Interview with Elijah Madiba by Lerato Tshabalala

Can you briefly describe your role at ILAM and how your training as a sound engineer shapes your archival practice?

At ILAM, I work as a sound engineer and archivist, focusing on the digitisation, restoration, and technical stewardship of historical sound recordings, including significant collections such as the Hugh Tracey field recordings and subsequent African music documentation projects. My role also extends to supporting research, teaching, and creative reuse of the archive.

My sound engineering background shapes how I approach preservation through careful audio transfer, noise management, and format migration, ensuring that fragile reel-to-reel tapes, vinyl, and cassettes are digitised in accordance with international best practices. At the same time, I treat these recordings as cultural artefacts rather than purely technical objects, preserving their sonic character while making them usable for contemporary musicians, scholars, and community partners.

From your perspective, what makes sound recordings—especially African music and oral traditions—distinct archival records that require specialised approaches?

Many of ILAM’s collections document musical practices, oral histories, praise poetry, and ritual performances that were never intended for written transmission. Projects such as the Hugh Tracey African Music Survey captured languages, tuning systems, and performance styles that, in some cases, no longer exist in everyday practice.

These recordings embody social relationships, community memory, and embodied knowledge. Preserving them requires not only technical care but deep contextual metadata, who performed, for what purpose, in what cultural setting, and how the music functioned socially. Without this contextual work, the recordings lose much of their meaning and educational value.

Where do you find archival theory most useful in managing sound archives, and where does it fall short in real-world practice?

Archival theory provides essential frameworks for organisation, long-term preservation planning, and intellectual control, which guide our digitisation workflows and cataloguing systems at ILAM.

However, theory often falls short when working with legacy collections, such as early field recordings, where consent processes were informal or undocumented and cultural ownership is collective rather than individual. In practice, we constantly adapt theoretical models to align with community consultation, repatriation initiatives, and living heritage approaches that recognise sound recordings as culturally active materials.

Can you share an example where you had to adapt international archival standards to suit ILAM’s collections or local realities?

In ILAM’s digitisation programme, we follow IASA and other international audio preservation standards, but metadata systems frequently require localisation. Many early recordings lacked performer names, indigenous genre classifications, or community identifiers.

Through repatriation projects and researcher collaboration, we have worked to enrich metadata using local languages, indigenous musical categories, and oral histories from communities connected to the recordings. This has meant expanding standard cataloguing fields to accommodate African knowledge systems rather than forcing material into Western archival taxonomies.

How has digitisation changed the preservation and access of sound archives at ILAM, and what sustainability challenges remain?

Digitisation has been transformative. Large portions of ILAM’s analogue holdings, including reel-to-reel tapes from across Southern and Central Africa, have been preserved digitally, protecting them from physical degradation. These recordings are now accessible to scholars, musicians, schools, and international partners through digital platforms and curated projects.

Digitisation has also enabled creative reuse initiatives in which archival sounds are incorporated into contemporary compositions, documentaries, and performance projects. However, sustainability challenges remain around long-term digital storage, funding continuity, infrastructure, and training future sound archivists within African institutions.

How does ILAM navigate ethical issues such as cultural ownership, consent, and access when working with source communities?

ILAM actively engages in repatriation and community access projects that return recordings to the communities where they were initially collected. This includes providing digital copies, facilitating listening sessions, and collaborating on educational and cultural revitalisation initiatives.

Ethical decision-making is guided by dialogue; some materials are restricted due to sacred or ceremonial significance, while others are shared widely for cultural education and revival. The goal is shared custodianship rather than institutional control, recognising communities as co-owners of their sonic heritage.

What skills do you believe are essential for archivists working with sound and audio-visual collections today?

At ILAM, effective sound archivists combine technical expertise in digitisation and audio restoration with a firm grounding in archival theory. Beyond this, cultural sensitivity, ethical engagement, and collaborative skills are critical, particularly when working with community heritage and historical field recordings.

Digital curation, platform management, and public-facing engagement are increasingly crucial as sound archives become interactive resources for research, education, and creative industries.

As a lecturer in ethnomusicology, how do you integrate archival thinking into your teaching and student engagement with sound collections?

I actively incorporate ILAM’s sound collections into coursework, encouraging students to conduct research directly from archival recordings. Students analyse musical structures, social contexts, and historical shifts using primary audio sources.

I also involve them in reflective and creative projects where they respond to archival material through performance, composition, and digital storytelling. This mirrors ILAM’s broader approach of using the archive as a pedagogical tool and a living cultural resource.

How does being a practicing musician influence how you understand archival sound, reuse, and living heritage?

My musicianship shapes how I engage with ILAM’s collections, particularly in projects that draw on archival recordings to inspire contemporary genres such as hip-hop, spoken word poetry, and experimental African music.

Collaborations with poets and hip-hop artists using ILAM’s archive have demonstrated how historical sounds can be recontextualised to speak to present social realities. These projects show that archives are not about freezing culture in time but about enabling continuity, dialogue, and innovation.

What do you see as the key priorities for sound archives in South Africa and across Africa over the next decade?

Priorities include the mass digitisation of endangered collections, the development of sustainable digital preservation systems within African institutions, and the training of a new generation of African sound archivists.

Equally important are ethical repatriation, community partnerships, and creative reuse models that make archives socially relevant. Developing African-centred archival frameworks, rather than relying exclusively on European or North American standards, will be essential for long-term impact.

What is one lesson from your work at ILAM that you think the international archival community needs to hear more often?

One central lesson is that sound archives are not passive historical repositories. At ILAM, recordings become active agents in education, cultural revitalisation, and contemporary creativity, from community repatriation initiatives to collaborations with modern musicians and poets.

Preservation must therefore be linked to use, ethics, and cultural engagement. Technical excellence alone is not enough; archives thrive when they remain connected to the people and traditions they document.

Dr Elijah Madiba is a sound engineer, digitisation manager, and lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the International Library of African Music (ILAM), Rhodes University. He specialises in the preservation of African musical heritage through archival practices and has played a key role in the ILAM–SAMAP cataloguing project. In addition, he leads music ensembles and teaches at Rhodes University.