Posted on August 30, 2009
By Thokozani Mhlambi
The event emerged out of a genuine desire to showcase the music of the bow, which is seldom performed nor given any meaningful performance platform. So we wanted to create a space in which we could perform this music freely and to highlight its significance in the shaping of our past. In recent years South Africa has seen an explosion of African music as commodity of tourist consumption, therefore part of our attempt is to shift this music away from a tourist-centred setting and to reinvoke it to the people to whom it belongs.
Bow songs document significant moments in our history, including early encounters with Europeans, migrations to urban areas and the brutalities of our past laws. But bow songs also convey something more intimate, they sing of lost love by young women, children's sleeping songs and travel-tunes of working men. Furthermore, bow songs convey an intense spirituality, from the voices of amagqirha ('spiritual diviners') to the biblical texts of Christianity. The show was also inspired by the fact that many of the pioneers of bow music have in fact been women, such as Princess Magogo, Nofinishi Dwyili, Madosini, just to mention a few. By including men as well at the forefront of this project, the attempt is to break the stereotype that Women's Day is a women's issue.
The musical bows are a particularly strong tradition amongst the South(ern) African indigenous groups, history has it that these were introduced to the Bantu, who moved further South by the Khoi-San who were already living in the area. When the Bantu came they lived and intermixed with the Khoi-San; to the extent that there are no marked differences between the Bantu and the Khoi-San (if there ever were). Colonial logic created an imaginary difference between the two, as if they had lived in complete hostility of each other prior to the arrival of Europeans. The clicks in the Nguni languages are but another marker of that mutual cohabitation.
Bows were used in many different performance contexts in history. A young lady for instance could play a certain type of bow, while on her own, as a way of summoning her lover. Some bows were given great significance, and would only be reserved for those momentous occasions, including in the performance of amahubo (hymns) sung at times of death, suffering, royal weddings and for prayer to uMvelinqangi (God). Some tunes were considered very playful and would be sung when playing with children (as a form of storytelling) and for lullabies.
These songs are very powerful and extremely spiritual. In performing these songs, we are hoping that their sound my struck a different chord in every person, so that they leave the performance transformed. From the sweet sounds of Uhadi (a Xhosa bow) to the droning sounds of Ugubhu, the various music bows reveal different styles of music performance.
The working model we have chosen as the Bow Heritage Agents incorporates performers, but also other kinds of practitioners within the field of heritage and culture. We therefore have an advisory and organizing team of young people from diverse perspectives, including those who are academics, economists and visual artist. In operating in this way we hope to engage with different ways of knowing and to bring about possible spaces of transformation. To provide an opportunity to think with and through the new South Africa and its historical legacies. The implications thereof point to the wider constitution of a truly postcolonial society.
Part of our intention in performing these bows is to revive the bow tradition. Interestingly enough, when I walk on the street carrying these bows, older people often make comments, some of them do so with beaming smiles on their faces, for me this just shows that this is not a forgotten tradition. Bow tradition has been deeply embedded in communal memory and often resides outside of formal public spaces. It has been transmitted through embodied practices, including revelations in dreams and through biblical prophecies.
Diviners have been particularly instrumental in the transmission of the bow songs due to the marginalized positions they often hold in society. The sacred nature of diviner practices and performances has made them more resistant to colonial domination. This is not to say that diviners were exempted from colonialism as such, but that they were, in the words of Tony Bogues, unreason as compared to European reason and disciplinary rationalities. Given the knowledge regime of colonialism, the practices of healing (of both body and polity) were confrontations with colonial powers that struck at the very core of the modern colonial and racial project. The figures who were engaged in projects could neither be redeemed nor be fashioned. They were 'mad' and seditious in the eyes of the colonial and racist order.
The performance of musical bows serves to point us to other politics which cannot be subsumed to nation-state political forms. The recourse of colonialism was to label such practices and individuals as insane, heathen and evil. Taking these women's bow songs seriously then can be a way rethinking Women's day, not so much as a celebration of political activists, but a celebration of very ordinary women out there, whose experiences demonstrate everyday negotiations of various forms of oppression.
The Bow Heritage Agents is a project of revival. A journey towards revival has been a characteristic feature of postapartheid South African creative production. It has to do with a quest of overcoming something; engaging with the limits of the end of apartheid. The question which says: what now, of the postcolonial? It uses the opportunity brought by this end of apartheid in order to imagine something new. Key to understanding this as a revival, however, is a need to acknowledge that there is no pre-established world that we can excavate to discover the true Africa. Our experiences and understanding of African societies permeates from the colonial transactions. Therefore, to think beyond apartheid does not write away the existence and pervasiveness of its unfolding, nor does it signal some pre-colonial time-travel in which we can locate the 'real' Africa. But what it does suggest is way in which we, in our present-day, can re-look these given histories critically.
The challenge remains, how do we begin to infer a new representation of indigenous music, without reinforcing the baggage of colonialism and without promising an exiting point through which a utopian vision of Africa can be revealed? It is precisely this question that the project seeks to address.