Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid by Louise Meintjes (review)

Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid presents a detailed account of various ways in which Zulu ngoma (which involves singing, drumming, and dancing) mediates sociopolitical life and shapes how individuals relate to each other, to different social assemblages (e.g., racial, ethnic, and gendered), and to national and global politics. Ngoma aesthetics is shown to be inextricably interwoven with sociocultural and politicoeconomic life experiences in postapartheid South Africa. The book is a pleasurable read, especially in the way it weaves together detailed ethnographic narratives, historical accounts, and theoretical explication. The book is also enjoyable because photographs of ngoma performances, taken by a renowned award-winning photographer T. J. Lemon, correspond well with and supplement the descriptions. Together they make us imagine the sounds and movements of the pictured performers.

Shaped by South Africa's history of migrant labor, ngoma participates in defining and expressing manhood and masculinity through the culture of competition, evocation of praise names, and eloquent and controlled voicing of anger and power. Louise Meintjes discusses how Zulu ngoma dancers use their voice and body movements to project themselves as warrior-soldiers (or amasosha). The music constructs the figure of a musical warrior-soldier through a number of performance acts: the drum-steady groove, dancers' kicks and dancers' uniforms, and the nicknames that reference guns and military ranks, among other things. According to Meintjes, "the blend of military styles, sounded, gestured, adorned, personalized, and differently figured in various contexts, marks the soldiers' performance of violence as performance" (p. 103). Likewise, Meintjes shows how the militarized and competitive performance of Zulu ngoma helps articulate Zulu ethnic identity and solidarity as well as mediate competitive party politics involving the African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party, especially during the turbulent transition years (around 1992 and 1994). She illustrates her arguments with direct quotations from dancers' speech or songs. For example, to describe how bitter experiences of violence inform the lyrics of ngoma songs, she presents a moving excerpt quoted from the dancers' song: "When will these things be over? When will this business of aiming guns at us be over? Houses are on fire. When will these things be over? Things are against the black person. When will these things be over?" (p. 145). She uses this excerpt to demonstrate how participants utilize ngoma's repetitive musicopoetic form to reflect and express their personalized feelings about their everyday encounter with violence. Ngoma enables these participants to carry their experiences and ideas of violence into entertainment. "Dancers finesse their encounters with violence through ngoma, and on behalf of their art" (p. 146).

Dust of the Zulu also provides a rich discussion of how ngoma dancers address issues related to HIV/AIDS. Specifically, Meintjes shows how ngoma dancers balance between the culture of secrecy and silences, on the one hand, and collective and individual acts of care, on the other. While dancers try to combat the social stigmatization, alienation, exclusion, and humiliation of HIV/AID victims through socially sanctioned reticence about the illness, they also strive to take care of the suffering or weakened individuals. This ambiguity is also evident in ngoma aesthetics. On the one hand, ngoma aesthetics cherish and depend on the dancers' display of strength, agility, and endurance; hence bodies weakened by illness are antithetical to ngoma aesthetics. On the other hand, in order to take care of their weakened bodies, infected persons also may shift their artistic expressions from virtuosic and rigorous dancing to vocal performance. As Meintjes explains, "A politics of silence coupled with a poetics of ambiguity enables people to take care of others socially while each figures out his or her relationship to the affliction and so his or her plan of action" (p. 197). She also argues that the culture of silence and continued participation in ngoma performance enables...