Angela Impey’s provocative study is an account of women making music in a remote corner of south-east Africa, told in a new mode. Difficult to pigeonhole, tugging at disciplinary boundaries, Impey’s book, in line with its title, argues for new transdisciplinary concerns. Scholarship, Impey reminds us, is also about advocacy, and she attempts to straddle the various demands this imperative makes on her text.
Music by the marginalized and land dispossession form the dominant strands of her intricate narrative. At times, the text suffers from overload – the strain of working across several disciplines, and, at moments, as in Chapter 4, the weight of too much detail. Balancing that, however, are powerful insights into music, belonging, place and loss. What is lost by the women who people her narrative is access to land, resources and livelihoods. What is gained for the reader is a new understanding of women’s songs and their ‘traces in landscape’, and a radical sense of urgency about all of this in the present.
Impey’s focus is on the borderlands territory of Western Maputaland and, within that, the Ndumo Conservancy, its history and the lives, languages and voices of the women. For over a decade in the early 2000s when Impey visited for fieldwork as an ethnomusicologist, they taught her their instrumental music and their songs. Many of these songs are featured in this beautifully produced book. It carries their stories and their losses, viscerally felt and most powerfully conveyed through music. In this way, the book makes a notable contribution to the largely ignored domain of women’s music culture in Southern African studies and, in particular, music by rural women (where Rosemary Joseph’s articles from the early 1980s remain unmatched). With a few exceptions, namely Isabel Hofmeyr’s 1993 study and Deborah James’ 1999 book on migrant women’s kiba music in Johannesburg, which Impey does not reference, work on Southern African cultural production has been heavily male-centred.
The central drive of Impey’s book is to show how women stated their needs and defended their interests when they were without power, influence or authority. Here, Impey draws on work in the field of African livelihood studies by Tim Ingold and others, and situates her study of landscape, gendered socialities and spatial practices alongside theirs. Early on, Impey tells us that she is trying to better understand ‘the social and emotional ecologies of the border landscape’. She urges us to listen to the voices of the disempowered and take heed of their songs and music making. Their messages are clear: they remember what is lost, they attack, they defend, and they recreate through their music. At the heart of the book sit the narratives, memories and songs of a small band of women farmers and musicians with whom Impey worked.
‘Why is it you have chosen to do something so complicated?’ asks one of the women whom Impey meets on her first visit (p. 24). The book tells us why. MaFambile and a small group of her companions are at the centre of the ‘hidden world’ that Impey wishes to bring into view. Particularly impressive in this regard are Chapters 5 and 6, with their rich evocation of walking, women, song and place. The women’s walking songs on the mouth harp (isitolotolo/isitweletwele), with many texts carefully reproduced, provide the focal point for this account of creativity, robustness and dispossession. Nevertheless, there are occasional factual and linguistic errors. For instance, in Chapter 4, the plural of inkosi (chief) should be amakhosi (p. 100), and the Zulu king who fought the Boers was Dingane, not Dingiswayo Mthethwa, who was the young Shaka’s protector (p. 110).
Another strand of Impey’s transdisciplinary approach is her critique of the rhetoric of neoliberal conservation, which she argues is partially responsible for the loss of land and rights that she encountered during her fieldwork with MaFambile and others. The ‘green discourse’ of global conservation, argues Impey, is one that cuts out the voices of those who understand and work the land and know it best. Certainly, in the case of the Ndumo Conservancy and the music and testimony that Impey compiles, we see a counternarrative of depredation masquerading as progress. Near the end of the book, she quotes Induna Ngwenya, who was interviewed by Impey in 2009: ‘We have gained nothing.’ Talk of integration, the forced removals of the 1960s, later ‘land claim agreements’ – all are held in the ‘nothing’ of the present that Ngwenya emphasizes.
On yet another level, the book is about a swathe of memory and unease that covers social trauma across gender and generation, region and locality. Impey writes about a variety of patriarchies that cut across time, race and culture. Women may remember through song, but they do not own or have rights to land in their own name or lineage, only through the lineage of their husbands. Thus, patriarchy and land ownership are intertwined.
The overarching concern of Impey’s study is to bring ethnography and public policy into dialogue. Ethnomusicology must speak to a wider audience, one that is transdisciplinary but also part of the domain of policymaking in the dubious field of environmental development. Despite some shortcomings, the book makes an important intervention. It challenges, teaches, but offers no safe haven. It lays pathways for the battles of the future.
