The story of how Buskaid began is one of strange chance and coincidence. In late 1991 British viola player Rosemary Nalden happened to hear a short clip on Radio 4’s Today Programme about the difficulties besetting a string project in Diepkloof, Soweto. A couple of months later, a similar report appeared in the Independent on Sunday, a newspaper which she read only intermittently. Responding to this double plea for help, Rosemary organised a ‘busk’ in 16 British Rail stations, with the support of around 120 professional musician friends and colleagues, to raise cash for the young African string players. A month later, in April 1992, on the first of many visits to the project (which was located in the washroom of a rundown community hall next to a sprawling squatter camp) Rosemary was overwhelmed by the wealth of talent and extraordinary motivation of the dozens of children coming in for lessons. Over the next few years, the UK’s Buskaid Trust (formed in 1992) organised further fundraising ventures, but by then the township project was running into unresolvable internal difficulties. In 1997, in response to requests from several of the children and their parents, Rosemary started a new project in a tiny dilapidated office attached to a priest’s house in Diepkloof. Around fifteen children from the original project formed the nucleus of this new venture; soon many more were applying to join.
In l999, with the support of a number of South African companies and trusts, Buskaid opened its own purpose-built Music School, also in Diepkloof. By now its numbers had more than doubled, and when word spread that the new school had opened, Rosemary was inundated with requests from many more children to join. The strange phenomenon of this fascination in the townships for playing the violin can in part be explained by a visit to South Africa in 1950 by Yehudi Menuhin, who, defying the terms of his contract, performed to a black audience in Sophiatown. In the audience was a young boy who was enormously inspired by Menuhin’s playing, and against all odds subsequently managed to find someone to teach him the violin. Four of his pupils eventually formed the Soweto String Quartet, many of whose children have studied at Buskaid.
