1. On Mentorship
It has been a tremendous honour to receive guidance in this process from both Dr. Kholeka Shange and Neo Muyanga. They challenged us in thought-provoking ways and encouraged us to critically engage with this archive by exploring its fringes and interiors. This approach has enabled us to develop a methodology for working with archives that can be applied across various spheres of our work and practice.
Dr Shange’s PhD dissertation for instance became a foundational text for our inquiry, as it interrogates Princess Magogo's photographic archive, asking questions that pointed to ecosystems, the environment, social and cultural community and histories that shape Princess Magogo. The PhD titled “Ngiphathel’ uGubhu Lwam’ Ekhaya Lapha, Mnawami!” highlighted for us the importance of demystifying the picture by relying on the quotidian experiences and enlarging the demarcated territory of how we read this figure. Part of this included getting to know her maternal line and the women in her paternal line by asking questions that lead us to these perspectives, by insisting on a praxis that involves the knowledge perspectives of women in Princess Magogo’s family. Dr. Shange's Black feminist visual praxis of reading into images and theorising through images helped and still helps us think about ways of articulating economic loss and the reparative, perhaps re-inventive for our present's sake, in the context of an archive that is largely tied to an ecological practice. In a world where concepts shift and take on new meaning, we were interested in how she mobilises concepts in isiZulu language to form a method or verbs that become functional in the process of making theory. The term 'Phoshoza,' which comes from a song that Princess Magogo sings, is a verb that we mobilised into a method of articulating an artistic research practice.
Neo Muyanga played a crucial role in encouraging us to reimagine the archive through a variety of mediums. His counsel and generosity in sharing the processes he has employed throughout his expansive career have been invaluable. He also facilitated our invitation from the Centre for the Less Good Idea, which allowed us to collaborate in a theatre setting with performers, singers, musicians, and playwrights. This process involved workshopping the archive for an entire week, culminating in what the Centre refers to as an Open Moment, where the audience is invited to engage with the practice-based research and reflections that unfold. Throughout this experience, we learned from the practitioners about interpretation and how they engage with various subject matters within their work. We explored the amplification of stories and how practitioners approach this in different ways. Initially, we were invited to consider the pepper's ghost methodology, which the Centre employs in its series of improvisational showcases. Neo Muyanga, as the Centre's impresario, guided the process, prompting us to think about voice, movement, text, and sound—conceptually engaging with Princess Magogo, but not solely focusing on her as a means of preserving her complexity. This process was initially challenging and relied on the invited artists to inscribe themselves into the archive and bring it to life.
2. On Process
The process for us has been challenging, often messy, with met and unmet expectations. We had a scope that we could not fulfill in its entirety, but in turn gained so much in the process. This process has enabled us to wander and be confused. To sing together, write together and reflect in a series of meal-sharing exchanges. With our collaborators, Sanele and Zawadi, we shared anecdotes of our family histories, which enabled us to enter the archive with empathy for ourselves and the Buthelezi family. Our research process became one of collective sense-making and collaborative making. This process was attentive to the implications of listening to, and learning from cross-generational experiences, recognising that cultural and political contexts are not only manifested in literal spatial and geographical terms but also as epistemological and cosmological knowledge systems. Listening was a fundamental component of the overall research process, as it compels us to actively engage with a variety of perspectives and experiences, and be comfortable grasping what we did not even know existed within the archive. We were challenged to dismantle the solitary figure that makes up artistic practice, and we collectively as people who hold different skill sets, in agriculture, music production, pedagogy, oral story-telling, archiving and urbanism, needed to combine all of these strengths and relegate disciplinary confinement and advance the prospects of animating the archive.
Collectively, we thought about repairing our relationship to electricity, the electronic traditions of song that have roots in South Africa's Indigenous and folk sonic traditions. The overdetermined presence of acoustic instruments and an acoustic understanding of sound traditions in South African often shadows the existence of an Indigenous electronic scene. There are many ways of making sense of folk, we enter this cultural practice through the acoustic and electronic scenes of sound. The latter has been underrepresented and cast aside in a world where electricity or the idea of electronic sound is understood to be generated by machines. Our project also wants to look at bow instruments as technologies of electronic instrumentation. Princess Magogo played uGubhu, a type of bow instrument that has the resonance of artificial frequency, that zesty effect of electronic sounding. She played ugubhu in the register of how she composed or sang collective compositions. The vibrations transmitted from the bow resonance meet the voice of a singer who hardly ever sings in the popular tone of what is conventionally thought of as 'great singing.' Princess Magogo's voice is akin to a great text that brings unforgettable moments in our lives in a way that only a great text can do after having earned its place in the politics of its audience. The tonality and stylistic way of presenting isiZulu, the language that she sings in, into sonic words, gesturing and generating meaning through the lifeworld of an embodied language where meaning sits in the body, the voice is co-produced by how the body sounds. Her voice is the aesthetic intervention into the politics of isiZulu. Princess Magogo does not invent this approach to voice. It is co-created and learnt behavior, inherited traditions of song that emerge out her maternal and paternal lines. She embodies collective individuality by developing a relationship with words and sounding that produce a style of singing that sits co-creatively with how she instrumentalises uGubhu. The music that Princess Magogo plays is in the air, it travels through orature, ritual and practice. Before she is even born the foundations have been set and they are passed down. The idea that her music can be seen as an ecological practice therefore opens us up to the idea of an inherited ecological practice. How people sing, how they use words to sound, make instruments to sound, produce sound is directly connected to their relationship with the earth, its living and non-living organisms. Our process tries to connect these ideas to themes and questions related to non-economic loss and to these ideas of sound as the base of how we think of artistic practice and the conceptual lens and insights that this kind of practice can bring to the realm of environmental crisis, repair and reparations. Moving forward this project will also look into how these ideas might be represented in the present through a reimagination project that takes seriously indigenous electronic sonic traditions and the ecological practices of vocalness that Princess Magogo's archive teaches us.
3. On Reinvention in the context of loss and damage and bow instruments
This project has sought to position Princess Magogo's music as an ecological practice. The process of how Indigenous bow instruments are made, from soil to product to music comes from an embodied way of relating to the earth. The idea of the oneness or interdependence of humans and other living organisms is exemplified in sound traditions that are built on the foundations of the earth, using materials that come from nature, without ever forming an enterprise of exploitation. Instead, every part of what is harvested is used, every branch that is carved out of a tree is given space to retrieve, repair and group. In the work of mapping the presence and use of bow instruments in Kwa-Zulu Natal, we visited the home of the late elder, teacher and bow instrument musician, uGogo Mabhengu, who taught many young people how to make uMakhweywane (a type of bow instrument) and how to play it, including our collaborator on this project Zawadi YaMungu. In the conversations with Mbali, MaBhengu's daughter, she paints a picture of her mother's practice and how the rural natural environment that surrounds their home in eShowe affirms the picture of how people like uGogo Mabhengu organised. Her family lives in an area inundated with heavy floods and ruins of rain that strip the roots of trees and disrupt the patterns of the soil. Items like uswela (calabash), which is the bedrock of bow instruments production do not grow like they use to in their areas, As a result, Mbali tells us, MaBhengu resorted to outsourcing some of the items that originally grew on her land from neighbouring farmers and substituted other materials with new material inventions that include wires and strings previously not used. These inventive strategies of refusal are some of the ways that cultural producers on indigenous ecological practices, through sound, respond to the non-economic losses that confront their daily experience of the world. Throughout this process, the preoccupation is on local concepts and ways of doing and knowing that describe repair. In the beginning of this project, we struggled with the tension around reinvention and repair, the latter feeling and sounding like an enclosure of sorts that assumes that people who bear the brunt of the consequences of environmental degradation are often living from a place of responding to crisis. There was this desire to uncover other lexicons that point to how black people in South Africa through song in particular but not limited to, have managed to build a language of re-organising, redefining new ways of inscribing and animating what it means to constitute life from their genre and culture specific time-space. The ruins and the fire are opportunities for new things to emerge and grow. The reparative practice is therefore reinvention. Making something new out of the ruins. Secondly, this is a reparative project in the sense that it deals with our personal relationship with the quotidian as a generative space of learning. We learn everyday from our close collaborator Zawadi Yamungu and other sonic practitioners who practice similarly to Princess Magogo. Kwa-Zulu Natal, collectively has not lost the sonic tradition of ukuhuba. Some of the songs date back into the 1800s, and today, they are still being reinscribed with recent stylisations, and they are embedded with complex histories of Nguni people. Princess Magogo with her family and community, contributed immensely towards this tradition, and every encounter of ritual, be it a wedding, iJadu—which is inter-clan love dance and sporting competition, umhlanga reed dance, a funeral or which ever important procession, there is a transmission and a reminder of lineage and kinship, and this process ushers means of reinvention. Some of the conversation that we were having as a collective acknowledged that there has been so much loss of song and traditions especially for clans that are not identified as being royal, and those that have since diminished due to wars and conquer which were a practice within Nguni people.
4. On Art Practice and Ecology
It was Thami Mnyele, South African artist and member of the MEDU Art Ensemble, who remarked that making art is no different to building a bridge, it is the work of many hands. What we have heard from this perspective is a gentle de-centering of artistic practices that seek to alienate art from society or alienate aesthetic practice from some sort of direct relationship with society. We enter art practice from Mnyele's perspective, the sensitivity is about what aesthetic practice can do with us as we try to make sense of the present future. There is an interest in the role of art practice, the verbal manifestation of aesthetic work that is seen, heard, felt and observed in our futurity. Art practice sits inside cultural practice, cultural working, culture being the instincts and questions that are the driving force behind what people do to produce the outcomes and experiences of the world that stand before us in the present. It is the container of the driving force and momentum that fuels how people contest human and non-human life. Princess Magogo's life, the grand and quotidian episodes in her story have been one of the most important articulations of the relationship between art practice and ecology. In other words, the non-economic, yet quite material consequences of environmental damage and loss can be understood through the lifeworlds that Princess Magogo occupies. The disintegration of material that often needed to make indigenous instrument is connected to the changes in our environment with every flood that meets the soil, uprooting trees that are central to construction of bow instruments With every drought that changes the topography of the soil, making it harder for certain foods that later become object material for indigenous instruments, traditions of sound change, these changes are some of the losses that economic grammar without dialect to think with Kamau Braithwaithe in his insistence on dialect in dialectics. In his latest visit in South Africa, David Scott has pointed this out in a different conversation that involves Braithwaite's reading of Walter Rodney seminal text 'How Europe Undeveloped Africa.' We think about Princess Magogo's archive being that example of dialect in the context of the inscriptions that we place on 'loss' that often animate loss and materiality as only relating to costs that we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands. Of course, the loss of traditions is also material in the sense that the proximity of wage labour for producers is tied directly to the soil. It is their livelihood and their relationship to bread is mediated by the ability to work with the environment to produce this sound tradition, as it is also mediated by the neoliberal market economy forces that control what becomes remunerated as music in the world.
5. On Gogo Nombenqe’s Cartographies
We have learnt so much about cartographies and counter-mapping from Princess Magogo’s niece, Princess Nombenqe. We were reminded that Black People have their own reading and understanding of the land and how it is socially produced. We experienced a tradition of describing the land as multitude, along with the experiences that have unfolded from it. Oftentimes, we are made to believe that these cartographies or geographies do not exist because of colonial modernity, but they really still do exist. What Princess Nombenqe did during our engagements is to denounce geographic domination of colonial names in their land. They inscribed their oral history and worldview as integral in understanding what is known as Zululand, and the experiences of her people being an integral and meaningful part of the overall landscape. The anecdotal stories were somewhat a contestation of the loss that precipitates the region. Katherine McMckittrick, highlights that cultural production and ways of knowing that emanate from Black geographies should be understood and interpreted as a byproduct of the social and spatial conditions in which black people transverse. Therefore McKittricks concept, “black matters are spatial matters” is important to understanding the worldviews of such elders, and they inspire the elders that we would also love to be.
It is important to also interrogate how these cartographies of the field are defined in field recorded music and the implications that this has not only on the production of song, genre and tradition, but the implications that this has on how we define spatiality. Who gets to name a field, who gets to define a record is political. In conversations with uGogo Nombenqe, the field for her begins and ends in ritual and performance and its archive travels through an oral tradition of knowledge production. In other words, human, kin relations and relations to land itself constitute the field. At some point in our conversations, we played her Princess Magogo field recordings that were recorded in the royal homestead where we conducted the interview. We learn from her that she participated in some of these recordings as a young girl. Her mapping of the music has nothing to do with the product of the record but everything to do with the visual memories that hearing those records provoked. She detailed the relations that produced that sound as opposed to the aesthetics of field recorded music or preoccupations with the artifact. In those moments, she redefined the field for us as something that is orchestrated before the microphone and the technologies of recording map it. Her remarks on the people who make up what are not institutions of field recorded music left a bitter taste in my mouth or more like, affirmed the bitter taste that we have often experienced about little relationality matters in the practices of ethnomusicology in a particular era in South Africa. uGogo Nombenqe spoke with un-minced irritation about white people coming to record them and how those lines of relations stopped with the ending of the recording. We could not believe that it was her first time hearing her voice in the echo of voices. In uGogo Nombenqe's world it is kinship that produces the record. Kinship transcends and overcomes the presence of a mic or the field recorded 'music' itself. The late South African intellectual and figurative mentor in all things memory, Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson centred social memory as a necessary component in our reconfiguration of colonial archives and Gogo Nombenqe also puts forward social memory as the container of ritual. We were amazed at how fluid traditions of black grammar can be in how we articulate social memory as a counter map for people who have been refused and discarded from self-definition in 'official' paper heavy, text heavy, visual heavy archives and memory portals. For Africans, for Black People, the intangible, non-material social repository has become an important time-space of intellectual production, of theorising and being. These are sensitivities that archival practice brings into the way we make sense, meaning and space of non-economic losses in the context of ongoing catastrophic environmental violence.
It has been a tremendous honour to receive guidance in this process from both Dr. Kholeka Shange and Neo Muyanga. They challenged us in thought-provoking ways and encouraged us to critically engage with this archive by exploring its fringes and interiors. This approach has enabled us to develop a methodology for working with archives that can be applied across various spheres of our work and practice.
Dr Shange’s PhD dissertation for instance became a foundational text for our inquiry, as it interrogates Princess Magogo's photographic archive, asking questions that pointed to ecosystems, the environment, social and cultural community and histories that shape Princess Magogo. The PhD titled “Ngiphathel’ uGubhu Lwam’ Ekhaya Lapha, Mnawami!” highlighted for us the importance of demystifying the picture by relying on the quotidian experiences and enlarging the demarcated territory of how we read this figure. Part of this included getting to know her maternal line and the women in her paternal line by asking questions that lead us to these perspectives, by insisting on a praxis that involves the knowledge perspectives of women in Princess Magogo’s family. Dr. Shange's Black feminist visual praxis of reading into images and theorising through images helped and still helps us think about ways of articulating economic loss and the reparative, perhaps re-inventive for our present's sake, in the context of an archive that is largely tied to an ecological practice. In a world where concepts shift and take on new meaning, we were interested in how she mobilises concepts in isiZulu language to form a method or verbs that become functional in the process of making theory. The term 'Phoshoza,' which comes from a song that Princess Magogo sings, is a verb that we mobilised into a method of articulating an artistic research practice.
Neo Muyanga played a crucial role in encouraging us to reimagine the archive through a variety of mediums. His counsel and generosity in sharing the processes he has employed throughout his expansive career have been invaluable. He also facilitated our invitation from the Centre for the Less Good Idea, which allowed us to collaborate in a theatre setting with performers, singers, musicians, and playwrights. This process involved workshopping the archive for an entire week, culminating in what the Centre refers to as an Open Moment, where the audience is invited to engage with the practice-based research and reflections that unfold. Throughout this experience, we learned from the practitioners about interpretation and how they engage with various subject matters within their work. We explored the amplification of stories and how practitioners approach this in different ways. Initially, we were invited to consider the pepper's ghost methodology, which the Centre employs in its series of improvisational showcases. Neo Muyanga, as the Centre's impresario, guided the process, prompting us to think about voice, movement, text, and sound—conceptually engaging with Princess Magogo, but not solely focusing on her as a means of preserving her complexity. This process was initially challenging and relied on the invited artists to inscribe themselves into the archive and bring it to life.
2. On Process
The process for us has been challenging, often messy, with met and unmet expectations. We had a scope that we could not fulfill in its entirety, but in turn gained so much in the process. This process has enabled us to wander and be confused. To sing together, write together and reflect in a series of meal-sharing exchanges. With our collaborators, Sanele and Zawadi, we shared anecdotes of our family histories, which enabled us to enter the archive with empathy for ourselves and the Buthelezi family. Our research process became one of collective sense-making and collaborative making. This process was attentive to the implications of listening to, and learning from cross-generational experiences, recognising that cultural and political contexts are not only manifested in literal spatial and geographical terms but also as epistemological and cosmological knowledge systems. Listening was a fundamental component of the overall research process, as it compels us to actively engage with a variety of perspectives and experiences, and be comfortable grasping what we did not even know existed within the archive. We were challenged to dismantle the solitary figure that makes up artistic practice, and we collectively as people who hold different skill sets, in agriculture, music production, pedagogy, oral story-telling, archiving and urbanism, needed to combine all of these strengths and relegate disciplinary confinement and advance the prospects of animating the archive.
Collectively, we thought about repairing our relationship to electricity, the electronic traditions of song that have roots in South Africa's Indigenous and folk sonic traditions. The overdetermined presence of acoustic instruments and an acoustic understanding of sound traditions in South African often shadows the existence of an Indigenous electronic scene. There are many ways of making sense of folk, we enter this cultural practice through the acoustic and electronic scenes of sound. The latter has been underrepresented and cast aside in a world where electricity or the idea of electronic sound is understood to be generated by machines. Our project also wants to look at bow instruments as technologies of electronic instrumentation. Princess Magogo played uGubhu, a type of bow instrument that has the resonance of artificial frequency, that zesty effect of electronic sounding. She played ugubhu in the register of how she composed or sang collective compositions. The vibrations transmitted from the bow resonance meet the voice of a singer who hardly ever sings in the popular tone of what is conventionally thought of as 'great singing.' Princess Magogo's voice is akin to a great text that brings unforgettable moments in our lives in a way that only a great text can do after having earned its place in the politics of its audience. The tonality and stylistic way of presenting isiZulu, the language that she sings in, into sonic words, gesturing and generating meaning through the lifeworld of an embodied language where meaning sits in the body, the voice is co-produced by how the body sounds. Her voice is the aesthetic intervention into the politics of isiZulu. Princess Magogo does not invent this approach to voice. It is co-created and learnt behavior, inherited traditions of song that emerge out her maternal and paternal lines. She embodies collective individuality by developing a relationship with words and sounding that produce a style of singing that sits co-creatively with how she instrumentalises uGubhu. The music that Princess Magogo plays is in the air, it travels through orature, ritual and practice. Before she is even born the foundations have been set and they are passed down. The idea that her music can be seen as an ecological practice therefore opens us up to the idea of an inherited ecological practice. How people sing, how they use words to sound, make instruments to sound, produce sound is directly connected to their relationship with the earth, its living and non-living organisms. Our process tries to connect these ideas to themes and questions related to non-economic loss and to these ideas of sound as the base of how we think of artistic practice and the conceptual lens and insights that this kind of practice can bring to the realm of environmental crisis, repair and reparations. Moving forward this project will also look into how these ideas might be represented in the present through a reimagination project that takes seriously indigenous electronic sonic traditions and the ecological practices of vocalness that Princess Magogo's archive teaches us.
3. On Reinvention in the context of loss and damage and bow instruments
This project has sought to position Princess Magogo's music as an ecological practice. The process of how Indigenous bow instruments are made, from soil to product to music comes from an embodied way of relating to the earth. The idea of the oneness or interdependence of humans and other living organisms is exemplified in sound traditions that are built on the foundations of the earth, using materials that come from nature, without ever forming an enterprise of exploitation. Instead, every part of what is harvested is used, every branch that is carved out of a tree is given space to retrieve, repair and group. In the work of mapping the presence and use of bow instruments in Kwa-Zulu Natal, we visited the home of the late elder, teacher and bow instrument musician, uGogo Mabhengu, who taught many young people how to make uMakhweywane (a type of bow instrument) and how to play it, including our collaborator on this project Zawadi YaMungu. In the conversations with Mbali, MaBhengu's daughter, she paints a picture of her mother's practice and how the rural natural environment that surrounds their home in eShowe affirms the picture of how people like uGogo Mabhengu organised. Her family lives in an area inundated with heavy floods and ruins of rain that strip the roots of trees and disrupt the patterns of the soil. Items like uswela (calabash), which is the bedrock of bow instruments production do not grow like they use to in their areas, As a result, Mbali tells us, MaBhengu resorted to outsourcing some of the items that originally grew on her land from neighbouring farmers and substituted other materials with new material inventions that include wires and strings previously not used. These inventive strategies of refusal are some of the ways that cultural producers on indigenous ecological practices, through sound, respond to the non-economic losses that confront their daily experience of the world. Throughout this process, the preoccupation is on local concepts and ways of doing and knowing that describe repair. In the beginning of this project, we struggled with the tension around reinvention and repair, the latter feeling and sounding like an enclosure of sorts that assumes that people who bear the brunt of the consequences of environmental degradation are often living from a place of responding to crisis. There was this desire to uncover other lexicons that point to how black people in South Africa through song in particular but not limited to, have managed to build a language of re-organising, redefining new ways of inscribing and animating what it means to constitute life from their genre and culture specific time-space. The ruins and the fire are opportunities for new things to emerge and grow. The reparative practice is therefore reinvention. Making something new out of the ruins. Secondly, this is a reparative project in the sense that it deals with our personal relationship with the quotidian as a generative space of learning. We learn everyday from our close collaborator Zawadi Yamungu and other sonic practitioners who practice similarly to Princess Magogo. Kwa-Zulu Natal, collectively has not lost the sonic tradition of ukuhuba. Some of the songs date back into the 1800s, and today, they are still being reinscribed with recent stylisations, and they are embedded with complex histories of Nguni people. Princess Magogo with her family and community, contributed immensely towards this tradition, and every encounter of ritual, be it a wedding, iJadu—which is inter-clan love dance and sporting competition, umhlanga reed dance, a funeral or which ever important procession, there is a transmission and a reminder of lineage and kinship, and this process ushers means of reinvention. Some of the conversation that we were having as a collective acknowledged that there has been so much loss of song and traditions especially for clans that are not identified as being royal, and those that have since diminished due to wars and conquer which were a practice within Nguni people.
4. On Art Practice and Ecology
It was Thami Mnyele, South African artist and member of the MEDU Art Ensemble, who remarked that making art is no different to building a bridge, it is the work of many hands. What we have heard from this perspective is a gentle de-centering of artistic practices that seek to alienate art from society or alienate aesthetic practice from some sort of direct relationship with society. We enter art practice from Mnyele's perspective, the sensitivity is about what aesthetic practice can do with us as we try to make sense of the present future. There is an interest in the role of art practice, the verbal manifestation of aesthetic work that is seen, heard, felt and observed in our futurity. Art practice sits inside cultural practice, cultural working, culture being the instincts and questions that are the driving force behind what people do to produce the outcomes and experiences of the world that stand before us in the present. It is the container of the driving force and momentum that fuels how people contest human and non-human life. Princess Magogo's life, the grand and quotidian episodes in her story have been one of the most important articulations of the relationship between art practice and ecology. In other words, the non-economic, yet quite material consequences of environmental damage and loss can be understood through the lifeworlds that Princess Magogo occupies. The disintegration of material that often needed to make indigenous instrument is connected to the changes in our environment with every flood that meets the soil, uprooting trees that are central to construction of bow instruments With every drought that changes the topography of the soil, making it harder for certain foods that later become object material for indigenous instruments, traditions of sound change, these changes are some of the losses that economic grammar without dialect to think with Kamau Braithwaithe in his insistence on dialect in dialectics. In his latest visit in South Africa, David Scott has pointed this out in a different conversation that involves Braithwaite's reading of Walter Rodney seminal text 'How Europe Undeveloped Africa.' We think about Princess Magogo's archive being that example of dialect in the context of the inscriptions that we place on 'loss' that often animate loss and materiality as only relating to costs that we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands. Of course, the loss of traditions is also material in the sense that the proximity of wage labour for producers is tied directly to the soil. It is their livelihood and their relationship to bread is mediated by the ability to work with the environment to produce this sound tradition, as it is also mediated by the neoliberal market economy forces that control what becomes remunerated as music in the world.
5. On Gogo Nombenqe’s Cartographies
We have learnt so much about cartographies and counter-mapping from Princess Magogo’s niece, Princess Nombenqe. We were reminded that Black People have their own reading and understanding of the land and how it is socially produced. We experienced a tradition of describing the land as multitude, along with the experiences that have unfolded from it. Oftentimes, we are made to believe that these cartographies or geographies do not exist because of colonial modernity, but they really still do exist. What Princess Nombenqe did during our engagements is to denounce geographic domination of colonial names in their land. They inscribed their oral history and worldview as integral in understanding what is known as Zululand, and the experiences of her people being an integral and meaningful part of the overall landscape. The anecdotal stories were somewhat a contestation of the loss that precipitates the region. Katherine McMckittrick, highlights that cultural production and ways of knowing that emanate from Black geographies should be understood and interpreted as a byproduct of the social and spatial conditions in which black people transverse. Therefore McKittricks concept, “black matters are spatial matters” is important to understanding the worldviews of such elders, and they inspire the elders that we would also love to be.
It is important to also interrogate how these cartographies of the field are defined in field recorded music and the implications that this has not only on the production of song, genre and tradition, but the implications that this has on how we define spatiality. Who gets to name a field, who gets to define a record is political. In conversations with uGogo Nombenqe, the field for her begins and ends in ritual and performance and its archive travels through an oral tradition of knowledge production. In other words, human, kin relations and relations to land itself constitute the field. At some point in our conversations, we played her Princess Magogo field recordings that were recorded in the royal homestead where we conducted the interview. We learn from her that she participated in some of these recordings as a young girl. Her mapping of the music has nothing to do with the product of the record but everything to do with the visual memories that hearing those records provoked. She detailed the relations that produced that sound as opposed to the aesthetics of field recorded music or preoccupations with the artifact. In those moments, she redefined the field for us as something that is orchestrated before the microphone and the technologies of recording map it. Her remarks on the people who make up what are not institutions of field recorded music left a bitter taste in my mouth or more like, affirmed the bitter taste that we have often experienced about little relationality matters in the practices of ethnomusicology in a particular era in South Africa. uGogo Nombenqe spoke with un-minced irritation about white people coming to record them and how those lines of relations stopped with the ending of the recording. We could not believe that it was her first time hearing her voice in the echo of voices. In uGogo Nombenqe's world it is kinship that produces the record. Kinship transcends and overcomes the presence of a mic or the field recorded 'music' itself. The late South African intellectual and figurative mentor in all things memory, Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson centred social memory as a necessary component in our reconfiguration of colonial archives and Gogo Nombenqe also puts forward social memory as the container of ritual. We were amazed at how fluid traditions of black grammar can be in how we articulate social memory as a counter map for people who have been refused and discarded from self-definition in 'official' paper heavy, text heavy, visual heavy archives and memory portals. For Africans, for Black People, the intangible, non-material social repository has become an important time-space of intellectual production, of theorising and being. These are sensitivities that archival practice brings into the way we make sense, meaning and space of non-economic losses in the context of ongoing catastrophic environmental violence.
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