JOHANNESBURG – Most South Africans have sung Tiyo Soga without ever being told whose words they were singing. Lizalis’ idinga lakho’, fulfil your promise, has carried congregations through funerals and steadied crowds at political gatherings for over a century and a half. The melody endured; the name attached to it did not. On Saturday, 20 June 2026, the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and Classics on Turf will put that name back in the room.
The concert billed as “Honouring the Legacy of Tiyo Soga” will be held at the Wits Great Hall, Johannesburg, marking the eighty-fourth birthday of Foundation Patron President Thabo Mbeki. The evening features Afro-soul and jazz musician Mandisi Dyantyis as creative director and lead performer, joined by the Chamber Orchestra of Johannesburg and the Renaissance Singers under conductor Kutlwano Masote.
Tiyo Soga was born in 1829 near Alice in the Eastern Cape. He became the first ordained black minister this country produced, translator, essayist, journalist and composer of more than thirty hymns. In August 1862 he founded the Xhosa-language newspaper Indaba, writing under the name Nonjiba waseluhlangeni, the Dove of the Nation. In its opening issue, he called the paper a container: into it, he urged, the elderly should pour their knowledge, and every story, custom and remembered deed should be kept, because the deeds of a nation are worth more than its cattle and its money.
His most celebrated composition, Lizalis’ idinga lakho, became the unofficial anthem of resistance to colonial oppression long before Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika was written. Other hymns; The Bell Hymn, Khangelani nizibone, Vuthelani ixilongo, together with his 1866 isiXhosa translation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, remain celebrated as groundbreaking works in the African literary and spiritual canon.
President Mbeki has long held that the African Renaissance did not begin in his generation. It has deep roots in the lives and labours of African thinkers who, long before us, refused the erasure of African humanity and insisted on the dignity of African thought, faith, and culture. The Foundation has chosen to honour him by lifting up the figure he has long named as something close to the father of the African Renaissance, not with applause alone, but by doing the very work he believes in.
Max Boqwana, Chief Executive Officer of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, situates the tribute within this longer intellectual lineage:
“President Mbeki has long held that the African Renaissance did not begin in his generation. It has deep roots in the lives and labours of African thinkers who, long before us, refused the erasure of African humanity and insisted on the dignity of African thought, faith, and culture. Tiyo Soga belongs to that lineage. To honour President Mbeki on his 84th birthday by returning Soga’s voice to the public stage is, for the Foundation, the most fitting tribute we could offer. It is a tribute that places our Patron within the very tradition he has spent his life recovering and advancing.”
Dyantyis and Masote are not embalming Soga. They are doing to his music what every living tradition does to its inheritance, handling it, turning it over, making it speak in old, new and different ways. The concert takes from the granary and adds to it in the same motion, the cycle on which the Renaissance depends.
Kutlwano Masote, conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of Johannesburg, reflects: “Johannesburg will be treated to the artistry of Mandisi Dyantyis with a choir and full orchestra, tastefully re-interpreting hymns that have been a part of our South African consciousness for well over a century.”
The concert is built on the collaboration between the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and Classics on Turf, building on their successful celebration of President Mbeki’s birthday in June 2025.
Soga wrote at a time when colonial voices predicted, with great confidence, that the African would wither and disappear. He refused the prophecy. Rather than accept a fate dictated by someone else’s convenience, he championed his people’s enduring right to belong and author their own futures. He pressed for unity across the lines that divided black people from one another, holding that for a people pressed from every side, union above all things is strength.
On the night we mark President Mbeki’s eighty-fourth year, Lizalis’ idinga lakho as Soga intended it, a charge, a call to recover what has always been ours, and to do so with and for all the people with whom we hold that inheritance.
The concert is made possible by WIPHOLD and supported by SAfm.
