Manana and the art of trusting the process

There’s a quietness to Ndumiso Manana when he speaks about success, not indifference but a kind of careful distance from it. When I ask him where he was when he found out he had been named the 2026 Standard Bank Young Artist for Music, one of the most significant recognitions for creative excellence in South Africa, he pauses. “I actually can’t remember,” he says, almost amused.

“I was probably in rehearsal … or in studio.” It’s an answer that feels telling. For an artist whose career has unfolded with remarkable speed from his 2020 debut to a Grammy-winning songwriting credit and collaborations with some of the biggest names in global music, the work has taken precedence over the moment of recognition. The Standard Bank Young Artist Award has, for decades, marked turning points in South African creative careers, offering not only national visibility but a kind of institutional affirmation that an artist is shaping the present and future of their discipline.

For Manana, it arrives at a moment when his voice is beginning to resonate far beyond the spaces that first nurtured it. “Awards in general are humbling,” he tells me. “It’s an award for work that you’ve put in.

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So it’s both humbling and affirming that we’re doing the right thing.” Manana’s journey into music, at least in its professional form, is relatively recent. His debut albumIn The Beginning Was The End, released in 2020, introduced a sound that resisted easy categorisation. It moved between electronic textures, R&B sensibilities, acoustic intimacy and subtle inflections of Afrobeats and amapiano.

What followed was the gradual unfolding of a larger artistic idea. His subsequent projects such asBut Could The Moments In Betweenand the EPCOMMAexpanded both the sonic palette and the emotional terrain of his work, culminating in 2024’sOur Broken Hearts Mend. Together, they form a loose trilogy, one that traces a movement from introspection to articulation, from fragmentation to a kind of healing.

But this sense of cohesion, he admits, was not always intentional. “Initially it probably wasn’t as clear,” he says. “But when the second project started forming, the vision of the trilogy started forming. We became more intentional about creating that narrative as we continued.”

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