Correspondent
YEARS after he kicked her out of his home for eloping with soccer star Tinashe Nengomasha, Oliver Mtukudzi has reunited with his daughter Samantha Mtukudzi, who is now part of the Black Spirits, the music superstars’ band.
The music superstar has had complicated relationships with his daughters over the years, having at one point disowned Selmor after she told the media that Tuku had been less than supportive of her music career.
Alleged to be the product of a secret relationship between Tuku and current wife Daisy, a relationship which happened while the music star was still married to Melody Murape, Samantha ran foul of her father when she fell pregnant with Nengomasha’s child out of wedlock.
Although he denied it at the time, Tuku’s publicist Shepherd Mutamba confirmed that he had indeed kicked her out when that happened.
“When Samantha fell pregnant with her first child Brooklyn, she was not yet married to Tinashe and Tuku kicked her out of the family home as punishment,” he wrote in his tell all book, Tuku Backstage.
This was not the first time that the musician had a fallout with one of his daughters because of a child out of wedlock, having had a strained relationship with his first born, Sandra, due to the same reasons.
“For many years, Sandra did not get on well with Tuku, after she had a child before marriage. Tuku wanted her to get married first and then have children and a decent family. Sandra finally got married to the father of her child in 2011,” Mutamba revealed.
While Samantha also got hitched in 2011, the status of her relationship with her father since he chucked her out of the family’s home has never been clear. Years later, it seems like that dispute is now water under the bridge, with Tuku’s publicist Walter Wanyanya revealing that Samantha was indeed back under her father’s wing.
“Samantha has been with the Black Spirits since last year. Yes, I can confirm that she is indeed a permanent part of the band now,” said Wanyanya.
This is not Samantha’s first flirtation with her father’s music, as she, alongside Sandra, helped with the arrangement of the female background vocals of the 1999 release Tuku Music, an album hailed as instrumental in catapulting the Zimbabwean music guru to international superstardom.
Samantha and Tuku’s reunion, unlike his reconciliation with Sandra and Selmor, seems to have flown under the radar, perhaps staying true to the character of a daughter who has been described as reserved.
“Despite being married to Tinashe Nengomasha, a Zimbabwean international soccer celebrity, Samantha herself shies away from celebrity life. At her wedding, in Harare, on Christmas Eve in 2011, she barred the media from her wedding ceremony.
Even after the wedding, not a single photograph was released to the newspapers. Such are her private life choices,” Mutamba wrote about the vocalist.
