Alexandrina Agloro

This description of ubuntu comes from Desmond Tutu’s book, No Future without Forgiveness—a text detailing the lessons the archbishop learned as the chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Although ubuntu is a social philosophy, the word appears in writings from the South African Constitutional Court, cementing its humanistic goals into the fabric of governmental legislation and everyday life for South Africans.1 This chapter continues the thread of ubuntu and makes a crossing into a digital ubuntu, or how connectivity using the internet furthers the values of collective well-being and care. The proliferation of digital music creation and music sharing is an example of this connectivity, and in this chapter, I share how the Philippi Music Project enacts these values of digital ubuntu through music-centered community making.

As an American outsider to South Africa and the Philippi township, I am hesitant to ascribe the labels of “digital humanities” or “community makerspace” to the Philippi Music Project (PMP), because those labels are Western and academic in their construction and not terms PMP would call itself—yet the work taking place at PMP is digital humanities work. Although technology has historically been deployed to disempower Black communities, in the spaces where Blackness and technology meet, PMP demonstrates that technology has the potential to bring the township residents closer together. Within this context, examining technology that enhances human relationships echoes Moya Bailey’s call to center the identities of humanness in digital humanities. In her article, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave,” Bailey asserts, “There is a need to address the complexities of globalization, colonization, and the alienated labor of people of color in the production of technology that advances digital scholarship practices that they will not be able to access or directly benefit from.”2 Bailey critiques the “add and stir” model of diversity in the invisibly white gatekeeping of what digital humanities is and asks us to recognize the work that is already taking place using digital tools to address human questions and so push the boundaries of the field. PMP is aligned with these human questions, and much like the music and sound coming from the townships, it is not trying to model itself to mimic Western culture. Instead, it is addressing the residues of colonialism through music production and dissemination so that artists in the townships are able to benefit from technological advances.

Digital ubuntu is a concept that has popped up across Africa and the United States. In 2015, Zawadi Nyong’o used the hashtag #DigitalUbuntu as a Kenyan Twitter campaign to build awareness of the impact of sharing negative information online and across the Black Atlantic; in that same year a conference was held at Fairfield University in the United States called Writing Our Lives—Digital Ubuntu. Most closely related to the context of digital ubuntu in this chapter is South African Glenda Venn’s TEDxRhodesU talk, where she referred to digital ubuntu as a way to invest in small startup businesses that could in turn help people became financially sustainable and no longer need to be supported by public grants.3 I propose that PMP’s practice of digital ubuntu reveals itself through interfacing across social media platforms with social entrepreneurship and social innovation organizations locally in Cape Town and across Europe. And while it must be legible to a global audience, PMP holds true to operating in a uniquely South African cultural sensibility without aiming to become another generic, whitewashed lab or fabrication studio.

It makes sense to zoom out and outline the South African digital landscape to better understand the context in which PMP operates. South Africa is widely considered the digital gateway to Africa. Cape Town—nicknamed the “Silicon Cape”—houses the fastest-growing economy in South Africa, in part because of the connectedness of its digital and startup cultures. The Cape Innovation & Technology Initiative offers the following snapshot of Cape Town: within fifty kilometers of Cape Town are four world-class universities and two globally recognized business schools. Nearly twelve thousand graduates of STEM fields are produced annually, and 60 percent of the population in Cape Town is under age thirty-five. Cape Town has the fastest supercomputer in Africa, one of the largest open-access fiber optic networks on the African continent, and a 60 percent internet penetration—including 275 public free Wi-Fi hotspots. The tech industry is thriving: 60 percent of South Africa’s startups are based in Cape Town, as are more than twenty startup accelerators and over twenty-five coworking spaces—the most of any African city.4 The city boasts world-class programmers, software engineers, and developers, and major tech companies including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have offices in town. Digital creative fields are thriving as well: Red Bull Recording Studios is located in Cape Town’s central business district (CBD), and fifteen of the seventeen indie game development studios in the Western Cape Province are in Cape Town.5 The culture of digital innovation permeates central Cape Town, and although innovation is just as strong in the townships, digital access is much more difficult.

Historical systems of segregation play a particular role in keeping Black and brown peoples from accessing technologies, as well as attaining the needed education and training to keep up with the digitally globalized world. The Philippi Music Project is located in the heart of Philippi, a township on the southwest outskirts of Cape Town. Geographically separated townships are communities intentionally situated outside of main cities in South Africa where Black and Coloured families were forced to relocate, most explicitly during the apartheid period. Although legislated apartheid was dismantled in the early 1990s, access to housing, education, and opportunities is still starkly unequal; discrimination—an instrument of colonialism—has been a part of South African cities since the Dutch arrived in 1652. Townships are the poorest urban communities in South Africa, and the World Bank estimates that half of South Africa’s urban population lives in townships and informal settlements. These residents make up about 38 percent of working-age citizens.6 Very few of the free Wi-Fi hotspots are found in the townships. Free access to the internet is rare, as are the hardware, software, and maintenance to support digital connectivity.

Internet usage and access to mobile data are limited in South Africa by the prohibitive cost of pay-as-you-go mobile data and unequal coverage by cell phone carriers. One study found that in Khayelitsha, one of the poorest townships in Cape Town, the average monthly income for a family of five is ZAR 1600 (about $114 USD) and cell phone users spent an average of ZAR 100–200 per user each month on mobile data. Despite the expense, the growth of mobile data usage in the townships has outpaced the average of South African users as a whole, indicating that mobile internet usage in the townships relies more heavily on cellular data networks than on Wi-Fi because of the limited availability of free public Wi-Fi.7 Although there are 4G and LTE cellular networks available across South Africa, in many townships only 3G service exists. South African mobile carriers like Vodacom and CellC acknowledge the increased demand for data coverage in the townships but claim that the high population density and lack of infrastructure make it difficult to meet the growing need.8 As internet access has become more crucial to communication and the functioning of daily life, the United Nations issued a declaration implying that open internet access is a human right.9 Notably, South Africa opposed the resolution along with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and India.

As illustrated in this overview of Cape Town and its townships, digital connectivity permeates every aspect of daily life for those living in Cape Town proper, as well as for those living in the surrounding townships. The culture of creativity and ingenuity is just as strong in the townships, but township residents must develop extra layers of resourcefulness to fill the gap between the possibilities in their imaginations and the practicalities of their everyday life. PMP works to support creativity while experimenting with sustainable ways to bridge the digital, economic, and resource gaps between Cape Town and its townships. It uses digital music production and dissemination as a social connector and solution to produce, market, and sell local township music.

PMP’s strategy of music production taps into the contemporary ways that music connects people, while drawing on South Africa’s tradition of using music as a link for social movement building and social change. According to Francois Bonicci, director of the Bertha Center of Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Cape Town, music is the medium of South African people. He describes music as giving voice to issues and emotions, as well as offering joy and creating a strong bond that brings people together.10 Music has been integral to South African social movements, much like how popular culture was a critical facet of politics in the United States during the civil rights era.11 During his first visit to the United States, Nelson Mandela gave a speech in Detroit, where he shared that he had found solace listening to Motown music while imprisoned on Robben Island.12 Music crosses time and space, inspiring across borders. South African rap also came into its own as a style and genre in 1994, the same year Nelson Mandela was elected president. This new sound matured to include creative use of local African languages, multilingual word plays, and instrumental tracks inspired by local music.13 Music provides that aural sense of digital ubuntu that inspires joy and human connections.

PMP was formed in 2014 to provide a space to record music at affordable prices for local township artists and also to be a gathering space and creativity hub for local young people. Philippi local Sibusiso Nyamakazi and French entrepreneur Baptiste Guillemet teamed up to create PMP while Guillemet was studying as an exchange student at University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. Early on, the two found that there was interest in hip-hop and electronic music, but there was no infrastructure to support music making. Recording studios in the CBD of Cape Town are often inaccessible to township artists because of the costs of studio time and of traveling into the CBD. Township artists were hindered by deficiencies of recording space, available training, and ability to disseminate their music.14 PMP’s approach meets the professional needs of local people using a model adapted to the economic realities of township life, including providing recording studio time on a sliding-fee scale. It has teamed up with Britecap (a job search mobile app), Playing for Change (a network of music schools), and the SAE Institute (a school of sound production, design, and film) to provide training, workshops, and access to scholarships. As a hub for digital music creation and dissemination, PMP is doing the work of providing an outlet to township residents so they can vocalize what it means to be human using the digital tools at their disposal. As an organization focused on serving its local community with digital connectivity, PMP does not present itself as a scholarly resource for academic audiences. Recalling Moya Bailey’s call for inclusivity and how digital humanities should meet people where they are, PMP is doing digital humanities work without the title.

PMP enacts digital ubuntu by bridging relationships between digital skills and real-world community need. Its physical space is a visual fusion of the ethos of township ingenuity and hip-hop culture, and it embodies hip-hop’s ethos of making something out of what is perceived to be nothing. The remodeled shipping container that PMP calls home houses a recording studio, a sound engineering booth, a student study area, and a patio with a DJ booth that can be used for community events. This space reflects the culture of collectivity found in digital ubuntu, which has expanded far beyond the original idea of creating a single mixtape featuring local township artists and giving its proceeds back to the featured musicians. According to Nyamakazi, that model was flawed because it did not do enough to sustain artists in the long term. One single mixtape was too small for the collective vision of growth and support that PMP imagined. Nyamakazi also saw the need for a space for schoolchildren to do their homework and for local gatherings. For these reasons, the space not only contains tools for digital music production but it also can transform into a hub for real-world connection as needed by local people.

PMP uses digital tools to extend South Africa’s ubuntu spirit to a global level through its online presence. It maintains this digital presence through its website and social media for both local and global connections. PMP relies heavily on international crowdfunding, using sites like Indiegogo to achieve development goals. Its first major crowdfunding campaign secured funds to insulate and soundproof the shipping container and buy the equipment for the recording studio. At the end of the campaign, sixty-four donors across South Africa, France, and the United States raised $3,444 USD. With additional donations from local NGOs, PMP was able to complete construction on the shipping container and purchase the equipment necessary for a recording studio. A year later, PMP again crowdfunded to send Nyamakazi to the Modular Festival in Ausburg, Germany, to give a three-day music workshop and showcase South African music as public-facing outreach for PMP. Crowdfunding to maintain an organization is a daunting task, and PMP was able to do the outreach, constant updating, social media blasts, and online interaction with visitors necessary to achieve successful crowdfunding campaigns, despite the constraints of township internet connectivity. Recently, PMP has ventured into offering an Airbnb experience as a way to generate income and increase global exposure. Marketed as an Airbnb “social impact experience,” Nyamakazi hosts guests, who hear the stories and music of local Philippi musicians and participate in a jam session. These deliberate efforts of social media, crowdfunding, and marketing tours illuminate PMP’s work at a global level.

PMP’s use of Facebook shows how the organization balances its local and global connections and fosters a sense of togetherness. Facebook enables the organization to stay connected to followers, donors, and constituents overseas and to keep its local community up to date. The organization maintains a robust Facebook presence, following social media guidelines of how to gain followers and stay present in their short attention spans. Maintaining an active social media presence requires constant content creation, as well as a stable internet connection to post status updates and upload photos and videos. These updates act as donor cultivation activities to keep international followers interested and invested in PMP’s developing work.

Whereas its Facebook page is geared toward global outreach, PMP’s use of Facebook Live targets engagement with its local community in real time through livestreaming video. This kind of streaming requires a significant amount of data and a consistent internet connection, yet constant access is sometimes unreliable in the townships. Because internet is a limited resource, the organization has to prioritize how its capped internet connection is distributed between daily administrative tasks, content dissemination for its international followers, and local interest generation. For example, on a weekend afternoon Nyamakazi livestreamed a Johannesburg-based muralist painting on the inside walls of the shipping container as a means to document the event. Seeing the Facebook Live video in real time, people who were close by the Philippi Village started immediately dropping by PMP’s shipping container to experience what was taking place; one such visitor, who brought his children to watch the art-making, was a director of one of the partnering NGOs. After about twenty minutes, the capped amount of data ran out, and the video cut off. The live stream abruptly ended, and anyone relying on the shipping container’s Wi-Fi connection for WhatsApp messaging or other communication lost access. At that moment, it was uncertain when the internet connection could be topped up again and if it would be ready when the new workweek began. This example also illustrates how money still supersedes the spirit of ubuntu in a capitalist economy, because without the funds to keep the internet topped up, there is no way to stay connected.

Digital ubuntu adapts a culturally specific term to describe the uniquely South African approach that PMP takes to balance local issues of access and connectivity with transnational social media outreach for collaboration and funding. As the Facebook Live example demonstrates, ubuntu is a concept largely incomprehensible within capitalist economic interests. And though communities of color in the United States have always had to rely on each other for survival after they arrived in a foreign land as enslaved abductees or after their indigenous lands were stolen, the struggles of these same communities are juxtaposed with celebrated American success myths of “rugged individualism” and the “self-made man” as models of success and self-worth. Digital ubuntu does not mean that the difficulties of unequal labor, resources, and access under capitalism do not exist, and issues of unequal access and the difficulties of running an organization have surfaced as Guillemet moved back to Europe while Nyamakazi stayed in Philippi. But digital ubuntu describes these South African digital practices within their own context, rather than using Westernized terms like digital humanities that do not quite fit.

Earlier in this chapter I discussed how Nelson Mandela shared his connection to Motown, one of Detroit’s musical heritages, in a speech he delivered there during his first visit to the United States. I conclude this chapter by returning to the African diasporic city of Detroit. While the word “ubuntu” is not explicitly named, a similar reliance on collectivity and togetherness can be seen in the actions of organizers in Detroit. Community organizers recall how local Black liberation activists Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs developed their theories of organizing strategies around technology and collective togetherness. Grace Lee Boggs believed that technology could be an answer to freeing us from capitalist wage labor, and James Boggs was known to say, “It is only in relationship to other bodies and many somebodies, that any of us is somebody.”15 His statement echoes Desmond Tutu’s epigraph at the beginning of this chapter. Although this chapter discusses digital ubuntu as a specifically South African sentiment, the positions of Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs demonstrate that the crossings of digital ubuntu have relevance throughout the Black Atlantic.