Background

Umoya Creations (UC) was established to bring music and arts education, reconciliation and development through the arts to regions where people suffer from deprivation, physical and emotional damage and poverty.

UC provides these opportunities for young people by helping them to discover their creative potential and use it to empower and advance themselves and their communities.

Examples of Umoya Creations work

Oha Maslo
Oha was 13 when the war in Bosnia started. He became one of the youngest soldiers in the whole Balkan conflict. On the frontline of the ethnically divided city of Mostar he was faced with challenging his best friend who was now his enemy and saw people he knew and loved killed by each other.

After the war he began attending drum workshops run by Eugene Skeef, who was employed by the British charity War Child as Director of Music Development of the Pavarotti Music Centre. Oha’s trauma was revealed through the music and other workshops focusing on trust and team-building, developed by Eugene and his colleagues. As the music healing proceeded his exceptional musical skills became apparent.

Oha has gone on to teach this self-empowering method of drumming in schools, community centres and psychiatric hospitals. He has become one of the most sought-after hand drummers in the region and has travelled internationally to perform. He is also now the Manager and Event Producer of the Mostar Rock School at the Pavarotti Music Centre (https://mostarrockschool.org/en/

Edmund Mhlongo
A young South African man found a focus for his ambitions through Ngoma, a touring multi-arts project. Edmund Mhlongo gained artistic skills and was trained in arts administration by UC staff. As a direct result of this experience he set up a performing arts group called K-Cap Alive Kids for children in an impoverished township in Durban.

His organisation built a school to house a dance studio and recording facilities through international funding and the group has made several trips to perform in Europe. These included an appearance at the WOMAD festival in the UK and a series of educational workshops and performances in Bosnia, which included Oha. They now have a thriving community arts centre called Ekhaya Multi Arts Centre at B25 Giya road KwaMashu, Durban (https://www.facebook.com/KCAPEMAC).

Long-term benefits of Umoya Creations work

The work of UC, as Oha and Edmund’s stories highlight, has the inherent capacity to:

• Build tolerance and understanding amongst people of different cultures,
  races, communities, religions and class who may be divided by conflict,
  thereby creating an alternative language of communication;
• Heal emotional wounds and damage caused by conflicts, wars, discrimination, abuse;
• Fight poverty by encouraging creativity, the creation of employment and business opportunities;
• Restore a natural sense of confidence among the disenfranchised, and heighten their self-determination;
• Develop empowering structures;
• Build capacities.

Aims

• Promote equitable exchange between cultures;
• Empower people, especially the youth, and improve their lives by giving them access to music and creativity;
• Use music as a healing force to alleviate the trauma suffered mainly by young people;
• Help create wealth among the disenfranchised through judicious and fair means of marketing their creative and musical talents and products.

We attain these aims by

• Conducting participatory music events for young people from different cultures in different countries, with disadvantaged groups in hospitals, prisons, refugee centres and in schools and open public spaces in the deprived areas of the UK and abroad;
• Promoting musicians and artists whose work is founded on indigenous cultural traditions based on a sacred regard for nature and respect for the natural environment;
• Organising inclusive international workshops and festivals;
• Creating a scheme for the marketing and fair trade of musicians and music products from disenfranchised artists from developing countries and from the deprived areas of the UK;
• Offering free training sessions where socially deprived and disadvantaged people will develop their creative potential, interpersonal skills and skills to promote and sustain themselves through their creativity;
• Involving participants and beneficiaries of the projects in the decision-making process of the charity;
• Collaborating with community clubs, arts centres, hospitals, refugee centres, humanitarian and development organisations.

Highlights of Umoya Creations work

Umoya Creations was created as an arts production company in 1992. Since then UC and its director Eugene Skeef have been conducting music education projects in the UK and abroad. Here are some highlights:

• 1992- “A Celebration of World Music” – Music education programme with London Sinfonietta involving children from schools in South East England;
• 1993 – Music workshops in HMP Wormwood Scrubs – series of workshops with London Sinfonietta players;
• 1994 – “Spirit of the Drum-Song” – An award winning commission by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO). The concert involved RSNO players, a 100 piece junior choir comprising young people from diverse ethnic backgrounds from local communities, four schools and a group of disabled adults;
• 1995 – “Ngoma” – Educational programme with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in South Africa (in the presence of HRH Queen Elizabeth II and President Nelson Mandela);
• 1996 – Devised and led Open Ears, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival’s first multi- age, multi-ability, multi-cultural, multi-arts-based composition and performance project;
• 1997-1999 – Post-war trauma healing – Music workshops for refugee and war-affected children in Bosnia and Sudan;
• 2000 – “Call and Response” – International cultural exchange workshop programme created with Sound it Out Community Music in Birmingham which culminated in a concert performed simultaneously at Symphony Hall in the UK and Benoni City Hall in South Africa and linked live by video conferencing (a world first!);
• 2001 – “Impulse” – Educational programme with the Purcell School of music;
• 1999-2002 – “Peacetrails” – Summer leadership and reconciliation
  wilderness camp with 180 young people from Bosnia.
• 2018 – Umoya Creations has an ongoing partnership with Gcina Mhlophe’s Gcinamasiko Heritage and Nozincwadi Storytelling Festival. In 2018 we contributed to the festival’s events in KwaZulu-Natal. UC’s involvement included conducting creative workshops with primary school pupils from the region. We also conducted music workshops aimed at increasing the self-confidence of young women from the Umngeni Dam (Valley Of A Thousand Hills) who were victims of sexual abuse.
• 2018 – Ran masterclasses and creative sessions on empowerment with young students from Wits University in Johannesburg.
• 2020 – Distributing food parcel donations to impoverished communities in KwaZulu-Natal, especially the vulnerable (elderly and young);
• 2020 – Contributed to Gcinamasiko Heritage’s first Covid- 19 themed virtual performance as part of Nozincwadi International Storytelling Festival, ‘Chanting The Bridges’.
• 2023 – Gave a lecture on the history of Black Theatre at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa.
• 2023 – Conducted a convocation and masterclass on deep listening and the transformative power of music and other cultural art forms at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT).

Umoya Creations/Artistic Director Eugene Skeef Awards And Honours

1992 – Voted Visiting Lecturer of the Year at Goldsmith’s College (University of London) by postgraduate music students.

1995 – Winner of ABSA award for a new commission, Spirit of the Drumsong, by the RSNO.

1999 – Awarded Certificate of Appreciation in recognition of his outstanding contribution as Peace Heartbeat at Bosnian Peace-building Wilderness Learning Program in Minnesota, USA.

2001 – Appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

Received the Queen’s Award in 1995 for Ngoma, an education and outreach project developed by Eugene and taken to South Africa with the LPO.

2003 – Winner of the Paul Keough Award for Water Music.

2005 – Winner of the Harry E. Schlenz Medal – Marjorie Ryerson’s Water Music.

2005 – Presented to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace historic concert to celebrate diversity in the UK.

2006 – Associated Board of Royal Schools of Music’s SoundJunction – Winner of the NMA Effectiveness Award in the music category.

2010 – The Battle of the Wordsmiths – Shortlisted for PRS New Music Award.