TEDxJohannesburg Salon

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check the event website for the latest lineup.

• Buhlebendalo Mda

  Philanthropist, storyteller, healer, visionary, a chosen vessel from the gods - are a few words to describe the vocal prowess that is Buhlebendalo. The stage is Buhlebendalo's safest place. When her feet start tapping to the beat of a drum, it is as though the heavens are clapping in jubilation.

• By Lwansta

  ByLwansta is a South African artist-entrepreneur and cultural producer. His work spans music, design, curation, and infrastructure building. He is driven by a simple philosophy: creating the things he wishes existed. His work prioritises storytelling, world-building, and long-term cultural infrastructure over monetary visibility.

• David Mann

  David Mann is an award-winning author, editor and art critic. He currently works as the writer for the arts incubator, The Centre for the Less Good Idea, and is a co-founder of the Johannesburg-based arts writing collective, Writers' Block.

• Desire Marea

  Desire Marea is a performance artist, experimental musician, actor, painter and writer and sangoma. His practice interrogates and embodies the multiplicity of black being. He asks the question: What does it mean to be? He identifies as Isimakade.

• Mbali Dhlamini

  Dhlamini performs visual, tactile and discursive investigations into current indigenous cultural practices. Working to maintain a state of unlearning and relearning, Dhlamini's process recognises language as a medium of understanding and as a repository of knowledge.

• mpho ndaba

  mpho ndaba is a writer, business strategist, producer, and transdisciplinary scholar. mpho's intellectual inquiries sit at the intersections of Black Studies, Black Planetary Studies, Environmental Humanities, Critical Queer Studies, Black Sonic Studies, Critical Urban Studies, and Change Leadership. At the core of mpho's thinking, life is a sustained inquiry around the historical processes that inaugurated alienation in Black psychic life.

• Relebone Rirhandzu eAfrika

  Relebone Rirhandzu eAfrika is a small-town girl who relishes getting lost in the city. She is a writer, mental health advocate, and philanthropist who writes on a variety of topics, including gender, music, culture and spatial politics.

• Sarah Delius

  Dr Sarah Delius is a political scientist and historian in the New South Institute’s Histories of Governance programme and a research fellow in the History Department at the University of Johannesburg. Her work explores how institutions such as marriage and slavery — shaped by the Atlantic slave trade, colonial rule, and shifting global orders — structured gender relations, labour systems, and political authority in Sierra Leone from the late nineteenth century through the civil war.

• Tumi Mogorosi

  Percussionist, scholar, composer, and activist Tumi Mogorosi is at the vanguard of the burgeoning international dimension of South Africa's music and cultural scene. He took the drummer's chair in multiple boundary-pushing formations. Driven by activist urgency and a large-scale creative vision, Mogorosi explores musical motives and improvisation to create modal grooves rooted in spiritual jazz and hard bop, working toward a sound that celebrates collective expression.