[Not for general circulation]
WiSER Seminar
May 2021
Fostering Decoloniality in Music: From Local Archives to Global Dialogue
What could decoloniality sound like?
Philip Burnett
Twelve years ago I attended a church service at St Matthew’s, Keiskammahoek, in the Eastern Cape.
At the time I was living in Makhanda, or Grahamstown, a place which had provided me with a springboard from which to explore the Eastern Cape. St Matthew’s had been established in 1854 as a mission station, one of several planted in the region with the intention of establishing Anglican
Christianity in Xhosa society. The service I attended was ‘INkonzo yoMthandazo waKusasa’ known in English as ‘Morning Prayer’, and then ‘IYukariste eNgcwele’ of ‘Holy Eucharist’, the service that recalls the Last Supper. There was a pattern of psalms, canticles, sung prayers, and because I knew some isiXhosa, and was familiar with the English versions of the services that took place, I knew roughly what was going on. I could recognise the melodies and harmonies of the sung parts, because oy my own Anglican background, but while everything was very familiar, it was also very different.
The language, of course, was one factor influencing this because I was used to singing the music in
English, whereas here it was inflected by the tonal patterns of isiXhosa. What was also striking was that a liturgical form of religious practice forged in Britain during the English reformation of the 14th and 15th centuries had become a part of this place, and expressed an identity that seemed to be indelibly linked with the setting. What I heard can best be described as a new local language—both religious and musical—, a sound, that reflected the history and experience of that place.1
1 Marie Jorritsma provides a fascinating analysis of how hymn singing, for example, reflects a community’s history. See Sonic spaces of the Karoo: the sacred music of a South African Coloured community (Temple, 2011).
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Reflecting back on that experience today, I feel a resonance with Walter Mignolo and
Catherine Walsh’s challenge to think with rather than about the peoples, struggles, knowledges, and thought we encounter as we try to understand the colonial past in order to give attention to our own
‘inner eyes […] that put limits on how we can see, know, and act on with respect to the local, national, global order’.2 What does it mean to think, or indeed listen, with rather than about the complex elements and history that surrounded and shaped that sound, and to unravel the layers of complexity that surrounded how a musical language functioned in that mission context.
The first part of my reaction to that day was a research project, largely driven by curiosity, that was historical, and involved completing a research project that analysed the different elements— both indigenous and European—that went into creating a musical tradition amongst Xhosa Anglicans in the Eastern Cape. I looked at and analysed historical sources, explored the input of individuals, and tried to explain using available evidence the reception of new musical styles. A striking aspect of this historical investigation was the longevity of the musical practices, many of which could be traced back 154 years to the early days of the mission’s foundation.
The arrival of Christianity to the Eastern Cape took place over a long period and I am not going to trace our outline that process here, expect to say that the length of time draws attention to the complexity of that process. In 1854, Anglican missions were state sponsored, and part of a new dispensation that followed a succession of devastating and dehumanising colonial wars. The music was part of a package of Christianity which itself was a problem, as was its impact and the responses of people to it. It was not simply a question of converting to a new religion and faith, and learning the tunes that accompanied it. Christianity was part of a project to disturb, and that it did so by dividing communities, villages, and families into “converted” and “unconverted” or “blanketed” and
“unblanketed”, and this project had a sonic element. As William Mpofu and Melissa Steyn have recently argued, missionaries formed part of the shape of conquest, ‘dominating the minds and hearts
2 Mignolo and Walsh, On decoloniality: concepts, analytics, praxis (Duke, 2018), p. 17.
2 of the subjects with gospels and hymns.’3 Musical sounds, many of which would have been known since the cradle, were taught to be recognised as heathen.
Like missions and missionaries throughout the British Empire, the position of St Matthew’s and the music that expressed its existence was complicated. Missionaries were not solely the humanitarian and religious representatives of the metropole: they transmitted and implanted cultural values, technologies, and a way of life into the local indigenous population. While missionaries may have at times been complicit in colonial and imperial projects, they also often resisted these policies.
They brought atrocities committed by colonial administrations to the attention of the public in the metropole, and were fierce critics of imperial and colonial policies.
It helps to understand what singing the new Christian song meant on a personal level, and on the level of relations in Xhosa society, for it shows how disturbing the sonic arrival of these missions was. Primarily, it challenged the structures of homestead and family, by attempting to supplant rites of passage at various stages of life from childhood to adulthood, and matrimony, and death, all of which had music and musical practices closely associated with them. It challenged family and friendship in the way that music was made communally, both in secular and religious ways. Many converts continued to live in their traditional locales, enabling missionaries with a means to implant systematically, Christianity by encouraging converts to practice their “new” Christian ways within converts’ societal structures when they returned from mission station to traditional life. This led to situations where only some family members or kin were singing hymns. Conversion required not just singing hymns and psalms, but also rejecting traditional leadership structures, polygamy, circumcision, structures of time, all of which were deeply embedded in the consciousness of those who suddenly saw and heard mission stations in their midst.
Music, particularly styles introduced by the missionaries such as hymns were reliant on structure not just in form but melody and harmony as well. The symmetrical structure of a hymn’s text and harmony was reflected in the buildings that missionaries put up on the landscape. For
3 Mpofu and Steyn, ‘The Trouble with the Human’, in Decolonising the human: reflections from Africa on difference and oppression (Wits, 2021).
3 missionaries, buildings provided landmarks, and sounds provided points of reference, which could be termed soundscapes. But often—frequently—missions were burned. The structures in which music sounded and which were built for music to sound in were regularly destroyed, either by acts of nature or in the course of war, or arson. A music which relied on structure came to be structureless, or at least was often heard in different and new physical structures, or out in the open, as accounts from missionaries and contemporary images confirm. We might ask what the implications of this change of structure is for thinking about a hymn in a decolonial way might be. A hymn, for instance, has a very precise and definite structure which was forged in the precise and symmetrical structures of the global north, and indeed, relied on a building for its aesthetics. What happened to these aesthetics when they were transposed, to use a musical metaphor, or recontextualised, where often the physical structure in which the musical form echoed, and which itself echoed the physical structure, was not there?
Why did people sing these new songs, involves asking why did they convert, and how did these new songs emerge from the experience of conversion? This involves thinking with rather than about. Conversion was, and remains, a highly personal choice in which the individual, existing as part of a community, carried the sum of their being, into a new framework of existence, and expressed this in music which itself became converted sound. There were of course, multiple reasons behind why people converted—the opportunity of a better life, political and group pressure, and so on. Such considerations require us to confront the features of religious conversion in its local context— something that is difficult to square with the terms of reference and values of a largely secular academy, itself trying to grapple with the challenges of decoloniality and decolonisation in the present.
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Roe-Min Kok/ WISER seminar
May 2021
(Not for General Circulation)
Ever since Ruth Finnegan placed the spotlight on a local music culture, scholars have been turning to oral sources in their own backyard.1 I, too, have discovered a “backyard.”
Teaching in a university, I am surrounded by sources of oral history – a rich “local archive” of students and colleagues. Today I present one example from this archive: a student’s unusually frank account about studying piano in 21st-century China. While I am aware of facts that are frequently repeated – millions of young Chinese students, victories in prestigious competitions, and international stars such as Yuja Wang, Yundi, and Lang Lang2 – I had heard little about the personal experiences of individuals striving for pianistic renown. Lang’s autobiography details the many hardships he overcame.3 Overall, however, his and other accounts reinforce what appears to be the dominant discourse about Chinese achievements in western music, which aligns with the Chinese government’s credo that mastery of western practices is evidence of the country’s rapid, successful modernization.4
My student Xiao-Han offered another side to this story. An undergraduate piano major, she undertook to deconstruct her personal experiences as an aspiring young pianist in China.
This is her story.
At the age of 8, Xiao-Han was uprooted from a small northern town and sent to Shanghai by her parents to prepare for entrance auditions to the Elementary School affiliated with the
I extend warm thanks to my student Xiao-Han for courageously sharing her story and experiences. The quotes are from her term paper, parts of which I will include in a publication with her permission. The emphases are mine. 1 The Hidden Musicians 1989, reprinted 2013. 2 Cf. Huang 2011. 3 Lang and Ritz 2009. 4 Huang 2011; Yoshihara 2007; Fong 2004; Zhang and Bray 2017; Law and Ho 2011
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(Not for General Circulation) prestigious Shanghai Conservatory of Music. For 12 months, Xiao-Han lived in a cramped apartment with her mother, who supervised a regimented daily schedule which included 8 hours of practicing. Xiao-Han’s regular schooling was put on hold; instead, she took lessons from a
Conservatory teacher. Happily, she did win one of the few available spots.5
Today Xiao-Han is sharply critical of her experiences. The dark side of Confucianism surfaces early in her paper. Where scholars have credited Confucius’s educational maxims as enabling two important factors – a widespread respect of music, and hierarchical deference to one’s teachers and parents – Xiao-Han recalls feeling stifled and hopeless: “… there is a quote in the Analects of Confucius, ‘lack of forbearance in small matters confounds great plans.’ The quote is applied to many circumstances in Chinese people’s daily lives, and ‘forbearance’ is always the key word. It is a virtue according to Confucianism; however, the culture of forbearance also fostered a lack of expressivity, suppression of emotions, and feelings of futility.
More [such] idioms … [are constantly] repeated orally ...” Delving deeper, she reveals systemic issues stemming from hierarchical deference: “In extreme cases, the Confucian concept is applied by teachers to develop their authority, and the supreme power often leads to bribery. … my piano teacher had social connections … I was able to have lessons with the adjudicators ….
The teachers always announced to the public that all lessons for pre-exam students are free, but in reality they took ‘red packets’ from students privately … usually … a minimum of 1,000 CNY
(200 CAD). As students pay more …, more guarantees of enrollment [were] offered. The adjudicators also accepted expensive gifts … vintage wines and first-class cigars. Such autocratic
5 According to Xiao-Han, 10 are typically accepted out of 70-80 candidates in her age group. Pianist C. Wei claims that in the same age group, 10 were selected from 300+ candidates the year she auditioned.
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(Not for General Circulation) authority figures have the highest status and sit at the highest ranks in the hierarchy and dominate students’ futures and destinies.”6
Xiao-Han suffered from the extended hours of practicing and lack of interactions with other schoolchildren: “[The] learning environment and method … were physically and psychologically stressful for young students like me. I often felt lonely and isolated, I thought I was socially left behind by other companions and there was no way to catch up.” One problem appears to be Lang, who was held up as a model, distortions notwithstanding: “[Lang talks] about how his father forced him jumping to death or taking poison in Beijing because of a small failure in piano studying. Such drastic and violent method of familial communication and education is transmitted repetitiously to the audiences including music students and their parents.
Lang … and his father perceive the extremeness as diligence which they are proud of. Whether
[Lang’s] experience is true or it has been exaggerated, the transmission of his father’s severe and irrational approach can be influential and destructive.” Lang’s image also underpins the Chinese media’s frequent hyping of “second Lang Lang’s.” Xiao-Han laments: “However, there is still only one [Lang], what happened to these ambitious young pianists?” She gives Shen Wen Yu [b.
1986] as an example.7 Shen, who as a teenager had shown outstanding promise, revealed that his career deteriorated after he returned from studying in Germany without a degree. Failing to secure a conservatory teaching position, he sought to perform but was greeted by “a lack of general attention and few invitations. Shen compared performance opportunities to a cake, the size of which remains the same but which ever more pianists want to share.”
6 Cf. Zhang and Bray 2017. 7 Shen had placed second at the Queen Elisabeth International Piano Competition in 2003, the youngest competitor to gain a prize.
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(Not for General Circulation)
Xiao-Han’s eye-opening account – born of her need to reconcile with a traumatic past – offers a valuable counterweight to the dominant discourses I mentioned. Piano instruction in
China seems a long way from our own concerns, but we recruit, host, and teach large numbers of
Chinese students who may be affected by similar systemic practices yet are unable to articulate their needs. Understanding their prior experiences is requisite to decolonizing our pedagogical approaches beyond asking seemingly impassive, technically perfect Chinese to “play more expressively.”8
8 Cf. Yoshihara 2007; Yang 2007.
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[Not for general circulation]
WiSER Seminar
May 2021
Fostering Decoloniality in Music: From Local Archives to Global Dialogue
Entangled worlds, harmonica magazines, and a face mask
Yvonne Liao
In a recent special issue of Archival Science, J. J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell call for “a decolonial archival praxis [that is] change-oriented and future-minded insofar as it helps us imagine both a different way of archiving and a different world to be archived.”1 Similarly,
Walter Mignolo has spoken of decolonial possibilities and what he refers to as “the praxis of living” in terms of “delinking from . . . the fictional constituted domains, which are based on the belief that the world is what the domains make us believe it is [author’s italics].”2 Further questions might be raised ontologically however about the separability of connect and disconnect, whether in our own world-perceptions or in “global” historical thought. The interweaving of connect and disconnect might also be understood in terms of the extent to which “delinking” as a transformative process may lead wholesale to more equitable shared outcomes, by virtue of shaping and reshaping the history-writing moment, here and now. I propose to contemplate this moment in the moment, noting how lived worlds past and present may become plurally entangled and even suspended in the thick of the archival imagination.
1 J. J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, “‘To go beyond’: towards a decolonial archival praxis,” Archival Science 19 (2019): 71–85, at 72. 2 Walter D. Mignolo, “Eurocentrism and Coloniality: The Question of the Totality of Knowledge,” in On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 194–210, at 208. Granted, what I am suggesting in the context of our theme and seminar differs somewhat from Ghaddar’s and Caswell’s longer-term aspirations for (a) decolonial reimagining.3 I do explore that potentiality in a second planned project, in the hope of articulating regional decoloniality and the question of canonic musical repertoires with Asian choral societies and their performance cultures across the port cities of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Yokohama from the 1950s through to the current century.
Returning to the matter at hand, my short reflection today is concerned neither with the problematic epistemologies of global history nor with the perpetuated discourses of global musical circulations, in many ways scripted by the continued legacies of cultural imperialism that have been framed binaristically between the “concept continents” of Europe and Asia.4 Rather, I would like to tease out the jarring, but also mutually constitutive sensibilities put into relief by the entangled worlds of past and present. In the remaining pages I will explore these entangled worlds across time and place, objects and touchpoints, by drawing on two brief examples as a music historian of twentieth-century colonialism and as a volunteer at a university museum.
My first example takes me to the opening chapter of my current book project,
Imperfect Global: Thinking European Music Cultures in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1897–
1997. In this particular narrative I examine the circularity, and not just the circulation, of transnational musical imports such as the German Hohner harmonica in treaty port Shanghai between the 1920s and 1940s. For the purposes of the present reflection, I turn specifically to
Chinese-language harmonica magazines from the 1930s and 1940s held at the Shanghai
3 Ghaddar and Caswell, “‘To go beyond’,” 74. 4 Here I have in mind the question of Europe and its apparent inextricability with global musical circulations and global historical thought. The term “concept continent” is discussed in Qadri Ismail, “Exiting Europe, Exciting Postcoloniality,” Kronos: Southern African Histories 43 (2017): 40–50, at 41. I also thank Lilliana P. Saldaña for her insightful response at the American Musicological Society’s 2020 Annual Meeting.
2 Library (see figures 1.1 and 1.2), for instance the China Harmonica News (中華口琴界) and the Shanghai Harmonica News (上海口琴界).
Fig. 1.1. China Harmonica News (中華口琴界), July 1934.
Fig. 1.2. Shanghai Harmonica News (上海口琴界), July 1941.
3 Shanghai’s status as a colonial treaty port and non-colony (1842–1945), coupled with its somewhat deceptive image as a global metropolis, at once clarifies and confounds the interpretive moment not least the sensibilities of research writing. Strikingly, in my chapter, juxtaposing a local archive of harmonica magazines with the familiar picture painted by economic historians (of Hohner as a global consumer product) has the effect of intersecting my written narrative with two distinct yet interlinked worlds.5 There emerges on the one hand a print world of disseminated foreign repertoires, in many ways a time warp of nineteenth- century European music cultures that which is encapsulated in the magazines’ own sheet music and arrangements, from marches, opera excerpts, to other popular classics aimed at the harmonica enthusiast. There also emerges on the other hand an indigenous literary world and musical public composed of the magazines’ subscribers, within which can be noted native- place ties extending from Shanghai’s neighboring provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, to the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, to the more distant provinces of
Shanxi and Heilongjiang; and a readership ranging from students and homemakers to businesses and the disciplined forces during the interwar years.6 Their appetite for
Continental art, literature, and philosophy visibly informs the magazines’ content, too, with featured quotes by Berthold Auerbach and Martin Luther for example, and musical anecdotes, despite their doubtful veracity, such as “Beethoven’s Kiss” (see figure 2), depicting the composer’s Weihekuss or “kiss of consecration” accorded a certain nineteenth- century piano prodigy named Franz Liszt.7
5 On Hohner’s prevalent commercial success, see for example Hartmut Berghoff, “Marketing Diversity: The Making of a Global Consumer Product—Hohner’s Harmonicas, 1857–1930,” Enterprise & Society 2, no. 2 (2001): 338–372, at 338. 6 China Harmonica News, July 1934. 7 Quotes, Shanghai Harmonica News, 30 July 1941. “Beethoven’s Kiss,” The China Harmonica News (中國口琴界), October 1936. Not to be confused with the China Harmonica News (中華口琴界).
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Fig. 2. “Beethoven’s Kiss” [Beiduofen de wen], The China Harmonica News (中國口琴界),
October 1936.
5 So, the odd, vacillating, nature of my narrative means deliberating but not adjudicating between the entangled worlds of Shanghai’s foreign musical presence and indigenous cultural mindset. This evasive positionality also finds its way into my second example. Here I shift from harmonica magazines in Shanghai to museum objects in Oxford; that is, from research writing to a public engagement activity aimed at exploring the theme of gender and performance through toys, masks, and dolls (see figure 3).
Fig. 3. The author and two museum visitors, March 7, 2020.
The activity in question took place at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, a university museum keen to confront its links to the British empire and to colonial collecting practices. Not that the current pandemic should lend itself to wordplay, but I do want to briefly mention a face mask in the form of a painted wooden mask derived originally from wayang wong, a genre of classical dance theatre found traditionally in Javanese court culture. A standard “distanced”
6 approach might be to enlighten the museum visitor on the performative aspects of the mask in what are highly stylized, gendered depictions from ancient Sanskrit epics. At our object handling stations however, my colleagues and I from the Colonial Ports and Global History network drew attention both to the mask’s provenance in Central Java and to its displaced status as a handling object touchable by “all,” having been sourced and donated to the museum in 2007 by a UK gamelan educator. Yet in deconstructing but not quite dismantling the museum as a “box of things,” to borrow the words of art historian Alice Procter, and in unsettling but not entirely changing what she calls “the complacency of believing,”8 we (as in a group of postcolonial researchers) became embroiled in that curated moment, and in the strange sensibilities of decentering western storytelling and potentially recentering the
Western-Other within the entangled worlds of a post-imperial museum archive.
If, indeed, the archival imagination is not only linked but also tethered to multiple lived worlds, it is worth reflecting around our conflicting responses in tandem with our research practices, and the ways in which the ambivalence of inquiry and reasoning may at once uplift and dampen our decolonial aspirations amid ongoing systemic inequalities. Even more importantly perhaps, how might this dilemma be resolved from within? Cultural theorist Chen Kuan-hsing offers some provocative words: “Rather than continuing to fear reproducing the West as the Other, and hence avoiding the question altogether, an alternative discursive strategy posits the West as bits and fragments that intervene in local social formations in a systematic, but never totalizing, way . . . Such a position avoids either a resentful or a triumphalist relation with the West because it is not bound by an obsessive antagonism.”9 If nothing else, we are reminded that epistemic change, whatever it entails,
8 Alice Procter, The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it (London: Cassell, 2020), 18. 9 Chen Kuan-hsing, Asia as Method : Toward Deimperialization, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2010), 223.
7 does not happen in change-neutral terms; and that our grappling with the history-writing moment—subjectivised by our multiple relationships with the past—should serve both to inform and to diversify discussion for the future.
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Fostering Decoloniality in Music: From Local Archives to Global Dialogue South African jazz case study Lindelwa Dalamba Department of Music Wits School of Arts
When concluding his 1961 autobiography, Chocolates for My Wife, Todd Matshikiza wrote:
In London my favourite pub is the Bull and Bush where I go and meet my pal Fred … I asked him where the African people live, like in Joh’burg they got locations for us. Fred said earnestly, “Well, looking at it that way, I know the zones go something like you’ll find the English in British West Hampstead, the Jews in Goldschtein’s Green, and the Indians in Belsize Pakistan. The other races are scattered all over the place.
By 1961, Matshikiza had lived in London for a year in exile, having arrived there as the composer of King Kong: An African Jazz Opera. This passage riffs on what Salman Rushdie once termed ‘imaginary homelands’. Whereas for Rushdie these involved how emigrant writers created fictional versions of the homes they left behind, for Matshikiza this is not the case. This is in part because, for certain South African black intellectuals, Britain had long been an ambivalent homeland encountered through school-books that formed their curriculum. Once in London, however, Matshikiza imagines this imaginary homeland as an echo of the ethnically demarcated homelands that the apartheid government was creating with racist zeal.
Matshikiza’s recollection is poignant, because he would move to Zambia in 1964 to die there in 1968 at the age of 47. Thereafter, his life would be scattered all over the place: in the British Library’s African Writers Club; in Lancaster University’s Jack Hylton Papers
Lindelwa Dalamba – WiSER 2021 DRAFT Presentation – not for circulation or citation. depository, because Hylton curated King Kong’s UK staging; at the University of KwaZulu- Natal’s Alan Paton Centre; at my University of the Witwatersrand’s William Cullen Africana Library, deposited by his granddaughter after her father John Matshikiza’s death, and at Rhodes University, where they were deposited at my request by his widow Esme Matshikiza.
Matshikiza’s scattering confirms Achille Mbembe’s observations in Critique of Black Reason that, and I quote, the black man ‘exists where he is not thought’ (28). He continues:
The historical experience of Blacks did not necessarily leave traces … it became clear that the history of Blacks could be written only from fragments brought together to give an account of an experience that itself was fragmented, that of a pointillist people struggling to define itself not as a disparate composite but as a community (28-29). Perhaps this is also why Kofi Agawu wrote in 2003 that the archive is bounded ‘only in principle; in actuality, it is an ever-expanding store’ that includes the factors that enable ‘their particular modes of knowledge organization’ (24).
South African talk about archives tends to follow Mbembe’s imagery of ‘slivers’ and ‘fragments’. Matshikiza would agree. As a jazz journalist, he pieced together the country’s unwritten jazz past in his longer writing for Drum magazine. Scholars of South African jazz are indebted; the South African Broadcasting Corporation had long decided that early South African jazz recordings were of no value, and destroyed them when moving to their new headquarters in Auckland Park (opposite my flat). As a composer, Matshikiza wrote works commemorating the cosmopolitan spaces the apartheid state was busy demolishing: King Kong for Sophiatown in Johannesburg, and Mkhumbane for Cato Manor in Durban. As a writer, we must take seriously the subtitle to Chocolates for My Wife, which is Slices of My Life.
We are, therefore, at Walter Mignolo’s ‘space’ of ‘border thinking’, dealing with ‘points of origination and routes of dispersion’ (274). For Mignolo, border epistemology anchors ‘a politics of knowledge that is ingrained in the body and in local histories’, but does not lead to comforting narratives of hybridity (274; 277).
Lindelwa Dalamba – WiSER 2021 DRAFT Presentation – not for circulation or citation.
In 2018, in the course of my work on Matshikiza, I curated what I now recognise as an example of border thinking. I want to recount 2 moments from this year. The first in March and the second in September of that year.
On 24 September 2018, Heritage Day in South Africa, I convened a panel consisting of heritage scholars, historians, and musicians. It was a glorious Spring day, and we indulged in plenty of meat and booze. The venue was the Father Trevor Huddlestone Centre in Sophiatown, named after the anti-apartheid priest who was stationed there before Sophiatown’s destruction. What I did not know is that the Centre has an archive of families and individuals who had lost their homes, and annually busses them into Sophiatown for Heritage Day. This was my audience: people whose knowledge of my research was ingrained in the body. I encountered another Todd Matshikiza: one who had walked these streets, had shared drinks with these elders and had taught their children. I also registered their sceptical looks – because someone my age, and a woman, would be interested in their South African jazz. Winning them over meant I had to speak my mother tongue – Xhosa – to show my investment. Moreover, I had to tell them that my grandmother had been a beer brewer during the 1950s, and had hosted Miriam Makeba in her establishment. These are some of the complexities involved when people try to form themselves as a community. We cannot think them through without considering the complexities of intergenerational dialogues – as Holocaust Studies has taught us. After the conversation there was live music, when we youngsters learnt the story of dancing to this music in a way that transcription – for Agawu indispensable – could not have sketched.
On 22 March 2018, a day after 21 March 1960 Sharpeville Massacre holiday, I curated a multimedia conference presentation. The theme was Matshikiza’s King Kong. This time the audience consisted of academics seated dutifully at the Huddlestone Centre (unaware that someone had forgotten to order the wine). In collaboration with 2 jazz musicians, our aim was to invite the audience into African jazz’s interiority. We listened for and drew out the narratives of African jazz; rather than reproduce or revive we aimed to transform, through improvisation, the possibilities of and alternatives to harmonic progressions, sonic textures, 32-bar forms, kwela, marabi, and the narrative significance with which they were imbued.
Lindelwa Dalamba – WiSER 2021 DRAFT Presentation – not for circulation or citation.
These moments show how local archives need not result in the reassertion of the archive’s power, tokenistically enhanced by new content. They also show how the so-called ‘experiential archive’ need not be romanticised into uselessness as Bhekizizwe Peterson warned against, ‘by imbuing such material with a subversive, underground anonymity’. Through public and creative engagement, we negotiated what Mbembe explains as the twin traps: of domesticating local archives into folklore, or of commodifying these stories. Both facilitate forgetting, or transform the archive into a talisman. For those who dwell in the postcolony as music practitioners, we can do worse than reckon with Mignolo’s challenge regarding the geopolitics of sensing and knowing. For South Africans, this would enable us to think through the dialogue of the black diaspora and South Africa’s place in its imaginaries. We are not merely scattered all over the place.
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Bibliography
Agawu, Kofi. 2003. Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. New York: Routledge.
Ballantine, Christopher. 2012. Marabi Nights: Jazz, ‘Race’ and Society in Early Apartheid South Africa. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Matshikiza, Todd. 1961. Chocolates for My Wife: Slices of My Life. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. ‘Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking and Epistemic Disobedience’, Postcolonial Studies, 14:3, 273-283.
Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Translated and introduced by Laurent Dubois. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Peterson, Bhekizizwe. 2002. ‘The Archives and the Political Imaginary’. In Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al. Cape Town: David Philip, 20-37.
Lindelwa Dalamba – WiSER 2021 DRAFT Presentation – not for circulation or citation.