Dr. Thandeka Mfinyongo is a South African ethnomusicologist, musician, and lecturer in African Music and Ethnomusicology at North-West University. She holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Rhodes University. She holds a Master’s in Music Performance from SOAS University of London, where she majored in the kora, as well as a Performer’s Diploma in Music and an Advanced Diploma in African Music from the University of Cape Town.

Her research focuses on Xhosa musical bows, particularly uhadi (gourd bow) and umrhubhe (mouth bow), and their relationship to memory, performance, cultural knowledge, and intergenerational transmission. Her doctoral thesis, The Voice of Uhadi: An Investigation into Traditional Instruments as Ideogrammatic Archives, develops the concept of the Ideogrammatic Archive — a tangible object that evokes recollections and memories relating to its origins and the culture from which it came. Unlike conventional archives, which are primarily textual or visual, the Ideogrammatic Archive can also be embodied in performance and sound.

Her research is closely connected to her practice as a performer and musical bow player, and includes fieldwork, archival research, collaborative performance, and instrument-making. Her recent project, Strings of Representation: Uhadi as Feminist Archive, developed with the Goethe-Institut, considers uhadi as a feminist archive of women’s knowledge, agency, and cultural memory — drawing attention to the women who have made, played, and safeguarded the instrument across generations.

In 2026, her work UMZILA (The Legacy) — an uhadi exhibition at the North-West University Gallery — explores instrument-making as an artistic, pedagogical, and archival practice, bringing handcrafted bows together with a video installation documenting their making. It foregrounds the relationship between making, memory, embodied knowledge, and the processes through which knowledge is held, transmitted, and remembered.

Her wider research and creative practice has included an artist residency with the University of Bayreuth’s Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence in Germany and the Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) programme in the United States.