Usuthu Gorge
Background
Usuthu Gorge is located in northern KwaZulu Natal at the confluence of the Swaziland, Mozambique and South African borders. To the east, Usuthu Gorge borders on Ndumo and Tembe Elephant Parks; to the west it is flanked by Hlane Wildlife sanctuary, Mlawula Nature Reserve and Ndzinda Nature Reserve in Swaziland. The area is located within the proposed Maputaland/Matatuine Transfrontier Conservation Area.The Usuthu community comprises Zulu-, Swati- and Shangaan-speaking people. Population density is low (some 1500 people), and homesteads are scattered over a vast area. Grazing land for cattle is plentiful and rainfall levels are generally high enough to support subsistence agriculture. Despite the availability of resources and the relative stability of the area, however, the community is financially poor. As a result, most men seek work as migrant labourers in the nearby towns of Jozini and Mkhuze, or further afield, in the cities of Durban and Johannesburg. Since national borders cut across ethnic and familial affiliations, people tend to move freely between the three countries. While most people in Usuthu can trace their ancestry back many generations, place attachment is not based solely upon familial, cultural and political affiliations, but is strongly driven by changing social and economic conditions.
The combination of poverty, rural remoteness and ecological diversity has made Usuthu, like neighboring Maputaland and the Pongolo Floodplains, a target of conservationists and development planners. At present, conservation development in Usuthu is being established in the form of a Community Conservation Area (CCA) in association with the local NGO, Wildlands Trust, and the provincial conservation body, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife. However, while material resources may be in place for the CCA, and the commercial benefits calculated, the community stakeholders and cultural assets have yet to be identified. This would ensure that policy development can build on community strengths and participation.
One important issue to be addressed is the exclusion of women from conservation planning. Women's day to day lives in Usuthu are intimately involved with the environment: they are the farmers, and thus important bearers of knowledge about land and natural resources. Their role as primary food producers for their families is made crucial by the forced absence of men who leave for long periods of the year in search of wage labour.
Project Outline
The Asibuye Emasiseni project in Usuthu is housed at the Ndumo Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife Environmental Education Centre. The focus of the project is to examine the construction of place by women in Usuthu Gorge, and the neighbouring Traditional Authority of Eziphosheni. Through the reintroduction of two types of traditional mouth bows (umqangala and isizenze) and the jaws harp (isitweletwele) - instruments that are highly endangered and remembered only by elderly women - the project focuses on musical sensibilities and the inner experiences of music-making as activating modalities about self and locality.
The project investigates cultural practices as indicators of how people (esp. women) transform landscapes into places of human action, and conversely, how nature becomes imbued with meaning by, and for social praxis and identity. Within this perspective, sound and musical memory become a way to:
- document local culture, focusing specifically on endangered musical instruments and women's cultural expressive forms;
- document differentiated perceptions of self and environmental place based on gender and livelihood practices;
- raise the volume of women's voices, particularly with regard to environmental decision-making;
- feed data back into environmental education, thus stressing the relevance of culture and gendered experiences in the social ecology paradigm;
- produce new knowledge about community interest groups and their cultural assets towards a more equitable representation in the emerging CBNRM process.
