Bongo Flava singer Zuhura Othman Soud, better known by her stage name Zuchu, recently toured the country with her boss and boyfriend Diamond Platnumz for a performance at the Furaha Festival.
The event wasn’t without drama when Platnumz failed to appear on stage. Nevertheless, Zuchu had her moment. In 2020, she was officially announced as the new signee of Wasafi Record Label. In less than a week, she received her first YouTube plaque for reaching 100,000 subscribers. In 2022, Zuchu became the most subscribed female artist in Sub-Saharan Africa. Zuchu speaks
If I’m honest, I haven’t achieved what I would consider my biggest achievement yet.
The YouTube achievements were big at the time, but now I have bigger dreams that I am looking forward to achieving.
I won’t lie though, getting 100,000 YouTube subscribers within a week did surprise me. I was a new artist, a female artist just starting, people didn’t know much about me. So I went from zero to 100,000 in the blink of an eye and in less than a year I got my YouTube Gold Plaque, which was a million subscribers.
It felt special to overtake my sisters who I found and who had been in the game for a long time. It was a shock, but it still doesn’t feel like a breakthrough achievement to me.
Diamond will always be my hero, no matter what happens (to us), I credit him for my successes. Looking back from where he came from the streets of Tândale to where he is now, you can see the kind of work he put in to get to the level he is at now as the biggest artist in East Africa.
But again, supporting me is another way of looking at it. He could have chosen to invest his money in his music projects or other ventures but he chose to invest in me. Look at all the artists that have passed through his hands, they are all now A-list artists in East Africa, and for that, I will always give him his flowers no matter what because it takes a lot to get an artist out there and make them successful.
When he released me as his new signee, he had to put his projects on hold for a year and instead redirected the investments to me to make sure I made it out of the blocks.
He probably would have chosen to use that money to build an apartment for his daughter Tiffah, but instead, he invested in me. If anything, it was much riskier to invest in a female artist than a male artist.
To put your career on hold for a year to make someone else’s career easier, that’s a lot of sacrifice. I always tell him I don’t think I can do that to anyone. I never see myself owning a label because that’s a lot of sacrifice that I don’t think I can keep up with. The industry has to give him his flowers.
He has created his legacy. You cannot talk about the Tanzanian music industry without mentioning his name, even though he is long gone. If you want to talk about Harmonize, you have to mention Diamond Platnumz’s name, Rayvanny the same, myself too, and the list goes on.
One thing I am proud of is playing the role of mother to his children (with Zari). At first, I was very nervous because they were not mine but now they are my little buddies.
