Ancestral work and ecologies of memory: a conversation

This article rethinks memory studies through Southern African praise poetry, arguing that memory is not only stored in minds, texts, or monuments but sustained through relational ecologies involving people, animals, land, ancestors, ritual, and performance. Centering ChiShona nhetembo and reading them alongside San and Nguni traditions, the essay distinguishes between “ecologies of memory”—the humanly cultivated practices that keep remembrance active through voice, rhythm, kinship, naming, and ceremony—and “ecological memories,” the agencies and traces of land, animals, waters, plants, and seasons that shape what communities remember. Through close readings of zebra and lion praises, the article shows how totems operate as ethical, historical, political, and environmental archives rather than as primitive survivals or mere symbols. It also critiques European intellectual traditions that relocated relational memory from land and kinship into individual psychology, myth, or representation. Ultimately, the essay presents praise poetry as both archive and method: a decolonial theory of memory grounded in performance, obligation, ecological belonging, and more-than-human kinship.