Cape Town Gospel Legend Simon Seekoei Dies at 70 After Cancer Battle

A week after his 70th birthday in a hospital bed, the street preacher from the Cape Flats was gone. Simon Seekoei, the Cape Town pastor and gospel artist whose songs filled churches and living rooms across the Western Cape, died on Monday at Eerste River Hospital after a battle with aggressive stage 4 prostate cancer.

Seekoei died on Monday 26 October 2026, aged 70. He had celebrated his 70th birthday in hospital on 20 October, a week earlier, and the closeness of the two dates gives his passing a particular sharpness for the family and congregation left behind.

He was born in Tiervlei, now known as Ravensmead, on the Cape Flats. As a boy he preached and sang in the streets with his parents, and that street beginning stayed in his music all his life, in songs that sounded as if they were sung to people passing by rather than to an audience seated in rows.

His albums carried that directness into recordings people still sing today. Ek Skaam My Nie was released in 2008, Met My Hart En My Siel followed in 2010, and Dankbaar came in 2021, and his best-known songs include Ek Skaam My Nie, Mamma Wat 'n Dierbare Mens, Geseend, and Met My Hart En My Siel.

Simon Seekoei Gospel Songs: Ek Skaam My Nie and the Fellowship Songs Project

Seekoei's Fellowship Songs project brought traditional choruses and hymns to new audiences. The project gathered songs people already knew by heart and gave them his voice, and the result was music that belonged as much to the congregation as to the artist.

His son Marco September announced the death, and his words carry both grief and pride in a father whose life was given to ministry. Marco spoke of a dad who served faithfully, and of a family in which ministry runs deep.

It is with a heavy heart that I announce the passing of my dad. He served the Lord faithfully...

That announcement came from Marco September, and he added the words that have since been repeated by many who knew the family: ministry is in our blood. The sentence is short, and it says everything about a household where preaching and singing were not a career but a way of life.

Seekoei's wife, Praylene Lee-Seekoei, paid tribute on Facebook. She wrote that although she missed him dearly, she would find a way to carry on, and that her world would never feel the same, and those two sentences hold the whole weight of a marriage measured now in absence.

Cape Town Gospel Legend Remembered by Jonathan Rubain and Dumisani

Tributes came from across the gospel world, and two in particular show how widely he was loved. Jonathan Rubain, of the kykNET programme Koortjies, which featured Seekoei in November 2021, wrote that it was a very sad day and wished the pastor peaceful rest.

Rubain also quoted Seekoei's lyrics about standing before God's throne, words that stand seperate in the memory of his congregation. The choice of lyric matters, because it turns a tribute into a reminder of what Seekoei himself sang about, and it lets his own words speak at his own farewell.

Gospel artist Dumisani put the loss in larger terms. He said the gospel world had lost more than a man, and that it had lost a king, and the word king, coming from a fellow artist, is a measure of the standing Seekoei held among his peers.

The gospel music world has been full of news this month, and Seekoei's passing sits alongside very different stories of faith and song. Readers can follow Kirk Franklin and Davido releasing Hope in You on October 30, and Colton Dixon and the Christian response to Halloween through his song Bones.

Other voices in Christian life have also been in the news, including Franklin Graham responding to Billy Crystal's comments about God, and faith leaders urging the Chancellor to make the wealthiest pay a fair share in the Budget.

Seekoei's story stands apart from those headlines because it began on a street, not a stage. A boy singing with his parents in Tiervlei became a pastor whose albums reached far beyond the Cape Flats, and the distance between those two points is the whole arc of his life.

Simon Seekoei Funeral: A Family That Carries Ministry Forward

The family has not lost only a husband, father, and pastor. It has lost the voice that led the singing, and the person whose birthday was marked in a hospital ward a week before his death, and that closeness will stay with them long after the tributes fade.

Marco September's words point to what comes next for the family. Ministry is in our blood, he said, and a family that believes that will not let the songs stop with one voice, because the songs were never only one voice to begin with.

Seekoei sang about standing before God's throne, and he sang about gratitude, and he sang in Afrikaans to people who knew every word. The pews in Cape Town will still hold those songs, the Fellowship Songs recordings will still be played, and the question now is who will stand where he stood, and which voice will rise next from the streets of the Cape Flats where his own voice began.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.