Umakhweyana: Who gets to teach me?

abstract

My perspective will focus around my journey learning and playing indigenous instruments and dance as a young black woman. Looking at the history trail of tradition and hear-say, some of these instruments were identified and known as a woman’s instrument. In questioning who can teach me, I raise my frustration with the barriers erected by academic institutions to the knowledge about and archival access to women’s indigenous music which I have confronted. My narrative speaks to practices of copyright exploitation and gatekeeping which keeps women ethnomusicologists who work as community activists, in the margins. Currently we have men in higher learning institutions as holders of this instrument with teaching rights. I recall several indigenous women performers whose work is widely recognised as contributing to indigenous music and knowledge, who learnt their cultural practices within their communities, many achieving fame even though illiterate. I argue for the old and new to mesh, for our women’s contribution as the holders of intellectual authority, memory and custom to be fully recognised to ensure it is not erased or that woman’s indigenous ways of knowing are lost to us through unacceptable forms of gender bias and artificial knowledge hierarchies. As my teachers, the women who have informed my study and practice, inspire me with the understanding that the body is the archive of sound, how the body helps us to reconnect with the ancestral vibration that is part of who we are. Healing through music and dance and nature is the centre stage of creating environments of connectivity. I conclude with possible methods of teaching indigenous knowledge systems and the value of preserving, promoting, developing and appreciation of our musical heritage as indigenous women.

keywords:

• women
• traditional music
• Umakhweyana
• indigenous knowledge curriculum

Notes

1 “In a highly reflexive review, Ellis and Bochner (2000) defined the term auto-ethnography as ‘an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural’ (p. 733)” (Humphreys, 2005:840).

2 “The Mntwana (Princess} Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu has for a great many years been recognised as the greatest living authority on Zulu music, besides being an expert performer without peer” (Rycroft, 1975:41).

3 ‘What is the umrhubhe? featuring Dizu Plaatjies - UBUNTU festival, 25 August, 2014’, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFn_R8yzqMc, accessed 20 February 2020.

4 Ethnomusicology: “Is a way of thinking about music that enables the perceptive scholar or creative individual to respond in a particular way to the challenges of his or her field content or to data presented by others” (Nketia, 2005:3)

5 Decolonising: “the process of a state withdrawing from a former colony, leaving it independent” - dictionary.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thobekile Mbanda

THOBEKILE MBANDA is a conceptual artist and community activist who uses music as her medium and muse. Centring her work around the preservation, promotion and development of indigenous instruments and music fuels her current project, ‘Songs of our Ancestors’. Among her trajectory of creative pursuits, in 2014 Mbanda wrote and produced a play while in Barbados called Princess Magogo the Rise of A Star. She currently works at Art for Humanity as Project Manager, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Mbanda has performed locally and internationally, and is constantly developing her repertoire working with young people at the intersection of music, learning, decolonisation and freedom. She is band leader of Ntomb’Yelanga naBaLimi. The band focuses on the preservation, development and promotion of indigenous music and the history of instruments. Email: [email protected]