A few weeks ago, I opened my childhood home in the Eastern Cape, South Africa to people from across the world who attended a two-hour gathering online and in-person. I shared local stories that have emerged through the making of a podcast series called UN/FOLDING_RE/FOLDING_FOLDED: Imiphindo kwaXhosa. These podcasts are sonic interventions that unravel some of the tighter, more concealed cultural and historical folds located in the Eastern Cape, exploring Xhosa sensibilities and histories through the lens of fashion.

Along with my collaborators fashion practitioner-thinker Sihle Sogaula and videographer and fashion thinker-writer Bongani Tau, we explore the slippages of fashion; blurring the urban and rural, the past and present, the individual and communal, folding languages, locations, and aesthetics to present new fashion knowledges, alternate fashion languages, and routes to other fashion genealogies.

The poster for episode two of the first series of the podcast UN/FOLDING_RE/FOLDING_FOLDED: Imiphindo kwaXhosa

In 2023 I visited remote Eastern Cape locations to collect and collate stories that introduce and expand on ideas about Xhosa people, ilali (rural areas) and our relations to dress and dressing. I asked the Willowvale community about the origins of Iqhiya, and what was the purpose of iqhiya for abantu bokuqala. “Yayithetha ntoni kwi ndlela ze sihlonipho kwaXhosa?”

The resulting podcast series is a way finder, a holding room for us, as amaXhosa: It is a listening room that we can sit in every so often.

For instance, we hear from Mama Makholi that umbhinqo (the act of folding cloth around the body normally associated with the female form) extends to all genders, it is a way of wrapping the body as a form of showing respect to ancestry. We meet Mama Jilingisa who shares her wisdom and knowing of instimbi (traditional beadwork) and its many histories. uMama teaches the history, making and meaning of iintsimbi (beadwork) to community children, other crafters while championing for social development in her village.

In 2024, I went to Lurhwayizo – about 50 kilometres from Willowvale – to meet with social entrepreneur, community leader and former uMkhonto weSizwe operative, Mr Mangaliso Jafta.

In a new season of the podcast – to be released in 2025 –  we are thickening the stories, as a way to piece through questions of healing, honouring the intimate yet politically charged story that continues to surface as an echo for those listening closely. Spending time in Lurhwayizo, allowed us to hear of a mindful recalling of forgotten activists involved in a battle that occurred in the area, and the haunted memories of those who were left behind. Sihle describes this “spending time” as a conduit for a deeper experience of a people, history and meaning. “Only through being present in space, only through engaging with the people who are from Lurhwayizo [can we] access that history, that knowledge”.

A general store owned by Jafta family in Lurwayizo

Throughout the project, it was important to me to create a digital home for the living repository of memories and experiences located in othered ontologies and cultures. It becomes an example of what co-authoring in informal spaces, through the everyday can look like. It emphasises the need for us to give place to our domestic experiences of knowledge, enabling language and our teachings to find new audiences who wish to be returned to something or learn anew.

And so, when I received an invitation from the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion to host the Global Fashioning Assembly (GFA) in October this year, I was excited to extend this listening in and sitting with to a hybrid audience. What does it mean to be in the presence of local fashion communities gathering from all over the world? How can it contribute to decentering and decolonising knowledge creation and sharing on body fashioning practices and heritages?

UN/FOLDING_RE/FOLDING_FOLDED: Imiphindo kwaXhosa joined 19 other self-representing, self-governing, and self-determining fashion coalitions from around the world, who during the month of October allowed for global and local audiences to “meet others who carry vast fashion knowledges,” as Erica de Greef of the African Fashion Research Institute described it in her opening welcome of our session.

From the intimate setting of my mother’s burgundy lounge, we screened two episodes of the podcast that offered an introduction to the fragments remaining of the violent and destructive battle that ensued between the apartheid police and the MK operatives in the area. We hear from Pumla Jafta, a businesswoman, creative writer and thinker in her tenderly spoken words that relay the intricacy of history, the layers of personhood, political and social abandonment, and the custodianship of history. She directs us to the value of creative and material practices that have invigorated a new telling of the past.

A peaceful morning in Lurhwayizo, outside the Jafta property where the community gather

How do you research your own culture? How do you familiarise yourself nesinxibo, language, practices and rituals that inform your ways of being in the world? Without othering myself and those I come to sit with, how can my presence come to aide an alternative way of reading and presenting ubuXhosa and the many nuances that underpin it. Through this sonic research work I am able to insert the voices that matter as spoken by them as new layers of critical thinking, potentially shifting and tilting what research practise can look like, who its key contributors can be and how they can be made visible.

Mama Jafta emphasises the manner in which we should enter the passage of listening: “Whatever we do, whenever we use eligama, we’ve got to be mindful of abantu. We’ve got to be mindful that they have totally been forgotten, in terms of ikhaya, in terms of indlu yakowabo, in terms of isiblings, in terms of inewphews because yena kwakungekho record yoba unomtana or anything like that.”

As an editorial gesture, I worked with filmic content capturing the visual landscape as an everyday observer, casual and connected to the people and place, offering a different sensing and seeing. This accompaniment to Mama Jafta’s recalling and retelling of the many threads of Lurhwayizo offers a glimpse into fashioning of both bodies and community, as alternative ways of reading fashion as culture, as isihlonipho, and as of time and place.

And so Imiphindo kwaXhosa becomes more than just a form of capturing culture for the sake of adding to the archive instead it becomes a way of reviving our collective memory, affording locals a way of hearing back from themselves as they think with the times, but also to look at what history has to offer collective consciousness and growth.

Author Siviwe James, right, with Mangaliso Jafta

• Feature image: The local community of Lurhwayizo gathers on an overcast day as they offer support to a family that had lost a child in a fire. As the police take stock of the surrounding events, the community became not only witness to the crime but they also became council, a sort of collective body of justice and mediation. The men and women sit in different parts of the property, discussing amongst themselves what this violent act means to the community and how they need to protect each other. At the end of the process between the police and the community, the grieving father got up and thanked the community for coming to his family’s side in their time of need. This whole moment spoke to how interconnected they are
• These podcasts form part of THE FOLD, a New Narratives project launched in 2023 and curated by the African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI) and supported by Creative Nestlings and the British Council
• To watch the full GFA24 session visit the link here
• The podcast is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts
• The project unfolds in this slow way with season one found here, and season two will be launched in February 2025
• James is the lead researcher and producer in the first season of stories, produced in close collaboration with curator and fashion practitioner-thinker Sihle Sogaula and videographer and fashion thinker-writer Bongani Tau
• For an expanded listening behind the ongoing research visit The Academic Citizen where Siviwe presented her research reflections at the Sound Matters Symposium hosted by the South African Research Chair in Science Communication, the Academic Citizen, and the South African Journal of Science