Scrolling through social media a few weeks ago, I came across a video that posed an arresting question: “What do liberation-minded people need in times of injustice and tragedy?”

At first blush, a simple question, but one that has been playing in my head as I seek to answer it. My immediate instinct was to turn to history and my reference point of living through the tail-end of South Africa’s liberation era and what the cohort of liberation fighters I knew turned to.

But it was only as I started writing this column that the answer crystallised – song.