The concept of sacred space in the amaXhosa context does not map onto Western theological categories of the holy as set apart from the ordinary. Sacred spaces in Hamburg Nyulutsi, the Keiskamma River, and the Indian Ocean are simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: They are used for fishing, for collecting grass, for daily washing and for the most intense ritual moments of a community’s spiritual life. What makes them sacred is not their separation from everyday practice but the density and quality of the relationships they sustain. As Eliade (1959) observed, the sacred is constituted through encounter; but in the amaXhosa context, that encounter is not a singular hierophany but an ongoing, repeated, sonically activated engagement with ancestral presence.

For community members in Hamburg, sacred spaces are primary sites of identity formation in the fullest sense: they are where individuals learn who they are, where they come from and what they are responsible for. Veronica Betani, a project manager at the Keiskamma Trust, describes her relationship with the ocean in terms that reveal how identity, ancestry and spatial practice are interwoven:

To be ‘a person from the river’ is not a geographical description but an ontological one: It locates the speaker within an ancestral network that has specific obligations towards a specific landscape.

This ontological grounding of identity in sacred landscape has practical implications for how community members navigate the contemporary world. Sambesiwe Mavela, a Rhodes University master’s student from Hamburg, describes visiting the sacred space as a process of identity renewal:

The language of rebirth and the removal of baggage registers the transformative power of sacred encounter, but it also registers the burden of living in a world that does not recognise the legitimacy of this form of knowledge or this form of selfhood.

The amaXhosa cosmological framework understands the natural world as animated by ancestral presence. Rivers, forests, mountains and coastal environments are spiritually inhabited landscapes where izinyanya [ancestors] are active, responsive and morally demanding. This framework produces what Tucker and Grim (eds. 2001) call religious ecology, a form of environmental practice grounded in spiritual obligation rather than abstract conservation ethics. The ancestors are understood to be custodians of the land; to pollute the river, to clear the forest or to overfish the ocean is not merely an environmental act but a spiritual transgression that disrupts the relationships upon which community wellbeing depends.

This cosmological framework shapes identity in profound ways. To be amaXhosa, within this framework, is to be embedded in a web of obligations that extends across time to the ancestors who have gone before and across species to the animals, plants and waters that share the landscape. Ecological knowledge is thus not a separate domain from cultural identity but constitutive of it. Community members in Hamburg demonstrate this integration consistently: Nolusindiso Jakavula describes sustainable fishing practices as expressions of the same relational ethic that governs ancestral ritual:

The ocean provides, but it must be respected and reciprocated.

Cebo Mvubu’s account of the protocols governing the use of Nyulutsi’s plant resources is particularly revealing:

The requirement to speak to the ancestors before harvesting is a linguistic-cosmological act that simultaneously constitutes the speaker as a responsible member of the community, acknowledges the authority of the ancestors over the landscape and enacts an identity grounded in relational obligation rather than individual right. It is, in miniature, an alternative political ontology.

The concept of the archive has been extensively theorised in African and post-colonial scholarship. Derrida (1996) established the archive as a political institution, a site of power that determines what is remembered and how. Mbembe (2002) extended this analysis to the colonial archive, arguing that colonial records constituted a form of symbolic violence against African subjectivity. Almeida and Hoyer (2020) and Sabiescu (2020) have proposed the concept of the living archive, a dynamic, participatory, performance-based archival practice in which memory is sustained through embodied, communal action rather than institutional record-keeping.

We extend this concept to propose the Sonic Living Archive: The convergence of sound, sacred space and cosmological practice into a dynamic system of knowledge preservation and transmission. In Hamburg, the sonic living archive operates through folklore songs, ritual soundscapes, call-and-response performance structures and the attentive listening to environmental sounds that community members describe as forms of ancestral communication:

The sonic living archive is distinguished from other archival forms by several features. It is performative rather than propositional: Knowledge is not stored as a set of claims to be retrieved but as a set of practices to be enacted. It is relational rather than individual: No single performer holds the archive; it is distributed across the community and activated through collective performance. It is place-bound rather than portable:

And it is adaptive rather than static: As Muller (2004) documents, amaXhosa musical traditions have evolved responsively to ecological change, with songs acquiring new emotional registers as environmental conditions shift.

Analysis of specific folklore songs performed in Hamburg reveals the sophistication of the sonic living archive as a knowledge system. The song Ngena Emanzini ngokuzithoba [Enter the water with humility], performed during river ritual preparations at Nyulutsi, employs a pentatonic descending scale in a slow, weighted pulse. Its call-and-response structure enacts the relational accountability it advocates: no individual acts alone; all action is communally endorsed and witnessed. Its text encodes specific ecological protocols: participants must not urinate near the water, must not harvest plants without ancestral permission and must not make disruptive noise at the site, which constitute an indigenous environmental governance framework transmitted through musical performance.

Mama waManzi [Mother of the Waters] performs a different archival function: It registers ecological grief. Performed during healing ceremonies at the Keiskamma River, it addresses the personified spiritual essence of the river as a maternal figure, expressing sorrow at the degradation of the water and petitioning the ancestral guardian for restoration. Traditional healers in Hamburg report that this song has gained new urgency as water pollution has worsened. The song has become what Feld (1996) might call an acoustemological registration of ecological loss, a sonic transformation of environmental change into communal awareness and moral obligation.

Izintaba Zekhaya [Mountains of Home] functions as a sonic map: A praise song for the Hamburg landscape that, in its performance, reproduces detailed geographical and ecological knowledge about the Keiskamma estuary, the coastal dunes and the inland forests. Community members who can sing this song demonstrate an embodied ecological literacy, knowing not only the names of landscape features, but also their spiritual significance, their seasonal dynamics and their place in the ancestral network that no written document can replicate. The song functions, as Nzewi (2007) argues of African music generally, as a multi-level pedagogical structure: It teaches at once the geography of belonging, the ecology of care and the cosmology of accountability.

The intergenerational transmission of the sonic living archive is the central preoccupation of elders in Hamburg. Oral literary forms are uniquely efficient vehicles for intergenerational knowledge transfer because their aesthetic and performative properties enhance memory, emotional engagement and embodied retention (Berkes 2018; Finnegan 1970). The rhythmic, melodic and call-and-response structures of amaXhosa ritual song are not ornamental but mnemonic: They make knowledge memorable, repeatable and transmissible across generations without the mediation of writing.

However, the transmission chain shows signs of significant disruption. In Hamburg, this decline is felt acutely by elders. MaSango expresses a concern shared by many:

Sambesiwe Mavela adds a nuance that reveals the complexity of the situation:

The disruption of intergenerational transmission is not simply a matter of youth disinterest; it is structurally produced by the colonial and post-colonial educational system, which has systematically excluded indigenous knowledge from formal curricula, and by the economic pressures that drive young people towards forms of employment and social participation that leave little time or space for ritual practice. As Muller (2004) and Erlmann (1996) have documented, the erosion of musical traditions and environmental degradation are bidirectionally related: When rivers are polluted, the songs that address those rivers cannot be performed in their full ritual context; when songs are not performed, the ecological knowledge they encode is not transmitted; when ecological knowledge is not transmitted, the community loses the capacity to recognise and respond to environmental threat.

Within African cosmological frameworks, healing is not a medical category but a relational one. Illness, physical, psychological or communal, is understood as a disruption of the relationships that constitute wellbeing: Relationships between the living and the ancestors, between the individual and the community, and between the community and the land (Hamilton 2022; Mokgobi 2014). Healing, accordingly, is the restoration of these relationships through ritual, sound and ancestral engagement. Sacred spaces are the primary sites of this relational restoration, and sound is its primary medium.

The concept of the healing archive that we develop from this research builds on Taylor’s (2003) distinction between the archive and the repertoire, but insists on their integration in African sacred practice. In the Hamburg context, the repertoire of the living body of ritual songs, soundscape knowledge, healing protocols and ancestral address forms is itself the archive. It does not supplement a written record; it is the record. And it is a record that heals by being activated: The performance of a healing song is not merely a representation of healing knowledge but an enactment of it, a doing that constitutes the therapeutic process it describes.

Nolusindiso Jakavula’s account of the practice of isolating individuals with health disturbances in sacred spaces surrounded by the sound of ocean waves, the rustling of wind through trees and the presence of the ancestors is particularly revealing:

The healing is accomplished not through pharmacological intervention but through immersive acoustic and relational encounter with the sacred: The waves, the wind, the birdsong and the ancestral presence they index constitute a therapeutic environment that works on the body and the spirit simultaneously.

The therapeutic function of environmental soundscapes in amaXhosa practice is one of the most consistent findings of the ethnographic fieldwork. Community members describe the sounds of sacred spaces, waves, wind, river flow and birdsong not as passive background but as active communicative agents. As Respondent 4 explains:

Respondent 1 adds:

This understanding of environmental sound as ancestral communication aligns with Feld’s (1996) concept of acoustemology, acoustic knowing, which holds that sound is not merely a cultural product but a mode of environmental engagement and knowledge production. To listen to the waves at the healing site is, within the amaXhosa framework, to engage with the ancestors who inhabit the water; the quality of the sound, its turbulence or its calm, and its rhythm or its silence carries information about the ancestors’ response to the ritual being performed.

As MaSango explains:

The therapeutic dimensions of the sonic living archive are thus inseparable from its archival and identity-forming functions. The same performance that transmits ecological knowledge across generations also activates healing by restoring the relational balance upon which wellbeing depends. The same call-and-response structure that enacts communal governance also produces the emotional and embodied states that Turino (2008) calls participatory music-making that sustain resilience in the face of loss, disruption and threat. Sound is, in this sense, the medium through which the amaXhosa community constitutes itself as a community: Remembering together, healing together and knowing together.

The concept of resilience in indigenous knowledge studies has been critiqued for its potential to naturalise the conditions of precarity that indigenous communities face (Smith 2012). We use the term advisedly here to designate not the capacity of communities to absorb external shocks without changing a definition that risks celebrating survival under conditions of injustice, but the active, creative and politically conscious work through which communities sustain their knowledge systems, their identities and their healing practices in the face of systemic dispossession.

In Hamburg, this resilience is sonic. The persistence of ritual song at Nyulutsi, at the Keiskamma River, and at the ocean’s edge despite the economic precarity of the community, the ecological degradation of the landscape, and the cultural pressures of Westernisation constitutes what Impey (2018) might call a practice of cultural survival through sound. The songs that grieve the polluted river while petitioning the ancestral guardian for restoration are not expressions of passive lamentation but active assertions of a relational right: the right to a clean river, to an ecologically intact sacred space, to a living archive that remains functional as a system of governance, identity and healing.

Zolekile Mavela’s account of the songs sung during community ocean rituals, including Sikhalo somntwana sihoye [Heed the cries of a child], which he describes and demonstrates the political dimensions of sonic memory:

The song is simultaneously a prayer, a governance claim and a form of collective memory that connects the present community to the ancestral networks through which the ocean has been sustainably managed for generations. To sing this song is to assert a claim to the ocean that is older, deeper and more legitimate within the cosmological framework of the community than any fishing permit or conservation regulation.