Angela Impey

Sounding Place in the Western Maputaland Borderlands.

This article draws on research conducted in western Maputaland, a remote region in the borderlands of South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland. It argues that sound and the affect of music-making represent a much under-utilised research resource in Africa, particularly in contexts of social and spatial rupture. As discursive modalities, they provide constructive entry points for understanding how personal and social identities are negotiated, how spaces or landscapes are constructed, and the ways in which these processes interrelate in the making of place. Building upon narratives inspired by the revival of the jews harp and two mouthbows – once widely performed in the area as walking instruments, but remembered now by elderly women only – the research utilises musical memory as a method to chart hidden geographies in a changing landscape. In so doing, it aims to raise the level of the voices of a people whose livelihoods and sociality may be at variance with broader environmental development processes in the region.

African Jim: sound, politics, and pleasure in early ‘black’ South African cinema

This article offers a new take on the film African Jim (popularly known as Jim Comes to Joburg), the first feature-length entertainment film made with a black cast and specifically for black audiences in South Africa (in 1949). In contrast to earlier interpretations of the film, which focus predominantly on the films images, its problematic production context, and its patronizing narrative, we focus on and offer interpretation of the films aural/oral aspects. Through analysis of the ways in which the films black performers mobilize African languages and music as ‘hidden transcripts’ (a concept we borrow from James Scott), we argue that the film is invested with certain political subtexts that have not previously been acknowledged. These subtexts, we suggest, must have been all the more powerful at the time the film was made since, in this context, the political efficacy of music was vested largely in its ability to simultaneously convey pleasure and pain, and to be both uplifting and subversive, thus concealing its essential meanings from the white power establishment. In bringing to our rereading of African Jim a sense of the importance and specificity of sound and music in black South African culture of the late 1940s, we hope to show how virtually impossible it is to give a complete reading of the film while ignoring the films aural/oral components. This rereading also suggests that within film studies in general, and African film studies in particular, it would seem vital to acknowledge the need for more profound studies of the complex ways in which African soundscapes – African music and African languages – contribute to the multiple meanings of films that are made in this context.

Keeping in Touch via Cassette: Tracing Dinka Songs from Cattle Camp to Transnational Audio-Letter

This article explores Dinka songs as poetic autobiography, focusing in particular on their composition and circulation as audio-letters between South Sudan and the global Dinka diaspora. Drawing on current debates on mobility and belonging, the article explores how a tradition of personal song making, which is rooted in a culture of pastoralism and localized mobilities, has been repackaged to accommodate population dispersal across continents and cultures. While ‘big’ mobilities (transacted by civil war) have caused Dinka societies to expand and grow, the article considers how audio-letters simultaneously bring clan groups together through a combination of old cultural forms and new geographies and concerns. Through the analysis of two Dinka Bor songs, the article explores how the immediacy and potency inflected in the sonic and poetic convention of the genre nourishes Dinka social and spatial relations and helps to define and redefine their pasts and futures. It concludes with a reflection on the ‘affiliative power’ of the cassette, which, despite increasing access to digital technologies, has remained the song carrier of choice, and has thus become implicated in the complexity of connections, identifications and intimacies of this contemporary global cultural practice.

SONGS OF MOBILITY AND BELONGING: Gender, Spatiality and the Local in Southern Africa's Transfrontier Conservation Development

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

Deep listening: towards an imaginative reframing of health and well-being practices in international development

This paper challenges the “intervention-as-solution” approach to health and well-being as commonly practised in the international development sector, and draws on the disciplinary intersections between Community Music Therapy and ethnomusicology in seeking a more negotiated and situationally apposite framework for health engagement. Drawing inspiration from music-based health applications in conflict or post-conflict environments in particular, and focusing on case studies from Lebanon and South Sudan respectively, the paper argues for a re-imagined international development health and well-being framework based on the concept of deep listening. Defined by composer Pauline Oliveros as listening which “digs below the surface of what is heard … unlocking layer after layer of imagination, meaning, and memory down to the cellular level of human experience” (Oliveros, 2005), the paper explores the methodological applications of such a dialogic, discursive approach with reference to a range of related listening stances – cultural, social and therapeutic. In so doing, it explores opportunities for multi-levelled and culturally inclusive health and well-being practices relevant to different localities in the world and aimed at the re-integration of self, place and community.

Song Walking: Women, Music, and Environmental Justice in an African Borderland

Song Walking explores the politics of land, its position in memories, and its foundation in changing land-use practices in western Maputaland, a borderland region situated at the juncture of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. Angela Impey investigates contrasting accounts of this little-known geopolitical triangle, offsetting textual histories with the memories of a group of elderly women whose songs and everyday practices narrativize a century of borderland dynamics. Drawing evidence from women’s walking songs (amaculo manihamba)—once performed while traversing vast distances to the accompaniment of the European mouth-harp (isitweletwele)—she uncovers the manifold impacts of internationally-driven transboundary environmental conservation on land, livelihoods, and local senses of place. This book links ethnomusicological research to larger themes of international development, environmental conservation, gender, and local economic access to resources. By demonstrating that development processes are essentially cultural processes and revealing how music fits within this frame, Song Walking testifies to the affective, spatial, and economic dimensions of place, while contributing to a more inclusive and culturally apposite alignment between land and environmental policies and local needs and practices.

Ageer Padang Women

The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project ‘Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song’, a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their ‘Beyond Text’ programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file. The collection is accompanied by an index, which is explained in the readme file.

Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music

Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music Mark Slobin (Ed.) Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2008 412 pp., ISBN 978-0-8195-6882-3 (pbk

Sound, memory and dis/placement: Exploring sound, song and performance as oral history in the southern African borderlands

34.95), 978-0-8195-6881-6 (cloth

Musical Constructions of Place: Linking music to environmental action in the St Lucia wetlands

85.00) Global Soun...