It was Thanksgiving 2016, the weekend of the opening of the Philadelphia Sudanese Community Center in West Philly, the place where graduate students in my Field Methods seminar had been conducting research. Most of the students were not in town that weekend, so I went alone for the day’s events, bearing a digital still camera and MP3 recorder. While I waited for events to begin, I ventured down into the basement of the building to encounter a long brightly lit room, with an array of Sudanese cultural objects, displays of food, clothing, jewelry, and walls lined with a wide array of Sudanese art—paintings, pencil drawings, linocuts, an image of Martin Luther King Jr. with a cross and Arabic script, another of an early Sudanese woman missionary in Germany, and pencil portraits of Sudanese poets and writers. A local community ensemble of teen girl string players, one of whom was Sudanese, was warming up in the corner; a small group of teens we had worked with in a freshman seminar in 2015 was rehearsing their song and dance routine; young children played on African-made drums and then wandered around the area; hijab-covered women in a rich array of colorful toobs were preparing food.

I have extraordinarily vivid memories of hearing South African musicians Sathima Bea Benjamin and Abdullah Ibrahim in two specific live performances in the United States. The first occasion was the JVC Jazz Festival in New York City in c. 1990. Abdullah performed a solo piano concert in the Weill Recital Room at Carnegie Hall. The second was a performance by Sathima at the Kennedy Center's Women in Jazz series held in Washington DC more than a decade later. Neither occasion was the first or only time I heard the couple perform. Nevertheless, these two events stand out in my memory for the profound way in which the sounds emanating from the grand piano, and those carried by the human voice, evoked a full-bodied, multi-sensory response in me. In the first moment, it seemed as if I could see, smell, feel, and hear the Bo-Kaap district of central Cape Town. The second moment elicited a deep sense of longing, an aching in my body for the space called ‘Africa’ that Sathima sang about. These utterances were musical echoes in diaspora, and probably I had been away from South Africa far too long.

Though I was born in Cape Town, and spent my childhood in South Africa, what I heard in those moments were not the actual memories of sounds and places I had experienced earlier in my life. Rather, these were poetic invocations expressed out of a longing to return home that I felt in the music of the two South Africans. In each performance the voice and instrumental sounds made contact with me as an audience member, acoustically generating images of faraway places for a fellow South African in America.