South Africa’s national anthem uses five official languages: Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans, and English. Its multilingual design reflects the country’s attempt to represent several major linguistic and cultural communities in one national symbol.
The anthem combines material from two earlier songs. The first section draws on “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” associated with Enoch Sontonga and later expanded by other composers. The closing section uses “Die Stem van Suid-Afrika,” whose Afrikaans and English versions had served as the former national anthem.
The combined anthem was introduced in 1997, after the end of apartheid and the creation of a new constitutional order. The languages do not appear in equal-length sections, but each contributes to the official text. A common mistake is to describe the anthem as simply one of its source songs; the current version is a deliberately combined composition.