Last year Monday Paper (Vol 26#18) we ran a story on third-year opera singer Mzo Daphula, sports co-ordinator for the 2007/2008 Student Representative Council, who believed himself to be the first music student to be elected to the SRC.

The student from De Aar suggested that the South African College of Music's location might have had something to do with this.

"Music students tend not to mingle with students on upper campus."

This 'isolation' may have cut them off from mainstream issues, including running for the Student Representative Council.

But that's not true, says UCT registrar Hugh Amoore and staffer Haajirah Esau.

Amoore wrote to say: "There certainly have been music students on the SRC before; the SRC of which I was a member had one, Jacques de Vos Malan, and he was neither the first nor I think the last.

"I was on the SRC in 1972/1973 (with Laurine Platzky , a UCT Council member among others); Geoff Budlender was on the SRC in the year before; Laurine stayed on for the next year and was SRC president in that year (1973/1974). There must have been a music student on the 1971/1972 SRC as well, as each faculty elected one member (there were 10 faculties, of which Music was one) and there were a further 11 students elected by the student body as a whole."

Esau points to an SRC member in 1996, one Ayanda Hollow, a first-year percussion student at the SACM who wrote in his election manifesto: "My involvement with African culture in the form of music, theatre, dance and visual art will ensure that Salif Keita and not Michael Jackson, John Kani and not Macbeth, are our real role models as African intellectuals."