From Makhaza to the world, and back to a name we own.

Where we began

We came together in 2023 in Makhaza, Khayelitsha — a community where joy and hardship sit side by side, and where music has always been one of the ways young people find each other.

We rehearsed wherever we could. We sang in community halls, at church services, at gatherings where our voices were the whole programme. We did it because singing together was the most joyful thing we could imagine doing with our lives. None of us were thinking about stages. We were thinking about each other, and about the songs.

Stages and screens

Within two years our voices had travelled further than any of us imagined. From Khayelitsha and Cape Town to Paris and São Paulo. From street corners in Stellenbosch to a national gallery. From a handful of local supporters to a following that grew into the millions across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

On 24 June 2025 a single performance video, posted to social media, met an audience we had never met before. It travelled to places we had never been. People wrote to us in languages we did not speak. For the first time, the world arrived at the choir, not the other way around.

Through all of it, the choir itself remained what it had always been: a group of young people from Khayelitsha, singing.

The shape of how we worked

For most of that journey, the choir performed under a name held by others, and our work was structured around a management organisation that was not ours. Many of the songs the world fell in love with were composed within the choir. The voices were ours. The decisions, the contracts, and the money were elsewhere.

On 19 April 2026, Carte Blanche, South Africa's longest-running investigative current-affairs programme, broadcast a segment titled "Choir Captured". It described, in detail and in public, what some of us had been living with privately for a long time.

A new name

On Freedom Day, 27 April 2026, we performed our first concert under our own name: Lizwi Choir. We do not pretend the path that led us here was a choice freely made. We do say that what we did with it was ours.

Shortly after, a documentary film about the choir's earlier journey premiered in France. The film tells one version of our story. We have written our own, in our own words. You can read it on our public statement.

What Lizwi means

Lizwi is the isiXhosa word for voice. Not just sound — voice in the fuller sense: the carrier of memory, the instrument of agency, the thing that says I am here.

It is the right word for who we are. The choir is its voices. The voices own the choir. The name is the thing.

Where we are going

We are sixteen voices, owned and led by the singers who built this work. We manage ourselves. As of 11 May 2026, we are Lizwi Choir NPC, a registered Not for Profit Company under the South African Companies Act (Reg no 2026/361808/08), governed by the founding members, with transparency built into its foundations from the first day.

We are going to keep singing. We are going to keep travelling. We are going to keep carrying Khayelitsha to the world and the world back to Khayelitsha. And in time, we hope to open the same doors for the next generation of young artists from our community that opened for us — only this time, with fair pay, ownership, and accountability built into the work from the beginning.