Dizu Zungula Mzikantu Plaatjies: Converging worlds of African Music at the University of Cape Town, 1992-2024

Dizu Zungula Mzikantu Plaatjies, Emeritus Professor of African Music Performance at the University of Cape Town, is among South Africa’s foremost traditional artists and cultural historians. As the founder and leader of South Africa’s globally celebrated ensembles, Amampondo and Ibuyambo, Plaatjies has spent more than three decades reshaping the soundscape of African traditional music. His distinctive neo-traditional blend of sound, rooted in collaboration and reinvention with artists from various cultural backgrounds, and his ability to revive, revamp and communicate old cultural practices and teaching methods, has led to countless teaching and performance engagements locally and abroad. Taking its frame from Plaatjies’s years as lecturer and later professor of African Music at the South African College of Music (SACM), University of Cape Town (1992-2024), this thesis explores his life and career as a lens through which to examine how African performance practices, grounded in lived experience and oral tradition, challenge Western epistemologies and contribute to broader debates on decoloniality and epistemic justice in music education. The key argument this thesis advances in both content and form, is that Plaatjies’s presence and contributions to UCT must be understood in relation to the worlds he inhabits and brings into the institution. It demonstrates how his life and practice unfolds across multiple worlds and historical moments, bridging ancestral, rural, urban, institutional and global spaces. In doing so, he functions as an interlocutor between distinct musical and cultural systems, mediating African music’s place within contemporary academic and global frameworks. Adopting a life-writing approach, the research draws on in-depth interviews with Plaatjies, archival materials and secondary sources. The study suggests that African music embodies a living epistemology, a way of knowing and being in the world. Plaatjies’s career illuminates new possibilities for embedding African music at UCT and beyond, advancing African-centred perspectives within higher education in post-apartheid South Africa. Few studies have centred the lived experiences of figures such as Plaatjies who embody these epistemic shifts within South African higher education. By situating Plaatjies’s career within the broader context of national transformation, this study addresses that gap and contributes to redress the historical marginalisation of African music in tertiary spaces.

Grantor dc:publisher

Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Grayer, Fiona Marian

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Vos, Stephanie

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/136040

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/136040