Aryan Kaganof of Collection

The Aryan Kaganof collection is a collection of recorded music archives by artist Aryan Kaganof. Kaganof donated four cassette tapes to DOMUS, containing a previously unpublished interview with The Blue Notes double bassist, Johnny Dyani. Kaganof, who was active in the anti- apartheid struggle in the Netherlands (where he earned renown as the award-winning film maker Ian Kerkhof), made the donation during his talk on Dyani at the Music and Exile Symposium in Johannesburg (27-28 January 2010). The Symposium was organized by former Stellenbosch University Masters student and current Unisa lecturer Stephanie Vos, and hosted by the Johannesburg Goethe Institute.

By the end of 1985, he had a collection of about 40 albums which featured Johnny as a side man, as well as all of his albums as a leader. It was then that he happened to meet Lefifi Tladi, a South African in exile who had left the country after the student uprisings of 1976.

Insisting that all recording equipment be switched off during his talk, Kaganof invoked the memory of Dyani (1945-1987) as a brilliant and unconventional musician. He recounted his introduction to Dyani’s music while the latter was living in exile in Sweden, their first contact and subsequent friendship, describing the tour he arranged for Dyani in The Netherlands. In a surprising and unscripted turn of events, Kaganof presented the tapes containing the interview to the head of DOMUS, Stephanus Muller, who was sitting in the audience. Kaganof asked delegates to reflect on what this donation to the historical intellectual home of apartheid revealed about the institutionally precarious state of South Africa’s musical heritage in general, but more specifically about the legacy of exiled musicians like Dyani.