SONGS OF MOBILITY AND BELONGING

Abstract

The combination of poverty, rural remoteness and exceptional ecological diversity in western Maputaland has long made the region a target of conservationists and development planners, locating it centrally within the Usuthu-Tembe-Futi Transfrontier Conservation Area. While driven by the rhetoric of ‘participatory biodiversity management’, which links environmental conservation with economic development, the fulfilment of the transboundary project remains dependent upon exogenous resources and authority, and conservation agencies are ambivalent towards local demands for self-determined development. This essay examines the politics of land in western Maputaland, its position in local memories and its foundation in spatial practices and cultural identities. Building on narratives accompanied by mouth-bows and the jews harp, once performed by young women as walking songs but remembered now by elderly women only, my analysis focuses on the ways in which mobilities and gender intersect in a changing landscape, and how meanings embedded in sound, song and performance inflect local experiences of belonging. The essay's aim is ultimately to provide witness to transboundary conservation planners of the need for a more culturally integrated and economically apposite reimagining of southern African borderlandscapes.

Keywords:

• biodiversity conservation
• borderlands
• gender
• memory
• walking songs

Notes

¹To date, there are twelve TFCAs either established or proposed in southern Africa. The programme includes twelve countries and encompasses a landmass of over 120 million hectares. See http://www.peaceparks.org/story.php?pid=100&mid=19 (accessed 27 March 2013).

²The organization Boundless Southern Africa has even commissioned a TFCA song with the lyrics: ‘Africa! Africa! Southern Africa! Oceans, mountains, deserts, and plains / Wherever we go / Boundless and free / Transfrontier, together we work / Tirelessly we keep and conserve / The wonders we have, for them to come / Boundless they roam, protected and free’. See http://www.boundlessa.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=172&Itemid=308 (accessed 27 March 2013).

³The Usuthu-Tembe-Futi TFCA is 4,195 sq km in extent, of which 317 sq km (8 per cent) is in Swaziland, 2,783 sq km (66 per cent) is in Mozambique, and 1,095 sq km (26 per cent) is in South Africa. See http://www.sntc.org.sz/programs/tfcas.asp (accessed 27 March 2013).

⁴For more information on the musical properties of these instruments, see Impey (2006).

⁵This notion of performativity in the marking and remembering of place invokes Michel de Certeau's (1984) framing of everyday spatial practice, which distinguishes the imaginative uses of space by the pedestrian from the technical, two-dimensional grid of the city.

⁶TEBA was the official recruitment agency established by the South African Chamber of Mines in the 1920s to secure migrant labour from various localities in southern Africa.

⁷KwaNyamazane means ‘the place of the antelope’ and refers to the Ndumo Game Reserve.

⁸Umthanathana, translated as ‘the one who speaks contemptuously and we shut our ears’, was the name given to the Park's official responsible for the removal of the communities from the game reserve.

⁹The Ndumo Wilderness Camp has since closed due to low occupancy rates.