Tender: Jabulile Majola has just released the single Isineke, from the soon-to-be-released debut solo EP Isitifiketi. Photo: Chelsea Pickering
Jabulile Majola is not just a musician — he is a storyteller who treats music like a lifelong friend.
You feel it in the way he speaks about his art — not as something to be conquered or mastered, but as a companion that has walked with him, whispered to him and sometimes even carried him along the winding paths of life.
His latest single Isineke, from his upcoming debut solo EP Isitifiketi, is no exception — it’s more than a song, it’s an offering, a quiet gesture toward something all of us need more of: patience.
Translated from isiZulu, isineke means patience, but the word unfolds more gently and richly in Majola’s interpretation. This isn’t the kind of patience that bites its lip and taps its foot waiting for the world to catch up.
This is patience that loves. Patience that listens. Patience that holds space. The kind of patience that relationships are built on — carefully, soulfully and with the quiet trust that the other person is trying too.
Listening to Isineke feels like overhearing a secret shared between two hearts. It moves like a whisper floating above an acoustic guitar, waves lapping at the shore beneath it.
The sound is intimate, hushed, like it’s not trying to grab your attention but instead waiting for you to come closer. That’s how Majola makes music — not for the spotlight, but for the soul.
“I wrote this song at a time when I had a girlfriend who later became my wife,” Majola shares.
“We needed patience then and we still need it now. It was something we had to learn to give each other.”
You hear that lived-in honesty in the lyrics — there’s no theatrical performance here, no reaching for poetic perfection. Instead, there’s truth, simple and bare.
The process of writing Isineke was just as organic as the song feels. Majola started with guitar chords — slowly shifting, evolving, like the very theme he sings about.
There was no formula, just a feeling that deepened into words.
“After the first verse, I knew I was talking about patience,” he reflects. That knowing, that clarity of intent, is what gives the song its weight.
But Isineke doesn’t stop with Majola’s voice. Enter Thando Zwide, who adds a new dimension with her verse. They had never met in person — only linked through the rhythms of the industry — but when she heard the song, she connected instantly.
Her contribution shifts the song’s lens from the personal to the communal, reminding us that patience is not just something we need in romance, it’s something we need in how we relate to the world.
“It was super cool how she came in with her verse,” Majola says.
“She touched on the community aspect of patience … through collaboration, we opened up another door to the story.”
In that moment, the song goes beyond a duet of voices to become a harmony of perspectives — patience between partners, yes, but also between neighbours, between generations, between ourselves and the world we live in.
Themes of faith, life and community echo throughout Majola’s work, and Isineke threads them together in one seamless breath.
“I like where I am now but I’m fascinated by what I’m yet to experience,” he says.
There’s a spiritual undertone here, not in the dogmatic sense, but in the way he opens his music to divine timing — letting each note, each lyric, arrive as it must.
Majola calls his genre Afro-soul — not because of the instrumentation but because of the intention.
“It is the music of the community,” he explains. It’s for the people. For the hearts that are trying. For the couples holding on. For the young ones growing up. For the souls learning to wait with love.
And perhaps that’s the quiet power of Isineke. It doesn’t just ask us to wait — it invites us to love while we wait. To breathe. To listen. To be present. To be patient.
Just like the sea.