Introduction: Music as Mirror, Hammer, and Liberatory Praxis
Throughout history, music has been a powerful protest tool to challenge and confront
societal norms and injustice. Intertwined with Black Political Thought, music has and
continues to play an integral role in individuals and movements that espouse social
progress. However, in the 21st century, hip-hop has become the most popular protest
musical form against inequality, injustice, and racial domination. In the case of South Africa, as early as the 20th century, music (irrespective of genre) united with Black Radical Tradition has always been a means by which indigenous Africans opposed racist disenfranchisement. An example is the 1920s composition by Reuben Caluza titled Silusapho Lwase Afrika (We are the children of Africa), which protested settlerism, white domination and economic exploitation.
Vocalist and traditional instrumentalist, Lu Dlamini, captures the essence of the role of music in liberation struggles. She notes that: “I realise that music in liberation struggles is like a mirror and a hammer. A mirror reflecting the truth of oppression, giving voice to the silenced and making the invisible seen. A hammer shattering complacency, fortifying the spirit of resistance and turning sorrow into strength.” Dlamini’s intervention on the role of music was practiced by many cultural activists such as Letta Mbulu and Caiphus Semenya. Their activism is explicitly extended by Thandiswa Mazwai’s inquiry, iphi inkaba yakho?
“Where is your umbilical cord?”
In her latest album Sankofa (2024), renowned South African born musician Thandiswa
Mazwai offers a song titled Children of the Soil where she poses the question, “iphi inkaba yakho” which can be translated as “where is your umbilical cord”. This is a startling question in a world obsessed with passports, borders, identity documents, and categories of race. The preoccupation with such categories and documents is designed to facilitate the statist and colonial placement and movement of people. This stands in sharp contrast to the question, “where is your umbilical cord?”, which understands home through a relationality defined by its people. The question arrives not as metaphor but as instruction. The song asks listeners to locate themselves within a lineage, a landscape, and a history. It asks where they come from, who they belong to, and what remains after centuries of dispossession.
These are old questions in South Africa. Long before they were debated in universities or
encoded in constitutions and policy documents, they were expressed orally and sung at
most funerals and political rallies. They appeared in hymn books, work songs, jazz
compositions, liberation anthems, and oral traditions that carried memory across
generations. In most political contexts, music has often been treated as accompaniment to political struggle. Yet for South Africans, music has frequently done something more
profound: it has preserved worlds that colonialism sought to erase. Music was and continues to a central form of orality in knowledge circulation and dissemination.
Taken together, these articulations open the ground for an Afrikan liberatory theoretical
framing in which music is understood as; a weapon of resistance, a repository of communal memory, a site of knowledge production, a central guide in the battle of ideas and a medium for reasserting Afrikan personhood against colonial erasure.
This framing aligns with the 2024 Afrika Liberation Hub Festival’s themes of cultural
resistance, reclamation, and collective liberation.
Music as an Archive of Worlds
Rather than framing music merely as a protest tool, one could argue that it also preserves entire social worlds.
This is where Ziph’inkomo becomes particularly powerful. When Semenya and Mbulu ask “Ziph’inkomo?”; they are not merely asking where the cattle have gone. The question
reverberates through a history of dispossession and disenfranchisement. In the African
indigenous sense, cattle occupied an economic role, certainly, but they also carried social, cultural, and spiritual significance. They linked families through lobola, anchored systems of reciprocity, and represented forms of wealth outside colonial markets. The loss of cattle was not only a loss to property. It was a dissipation of a way of organising social life, heritage and identity. Colonial conquest understood this. From the one-hundred-year wars of resistance, to the destruction of African agricultural systems, dispossession was never solely about land. It was about also about dismantling the institutions through which African communities reproduced themselves.
Sankofa and the Question of Identity: “Ningobani na?”
In Sankofa, Children of the Soil, Thandiswa Mazwai initiates another conversation throughthe lyrics: ‘Singabantu bokuqala, selifikile ithuba lokuziveza ningobani na, selifikile ithuba lokuzibika, iphi inkaba yakho?’
Translated:
‘We are the first people, the time to reveal who you are has arrived, the time to express
yourselves has arrived, where is your umbilical cord?’
This body of work is a cultural archive. The link between ‘ningobani na’ (who you are, in
plural) and ‘iphi inkaba yakho?’ (where is your umbilical cord?) is a question of place in
relation to belonging and personhood. To ask ‘ningobani na’ instead of ‘ungubani na’ is
central to how Black people connect the self to their community, their history, their culture and the knowledge of their ancestors. It is therefore a question about both community and identity.
This resonates with a core principle of Afrikan liberatory theory: that the self cannot exist without the collective, and that cultural expression retrieves what colonial modernity attempted to sever.
Cultural Archives as Resistance to Settler Colonialism
In the (South) African context, this kind of cultural archive can be understood as part of the same tradition where Black artists had to respond to, challenge and address daily racism, white domination, injustice, inequality and exploitation. To insist that “singabantu bokuqala” is to rebel against the colonial historicising of terra nullius. There are many examples that can be in conversation with Thandiswa Mazwai’s musical catalogue. What they all illuminate is that Black musicians not only resisted through music but drew from their way of life to advance an argument about the extent of the loss and disruption caused by settler colonialism and capitalism. Miriam Makeba’s A Piece of Ground, and Ziph’inkomo are but some of the examples.
Ziph’inkomo and the Political Imagination: Cattle, Community, and Colonial Disruption
Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu’s Ziph’inkomo brings one to think about the place of
iinkomo (cattle) as currency and in playing a role in processes such as ukulobola, bringing together families, and sustaining community. If cattle, as assets and an idea, were that central in the way of life and social fabric of African people , one is prompted to think about the Ziph’inkomo as not only about ukulobola, but also about what happens in such a society when violations such as cattle culling and cattle stealing were part of the colonial machinery. What do people lose when they lose iinkomo zabo (their cattle)?
In this submission, we argue that ‘Ziph’inkomo’ provides a theorising practice and a political imagination that are prerequisites to challenge and address daily racism, white domination, injustice, inequality and exploitation. In the main, we are suggesting that music as a cultural practice plays a significant role in the preservation of Afrikan’s Identity and development of political reimagination.
This underscores a key tenet of Afrikan liberatory thought; to restore meaning to what
colonialism attempted to destroy is itself a revolutionary act.
Music as Archive, Protest, and Reclamation
The examples above show that music can play multiple roles. It can highlight how deeply
personal the political is, it can archive by preserving life histories and experience, and in turn preserve Afrikan identity and political reimagination. It is a protest tool. In our context, it is a protest against settler colonialism, neo-colonialism neo-apartheid, patriarchy, and capitalism. It is also a tool for reclamation, reclaiming African (Black) people’s ability to write their stories and convey that through song or music. We therefore understand music as a form of expression which has the ability to communicate the dissatisfaction, resistance and aspirations of African (Black) people in a world where their treatment shows that they are still not afforded the dignity of human beings.
From an Afrikan liberatory theoretical standpoint, music is not merely art-it is theory, praxis, and insurgent memory. It constitutes epistemic resistance (refusing colonial knowledge hierarchies), cultural continuity (maintaining Afrikan worldviews), political imagination (envisioning liberated futures) and collective healing (restoring dignity and wholeness).
Conclusion: Afrikan Liberatory Framing
To synthesise these works together-Sankofa, Children of the Soil, Ziph’inkomo, and the
expansive tradition they anchor is to witness the assembly of a formidable liberatory
framework. This framing shows the revolutionary character of art and artist, and how it and they can be a rigorous, creative intellectual project.
The lyrical content of Thandiswa’s Children of the Soil, Semenya and Mbuluare the active and deliberate return to the source interventions to reclaim an identity fractured by historical violence. These bodies of work are notes on Ubuntu, where the collective self serves as the very ground of being, contrary to hyper-individualism. In this space, cultural memory becomes an archive, a form of resistance that preserves what ‘official’ histories try to bury.
This sonic anti-colonial praxis is a reclamation of land, language, lineage, and stories which narrate African ways of being. It functions as a bridge of generational continuity, a
conversation sustained across time between ancestors and descendants. Within this
framing, Afrikan music is a strategic, liberatory tool-a vessel carrying not only our political imagination and ancestral knowledge, but our absolute refusal to be erased. Colonialism sought many things. It sought land, labour, and political control. But it also sought to interrupt memory. It attempted to sever people from language, ancestry, territory, and ways of knowing. South African music reveals the limits of that project.
From Reuben Caluza’s declarations of African belonging to Letta Mbulu and Caiphus
Semenya’s reflections on loss, and from liberation songs to Thandiswa Mazwai’s
Children of the Soil, music has remained a site where Black people remembered
themselves.
This is why these songs matter. They do more than entertain. They carry political
theory, historical memory, and visions of freedom. They remind us that liberation is not
only the struggle to build a different future. It is also the struggle to recover what was
never meant to survive.
References
Caluza, R. (1920s). Silusapho Lwase Afrika (We are the children of Africa).
Dlanga, T. O. (n.d.). Rhythm of Resistance: Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu’s
Ziph’inkomo Composition.
Dlamini, L. (n.d.). Quotation on music as mirror and hammer.
Mazwai, T. (2023). Sankofa: “Children of the Soil”
(By Y. Phyllis , T. Dlanga and LL Pheko)
(Image Credit: Blessing Ngobeni, “Healing Notes, 2025” / David Krut Projects)