Umhlabathi / Umhlabuthi: The registers of sonic
temporalities of Deferred Decay

Umhlabathi / Umhlabuthi redefines decay not as disappearance, but as deferred persistence, a sonic, geological, and digital condition through which empire sustains itself across matter, media, and time. The project listens to the entanglement of three interconnected sites: the Rhodes Memorial in Cape Town, the JC Clift De Hoop Quarry in Paarl, and the digital archive that now frames both as apolitical heritage. Together, these sites expose how colonial infrastructures endure by transforming decay into preservation and erasure into continuity, producing a politics of endurance that is both material and algorithmic.

The project began with a digital encounter: a Google search for “De Hoop Quarry apartheid history” returned the phrase “neither directly linked to apartheid.” This algorithmic assertion of purity performs what Safiya Noble (2018) calls digital colonialism, a computational whitewashing of history through which forgetting is reproduced as fact. The search became the catalyst for re-examining the quarry’s layered afterlives, its geological extraction, monumental commemoration, ecological rehabilitation, and digital re-encoding, as continuous registers of colonial persistence. Located in Paarl, the De Hoop Quarry is South Africa’s oldest operative granite quarry and the geological origin of the Rhodes Memorial and the Huguenot Monument. By the mid-twentieth century, its afterlife followed a familiar colonial script: absorbed into the Cape Floral Kingdom conservation zone, it performed what Mbaria and Ogada (2016) term the conservation complex, where colonial preservation regimes persist as postcolonial environmental management. Yusoff (2018) extends this reading to the geological persistence of empire, in which stone, soil, and species are enlisted to naturalise historical amnesia. These processes are mirrored in the digital archive’s treatment of the quarry as neutral data, an epistemic ecology in which the colonial past is sanitised through the aesthetics of sustainability and searchability. The Rhodes Memorial and statue share both material and financial ancestry: the statue was commissioned from the memorial’s leftover funds, binding stone to capital and capital to empire. Their afterlives, marked by the Rhodes Must Fall protests and the subsequent removal of the statue “for protection", demonstrate decay as bureaucratic suspension, where containment replaces decomposition. The statue’s continued storage by Heritage Western Cape exemplifies a regime of controlled stasis: empire survives not through renewal, but through its management of non-decay.

Grounded in Sithole’s (2020) conception of the Black register, Umhlabathi / Umhlabuthi develops sonic supersurfaces, a practice-based research method that translates the quarry’s shifting legal, material, and memorial strata into acoustic form. Sonic supersurfaces operate as both analytic instrument and design experiment: they convert legislative timelines, extraction data, and archival distortions into spatial sound compositions that register the rhythms of deferred decay. This method positions listening as an epistemic and political act, one that re-enters the archive through vibration rather than vision. Realised through a spatial sound installation and corresponding cartographic interface, the project situates listening as a decolonial epistemology of radical futurity. By rendering audible the sonic residues of empire, from the chisel’s strike to the click of the search bar, it invites audiences to inhabit the suspended temporality of deferred decay and to imagine new vocabularies of attunement beyond the colonial archive.