Paper short abstract:

South Africa's rural-urban migrants fashion integrated realities of their ancestral country homesteads and Johannesburg labour hostels. This ethnographic study explores the social dynamics of kinship and identity in isishameni Zulu dance to explore the phenomenology of collapsing worlds.

Paper long abstract:

Successive colonial and apartheid governments imposed on black South Africans a life of migrancy from rural homesteads to rapidly industrializing towns and cities. The exploitation of South Africa's natural resources and black labour had drastic consequences for the livelihoods and social dynamics of rural communities. Taxation forced men, and later women, to work on the mines and in urban settings to earn wages for their families. While millions of South Africans consider themselves urbanites today, there are still millions more whose lives integrate the distant yet intimately connected spaces of metropolis and rural village. These migrants have imagined new forms of music, dance, and art that intersect worlds seemingly distinct. This paper focuses on the complex systems of kinship and identity made manifest in the music, movement and gesture of isishameni Zulu dance. These dances are practiced by small groups of men who perform annually at festivals in hostels and in the rural isigodi (districts) of their ancestral homes. I draw on fieldwork conducted at Jeppe hostel in Johannesburg and the districts of Msinga and Weenen in the midlands of KwaZulu-Natal province to show how urban and rural sensibilities intersect and are made expressive through music and dance. Audiovisual footage of these dances at weddings and community festivals is used to study the phenomenology of collapsing worlds.