In 1986, the South African photographer Santu Mofokeng produced a series of images called Train Church. It was an ode to Black commuters who prayed as they rode on packed passenger trains that shuttled them back and forth between their homes in Soweto and the centre of Johannesburg, where they were employed in menial jobs legislated for them by the apartheid regime.
In one photo a preacher holds his Bible open; in another a woman stands with her mouth wide in religious ecstasy. Years later, Mofokeng wrote that the pictures captured “the experience of commuting and the pervasiveness of spirituality”. He argued this constituted “the most significant features of South African life”.
Like the commuters in Mofokeng’s photos, cellist and singer Abel Selaocoe grew up travelling on trains. He also grew up in the church, with rhythms that channelled both Christianity and African traditions that predated the arrival of Europeans. Selaocoe has a keen understanding of the still-dominant landscape of South African segregation, although he grew up in post-apartheid South Africa, free of the subjugation that marked his parents’ lives.
Selaocoe is making his Australian debut with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, bringing with him the vitality and innovation that have thrilled audiences worldwide. Since he burst onto the international stage with his BBC Proms debut in 2021, he has garnered hundreds of thousands of fans from across the globe. He makes music look easy. Selaocoe can play a Bach cello suite as comfortably as one of his own compositions.
Much of the excitement in his music comes from his apparent refusal to choose where he belongs. For the ACO he will perform four of his own compositions – Qhawe, Tshepo, Lerato and Ka Bohaleng – each of which is steeped in the stories of South African life. Loosely translated, “Qhawe” means hero, “Tshepo” means hope and “Lerato” means love.
“Ka Bohaleng” – an allusion to a proverb that says “a woman will always hold the knife on the sharp side” – is a tribute to the fearlessness of mothers. In these compositions Selaocoe seamlessly blends the music of his childhood with his expansive world view.
This is what Selaocoe does best: he stretches and contorts the canon even as he honours and respects the music that has come before him.
Selaocoe will also perform When We Were Trees, a double cello concerto by Italian cellist and composer Giovanni Sollima, alongside ACO Principal Cello Timo Veikko Valve. Selaocoe has long admired Sollima for his “open-ended exploration” of the cello and has performed his compositions across his career, including an arrangement of Sollima’s Lamentatio that includes a Zulu song. In Selaocoe’s hands it becomes a song of mourning that gathers in intensity then ebbs exquisitely, before it picks up speed again for a finale that pays homage to the Italian drama of its lineage.
This is what Selaocoe does best: he stretches and contorts the canon even as he honours and respects the music that has come before him.
He tells me that he is drawn to traditional music from all over the world. “It all speaks to the same themes,” he says. “No matter where in the world it comes from, music rooted in tradition has always been about the Earth that we walk on. It’s about seeking to understand the cosmos.” He pauses to reflect for a moment. “I mean if you listen to Zulu music, it’s all about the stars.”
Selaocoe does this throughout our conversation – starts expansively, thinks widely and looks out at the world for answers. But he always returns to first principles, coming back to the idea that music is for connection, exchange and healing.
He was born in 1992, a year wedged between two moments of dramatic political possibility: February 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released after decades of imprisonment, and April 1994, when South Africans voted to end apartheid in historic elections that swept Mandela and his comrades to power.
While Selaocoe embodies the confidence and style of a new generation of South Africans, his focus on home and belonging, the rhythms of his improvisations and the often-haunting tone of his voice are reminders that he is the product of a long and complex set of histories. The source of his artistry is embedded in the social DNA of his upbringing, but it doesn’t confine him. He uses his cello as a percussive instrument, throws his voice and calls upon dozens of musical traditions. When I ask how he has come to do this, he says it is because no one ever told him not to.
Selaocoe grew up in Sebokeng, a township about 60 kilometres south of Johannesburg in a family that was both religious and musical. By the time he was a teenager, his talent was apparent to everyone in his community. He was enrolled in a prestigious weekend music program in Soweto and soon was attending an elite boys’ school in one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in South Africa.
To get to school or to his music lessons, Selaocoe often had to take the train. As he moved between locations, he developed a ritual he described in a profile in The New York Times, in which he would “remove the bridge of his cello, take off the endpin and put both parts in his pocket, standing with the instrument flat against his chest to take up as little space as possible”.
The image is stark: a little boy with a big cello, making himself small.
Today Selaocoe is a global star, and he doesn’t need to worry about how much space he takes up. Indeed, he seems to be everywhere at once. In the weeks leading up to our interview he was in Manchester but on the day we spoke, his Tiny Desk Concert was released on NPR Music. As we hopped on the call, he was in Germany.
Reading the comments on his Instagram post in response to the digital concert, it’s hard to believe he’s a classical musician whose instrument is the cello. He has well over a 100,000 followers, many of whom have left breathless comments. Most are punctuated by love hearts and fire emojis. Someone writes “Brooooooo!!!” Another comment reads: “One of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. It was like a spiritual experience.”
It’s the sort of enthusiasm that has followed him since his days as a student at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. Two years into the program, Selaocoe formed Chesaba, a trio with Alan Keary on bass and Sidiki Dembélé on percussion (Dembélé will join the ACO concerts). Their performances included playing the kora and ngoni, and included songs sung in Bambara, Sotho, Tswana and Zulu. They also regularly collaborated with the seven-piece ensemble BCUC – Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness – to create concerts that throbbed with classical, hip-hop, Afrobeats and funk.
“I’ve come to a place where I’ve decided that it’s less about me and more about being a vessel for something universal, something powerful, something for people to hold onto. And when you think about it that way, it sort of takes away the fears.”Abel Selaocoe
Some of the pride and excitement is about his African-ness. Though people from the African diaspora have always played a role in Western classical music, and despite the gains made by leaders such as Chi-chi Nwanoku, who founded the Chineke! Orchestra, the genre is still struggling to embrace Black musicians, composers and audiences.
When I ask Selaocoe if he ever experiences imposter syndrome, he reframes the question. It is no longer a question about race: instead he wants to talk about art and purpose. He insists that it’s not so much about being an imposter as it is about feeling insecure, and insecurity is a feeling anyone can tap into. He says insecurity is valuable because it “forces you to ask yourself ‘why do I feel out of place here?’”.
He says that these days he is clear about this mission. “I’ve come to a place where I’ve decided that it’s less about me and more about being a vessel for something universal, something powerful, something for people to hold onto. And when you think about it that way, it sort of takes away the fears.”
I’m always interested in how people become who they are. I want to know how he learned to be brave. I begin by asking if he was intimidated by the cello as a child – its size, the oddness of the sounds it made in contrast to the other instruments he would have heard in church.
He throws the question back teasingly. “Imagine I’m an adult and I meet this thing. Then I would be intimidated. But as a child, you know, curiosity is something that seems to come first. You want to hold the thing, you want to see how it works, and so I was just more fascinated with how it worked at that age.”
Fascination comes up often in our conversation. It’s not just that the cello was fascinating, it’s that it was made fascinating by those who loved him.
“Everybody was around to teach me in music, and they made sure that fear was never part of the process,” he says. “It was beautiful, that they said ‘just explore’, you know. ‘Do you remember that hymn that we sing in church? Can you play it, can you find it?’”.
This ethos – Do you remember it? Can you play it? Can you find it? – is at the core of Selaocoe’s musicality. It’s why his work extends beyond the aural, why critic Kate Kellaway described attending an Abel Selaocoe concert as “medicine for the masses”. He never lost the fascination that was cultivated in him as a child when he learned that “when you play music you never ask for permission”.
He is not interested in “whether I should be doing something or not”. His audience, he says, understands that “when they come to this, when they come into the music, it’s an active experience. It’sabout exploring and taking risks.”
For Selaocoe, music is a resource. “[It’s] like this mineral that I can show the audience, and it helps,” he says. “It helps because I’m no different to them in that I am searching for a place to belong and to be cared for. And like them, I find it in music.”
Sisonke Msimang is the author of two books, Always Another country: a memoir of exile and home and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela, and has been widely published, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN and Al Jazeera.
Abel Selaocoe is touring to Wollongong, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide, 3-15 April. Click here to buy tickets.
