As I write this chapter, South Africans are mourning three performing artists and musicians, who were all brutally murdered. In the early hours of Sunday morning, 20 November 2022, DJ Sumbody (Oupa John Sefoka) was killed in a hail of bullets on the way to a gig at a nightclub in Pretoria. Again, in the early hours of Monday morning, 30 January 2023, Vusi Ma R5 (Itumeleng Mosoeu) met his untimely death after being shot and killed in Soshanguve. Most recently – and arguably, the death that received the most widespread attention locally and all over the world – AKA (Kiernan Forbes) was murdered shortly after having dinner at a restaurant in Durban on Friday evening, 10 February 2023.

These deaths and their hypervisibility, with people expressing utter disbelief at their brutality, should be contextualised not only from the interstices of history’s precarious relationship with Black death and survival,but also in relation to the South African government’s fundamental decline at governance, leading to rampant lawlessness.

In the context of these reports of brutal deaths, while simultaneously reeling from and reconciling with the unprecedented deaths of the Covid-19 pandemic, I remember witnessing Mthuthuzeli Zimba’s exploration of the idea of the burial tribute that specifically borrowed from a repertoire of performance arts and cultures in South African townships. Zimba’s performance – which formed part of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) 2019 Infecting the City (ITC) programme – titled Habashwe! / Let Them Die! / Anything Goes! – interrogated the burial rituals from many townships, including the social practices of wie sien ons.In fact, Zimba’s performance reminds me of Vusi Ma R5’s funeral proceedings in Mabopane that were documented in a series of viral videos depicting a frenzied atmosphere of young Black people taking over the streets in processions: dancing, singing, playing Bacardi music,with half-nude young women directing traffic and attracting enormous attention from passers-by and local media outlets.

I want to start by thinking about the everyday practices of performance cultures stimulated in the streets of South African townships, particularly where cultural production intertwines with the dehiscence of Black death and survival. Performance cultures in South African townships are often quotidian and they tend to fall outside of the wholly disciplinary frameworks of the performing arts.