In this episode of Mother Tongue, LAVAS is joined by organiser, writer and co-founder of uManyano Lwe Jazz, Zukiswa White, to explore what it means to listen at the edge of a collapsing world. Together they trace the connections between abolition, queer politics and the Black radical imagination, asking how music, gathering and love can serve as blueprints for collective survival.

Guided by thinkers such as Dr Joy James, bell hooks, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Robert Sobukwe, this conversation moves between theory and tenderness, considering what it means to build community when harm no longer feels inevitable. Zukiswa reflects on uManyano Lwe Jazz as a living archive and a gathering place where jazz becomes both social practice and spiritual technology. From the afterlives of apartheid to the crises of genocide, queer erasure and climate collapse, Mother Tongue listens for the frequencies of care that persist in the ruins. It is an invitation to imagine politics as an ethic of love and to remember that listening itself can be a form of resistance.

With Guest: Zukiswa White is a queer feminist organiser, writer, and cultural worker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the co-founder of uManyano Lwe Jazz, a community-rooted festival that treats jazz not simply as a genre but as a social practice that connects people, archives memory, and rehearses freedom.

Her work draws from abolitionist and Black feminist traditions, using listening as a political and spiritual method. Through uManyano Lwe Jazz, she creates spaces that centre care, safety, and belonging while honouring the long lineages of South African jazz and contemporary improvisation.

Zukiswa’s practice explores how joy, gathering, and sound can act as technologies of resistance in a world marked by precarity. She writes and speaks about culture, movement work, and the everyday labour of building community, always returning to the question of how people can live and organise around care rather than punishment.

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