The Voices and the Drum

Cape Town, end of April 2026

Anyone who knows me knows how much I care about music education.

I'm a trustee of the Voces8 Foundation and Chair of Morabe Rural Music, a Suffolk-based charity that puts music education into primary schools. A meaningful share of my volunteer hours goes into the same question, in different shapes: how do we put singing, and music in general, in front of more children and adults, in more places, with more skill, love and creativity behind it.

I am a passionate amateur singer who believes — quietly but completely — that singing together is one of the most powerful ways we have of binding people. It builds communities. It does, in five minutes of harmony, things that take politics and policy decades to attempt.

That is the lens through which I have ended up doing what I have ended up doing over the past two weeks.

Cape Town

I have been in Cape Town since 1 April. I head back to London in mid-May.

This is not a holiday. Since January 2025 I have been quietly building a dual London / Cape Town life. The original plan was three months a year here, nine in London. The numbers have flipped — three in London now, the rest of the year here — and I am working on a creative project in Cape Town involving an events space that will shape the years ahead.

I was born in South Africa, in Johannesburg. I have spent most of my adult life in Europe. The pull back to this country, at this stage of my life, is partly nostalgia and largely something more specific. There is so much work to do here — communities to rebuild, creative projects to collaborate on, bridges to build through music and art. I want to be part of it, in whatever small ways I can.

Which is, more or less, what I came here to do this April. I just did not expect the universe to nudge me quite so quickly, or quite so specifically.

A choir I already loved from afar

If you follow choral music, you know Thanda.

Those voices! That Vibrant Energy- that distinctive sound of South Africa, the rehearsal videos that landed in your feed at three in the morning, the gwijo, the harmonies, the sheer joy. I had been following them for a while. At this year's Cape Town International Jazz Festival they collaborated with Jacob Collier — and yes, I am a serial Jacob Collier fanboy — and I missed it by a few days. I relived it on Instagram and Youtube afterwards, half-heartbroken not to have been there, like everyone else who only saw it second-hand.

A few months before all this, Paul Smith, CEO of the Voces8 Foundation, had said to me — half in passing — "Adrian, while you're in Cape Town, see if you can connect with some local choirs. There must be brilliant work happening there."

There is brilliant work happening here.

Then, on 19 April, Carte Blanche aired its investigation — Choir Captured — into the management of the NPO behind Thanda. The story that broke that night and unfolded over the days that followed is now well-documented, collated by the Lizwi choir on their own news page. The short version: the singers chose to step forward and represent themselves.

I sent Prince a message on Instagram. I offered to help. He said yes.

So that's the answer to Paul's nudge. The Voces8 brief is, you might say, complete.

A drum, and a press release

A week later I was at 196 Victoria for the choir's Freedom Day livestream concert — Let Freedom Reign, their first public performance under their new name, Lizwi. Lizwi is the isiXhosa word for voice. There is a story behind why a new name was needed at all, and the choir tells it carefully and well in FAQ 3 on their website. Anyone who wants the full context should read it from them directly. It is the cleanest piece of public writing I have read this year.

What I noticed at the concert, beyond the singing, was that they were using a partially repaired, borrowed drum. So I did the smallest, most useful thing I could think of: I bought them a new one. It is now theirs.

That is the entirety of my material contribution.

The other thing I have been doing is the one thing they urgently needed and the one thing I had almost no experience in: PR. How difficult could it be? I was honoured to be at the Freedom Day concert, so I wrote a piece around that. I built a spreadsheet of journalists and editors by Googling and combing through Instagram. Then I got onto WhatsApp and Instagram DMs. Bosh. Let's just say I am cutting my teeth on the PR side a little late in life.

On going to Langa

I should be honest about something else.

In 54 years as a South African, the rehearsals I attended in Langa over the past fortnight were the first time I had ever set foot in a township.

That sentence is uncomfortable to write and harder to publish. It is also the truth, and the truth tends to be where the work is.

The choir is rehearsing for now at 16 on Lerotholi, the art gallery and creative space at 16 Lerotholi Avenue in Cape Town's oldest township. Their home is Khayelitsha, a real distance away across the Cape Flats. For sixteen singers and a musical director to get themselves to rehearsal twice a week is no small undertaking — shared taxis, time, money. The logistics are part of what holds this thing together, and it is the kind of quiet love that is invisible from the outside.

What I will say plainly is this. I felt welcomed and safe in Langa. The space at 16 on Lerotholi is one of the most quietly remarkable creative environments I have walked into in years. An artist exhibiting on the gallery walls. Sixteen voices warming up in front of the work. The volunteer web developer who built lizwichoir.com setting up his camera in a corner to take the headshots that are now up on the members page. Look closely at the backdrop behind every face. That is the gallery. Those are the works.

I also met Mzi, who runs an organic, community-led vegetable garden a short walk from the gallery. There will be a separate post on him alone — what he is doing deserves more than a paragraph here. The artist on the walls deserves their own post too. There will be more.

The vibrancy of that small corner of Langa, the creativity, the warmth, the matter-of-fact welcome — it has reordered something in me.

The song I cannot stop playing

There is one track that has not left my speakers in two weeks. It is the song I first heard them sing live in the first rehearsal I was so blessed to attend.

Ndilimele is an original composition — written (I am virtually sure) by Prince and Iva and others, recorded by the choir, released as a single in January 2025. The title is isiXhosa: it means "I'm hurt". The choir's own framing of the song, in their social posts, is "what have you done to me?" — and they describe it as a song about wounds and healing.

I do not speak isiXhosa. I cannot give you a line-by-line translation. What I can tell you is what the song does to a non-speaker on first listen, and on the fortieth: it pulls the floor out from underneath you. There is a pain and a beauty in it that need no translation, and a vulnerability in Iva's lead voice that I find difficult to look away from. And I heard them sing in live in that Gallery space last Friday and it will be with me forever.

That a choir whose recent chapter has included real, documented hurt has a song called I'm hurt already in their catalogue is one of those coincidences that does not feel like coincidence.

If anyone reading this speaks isiXhosa and would help me understand the lyrics properly — what is being said, how, to whom — please get in touch. I would be grateful.

What I did not expect

What I did not expect — and what I genuinely want to record — is how much Cape Town is behind this story.

I am, on any given week, one of dozens of people offering time, money, expertise, advice, contacts, legal hours, design hours, accounting hours, rehearsal space, transport, equipment. The choir is not short of love. It is being held by an extraordinary, uncoordinated, almost entirely voluntary community of people who have decided that this — these voices, this choice, this freedom — matters to them.

That is worth saying aloud. The story that gets told about South Africa from the outside is too often a story of what is broken. The story I have watched unfold over these last two weeks is a story of what works. Generosity, organisation, expertise, solidarity — without performance, without fuss.

On being here

I have spent most of my adult life moving between two cities — an and/and person rather than an either/or one. To be in Cape Town for the moment Lizwi found their name is one of those quiet gifts that the and/and life sometimes hands you.

There is something else, though, beneath the convenience of the timing.

I grew up in apartheid South Africa, in a country that was busy keeping me — and millions of others — separate from each other. The heritage I am stumbling into now, in my mid-fifties, with a choir that sings in isiXhosa, in a township I had never set foot in, in a creative space I had never heard of, is a heritage I was raised to be kept apart from. Coming back to it is not exactly going home. It is more like finally going somewhere I was always told was not for me.

Coaching teaches you that the moments that matter most rarely announce themselves in advance. You step forward, or you don't. You message the stranger, or you don't. You buy the drum, or you don't.

I'm glad I stepped forward. I'm glad Prince said yes. I'm glad to have been one of the many.

The voices are now their own. As they always should have been.