Robert Sithole was born in District Six in 1945 and grew up in the same are (He later moved to Rylands as a result of apartheid South Africa's Group Areas Act and resultant forced removals from District Six). He played the pennywhistle in the Kwela Kids band together with his brother Josh. In the 1960s Sithole’s genius on the penny whistle on Cape Town street corners caught the eye of artist Vladimir Tretchikoff. Robert, his brother Josh and Duke Ngoma were immortalised in the Tretchikoff painting "Penny Whistlers".
Basil Simons, a Cape Town jazz club owner, invited Sithole to play at the Old Village Pub. Sithole went on to turn his music into a successful career.
In 1987, the ANC sent Sithole to the UK to study the arts, and things headed downhill from here. Ellen Zulu (Sithole's sister) said: “Someone saw him wearing a blanket and begging in the streets in the UK. Then, in 1998, he contacted my brother and told him that he was stranded there. So my brother sent some money for a ticket home.”
Together with musician Joe Schaffers, Sithole started performing again at the District Six Museum. While working at the museum he suffered a stroke but wouldn't give up smoking. “He made some wrong decisions in his life, he loved having a good time and smoked all the time. His smoking damaged his lungs and it caused heart failure and then kidney failure. So there were also problems with his blood circulation and eventually they had to amputate part of his left leg last month,” said Zulu.
After years of chain-smoking, illness left him bedridden and dependent on his elderly sister and brother-in-law. In June 2006 Sithole died at the age of 61, penniless, in a Cape Town hospital. He leaves behind a daughter, Melody.
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