What is the Buskaid project?

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Rosemary with students

“A challenge always turns into a miracle”, this is the thought that helped Rosemary Nalden set up Buskaid, an initiative that helps children from economically backward families in Soweto, South Africa, to gain a high quality education in playing stringed instruments.

Rosemary, who was recently in Mumbai to give a talk, has a simple way of explaining the Buskaid objective. “There was once a young boy, who lived in a poor township of Soweto. He had four brothers and sisters; the eldest was a drug addict. By the age of eight, with no parental input, this boy had decided he wanted to learn to play the violin. But at the classes that he went to, he realised he wasn’t getting a good deal. So he went to the next, and the next, until he found us,” she begins.
Then she shows a video clip of the same boy, now grown into a young man in his 20s, playing the violin like a virtuoso at the Royal Academy of London, where he is a second year student. “In this story, I suppose I’m the fairy godmother and not the wicked witch,” Rosemary jokes.
Since it was established in 1997, the Buskaid Soweto String Project has helped many other children — who otherwise wouldn’t have had access to musical education — realise that they have a special talent. They have performed at some of the most high profile events in the world, including at the BBC Promenade in London and earned the title of being among the world’s “most inspirational orchestras”. Mastering a stringed instrument can take between 12 to 16 years of tuition and thousands of hours of practise, but Buskaid makes that possible for these children, and in doing so, uplifts them as well.