KHNYSA

Sisonke Papu, a.k.a. KHNYSA, is an Eastern Cape-based traditional healer, storyteller, and multidisciplinary artist. KHNYSA’s soundwork mediates between the spiritual and sonic, using traditional music and indigenous technologies as repositories of memory, healing, and reactivation in both South African and global contexts. He repurposes found objects and natural materials to craft complex soundscapes that function as portals for collective remembrance and embodied listening.

He is the founder of NgoMa Technologies, an initiative selected for the inaugural OneBeat Institute in New York. NgoMa is dedicated to the preservation, innovation, and application of indigenous sound technologies as instruments of healing, education, and creative economy development. Through this ecosystem of musicians, healers, and cultural technologists, KHNYSA facilitates workshops, sonic therapy, public rituals, and the crafting of ancestral instruments to activate community healing and spiritual reconnection.

His performances, installations, and sound journeys have been featured across South Africa, Kenya, Zanzibar, the UK, New York, Los Angeles, and Greensboro, activating galleries, festivals, and sacred spaces. In 2024, he shared a powerful sonic healing activation at the Hazendal Festival: Soil Edition, and in 2025 he joins the ALTBLK Music Camp in Nairobi and Sakifo Festival in Réunion Island as part of the ALTBLK Africa delegation curated by Msaki.

KHNYSA is also the bandleader of IZANUSI, whose debut album SIZANGENGOMA (2021) explores ancestral rhythm and futuristic ritual. His ongoing work dissolves the boundaries between performance and ceremony, art and medicine.

Rooted in KHNYSA’s sacred divination sounds and indigenous instruments as technologies, KHNYSA and The Light, his most recent evolution emerges as a collaborative sound journey woven with the resonance of guitar, cello, viola, and the grounding rhythm of the Cajón and marimba. It is a vibrational prayer — a living, breathing offering for the restoration of spirit and the remembrance of the body.

Each session is spirit-led and improvised, allowing the frequencies to shift and respond to the field in real time. This genre — called Ancestral Ambient — is both deeply meditative and vibrantly alive. It softens the nervous system, stirs cellular memory, and opens portals to remembrance. It reconnects us to breath, body, and the rhythms of the natural world.

For those seeking grounding, clarity, or spiritual awakening, this sound is a sanctuary. It is medicine for transitions, sonic holding for return, and a gentle guide home.