Makhandzambili ("Forerunners")

STORY OF CAVES:

CAVE#1

In May of 2022, under the auspices of performer-academic Msakha Mona, we participated in a concert held inside the 240 million year old Precambrian dolomite caves near Mbombela in the Mpumalanga province of the Rep. South Africa, not far from the eSwatini border.

Young people from schools around the province were bused in to form the participating audience in the enormous natural amphitheatre, with a stage set inside its vaulting rock fortress, with incredible acoustics, grace of the absorptive capacity of dolomite.

These are officially called the “Sudwala Caves”, whereas this is a relic of Anglicised pronunciation, with the true name being “Sidvwaba”, eponymous of the indvuna (captain/councilor) of Prince Somcuba, who was their guardian when used as a defensive fortress inhabited by many people with cattle. https://ss.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlandvo_wemaSwati

But as the music filled the cave, and this “correction” was made in song (正名 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names), the space temporarily became like a living rock cathedral of alternative knowledge production. It became clear that we need to mobilise further for this..

So, the above narrative reorientation served as an index to a possible collaborative objective. We could attempt to summarise this as follows:

“an ensemble of adventurous artist/ic-researchers giving way to endogenous knowledge production and tradition”.

These people hail from the region of Southern Africa, but who are to be found all around the world, as well as those that hail from all around the world, but who could be better found in our caves.

CAVE#2

Near the mouth of the estuary known as the Verlorenvlei, in the cold rainfall region of the Western Cape called !Naremâb, there is the Eland’s Bay Cave. It is named as such because of the traditional petroglyphs depicting eland antelope – a prime potency and identity in the trance practice that produced/sensed them. Also on these walls are hundreds of ancient ochre handprints. We understand they are created in the diviner’s séance and they connect people through the rock across time and space. At the foot of these caves are some abandoned buildings inside which there are decades of scratched graffiti – a companion to the old rock paintings above.

Here we find another space of emakhandzambili – the forerunners – and their descendant digressions of sign – another meeting place for the practice of collective reorientation.

We propose to use these two spaces as both a physical/online and figurative base to image how a peer-learning hub fostering these values could be structured and maintained as a companion or satellite to the SoC, currently based at ZHdK. (1) We want to do this project because there is a real need for alternative peer-learning spaces in Southern Africa that are sustainable and foster communal growth, dynamism, and imaginative experimentation. We want to use the caves as an emblem of this and engage peers to help realise this investigation, in Mbombela, ||Hui!gaeb (Cape Town), and Johannesburg, as well as eSwatini, Botswana, and possibly Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Lesotho.