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Gugulethu Duma (aka Dumama) is a musician / composer / sonic poet / creative producer
from the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Her practice plays with the deconstruction
and critique of archaic modes of representation in Southern African/African sonic and
performance culture, while also composing music for herself and others. As a storyteller and
lyricist she weaves together childhood songs, stories and personal memories with electronic
hues and gestures, experimenting with the divide between traditional oral culture and futuristic,
globally oriented poetics in her embodiment of an African technological consciousness.
For her performances and recordings, she predominantly works with voice, uHadi (a traditional
Xhosa bow instrument), live vocal effected loops, processors, field recordings and distortions.
She studied under celebrated bow master, composer and vocalist Dr Madosini Lathozi.
The debut album from her music duo, dumama + kechou, titled ‘buffering juju’ was released
in March 2020 with South African Independent Label, Mushroom Hour Half Hour, and received
international critical acclaim (e.g. Global Album of the Month at the Guardian (UK) / The Wire
Magazine / Afropunk / Bandcamp Daily / BBC Radio / Gilles Peterson).
She is now working towards the release of her debut solo album, titled “Towards an Expanse”,
which will be co-released in March 2026 by Mushroom Hour (SA) and New Soil (UK). For this
album, she has collaborated with a wide pool of instrumentalists, primarily from improvised
recording sessions at Shahzad Ismaily’s Figure 8 studios in New York, which recordings where
then cut up and re-imagined by a Johannesburg based electronic producer / arranger called
Nandi Ndlovu. Mixing and vocal production for the album was done by Dion Monti.
Dumama is currently based in Berlin (Germany).
