Season 03-ish - Episode 06: South Africa Special Feature - Part One
This is the first of two episodes based on interviews recorded at the 2019 African Critical Inquiry Workshop: African Ethnographies conference that was held at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa by Sara Rendell and Dina Asfaha from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
In this installment, Sara Rendell interviews Nosipho Mngomezulu, a lecturer at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg whose research focuses on national and transnational youth cultures, nation-building projects in post-colonial societies, and community engaged learning and teaching.
TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00] Anar Parikh:
Anthropological Airwaves is the official podcast of the journal American Anthropologist, whose main offices are located on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Anacostan and Piscataway peoples. The Anacostia and Potomac rivers have long been places of trade and gathering for Indigenous peoples, and Washington DC is now home to diverse Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. American Anthropologist has published articles throughout its history that have taken knowledge from Indigenous peoples for a scholarly audience and has not required its authors or editors to be good relations to Indigenous peoples and communities. Acknowledging territory is only one step in repairing relationships between anthropologists and Indigenous peoples. The Editorial Collective of the journal is committed to deep listening and engagement with Indigenous scholars, peoples, and communities to explore ways to be a better relation.
[00:51] This episode of Anthropological Airwaves was edited and produced on the Indigenous territory known as Lenapehoking, the traditional homelands of the Lenape also called Lenni-Lenape or Delaware Indians. These are the people who, during the 1680s, negotiated with William Penn to facilitate the founding of the colony of Pennsylvania. Their descendants today include the Delaware Tribe and Delaware Nation of Oklahoma; the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, Ramapough Lenape, Powhatan Renape of New Jersey; and the Munsee Delaware of Ontario.
[01:25] Parts of this episode were also recorded, edited, and produced from the traditional territories of the Catawba, Waxhaw, Cheraw, and Sugaree peoples, and specifically in Charlotte, North Carolina—a city located on the traditional crossroads of two Indigenous trading paths: the Occaneechi Path and the Lower Cherokee Traders’ Path, which facilitated the extensive trade network of Cherokee, Catawba, Saponi, and Congaree peoples prior to colonization. While many descendants of Cheraw, Waxhaw, and Sugaree communities eventually joined the Catawba peoples, today, the Catawba Nation continues to thrive as a federally recognized tribe located less than one hour south of where this recording took place.
[2:01] Intro music begins
[2:15] Anar Parikh:
Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us for another episode of Anthro Airwaves – the official podcast of the journal American Anthropologist. This is Episode 6, Season 3-ish.
[02:27] Intro music ends
[02:26] Kyle Olson:
Hello and welcome to this special feature of Anthropological Airwaves. My name is Kyle Olson, formerly lead editor and producer of Anthropological Airwaves. This is the first of two episodes based on interviews recorded at the 2019 African Critical Inquiry Workshop: African Ethnographies conference that was held at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa by Sara Rendell and Dina Asfaha from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, I hear what you are thinking: I thought Anthropological Airwaves had been reborn as a new show, hosted by Anar Parikh. And you would be right! But, we, the founders of Anthropological Airwaves had left some quality tape on the cutting room floor, so to speak, during the editorial change from Deborah Thomas’ tenure as editor in chief of American Anthropologist to Elizabeth Chin. We would like to recognize and apologize for the lengthy delay in producing these episodes. There are myriad reasons for this, but what is important is that we are pleased to bring you three interviews now, featuring the following scholars:
[03:23] First, Nosipho Mngomezulu – a lecturer at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her research focuses on national and transnational youth cultures, nation-building projects in post-colonial societies, and community engaged learning and teaching. Dominique Santos – a Lecturer at Rhodes University. Her work explores the nexus of music, play, dreaming and heritage practices as they intersect with intimate experiences of the self, space and social change, as well as on dreams and the role of dreaming in refusing the conditions of oppression. Kharnita Mohamed – a lecturer at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on issues of race, gender, disability, and identity in post-Apartheid South Africa. She is also a novelist, publishing her debut “Called to Song” in 2018 with Kwela Books.
[04:07] The African Ethnographies Workshop sough to prompt reflection on the concept and practice of ethnography, in all of its slipperiness, transformations, densities, polysemy, and proliferation of voices. The conference sought to raise questions about contemporary forms of ethnography across disciplines, especially focusing on ethnographies that are not exclusively written. To quote the call for papers: “The workshop is particularly interested in understanding how ethnography and its conceptual work can allow us to grasp the complexities of contemporary African worlds, their precariousness, and their becomings. We are interested in exploring: (1) the work of theorization that ethnography makes possible; (2) understandings of public ethnography today; and finally (3) ways to re-rethink ethnography from the African continent.”
[04:50] We selected these interviews because they represented rich dialogs on each of these three areas of exploration. In the first of the two episodes you will hear from Sara Rendell and Nosipho Mngomezulu, and in the following episode from Dina Asfaha and Kharnita Mohamed as well as Sara and Dominique Santos.
[05:07] Huku by Sho Madjozi begins
[05:07] Kyle Olson:
We hope you find them as rewarding to listen to as we did. And with that, I’ll pass the metaphorical microphone to Sara.
[05:35] Sara Rendell (SR): Hi I’m Sara Rendell and I’m here in Cape Town, South Africa at the University of the Western Cape.
[05:45] Huku by Sho Madjozi ends
[05:45] Sara Rendell:
With Dr. Nosipho. Mngomezulu, a lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand. You had mentioned that you are currently working on growing a network of South African podcasters. So can you tell me a little bit more about this network and the work you're hoping it will do?
[06:08] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Maybe background to lead into why it is that I think we should form a certain network. So, my friends and I, we worked on campus radio, and we're students, and it was a really beautiful space to think about what it means to work in community radio. And a lot of our understanding of what it is to work in radio, for me, was derived from listening to Ukhozi FM, listening to local radio stations, and it is a very different kind of relationship to audience and producing media, from what I grew up listening to, to what I'm now producing as a podcaster. And I think the huge difference is because the register of podcasting, I think, is so largely dominated by Euro-American producers of media, and we get lots of access to it: when I search on my iTunes, I just find a lot of American podcasts, and I don't see as many South African or even African podcasters. And so it gives me a sense of what the appropriate or professional style and register of podcasting ought to be, and I find it a bit troubling that I grew up with such a rich history of radio and media producers in South Africa. And yet, when I do podcasting, I produce a very different kind of voice; I speak to a very different kind of audience; I'm assuming that I mean, even the numbers for our podcast, we get a lot of business in the global North. And so the cost of data, the cost of actually producing your own kind of podcast as opposed to working at a big radio station, we can kind of transmit all of these have an effect on why it is that we don't really see a lot of African podcasters. And so, so my mates and I who come from a wide range of disciplines and fields, I've got friends who are media practitioners, I've got friends who are actors, I've got friends, who are academics. Who else is making podcasts: people want to do book reviews, and just talk about like things they read. So, it's a it's a mixed bag of people who wanted to produce podcasts, and we really want to trouble this idea that we ought to sound or produce podcasts in a particular register in order for him to be legible as podcasts, and see what it is to actually make a podcasting community in the global South that isn't necessarily responding to, or in defense, I guess, against like a hegemonic Euro- American podcasting style, but just to see what it is that we could make if we make radio or podcasts in a way that we just enjoy listening.
[08:46] Sara Rendell:
Instead of being so concerned about becoming legible to, [overlapping speech] global North audiences.
[08:51] Nosipho Mngomezulu: Yeah, yeah, certainly [overlapping speech ends]. Yeah, certainly. I mean, I mean, no shade on American podcasts. I love listening to The Read. I love listening to Still Processing, I love listening to NPR. And like, this is very beautiful and professionally done. But also I feel there's like a distance. There's a huge distance. When I my mom asked me what I'm listening to, she's just like, "ugh boring." And I want her to be able to listen to my podcast and be like, cool, "This is entertaining." Like, "I will drive and listen to this in the same way that I listened to your American podcast." So I want to, I want to appeal to my mother and my sister as an audience as opposed to trying to get Ira Glass to be like you really do a great--I mean, shout out Ira Glass if you're listening but you know, he's not my intended audience. I want people on the continent to be able to recognize the conversations, the story making, and feel like this is a storytelling form that is accessible.
[9:51] Sara Rendell:
And you anticipated what my next question was going to be. And the podcasting that you have done because you have substantial experience, actually. Producing and acting podcasts. Has the audience you imagine personally been different in what you've produced prior to now?
[10:10] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Certainly, yeah, I think it has to do with the type of podcasts that we did. So The Academic Citizen was around issues in higher education, and so our primary listenership was people who work in academia, mostly academics, scholars. So we're having in-depth conversations about issues and concerns within that particular sector. So, I think that's maybe why my friends and family weren't that interested outside of like, my intellectual community. But yeah, we did find that in an attempt to try and think about, like, creating more access to higher education to knowledge as a more decolonial, democratic practice, we still weren't getting those listeners. We were still very much talking to the same people who were at our seminars, and I, I think it's something that we are missing, and to to trace back some of those missing steps maybe is that the register in which we're producing this democratic media is not recognizable? And so how do you make it recognizable to people who definitely listen to the radio? They're just not listening to our podcast? Yeah.
[11:25] Sara Rendell:
And then what I'm hearing you saying is that taking something out of written forms, so that you're not putting the burden of reading on somebody moving it into an audible forum where people can listen isn't enough?
[11:38] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
[overlapping speech] Yeah, that's certainly not enough. Yeah.
[11:40] Sara Rendell:
It's the first step, and then you've then have to think about the register in which you're speaking and the shape that conversations even take, whether or not there's space for spontaneity and what kinds of spontaneities is arise and to whom those are legible?
[11:56] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Yeah. And then for me, that's often when people like you're an academic, "Boring. why should we care? Please don't bring this up at a party, you're going to try and teach me?" And then we'll have a conversation and people like, "Is that what you do?" And I'm like, "Yeah, actually, there's some interesting intersections between your media gig or your acting gig or your waitressing gig, and the work and conversations that we're having," because especially in anthropology, we're interested in everyday, and yet, the way we translate the everyday in our ethnographies is just becomes like, completely foreign to the very people whose lives we are kind of thinking with. And maybe that's part of the problem, is that, like, demonstrates that we're not actually thinking with people's lives where we actually may be thinking above, and kind of that idea of anthropologists being like interpreters of culture, looking down and explaining to people who they are, what they do. And that definitely thing that comes through and then what people assume we're doing in our podcast and what the conversations we have. And then you're like, "just give it a listen." And they hear it and they go, "Oh, wow, that's really interesting. I don't know how you've moved from Wu Tang clan, to bell hooks to tell you some as why, what how did that happen?" And you're like, "come through, let me tell you how." [Laughter] Yeah.
[13:16] Sara Rendell:
And so you are having to demonstrate to people that what you're doing is different from the thinking above and about different from the alienation of people's everyday worlds from them for metrical academic space. And instead, you're actually having conversations with the people that might have been written above or about.
[13:41] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
And then that's the that's the attempt, whether or not we're successful at that is another thing, but that's certainly the attempt. And I mean, how is it we fail? And can, can our failures, be teachable? Because I do have a big desire for people to, to be more familiar, at least just more familiar with that topology, which you know, is The Handmaiden of colonialism, and people just don't really want to talk about it. And we need to engage with this discipline, because it's not going anywhere. And so to know, like people like, Why do your black anthropologist? They exist? And I'm like, "yes, we do exist." And we write, and we podcast and we engage. If want people to imagine a different kind of anthropology, they also need to recognize there are different forms of doing anthropology, different kinds of anthropologists with all kinds of different political objectives and dispositions that are much wider than the colonial project.
[14:39] Sara Rendell:
In actually talking about imagining a different kind of anthropology, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it has been like for you to do anthropology among youth, with youth, of youth, or for youth, depending on how you see your research practice?
[15:03] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
So how I come to do work with, on, about young people is because I was a young person, once upon a time. And I read. Like many students that I teach now, I stumbled into anthropology. I was a law student, and I happen upon this discipline. And it intrigued me. And when it came time to start doing research projects, I was like, I want to answer a particular question that I found troubling. And it was about my own history and my own biography that shaped my interest in youth because I was born in 87, and so we were the first 80s babies, we were the first generation to fully be in multiracial, integrated schools in South Africa. And so, I've had all these questions and been troubled about what does it mean, for me to be a Black South African to be Black, in a context of education that was just so deeply colonial and British, and this integration didn't so much look like integration, than assimilation later on in life. And so that's where my research question came from. I was like, "what are we doing in these integrated multiracial schools?" And so, I was like, " let me go speak to some young people who've gone to similar schools that I did. And let's have chats about that." So, this is how I come to conceive of my area of research with young people is, it comes from my own biography of just like, I was concerned with how I was educated, I wanna talk to other people will be educated in a similar way.
[16:42] And this was, yeah, I was like, 2019, when I did like, my first mini ethnography with young people, and it was just with mates, and I was like, "let's have conversations about the kind of schools we went to." And then the more I continued this work, with my work in Mauritius, and engaging with people in high school, and I was well into my MA work at that point. That was, I found that really interesting because I was no longer doing kind of peer-to-peer research. But now, I am full on with teenagers, and you think you're young, until you're with the teenager, and you're like, "wow, wow, there is a whole other world that I've full-on missed in the last five years since I left high school," and to remember that: to remember the courtyard, to remember the politics of the cafeteria, to remember the strangeness of a teacher in a classroom, which is not too far from the university space. But it's, it's bizarre when I'm sitting there with my notebook, and I'm trying to be inconspicuous doing fieldwork, we're going to class you're like, " I am not a teenager, like I'm quite far in experience" and I am deeply curious about how young people in the age of social media are growing up under circumstances that appear on the surface to be vastly different, but when you start engaging in conversation--like many incidents in anthropology--when you start engaging in conversation, you start to recognize the commonalities, and how things become inflicted in different intensity or severity, or how questions that I was plagued with as a teenager, suddenly don't seem to matter so much to this particular generation. And so, working with the category of youth is kind of strange, because in the South African and Mauritian context, it's kind of people over 13, below the age of 35. And I was like, I am a youth then, I am still in there. But my work, particularly in schools, was quite instructive in troubling this idea of age as a marker of youth that like, how do we tell a nine year old who is the head of a household that they are a child and not a youth? You know? How do you say to a young person who is, you know, a mother or has all kinds of responsibilities and life experiences that they are not quite fully formed in personhood? Like, so I, this idea of, of gauging youth by age, I don't think it's very useful for us to understand who young people are, and even like the word youth, you know, you must travel, right? Because it's a, it's quite a modern concept. I can comes through modernity, we receive this category of youth, you were a child, and then you were married, let's carry on, you know, but now we have this residual category because we've invented schools in the factory model and all kinds of other politics and experiences of that shape, how we've come to classify, even ithe deal youth. And I think the two things that I find really important, or three. The first is the role of this category of African continents. So the United Nations, a few years ago, issued a statement that this is the generation of youth in Africa, and global South, I guess, because we're going through a youth bulge. There are a lot more young people being born and living and surviving. And so we are having an increasingly young population. And you can see that playing out so clearly in a South African context with the kind of political movements, political parties, the calls for decolonization, land redistribution, economic empowerment--all these calls have come from a pushback of young people against what they're feeling as an older generations kind of lethargy and, and responsiveness to the challenges of the 21st century. And so this youth boredom, deeply fascinated in because I think it's going to shape this continent very greatly. And it's already shaping this continent in very significant ways. The second then, which I've kind of mentioned, is this relationship between young people and older generations. I don't think you can talk about youth without talking about this relational nature of this category. Because no youth without so called adults are grownups. And so I'm also really interested in this relationship between generations. Personally, I'm struck by how my mother and I are not just speaking in different languages because of me being her child.
[21:33] But how deep the schism, has been between the post-apartheid generation and the generation that grew up during apartheid. And so, a very small anecdote to demonstrate this: I was probably in the fifth grade, and I had a white friend come and sleep over, and it was the first time my mother had been around a young white person who is coming to her home, to sleep over and like to tell them :make your bed." This has never been an encounter that she's had with a white person. And I was just like, this is bizarre, of course, course you get to tell my friend what to do, like you're the mom, and we're here for a sleepover. So let's go. These generational experiences marked by this huge, I mean, I say 'huge political shifts" with a pinch of salt, because there are still many continuities and problems of the legacy of apartheid. But I'm deeply interested and invested in this intergenerational relationship, which I think if we don't pay enough attention to it can be a mark of, of conflict. And I don't think it necessarily has to be so explicitly because in our speak of my family tradition, as a Zulu speaker, the relationship between older and younger generations is like spiritual, it's deeply nurturing. It's so important that these power dynamics to be negotiated. And when you introduce, like such a huge political shift, you disrupt this intergenerational relationship. And so I'm really deeply fascinated with how, how do we talk to young people, and how young people speak to other generations, when our worlds really are just like, wildly, wildly different? And then lastly, the racialization of this category of youth, I mean in South Africa. And I would guess, in the United States, this category is deeply racialized. A youth in South Africa was often not just even a black young person, but it's also a black male, and the black male as political agents as a potential danger to the apartheid state and imaginary youth had to be kicked in line and disciplined. And the term teen was always reserved, almost always reserved for white, young people who who retain a perpetual childlikeness and can explore and be young and make mistakes, and the youth is criminalized and is surveilled. And I'm also very deeply interested in this relationship between teens and youth and how we use these terms. Yeah.
[24:20] Sara Rendell:
You spoke most recently about the differences between teen and youth: youth being a racialized category to be disciplined, criminalized, controlled as threat to a white supremacist status quo. So youth as a politically dangerous and therefore hyper surveilled, hyper scrutinized, hyper discipline category, one that's only already gendered as well.
[24:52] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Certainly.
[24:53] Sara Rendell:
And then you spoke about teen-ness as hailing a kind of innocence, freedom. an ability to develop in any way that they might want. Um, because it's a White category or like an unmarked White state.
[25:10] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Yeah, unmarked White and also I mean, it's it's the object of the the ideal capitalist subject, because then the teen is at the mall, and the teen is having fun dating, and buying makeup and buying Levi's and buying, buying buying, right. And the rainbow nation imagining South Africa, post apartheid as a rainbow nation as a very neoliberal country is that everyone can become a teen: black and white can all become teenagers. You follow those these rules, and are disciplined, if you are not kind of agitating for land, and you're not talking about economic freedom. If you're not poor, if you have money to buy into the dream, then you too can be a teen, and I also find that very fascinating how the teenager has, I think modeled ideally, the ideal team is still a young white person, but how you can perhaps buy into that you can have proximity to that through access to money, financial means Yeah.
[26:15] Sara Rendell:
In proximity that's only ever asymptotic because the minute of Black youth reaching for teen hood stands for any kind of a political claim, then their teen is [overlapping speech].
[26:28] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Yeah, then they're dangerous. They have criminal. Yeah, certainly.
[26:33] Sara Rendell:
But you mentioned another term, which was childhood.
[26:37] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
I mean, honestly, I don't know. I mean, I do know, but I it's I am weary of childhood and work in the area of childhood because of the disciplinary structures around ethics and working with people under 18. So I really work with like, children. But I find the one one small thing I've noticed about my colleagues and friends who are doing childhood studies or work in childhood, is if the youth is a political problem, the child is a public health problem. And the child's well being is very much at least just on observational basis. I haven't done enough research on this. But I noticed how the there are all these public health interventions, rightfully so because of the HIV and AIDS crisis, that making sure that children can survive, literally, and live has turned this area of life into kind of this medicalized kind of space. And I just think that's really interesting. I mean, but yeah, that's just like one little aside that I have noted about like childhood. But yeah,
[28:06] Sara Rendell:
And I'm also going back to the second point you made about generations and interactions between generations. I'm curious about how sometimes the the conflicts that you describe emerging when just taking the example that you gave your mother's experience and your experience, were almost incommensurate? And then what that forces may be seen about stories are like histories that are told us complete? In other words, this is a post-apartheid moment. But if, if there are these moments of conflict around a younger person's every day, and then the way they parent or someone in the older generation, who has an important role in their life reads that same moment, if there are conflicts there. I wonder if that's also a site where it becomes possible to question the dominant history that's being told about where we are now and how we got here?
[29:14] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Certainly, and I think it does several things. Right. One of the things I think it does not just happen in my life, but for many of my friends is if you're attending multiracial school in so called integrated assimilation schooling, the term is "Model C." hat's used in South Africa. So if you go into a Model C school, and your mother is having this experience with your young white friend, it's so easy for your default to be the dominant narrative that has been taught at school: of the rainbow nation. Because the teachers are clever. Your parents are paying a lot of money for you to go to this very clever school. And so, how your very historically white and currently white institution is teaching you how to understand that moment, for me, used to take precedence. And I think for many years, I would read it in "youre being strange mother," as opposed to note, this is a deeply weird experience for someone who has spent their entire life, more than 40 years, living under a racist regime to have a young white child in their home, and be treated as not only as not actual as not worker or servant, but to be treated as home owner is like, mind blowing for my mother. And the anxiety that produces for her, like, what do I do with this child for a few hours? They're in my house? Like, is this gonna be okay? If, what if something goes wrong? What if the parents get in--like. I can, only now with hindsight, imagined anxieties, I produced for my mother when I was like, "Come on over, it'll be fine. This is gonna be slow." Yoou know, and to think about that burden of history that she carried, and almost had to protect me from, you know, in order to give me particular kinds of opportunities, that burden then means that she has to find different ways of articulating those anxieties for me, so that I can have these relationships with these friends. And I can live in the post-apartheid moment. But for her, it's, it's bizarre. And it's, it's I can't think of a better word, but it's triggering. It's, it's, it's it's a very strange and unusual experience for which I don't think I gave her enough time to really make sense of like, "Whoa, this is a lot." I was just like, my White friends have sleepovers. We're having sleepovers, they're comimg". And it's just like what is happening, right? And to have a language for the generations to speak about this, that is adequate enough to capture what is happening for both of us. And recognizing that the rainbow nation is not that language that, you know, the history of apartheid is over and everyone is in tralala land just wasn't adequate to help us make sense or hold on to that moment. Yeah.
[32:21] Sara Rendell
You were being educated into use of the language of rainbow nation. Oh, yeah. And educated into disavowing the strangeness of your mother's experience of what was happening. And then because of that disavowing history.
[32:38] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Certainly. Yeah.
[32:39] Sara Rendell:
And it sounds like, if I'm understanding right, before your awareness of that disjuncture, between what your mother was experiencing and what you were experiencing, became conscious--something you could narrate the way you just narrated it to me--it was felt and affective.
[32:57] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Certainly. Yeah. And felt in a impatient response, right? Because I'm getting on to get along. I'm here at school. I'm speaking the English. I'm wearing the little colonial uniform, I'm doing it. "Why are you not, kind of, you sent me to the school, like, get with the program, this is what you signed me up for right?" And to also complicate matters further is like, I can imagine that this was as bizarre for my white friends, parents as like, this Black child is out here, like just in our home, being a free, you know. And I think they must have also been like, "We literally were spoon fed on this white supremacist narrative on this country. And now here are children just turning up with whomever they end up with at home." I mean, I'm sure it's more complicated than that. But I think it's taken us, let me say that I think it's taken us a moment to really come to terms of providing ourselves the language to talk about these incongruencies and hailing discomfort in those moments. And yeah, I think that growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, and going to school, in these Model C, schools. I think that's what really has pushed me to pay attention to young people and what they're being interpolated into, what are they educated to become, and how are we creating national subjects, and then these different schooling systems?
[34:36] Sara Rendell:
And what are they trying to hurry you out of?
[34:41] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Yeah. And, not not to read history as kind of like this inevitable linear process. But I think there's something to be said about these, these these particular moments that happened in my household and many other households. That it's it's almost inevitable that we had a moment of have really reckoning with how troubled our past and present continues to be, that we couldn't just quickly play rugby, have World Cup, and just be like, "Whoa, we sure fixed that racism. Lucky for us." Our country has kind of time traveled and just like have a moment and be like, "Whoa, this is hectic, guys like let us all take a deep breath and reckon with how wild and oppressive and violent and real this this mess that we're calling a born again country continues to be." And we have to name it and we have to develop a language for it in order to be able to deal with it. Because the story we've been telling ourselves is not adequate.
[35:53] Sara Rendell:
Not adequate to the recalcitrance of the ever-present history, but also the active reproduction of these forms of oppression. You mentioned how, we can describe this as the age of social media and you said it like that, because we don't want to over over-diagnose what that means for young people and who they are and how they interact.
[36:18] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Transnational youth culture, as imagined by advertisers, for good and bad, is deeply inaccurate. And I don't know if accuracy is even important when you're marketing, but the imagining of what young person, a young person, in Johannesburg or young person in Port Louis in Mauritius is being enticed by by media advertising and such, is it's not it. It's not it. The people working in the ad agencies are really struggling to put their finger on who are these young people who are loc-, who are located obviously, in a particular context or local. Yeah, a local context, but also up-to-date with what Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry and who else I'm trying to think of like, anyway, all over the world. You know, they're they're watching anime that they're doing the most. They're consuming transnational youth cultures and putting them together and assembling them in a way that makes it so hard to be like, "I'm going to sell this to young people in Johannesburg using this particular register, because I know how to get them right. I know how to connect with them. Because this is what a young person in Joburg is." I don't know, the same person in Joburg is both into Pokemon, and into hip hop, and also just a bunch of different connections and assemblages that they draw from their lives online and being transnationally connected. And I think is a really beautiful opportunity that young people have, not just to simply, you know, whoa moral panic, young people are in jeopardy because of the old Internet's but because again, I'm speaking of not only privileged youth, actually, Because you get multiple sorts of youths, you've got to get young people of all different socio economic backgrounds who are transnationally connected, I don't think it still holds. So, not just for middle class or wealthy young people. But there's an opportunity for self-narration. And I think it's self-narration to an audience that they can recognize, and that recognizes them, that isn't necessarily going to be another young person in Johannesburg, it might be chatting to the guy I play, what's that awful game, Fortnight with online, or we are all into, you know, this particular anime, and so this is our conversation that we're having. And I think that's really exciting that the the connections aren't as easy or not as lazy rather, that we could, once upon a time produce an anthropology of the Zulu youth. And then what happens to young people of Johannesburg, whereas now what's happening to a young person in Johannesburg is deeply informed by Black Lives Matter, protests in Sudan. There are all these conversations and global, transnational youth connections that may not even be overtly sought out for but are registered on on some level. And how like, I think many young people are producing a very sophisticated relationship with social media. Far more sophisticated than I think people in their 30s because we were kind of the guinea pigs of Facebook and MySpace and all that stuff. But now I think this generation is like a bit more obsessed about like, actually, my WhatsApp, my Facebook, my Instagram and all these things come together in a way that I think is still really interesting and unfolding. And I'm quite curious about that.
[40:06] So, I don't wanna be whack and be like "I think that you're cool." That's whack. But in the way I approach my work as an anthropologist I definitely write for my younger self. I find myself constantly going back to questions and I had and providing myself a langauge for those questions even to be articulated and doing an anthropology that I wish I had been reading in my first and second-year curriculum. So, I think that's really the audience I write for and that's the first impulse, so like ask a question or engage in any kind of research. But then there's something strange that happens from that moment to then publishing, doing that work. And my supervisor and I used to have this moment where she would just mark on work I'd submitted and just like "you sound like an old white man" because there's a register that I'd go into being like "This is how a proper scholar addresses their audience." This is like "Now you don't sound like yourself. I don't know who this is, but this is strange. Can you go back to sounding more like yourself." And I think I'm still figuring out that sweet spot between writing for my younger self and engaging my fellow scholars and the academy such as it is. Bringing these two voices that I have within me. Bringing these two voices together in order to be able to articulate something that I think is unique about how I come into this scholarship and how I approach my research. I certainly don't want it to just be, you know, this exercise only for myself and I also don't want it to be this weird thing where I sound like an old white man. I really wanna find the sweet spot between these. And maybe the way I find it is through like a series of attempts and failures and playing with different modes in order to figure out how to make that legible.
[42:21] Sara Rendell:
It's amazing hearing you talk about the process of disalienating your own voice from your writing when you move into an academic form. And, equally interesting to think about the self that you would address and it strikes me that maybe that self is a composite self and addressing a younger you is also addressing younger people you know now who might be looking for a language like the younger you was looking for
[42:56] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
And, the old white man is in me too. Ugh [overlapping speech]. But that's also a part of like my education and that voice comes into it. My mother's voice comes into it. And so yeah, it's definitely a composite. And it's to figure out how I speak clearly as possible without kind of going "I'm going to alienate." Cause some of my old white male professors were really instrumental in my education. Whether I was fighting them or just learning about the discipline from them. They can't just be disappeared, so "How do I deal with them? And where do I put them? And which order I place them." is also a strange game to play.
[43:48] Sara Rendell:
We started with questions of audience and address and we ended there.
[43:53] Nosipho Mngomezulu:
Yeah.
[43: 55] Outro music begins
[43:55] Sara Rendell:
Dr. Mngomezulu, thank you so much.
[44:12] Anar Parikh:
Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Anthropological Airwaves, we’ll be next month with the second installment of this South Africa Special Feature.
[44:21] Outro music ends
[44:21] Anar Parikh:
This episode was produced and edited by Kyle Olson. The interview was conducted by Sara Rendell at the African Critical Inquiry Workshop: African Ethnographies conference held at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa in 2019. Many thanks to Nosipho (no-si-pho) Mngomezulu (m-go-me-zulu) for her time and insights. The intro and outro music you hear is “Waiting” by Crowander. This episode also features the song Huku by artist Sho Madjozi. As always, a closed caption version of the episode will be available on the Anthropological Airwaves YouTube channel and a full transcription on the episode page on the American Anthropologist website. Links to both are included in the show notes. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Anthropological Airwaves wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, don’t forget to rate and review us while you’re there. A five-star review in particular will help other listeners find the show! We would also love to hear from you in general. If you have feedback, recommendations, or thoughts on recent episodes, send an email to amanthpodcast@gmail.com. You can also reach out to us on our Facebook page Anthropological Airwaves or on Twitter with the handle @AnthroAirwaves. Find links to all of our contact information in the show notes and on the Anthropological Airwaves section of the American Anthropologist website.
45:45 End of Episode.