Google has graced its home page with an illustration of Enoch Sontonga wrapped in the colours of the South African flag.
For many years before and after his death, Sontonga was an obscure figure. He is now celebrated as the man who wrote a familiar hymn that would become a tribute to the struggle of black people against the oppression of the white apartheid regime – “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” (God Bless Africa).
Sontonga, a choirmaster, composed the music and, in 1899, children in a church choir were among the first South Africans to sing the hymn in public. Samual Mqhayi, an isiXhosa poet, would later add verses to Sontonga’s hymn.
The hymn was written in the Cape Colony, which now forms part of the Eastern Cape. The choirmaster and poet was born in Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape in 1873.
After his death in 1905, at the age of 34, Sontonga’s songs lived on. Diana Mgqibisa, his wife, would share his notebooks with church choirs, who would then sing his hymns.
In 1923, Sol Plaatjie, one of the founders of the ANC, contributed to the first recording of the hymn in a London studio. In the two years that followed, the ANC adopted the song as a struggle anthem, so that by 1925 the organisation was closing its meetings with a rendition of the hymn.
The hymn became an anti-colonial anthem around Africa. Later on Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Tanzania declared it their national anthem. Some have since changed this.
In 1994, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ was declared the official South African anthem, incorporating ‘Die Stem van Suid Africa’ – the national anthem under the apartheid regime. In 1996, the two songs were shortened and combined into an anthem that includes Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Afrikaans and English.
But it has become contested: last year, Fees Must Fall student protesters have created their own remake of the anthem, removing the verse from ‘Die Stem’.
Today, South Africans mark the first democratic vote in 1994 – in the celebration of freedom or (un)freedom – and by honouring a man who isn’t always at the forefront of public memory, Google seems to have won a few South Africans over.