Asher Gamedze

Asher Gamedze is a cultural worker based in Cape Town, working mainly as a musician, student, writer, organizer, educator. His work as a musician spans various ensembles across and between musical traditions of improvised and free music, pop, rock and roll, hip-hop, and soul music and has performed across a number of countries on the African continent, as well as in USA and Europe. Some of the artists and ensembles he has worked with include Xhanti Nokwali, Manny Walters, Nduduzo Makhathini, Angel Bat Dawid, volume 2, The Space Section and many others. His debut album as a bandleader, dialectic soul, came out in 2020. Out side work, with Xristian Espinoza and Alan Bishop, came out in April 2022. As a writer and a researcher his interests include African history, histories of revolutionary thought and practice, Black cultural production, and radical pedagogy. Asher is a fellow in the History Workshop at Wits University and is doing a PhD on the relationship between study and struggle in the history of the Yu Chi Chan Club and the National Liberation Front. His written work is published in a variety of online popular and news forums, academic journals and independent activist publications. He is part of a number of autonomous collectives that are oriented toward radicalising cultural work, these include Pathways to Free Education, The Interim, Sites of Struggle and others.