A gospel record just broke amapiano's grip on SA's biggest airplay award. Streaming data, Stats SA numbers suggest the win was less an upset than an inevitability.
The Southern African Music Rights Organisation (Samro) has congratulated gospel singer-songwriter Nontokozo Mkhize and her co-composers on winning the Samro Highest Airplay Composer Award at the 32nd South African Music Awards (Sama32), held on Saturday night, 15 August 2026, at Sun City Superbowl.
The award crowns the local composition that racked up the most radio and TV airplay over the qualifying period and this year, that composition was Esandleni.
That’s a big deal, because of who Esandleni had to beat to get there.
The Highest Airplay title has an amapiano and dance-floor pedigree: Kabza De Small took it for Isimo, K.O, Young Stunna and Blxckie for Sete, Zakes Bantwini and Kasango for Osama, and Master KG and Nomcebo Zikode for the genre-defining Jerusalema.
Mkhize just interrupted that run with a gospel record.
Nontokozo Mkhize. Picture: Supplied, Samro
Spotify’s 2025 Loud & Clear report names worship music as one of South Africa’s five fastest-growing genres over the past five years.
Mkhize’s debut album, Lindiwe, was the only gospel project on Spotify’s list of SA’s ten most-streamed albums for 2025 – it cracked one million streams in its first week and closed the year at 28 million, per Spotify Wrapped 2025.
Zoom out further, and the same report found that Zulu-language music grew by 37% in global royalties year-on-year and by 120% over two years.
Line that up against Esandleni’s airplay win, and the pattern becomes apparent: airplay and streaming, usually treated as two separate scoreboards, are starting to agree with each other.
Samro’s own statement chalks up the win to “current music consumption trends,” and the demographic data backs it up.
Stats SA figures from March 2025 show 84.5% of South Africans identified as Christian in 2022, with affiliation topping 85% among black African, coloured and white respondents. Hinduism holds the dominant faith identity within the Indian/Asian community at 37.1%, while a multivariate analysis found white South Africans were 1.78 times more likely than black Africans to report no religious affiliation – a modest secularising trend, but one concentrated in a single demographic group.
It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude that the sheer size of South Africa’s Christian majority explains why a gospel record had a massive, ready-made audience to reach in the first place.
It also points to why broadcasters had every commercial incentive to keep spinning a song built at the exact intersection of two of the country’s biggest audiences: Christian and Zulu-speaking.
SAMRO Licensing GM Karabo Senna presenting the Highest Airplay Composer award at the 2026 SAMAs. Picture: Supplied, Samro
“On behalf of Samro, we congratulate Nontokozo Mkhize and her team on this well-deserved recognition. Esandleni is a testament to the power of gospel music to move audiences, and this win reflects the broader rise we are seeing in local composers claiming their place on air and on the world’s streaming platforms,” said Nobambo Goduka, Samro’s General Manager of Member Services, in a statement.
