Aryan Kaganof is many things — filmmaker, writer, artist, historian, editor, provocateur. It is tempting to describe him as being like a chameleon, although that isn’t quite right. Certainly, he changes colours, deploying contrasting identities, moving between different environments and contexts with aplomb. As a documentarian or as a promoter of others’ work, he can blend into the background. But he is also, in many ways, conspicuous; he doesn’t fit in, he rubs against the grain, he is by nature nonconformist.
Perhaps it’s better to call him a shape-shifter. Over the years I have encountered him as a poet, as an unconventional political activist — one thinks of his films about Marikana and FeesMustFall — and even as a kind of public performance artist. He is, by turns, ironic and earnest. It’s very difficult to pin him down. Yet he is rigorously self-critical when it comes to the question of whiteness in SA and he is committed to both the ethical and intellectual considerations of decolonisation.
Having followed some of the strands in Kaganof’s career I was intrigued when, in 2020, he launched herri — a digital publication promising to “turn academic work into public knowledge” (the university professor in me believes there is no higher calling than this). Ostensibly the focus is on music and “imagining a future SA music studies”; herri is a project of the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University and is published by the institute’s director, Stephanus Muller.
The website is structured into issues — there have been six thus far — each carrying a theme linked to some aspect of the (South) African soundscape, to individual musicians, to a particular genre or style or other musical phenomenon. Editorials and themed pieces offer diverse threads that may or may not be picked up by contributors in other sections of the issue. Names both recognisable and obscure mix and mingle as objects of study and subjects of tribute: Mantombi Matotiyana, the Eoan Group, Barney Rachabane, Graham Newcater. A forthcoming issue is on jazz maestro Johnny Mbizo Dyani.
These themes are, however, merely focal points or springboards. Under headings both playful and discordant — “borborygmus”, “claque”, “frictions” — dozens of impressive contributors are corralled into conversation. Some of the material is original commissioned work, some of it has been harvested from elsewhere. As curator-editor, Kaganof weaves the elements together. Text is interrupted by, overlaid on and supplemented with images and embedded video. Artwork meets audio. It is cluttered but beautiful, a heady multimedia mix that invigorates and takes you down innumerable virtual rabbit holes.
In building “a soundmine of narratives, mythologies, ideologies, statements, ambiguities and ideas just waiting to be excavated”, herri expands in many directions — from literature to the visual arts and film, from polemics about cultural production in SA to reflections on heritage studies. In fact, as the metaphor of mining and excavation suggests, herri is not just a publication or a platform but an ever-expanding archive. It offers a journey down, through horizontal layers of history, but it is very much present- and future-orientated, a portal between diverse settings and geographies and languages.
Kaganof’s design encourages visitors to the site to lose themselves in the archive and gives them fixed navigation points. The herri credo declares that “Discontinuity is the continuity. Disconnection is the connection. Incoherence is the coherence.” There is nonetheless much method in the madness, and herri is also quite clear about its manifesto: facilitating “critical and artistic engagement with a variety of SA musics” in various “discursive registers” (that’s academese for a healthy mengelmoes of voices and writing modes — an erudite essay, a screenshot of an email, a wordy think piece and an experimental poem will all find a home at herri).
Above all, to browse through herri is to receive a musical education; as Fela Kuti sang, “Who no know go know”.
Kaganof recently announced that herri has reached a quarter of a million page views. That’s no mean feat for a public-facing scholarly project. If it keeps going like this, soon a lot more people are going to know a lot more about, as Kaganof describes it, “what decolonisation sounds like in the age of techno hybridity”.
Visit herri.org.za.
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