Open Moment, hosted by the Centre for the Less Good Idea.
Phoshoza, as a rule of love
“The Rule is Love” — Sylvia Wynter
One of the very few audiovisual archives of Princess Magogo is a self-titled film, approximately one hour and three minutes in length, produced by Canadian filmmaker Peter Davis in the 1960s. This film was created as part of a special project commissioned by the United Nations to document life under apartheid in South Africa. It has since been digitised utilising telecine technology, which integrates motion picture film with film scanners. An excerpt from this film, accessible on YouTube, showcases Princess Magogo singing alongside Dr. Frank Mdlalose, a prominent figure within the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) at the time, and her son, Mangosuthu Buthelezi who was the founder of the IFP. The song they sing, titled “Phoshoza, Sunduza AmaBhunu Ahambe”, can be loosely translated as "push away the colonisers" from the land they have invaded. The composition features a repetitive cadence and a melancholic tonality, expressed through the sequential harmonisation of the three voices led by Princess Magogo.
When we encountered this snippet, we had questions that advanced our inquiry into the perspectives of ethnomusicologists who have documented Princess Magogo, as well as their aesthetic decisions regarding the historicisation of her as a figure and the categorisation of her music. We were interested in knowing who documented the film, what circumstances surrounded its creation, and why it is held by a production house in Canada. Additionally, we sought to understand why the song was openly political regarding the conditions of apartheid, in contrast to the veiled discography of Princess Magogo that has been widely circulated, which is often poetic and subject to varied interpretations and comprehension upon listening. This set of questions, among others, enabled us to form a collective named Phoshoza, which includes both of us, along with our collaborators Zawadi Yamungu and Sanele Ngubane. Together, we are undertaking a sound-based, transgenerational artistic research project focused on the life and legacy of Princess Magogo. Our investigation is grounded in archival materials related to her cultural and social contributions as a musician, ancestor, and esteemed member of the Zulu and Buthelezi Royal Family.
Our research has a particular emphasis on uMakhweyane, an Indigenous bow instrument played by musicians in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. We engage the bow instrument as a conduit or an eco-sphere that can facilitate an examination of the intangible losses and damages inflicted by the climate crisis on cultural heritage and identity, as well as its connection to colonial modernity in South Africa. We collectively identify our research process and artistic practice as (un)trans-disciplinary, fundamentally anchored in participatory practices of repair and collective sense-making. This approach encourages critical inquiry into how we can engage with compromised and sometimes contaminated historical narratives and archives. It is attentive to the implications of listening to and learning from cross-generational experiences, recognising that cultural and political contexts manifest not only in literal spatial and geographical terms but also as epistemological and cosmological knowledge systems. This inquiry necessitates a deeper engagement with the remnants of colonial modernity, providing us with a lens and a source for understanding a past and present obscured by various forms of erasure, manipulation, and cultural violence.
The original research was conducted in Ulundi, KwaZulu-Natal, where Princess Magogo spent the majority of her adult life at the Kwa-Phindangene Royal Palace. She sang traditional Zulu songs that emerged from a collective musical tradition, positioning music-making as an expression of cultural and communal solidarity. Many of her compositions reflect her individuality and stylistic innovations, while a significant portion of her work was influenced by her surroundings, stemming from the social production of an artistic and cultural tradition rooted in intimate extended family relationships and close-knit community bonds. This observation has been evidenced through the findings from the initial phase of this research, which involved in-depth ethnographic engagements with elders in Ulundi that revealed that Princess Magogo was a product of the community's collective world-making process, with their music representing a constellation of shared cultural production.
The focus of our investigation has been the examination of how to engage with this archive in a manner that transcends the constraints of conventional historical narratives, which have often sought to marginalise and silence it. Our objective was to comprehend Princess Magogo as a vital member of her community, fulfilling various roles such as being a grandmother, sister, aunt, and friend in her community. We endeavoured to acknowledge her as an intombi yaso Suthuwini, a figure of esteem within the Buthelezi Royal Household, and as a matriarch who nurtured a generation in Kwa-Phindangene. Additionally, we recognise her contributions as an imbongi, an intellectual, and a pioneer in the fields of art, society, and politics.
Our primary research revealed that these elements were essential to her world making efforts. In our analysis, we align Princess Magogo’s commitments and practices with Sylvia Wynter's concept of the "Rule of Love." Wynter explores the intersection of this concept with her ideas on sociogenesis, which asserts that human identities and social realities are constructed through intricate interactions of culture, history, and power dynamics. By advocating for love as a foundational principle, Wynter critiques western ideas of the human that premise on individualism and competition and encourages a re-evaluation of how societal norms and values can be transformed to prioritise empathy, solidarity, and collective well-being over the individualistic pursuits that dominate contemporary society. This critique is crucial for understanding how love, as a relational and ethical framework, can function as a counter-narrative to the prevailing ideologies that emphasise individualism and competition over communal and relational values. It has become evident to us that comprehending the lifeworld of Princess Magogo is inextricably linked to understanding the community that shapes her and the collective traditions of solidarity that define her existence, which are somewhat lost in the archive that exists of her.
Ethnomusicologists, including Hugh Tracey, have played a significant role in documenting Princess Magogo; however, their work often reflects the colonial state's treatment and fixation on the pathologisation of Blackness and its Indigenous subjects through ethnic markers. This documentation serves as a terrain that is invested in both the narrative of “discovery” of Indigenous Peoples and the construction of meanings surrounding them and their histories. It partially provides the rationale that further legitimises the Apartheid colonial state's material interpretation of indigenous peoples as non-beings, modern subjects conscripted into the expansion and aspirations of colonial regimes. In essence, ethnomusicology significantly contributes to the depoliticisation and provincialisation of black cultural life. This distortion occurs when Indigenous sonic practices are regarded as curiosities rather than as forms of resistance that challenge the tenets of colonial worldviews, particularly concerning individuals categorised as subjects. The inability of archivists to grasp these sonic and song practices is directly related to the intangible socio-cultural losses and damages that necessitate redress.
For instance, our primary research indicated that Princess Magogo did not consider herself a musician. A family member remarked that she was averse to being recorded, particularly during ritualistic praise singing. This implies that her understanding of sonic traditions transcended the conventional frameworks utilised by ethnomusicologists, and her cultural production has not been, and was never fully documented. Those closest to her also expressed a desire that they wish she was recorded in her everyday practices of communion and being an everyday normal elder to them, which they cherish with fond memories.
Utilising Edouard Glissant's notions of errantry, relation, and opacity, our primary research reveals the spatial strategies of counter-geographic resistance as articulated by one of our respondents Princess Magogo’s niece, Princess Nombenqe, who serves as a comprehensive repository of knowledge regarding the land in Zululand. She employs various names that reflect her deep understanding of the land, thereby preserving the tradition of eschewing names derived from colonial influences in favour of those that resonate with her lived experience. These names encapsulate the features of the landscape, including landmarks, homesteads, valleys, and streams, which cannot be reduced to the contemporary designation of Ulundi. For example, Princess Nombenqe elucidated the origins of the name of Princess Magogo's son, Mangosuthu, explaining that it is intrinsically linked to northern Kwa-Zulu Natal due to its relational significance to the land and its geographical markers. This interaction underscores the critical role of placemaking for Black People and highlights the imaginative dimensions of existence that globalisation and colonialism threaten to diminish. This spatial practice asserts that these names extend beyond mere geography; they are inherently interconnected with it.
Princess Nombenqe provided further insights into the life of Princess Magogo, highlighting her strong connection to the environment and her passion for farming. It was noted that even in her advanced years, she used a big plough to cultivate her land, a practice that held profound resonance for her. Her musical compositions embody this stewardship of ecological knowledge, often featuring natural themes such as mountains, seasonal transitions, rivers, wildlife, the rhythms of the earth, as well as the cycles of planting and harvesting and the migrations of animals. Through her work, she preserves these natural cycles within the cultural memory of her community. In this regard, she emphasises that the land is not merely a passive entity; it is imbued with significance and intricately connected to its inhabitants. This relationship is further reflected in her oral traditions, which encompass praise poetry and spoken narratives that transform into lullabies and songs, utilising orality as a literary device that shapes a sonic tradition. Embedded within her music is an operational framework that manifests as a linguistic act in the form of song-poems. The histories of these song-poems serve as a conduit for social, historical, and ecological wisdom, guiding individuals toward harmonious coexistence with the land, fostering respect for its resources, and promoting a holistic understanding of the natural eco-sphere.
The dominance of the oral form in this specific region of South Africa has meant that one of the earliest forms of producing knowledge, replicating, contending with, countering and sharing it began with the spoken form. Orality is an embodied practice of being in the world, it is a practice that invites the body of human beings and our surroundings to produce its 'speech.' How we practise memory is embodied. In South African writer Mongane Serote novel's 'To Every Birth its Blood', one of the characters remarks the following: 'You know that it is only in our memory that this land is ours.' There is a recognition that the realm of memory is a space where we know things that the material - present condition violates. These memories manifest not only in our minds but also in how memory governs the body when bodies become sites of inherited burden and inherited resolve.
As a poet, and unofficial bard as she is affectionately remembered by family members and composers, Princess Magogo had the gift and inherited skill of being able to practise memory across temporalities. In other words, she could recite the praises of kings for hours not only with her words, but with her entire body, in trance, elsewhere but here, tears running down her face. She practised ukubonga which literally means to give thanks but figuratively and in practice, means to be in the mode of prayerful gratitude to the kings of the Zulu kingdom. In other words, ukubonga is a spiritual practice that sits inside orality. The act of recital is an embodied ritual of giving thanks in every way that the body can produce meaning alongside voice. This practice of orality is one of the losses that we encounter in the archive. It is a practice that is quite opaque to text.
We have a few images that pointed us to these insights of bard-like activity. We also have stories from family members who saw her in this mode of orality. We feel the distance, as much as we have tried to find moments in the archive that bring us into this side of her, mostly through her public archive of music where she samples herself praising into singing. The project of repair is also about how we make sense of this opaque moment in the archive, how we reinvent our present experience through a cultural practice of orality that we did not live through. This specific form of orality is being lost with every new generation and with every dying generation. These are the non-economic losses that are a consequence of a neoliberal capitalist colonial modern world that has sought to recapture the conditions from which we produce culture.
Therefore, for us non-economic loss is concretely an ethical inquiry, ethical in the sense that there is a recognition that the past persists in the present conceptions of the non-material orders and production of life. We are acutely aware of how the theft of land through colonial technologies and grammars of conquest affected and persistently, still affect our relationship with the non-economic, non-material productive relations that influence how people define what life is, its value, its purpose and how it might be lived outside the dominant definitions that colonial modernity ascribes. Our research practice takes seriously the insight that damage to the environment through extractive relationships that change the materiality of land, affecting the production of bow instruments that depend on nature as the factory, affects cultural production.
Cultural production is at the base of human life and we recognise the damaging effects that a capitalist colonial economy driven environmental crisis has on the production of the intangible yet significant ways of doing life. The moral ethics that the politics of reparations point to in the present illustrate to us that people are walking memories, some embodied memories and carrying histories of what has happened to them. We carry the scars of ruin just as much as we draw our courage from those same scars. David Scott talks about the 'burden of the past as an ethical form disregarded.' The present questions must take seriously the persistence of the past. The persistence of non-economic harm, replicates in the present order of things. We cannot heal the wounds that indigenous communities carry simply through the production of a new world without addressing the past in the present.
The work of artistic research and practice in this context is about centering non-economic loss and elaborating on the ethical moral politics of this recognition in the present. This includes confronting that cultural practitioners, Indigenous practitioners of song have to navigate and reinvent new paths while carrying the past in the present. They have to re-engineer themselves alongside what Zimbabwean artist and activist Kudzanai Chiurai calls the 'libraries of things that they forgot to remember' yet the body remembers both the material and immaterial. Non-economic loss is connected to economic loss, it is material in its own right. The intangible is a non-economic variable yet that does not diminish its value. It is the responsibility of artistic research and practice to thread carefully and deploy aesthetic practice in a way that uncovers the imperial, modern colonial forces that form the structures of destruction. Our commitment to the quotidian as a productive base of knowledge production must connect back to the contemporary modes of governmentality and Imperial domination.
These active stances by Princess Magogo, be it ukubonga or the holistic imaginings of the ecosphere, are a technology on how one can oppose (neo) colonial efforts that aim tirelessly in reducing African landscapes and populations to mere resources or subjects of control. In contemporary contexts, her music continues to inspire radical imagination, providing alternative viewpoints on ecological stewardship that predate current discourses on climate change and the fixation on quantifying environmental loss and degradation. Her cultural contributions can be viewed as attempts to reclaim ecological knowledge and a “rule of love” in practice. This perspective sharply contrasts with colonial ideologies that sought to disrupt the bond between humans and nature, viewing the land merely as a resource for exploitation. As a result, Magogo's music offers a unique framework for understanding ecological relationships—one that is rooted in principles of reciprocity, respect, and sustainability.
“The Rule is Love” — Sylvia Wynter
One of the very few audiovisual archives of Princess Magogo is a self-titled film, approximately one hour and three minutes in length, produced by Canadian filmmaker Peter Davis in the 1960s. This film was created as part of a special project commissioned by the United Nations to document life under apartheid in South Africa. It has since been digitised utilising telecine technology, which integrates motion picture film with film scanners. An excerpt from this film, accessible on YouTube, showcases Princess Magogo singing alongside Dr. Frank Mdlalose, a prominent figure within the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) at the time, and her son, Mangosuthu Buthelezi who was the founder of the IFP. The song they sing, titled “Phoshoza, Sunduza AmaBhunu Ahambe”, can be loosely translated as "push away the colonisers" from the land they have invaded. The composition features a repetitive cadence and a melancholic tonality, expressed through the sequential harmonisation of the three voices led by Princess Magogo.
When we encountered this snippet, we had questions that advanced our inquiry into the perspectives of ethnomusicologists who have documented Princess Magogo, as well as their aesthetic decisions regarding the historicisation of her as a figure and the categorisation of her music. We were interested in knowing who documented the film, what circumstances surrounded its creation, and why it is held by a production house in Canada. Additionally, we sought to understand why the song was openly political regarding the conditions of apartheid, in contrast to the veiled discography of Princess Magogo that has been widely circulated, which is often poetic and subject to varied interpretations and comprehension upon listening. This set of questions, among others, enabled us to form a collective named Phoshoza, which includes both of us, along with our collaborators Zawadi Yamungu and Sanele Ngubane. Together, we are undertaking a sound-based, transgenerational artistic research project focused on the life and legacy of Princess Magogo. Our investigation is grounded in archival materials related to her cultural and social contributions as a musician, ancestor, and esteemed member of the Zulu and Buthelezi Royal Family.
Our research has a particular emphasis on uMakhweyane, an Indigenous bow instrument played by musicians in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. We engage the bow instrument as a conduit or an eco-sphere that can facilitate an examination of the intangible losses and damages inflicted by the climate crisis on cultural heritage and identity, as well as its connection to colonial modernity in South Africa. We collectively identify our research process and artistic practice as (un)trans-disciplinary, fundamentally anchored in participatory practices of repair and collective sense-making. This approach encourages critical inquiry into how we can engage with compromised and sometimes contaminated historical narratives and archives. It is attentive to the implications of listening to and learning from cross-generational experiences, recognising that cultural and political contexts manifest not only in literal spatial and geographical terms but also as epistemological and cosmological knowledge systems. This inquiry necessitates a deeper engagement with the remnants of colonial modernity, providing us with a lens and a source for understanding a past and present obscured by various forms of erasure, manipulation, and cultural violence.
The original research was conducted in Ulundi, KwaZulu-Natal, where Princess Magogo spent the majority of her adult life at the Kwa-Phindangene Royal Palace. She sang traditional Zulu songs that emerged from a collective musical tradition, positioning music-making as an expression of cultural and communal solidarity. Many of her compositions reflect her individuality and stylistic innovations, while a significant portion of her work was influenced by her surroundings, stemming from the social production of an artistic and cultural tradition rooted in intimate extended family relationships and close-knit community bonds. This observation has been evidenced through the findings from the initial phase of this research, which involved in-depth ethnographic engagements with elders in Ulundi that revealed that Princess Magogo was a product of the community's collective world-making process, with their music representing a constellation of shared cultural production.
The focus of our investigation has been the examination of how to engage with this archive in a manner that transcends the constraints of conventional historical narratives, which have often sought to marginalise and silence it. Our objective was to comprehend Princess Magogo as a vital member of her community, fulfilling various roles such as being a grandmother, sister, aunt, and friend in her community. We endeavoured to acknowledge her as an intombi yaso Suthuwini, a figure of esteem within the Buthelezi Royal Household, and as a matriarch who nurtured a generation in Kwa-Phindangene. Additionally, we recognise her contributions as an imbongi, an intellectual, and a pioneer in the fields of art, society, and politics.
Our primary research revealed that these elements were essential to her world making efforts. In our analysis, we align Princess Magogo’s commitments and practices with Sylvia Wynter's concept of the "Rule of Love." Wynter explores the intersection of this concept with her ideas on sociogenesis, which asserts that human identities and social realities are constructed through intricate interactions of culture, history, and power dynamics. By advocating for love as a foundational principle, Wynter critiques western ideas of the human that premise on individualism and competition and encourages a re-evaluation of how societal norms and values can be transformed to prioritise empathy, solidarity, and collective well-being over the individualistic pursuits that dominate contemporary society. This critique is crucial for understanding how love, as a relational and ethical framework, can function as a counter-narrative to the prevailing ideologies that emphasise individualism and competition over communal and relational values. It has become evident to us that comprehending the lifeworld of Princess Magogo is inextricably linked to understanding the community that shapes her and the collective traditions of solidarity that define her existence, which are somewhat lost in the archive that exists of her.
Ethnomusicologists, including Hugh Tracey, have played a significant role in documenting Princess Magogo; however, their work often reflects the colonial state's treatment and fixation on the pathologisation of Blackness and its Indigenous subjects through ethnic markers. This documentation serves as a terrain that is invested in both the narrative of “discovery” of Indigenous Peoples and the construction of meanings surrounding them and their histories. It partially provides the rationale that further legitimises the Apartheid colonial state's material interpretation of indigenous peoples as non-beings, modern subjects conscripted into the expansion and aspirations of colonial regimes. In essence, ethnomusicology significantly contributes to the depoliticisation and provincialisation of black cultural life. This distortion occurs when Indigenous sonic practices are regarded as curiosities rather than as forms of resistance that challenge the tenets of colonial worldviews, particularly concerning individuals categorised as subjects. The inability of archivists to grasp these sonic and song practices is directly related to the intangible socio-cultural losses and damages that necessitate redress.
For instance, our primary research indicated that Princess Magogo did not consider herself a musician. A family member remarked that she was averse to being recorded, particularly during ritualistic praise singing. This implies that her understanding of sonic traditions transcended the conventional frameworks utilised by ethnomusicologists, and her cultural production has not been, and was never fully documented. Those closest to her also expressed a desire that they wish she was recorded in her everyday practices of communion and being an everyday normal elder to them, which they cherish with fond memories.
Utilising Edouard Glissant's notions of errantry, relation, and opacity, our primary research reveals the spatial strategies of counter-geographic resistance as articulated by one of our respondents Princess Magogo’s niece, Princess Nombenqe, who serves as a comprehensive repository of knowledge regarding the land in Zululand. She employs various names that reflect her deep understanding of the land, thereby preserving the tradition of eschewing names derived from colonial influences in favour of those that resonate with her lived experience. These names encapsulate the features of the landscape, including landmarks, homesteads, valleys, and streams, which cannot be reduced to the contemporary designation of Ulundi. For example, Princess Nombenqe elucidated the origins of the name of Princess Magogo's son, Mangosuthu, explaining that it is intrinsically linked to northern Kwa-Zulu Natal due to its relational significance to the land and its geographical markers. This interaction underscores the critical role of placemaking for Black People and highlights the imaginative dimensions of existence that globalisation and colonialism threaten to diminish. This spatial practice asserts that these names extend beyond mere geography; they are inherently interconnected with it.
Princess Nombenqe provided further insights into the life of Princess Magogo, highlighting her strong connection to the environment and her passion for farming. It was noted that even in her advanced years, she used a big plough to cultivate her land, a practice that held profound resonance for her. Her musical compositions embody this stewardship of ecological knowledge, often featuring natural themes such as mountains, seasonal transitions, rivers, wildlife, the rhythms of the earth, as well as the cycles of planting and harvesting and the migrations of animals. Through her work, she preserves these natural cycles within the cultural memory of her community. In this regard, she emphasises that the land is not merely a passive entity; it is imbued with significance and intricately connected to its inhabitants. This relationship is further reflected in her oral traditions, which encompass praise poetry and spoken narratives that transform into lullabies and songs, utilising orality as a literary device that shapes a sonic tradition. Embedded within her music is an operational framework that manifests as a linguistic act in the form of song-poems. The histories of these song-poems serve as a conduit for social, historical, and ecological wisdom, guiding individuals toward harmonious coexistence with the land, fostering respect for its resources, and promoting a holistic understanding of the natural eco-sphere.
The dominance of the oral form in this specific region of South Africa has meant that one of the earliest forms of producing knowledge, replicating, contending with, countering and sharing it began with the spoken form. Orality is an embodied practice of being in the world, it is a practice that invites the body of human beings and our surroundings to produce its 'speech.' How we practise memory is embodied. In South African writer Mongane Serote novel's 'To Every Birth its Blood', one of the characters remarks the following: 'You know that it is only in our memory that this land is ours.' There is a recognition that the realm of memory is a space where we know things that the material - present condition violates. These memories manifest not only in our minds but also in how memory governs the body when bodies become sites of inherited burden and inherited resolve.
As a poet, and unofficial bard as she is affectionately remembered by family members and composers, Princess Magogo had the gift and inherited skill of being able to practise memory across temporalities. In other words, she could recite the praises of kings for hours not only with her words, but with her entire body, in trance, elsewhere but here, tears running down her face. She practised ukubonga which literally means to give thanks but figuratively and in practice, means to be in the mode of prayerful gratitude to the kings of the Zulu kingdom. In other words, ukubonga is a spiritual practice that sits inside orality. The act of recital is an embodied ritual of giving thanks in every way that the body can produce meaning alongside voice. This practice of orality is one of the losses that we encounter in the archive. It is a practice that is quite opaque to text.
We have a few images that pointed us to these insights of bard-like activity. We also have stories from family members who saw her in this mode of orality. We feel the distance, as much as we have tried to find moments in the archive that bring us into this side of her, mostly through her public archive of music where she samples herself praising into singing. The project of repair is also about how we make sense of this opaque moment in the archive, how we reinvent our present experience through a cultural practice of orality that we did not live through. This specific form of orality is being lost with every new generation and with every dying generation. These are the non-economic losses that are a consequence of a neoliberal capitalist colonial modern world that has sought to recapture the conditions from which we produce culture.
Therefore, for us non-economic loss is concretely an ethical inquiry, ethical in the sense that there is a recognition that the past persists in the present conceptions of the non-material orders and production of life. We are acutely aware of how the theft of land through colonial technologies and grammars of conquest affected and persistently, still affect our relationship with the non-economic, non-material productive relations that influence how people define what life is, its value, its purpose and how it might be lived outside the dominant definitions that colonial modernity ascribes. Our research practice takes seriously the insight that damage to the environment through extractive relationships that change the materiality of land, affecting the production of bow instruments that depend on nature as the factory, affects cultural production.
Cultural production is at the base of human life and we recognise the damaging effects that a capitalist colonial economy driven environmental crisis has on the production of the intangible yet significant ways of doing life. The moral ethics that the politics of reparations point to in the present illustrate to us that people are walking memories, some embodied memories and carrying histories of what has happened to them. We carry the scars of ruin just as much as we draw our courage from those same scars. David Scott talks about the 'burden of the past as an ethical form disregarded.' The present questions must take seriously the persistence of the past. The persistence of non-economic harm, replicates in the present order of things. We cannot heal the wounds that indigenous communities carry simply through the production of a new world without addressing the past in the present.
The work of artistic research and practice in this context is about centering non-economic loss and elaborating on the ethical moral politics of this recognition in the present. This includes confronting that cultural practitioners, Indigenous practitioners of song have to navigate and reinvent new paths while carrying the past in the present. They have to re-engineer themselves alongside what Zimbabwean artist and activist Kudzanai Chiurai calls the 'libraries of things that they forgot to remember' yet the body remembers both the material and immaterial. Non-economic loss is connected to economic loss, it is material in its own right. The intangible is a non-economic variable yet that does not diminish its value. It is the responsibility of artistic research and practice to thread carefully and deploy aesthetic practice in a way that uncovers the imperial, modern colonial forces that form the structures of destruction. Our commitment to the quotidian as a productive base of knowledge production must connect back to the contemporary modes of governmentality and Imperial domination.
These active stances by Princess Magogo, be it ukubonga or the holistic imaginings of the ecosphere, are a technology on how one can oppose (neo) colonial efforts that aim tirelessly in reducing African landscapes and populations to mere resources or subjects of control. In contemporary contexts, her music continues to inspire radical imagination, providing alternative viewpoints on ecological stewardship that predate current discourses on climate change and the fixation on quantifying environmental loss and degradation. Her cultural contributions can be viewed as attempts to reclaim ecological knowledge and a “rule of love” in practice. This perspective sharply contrasts with colonial ideologies that sought to disrupt the bond between humans and nature, viewing the land merely as a resource for exploitation. As a result, Magogo's music offers a unique framework for understanding ecological relationships—one that is rooted in principles of reciprocity, respect, and sustainability.
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