ARYAN KAGANOF

Abstract

A brief introduction to a new model for online archiving and journal publishing that rejects a print lineage (book or magazine) for online publication but rather embraces a screen-based genealogy, foregrounding both cinematic and gaming approaches to digital design, user experience and navigation.

Keywords: herri, decoloniality, relationality, digital humanities.

0.

herri has been designed as a radical new pedagogic tool, an Afrocentric revolution in how new knowledge is generated, cultivated, analysed, propagated, archived, and taught in and out of universities.

Our first principle was gleaned from Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”^{[1]The Buckminster Fuller Reader (1972) editor James Meller, ISBN 978-0140214345.}

What we understood from the slew of boring, badly-designed web journals out there was that everybody was missing the point of the screen. Designers were trying to replicate onscreen a genealogy rooted in print; in books and magazines. In other words they were negating the ontology of the screen, of what the screen has to offer, and therefore all these online journals were deeply dissatisfying because, in emulating something they were not, the participant was constantly left feeling in-between – the experience of reading these journals online gave nothing of the satisfaction of reading a physical book, but also, and more egregiously, did not exploit the actual medium they are embedded in.

herri therefore was designed explicitly with the history of cinema, and the history of video games, as well as the history of the print media in mind. A synthesis of these three strands. A recognition that the screen is capable of so much more than a printed book page is, and must fulfill that capability if it is to secure the participation of a new generation of users who have grown up with movies and games as an intuitive part of their learning and cognitive process. Please note that I don’t describe them as “readers” because they are doing more than that when they engage with herri, they are active participants in an ongoing jouissance of the moment that enables learning through the medium and not only through the medium’s content. What I am saying here is that engagement with the medium itself is a way for the engagee to develop skills, to hone perception, to sharpen intuitive faculties. herri is a sensory perception builder, the more you engage with it the more it heightens your senses, you become aweh.

The second principle was learned from Édouard Glissant. herri is not a thing (certainly not one thing) but a relation between the user and the interface. herri has been described as an online archive, as a journal, as an e-magazine, as a digital museum, and, while it happily accepts all of these definitions, it does not allow itself to be limited by any of these definitions because herri is an endlessly proliferating sculpture in time.

Let me briefly go back to the beginning. When we started designing herri the students were still a force to be reckoned with and the word “decolonizing” was very much in the air. What we did not want to do with herri was create another thoroughly colonial collection of carceral disciplines marching in parallel sequence and thereby merely replicate an ongoing history of these incarcerated knowledge paths (the university) but rather to radically investigate what “decolonization” might mean in this age of techno-hybridity.

The first thing we needed to decolonize from was time. Therefore there are no publication dates in herri.

We do have them stored and if researchers really need them they could, theoretically, be given out, but the point is that herri is always now. herri is published the moment you encounter her. She is not a “product” with a sell-by date. She is not for sale. She gives her knowledge to you willingly, with love and respect, every time you log on to her. The whole western idea of time is foreign to herri. She is never late, never early. When you vibe with her, you and herri are now. The word “vibe” is very important because herri is an African creation rooted in a Pan-African ethic and aesthetic that is best described as simultaneous multi-dimensionality.

1. A Living Archive

herri is the name the Dutch colonisers called the seventeenth century khoi freedom fighter Autshumao^{[2]Patric Mellet, Autshumao – Between What Is Said and What is Kept Silent.}, the first South African political prisoner, who famously escaped from incarceration on Robben Island. Twice. “herri” as opposed to “Herrie” is a decolonial orthography decision that was made because the curatorial team did not believe that the Dutch spelling of the sound herri was necessary, and, inspired by the way sms messages have influenced the orthography of contemporary Afrikaaps, decided to use herri as a flag signalling a de-linking from conventionally inherited colonial spelling.

herri gives expression to a decolonial ethics and aesthetics of scholarly and artistic engagement. It positions African Psychology and music as the central point of reference for a politics of thinking and writing and creating. herri is conceived of as a living archive that demonstrates the possibilities of (post)new media and integrated technologies where discrete categories like “art”, “music”, “film”, “text” and “design” all merge into sensorial and informational abundance. Initiated in 2019 as part of the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Delinking Encounters project at Stellenbosch University, herri developed into an investigation about how the notion of decolonisation and decoloniality impacts on the archive, and in its ten iterations to date, herri demonstrates how the archive is dispersed between artefacts, living people and their memories, and artistic imaginings of the past, present and future.

herri is foundationally built upon the notion of open access, and is freely available online to anybody who can connect to the internet. The publication uses the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike  CC BY-NC-SA license. All contributors are informed that this is the license adopted with regard to their particular content. In terms of this License “You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.”^{[3]Creative Commons, creativecommons.org, accessed Wednesday 24 August 2022.}

This is a crucial aspect of the idea of decoloniality: no borders, no gates, no hindering of the flow of information in any way. The free and open exchange of deep cultural analysis and the open platforming of experimental forms across all artistic disciplines is thus a core principle of the herriverse. herri has been funded with this principle clearly stated, from such diverse sources as Afridig, the National Arts Council (NAC), the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS), and the Social Impact initiative at Stellenbosch University.

Pragmatically, herri was created in a university environment obsessed with branding and sensitive to criticism. Modes of engagement were developed between the University and the editorial and design team, enabling institutional existence at a remove that didn’t compromise content or the freedom to experiment. The intellectual challenge of herri was how to act as a mediating device, or bridge, between the memories of lived experience and the digital media currently available for recording and storing those memories. In my role as Curator/Editor I saw the challenge as one of changing traditional notions of institutional archiving which involve gated communities of difficult to access physical material in unwelcoming carceral environments (think colonial structures), into an unrepentantly liberated zone, a new model of open access memory sharing which makes the existing models obsolete.

In setting out to do this, herri attempted to answer the question:

What does decolonization sound and look like in this age of techno-hybridity?

In presenting a sound-mine of narratives, mythologies, ideologies, statements, ambiguities and ideas inviting excavation, herri postulates that there is not just one answer to this question. By being deliberately trans- and post-disciplinary, incorporating all forms of digital media and by working with writers, musicians, film-makers, composers and designers at the cutting edge of their fields of expertise, herri contributes to new knowledge, forging a South-led digital humanities voice that does not emulate what is already known. Writing in Business Day, Chris Thurman commented that:

“herri is not just a publication or a platform but an ever-expanding archive. It offers a journey down, through horizontal layers of history, but it is very much present and future-oriented, a portal between diverse settings and geographies and languages.”^{[4] Chris Thurman, Business Day, 11 February, 2022.}

2. An Intersectional Structure

Structurally, herri consists of differentiated sections, that are digitally and conceptually linked in a variety of ways with other content in each edition, but also with content in other editions. Intersectionality is an important feature of the herriverse. The sections have been created to allow entry into the site from different portals, not necessarily only the single front cover entrance.

The ‘Editorial’ section forwards positions, formulating viewpoints and positing analyses much in the way conventional editorials are expected to do with the exception that these herri editorials are not limited to textual contributions but have also appeared as films and, as in this powerful example by Khadija Tracey Heeger, as performed poetry.

Each issue of herri has a Theme, which invites writers to explore in-depth the work of an individual artist or genre. This kind of deep focus writing and analysis is difficult to sustain in the market-driven, product-related contemporary media environment of late capital where academic writing itself has become an entirely fungible commodity, administered by monolithic corporate behemoths. The ‘Theme’ section has to date featured ‘Mantombi Matotiyana’ (#1), ‘Code Switching: From The Eoan Group to Country Conquerors’ (#2), ‘Night Music’ (#3), ‘Africa Synthesized’ (#4), ‘Social Impact’ (#5), ‘Graham Newcater’ (#6), ‘Johnny Mbizo Dyani’ (#7), ‘AI in Africa’ (#8), ‘Lefifi Tladi’ (#9), and this current issue, ‘African Psychology’ (#10). These themes have developed organically from archival material I have been recording and collecting since the 1980s, working closely with Guest Editors Vulane Mthembu (AI in Africa) and Professor Kopano Ratele (African Psychology).

The release of Songs of Greeting, Healing and Heritage became the focal point for a multi-perspectival reflection on the artist/composer Mantombi Matotiyana, the heritage represented by her music, and the music itself in the ‘Mantombi Matotiyana’ theme (issue #1). Matotiyana (who was 85 at the time), created her very first CD recording of her own compositions and herri initiated a series of commissioned responses to the recorded work by writers, poets, composers, producers, DJs and theorists, including Njabulo Ndebele, Antjie Krog, Malaika wa Azania and Mbe Mbhele. These fifteen responses were published in the Theme section of the first issue, while the CD itself went on to win the 2020 Humanities and Social Sciences Award in the Best Music Composition/Arrangement category. The point of these commissions – a practice sustained over the course of all ten iterations of herri – was to explore the archive as a creatively generative motor, a source of unending creative possibility both academically and in terms of artistic practice.

‘How do we begin to think and speak (“do research”) about a practice such as music that “lives inside people” without approaching it through a colonial lens’, asks Neo Muyanga in his editorial to issue #1 which offers various perspectives on this question. Congolese rapper, artist and filmmaker Baloji’s multi-faceted short film Zombies is a critique of techno-dependence, and an essay by Dutch philosopher Henk Oosterling considers the relationship between recordings and the real, among others. herri itself is not exempt from this question, and the whole herri project could be regarded as a meditation on its own role as medium.

For issue #2 another CD release, Streng Verbode, this time of Greyton’s ghoema-reggae band the Country Conquerors, twinned with a long-term archival project on the Eoan Opera Group, presented the opportunity to interrogate the notion of code switching through the juxtaposition of opera and reggae, past and present. Writing in The Conversation, Stephanie Vos explained, “It places an ostensible high next to low, what might be considered a ‘white’ colonial artform next to a grassroots musical connection with the Afro-diaspora, the cosmopolitan next to the rural. Reading about the Country Conquerors and the Eoan Group side by side becomes an exercise in code-switching.”^{[5]Stephanie Vos, theconversation.com.}

The design of herri reflects this content, through its fluidity and non-linear, non-hierarchical presentation of material. Again, the theme developed organically from turning a critical lens on work conducted within the university, in one way adding to the reception of the work, and in another subjecting the work to scrutiny by stakeholders from outside the university. herri strives always to avoid the pitfalls of university-bound humanities projects where “Institutions have the pathetic megalomania of the computer whose whole vision of the world is its own program.” (Mary Douglas, “How Institutions Think”, p.92, 1986, Syracuse University Press.)

Issue 3’s Theme, ‘Night Music’, too, has a CD and book as its central pivot. This time the music of composer Arnold van Wyk (1916-1983) forms the focus of the theme. Already in this third edition herri sent a clear signal that South African music was not either ‘Western’ or ‘African’, ‘elite’ or ‘popular.’ The sequence of topics and approaches embedded in the wider sectional diversity of herri enabled a syncretic-hybridic effect that proposed a South African music culture released from its apartheid ghettos of categorization.

The theme of issue 4, ‘Africa Synthesized’ was Guest edited by Stephanie Vos and Carina Venter. This was herri’s first experiment in contracting editorial expertise from elsewhere (in this case, scholars in the Music Department of Stellenbosch University). Transplanting the notion of a physical conference (that did not take place because of COVID) to the domain of a design-intensive and media-rich platform expanded the kinds of material and presentation that would have resulted from conventionally published academic exchanges.

The theme of herri #5, ‘Social Impact’, was prompted by a funding award from the Social Impact Division of Stellenbosch University. It enabled the university to turn a critical lens on its notion of social impact, which could easily become an alibi that allows the broader academic (and managerial) project of the university to avoid the responsibility for thinking through and implementing the imperatives of transformation and decolonization. This theme, more than any of the others, tested the university’s threshold for receiving and nurturing critique directed against itself, by itself. This ability of the institution to generate and value dissent from within, is an important function of herri as it privileges forms of expression that prioritize aesthetic insight over the functionally controlled brand.

The special issue of herri with its focus on Social Impact flowed organically out of its concern with music as a “weather vane” to understand and analyse social conditions. The referent here was Giorgio Agamben who, in his “What is Philosophy?” states:

Philosophy is today possible only as a reformation of music. If we call music the experience of the Muse, that is, of the origins and the taking place of the word, then in a given society and at a given time music expresses and governs the relation humans have with the event of the word. In fact, this event – that is, the arche-event that constitutes humans as speaking beings – cannot be said within language: it can only be evoked and reminisced museically or musically. In music something comes to expression that cannot be said in language.^{[6]Giorgio Agamben, What is Philosophy?, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa, Stanford University Press, California, 2018.}

The South African twelve-tone composer Graham Newcater celebrated his 80^th birthday in 2021, and herri marked the occasion by publishing archival scores and recordings of his music in its ‘Graham Newcater’ theme issue #6. What was unprecedented in this theme, was the sheer amount of conventional archival score and sound material presented for open access with the permission of the composer. Again, as with the thematic focus on Arnold van Wyk in issue 3, herri proposed through its consistent integration of different kinds of music and art that the old categories of containment had become obsolete in the digital realm, where the esoteric and ostensibly anachronistic music of Newcater could be freely encountered juxtaposed among some of the most radically contemporary musical expressions in (South) Africa today.

The thematic focus on Johnny Mbizo Dyani (issue 7) illustrated the manner in which archival depth or diachronic layering, is digitally presented as synchronous curation. Dyani’s theme was built on an interview conducted by the curator/editor more than three decades ago. In a sense then, the Dyani theme shows how digital curation accrues depth not only from research or mobilized networks, but through sustained individual and team engagement with important people, bodies of work or ideas.

The ‘Galleri’ section of herri foregrounds sonic, visual, photographic and film work as autonomous art works, rather than as (inter)textual contributions to discursive engagements. ‘Borborygmus’ (stomach rumbling, peristaltic or abdominal sounds) serves as a digital soap box for hard to swallow material that might resist polite, academic or entrained forms of reception and engagement. It frames difficult and in some contexts unpalatable expressions of critique and affect, in such a way as to ensure that the material be heard, seen and made available to a global audience. The ‘Borborygmus’ section of herri forms part of a larger ethos of respecting the importance of encouraging transgression, bringing to the surface submerged or repressed material or forms of expression, and insisting that discourse and creative engagement with abrasive and potentially offensive ideas be invited, as far as possible, into the academic space. As Edward Said put it “Least of all should an intellectual be there to make his or her audiences feel good: the whole point is to be embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant.”^{[7]Edward Said, The Reith Lectures, BBC 1, bbc.co.uk, accessed Thursday 25 August 2022.}

Whereas ‘Galleri’ privileges a full spectrum of artistic creativity, it is in ‘Frictions’ that newly commissioned work of edgy text – both poetry and fiction – is showcased. Issue 1, for example, features University of Johannesburg Literature Prize Winner Lesego Rampolokeng, whose writing is translated into an indigenous South African language (isiXhosa) for the first time. Again, as the collation of the two words ‘fiction’ and ‘friction’ intimates, there is an understanding that herri will allow contradictory, contrarian, difficult and provocative work to be published, alongside playful, wistful and lyrical pieces. In other words, there is no preferred register of publication; rather an affirmation that the space is open.

‘Claque’ is a review section where books, CDs and DVDs are analysed by practicing experts in their fields, whilst ‘Ekaya’ concerns materials closely connected to the in-house scholarly production of the Centre for Critical and Creative Thought. ‘Off the record’ is where herri invites writers to uncover what has hitherto been deliberately hidden or inappropriately conveyed. This is the most classically “archival” section of the herri architecture.  

‘Hotlynx’ is designer Andrea Rolfes’ creation of an evolving artwork, it’s an abstract motion machine on the surface, click on the hotlynx and you get immersed in an information tunnel… it’s a fun section, a lucky-dip curation into wildy different avenues of exploration for herri readers, while ‘Shopping’ enables readers to order and purchase books, CDs and DVDs that are relevant to the issue’s concerns. ‘Contributors’ is a listing of all the herri team members, co-workers and writers who have contributed to the issue, while ‘The Back Page’ is a section devoted to philosophical counter-narratives, reflections and possibilities. A contra summing up of the issue. ‘The Selektah’ is a section that invites a DJ to contribute a mix and an essay.

3. Language

One of the most significant aspects of herri is that it is potentially a multilingual publication. By not segregating the languages onto separate pages, apartheid style, but rather criss-crossing and alternating the different language paragraphs with each other, herri’s pages give a sense of the linguistic code switching which South Africans do every day in their communications with each other. It is in this polylinguistic approach that herri creates new knowledge; not merely endlessly talking about decolonisation in English, but actually doing it, mediacentrically.

A navigation button allows readers to engage a text in two or more languages simultaneously. So, for example, in the Mantombi Matotiyana themed issue (#1) the Sazi Dlamini article is given in isiZulu, English and the Mpondomise language, which is uMam’ Mantombi’s mother tongue. Many of the articles have a dual language button top right.

The pages were designed so that the articles that were available in more than one language would have these languages integrated. Instead of a full page article in English followed by a full page article in isiXhosa or seSotho, a paragraph by paragraph ‘flip flopping’ between languages was designed. This enables the reader to choose a language by clicking on the button of the language they prefer to read. The relational aspect of the herri page design, particularly (but not exclusively) with regard to language, is strongly influenced by Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and is a concrete example of how decolonial theory has been incorporated into the nuts and bolts of herri‘s web design at every level, thinking these issues through so that no design ideas are inherited from other sites. Instead, the editor and design team of Andrea Rolfes (front end user experience), Jurgen Meekel (moving elements and colour grading) and Martijn Pantlin (full stack back end coding) worked collectively to invent their own ‘African wheels’, to develop their own South African design language rather than attempting to emulate models from elsewhere.

Here are some of the pages that feature the language button:

https://herri.org.za/2/zimasa-mpemnyama (isiXhosa and English)

https://herri.org.za/3/nduduzo-makhathini (English and isiZulu)

https://herri.org.za/3/mamta-sagar (Kannada and English)

https://herri.org.za/4/lewis-nkosi-olivier-ledure (French and English)

4. PHD

A major development facilitated through and by the digital infrastructure and attendant conceptual possibilities of herri, was the publication, in issue 5, of a PHD thesis by a student of Stellenbosch University, to the curatorial team’s knowledge the first time that a University anywhere has allowed a student to present a PHD in a completely digital format. Contemporary artist Nicola Deane, who works across a multiplicity of platforms and media, received her PhD in Visual Arts in 2020. It is entitled Decentering the Archive: Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories. Her inter-disciplinary practice-based research project engages archival material of the Documentation Centre for Music, (DOMUS), to create audio-visual media for a conceptual art installation. Deane’s research was a visually-based exploration of the sound archives of the DOMUS. In her work, she identifies similarities between the “incarceration” of women in domestic spaces and the categorisation and ordering which characterise an archive. Deane has reflected on the expanded scope afforded her by herri as follows:

I started this PHD in the wake of the student protests of 2015, and wanted, therefore, to engage decolonial theories and decolonising practices for my research … In designing the dissertation for the website I gained more control of the ways in which it could be read, opening up the relations between the textual and creative outcomes of the research. The various features of herri allowed me to create visual reference pop-ups and links throughout the text, to embed my own film works, as well as YouTube videos that I referred to, to interrupt the text with audio files or image carousels, with the aim of integrating theory with practice and making the reading experience more interactive and multimodal.^{[8]sun.ac.za.}

In herri 9 another Stellenbosch University student had her PHD published digitally. Inge Engelbrecht’s Die Koortjie Undercommons was written in a bold decolonial hybrid of Afrikaans, Afrikaaps and English and accepted by the University in that format.

5. Institutional context

Although herri as a publication project has been developed to be a unique contribution to pedagogy, research and arts curatorship in South Africa and on the African continent, it functions within a context of initiatives that have recognized the necessary reciprocity between post-apartheid reconstruction of the South African social imaginary, and the pivotal role of the arts in this project.

Furthermore, herri is institutionally aligned in a collaborative partnership with the biggest university sound and music archive in South Africa, the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS). Its curation of materials in this archive – sound and images – constitutes a unique critical interaction with these materials in a digital domain where the materials are viewed and used by academics and non-academics alike.

herri showcases how collections of humanities research materials can transcend disciplinary strictures in the digital domain to constitute tapestries of meaning uniquely dependent on the digital interface. However, herri does not only depend on the archive to enrich existing collections of humanities research. It actively commissions, republishes and creates new works in text, sound, image and film. These new materials create novel aesthetic and intellectual perspectives on our world and reality. In this sense, herri diversifies existing digital humanities research materials by extending the field of digital curation and research to music, one of the least decolonized tertiary domains in South African higher education. Music’s ontological ambiguity – its existence as either performance, recording or score – has made it difficult in the pre-digital age to bring it into vibrant discursive interaction with other humanities and arts discourses. herri addresses this challenge by embracing the existence of music as/in text, visuals, dance, and hybrid forms of co-creation.

herri is currently being used by Matthew Pateman in his media lectures at Edge Hill University, UK, where he is Professor of Popular Aesthetics and Head of Department. Pateman writes, “I just completed the external review/evaluation of herri 2 – 4. It struck me as I was writing that one aspect which is profoundly important is the fact that the curatorial as opposed to editorial nature of herri means that the wide variety of ways of entering into a page, exiting a page and therefore having interesting and (while not at all random, nevertheless) un-motivated collisions, juxtapositions and abrasions. In my report I described how I think that creates a new kind of research method: one that is structural or even meta- insofar as it exists in the reader’s navigation of the curated space and the possible contingent connections, as much as in the objects being curated.”^{[9]Prof Matthew Pateman email correspondence 10 Sep 2021.} In other words, an epistemic construction that is obliquely but absolutely determined by ontologically unpredictable exchanges.

Because herri is an institutional initiative, the long-term availability of the publication is guaranteed. This means that the objectives of promoting heritage and of developing decolonial patterns of thinking and engagement with African Psychology and music will continue beyond any specific issue or series of issues. The impact of the herri online archive project is already considerable: it is suggestive of African Psychology and music as radical mediums through which to think and imagine not only heritage, but the current moment in all of its urgency. As Zim Ngqawana has said, “The known has been found wanting, it has failed. We need to explore the unknown.”^{[10]Zim Ngqawana interview in The Exhibition of Vandalizim, African Noise Foundation, 2010, directed by Aryan Kaganof, vimeo.com.}

This article was first published in the Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa, Vol. 4, No. 2. (2022).