Azibuye Emasisweni
"Azibuye Emasisweni" (meaning 'to recover our culture') is an innovative community documentation initiative that links research on music with notions of land, locality and belonging.
The project is based on the premise that culture is as much a part of the treasure of the landscape as are its faunal, floral and marine resources.
It maintains that songs, dances and ritual processes present rich repositories of local knowledge about the environment. They guide us and reveal to us systems of local thought and meaning where, due to geographic displacement and rapid socio-economic transformation, these systems may no longer be learned through apprenticeships or oral tradition.
Through the development of a participatory documentation process that focuses on the collection of narratives, songs and cultural information the project strives to explore ways in which deep-rooted cultural wisdoms may be revalued and recast to generate an organizing paradigm for the sustainable custodianship of the environment.
