The drums. The songs. The dance. And the people. The spirit of South Africa manifested through Africa Umoja: 20 Years Freedom and Democracy, a musical celebration of South African song and dance. The audience’s journey centered around the narrative of an older man named Hope as he took everyone from his childhood in the village to moving to the big city.

Opening drums threw the audience directly into the action. The drums had a literal presence on stage, where people sang as they did daily chores around the ‘kraal’. Sangoma took us into the heart of ritual with the Venda Snake Dance. The women’s connected arms moving together in a snake shape showed the importance of community and sisterhood once the girls in the village reached womanhood. Enter the Zulus, where a man was denied by a womb he wanted to marry, had a sense of play and liveliness between the men and the women.

The audience was then transported with Hope from his small village to 1950s Johannesburg. The Egoli Street Scene showed that men and women separated from each other; the men migrated to the city while the women stayed back in the hills and villages. The men brought their pulse of music to the big city, where it merged with jazz and other Western music traditions. However, apartheid disenfranchised blacks within the country. Music was driven underground to shebeens, illegal drinking pubs. The shebeen featured a performance by one of the most famous South African singers, Miriam Makeba.

The most significant thing about Africa Umoja was that the story did not stop to focus solely on apartheid South Africa. Even though its presence could be felt throughout several pieces, it was another chapter in South Africa’s history. Apartheid did not define the nation; rather, the performance showed that South Africa had a future ahead of apartheid. With Enter the Jembe Players’ Marimba Players, Can Girls, and the Gumboot Dancers (predecessors to modern-day stepping traditions); gospel music in Gospel Explosion in South Africa, and kwaito (hip-hop) music in Club Scene, South Africans continued to reinvent and add onto the wheel of music.

Todd Twala and Thembi Nyandeni have created a piece with a unique focus on the people, their resilience, and the circumstances surrounding their unity and strength. Rather than defining South Africa by the events within the country, Africa Umoja allowed the spirit of togetherness to speak for their nation’s music and culture.