My Lover Swears: Sonnets and Song

[This post was updated and revised on 14 May 2025]

The Tsikinya-Chaka Centre is proud to announce an exciting collaboration between singer-songwriter Tholwana Dyosopu, poet-performer Siphokazi Jonas and language expert Sanele kaNtshingana to present a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets . . . updated, adapted and translated!

When my lover swears that he is honest

I pretend to be fooled

Thought I know it’s not true

And now he thinks I’m unschooled

Tholwana Dyosopu (formerly Tholwana Mohale) burst onto the music scene as a teenager, winning SA’s Got Talent in 2014. After graduating from the National School of the Arts, she launched her debut EP Warrior (featuring the hit track “Hollywood Guy”) and followed this up with 2.0.1.5, which was nominated for a South African Music Award for Best Pop Album, and much-loved singles like “Don’t Let Me Go”. Tholwana took a break to further her studies at Wits University, where TCC Director Chris Thurman had the good fortune of meeting her in an undergraduate English seminar course in 2022.

Actor Anelisa Phewa, the TCC Artist in Residence that year, worked with students in the class to develop translations and adaptations of Shakespeare’s sonnets for performance. Tholwana blew everyone away with her updated musical version of Sonnet 138, “When my love swears that she is made of truth”. (The word sonnet, of course, comes from the Italian sonnetto, a “little song”.)

Fast forward a couple of years, and Tholwana’s talents as a singer-songwriter have come to the fore again as she marks a new direction in her musical career by creating an EP of sonnet-songs. With the help of technical experts in the Wits Music Department, she is carving time out of her busy schedule as a teacher-in-training to record a handful of tracks at the University’s brand new venue, the Chris Seabrooke Music Hall.

Images: The stage of the Chris Seabrooke Music Hall is converted into a recording studio as Tholwana Dyosopu performs her takes on Shakespeare’s sonnets

Siphokazi Jonas is a poet, writer, performer and producer. The stage show she created with Zimbini Makwetu and Hope Netshivhambe, #WeAreDyingHere, was adapted into a short film (produced by Siya and Rachel Kolisi) that won a South African Film and TV Award in 2022. Her poetry collection Weeping Becomes A River (Random House) was the Book Lounge Book of the Year in 2024. She has headlined at poetry sessions and festivals worldwide.

Siphokazi holds an MA in English Literature with a focus on Shakespeare Studies, and readers of Weeping Becomes A River may note some decolonial Shakespearean tropes at work in the text. For this project, she will be working with TCC affiliate Sanele kaNtshingana to develop a series of isiXhosa sonnet translations that will be in dialogue with Tholwana’s musical renditions.

Sanele is a lecturer in African Languages at the University of Cape Town. His research maps out how amaXhosa political life and ideas of political authority were discursively manoeuvred and shaped by amaThwasa ooNcwadi “African intellectuals” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sanele co-translated extracts from Othello into isiXhosa for the 2023/24 Baxter Theatre production of that play. He is a contributor to the forthcoming TCC Press publication Isiqalo sobulumko: The Life and Work of Bennett Best Mdledle.

Watch this space for announcements about live performances by Tholwana and Siphokazi, and for more information about this developing collaboration!

New book: African Shakespeare