Reunion Music at 30: How Three Children Built a Ministry that Endured

In 1996, Chris Chidzanja, Ndaba Ngwenya and the late Nothando Ngwenya began Reunion Music with strict parents, young voices and more belief than they could yet explain. During school holidays, they carried food to the Harare Botanical Gardens and practised for hours, sometimes long enough to make strangers stop and listen, long before wives, children and loss entered the song. Thirty years later, Reunion Music, a mixed acappella ensemble from the Seventh Day Adventist Church, has grown into one of Zimbabwe’s enduring gospel acappella ministries, with a journey shaped by discipline, rejection, growth, humour, grief and the hard work of staying together.

The milestone will be marked on April 25, 2026, with a 30th anniversary concert at 7 Arts Theatre in Avondale, Harare, a night the group is eagerly awaiting and one that carries far more than celebration. Outside the durawalled Chidzanja family home in Warren Park D, where the group now rehearses, the music rises from a setting as ordinary as the story is not.