DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
Preview
2024
Volume 18 Number 4
2024
Volume 18 Number 4
Decolonial by Design: Building Sekuru's Stories
Jennifer W. Kyker
<jennifer_dot_kyker_at_rochester_dot_edu>, University of Rochester 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1876-2498
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1876-2498Abstract
This case study illustrates how carefully designed digital publications can make significant contributions to decolonial scholarship, with a focus on the humanities. Drawing upon my recent experience creating Sekuru's Stories, a co-authored digital humanities project featuring music from Southern Africa, I suggest several ways to engage this decolonizing potential. Among other issues, I discuss which digital platforms may prove most readily accessible to users with limited internet access, outline options for making content available in indigenous languages, and highlight special interactive features such as comparative map viewers and 3D imaging. I also discuss considerations in building digital projects that will prove accessible, robust, and sustainable over time, as well as specific strategies for cultivating a wide audience. One highlight of digital publication is its ability to support multiple navigation options, including both linear and non-linear ways of moving through content. Similarly, digital projects can integrate both narrative and non-narrative formats, blending aspects of monograph and website. When these considerations are taken into account, well-designed digital projects are uniquely capable of reaching a wide audience of scholars, students, and laypeople. As evidence, I analyze data from Google Analytics showing that the primary readership for our project is located in Southern Africa. I argue that digital humanities projects can prove accessible and engaging for non-specialists without sacrificing scholarly rigor, and I call upon scholars to embrace the decolonial potential of digital work. I conclude by outlining concrete steps to place the digital humanities more firmly at the heart of the humanities writ large.
Introduction
Shortly after arriving in Zimbabwean territory in the mid-1890s, the British South Africa Police established a
small camp in the town of Chinhoyi. Soon, however, British authority was threatened by a spirit medium
named Sasa, who had settled at the nearby sacred site of Chirorodziva. Sasa was
captured and taken to the police camp with his brothers, precipitating a dramatic series of events still recounted by
his descendants. Among them is Sekuru Tute Chigamba, a renowned performer of the Zimbabwean
mbira dzavadzimu, or mbira of the ancestral spirits. In
Chigamba's telling, the British forces demanded that Sasa prove his legitimacy by making
rain fall within the hour. Positioned beneath the hot sun, the brothers began to sing,
“Kakore tenderera, kemvura tenderera”, or, “Little cloud,
circle around, full of rain, circle around”. Soon, a small cloud appeared in the sky. The ensuing downpour
lasted more than a day, and after begging Sasa to halt the deluge, the British ordered him to resettle
near the British encampment. As Chigamba recounts, “The British said to
Sasa, ‘Whenever we need rain, we will come to you. You are the… [best] rainmaker in
Rhodesia’. … And people were coming to them to ask for rain”.
Chigamba's fascinating account of this colonial encounter belongs to the Shona narrative genre of
nhoroondo, or stories about the past. Drawing on decades of ethnographic work, I present
a series of Chigamba's oral narratives through a born-digital project titled Sekuru's
Stories (sekuru.org). Sekuru's Stories
brings together a multimedia ethnographic archive of photographs, musical transcriptions, maps, audio and visual
recordings, and narrative text, making it a project ideally suited for digital as opposed to manuscript publication
(see Figure 1). This digital project was co-authored with Chigamba, who is often referred to by the
honorific title Sekuru, or “Grandfather”. Born in 1939, Sekuru Chigamba
grew up immersed in the ritual life of northeastern Zimbabwe, where his father served as an interpreter
for a senior clan spirit, or mhondoro. Yet his father also worked as a cook on a succession
of commercial farms owned by white Rhodesian settlers, giving the young Chigamba an intimate view of
everyday colonial entanglements. Echoing one of the world's most recurring twentieth-century narratives,
Sekuru Chigamba migrated to the colonial capital in 1962. Here, he gained employment in a shop owned by
Albert Amato, a Jewish refugee who fled Rhodes Island during the Holocaust. During this time,
Sekuru Chigamba also began teaching himself to play the mbira dzavadzimu.
Now considered one of the world's foremost mbira musicians, Sekuru
Chigamba has toured widely in Europe, North America, and beyond.
Figure 1.
Screenshot of the homepage for Sekuru's Stories
(https://sekuru.org/home).Around the time of Zimbabwe's political independence, a rising tide of decolonial scholarship analyzed
several of the nation's oral poetic genres, with emphasis on the resilience and contemporary import of African
languages and cultures. Among these genres were tsumo proverbs
[Hamutyinei 1987], nhetembo praise poetry
[Hodza and Fortune 1979], ngano folktales [Hodza 1980], song
lyrics [Pongweni 1982], and the didactic and narrative poetic forms of
nhango and ndyaringo [Fortune 1974].
By comparison, nhoroondo have received scant scholarly attention. This may be partly
because the term nhoroondo can refer to various ways of narrating the past, including
legends and myths, specific historical accounts, individual life histories, and academic narratives. A variety of
other expressive forms, including songs, folktales, proverbs, and even dream narratives, are also frequently caught
up within nhoroondo. As exemplified in Sekuru Chigamba's account of
Sasa's encounter with British authorities, the narrative genre of
nhoroondo brings together multiple strands of scholarly interest, including
relationships between mediumship and musical performance [Berliner 1993], ritual and place
[Ranger 1999], and the problems of navigating different forms of power [Werbner 1991].
Through digital engagement with Sekuru Chigamba's narratives, Sekuru's
Stories takes up nhoroondo as a multivalent and polyphonic form, offering
a new way of approaching Zimbabwean history, biography, and memoir. Following Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni,
I consider Sekuru Chigamba's oral narratives through the larger framework of decoloniality, marked by an
“epistemological movement gesturing towards… the different ways of knowing by which people across
the human globe provide meaning to their existence” [Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019, 4]. This is
especially significant in light of published accounts of Zimbabwe's colonial and postcolonial history,
which includes a recent spate of both scholarly and popular memoirs [Fuller 2003]
[Godwin 2007] [Meldrum 2005] [Ranger 2013] [Todd 2007]. With
the exception of the account of a few black nationalists [Marembo 2014] [Mayowe 2015]
[Msipa 2015], however, these memoirs overwhelmingly portray the experiences of expatriates and white
Zimbabweans.[1]
In this context, the digital presentation of Sekuru Chigamba's oral histories offers precisely the type
of “counterstories” that “narrate away from the center of the digital
humanities which has been consistently and frequently imagined as a white, male, able-bodied, cisgendered,
heternormative space” [Kim 2018, 25–26].
Based on my experience creating Sekuru's Stories, I discuss some of the many ways in
which carefully designed digital publications can contribute to the decoloniality of knowledge by presenting new
ways “of thinking, knowing, and doing” [Kim 2018, 4].[2] My account highlights specific strategies and approaches in
building Sekuru's Stories. Among them, I advocate for building accessible, robust, and
sustainable digital projects, making content available in indigenous languages, cultivating readerships outside
North America and Europe, and integrating non-linear as well as linear paths through
digital humanities projects. I also discuss how specific design elements in Sekuru's
Stories, notably its logo and color scheme, both reflect and contribute to the project's decolonial goals.
Before turning to the project itself, however, I offer a brief description of Sekuru Chigamba's primary
instrument, the mbira dzavadzimu (or mbira of the
ancestral spirits), which has come to be one of Zimbabwe's most iconic musical traditions.
The Mbira Dzavadzimu
One of many types of mbira played throughout Southern Africa, the
mbira dzavadzimu features between 22 and 28 keys mounted on a wooden soundboard, or
gwariva (see Figure 2). These keys are organized into three separate registers,
with the highest register on the instrument's right-hand side, a middle register on the instrument's upper left-hand
side, and the lowest register on the instrument's lower left-hand side. Played during all-night ceremonies called
mapira, the mbira is instrumental in summoning the
ancestral spirits to possess living mediums, known as masvikiro. The
mbira's unique timbre is produced by shells, bottle tops, or wire beads affixed to
the instrument's soundboard, which produce a gentle buzzing sound integral to generating states of trance. During
performance, the mbira is often placed inside a calabash resonator, or
deze, which amplifies its sound. Within a typical ensemble,
mbira players are joined by at least one musician playing the
hosho shakers, which are responsible for maintaining a steady triplet pulse. The
hosho also contribute a dense, distinctive timbral quality that complements
the buzzing tone of the mbira.
Figure 2.
The mbira dzavadzimu (photograph by Jennifer Kyker).The repertory of the mbira dzavadzimu includes well over a hundred songs. While
some are specific to particular regions, families, or individuals, others are widely shared, immediately enabling
musicians from different areas to play together. Mbira songs generally feature two
interlocking parts, known as kushaura and kutsinhira,
which are played simultaneously by two or more musicians. The interplay between these parts produces the complex
polyphonic and polyrhythmic musical relationships characteristic of mbira music.
Because Sekuru Chigamba actively composes new songs for the mbira, his
stories offer examples of innovation within a musical tradition often described as inherently conservative in its
orientation toward the past [Berliner 1993] [Turino 2000]. In addition,
Sekuru's Stories presents a range of other musical practices, from twentieth-century
acoustic guitar playing to endangered Zimbabwean musical bows such as the mukube,
chipendani, and the groundbow.
Building Sekuru's Stories
I developed Sekuru's Stories between April 2018 and September 2019 with funding from an
ACLS Fellowship and institutional support from the University of Rochester's Digital
Scholarship department, led by director Emily Sherwood. With the backing of the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, as well as dedicated institutional investment, the University of Rochester is a leader
in the field of digital humanities. Many born-digital research projects supported by the Digital Scholarship
department, such as the Blake Archive, the Seward Family Archive, and the Bragdon Train Station, have come to
successful fruition. Through the Digital Scholarship department, I had access to a team of tech professionals that
included programmers, archivists, geographic information system (GIS) research specialists, visual technologists,
and specialists in metadata, information discovery, and digitization. After evaluating three different platforms —
Omeka, Scalar, and Wordpress — we selected Wordpress as best suited for broad, international accessibility. The
team then helped me select and customize a Wordpress theme that suited the project's requirements. Along the way, we
took care to minimize our use of plug-ins and external links to ensure long-term sustainability. The team's initial
contributions enabled me to work independently throughout the rest of the year as I built the project's internal
structure and added content.
Structuring a Digital Monograph
Designed as a digital monograph, Sekuru's Stories is organized into five sections
roughly akin to chapters, allowing readers to page sequentially through its content. Reflecting the project's
structure as a digital monograph, its initial landing page is designed to look like the digital analogue of a physical
book cover (see Figure 3). Despite growing interest in the digital humanities, relatively few digital humanities
projects present monograph-length scholarly work in the form of an interactive website. While many university presses
now work digitally, for example, they tend to employ the conventional format of e-books, which seldom accommodate
extensive multi-media features. Projects such as digital archives, on the other hand, often focus primarily on
curating primary source materials rather than presenting detailed interpretation and analysis. With its distinctive
format as a born-digital monograph, Sekuru's Stories has proven exceptionally successful
in garnering readers in Southern Africa and in the Global North.
Figure 3.
Screenshot of the landing page for Sekuru's Stories
(https://sekuru.org).Reflecting the multivalent nature of Sekuru Chigamba's oral narratives, Sekuru's
Stories is designed to encourage various modes of engagement, making it accessible and engaging for general
audiences and specialists alike. Organized in chronological order, the first three sections of the project — Early Years,
Musical Life, and Independence — chart the trajectory of Sekuru Chigamba's life. Two other sections —
“Mbira” and “Ancestors” — present Sekuru Chigamba's
specialized knowledge of Zimbabwean music and history. Each section of the project is accessible through the top
navigation bar, which serves as an analogue to the table of contents in a physical book. Within each section are the actual
stories, which may be read individually or sequentially and are accessible through drop-down menus. In addition, each section
of the site features introductory and concluding essays framing the stories within that section for readers.
In the first section of Sekuru's Stories, titled “Early Years”,
Sekuru Chigamba relates stories from his early years in Guruve, beginning with his birth in
1939 and ending with his departure as a migrant laborer in 1957. The stories in this section offer vivid oral testimony
about the detrimental effects of colonialization as experienced by an ordinary Zimbabwean family. At the same time, the
vibrant world of Zimbabwean musical practice within these stories illustrates the vitality and resilience of indigenous
lifeways even under trying circumstances. In the second section, titled “Musical Life”, he
recounts stories about his life in the urban capital, from his attendance at ceremonies in the early 1960s to his family's
experiences of extreme hardship in the late 1970s. Here, Sekuru's oral narratives challenge conventional
portrayals of the mbira dzavadzimu as an inherently conservative musical tradition.
Rather, his stories depict the mbira dzavadzimu as a vibrant musical practice
characterized by relentless innovation, creativity, and change.
The third section of Sekuru's Stories, titled “Independence”,
begins at the pivotal moment of political decolonization, which in turn paved the way for Sekuru Chigamba's
emergence as an international touring artist. The stories in this section illustrate how seemingly opposed spiritual
figures important during Zimbabwe's liberation struggle interact within a worldview that understands
political and religious authority as interrelated. Through his involvement as a mbira
musician, Sekuru Chigamba brought this worldview to life in many forms. These include his work composing
mbira songs and lyrics dedicated to senior ancestral spirits, his creative arrangements
of songs performed by Apostolic Christian leaders and their followers, and his active musical participation in ceremonies
organized by traditionalists and Apostolic sects alike. In the process, Sekuru Chigamba's musical engagement
and oral histories have participated in what anthropologist Joost Fontein has called the creation of
“alternative, moral visions of the past, present and future”
[Fontein 2006, 178].
In the fourth section of the project, titled “Mbira”, Sekuru Chigamba
offers a detailed account of his primary instrument, the mbira dzavadzimu, exploring
topics such as the mbira's origins, the law of mbira,
and the social role of the mbira player, or gwenyambira.
This section includes a catalogue of various songs from the mbira's extensive repertory,
with audio examples and Sekuru Chigamba's explanation of each song's meaning and significance. Here,
Sekuru Chigamba's oral narratives describe constant practices of innovation, revealing the creativity,
experimentation, and innovation inherent in indigenous ritual and musical traditions. In the fifth section, titled
“Ancestors”, Sekuru Chigamba turns to the ancestor spirits for whom
the mbira has historically been performed. This section presents Sekuru
Chigamba's understanding of the long perspective of Zimbabwean history.
The last section of the site, titled “Explore”, invites readers into the project through
completely different modes of engagement (see Figure 4). This section offers several non-linear paths through the site,
inviting viewers to engage with an extensive image gallery, musical archive, and other special features. These include a
3D viewer of one of Sekuru Chigamba's oldest instruments, online audio streaming through a SoundCloud
playlist, free digital audio downloads through Bandcamp, an interactive family tree and timeline, and individual pages
describing several indigenous Zimbabwean instruments.
Figure 4.
Screenshot of the “Explore” page for Sekuru's Stories
(https://sekuru.org/explore).Design choices in Sekuru's Stories
The single most prominent design element in Sekuru's Stories is its logo, which depicts a
stylized version of a fish eagle, known in Shona as hungwe (see Figure 5). Long held sacred by
Shona speakers, the fish eagle is closely associated with the pre-colonial empire of Great Zimbabwe in
Masvingo, where several soapstone carvings of fish eagles rose prominently from the imposing stone walls of
the kingdom's many enclosures. In the nineteenth century, colonial explorers removed these carvings from the sacred site
of Great Zimbabwe and sent them to various museums in apartheid South Africa and
Europe for display. Following independence, the carvings were subsequently returned to Zimbabwe,
with an initial group of four birds returned by South Africa in the early 1980s and a final sculpture returned
by the German government in 2003 [Ranger 2004]. The carvings' history has rendered them metonyms of
national history writ large, In the words of anthropologist Joost Fontein, “The story
of their removal from Great Zimbabwe at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth
century, and final return to Zimbabwe in the early 1980s has come almost to symbolise the cultural
colonisation of Zimbabwe, and the ultimate victory of independence”
[Fontein 2006, 782].
Figure 5.
Logo for Sekuru's Stories (media file from Sekuru's
Stories).Fontein procedes to observe, “Apart from Great Zimbabwe itself, nothing has
been invested with as much national symbolic sentiment as these birds. They have become an intricate part of the spiritual
and historical basis of the state of Zimbabwe” [Fontein 2006, 782]. Epitomizing
these associations, the national flag hoisted to replace the British Union Jack on the eve of Zimbabwe's
independence — April 18, 1980 — featured a black-and-yellow line drawing of the fish eagle based on the most iconic of
the Great Zimbabwe sculptures.[3] Inherently tied to the moment
of the nation's political decolonization, this particular carving has come to be known simply as the
“Zimbabwe Bird”. It continues to serve as the most prominent symbol of Zimbabwe's political
independence, leading Sekuru Chigamba to remark on how its image “continues to appear
on all things related to Zimbabwe”.[4] Indeed,
the Zimbabwe Bird is rendered in various ways on the nation's currency and coat of arms, as well as in parastatal and
private company logos [Fontein 2006, 782].
Centrally positioned in the static header that appears on all pages on the site (see Figure 6), the logo for
Sekuru's Stories features Sekuru Chigamba's own rendition of the Zimbabwe Bird,
which he began carving into the wooden soundboard of mbira instruments shortly after it
was adopted as a symbol of the new nation in the early 1980s. Yet Sekuru Chigamba also holds the fish eagle
particularly meaningful on a personal level, as it was his mother's totem, or mutupo.
Indeed, Sekuru Chigamba was first motivated to carve the Zimbabwe Bird on the back of his own personal
instrument as a form of remembrance, or mucherechedzo. As he told me,
“It was a form of remembrance. I did it for my mother, who is of the Shiri (bird) totem, that fish
eagle… I just thought, ‘Let me add the image of the fish eagle’. And then I added it. I said,
‘I am adding an image of my mother’” (Interview with author, 18 May 2017). Shortly
thereafter, Chigamba's fellow mbira maker Chris Mhlanga noticed
the carving and encouraged him to begin carving it on all of the instruments he made and sold. As Chigamba
recalled, “Mhlanga saw it, and said, ‘Oh, your
mbira has an image of the fish eagle. Why?’ I said, ‘That is
my mother's totem’. He said, ‘Put it on all your mbira’.
Yes, and I said, ‘That's a great idea’. Then I put an image of the fish eagle on all my
mbira” (Interview with author, 18 May 2017). Sekuru Chigamba's carving
of the Zimbabwe Bird thus functions both as a widely recognized icon of political decolonization and as an intimate
remembrance of his maternal lineage, history, and kinship networks.
Figure 6.
Header for Sekuru's Stories (media file from Sekuru's
Stories).The elongated shape, unique patterning, and lack of color in Sekuru Chigamba's rendition of the fish eagle
clearly distinguish his carvings from the Zimbabwe Bird featured on the nation's flag. In Sekuru's
Stories, his carving is rendered as a simple, black-and-white line drawing. While this color scheme echoes the
coloring of the fish eagle itself, black and white also have particular significance for
mbira players, spirit mediums, and other ritual specialists. As Zimbabwean scholar
A.C. Hodza explains, “Hungwe (fish eagle) becomes
sacred because of its two colours, namely, white and black… the two colours are likened to two black and white pieces
of cloth given to a spirit medium. When the two pieces are sewn together, and have become one, it is called
jira rehungwe or fuko remudzimu”
[Roberts, Wylie, and Hodza 1982, 57]. This color combination likewise inspired the overall aesthetic of
Sekuru's Stories. Apart from photographs, the site's design largely features simple black
text set against a clean, white background, with shades of gray and tan used for most borders, buttons, and hyperlinks.
Like its logo, the color palette of Sekuru's Stories thus references both the black-and-white
coloring of the fish eagle and the jira rehungwe cloths worn by mediums during spirit
possession ceremonies, which are in turn the subject of many of the oral narratives presented in this digital project.
Cultivating Readership in the Global South
As critical digital pedagogy scholar Jesse Stommel has observed, “Making scholarly work
legible to the public and helping it find audiences is a form of outreach, community building, and advocacy”
[Stommel 2018, 81]. Early on, I made the decision to build Sekuru's Stories
publicly, giving readers access to the site as I created it. In doing so, I sought to build an audience for the project
from the beginning, rather than waiting for the project's completion. At the same time, I understood that readers would be
more likely to engage with the project's extensive materials piece by piece. Through the subscription function on
Wordpress, I sent out weekly emails informing subscribers about newly published pages. I also shared new material on
Facebook through my personal page and in groups for the global Zimbabwean music community. Finally, I circulated the
project through the Society for Ethnomusicology listserv and various Zimbabwean music community listservs.
People began reading Sekuru's Stories immediately, with 162 users on the first day. These
numbers picked up quickly, with more than three hundred readers in the first week, five hundred in the first month, and
twenty-two hundred in the first year, for a total of over twenty thousand individual page views.
Sekuru's Stories was also assigned in graduate and undergraduate classes in ethnomusicology
during the build phase. Presently, over fourteen thousand individual users have accessed the site since I launched it in
January 2019.
During the build phase, the major readership for Sekuru's Stories was in the
United States and Canada, followed by a secondary concentration in Southern Africa.
Gradually, however, this situation has reversed, and most readers are now located in Zimbabwe and
South Africa, followed by the US and the UK. In one recent month, for example,
just over eleven hundred users visited Sekuru's Stories. Fully seven hundred of them were in
Zimbabwe, representing 65.23% of the site's recent readership. And of the fourteen thousand individual users
who have accessed the site since its inception, nearly five thousand have been in Zimbabwe, with another two
thousand readers in South Africa. Together, this represents roughly half of the total readership for the
project. The US and the UK, on the other hand, jointly account for just over four thousand
discrete users, or roughly a third of the project's total readership.
Anthropology and related disciplines have increasingly recognized that ethnography involves work “with
real, everyday people who deserve to know what we are up to and how we are interpreting their lives”
[Lassiter 2005, 121]. Enacting this premise in a digital realm, Sekuru's
Stories is designed for both scholars and general audiences, including a world-wide community comprised of
students and performers of the mbira dzavadzimu and related Zimbabwean musical
traditions. Sekuru's Stories is also specifically designed to appeal to both English and
Shona speakers, as well as readers with an interest in learning the Shona language. Many of Sekuru Chigamba's
stories are available in both Shona and English versions, with a button enabling viewers to easily move between the two
languages (see Figure 7). Combined with platform choices and a public build, this Shona-language component has contributed
significantly to making Sekuru's Stories accessible to audiences in Zimbabwe and
its associated diaspora.
Figure 7.
Screenshots featuring parallel pages in English
(https://sekuru.org/meeting-sekuru-gora/) and Shona
(https://sekuru.org/kuzivana-nasekuru-gora/).Decolonization and Fieldwork Ethics
As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, decolonization is not a metaphor; rather, it is the
struggle for the “the repatriation of Indigenous land and life”
[Tuck and Yang 2012, 1]. While co-authorship conveys some limited benefits within the international
framework of intellectual property rights, it does little to change material inequalities. To this end, after receiving
an ACLS Fellowship for Sekuru's Stories, I found it important to share this
funding with Sekuru Chigamba. With slightly over half of the fellowship money, Sekuru Chigamba
purchased a five-bedroom home for his wife and young children. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, I then began teaching online
community mbira classes to support my three primary mbira teachers,
Musekiwa Chingodza, Patience Munjeri, and Sekuru Chigamba, all of whom were affected
through canceled tours, closed post offices, and the demise of international travel. Over fifteen months, these classes
raised a total of around $35,000. Sekuru Chigamba's share of these funds has enabled him to install solar
panels and dig a generator-operated borehole, providing the family with both electricity and running water.
My collaborative, digital projects with Sekuru Chigamba and other Zimbabwean musicians reflect my conviction
that our “primary responsibility is to the community consultants with whom we work”
[Lassiter 2005, 83]. In addition to writing articles, teaching classes, and presenting at conferences,
I have sought to privilege working with my teachers on projects in which they derive significant economic benefit. The
struggle for the repatriation of indigenous life and land remains incomplete; as such, our efforts to work toward
collaborative projects must remain ongoing and subject to critique and revision at all times. Digital, online, and applied
approaches to ethnomusicology hold great promise for those of us who are committed to the co-creative process of this
ethical imperative.
Moving Forward
The digital humanities offer unique opportunities for ethnomusicologists to work toward innovative projects with our
research collaborators. As we worked together on developing Sekuru's Stories,
Sekuru Chigamba read over and commented upon all my transcriptions and translations. With funding from the
University of Rochester Humanities Center, he also came to workshop the material with Darien
Lamen, Tony Perman, and Stefan Fiol, all of whom he knew from their previous travel to
Zimbabwe as graduate students in ethnomusicology. Our discussions at this workshop proved essential in
enabling me to develop the theoretical framing for the individual stories on the site and in bringing our voices together
much more closely than if I had worked on this material independently.
While Sekuru's Stories was co-authored, one of the project's limitations is a design team
based entirely in the Global North, without the participation of institutions and individuals working in the digital
humanities in Zimbabwe. This was largely due to the combined pressures of balancing the demands of a
tenure-track academic career and family life. In the first place, I built Sekuru's Stories
while raising my young, Black son as a single parent and full-time academic, with limited working hours and ability to
travel. At the same time, I conceived the project while still a junior faculty member, which hindered my ability to
envision and execute complex collaborative projects spanning multiple institutions and continents. The circumstances
under which I built Sekuru's Stories reflect Kim's observations regarding how
women and people of color may find themselves “doing double or triple the work” as they seek
to engage in the necessary “labor — political, social, and cultural capital — to work ethically and
with respect for various communities” [Kim 2018, 486]. They do not, however, erase critical
distinctions between the content of Sekuru's Stories, which was produced through a long-term,
collaborative effort between Sekuru Chigamba and myself, and the project's design, which I undertook largely
on my own.
Following directly on Sekuru's Stories, I am currently working toward a second digital
project that will bridge various departments at the University of Rochester and the University of
Zimbabwe, representing a more sustained, collaborative foray into the digital humanities. Provisionally titled
Portrait of Zimbabwe/Mufananidzo weZimbabwe, this project will curate and present an
extensive selection of images from the Chicago Dzviti Photographic Archive.[5]
Several of these images were also featured in Sekuru's Stories (see Figure 8), paving the
way for this new project. Through a multimedia approach linking Dzviti's photographs of Zimbabwean musicians to
audio examples, physical instruments, and ephemera, our collaborative digital humanities project will offer a unique depiction
of Zimbabwean musical life as viewed through the eyes of a pioneering Zimbabwean visual artist. Expanding my initial work on
Sekuru's Stories, Portrait of Zimbabwe/Mufananidzo weZimbabwe
represents a more complex and sustained collaborative effort in digital publication, in which scholars located on both sides
of the Atlantic engage as digital subjects and producers.[6]
Figure 8.
Screenshot of the Chicago Dzviti Collection image gallery in Sekuru's Stories
(https://sekuru.org/chicago-dzviti-collection/).Sekuru's Stories illustrates several promising facets of the digital humanities, with great
significance for future projects. This includes their capacity to present narrative content in multiple languages,
ability to integrate special interactive features, compatibility with online music platforms such as Soundcloud and
Bandcamp, and accessibility for readerships located in the Global South. Yet, the digital humanities continue to occupy
an uneasy space in academic scholarship. The ACLS Fellowship I received for Sekuru's
Stories confirmed the project's scholarly importance and served a function akin to peer review.
Sekuru's Stories has also been favorably reviewed in many academic journals, including
Reviews in Digital Humanities 1(1), Journal of the American Musicological
Society 73(2), African Music 11(2), Yearbook for Traditional
Music 52, and Ethnomusicology Forum 29(3). In the absence of a formal peer-review
process for digital humanities projects, fellowships and scholarly reviews are two modes of providing evidence of a
project's scholarly rigor.
There are many other ways in which ethnomusicology and other academic disciplines can and should work toward facilitating
full acceptance of digital humanities projects. These might include actions at the level of our professional societies
such as creating prizes specifically for digital projects, as well as opening existing prizes to digital work as well as
printed publications. Of equal if not greater importance, professional societies should develop guidelines for evaluating
work in digital humanities for the purposes of hiring, tenure, and promotion. Such guidelines have been adopted by some
organizations, such as the American Musicological Society, the Modern Language Association, and
the American Historical Association. Yet many of these statements do little more than refer readers back to
guidelines developed by the Modern Language Association in 2012. By developing their
own detailed guidelines for the evaluation of digital projects, professional societies can establish useful baselines both
within the disciplines and for individual universities dealing with questions of hiring, promotion, and tenure.
Notes
[1] One notable exception is a memoir published by third-generation Chinese Zimbabwean
Fay Chung, who played an important role in the nationalist movement [Chung 2006].
[2] I take the
idea of decoloniality of knowledge specifically from the work of Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni. Echoing
Kim's formulation, Ndlovu-Gatsheni likewise emphasizes the importance of
“the emergence of another-thinking, another-logic, and another-world view”
[Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019, 16].
[3] In addition to its depiction on the flag, a more intricate rendering
of the same sculpture has also frequently appeared on Zimbabwe's currency.
[4] Kyker, J. and Chigamba, T. (2018) “Masvingo's Rise
and Fall”, Sekuru's Stories,
https://sekuru.org/masvingos-rise-and-fall/.
[6] I thank an anonymous reviewer for this wording.
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Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
