Five weeks after putting out a 28-track debut album, Don Ndikberry is back with another song. “Uphi? Ndilapha” came out on 20 September 2026 through RCV Records, and it pairs the Cape Town producer once again with Vuyorido, the singer who has been on more of his records than anyone else.
The title is isiXhosa and reads as a question and its answer: “Where are you? I am here.” The song runs four minutes and 43 seconds, and it is filed under R&B/Soul on Apple Music instead of the amapiano tag his earliest songs carried.
Who is Don Ndikberry?
Don Ndikberry is the stage name of Luvuyo Ndiki, a producer, songwriter and engineer based in Cape Town whose main business has nothing to do with music. He runs a 3D printing farm in the city, and the companies around it include 3D Printing Village, 3PV Labs and Red Cup Village. RCV Records, the imprint on this single, takes its initials from the last of those.
He has a name for what he makes: Ubuntu Wave, which he describes as amapiano joined to isiXhosa and isiZulu storytelling. Nearly all of his lyrics are in those two languages. He also built his own tool for the job, a music program called Umoya Studio, and by his own account the album was finished on it between production runs at the factory.
A release almost every month
What stands out about his catalogue is how fast it has grown. His first song, “Mama Wethu”, arrived on 4 February 2026. “Uphi? Ndilapha” is his eleventh release since then, which works out at more than one a month.
March brought “Semhle Sisi” and “Ikhomishani Yentliziyo (Madlanga Commission)”. The title means “commission of the heart”, and it borrows the name of the inquiry into South Africa’s criminal justice system that was set up in 2025. April had two more, “Open Source Society (Telepathy)” and “Sika Bhuti” with Vuyorido and Amish. “Umoya Wami” followed in May and “Ngiyaxolisa”, another Vuyorido duet, at the start of June.
The biggest name on any of them is Ice Prince. The Nigerian rapper leads “One African Passport, One African Currency”, released on 19 June with Don Ndikberry and Vuyorido both credited, a song about a continent with open borders and shared money. “Incwadi Yam” with ZanBhele came in July.
After INKQUBO
Then came the album. INKQUBO, which he translates as “The Process”, was released on 14 August with 28 tracks and a running time of about an hour and 45 minutes. Most debut albums are half that length. It is sung in isiXhosa, isiZulu, English and Yoruba, and its guest list stretches from Cape Town to Lagos, where the collective ỌRÙN MOB feature on “OLÓRÌ” and “Ọ̀GÁ MI”.
None of the earlier singles were put on the album, so everything on INKQUBO was new on the day it arrived. “Uphi? Ndilapha” keeps that habit going. It is a standalone single and the first thing he has released since the album, which suggests he is not planning to slow down and work one record for a year the way most artists would.
The Vuyorido partnership
If there is a constant in all of this, it is Vuyorido. The singer is credited on ten of the 28 tracks on INKQUBO, among them “INGQONDO YAMI (My Mind)”, “Amadoda Amaningi (Many Man)” and “Ndicela uPhila Nawe”, the song the album was promoted with. Add “Sika Bhuti”, “Ngiyaxolisa” and the Ice Prince record, and “Uphi? Ndilapha” becomes the fourteenth song the two have released together in under six months.
That is closer to a duo than to a producer with a guest. The two singles credited to them jointly, “Ngiyaxolisa” and now this one, are also the two that sit under R&B/Soul, which says something about where the partnership leans. “Ngiyaxolisa” means “I apologise” in isiZulu. A title that asks “where are you?” and answers “I am here” stays in the same territory: two people, some distance between them, and one of them trying to close it.
Where to listen
“Uphi? Ndilapha” is out now on Apple Music and Deezer. You can play a preview of it, along with every track on INKQUBO and the nine singles before it, on Don Ndikberry’s AfroYard profile.
