By Byron Tenesaca (Kichwa Kañari, CS Staff)
Across Indigenous communities, culture is not something preserved only in museums or history books. It lives in songs, languages, instruments, stories, dances, and the knowledge carried from one generation to the next. But as globalization, displacement, and other pressures reshape Indigenous communities, many of these traditions are at risk of being lost. Indigenous youth are using their own voices and creative practices to keep their cultures alive.
Through Cultural Survival’s Indigenous Youth Fellowship Program, young Indigenous leaders are developing projects that strengthen cultural identity and create new ways for their communities to share and transmit Indigenous Knowledge Systems. In South Africa, musician, educator, and composer Asakhe Cuntsulana is using music, research, storytelling, and community engagement to help ensure that Indigenous musical traditions remain living practices that can be passed on to future generations.
Reviving the Sound and Story of the uHadi
For South African musician, educator, and composer Asakhe Cuntsulana, music is a way of remembering, healing, and reconnecting with community. As a member of the amaXhosa community, Asakhe has built his work around Indigenous music and the stories carried within it. His studies in music at Rhodes University, combined with his work with artists and cultural historians, have allowed him to explore the ways traditional African sounds can speak to contemporary audiences. Through his work as founder of IThala leAfrika, he promotes Ubuntu, arts, and literature while creating spaces for people to reflect on and celebrate Africa’s diverse cultural heritage. His work insists that Indigenous music is not merely a cultural object to be preserved, but a knowledge system in its own right—a way of thinking, teaching, healing, remembering, and understanding human relationships with community and creation.
At the heart of Asakhe’s work is the uHadi, the traditional Xhosa bow harp. For generations, Indigenous instruments and the music surrounding them have carried histories, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, divine wisdom, relationships with nature, and ways of understanding the world. Yet much of this knowledge is increasingly vulnerable as younger generations face the influence of globalization and changing cultural practices. For Asakhe, preserving the uHadi is therefore about much more than saving an instrument. It is about protecting the stories, techniques, meanings, and relationships that give the instrument its cultural significance. It also challenges the assumption that knowledge must first be written, institutionalized, or validated by Western academic systems before it can be recognized as knowledge.
His project also brings the uHadi into dialogue with the Adungu, a traditional harp from Uganda, creating a pan-African exchange around Indigenous musical traditions. By connecting musical practices across African communities, Asakhe’s work explores how traditional instruments can serve as bridges between histories, cultures, and generations. In this dialogue, the instrument becomes more than sound: it becomes an archive, a classroom, a language, and a living carrier of Indigenous intelligence.
This vision is at the center of Ingoma yoHadi (Song of the Harp), a project that brings together music, research, storytelling, and publication. Asakhe is developing a music album featuring compositions that blend the sounds of the uHadi, Adungu, and other traditional instruments, while a companion book will document the instruments’ histories, oral narratives, playing techniques, and roles in traditional and contemporary music.
The project builds on preliminary work that began in 2024 through live performances and the development of the concept. By bringing together musicians, cultural historians, and visual artists, Asakhe hopes to create a living archive that can reach both community members and wider audiences. Rather than treating Indigenous music as something fixed in the past, the project recognizes tradition as something that can continue to evolve while remaining connected to its cultural roots. This approach refuses the false choice between preservation and innovation: Indigenous Knowledge Systems can remain rooted while also composing new futures.
The project will also create opportunities for knowledge to be shared directly within communities. Through local workshops, participants will learn how to play the uHadi and Adungu while exploring their cultural significance. Multimedia materials, exhibitions, online platforms, and public engagements will further extend these stories beyond the performance space.
For Asakhe, this is a way of ensuring that Indigenous music remains a living practice rather than becoming something remembered only through historical records. By combining performance with documentation, education, and storytelling, he is creating opportunities for younger generations to encounter traditional music not simply as an artifact of the past, but as a source of creativity and connection in the present. It is also an invitation to recognize African Indigenous instruments as sites of theory, philosophy, pedagogy, wellness, and intellectual inquiry, not only as objects of performance.
Ingoma yoHadi is ultimately an invitation to hear the divine wisdom of uMvelingqangi God the Creator resonating through traditional instruments, while making space for younger generations to create their own songs, ask new questions, and carry Indigenous Knowledge boldly into the future.
Facts Only
* Byron Tenesaca is Kichwa Kañari, CS Staff.
* Cultural Survival runs an Indigenous Youth Fellowship Program.
* Asakhe Cuntsulana is a musician, educator, and composer in South Africa.
* Asakhe studies music at Rhodes University.
* Asakhe founded IThala leAfrika to promote Ubuntu, arts, and literature.
* The central instrument is the uHadi, a traditional Xhosa bow harp.
* Asakhe's work involves exploring Indigenous music as a knowledge system.
* The project Ingoma yoHadi involves creating a music album and a companion book.
* The project seeks to bring uHadi into dialogue with the Adungu harp from Uganda.
* The project aims to create a living archive through performance, documentation, education, and storytelling.
* Local workshops will teach playing the uHadi and Adungu while exploring cultural significance.
Executive Summary
Young Indigenous leaders are establishing projects, such as Cultural Survival’s Indigenous Youth Fellowship Program, to strengthen cultural identity and facilitate the transmission of Indigenous Knowledge Systems. In South Africa, Asakhe Cuntsulana uses music, research, storytelling, and community engagement to ensure Indigenous musical traditions persist. His work focuses on the uHadi, a traditional Xhosa bow harp, viewing it as a knowledge system rather than just an artifact. He promotes Ubuntu while exploring the dialogue between the uHadi and the Adungu harp from Uganda to foster pan-African cultural exchange.
The project Ingoma yoHadi involves developing a music album blending sounds from the uHadi and other instruments, accompanied by a book documenting instrument histories, techniques, and narratives. This initiative seeks to treat Indigenous music as an evolving practice rather than a static historical record, balancing preservation with innovation. The goal is to create living archives through performance, documentation, and community workshops, allowing younger generations to connect traditional knowledge with contemporary creativity.
Full Take
The narrative positions Indigenous musical traditions not as static objects of preservation but as dynamic knowledge systems capable of evolving while remaining rooted in cultural context. This challenges the Western academic assumption that knowledge requires institutionalization or written validation before recognition, particularly concerning Indigenous epistemologies embedded in practices like music. The focus on the uHadi as a site for theory, philosophy, and pedagogy reframes traditional instruments from mere artifacts to intellectual tools embodying wellness and worldview.
The engagement across cultures (uHadi and Adungu) emphasizes a pattern of cross-cultural relationality, suggesting that musical exchange functions as an archive and bridge between disparate histories. The intentional refusal of the dichotomy between preservation and innovation suggests a resistance against colonial structures that often demand static conservation over dynamic adaptation. The project’s structure—combining performance with documentation and community education—suggests a counter-narrative to historical erasure by insisting on experiential knowledge transmission.
The implication for cognitive sovereignty lies in asserting the authority of Indigenous ways of knowing as legitimate intellectual frameworks, thereby shifting the locus of validation from external Western systems to internal community experience. The potential vulnerability addressed is the risk of cultural practices being reduced to mere history, suggesting that resilience is found in active creation rather than passive memory. What mechanisms exist within these community-led projects to ensure that the knowledge shared remains sovereign and controlled by the originating communities as it evolves? How can these cross-cultural dialogues be sustained against pressures that seek to isolate and diminish localized forms of wisdom?
Sentinel — Human
The text exhibits characteristics of human journalistic or academic writing, characterized by deep contextual integration and nuanced argumentation regarding cultural preservation.