The architecture of speech: How to be heard

Southern Africa’s reigning public speaking champion, Vus’umuzi Phakathi, moves between poetry, journalism, advertising and academia with rare fluency. 

In this conversation, he talks about confronting mental illness on stage, transforming a century-old organisation from within and the secret behind crafting the most powerful speech in the region.

Vus’umuzi Phakathi, you are a proud member of Toastmasters, a global network dedicated to fostering public speaking skills. When did your speaking journey begin, and why did you join Toastmasters?

As a performing poet with 20 years of experience, I am no stranger to the spoken word. What brought me to Toastmasters in particular is the quiet architecture behind public speaking: the structure, the order, the reverence for time. 

I wanted to become someone who could hold a deadline with grace and precision. Someone who could show up prepared, speak with clarity, and live with intention.

Some of my closest friends are Toastmasters and I had been circling its orbit for over five years — a guest at the table but never quite pulling up a chair. 

Late last year, something shifted. Life asked something more of me and I knew I had to answer it as a different kind of person. More rooted, deliberate and disciplined. I didn’t just want to speak better, I wanted to be better.

You seem to have mastered the former rather quickly. In May, after winning several competitions on club, area, division and district level, you were crowned Southern African Champion of Public Speaking – declaring you the best speaker of 114 clubs with close to 1  500 members. In your professional opinion, what makes a good speech?

A good speech begins long before the first word is spoken. It begins in the marrow of lived experience, where truth meets memory. That’s the spine. 

From there, it needs intention — the skeleton that holds the form upright.

Why are you telling  this story? Why now? Intention gives the speech direction, it teaches your truth how to walk toward someone else’s heart.

Then comes the writing, the flesh and organs. Writing, at its best, rests on the trinity of narrative, image and sound. Narrative gives it shape; image gives it colour; sound gives it breath. A good speech sings before it is spoken, its rhythm and texture is felt even on the page.

And then comes the skin: the delivery. Tone and pace, posture and pause, eye contact and silence. Performance is not just acting, it’s alignment. When body, voice and spirit are speaking in one direction — that’s when the audience stops hearing you and starts hearing themselves in your story.

So, a good speech is a body, fully formed: spine made of truth, skeleton shaped by purpose, flesh and organs carved with craft, and skin alive with presence.

Your winning speech certainly carries your truth at its core. It tackles issues of mental health, taking listeners to the scene of your suicide attempt and behind the walls of a psychiatric hospital. What prompted you to tackle this topic?

This story isn’t just something that happened to me — it shaped the ground I stand on now. I was diagnosed with chronic manic depression in 2008. From that moment, I began living through seasons I could not predict. Some days came like floods, others felt like drought and it took years to understand that I couldn’t outrun this storm. I had to find shelter within it.

My speech is for those who know this landscape. For those who have walked it barefoot, who have felt the weight of their own minds trying to drag them under. 

I want them to know that they’re not alone. That I’ve been there and I’m still here.

But it is also a speech for those who stand beside us: family, friends, lovers. Those who don’t always understand but want to. It is a bridge, a light left on. It is context, when all they’ve had is confusion.

When someone dies from depression, the world says that they killed themselves. But when someone dies from cancer or heart failure, we say they died of the illness. That’s the cruel twist of suicide, its final injustice — how we speak about it. So, I wanted to say this clearly: “The depressed do not kill themselves, they die of the illness.”

Like with any chronic illness, living with depression means doing the work. Sometimes it’s medication, sometimes movement; sometimes talking, sometimes simply breathing. It’s choosing life, one small decision at a time. 

And it helps to be surrounded by the right people, the ones who remind you that you matter, even on the days you forget.

In South Africa, Toastmasters is a historically white institution. The first club was founded in 1950, almost parallel to the birth of apartheid, and it’s a legacy that still lingers. What does your success now, in 2025, mean for the organisation’s transformation? How can it open more doors in future?

True, the legacy lingers indeed. The trophy I brought home was first awarded in 1956. It carries nearly 70 years of history, etched name by name into its surface — yet across all those decades, only a handful of names are black. 

This is in the Southern African district, not just South Africa.

One of those names belongs to my head coach Thandwefika Tshabalala. That matters. It shows the fire has been carried before. He is not only my coach, he is a torchbearer. 

And so are Lazola Bele and Thabo Leshoeli, the other coaches who walked with me on this journey. 

When they joined Toastmasters over a decade ago, they entered rooms that were not always made for them. But they stayed. They studied the rules, rose through the ranks, and once they understood the structure, they began to build spaces of their own. They opened clubs in townships, in corporations, in different places where black voices could rise without restraint. 

Instead of burning down the house, they built new rooms within it, rooms which someone like me can walk into and not feel like a guest, but like a host in my own home.

I believe this is how we open the doors. We walk through them fully ourselves. We don’t shrink to fit, we expand the room. We bring our own stories, our own tone, our own language, and still hold to the craft. We don’t abandon the form, we add to it.

And the shift is already happening. My club, the Morningside Toastmasters Club, led by Setloboko Motsoagae, is predominantly black. 

The culture is rich and real, true to who we are. People who visit almost always return because they feel something alive, something honest. 

So, yes, my name joins the few black names engraved on that trophy. 

But what matters more is who will see it. When someone who looks like you does what seems impossible, it suddenly becomes imaginable — and possible for you too. 

This is what transformation looks like: to be visible, authentic and excellent; but above all, to make sure the flame doesn’t stop with me. To pass it on and light the way.

After winning the Southern African division, you are aiming for the world championship next year. What is it that South Africans bring to a global stage?

When you travel outside of South Africa, something shifts. You start to see your country more clearly. You also begin to understand just how much we carry.

As South Africans, we don’t just speak — we feel, we remember, we embody. Ours is a country built on resistance and diversity. We don’t all look the same, sound the same, pray the same, so from a young age, we learn how to live in difference, how to both listen and translate our experience into expression.

We are not just expressive, we are performative. That’s in our blood. It’s in our protests, in our prayers and even parliaments. We don’t march in silence, we dance, we sing; because we don’t carry our message in our words only. We carry it in movement, in rhythm, in bodies. That is how we speak, that is how we arrive.

What do South Africans bring to the global stage? We bring an invitation to not only experience something but to express it: with truth, with power, with feeling. We bring a voice that was shaped by struggle but not silenced by it. 

We bring a voice that is alive — and that moves when it speaks.