Writer: Live Music Desk | Artwork: Slovo Mamphaga
2015. A generation of young people rise across the country. The streets ignite with voices demanding what many deemed as the ‘impossible’: a decolonised, decommodified, and truly liberatory education. But this call did not begin in 2015. For years before, students in historically Black universities had resisted financial exclusions, sounding alarms against a system designed to keep them out. Their protests laid the groundwork for the eruption to come.
When #FeesMustFall and #OutsourcingMustFall broke open, they did so in the searing light of #RhodesMustFall, an earlier uprising that tore down colonial statues and demanded a deeper reckoning with knowledge, power, and history. Together, these movements shook the foundations of South African universities and forced the nation to confront its unfinished struggle with freedom. Mental breakdowns. Criminal records. Permanent university expulsions. Lives lost.
Yet the story is layered. These uprisings, as fierce and necessary as they were, carried their own exclusions. They centred those who had gained access to higher learning, while leaving behind the vast majority of South Africa’s youth locked out of university gates. Their struggles, shaped by class, gender, sexuality, different abilities and geography, remained outside the corridors of academia. The Fallist moment, for all its radical clarity, bore within it the valid critiques of a revolution still wrestling with intersectionality and inclusivity.
Among those students were members of iPhupho L’ka Biko, then 6-piece band, and now 12-piece ensemble founded in the same year by the visionary Nhlanhla Ngqaqu. Immersed in the protests, the band carried the spirit of the struggle into their music, creating a sonic archive of memory, resistance, and hope.
2025. Ten years later. We return.
Not just a musical. Not just a show. A gathering. A remembrance. A call.
An offering to the spirits of those who rose, who fought, who dreamed. A reckoning with what was, what is, and what still must become.
“This work is a chant to the unfinished project of liberation,” says Ngqaqu.
“We gather to remember, to (re)think, to (re)imagine, to reflect, to love, to heal and to resist.”
A Rite of Memory in Many Tongues
This is not sound alone, it is a weaving of “disciplines”, a liturgy of art.
- On stage, voices embodied: Actors, Abongile Maurice Matyutyu, Sinenhlanhla Mgeyi, Nandi Zulu, Sibusiso Mkhize and Pulane Mafatshe move between silence and cry, laughter and defiance, summoning the contradictions of youth in a world half- transformed.
- Light as language: On lighting, Hlomohang ‘Spider’ Mothetho bends shadow and blaze into testimony, carrying memory in the flicker of lamps.
- The prop as a signifier: Set designer Lindani Nxumalo sculpts the ground we walk, the space where spirits and the living embrace.
- The stage and cloth as memory: Sinenhlanhla Zwane and Happy Gladness Simelane clothes bodies in the unfinished struggle, garments that whisper lineage and longing.
- Word as blade, as balm: Poets Makhafula Vilakazi & Thapelo Tharaga, cutting through the air, chanting prophecy, spilling meditation, stoking remembrance.
- The Black Body in motion: Moeketsi Kgotle bends, breaks, and remakes space through movement, channeling rhythm into remembrance, and silence into resistance.
- Image as witness: Tshepo Bopape, Khotso Motsoeneng and Levy Pooe stitch ghosts into living canvases, mapping struggle and painting memory as future.
- Sound reimagined: Simangaliso Dlamini (Livebug), recreates an ambience of revolution, defiance and joyful militancy, through engineering the ensemble’s sound.
- Artwork: Slovo Mamphaga
And at the heart and driving the narrative, iPhupho L’ka Biko a twelve-piece strong sound becomes archive, horn and drum become resistance, a remembrance that refuses forgetting, a sonic uprising toward the complete liberation of Africa.
Vuleka Mbombo, Mbombo Vuleka! directed by Nhlanhla Ngqaqu is a chant, a convocation, a dream retold. It is how we return. It is how we continue to identify and strive for the opening of iMobobo.
Event Details
Date: 27 September 2025
Time: 7:00PM
Venue: The Market Theatre, Johannesburg
Entrance: R200 early bird | R275 general
Tickets: ONE NIGHT ONLY. Seats are limited. Secure yours here: Webtickets
More on iPhupho L’ka Biko: https://linktr.ee/iphupholkabiko
