AMOGELANG MALEDU

There is no denying that the colonial archive – as distorted^{[1]The histories written from records held in the colonial archives are distortions in favour of those who ruled during colonial eras.} as it is – has been a vehicle for profound imagination: both contemporaneously and in envisioning a just future. The political socio-economic and cultural disaffection South Africa has seen in the past couple of years, epitomised in the buzzword “decolonisation”, speaks to quests of evaluating colonialism’s dire ramifications on the traditions of a distant past. However, current investigations of the assumedly redemptive vicissitudes of (un)packing the (colonial) archive must be met with suspicion. Suspicion because inasmuch as global demands of exploring a society pre- colonisation is important, developing epistemological frameworks that advocate for an “authentic” past not only become mammoth tasks of relativity, but can also be misrepresented by the undependability of memory and the porosity of human evolution in our current times.

Thus an alternative framework of resisting to forget^{[2]Glissant, É. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.} can be done through the agency of reclamation and re-appropriation. My object-studies curatorial project explores the historiography of the soundless, subsequently silenced objectification of the Isigubu^{[3]The direct translation of Isigubu means drum in isiZulu but can take many colloquial meanings such as song and sound. The term is always indexical to rhythm and is suggestive of the drum’s ability to create music that one can dance to. It is sometimes spelt as either Isi’gubu, Isigubhu or Sgubu (Sgubhu).}, alleged to have been played during the 1906 Bambatha rebellion against British rule and unfair taxation in what was then the colony of Natal. The soundlessness of what is evidently a music instrument is reimagined through the popular presence of the musical genre Gqom: a speculative consideration of the imagined rendition of the traditional Zulu drum. The curatorial explorations of the Isigubu (collected by Percival Kirby and housed in the WH Bell Music Library, University of Cape Town) survey the object’s index to music through making visible the colonial ethnomusicological context that rendered it silent and artefactual. Thus reimagining the object’s utility through the Kwaito music subgenre of Gqom, gives the instrument the same agency seen in post-apartheid youths producing this music as they simultaneously democratise cultural production. This curation unpacks these research intersections while speaking to the politicisation of contemporary Gqom music-making in South Africa.

To be black is to be burdened with the automatic, relentless work of saving black people. A black person can’t simply tell a story out of their love for stories – that story must carry with it some ‘conscious’ message, preferably political. At the very least, it is expected of black art that it should have the potential to offer solutions to the problems we face
(Ndabeni 2018: 1).

The sentiments expressed by Ndabeni suggest how the reading of blackness in tandem with its politicisation can be, and often is, limiting. Where artistic practices are concerned, this often leaves little room for agency or black subjectivity ^{[4] In Postmodern Blackness (1990), celebrated feminist theorist bell hooks defines black subjectivity as a liberatory tool against essentialised notions of blackness that are not without racist stereotypes and prescriptions of an “authentic black identity”.}. This object-based curatorial essay is interested in the unintentional politicisation of Gqom music (primarily played in clubs and party environments) as a form of resistance: practicing a different kind of freedom that is not necessarily tied to any particular conscious messaging besides black joy.

More so because the sound of Gqom is often indexical to Isigubu, I imagine its contemporaneous sound to enliven a muted early 20th century musical drum with a similar name. Such imaginings also disrupt the linearity of time and progress: accounting for how so much of the present can be read and influenced by the past. This becomes particularly interesting in re-appropriating the reductive readings of viewing African materiality (such as the Isigubu) as merely ‘traditional’. It is in the 21st century that electronically-produced Gqom is still – in spirit – interested and inspired by such musical traditions but still adapting them to a quintessential presence of international acclaim. Similarly, the political context of war that the Isigubu is alleged to have come from can help us imagine the sound of an uprising that the drum may have assisted in invigorating the Zulu warriors for battle – evocations that perhaps Gqom can aid in imagining considering its tempo. After all it is Gqom Oh! label owner and DJ, Nan Kolè^{[5]Kolè is considered by many as a catalyst of the genre of Gqom music. He has put a lot of the local DJs producing Gqom on the international map. He started the label Gqom Oh! in 2016 as a way to capture the sounds of Durban and give local DJs label representation that they rarely enjoyed locally until the genre’s international following. Although Kolé created global visibility for Gqom, it was South African black artists that preceded him who pioneered the genre.} who described the music genre as:

apocalyptic riot music. It’s as deep and dark as the subconscious. Mental, but at the same time very physical. It’s intuitive dance music, powerful and pure
(Feola, 2017).

Section 1: The colonial archive as a potential palimpsest: the Kirby collection and colonialism’s deadlocks

Throughout my curatorial project, reflections are made in problematising colonial collections such as that of Kirby, particularly in questioning the knowledge production and scholarship about (South) Africa in fields such as ethnomusicology. This is highlighted in Section One alongside reflections of how even though such colonial remnants remain, there are more animated ways knowledge production has been democratised particularly through the Internet where young people are not only re-writing their own narratives, but simultaneously democratising cultural production. Throughout resistance movements in history, artistic practices have been used as tools of defiance.

Section 2: Locating Gqom’s cultural production

In Section Two I explore how Gqom’s principal mandate of creating boisterous music for the purpose of dancing and creating nightclub musical hits can be viewed in the articulation of black joy as a form of defiance (whether unintentionally or not) against the burdens of black township life. Further unpacking the (de)politicisation of post-apartheid black music to situate Gqom contextually in the South African popular music scene.

Section 3: Curating contested histories: re-contextualising the silenced Isigubu

With current calls for cultural and epistemological production to decolonise Section Three details ways in which mining the colonial archive^{[6]This refers to archives that were established during the colonial period and how the knowledge and cultural production produced therein perpetuated justifications for colonialism.} can be a useful exercise in (re)appropriating and reimagining narratives that are often objectified or made perfunctory in history books. Here I reflect on my curatorial strategies and the dynamism of (re)appropriating a music instrument that has been silenced by the processes of colonialism through the introduction of transmedia storytelling as a new archive.

Isigubu allegedly collected during the Bambatha rebellion. Date unknown. Photography by Sean Wilson.

My object-based curatorial project aims to explore how one can simultaneously problematise the colonial archive and speak to the heavily laden and contested history that it bears. Through engaging with the archive of Kirby’s collection of “musical instruments of the indigenous people of South Africa” (Kirby 2013) and focusing on the Isigubu in particular, I find how one can explore the object’s contemporaneousness without perpetuating the soundless and artefactual gaze that it is currently indexical to – locked away in a cabinet of curiosity. By situating Gqom music as a potentially evocative sound to animate the muted Isigubu I hope to contribute to ways in which curatorial practices can deal with colonial archives that have been deliberately silenced or their stories distorted. Here what Nontobeko Ntombela (2016: 88) calls “individualised imagination” becomes an important creative curatorial strategy in asking questions around how does one represent fraught archives without negating their histories; and what usefulness might the creative process of imagination have in presenting them currently, devoid of archaic ways of othering.

The current postcolonial demand to problematise the production of (Western) episteme is not without its dependence on the colonial archive as a site of knowledge production despite its dynamic interventionist framework. This poses the inherent aporia of mining the colonial archive to contemporaneously (re)contextualise its productiveness where national memory, history and subsequent issues of redress from a nation-building perspective are concerned (Lambrechts 2016: 132). Such considerations are important in speaking to the relevance of archives such as the Kirby collection that is fundamentally legitimatised by colonialism’s processes of knowledge production, especially in disciplines, such as ethnomusicology, which dangerously essentialised difference.

Percival Kirby with one of the instruments in his collection currently housed at UCT. Date unknown. Photograph by The Archival Platform 

Kirby’s publication – Musical instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa^{[7]The initial title for the book was Musical Instruments of the Native People of South Africa first published in 1934.}– valorises the colonial manifestations that came with the very reductive and inquisitive white gaze of studying the material culture, particularly musical instruments, of black South Africans. In the latest book edition published in 2013, Michael Nixon: a former curator of the Kirby collection, implicates the role Kirby and his social scientist contemporaries played in legitimising knowledge production that aided the development of scientific racism, subsequently apartheid, in South Africa.

Wits’ department of Bantu Studies was founded in the early 1920s at the same time Kirby established the Music department. His phrase ‘native races’ resonates with the descriptive subtitle of the Wits journal, Bantu Studies: A Journal devoted to the Scientific Study of BANTU, HOTTENTOT, AND BUSHMAN
(Nixon 2013: xii).

Therein Kirby’s collection, as a colonial archive, presents both a deadlock and a potential palimpsest of conceding with the history of ethnomusicology. The discipline was not only a pretext of “studying the music of indigenous South African people” but similarly became a tool of bolstering racial injustice. Certainly, the challenge for contemporary scholars concerned with postcolonial epistemology then becomes; how does one reconcile with the archive’s intellectual production and historicity without negating its contribution to shaping ideological frameworks that supported colonialism and apartheid?

Michael Nixon, former curator of the Kirby collection at the UCT launch of Kirby’s revised book reprinted for a third edition. 2015. Photography by Liesl Jobson 

This question becomes pertinent in deliberating what we choose to (re)contextualise from the archive; and what redemptive qualities does reclaiming the cultural affinity that comes with such laden music collections do for the present and future generations. Mbongiseni Buthelezi (2016: 587) asserts that when reflecting on the colonial archive and decolonisation agendas, one should bear in mind the ideological underpinnings of cataloguing difference that came with the intellectual rigour of Europeans studying (South) African life. Buthelezi (2016:587), following a framework Mahmood Mandani calls a “paralysis of perspective” nudges cautiousness in using the colonial archives documentation of “authentic” pre-colonial African life in our contemporary considerations of what a decolonial reading of Africa and its material culture could be. Buthelezi (2016: 587) suggests that we must understand that such archives mapped

… a sophisticated apparatus of corralling colonised peoples into administrative units termed ‘tribes’, under the cover of recognising pre-existing African forms of social organisation. This has taken the form of developing extensive codes of ‘native law’, establishing academic disciplines to study the ‘natives’, as well as collecting, arranging, labelling, storing and exhibiting materials in museums in line with developing ideas of how Africans lived, thought and behaved prior to the advent of colonial rule.

This situatedness of colonialism’s intellectual academic support and its need for preserving topicalities of “the Other”^{[8]Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.} becomes an important background for thinking about how the Isigubu may have potentially landed in Kirby’s collection. The fact that Kirby makes no mention of how he acquired the drum alerts us to questionable ethical concerns of the collecting mechanisms of early ethnomusicologists that might have been exploitative. In fact, Kirby’s more than 300 page book makes little reference to the acquisition modes of all the musical instruments he collected. This only leaves us with assumptions of why he found details that are now considered important in contemporary archiving, irrelevant.

There are many variations and sizes of the Isigubu. The one found in the Kirby collection is cylindrical in shape and consists of a resonator (Kirby 2013: 59). According to Kirby (2013:59) the drum is usually made from a hollowed tree-trunk, while the ‘head’ of the drum is made out of calf or goat skins. The skins, on each end of the trunk, are secured by thong laces that connect them to form a rope in the same way as a European bass drum would (Kirby 2013: 59). The drum is alleged to have been made either from umsenge, also known as “Cabbage tree” (Cussonia spicata) or from umhlonhlo (wehlanti) (Euphorbia grandidens) (Kirby 2013: 60). These trees were not simply favoured because of their accessibility but most importantly because of their ability to produce soft wood (Kirby 2013: 60).

British ethnologist, Alfred T. Bryant, who is eulogised with the by-line “the name of Bryant will always be associated with the Zulus – their language, their history and their manner of living” (Malcolm 1953: 131) defines Isigubu as a “gourd or calabash, emptied of its pulp and used as a beer or water vessel” (Kirby 2013: 60). Furthermore, Kirby (2013: 60) concedes that Bryant’s definition further expands the drum with connotations of a military band. This association is important in typifying the defiant context of the drum being used during the Bambatha rebellion: in combat against British colonialism.

Black and white photographs of the Zulu warriors and members of the Natal government that fought during the Bambatha rebellion. Date unknown. Photograph by South African History Online/sahistory.org.za

A motif similarly worth exploring briefly in this subchapter is Kirby’s (2013: 60) insistence, quoting Father Franz Mayr – a Tyrolian priest who arrived in South Africa in 1890 and took a huge interest in Zulu life (Fargion 2007: 130) – who speaks of how the Isigubu was an “inauthentic” Zulu instrument:

Mayr’s description adds much to our knowledge of the instrument, for not only does he tell us of the shape and size of the Isigubu … he further notes that it is played with small drumsticks … seen to have padded heads, a most unusual feature in South African drums.

Kirby (2013: 60) further insinuates that because of the aforementioned characteristics, the Isigubu was a hybrid instrument – re-mixing other features of drum-making witnessed during the colonial-settler context of the time:

The fact that no mention of the Isigubu is made by the early writers, together with the fact that it is a double-headed drum, with the heads laced together, and beaten by two padded sticks, caused me to suspect long ago that it was not an original Zulu instrument, but had been deliberately copied from the European military drum, in all probability from the bass drum.

This points to the catalyst the Isigubu cultivated in deconstructing this widely held perception of African culture, particularly Zulu tradition in this case, being timeless and stagnant towards adopting other cultural influences. If one explores such a reading (ceteris paribus given the malleability and relativity of the colonial archive) one sees how this disrupts the idea of Zulu tradition as wholly original and its material culture unsusceptible to evolvement. It is from this perspective that Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael (2000: 8) borrowing from research by Carolyn Hamilton (1998), unpack how European culture influenced Zulu life during colonialism particularly through the construction of the “tribe”^{[9]Hamilton, C. 1998. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.}.

Nuttall and Michael (2000: 7) appropriate scholarly explorations on creolisation borrowing from Édouard Glissant to nineteenth century Zulu life and the hybridity that morphed out of the colonialist- colonised relationship which allowed for creative exchanges. This not only illustrates the cultural hybridisation of the Isigubu but similarly dispels traditional definitions of Zuluness and the dichotomies of “traditional versus modern”. This disruption points to a similar juncture in the production of the musical genre Gqom and its hybridisation. Gqom subverts the binary of falling into either traditional music because of its Isigubu reification made possible by technological advancements, or just being contemporary electronic music representative of the youthful South African milieu. It is from this point of view that the Isigubu, much like Gqom is quite iconoclastic in its production: Isigubu with its European facets and Gqom with its largely improvisational contemporaneous electronic sound with Kwa-Zulu Natal historical musical influences.

Nonetheless it is important to note that this hybridised and creative exchange (particularly where the Isigubu is concerned and its relationship to both colonialism and the Bambatha rebellion) was permeated alongside political violence premised on positionalities of power. In fact, Martin (2006: 168) quoting Turgeon (2003) encourages for a reading of hybridity that does not overlook the power relations that colonialism manifested despite the creativity that came along with it: he nudges “Métissage hybridity and interstices… must be understood as a political phenomenon originating in colonial violence.”

With a taint of scorn, Mahatma Gandhi (1968: 18) illustrates how the Bambatha rebellion was first and foremost the proletarianisation of the African:

In order to increase the Negro’s wants or to teach him the value of labour a hut tax has been imposed on him. If these imposts were not levied, this race of agriculturists living on their farms would not enter mines hundreds of feet deep in order to extract gold or diamonds, and if their labour were not available for the mines, gold as well as diamonds would remain in the bowels of the earth. Likewise, the Europeans would find it difficult to get any servants, if no such tax was imposed.

The Bambatha rebellion, also known as impi yamakhanda (war of heads) was a revolt against British colonialism, catapulted especially by a poll tax in 1905 (Croucamp 2016: 467). In 1905, colonial authorities in Natal imposed a £1 poll tax, in addition to hut taxes, on isiZulu-speaking males older than eighteen (Croucamp 2016: 467). The repressive direct tax increased financial pressure on black families, subsequently forcing them to work for the colonial government (Croucamp 2016: 468) or flee the colony for the Witwatersrand Gold Rush^{[10]In 1886 the world’s largest gold rush began, subsequently leading to the establishment of Johannesburg, South Africa. This also led to the eventual Boer defeat in the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the loss of Boer autonomy and self-government, and total British rule in South Africa.} (Redding 2000:38). This led to numerous forms of resistance: a noteworthy instance is by Chief Bambatha kaMancinza (head of the Zondi clan) who, in 1906, attempted to resist the tax in a guerrilla-style uprising (Croucamp 2016: 468) subsequently leading to the revolt being named after him. The British colonial government were much more militarily equipped – armed with machine guns and cannons, overpowering Bambatha’s poorly armed men (Croucamp 2016: 468). According to Marks (1970: xvi) Bambatha was beheaded for identification, yet there were conspiracy theories by his supporters that he was still alive especially because his wife never went into mourning (Thompson 2008: 37). It is estimated that between 3000 and 4000 Zulu-speakers were killed, some of them fighting on the side of the colonial government (Croucamp 2016: 468). This was the last armed resistance of Africans in South Africa before the adoption of the armed struggle by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1960s, which eventually led to democracy in South Africa in 1994 (Hennop, 2006).

Popular culture reference of the Bambatha rebellion in a Rehad Desai documentary film titled Bhambatha – War Of The Heads. 2009. Photograph by Journeyman Pictures  journeyman.tv/film

Unlike Ghandi’s assessment of the necessity of taxing Zulus in order to introduce them to the labour force, Redding (2000: 34) suggests a much more nuanced reading of the revolt that does not only focus on the possibilities of modernity (capitalism) but similarly unpacks the power imbalances of colonialism. Redding (2000: 34) worthy of quoting at length, appropriates Shula Marks’ analyses in her book on the uprising titled Reluctant Rebellion (1986) to unpack this dynamic poignantly:

The kernel of her [Marks’] conclusions is contained in her title: that Africans were not eager to rebel, but the history of colonialism, which culminated in the imposition of the poll tax, combined with the heavy-handed actions on the part of Natal officials in stamping out the early phases of the revolt, forced many Africans into revolt as a defensive measure. Land shortages, resulting from white expropriation, and the increasingly widespread system of labor migration were undermining social and economic structures within the rural areas:

The revolt ‘was the last armed resistance to proletarianisation by Africans, and a crucial moment in the consolidation and restructuring of colonial domination and settler accumulation in twentieth-century South Africa’ (1986:351). Thus the rebellion was a defense of African social structures as well as of territory. For whites, the rebellion became an opportunity to crush not only the vestiges of the Zulu military state, but also the rural Zulu homestead which impeded the free flow of laborers out of the rural areas and onto white-owned farms and industries. Seen in this way, the Bambatha revolt becomes one example of the many early revolts against colonial rule, a form of ‘primary resistance’, to use Terence Ranger’s terminology (1968:437) or, in broader historical terms, an uprising of ‘primitive rebels’ (in Hobsbawm’s sense) (1959:1-12) trying both to recapture a lost political autonomy as well as to shore up a fast-eroding social formation.

Croucamp (2016: 469) suggests that despite the Zulu’s defeat, the rebellion was an apotheosis in unifying Natal Africans. The revolt mended polarising gaps such as the young and old; between rival chiefdoms, traditionalists and educated Christians (Croucamp 2016: 469).

The situatedness of Gqom music only makes holistic sense if one considers what informed the FruityLoops-based^{[11]Now FL Studio: is an electronic music-making program. It is notorious with Gqom producers because the software began first as a MIDI drum sequencer and has now transformed into a portable, easy-to-use recording studio with synths, drum machines and the ability to record vocals or live instruments all at once.} electronic genre’s notoriety: township life (a theme that is explored intermittently in this chapter). Nevertheless, a brief etymological breakdown of the word is warranted too. Sihle Mthembu (2017), co-author of recently released book Born To Kwaito (2018) contextually traces the word Gqom to ukuGqoma – which means a “persistent rhythmic thud” initially associated with the process of grinding maize. However, current incarnations of the word have morphed from a purely sound and sonic deduction to categories of music: especially music with a defining tribal drum bass helmed “by a new generation of Durban’s music makers to communicate the broken sounds that are part of Gqom music’s DNA” (Mthembu, 2017).

Gqom producer, Resto working on a track on a computer and a monitor with the software FruityLoops on display. 2016. Photograph by Credo Volta/ idmmag.com/news/watch-woza-taxi-documentary-gqom/

Much of Gqom’s international appeal is mainly because it falls privy to aesthetic qualities of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Principally created for all intents purposes: to dance especially at party environments such as nightclubs. Gqom, like it’s linguistic onomatopoeic inference suggests a percussive heavy broken bass beat. It fits perfectly with EDM’s cohort because it too is relentlessly loud and uniquely tribal with a crude disinterest in being a respectable canonical genre, much like a lot of music created by teenagers who may be on the verge of cultural rebellion. This potentially reminds one of the (club) subcultures that morphed in Europe post the international war years. In fact, a lot of the international interest in Gqom comes from the United Kingdom, where the genre has been incessantly compared with Grime^{[12]Grime is a genre of Rap music that emerged from London in the early 2000s. It can be traced to earlier UK electronic music genres such as garage and jungle, while drawing significant influence from other global music genres like dancehall and hip hop. The genre is distinctly fast with syncopated breakbeats and often features a jarring electronic sound.}. Emo Kid (one of the genre’s pioneers) tells London-based music journalist and producer Ben Murphy (2016) that Gqom can loosely be translated to noise:

I think Gqom means noise, because when I produce, I sit in my room then apply the speakers to the maximum volume so I can be in that state, that producing state, and my mom will usually open the door and shout ‘Kukhla ub’gqom gqom nje lah’ which translates to ‘there’s a lot of knocking [banging] here.

Kukhla ub’gqom gqom nje lah

It is this loud and unapologetically raw sound of Gqom that has gained the genre both fame and disdain – disdain especially in its early inception when South African record companies and radio stations were not paying particular attention to the genre, calling it “amateurish”. Gqom producer King Ice of NakedBoyz – considered the founders of the genre – tells Mthembu (2017):

We are shut out and ignored a lot in our own country and that can be disheartening. Seeing the love we get overseas, yet we can barely get radio play or interviews in our own radio stations, it’s a hard pill to swallow. We have to blow up outside and then later will South Africa love us.

NakedBoyz on a digital flyer promoting an after party following an episode of Gqom Nation (an MTV Base local production that started earlier in 2018 after the international acclaim the genre had been gaining and complaints by Gqom producers about local media outlets not paying attention to the emerging genre). 2018. Photograph by KingIce NakedBoyz/Facebook

However, some artists have taken the genre international and forced South African media outlets and record companies to pay attention. Gqom has produced internationally-acclaimed young South African artists such as DJ Lag, Babes Wodumo, Destruction Boyz, DJ Maphorisa, Bhizer, RudeBoyz and FAKA to name a few. The genre is catching so much international acclaim that Babes Wodumo’s song Wololo (2016) and Bhizer’s Gobisiqolo (2016) both featured on what critics have considered one of the most culturally significant films of all time: Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Black Panther (2018) directed by Ryan Coogler and the film’s soundtrack curated by 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music winner, rapper Kendrick Lamar.

Meanwhile, performance art duo FAKA’s Gqom hits have served as soundtracks for international fashion shows such as world-renowned Italian brand Versace and androgynous label Telfar.

Performance art duo FAKA who were invited to attend and provide their Gqom hits for the Versace Spring Summer 2019 fashion show in Milan. 2018. Photograph by Channel24/Getty (Screengrab, YouTube)

One cannot speak about Gqom without speaking about Kwaito – particularly Durban Kwaito – and a couple of experimental sounds that created Kwaito: Isigubu being one of them. However, because Isigubu has not yet been historicised as a genre of music but rather more emphasised epistemologically as a drum and colloquially, especially in South African townships, as a stand in for music that is particularly percussive heavy and fast. Sometimes even as a prefix to stand in for “Music from-“ such as the once influential early 2000 electronic sounds coming from Pretoria called Sgubhu Sa Pitori (also known as Direkere or Bacardi House)^{[13] Sgubhu Sa Pitori (also known as Direkere or Bacardi House) is a sub-kwaito/House genre that emerged in Pretoria from early 2000. The genre was a catalyst for electronic music in South African township with many attributing its success to Pretorian producers such as DJ Mujava, the late DJ Spoko and Machance to name a few. In fact, UK-born but South African-based producer, Jumping Back Slash famously tweeted a eulogy to DJ Spoko as a defining influence of Gqom music, precipitated by Bacardi House.}.

I attempt to get a possible neat genealogy of the link between Isigubu, Kwaito and Gqom from Mthembu’s co-author of Born To Kwaito (2018), Esinako Ndabeni and she stops me in my tracks to consider that sometimes sounds can be experiments and do not necessarily have to fall under orthodox genres in order to be historicised. This is especially pertaining to the sonic qualities of Isigubu and its polysemic meanings as it morphs locally from vessel, to drum and music. Ndabeni (personal communication 2018, October 15) shares her insight in a way that complicates and questions this lineage of South African popular electronic music:

To my knowledge, and my logical reasoning of it, Sgubhu is more [a] predecessor to iGqomu^{[14]Another word for Gqom.} than Kwaito. Kwaito is a sound that, essentially, marks the first (mainstream) experimentation with House music in South Africa. And it was entirely too slow for Sgubhu. I know Sgubhu as something that paves way for iGqomu – it’s even in the pace. And there are many words for the post-Kwaito pre-Gqom moment; is’jokojoko, Isghubu etc but I think these are moments that lead up to iGqomu?

Ndabeni (personal communication 2018, October 15) also importantly adds to her response:

I also dk [don’t know] to what extent sounds are allowed to be experiments w/out [without] being defined as genres.

Kwaito shares similar socio-historical, geographical and cultural specifics with Gqom – a very important commonality being that both the genres celebrate “the aesthetics of freedom in South Africa’s”^{[15] Borrowed from Gavin Steingo’s brilliant book titled: Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa (2016).} post-apartheid. Kwaito was created by young musicians towards the late 1980s who had a vested interest in new sounds while South Africa was on the brink of political change. It is in this context of local political turmoil and global cultural trends (particularly Hip Hop from America) and the triumph of neoliberalism post the Cold War (Steingo 2008: 80) that young Kwaito musicians started experimenting with new international sounds and trends, yet recognising local styles too (Mojapelo 2008:166).

Kwaito’s sonic qualities were shaped by international House music and Rap. However, those genres were fundamentally appropriated to speak to South African township life and location culture (or Loxion Kulca^{[16]Loxion Kulca became one of the hottest apparel brands of the early Kwaito generation. It was founded in 1997 by Sechaba Mogale and Wandi Nzimande who have said to be inspired by the urban ‘kulca’ (culture) and vibrancy of the ‘loxion’ (locations/townships). The brand – not as notorious as it was in its heydays – still supplies clothing to reputable retail stores in Southern Africa.} (Mojapelo 2008: 166). Socio-historically, Kwaito music was and still is indexical to the hindrances of township life. Much like Gqom, Kwaito’s lyrics express both the joys and pains of being a young black person through township street culture and tsotsitaal (also known as (Isi)camtho)^{[17] Tsotsitaal and (Isi)Camtho is a creolised township slang borrowing from some of South Africa’s 11 official languages, including Afrikaans, Sestwana, Sesotho and Zulu to name a few. Tsotsi meaning criminal or gangster in Afrikaans is suggestive of the hybridised language as a lexicon first used and conceptualised by criminals to mask their criminally-incriminating conversations.}. These are some of the attributes that birthed Kwaito both musically but also subculturally as a lifestyle denomination for many young black people in post-apartheid South Africa. In this sense joy is also political as well as cultural.

Much like Gqom, Kwaito is township music that emphasises both music and dance. The sibling genres share immersive audio-visual qualities appropriated from international dance styles and local rhythms like Mbaqanga and township soul (Mojapelo 2008: 166). The lyrical content of both Kwaito and Gqom is almost always township earworms because they are mostly repetitive street colloquiums more than lyrics with particular (social) messages. In fact, internationally-acclaimed Gqom producer, DJ Lag tells Beijing-based music writer and producer, Josh Feola (2017) that:

When I do music, I’m just doing music—choosing the sounds and creating atmospheres and beats for dance. I don’t talk about socials or politics, I don’t think of the audience reacting in one way or another. It’s something I can’t explain, because it’s something that grows in me.

Durban Kwaito’s genealogy with Gqom is a lot more obvious especially geographically. Ethnomusicologist and current curator of the Kirby collection, Richard Deja (personal communication 2018, October 9) suggests that apart from the political context of the Isigubu Kirby collected, it is clear that there is a culturally relevant incarnation and purpose it has even today apart from colonialism and war. Deja (personal communication 2018, October 9) says this is especially so because as the word Isigubu becomes increasingly polysemic and porous to connotations of music, Kirby also noted that the drum is similarly adaptive to contextual settings and can also be played at weddings or for merrymaking (Kirby 2013: 60-61). Such archival literature serves as a nascent historical thread of illustrating how music- making featured as a very important part of Zulu cultural life from both a (pre)colonisation and contemporary perspective. This is because Zulu music has a history of global reach and dominance.

Solomon Linda. 1941. Photograph by Genius/ genius.com

For instance, Mbube (also somewhat of a polysemic Zulu word with an interesting cause célèbre as one of the biggest copyright infringement cases in music history) similarly highlights ethical questions around ethnomusicology. Mbube is also a palimpsest of not only the colonial archive’s potential –– but also of the constant appropriation of music (experimentation) albeit often not sans exploitation.

The direct Zulu translation of Mbube is lion. However, the word became popularised first as a song by a Zulu man from Zululand who subsequently became a migrant worker in Johannesburg: Solomon Linda (Malan, 2000). Mbube is simultaneously known as a genre of South African popular music that was inspired by Linda, popularised by Grammy-award winning South African male choral group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Nevertheless, Mbube’s transcultural genealogy (un)intentionally speaks to the interesting web of Zulu music’s international appeal and how that often implicates the presence of ethnomusicology’s misuse.

Mbube was recorded in 1939 “in the only recording studio in black Africa” (Malan, 2000). The song – originally sung in traditional Zulu choral style – caught the attention of American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax (considered as “the father of world music”) who brought the song to folk singer Pete Seeger, then of The Weavers. They made the song a Top 15 American hit in 1952, titled Wimoweh but Linda was not credited; later, the Kingston Trio released a cover of it.

And in 1961, The Tokens turned the song into The Lion Sleeps Tonight and it became a number one American hit song and the soundtrack of one of Walt Disney’s most celebrated musical animations, The Lion King (1994). It is through this fascinating unfortunate story (with an eventual relative happy ending: Linda’s heirs received worldwide rights and license to the song in 2006) that one can see both the cultural impact of Zulu music and most importantly the porosity of music experimentation in the form of transcendental genres like Gqom. In fact, Malan (2000) speaks about how this incident carved an archival palimpsest of different kinds of music from one source:

The Lion Sleeps Tonight was a reworking of Wimoweh, which was a copy of Mbube. Solomon Linda was buried under several layers of pop-rock stylings, but you could still see him beneath the new song’s slick surface, like a mastodon entombed in a block of clear ice.

LP cover for The Token’s album The Lion Sleeps Tonight/Dry Your Eyes. 1961. Photograph by LP Cover Lover lpcoverlover.com

However, the story of Mbube brings to mind a similar incident – albeit minuscule in scale. Lesser known Gqom DJs, Luvas and Pluto accused Babes Wodumo of plagiarising their song and calling it Ganda Ganda (2017) (Makhoba, 2017). Wodumo’s version of the song was questionably released after she pleaded to her more than a million Instagram followers to help locate her USB that contained the un-mastered version of the song. Fans initially called it a marketing strategy for the upcoming hit but DJ Luvas and Pluto suggested the request was a lot more sinister in intent. The DJs assert that the suspicious request was orchestrated to discredit them as the creators of the song that was released months prior to Wodumo’s one in case people notice similar qualities and lyrics of the song (Makhoba, 2017). However, a producer interviewed by journalist Ntombizodwa Makhoba (2017) is sceptical that the accusations are unlikely to materialise into tangible copyright infringement lawsuits because “Ganda Ganda used to be a recitation that kids sang, so it does not belong to anyone. Unfortunately, these guys are fighting a losing battle”.

Babes Wodumo performing at the first ever Gqom Concert on the 21 April 2018, it was preceded by another first: a Gqom workshop to equip young producers and enthusiasts interested in growing the genre. 2018. Photography by the author.

Black music has been historically intrinsic and significant in building equitable societies and fighting against systematic oppression. Whether it is music dating as far back as the hymns of diasporic African slaves in America; or songs of African political activists during colonialism with terse defiant slogans such as A luta continua; or as recently witnessed in the #FeesMustFall protests where apartheid struggle songs sung by South Africa’s so-called born free generation reverberated in universities.

Many black contemporary and historical musical genres are often borne from impasses of black life such as misery, triumph, endurance and protest (Anderson, 2015). However, despite black music’s imaginative and creative transcendental qualities, the music is “still … shaped by the fatigue of the constant protest that comes with Black existence” (Anderson, 2015). Thus it is from this point of departure that it becomes imperative to explore black music’s subversive potential to create songs and genres that are not overtly political despite the hindrances of black life. Music genres such as Gqom are nonetheless born from a generation disaffected by South Africa’s inequalities and failures of democracy’s new dawn, yet Gqom’s young producers still choose to imagine and create boisterous sounds of youthful decadence in their poverty-stricken environments. Music that does not dwell on the labyrinth of black life but instead uses it as a form of defiance to declare themselves happy despite systemic intolerances to their livelihood.

It is from this point of exploration that Gqom can form part of a nascent archive of black musical genres that are deliberately interested in black joy. In a 702^{[18]A commercial talk show radio station based in Johannesburg.} podcast titled “a deeper look into South Africa’s new generation of House” seasoned broadcaster Eusebius McKaiser discusses the topic with Durban Kwaito pioneer and entrepreneur, DJ Tira as well as award- winning journalist and author, Percy Mabandu. Mabandu (2018) attests to Gqom’s culturally buoyant parlance as legitimate and more so, a representation of the decadence of today. The latter annotation is similarly explored by Steingo (2008: 81) of Kwaito as a genre of global neoliberalism in its celebration of bodily autonomy, pleasure and consumerism. Meanwhile, Mabandu (2018) asserts:

In a place where you are restricted from doing things, you can just be happy as a form of defiance. To claim space in the world by singing: Ndi funa ukuba happy [I want to be happy] as another Durban Kwaito song would claim. And that is a valid way of claiming space.

Another derivative of joy Gqom is able to materially extrapolate is the social capital and upward mobility the genre has provided for black youths in remote townships of Durban. This is especially valuable in assessing how technological advancements have aided this accessibility to both material resources and transnational cultural influence. The global connectivity of the Internet and accessible electronic music software such as FruityLoops have contributed significantly to the success of this youthful improvisational sound. Mabandu (2018) attests that these virtual spaces have:

… democratised cultural production. Jabulani from Kwa-Mashu who may not have had the benefit of a musical education is now finding – through FruityLoops and a cheap computer – access to the means of cultural production. For me, that is opening up the doors of culture.

Another important narrative to explore – one catapulted first by early Kwaito musicians and entrepreneurs in post-apartheid South Africa – is how the country’s redress policies have benefitted the careers of budding black creatives. Before the advent of democracy, South Africa’s music industry was entirely in the hands of white people. They – together with the apartheid regime’s media outlets – helmed distribution channels and publications. The redress policies, coupled with the accessibility of affordable and easily available digital technological equipment saw the formation of black owned independent labels such as Kalawa Jazmee, 99 Music, Ghetto Ruff and TS Records to name a few (Mojapelo 2008: 66). This economically empowering methodology of owning one’s musical creativity has spilled over to the contemporary black Gqom record labels that have emerged. This includes DJ Maphorisa’s Blaq Boy Music signed with Sony Entertainment Music Africa in “an empowerment deal” (Sosibo, 2017).

Mthembu (2018: 158) highlights Durban’s current cultural vibrancy having been jostled by the types of urban township lifestyle venues that were cropping up alongside the city’s energetic music scene. Mthembu (2018: 158) elaborates:

De La Sol, with its short-lived but energetic bursts of tribal house, is a notable entry. Plush is another, and is a peer to the Afro Fashion Lounge, which was a mecca for Deep House fans with an appreciation for a more refined sound. Popular shisanyama (braai) joint KwaMax, for instance, has always had slots on Saturdays and Sundays where new and upcoming DJs can play afternoon sets that can go for as long as three hours. It’s a crucial development platform, a place where young DJs can cut their teeth and also expose their music to a wide audience, while the audience gets a sample of their style.

Popular lifestyle lounge KwaMax. 2016. Photograph by K.O

Mthembu (2018: 158) probes further: asking KwaMax owner Max Mqadi what he thinks these cultural hubs did for Durban’s music scene, to which the entrepreneur responds:

What Durban Kwaito did was it gave the young people of Durban a cultural identity that they could hang on to. So when people saw guys like [DJ] Tira going from being unknown to making it, it gave them a template for success and something to aspire to.

Meanwhile, Mabandu (2018) suggests that besides the immediate responses of economic redress post-1994, a decade and half later, in 2009 Kwa-Zulu Natal became an interesting cultural-political-economic hub alongside South Africa’s “it-provinces” Gauteng and the Western Cape. This is defined by the precarious transition from former President Thabo Mbeki’s reign (1999 – 2008) and his successor’s rule, former President Jacob Zuma (2009 – 2018). Mabandu (2018) insightfully suggests that the 52nd National Conference of the ANC held in Polokwane, Limpopo from 16 December – 20 December 2007 was an important catalyst in revitalising Kwa-Zulu Natal (Zuma’s power base) as a culture and economic hub. Mabandu (2018) notes that this transition enabled transactions that aided cultural expenditure. This subsequently put Durban on the South African cultural and tourist map as a centre for youth culture. Thus sowing the imaginative possibilities that blossomed Gqom and its hedonism and iterations of boisterous black joy.

The implication that museum objects are somehow alive is a peculiar one since the majority of museum objects have either never been alive or are things which were once alive and are now, very definitely, dead. The fantasy of awakening them from their enchanted sleep is at one level metaphoric: it means to make them more vivid and communicative for the audience, by removing the constraints placed on them by the museum. But there is a little more to it than this. It is also a fantasy of possession (Henning 2006: 5).

The Isigubu currently housed at the WH Bell Music Library at the University of Cape Town could well be a museum object. Displayed, displaced alongside many other musical instruments of South African cultural importance, collected during the colonial period, the Isigubu and its neighbours are dead: without their sonic and musical utility. They are not only silenced by the past (colonialism’s processes of scientific study) they are also silenced in the contemporary by institutional bureaucracy that will not have them re-contextualised in a 21st century curation that will, as Henning’s (2006: 5) introductory quote suggests: “make them more vivid and communicative for the audience, by removing the constraints placed on them by the museum”. In other words, make them more relevant – in this curation at least. Make the Isigubu converse with the longue durée of South African Zulu music practices post 19th century until the meeting point of the contemporaneous and ambitious sounds of Kwa-Zulu Natal’s Gqom. The continuing silence of Isigubu manifests as it sits reified only by discourse such as mine, in attempts to imagine its sound. Its university custodians have strict policies in how it may leave its trove – as such perpetuating its continued silence and essentially, death.

There is no denying that despite the end of institutionalized colonisation, colonialism’s ramifications continue to permeate contemporary life.

Coloniality manifests through structural forms of privilege and bias (Muñiz-Reed 2017: 99). Apart from the system’s obvious socio-economic perpetuation, colonialism’s pervasive and oppressive hierarchies manifest in the realm of culture (Muñiz-Reed 2017: 99). This has been done through a Western episteme that subsequently objectified and silenced the “social lives”^{[19]In The Social Life of Things:Commodities in Cultural Perspectives (1988) social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai explores how objects have social lives through the ability of “illuminat[ing] their human and social context”.} of objects (and even subjects). As such, it is not surprising to evaluate how Kirby’s archive is locked in this web of Western imperial categories of (colonial) knowledge production (such as ethnomusicology) and its twin obsession with “the fantasy of possession”. It is from this point of departure that my curation contests, or perhaps expands, the knowledge production the Kirby collection has produced, particularly as it relates to the Isigubu. My overarching curatorial interest is concerned with the contemporary curator’s ability to restructure knowledge production especially as it relates to the decolonial moment of reevaluating (cultural) episteme. Much like Muñiz-Reed (2017: 99) I am interested in How cultural workers (such as curators) within the colonial matrix, restructure knowledge and power to return agency to those who lost it.

Throughout this object-based essay and its subsequent curated exhibition I have realised how important it is to democratise curatorial practices in necessitating not just representational participation in cultural spaces, but also disrupting the priori knowledge of objects. The biases and prejudices of custodians of colonial collections of objects such as Kirby’s reveal the particular narratives that have been constructed around artefacts in the archive. This dominant cultural production model based on a Eurocentric epistemic canon has a long tradition of situating its knowledge frameworks as superior to those that are non-European. This curatorial strategy to subvert these biases is not new. It began with the school of New Museology^{[20]Given museum studies’ relationship with imperialism and colonialism’s problematic agendas of ‘othering’, a self-reflexive turn of museum studies from the 1980s began, coining the institution’s critical reflection “New Museology”. This self-reflexivity allowed for the museum custodians to investigate their roles in a public institution of political ideology through discourses around post-colonialism, the “nation” as a construct, or the interpretation of “race” and “gender” as a social, ideological, and cultural construct amongst other contentions.} and is becoming further developed in contemporary curatorial practices through the larger praxis of decolonization^{[21]The concept of the ‘decolonisation’ has a dated genealogy but in the context of this essay it specifically refers to the intellectual framework developed by Latin American thinkers and more broadly, scholars from the Global South. They have generated critical theory from the perspective of restoring full autonomy of the colonised and the oppressed. The phrase became increasingly popular in South Africa during the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements.}. The aim of such curatorial practices is to acknowledge the ideological basis of curators, collectors and archivists. Their understanding about socio- historical objects is not necessarily objective because “objects are understood to be mute unless they are interpreted” (Witcomb 2003: 86).

Because my curation is rooted in speculative renditions of re-claiming and reimagining the Isigubu without negating its colonial history, a decolonial curatorial practice becomes an appropriate intellectual framework to speak through the fissures of these inevitable intersections. Much like independent curator Chandra Frank (2016) insists: “curating exhibitions on forgotten histories, contested legacies and silenced memories calls for a systematic decolonial approach”. In order to succinctly understand what a decolonial curatorial practice entails, a brief context is necessary to outline the modes of operation that decoloniality emerges from. Therefore,

inasmuch as decolonisation refers to the final socio- historical process of total independence from implicit colonial powers, decoloniality is in flux.

It is a continuous epistemological project interested in socio-political and ethical justice, with the objective of “de-link[ing] from colonial structures that have persisted throughout modernity and which underpin Eurocentrism and systems of discrimination” (Muñiz-Reed 2017: 100).

However, I am very conscious – in my curation – to not overstate my speculative production of reimagining the Isigubu and underestimating Kirby’s nascent knowledge production. After all I did borrow from his archive, notwithstanding its problematic history, to come to the connections with Gqom and its subsequent music influences. Kirby’s collection has assisted the development of my curatorial practice through the possibilities of tracing brief genealogies of South African Zulu music-making through the one music instrument he thought was worthy of being collected and subsequently silenced. It is important to emphasize that my curatorial project as well as its thesis component, and especially the revelations of the archive I depended on – Kirby’s – are not read as arriving at absolute theoretical analyses or ‘truths’. Instead, my wish is that connections between the Isigubu and Gqom be read as an attempt to re-think and reimagine the archive through the viewpoint of object-based curatorial practices and historiography. What I hope this curation does through the frameworks of New Museology and the decolonial turn in curatorship is to reveal the colonial archive’s potential of re-appropriating narratives with more subjective agency that they might have not been afforded. Since it has been resolved that the Isigubu and Gqom are not ostensibly related – at least intentionally – this thesis and exhibition aims to highlight their shared concerns (such as music as a form of defiance). It is here where new perspectives of viewing the silenced object (Isigubu) through the omnipresent, loud Gqom music genre of Kwa-Zulu Natal that evokes new ways of coevally reimagining the colonial archive’s dead novelties. Thus the objective is not necessarily to prove that the Isigubu and Gqom are certainly linked in an overlooked manner – even though they may well be – such a link is quite perfunctory to the overarching curatorial project.

A significant feat for this curation includes its digital transmedia archive lens. Here my object-based curatorial project seeks to counter-narrate traditional frameworks of archiving through the Internet and its embedded system of democratising knowledge production.

Unlike colonial archives such as the Kirby collection, a digital transmedia archive allows a dynamism of constantly rewriting and cross-culturally creating webs of porous connections. Through the interaction of knowledge and information about interrelated subjects on the Internet connecting different kinds of coverage about a particular subject, a more continuous archive is created by various constituencies that are not necessarily gatekeepers of Western episteme.

The Internet’s transmedia archival mobility is also symbolic in its curation. It can also allude to the same democratisation of cultural production young South African Gqom producers have gained through the Internet’s ability to self-narrate their stories through easy to access (YouTube) documentaries and in carving out opportunities outside stringent conventions. This transmedia archive is thus mainly focused on the contemporaneous curation of Isigubu’s trajectory through the dynamism of Gqom. However, Gqom becomes a case in point of how sterile archives can be transformed: through transmedia storytelling where the mediums that narrate those stories are multifold and easily digitized online. For Gqom, this curation becomes noteworthy because the beginning of the genre (before well-established record labels like Gqom Oh!, Sony, Afrotainment and a few others riding the so- called Gqom Wave^{[22]In an article titled Surfing the Gqom Wave to oblivion (2017) art journalist, Kwanele Sosibo unpacks how a local documentary about Gqom erodes the genre’s staying power in the global (electronic) music scene. Asserting that compare the genre akin to “a wave” is to undermine its potential.} depending on the Internet’s social media platforms and MP3 sharing sites such as KasiMP3 and Datafilehost as important distributors of the music to the rest of the world. As Gqom Oh! label owner, Kolè narrates to Murphy (2016):

One night around January 2015, I saw that a friend of mine was tagged in a link with the hashtag #Gqom. I clicked it and sat till 5am downloading hundreds of Gqom songs. I was immediately addicted to that crazy and unique sound.

According to founder of ‘transmedia storytelling’, prolific media scholar Henry Jenkins (2006: 95) transmedia emerges from the realisation that some narratives are too large to be covered by one single medium or archive. The story of Gqom is an example of such a potential archive. From Gqom’s inception and dissemination through taxis^{[23]In Born To Kwaito (2018) Sihle Mthembu explores Durban music’s relationship to the taxi industry and the culture of ‘ukugqoma’. He unpacks how Durban taxis would be excessively accessorised and Matric pupils would hire them for beach parties and dance competitions – most of them with extravagant sound systems to accommodate the loud sounds of Gqom that would serve as dancing tunes for the competitions.} and nightclubs; to its imprint online and subsequent radio airplay; to music documentaries about the genre and its cultural features on international digital platforms such as VICE, FACT and Rolling Stone, Gqom’s narrative can indeed be transmediated through different platforms.

The genre has the capability of being coalesced into one platform: a website as its digital archive.

However, I am quite critical of this curatorial strategy that thinking about the archive is not seen to frame me as the representative or authority of the genre in my selection of what is provisionally archived on the website. Instead, this archival shift recognises “that access is not only about being seen to represent, but is also about democratising the right to speak and to create [with others]” (Kidd 2014: 75). Here the curator becomes an interlocutor in diversifying stories of a particular subject matter.

It is through dynamic frameworks that call for decolonisation in cultural work and the interconnectedness of transmedia storytelling that curatorial practices not only become dynamic, but deliberate too, in dismantling hierarchical ways of producing knowledge through subversions of the archive’s normative authoritative voice. It is through the component of my digital curation that the politics of archival inclusion and framing is outlined through democratising the role of the curator. Curatorial practices can benefit from the interconnectedness of transmedia storytelling where its knowledge production and physical manifestation is not only confined to the closed repository of museums and archives, but other alternative and digital archives too, offering a plethora of cultural representation (Witcomb 2003: 110).

The information that I was able to extrapolate about the Isigubu revealed myriad challenges surrounding the colonial archive. The archive, particularly Kirby’s collection, exposed as much of his affinity with South African musical instruments as much as it revealed his complicity in perpetuating the system of colonial rule and apartheid.

Kirby’s practice of collecting South African indigenous musical instruments such as the Isigubu was intrinsic to the colonial experience.

These practices were legitimized through Western epistemic disciplines such as anthropology, which accelerated in the 19th century in tandem with imperial-colonial domination. Kirby’s archive and much of many colonial archives are ways of gathering and categorising knowledge, as much as they are about colonial control and curiosity (Byala and Wanless 2014: 550).

Through speculative and an imagined interconnectedness of the Isigubu and Gqom, I appropriated the scant information about the former to expand on what relevance Kirby’s collection might have today. Kirby’s silenced Isigubu provided an impetus towards thinking about the agency and self-reflexive narrations of Gqom music-making as a mechanism to weave back this contemporaneous narrative to restore the drum’s musical relevance. Exploring the tangible manifestations of Gqom’s freedoms (black joy, black youth social upward mobility and the democratisation of cultural production) suggests a trajectory of how far South African Zulu music-making (made visible through the palimpsests of Isigubu) has come in its web of cultural exploitation. Here I am not overtly interested in filling historical gaps between Isigubu and Gqom, rather I am concerned with the potential of reframing colonial narrations and aesthetics through “reinvented new historical pathways” (Biwa 2012: 291-292) of memory and new archives.

Through the framework of historicising Gqom, a transmedia Internet-based archive becomes an important curatorial strategy for democratising the genre’s knowledge production and linking it with its speculated genealogy to the Isigubu from the colonial archive.

This disrupts the colonial archive’s often authoritative and stagnant voice. This curatorial strategy of the curator as a transmedia digital archivist becomes pertinent in the contemporary because, as Janet Murray (1999: 161) puts it:

The kaleidoscopic power of the computer allows us to tell stories that more truly reflect our … sensibility. We no longer believe in a single reality, a single integrating view of the world, or even the reliability of a single angle of perception.

Moreover, subversions of Western episteme are briefly explored through centering decoloniality in curatorial practices of archival cultural production. Through this lens I establish the archive’s biases of its knowledge production, investigating what the archive makes (in)visible through colonialism’s omnipresent manifestations. Therein the role of the contemporary curator becomes how they rearticulate these distorted stories that remain the cultural edifice of colonialism’s remnants in such a way that does not negate their problematic Western epistemic knowledge production.

My object-studies curatorial project, starting with the material culture of the Isigubu, aimed to treat the drum’s social life through its historical sojourn and appropriated palimpsests across societies and history. Paying particular attention to the drum’s colonial history of defiance, the cultural significance of the object is revealed – especially in the larger context of black resistance (during colonialism).

In surveying the Isigubu’s musical social life despite its silencing, I have imagined its contemporaneous utility in the (un)intentional similarities it shares with Gqom: well beyond its material properties. This differs from the conventional way of wholly working within the knowledge production of archival troves. Instead of solely focusing on objectness, (black) subjectivity was intermittently explored to articulate the artefact’s broader significance to historical and socio-political practices.

A mini-dissertation submitted to the University of Cape Town in partial fufillment of the requirements for the degree BA Honours Curatorship, Centre for Curating the Archive, Michaelis School of Fine Art, Faculty of Humanities. Date of submission: 30 October 2018.
Supervisor: Professor Stephen Inggs.