mpho ndaba

I am an artist manager and co-founder of HEAVY KATS: A Black Studies Programme, a label based in Cape Town, co-founded by myself and Elu Eboka of EBK Studio

mpho ndaba is a multidisciplinary cultural art practitioner working in film, black music, and research. He is the co-founder of HEAVY KATS: A Black Studies Programme, a label that cultivates, archives, and circulates jazz and improvisation in South Africa and Africa's diaspora. At HK, mpho works as A&R, creative strategist, and is responsble for marketing and visibility. His past film and television work includes Al Jazeera’s #GenerationChange (2021), Cape Town TV’s Free Media Free Minds (2018/19) which he produced and hosted, and The Hour After Midnight, a documentary film that explores the life, death, and activism of Dr. Niel Aggett. mpho is the Mail and Guardian 200 Young South Africans – Environment Category (2018); OSF-SA Scholar (2020-2021); Mellon Foundation Scholar (2018); Sciences PO x Wits University MA Scholar (2020), and Critical Zones Africa Scholar, funded by Science for Africa Foundation. mpho’s public writing has appeared on the Johannesburg Review of Books, Africa is a Country, the South African Labour Bulletin, Mail & Guardian, New Agenda Journal, and Poetry Portion (etc). Trained across multiple disciplines and fields of practice, mpho holds an M.Phil. in Environmental Humanities South (University of Cape Town), where he researched the colonial uses of the figure of the dog in the apartheid policing of space and race. mpho also completed an MA in Sociology, in which he researched antiblackness, anti-immigrant discourses, food access, state-led surveillance and the governance of COVID-19 pandemic in Yeoville, Johannesburg (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). Further, mpho holds a Business Management M.Phil., from the Gordon Institute of Business Science, specializing in Change Leadership. He is a doctoral scholar at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town.