Digging and Listening: A South African Perspective

Little has been researched and documented about the way we work and think about sound as DJs and sonic researchers in South Africa. The main way we broaden our knowledge about music is through listening. This is made difficult without access to the music itself, whether that be the original vinyl records, field recordings or oral traditions. Though there is much more work to be done, there is a history of South African DJs, cultural workers and music collectives who have furthered knowledge and influenced generations greatly.

The late Donald ‘Jumbo’ Vanrenen (1949-2018) was one of the finest selectors and teachers of music that we had, with an interest in African and Caribbean sounds in particular. Born near Stellenbosch, he spent most of his life in the UK working for various labels and signing artists. He founded Earthworks Records, the label that issued seminal releases such as The Indestructible Beat of Soweto and Zulu Jive, works which gave international audiences their first introductions to Mahlathini, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and many others. He retired in Cape Town, where he continued to share music through DJ sets around the city, but remained fairly lowkey despite his mammoth career in music. Many of us were able to own African records for the very first time because of him. ((While there are many record labels around, there are no vinyl printing presses on the African continent. There have been attempts by numerous individuals, but the pricey nature and the requirement of manpower to operate such a press is lacking. Hence the importance of this work).

Noteworthy, too, is the DJ collective Fong Kong Bantu Soundsystem, who hosted popular events around Cape Town at venues such as Zula Bar in the early 2000s. Ntone Edjabe and Graeme Arendse formed part of that collective – selectors and DJs (but also writers, editors and designers) who now run the pan-African publication Chimurenga (founded in 2002) and their radio platform, the Pan-African Space Station. Through Chimurenga they have created an incredible sound archive that spans decades of journalistic work around music, DJ mixes, radio shows, sound lectures and live performances that is a treasure trove of Africa and the diaspora.

Venues like Cape Town’s Tagore’s and jazz venue The Mahogany Room, both of which closed down in 2016 a week apart from each other, were also vital in providing spaces and inspiration for a younger generation eager to find and unearth new sounds.

The collective I co-founded, Future Nostalgia, emerged in 2013 as a listening space to bring together ‘collectors, selectors, DJs and diggers.’ It was deeply influenced by these predecessors and contemporaries. In my own work, from being a journalist to a DJ, listening (almost always focused on African records) is a never-ending process of learning and discovery – often through crate-digging, scouring endless ranks of dusty records in order to find hidden gems.

A problem with this, however, is that African sound archives remain a mystery on the continent. African music, like that of many Indigenous cultures, was not traditionally recorded as there was no need for this. Sound preserved via oral traditions carried through generations over centuries. It was not until Westerners reached Africa through colonisation that the desire for documentation of these sounds arose. One result of this is the International Library of African Music in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, dubbed ‘the greatest repository of African music in the world’ by Smithsonian Folkways. It is the collection of historian and sound archivist Hugh Tracey, founded in 1954 – with recordings that go back to 1929 (including records such as Chokwe Songs and Dances with Various Drums from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, recorded in 1957: ‘dance songs,’ according to Tracey’s 1973 notes, ‘accompanied by goblet or conical drums… recorded in mining compounds in the DRC and Angola, where the Chokwe had gone to work.’)

However, most African recordings, sound archives and associated artefacts are sitting in various parts of the Western world. Even with the aid of some digitisation, most of these are only accessible to scholars or those in academia. For example, the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv in Austria – the oldest sound archive in the world, founded in 1899 – preserves a large collection of audio and visual material in over 250 languages from Africa, with the earliest sound recordings of an African language dating back to 1905.

This knowledge should be available for everyone, and it is our duty to make it accessible to those within Africa, first and foremost. We must continue to build an African archive of sound on home soil and open it out to the public. There is no better platform than the practice of DJ-ing to make this happen and this is what I have incorporated into my own sets, finding a way to fuse the past and present into a new way of listening.

Why does the digging up of African sound archives matter? For one, it narrows the gap of our missing history. It also allows us to correct the misrepresentation of the past through the colonial lens. It teaches us more about history, politics and culture. By trying to understand and by practicing listening, we aim to form compassion for the past, we try to right the wrongs and offer a way of humanising those ancestors who came before us.

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today