Re-Centring Afro-Asia: Musical and Human Migrations in the Pre-Colonial Period 700–1500AD
NRF Chair in Archive and Public Culture, Carolyn Hamilton, and APC post-doctoral researcher Thokozani Mhlambi attended parts of the conference, “Re-Centring Afro-Asia: Musical and Human Migrations in the precolonial Period 700-1500AD” (18-21 September, 2016), hosted collaboratively by project partners from Ambedkar University, Delhi, University of Cape Town, University of KwaZulu-Natal, University of the Western Cape and University of the Witwatersrand. The project seeks to highlight connections, and in particular musical influences, across and around the edges of the Indian Ocean, as well from those edges into interiors.
The opening evening of the conference consisted of creative presentations by members of the project. Creative outputs are a central component of the Re-Centring Afro-Asia project, which aims to incorporate embodied forms of knowledge alongside scholarship.
APC fellow Michael Nixon curated an exhibition of photographs of musical instruments highlighting the cross-pollination of ideas between Africa and Asia. Live music presentations were also rendered. One of the highlights was collaboration of local presenters and Indian colleagues in a rendition of a Heer, which is a centuries-old Indian lament genre. Mhlambi was part of the line-up of musicians who performed on the opening evening of the conference. He presented a “deconstruction of tonality,” as a way of recognizing that the cultures we are dealing with do not fit squarely into the Western tonal music paradigm, and that the deployment of the vocabulary of Western art music remains problematic.
The conference began with an introduction by Ari Sitas (UCT) and Sumangala Damodaran (Ambedkar University) covering the aims of their project and the kinds of maritime links, movements and routes with which the project is concerned. Carolyn Hamilton then presented on the methodological challenges involved in researching the history of southern African in the period covered by the project, that is 700 –1500AD, beyond the particular insights that archaeology provides. Her presentation covered the way in which the history of the period came to be consigned to the domains of archaeology and anthropology. She tackled the way in which the portmanteau term “oral traditions” effaces political discourse, and lumps together multiple oral forms and genres. She further made the case for urgent investment in forms of intellectual history capable of exploring indigenous concepts and historical discourses.
Mhlambi’s presentation explored contemporary interest in the long past before European colonialism. He drew on earlier examples of similar interests in the topic, particularly the efforts of the intellectuals who are now considered part of the “New African movement” (see Masilela, Ntongela) who mobilized the remote past for a variety of intents and purposes.
The primary intent of the renewed interest in the past was in pursuit of self-definition against the totalizing views of the African past, that viewed Africans before the arrival of Europeans as savage and under-developed. From the works of HIE Dhlomo, who is now viewed as the chief architect of the New African movement, Mhambi argued, we get a sense of something undeemable within the grammar of domination. In his unfinished manuscript on Zulu Tribal Life and Thought (available at the UKZN Killie Campbell Library, KCM 8266), Dhlomo uses the elusive category of ‘Zulu’ in order to problematize certain things about ‘modern’ life. He offers suggestions on the transformations modernity must make in order to accommodate African people, and the transformations African people must be willing to undergo in their expression of locality and presence, which must be drawn from the whole archive of culture as well as global perspectives.
The final part of Mhlambi’s presentation discussed iziyendane metalworkers (1500s–1700s) in the area now called KwaZulu-Natal as examples of innovation that took place before the arrival of Europeans. Throughout Southern Africa there is archaeological evidence of a network of metalwork industry, which attests to the human interactions that accompanied it. Given that KZN is located at the southernmost tip of the musical and human migrations that took place between Africa and Asia, Mhlambi then asked: what does it mean to be on the outer edges of that exchange? How might we conceive of that particular local history of KwaZulu-Natal in relation to the global, in ways that see beyond the European colonial encounter?
The great challenge of the project on “ReCentring Afro-Asia: Musical and Human Migrations in the pre-colonial Period 700- 1500AD”, at least from an APC point of view, is how to produce research which shows the movement of musical ideas in a way that makes sense of the aurally suggestive contemporary resonances and connections with which many of the contributions were concerned. Paolo Israel commented on this, asking the critical question of whether the project was an effort in tracking what was for a long time regarded as “cultural diffusion”, or were different conceptual frames and methods being proposed?