Song Walking

Women, Music, and Environmental Justice in an African Borderland

Angela Impey

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226538150
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

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.

Part I

ONE

Paths toward a Hearing

Ayihambi lapho thanda khona

(The road doesn’t always go where you want it to go)

The road to western Maputaland rises precipitously from the sugarcane fields of lowland Mkuze and cuts up the Lebombo Mountains through a dry and desolate landscape. From the municipal center of Jozini, where traders and taxis swarm and jostle for a place on the precarious summit, the horizon stretches in every direction. To the west, the Jozini (Pongolapoort) Dam lies brown and motionless, dissolving into an opaque, mountainous frontier with the small kingdom of Swaziland. The Makhathini floodplains extend endlessly eastward, their hot, vaporous interior intersected by the Pongola River that drifts slowly across them as an emerald vein of sycamore figs and silver-leafed terminalia. Directly ahead lies Mozambique, its boundary with South Africa incised into the land by the greatest river of them all. Known as the Lusutfu River in Swaziland, the Great Usuthu (Usutu) River in South Africa, and the Rio Maputo in Mozambique, this majestic waterway merges with the Pongola River at the far northeastern corner of the Ndumo Game Reserve, whereupon it flows resolutely north across the Mozambican coastal plains toward its destination in the Indian Ocean.

Some of the earliest records of the region can be traced to the writings of Portuguese sailors in the 1500s, whose designation, Terra dos Fumo (Land of Smoke), was taken from the palls of smoke that hovered above the hot savannah plains, generated by slash-and-burn cultivation (Matthews 2005, 11). In the 1800s, British sailors referred to the stretch between the Lebombo Mountains and the Indian Ocean as “Mapoota land,” so called after the “Mabudu” (known also as the Mabudu-Tembe or Tonga) who had inhabited the region for centuries. In 1897, the area fell to the British Crown under the appellation (Ama)Tongaland (occasionally, British Maputaland or the Trans-Pongola Territories), and in the 1970s, while under the jurisdiction of the KwaZulu “Homeland” Government of South Africa, it came to be known as Maputaland.

Figure 1.1. Map of the western Maputaland borderlands

The official Automobile Association map describes the road to Ndumo1 as a “transit route,” yet in reality it appears to lead to nowhere. Its departure from the main arterial road that leads to the official border crossing on the east coast is announced by an unremarkable steel sign, its once celebratory inscription long faded from years of searing summer sun and pocked by the bullets of drive-by drunks. Traversing the seventeen kilometers of sharp, shattering gravel corrugations to the town of Ndumo reveals a hot, exposed landscape that is shrouded in a shimmering, enigmatic silence. Yet all along, there are signs made from pieces of driftwood and reclaimed metals—”Jabulani Str.,” “Gogo’s Chicken Dust,”2 “Exactly Bus Stop”—that attest to a vigorous existence behind the lime-washed veneer. Clusters of thatched and half-built brick houses are scattered across the hills, and freshly plowed fields announce recent activity. There is an occasional primary school, a brightly painted “spaza” shop made from a converted shipping container, a copse of “eco-toilets” signifying the former presence of a foreign NGO.

The town of Ndumo, once merely a trading store and labor recruitment depot, is now the economic hub of the western frontier. Its boundary is marked by a rudimentary gravel airstrip and face-brick clinic, whereupon life erupts suddenly into a loud display of buying and selling. There is a gas station, a SupaTrade Spar grocery store, a furniture franchise, and a smattering of Asian-run general dealers. Women occupy a fragile wood-shack market on the edge of the commercial zone where they preside over meticulously stacked fruit, vegetables, and a random assortment of safety pins, hand creams, whistles, and cassette tapes. In a central parking area, buses and minibus taxis hover briefly for their consignment of passengers, groaning under the weight of overloaded roof racks and raring to go. Neatly labeled and lapelled game rangers and military men pull in, announcing their official eminence in starched camouflage and gold-rimmed sunglasses. And every now and then, amid the dust and disarray, a state-of-the-art 4x4 drops by, its cargo of mainly foreign tourists shielded from the turbulence by well-oiled shock absorbers, air conditioning, and the latest in safari gear. With last-minute supplies at hand, they proceed to the nearby gates of the Ndumo Game Reserve where they become instantly absorbed into a timeless, pristine world of nature; a place where black egrets, pygmy geese, and flocks of pelicans congregate in the cool of acacia-lined pans; of vast night skies, flickering campfire stories, and the deep, ethereal call of the Pel’s fishing owl. Commandeered by the mystique of the Nile crocodile, the hippopotamus, and the elusive Nyala antelope, they will have arrived at the place that marks the ultimate destination at the end of the road.

Points of Entry: Far but Not So Far

The purpose of my initial visit to Ndumo in January 2002 had been a simple one. I had gone in search of women who played the mouth harp, an instrument that was introduced into the region by European hunters and traders in the mid-1800s and adopted by young women to accompany long-distance walking. Although it had once been widely played across the southern African region, I had heard the instrument only on old field recordings. For years I had asked people in the southern regions of KwaZulu Natal whether they knew of anyone who still played it and their answers had been curiously the same: “Up there,” they would point northward, “beyond the Pongola River, near Mozambique. That is where you will find women who know these things.”

For most, “up there”—Maputaland—was located both literally and figuratively on the other side of the mountains, a place known for its magnificent trees, its potent medicinal plants, and its authoritative traditional healers. It was described as not quite South Africa nor yet Mozambique; this side still of eSwazini (the place of the Swazi people), but well beyond the geopolitical sphere of the Zulu.

“Up there,” they would advise, “is far but not so far.”3

On the day that I arrived in western Maputaland, it happened to be pension day in the region. This I learned from the game wardens stationed at the Ndumo Environmental Education and Information Center, a disheveled collection of prefabricated buildings located near the entrance of the Ndumo Game Reserve. Bemused by my musical quest, they had encouraged me to proceed directly to a ward in the extreme west known as Usuthu Gorge, where hundreds of elderly people would be gathering to receive their monthly government grants. If there is anyone who still remembers this little instrument, they suggested, you will find them there.

So I set off at once, accompanied by a young volunteer from the conservation center and stopping en route to pick up a local hitchhiker who was similarly destined for the pension assembly point. Unlike my quiet-spoken khaki-clad companion, our new passenger had assumed the flashy affectations of the city, his fake designer sunglasses and dashing yellow vest standing proud against the hot, dry savannah landscape. Hearing of my musical interests, he proceeded to make loud pronouncements about the area and its people: “This is a good place!” he pontificated. “It’s not like town! Here, there are no f*** criminals! Life is life!” As he persisted, waving vigorously and pointing, I caught a glimpse of a large handgun tucked into the top of his trousers and silently froze.

This is the way with southeast African edgelands, I was to discover, which harbor a multitude of stories about gun running, car smuggling, and other forms of illicit business. However, while the voluminous literature on Zulu political history has long nourished the global imagination with its kings, spears, and military conquests, there had been little way to prepare for the seemingly unspectacular realities of western Maputaland. On the contrary, its public notoriety rests exclusively on its reputation as a remote wilderness, valued in ecological terms as a transitional zone between East and southern African floral kingdoms.4 Renowned for its two protected areas—Ndumo Game Reserve and its more recent neighbor, Tembe Elephant Park5—its vast range of endemic species and inland water systems have earned it an array of high-profile accolades. It is acclaimed as a biodiversity “hotspot” of high conservation priority; it ranks as a “first order” site of global botanical significance and is officially accredited on the prestigious list of Ramsar Wetlands of International Importance (Naguran 2002). Yet while the borderland is celebrated for its unique ecological assets, the border people, with their mixed heritage and fractured histories, seem to have all but fallen off the edge of public knowledge.6

Our journey came to an end in a clearing in front of the newly built Mpolimpolini High School where a large crowd was assembled around a cluster of heavily armored government vehicles. Most people were gray and wizened, some so bent and feeble that they had been carted by relatives over the rocky mountain paths in improvised wheelbarrows. Bustling around them were swarms of traders and hangers-on, attracted, so it seemed, by the smell of fresh cash and the chance to socialize. Mozambican women had crossed the Usuthu River to sell cheap Chinese clothes acquired from the border town of Catuane or further afield in Maputo. Rusted pickup trucks had braved the shattering roads laden high with tomatoes, cabbages, and oranges fresh from the southern market towns of Pongola and Empangeni. A recently slaughtered cow had been hung up for sale in the branches of a gnarled acacia tree, its fly-infested flesh cut neatly into long slabs and manageable portions. And sitting silently amidst the action was a group of izangoma (healers), dressed in customary red, white, and black amahiya (cloth), hair greased thick with red ochre; roots, wild herbs, and vital knowledge at the ready.

As I began to wander through the crowd, I was summoned by a large woman trader who was presiding over an upturned cardboard box stacked high with bags of dried beans and candles.

“What is your surname [isibongo]?” she shouted brusquely, using the customary Nguni greeting that sets out to establish geographic origin by association with a family (clan) name.

“Impey,” I replied obligingly, and knowing that this would not mean much to her, attempted an affable point of clarification: “you could say that it is something like the Zulu or Swazi word impi [warrior].”

Mystified, she tried again: “What is your [first] name [igama]?”

“Angela,” I said, “sometimes people call me ingelosi [angel],” fumbling to explain that the designation was derived from word association rather than any such personal attribute.

Indifferent, she soldiered on: “Where are you from?”

“eThekwini [Durban],” I offered, “I’m looking for people who know these instruments,” and I showed her the box of mouth harps that I had brought with me: “I think you call them isitolotolo, or perhaps you know them here as isitweletwele?”

She stared vacantly at my display of Austrian mouth harps in different colors and sizes, and with evidently nothing to say on the matter, simply turned away, intent on attracting the attention of a more worthwhile customer. Deflated by my inability to solicit from her even the slightest curiosity in my spirited musical mission, and not wanting to jeopardize her rare opportunity to trade, I moved on.

My dejection was short-lived, thankfully, as my ensuing, more cautious enquiries began to produce a ripple of interest in the crowd.

“Haibo! These izitweletwele!” one woman exclaimed, peering at my collection of instruments as if encountering old friends after a protracted absence. “Hha! It’s a long time since we played these things!” She rummaged through the box of mouth harps, pulling out one after the other and tentatively trying to play them. “Hha! The mouth is shaking!” she exclaimed, handing them back and looking at me with amazement.

Soon several women were testing the instruments.

“Hha! Ndoda! This one sings like a man!” complained one, exchanging a large model for one of a more familiar size.

“If you play isitweletwele, you can’t sing!” remembered another, handing her instrument to the old woman standing beside her. Obligingly, and with shaking hands, she positioned the instrument on one side of her mouth, and when failing to produce more than a breathy murmur, tried it on the other. After several feeble attempts, she handed it back to her younger companion, murmuring sadly, “I can’t play these days, my dear; it’s a problem with teeth.”

“It is such a long time since we last played,” remarked another. “If our children saw us, they would say ‘what is this?’ These days the children only want ama-disco!”

I watched with fascination as the women began to tune into the sounds and feel of an instrument that they had evidently not played for a very long time. Some experimented with short, stop-start phrases, systematically working their way through each instrument until they settled on a model that seemed to resonate best with their bodies. I was intrigued by how exacting their musical memories appeared to be, and how decisive they were about the size and make of the instruments they had last played so long ago. I noticed too that they immediately began to distinguish between the sounds of the different instruments: “This one is not clear,” declared one, using the phrase awacacanga, which would more appropriately describe tuning into the radio, hinting at the mediating influence of technology on cultural perceptions of sounds, listening, and performance in the region.7 Some simply offered the colloquial “Hha!” to announce both deep satisfaction and extreme objection.

When the feeling of an instrument settled, I noticed that the kinetic memory of the player was suddenly unleashed. Like a bird taking flight after too long on the ground, she seemed to stumble, hesitate, and then very naturally take to the air. A particularly good rendition of a melody elicited loud exclamations from the women who had congregated to listen. And when the song came to an end, they hung onto one another, weak with laughter and a collective sense of amazement. In no time, the sounds seemed to lift the group of old women, who were huddled close together in their amahiya (cloth) and faded pinafore dresses, and drop them into another time and place altogether.8

“This instrument reminds me of my sister!” one shouted; “we used to walk across the floodplains at Banzi Pan to visit our relatives in Mozambique. All the way we would play these izitweletwele!”

“It’s true!” said another, “these songs remind me of when I was young. I would feel that I was a girl! Life was good then. We would walk a long way w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Postscript
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index