SONGS OF MOBILITY AND BELONGING: Gender, Spatiality and the Local in Southern Africa's Transfrontier Conservation Development

The combination of poverty, rural remoteness and exceptional ecological diversity in western Maputaland has long made the region a target of conservationists and development planners, locating it centrally within the Usuthu-Tembe-Futi Transfrontier Conservation Area. While driven by the rhetoric of participatory biodiversity management', which links environmental conservation with economic development, the fulfilment of the transboundary project remains dependent upon exogenous resources and authority, and conservation agencies are ambivalent towards local demands for self-determined development. This essay examines the politics of land in western Maputaland, its position in local memories and its foundation in spatial practices and cultural identities. Building on narratives accompanied by mouth-bows and the jews harp, once performed by young women as walking songs but remembered now by elderly women only, my analysis focuses on the ways in which mobilities and gender intersect in a changing landscape, and how meanings embedded in sound, song and performance inflect local experiences of belonging. The essay's aim is ultimately to provide witness to transboundary conservation planners of the need for a more culturally integrated and economically apposite reimagining of southern African borderlandscapes.