Dr Sazi Dlamini is a renowned South African musicologist specialising in jazz, black popular music history, and southern African musical bows. He earned his PhD from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2009 with the groundbreaking thesis South African Blue Notes: Bebop, Mbaqanga, Apartheid and the Exiling of a Musical Imagination. His research expertise spans Nguni musical bows such as the ugubhu, umakhweyana, isithontolo, umqangala, and uhadi, as well as crafting instruments from bamboo, reed, horn, calabash, and recycled materials.
As a performer and producer, Dr Dlamini released his debut album Skokiana (2017) and collaborated on Umakhweyana (2017), a tribute to Zulu umakhweyana and umbheleza mouth-bow songs featuring the late Mama Bavikile Ngema. He is also the volume editor of Musical Bows of Southern Africa (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) and a founding member of the Insurrections Ensemble, a multimedia collective uniting musicians, puppeteers, video artists, and poets from across South Africa, India, Tanzania, China, and Ethiopia