RESTORATION: Thabo Mbeki tribute concert restores Tiyo Soga to the African Renaissance

As President Thabo Mbeki marks his eighty-fourth year, Tiyo Soga’s hymn returns as a summons to memory, restoring a father of the African Renaissance to the centre of our unfinished national promise and shared inheritance.

For more than 150 years, South Africans have sung Tiyo Soga’s prayer as if it arrived from the heavens without an author.

At funerals, in churches, at political gatherings and in moments of national longing, Lizalis’ idinga lakho — fulfil your promise — has risen from our throats with solemn force. We know the hymn. We know its ache. We know the promise it demands. Yet, too often, we do not know the man who gave it to us.

That forgetting is not innocent. It belongs to the larger wound Soga spent his life resisting: the erasure of African memory, African intellect and African authorship. The hymn endured, but the name behind it receded. The prayer remained in the mouths of the people, while its maker slipped from public memory.

The Thabo Mbeki Foundation and Classics on Turf will seek to repair that breach on Saturday, 20 June, with a concert that restores Soga to the centre of the story.

It is more than a performance. It is an act of recovery, linking Soga’s 19th-century vision to the present while marking the 84th birthday of the Foundation’s Patron, President Thabo Mbeki. Instead of placing Mbeki himself at the centre, the Foundation honours the mission that has animated much of his public life: the belief that Africa’s renewal begins with the recovery of its memory.

In lifting Soga, whom Mbeki regards as something close to a father of the African Renaissance, the concert turns commemoration into restoration.

Mandisi Dyantyis directs the evening — a musician whose deep feel for the African idiom brings 19th-century hymnody into a contemporary hall.

Kutlwano Masote conducts, leading the Chamber Orchestra of Johannesburg and the Renaissance Singers through careful (re)interpretations of music woven into our consciousness for over a century.

The concert both preserves and innovates, taking from the granary and adding to it in the same motion — the cycle on which the African Renaissance depends. Dyantyis and Masote are not embalming Soga. They treat his music as a living tradition that handles, turns and makes it speak in old, new, and different ways.

Born in 1829, Soga became the first black South African to be ordained as a church minister. He was also a translator, essayist and composer of more than 30 hymns.

In August 1862, he founded a Xhosa-language newspaper titled Indaba. Writing as Nonjiba Waseluhlangeni, the Dove of