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John Knox Bokwe, Colonial Composer: Tales about Race and Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Grant Olwage
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Abstract

This article intervenes in debates on the status of ‘race’ in ethno/musicological writings. It does so through an examination of the compositional discourse of colonial black South African choral music, particularly detailed analyses of the work of John Knox Bokwe (1855–1922) and their metropolitan sources such as late nineteenth-century gospel hymnody, exploring both how Bokwe's compositional practice enacted a politics that became anticolonial and how early black choral music became ‘black’ in its receptions. The article concludes that ethno/musicological claims that colonial black choral music contains ‘African’ musical content conflate race and culture under a double imperative: in the names of a decolonizing politics and a postcolonial epistemology in which hybridity as resistance is racialized.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 131 , Issue 1 , 2006 , pp. 1 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

My thanks to Christine Lucia and Roger Parker, as well as to the editor of the Journal, Katharine Ellis, and anonymous readers, for comments on this article.

References

1 Kaffir Express (June 1875), 8.Google Scholar

2 For a melodic analysis of the Old Hundredth, see Havergal, William Henry, A History of the Old Hundredth Psalm Tune (New York, 1854), 16–17.Google Scholar

3 The translation of the text (though not of the title, which is by Bokwe) is by Jackson Vena of the Cory Library for Historical Research, Rhodes University. IsiXhosa is the dominant black language of south-western South Africa.Google Scholar

4 Free Church of Scotland Monthly (November 1892), 268.Google Scholar

5 John Stainer, The Present State of Music in England: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, November 13, 1889 (Oxford, 1889), 11–12.Google Scholar

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7 See Musical Times (July 1874), 546; (August 1874), 588.Google Scholar

8 The educationalist John Curwen's How to Observe Harmony (10th edn, London, 1889) was at the vanguard of these developments. First published towards the end of 1861, and advertised as a novelty, it was structured according to the idea of a standard practice. If it had the unintended consequence of stimulating hundreds of pupils ‘to attempt Elementary Composition’, its author was happy to have guarded them from ‘gross errors’ and ‘many blunders’ in ‘correcting [their] exercises'; see the ‘Notice’ for the 1872 edition reprinted in the 10th edition. Trinity College, London, instituted external examinations in the theory of music in the mid-1870s.Google Scholar

9 Hymns Ancient and Modern, for Use in the Services of the Church, with Accompanying Tunes (London, 1861, 1875 and 1904).Google Scholar

10 The in the bass at bar 6.4, which makes the tenor in Example 1a appear misplaced, is a passing note, an effect of voice-leading; see also the clash of the passing G in the bass with the soprano–alto f′ in bar 5.3. In a similar passage in bar 14.4, Bokwe chose G in the bass, rather than the again, probably because of the impending closure.Google Scholar

11 See, for example, George Oakey, Compendium of Harmony for Tonic Sol-faists (London, 1889), 7, 10–11.Google Scholar

12 Lovedale, South Africa. I have been unable to locate a copy of the 1885 edition. Subsequent editions of Lovedale Music were issued by the same publisher.Google Scholar

13 Letter to Mr Shaw, 14 July 1885, ‘Letterbooks’, Vol. 1, National Library of South Africa (Cape Town campus), MS B59,1(1); letter to R. Kawa, 10 May 1886, ibid.Google Scholar

14 See above, note 4.Google Scholar

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17 I borrow the phrase from Frantz Fanon's essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (London, 1980), 13–45, in which he famously showed that the practice of veiling/unveiling was instrumentally political.Google Scholar

18 Also called Ulo Thixo ‘Mkulu (Thou great God), it was first published in the Lovedale paper Isigidimi sama-Xosa (Xhosa Express; November 1876). Bokwe also transcribed three other Ntsikana hymns, and wrote several accounts of the prophet's life.Google Scholar

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21 Veit Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West (New York, 1999), 120–6. For a trenchant critique of Erlmann's (really Dargie's) analysis of the Great Hymn, see Scherzinger, Martin, review of Veit Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 126 (2001), 117–41 (pp. 129–32).Google Scholar

22 Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, 128. This scenario was already outlined in the earlier work of Erlmann and David Coplan; see my ‘Scriptions of the Choral: The Historiography of Black South African Choralism’, South African Journal of Musicology, 22 (2002), 29–45. Coplan, for example, suggested that by the 1880s black elite identity was no longer constructed on ‘adopted European models’, searching ‘instead for a distinctly African concept of civilisation'. ‘Most important, Bokwe's works [i.e. the Great Hymn] contained African as well as Christian [sic] musical features’, which ‘gave powerful musical support to the cultural nationalism of mission intellectuals'. David Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre (Johannesburg, 1985), 30–1.Google Scholar

23 See Hodgson, Janet, Ntsikana's ‘Great Hymn ‘: A Xhosa Expression of Christianity in the Early 19th Century Eastern Cape (Cape Town, 1980); and Erich Bigalke, ‘An Historical Overview of Southern Nguni Musical Behaviour’, Papers Presented at the Third and Fourth Symposia on Ethnomusicology, ed. Andrew Tracey (Grahamstown, 1984), 38–47 (p. 43). Bokwe's own account of the prophet's life is prefaced with an acknowledgement of the importance of oral testimony on Ntsikana; see Christian Express (October 1878), 14.Google Scholar

24 Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, 128–9. While there is a case for reading Ntsikana's reception by the black elite from the turn of the century on as anticolonialist nationalism, one cannot be made for the quarter of a century prior to this. The strain in Erlmann's reading is clear from a lack of attention to the specificities of chronology, as he jockeys between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s and 1930s.Google Scholar

25 Report of the Superintendent-General of Education (Cape Town, 1903), 165a.Google Scholar

26 Richard Middleton, ‘Musical Belongings: Western Music and its Low-Other’, Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000), 59–85 (p. 76).Google Scholar

27 Quoted (from Houston A. Baker) ibid., 74.Google Scholar

28 Dargie, ‘The Music of Ntsikana’, 13.Google Scholar

29 The hundreds of transcriptions of Xhosa music in Deirdre D. Hansen, ‘The Music of the Xhosa-Speaking People’, 2 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 1981), and Dave Dargie, Xhosa Music: Its Techniques and Instruments, with a Collection of Songs (Cape Town and Johannesburg, 1988), throw up nothing like it. A trawl through Victorian hymnals would yield the same conclusion. All known recordings of the text of Ulo Thixo ‘Mkulu, including one made of a choir led by Bokwe's son, are sung to one of the other Ntsikana tunes, known as the Round Hymn; see Dargie's CD compilation of recordings of Ntsikana's music, Ntsikana Music Collection 2000: Songs of the First Christian Xhosa (University of Fort Hare, Alice, South Africa, 2000). The performance of the Ulo Thixo ‘Mkulu text to different tunes has resulted in some confusion. Throughout, I refer to Bokwe's setting as presented in Example 2a.Google Scholar

30 Autograph manuscript (c. 1894), Rhodes University, Cory Library for Historical Research, MS 11086.Google Scholar

31 Christian Express (October 1878), 14.Google Scholar

32 See Dargie, ‘The Music of Ntsikana'.Google Scholar

33 Only in the last quarter of the century were other voices occasionally the principal voice; see Temperley, Nicholas, The Music of the English Parish Church, i (Cambridge, 1979), 304–5.Google Scholar

34 Christian Express (May 1879), 15.Google Scholar

35 John Knox Bokwe, Amaculo ase Lovedale (Lovedale Music) (1910), x. Bokwe claimed Lovedale Music to be ‘the first effort of its kind by a Native’ (1894 edn, unpaginated).Google Scholar

36 Christian Express (May 1879), 15; Lovedale Music (1910), iv.Google Scholar

37 Ntsikana's Vision appeared for the first time in the 1910 edition of Lovedale Music. Elsewhere, Bokwe exoticized precolonial Xhosa musicking in the spirit of colonial ethnography. To his ‘ear trained in civilized music’, the singing at a wedding dance was described as a ‘discord … something unbearable … yelling, howling, and bellowing'; Christian Express (November 1878), 14.Google Scholar

38 John Knox Bokwe, Ntsikana: The Story of an African Hymn ([London?, 1904]), 12–13.Google Scholar

39 Christian Express (October 1878), 14; (May 1879), 15.Google Scholar

40 Bokwe called Lovedale home, and its Scottish principal and his wife, the Stewarts, his parents; letter to Mrs Stewart, 5 January 1895, ‘Letterbooks’, Vol. 2, National Library of South Africa (Cape Town campus), MS B59,1(2); letter to Mrs Stewart, 11 June 1906, Cory Library, MS 9179.Google Scholar

41 Christian Express (May 1879), 15. Ntsikana (or Bokwe) forbade his disciples to attend ‘heathen dances'; ibid. For a fuller account of Bokwe's appropriation of Ntsikana, see my ‘Music and (Post)Colonialism: The Dialectics of Choral Culture on a South African Frontier’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Rhodes University, 2003), 139–42; cf. Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, chapter 5.Google Scholar

42 Tamke, Susan S., Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord: Hymns as a Reflection of Victorian Social Attitudes (Athens, OH, 1978), 42–3; John Richard Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford, 1997), 495–6. ‘Heaven’ was the largest subject in Ira D. Sankey's expanded, 750-piece late-century edition of Sacred Songs and Solos, with Standard Hymns, Combined (London, 1873; repr. c.1890).Google Scholar

43 Songs of Zion: A Book of Hymns and Christian Songs, ed. James Hood Wilson (London and Edinburgh, c.1860; repr. c.1877).Google Scholar

44 Erlmann claims that Bokwe's Ntsikana hymns were his most important works; Veit Erlmann, ‘Black Political Song in South Africa – Some Research Perspectives’, Popular Music Perspectives, 2, ed. David Horn (Gothenburg, 1985), 187–209 (p. 192). Most important, perhaps, for the postcolonial musicologist. Together with three other Ntsikana fragments, the Great Hymn was exceptional for being Bokwe's only attempt at transcribing precolonial music. And though Bokwe was clearly associated with Ntsikana and his music, neither the public nor Bokwe overly privileged the Ntsikana music as representative of his output.Google Scholar

45 Songs of Zion, ed. Wilson, 3.Google Scholar

46 Ibid.Google Scholar

47 Christian Express (February 1878), 7; letter to Mrs Muirhead, 1 December 1883, ‘Letterbooks’, vol. 1. A music inspector of the Cape Education Department attributed the lack of ‘real native tunes’ in the eastern Cape mission schools to the ‘vogue’ for Sankey's hymns; Report of the Superintendent-General of Education, 165a.Google Scholar

48 The in bar 5 is probably meant to be an e#′.Google Scholar

49 See Percival R. Kirby, ‘Some Problems of Primitive Harmony and Polyphony, with Special Reference to Bantu Practice’, South African Journal of Science, 23 (1926), 951–70 (p. 958); Hansen, ‘Music of the Xhosa-Speaking People’, ii, 698; and Dargie, Xhosa Music, 75–89.Google Scholar

50 I base my claims for gospel hymnody on an analysis of Sacred Songs and Songs of Zion. Although known as Sankey's Sacred Songs, the songbook is a compilation, mostly of American music, with few songs composed by Sankey himself.Google Scholar

51 Lovedale Music (1894).Google Scholar

52 John Spencer Curwen, Studies in Worship Music, Chiefly as Regards Congregational History, 2nd series (London, 1885), 24. Albeit popular, the movement that I analyse below is not a compulsory feature of gospel hymnody. More generally, there is no single gospel song type. The revivalist hymnal included, for example, many mainstream-type hymn tunes. Conversely, the ‘standard collections’ incorporated revivalist hymns, though typically reworked; see ibid., 40.Google Scholar

53 See, for example, ibid., 24–5; and Watson, The English Hymn, 494.Google Scholar

54 The Victorian hymnologist John Heywood noted that a successful gospel tune had to ‘run along quickly, have “a swing” with it, be “springy”, with some “touch and go” about it'; Our Church Hymnody: An Essay and Review (London, 1881), 11–12.Google Scholar

55 While not conceived as a system of figures, as has been claimed for instance especially for eighteenth-century German Figurenlehre, musical rhetoric in gospel hymnody functioned similarly and to the same end as in pre-nineteenth-century European practice: to create meaning, and to persuade, through the strategic deployment of musical figures; see Patrick McCreless, ‘Music and Rhetoric’, The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge, 2001), 847–79.Google Scholar

56 Curwen, Studies in Worship Music, 42.Google Scholar

57 Ibid., 40.Google Scholar

58 Heywood, Our Church Hymnody, 16–17 (see also pp. 11–12); Watson, The English Hymn, 496.Google Scholar

59 Henry Cary Shuttleworth, The Place of Music in Public Worship (London, 1892), 4.Google Scholar

60 Curwen, Studies in Worship Music, 39–42.Google Scholar

61 For colonial evangelism's use of song, see Olwage, ‘Music and (Post)Colonialism’, chapter i.Google Scholar

62 Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London and New York, 1994), 102.Google Scholar

63 A metropolitan notice for the second edition of Lovedale Music (1894) suggests that the image and the music were often part of the same message: ‘We have received (with the author's portrait) a book of tunes in four-part harmony, composed by John Knox Bokwe. The record of his life shows how even an African newly emerged from barbarism may be tamed by the strains of music'; Musical Herald (March 1895), 95.Google Scholar

64 Letter to Mrs Stewart, 13 June 1891, Cory Library, MS 9181. It is unlikely that Bokwe joined the African Choir. There is no record of it, and in the above letter he stipulated that he would do so only if they were ‘proceeding successfully'. By mid-to-late 1892, when Bokwe finally got to Scotland, the choir's tour had been derailed; see Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, 14, 99–100.Google Scholar

65 Curwen, Studies in Worship Music, 41. Songs of Zion justified its introduction of refrains on the basis of their suitability for ‘evangelistic meetings and gatherings of children'; see p. 4.Google Scholar

66 Curwen, Studies in Worship Music, 40–1.Google Scholar

67 The programme consisted of Victorian music, metropolitan and colonial; traditional precolonial African music; and hybrid music such as the Great Hymn. The pieces from which the ‘native’ preferences were identified are all exemplary Victorian choral compositions, including Send the Light, arranged by Bokwe; see Lovedale Music (1894). By contrast, none of the descriptions of the traditional songs makes mention of humming, vocal accompaniment or the solo–chorus form; see Ludgate Monthly (December 1891), 11–12. They may well have done so, though, for humming, variously called ‘ukumemelela’, ‘ukumbombozela’ or ‘imbuyo’ in the ethnomusicological literature, is a common vocal technique in traditional Xhosa musicking, either accompanying or alternating with singing; see Hansen, ‘Music of the Xhosa-Speaking People’, 132; and Dargie, Xhosa Music, 60. Similarly, the idea of a solo and chorus defines communal Xhosa musicking; Hansen, ‘Music of the Xhosa-Speaking People’, 116–17, 240, 616; and Dargie, Xhosa Music, 103–4. To look for structural affinities in the details of the solo–chorus relation between traditional Xhosa musicking and revivalist hymnody would be an exercise in vain. I make these observations to point out that similarities between Victorian choralism and traditional Xhosa musicking can be found, not to suggest that Bokwe's music includes Xhosa African characteristics.Google Scholar

68 Ludgate Monthly (December 1891), 11–12.Google Scholar

69 James Stewart, Lovedale: Past and Present, A Register of Two Thousand Names (Lovedale, 1887), 23. The black elite's ‘complicity’ in the missionary discourse of trophyism is not difficult to understand. Given the always precarious position of the mission, on the one hand competing for resources from the home public, on the other up against an often hostile colonial government, the self-exhibiting game was compulsory – a matter of the mission's survival.Google Scholar

70 In Britain, Plea was published by the Scottish firm Paterson and Sons. Later, it was translated into French as L'Afrique malheureuse, published by Berger-Leovault, and advertised in the Journal des missions; see letter to David Stormont, 14 December 1898, Cory Library, MS 14303; and Imvo zabantsundu (Native Opinion; 12 December 1898). Bokwe's daughter, Frieda Bokwe Matthews, reported that Plea was sung ‘as far afield as Ghana'; Remembrances (Cape Town, 1995), 2.Google Scholar

71 Christian Express (September 1891), 149–50.Google Scholar

72 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 93–101.Google Scholar

73 Christian Express (September 1891), 150.Google Scholar

74 Ibid. For an account of Bokwe's protest politics in the early 1890s, see my ‘Music and (Post)Colonialism’, 158–61. Elsewhere there, I argue against the standard accounts of early black politicking, showing that Bokwe's politics before this time was not oppositional, but that its ‘independence’ was grounded in the Victorian moral of ‘self-help’ as a model for reform, which resonated with, not against, missionary, and indeed colonial, policy; see pp. 149–52.Google Scholar

75 The few scholarly excursions into black choral composition have largely declined to face its music. Veit Erlmann, for one, said about the later elite composer Reuben T. Caluza that his ‘early nationalist songs are a good example of the futility of bringing plain structural approaches to bear upon analyses of popular black music in South Africa. An etic analysis of the surface structure in these compositions would indeed bring to light only a limited number of technical resources.’ The ‘limited’ technique that informed Caluza's songs owed a debt, Erlmann tells us, to ‘the older generation of choir composers such as John K. Bokwe'. Veit Erlmann, African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago, 1991), 120. And so, in a not particularly satisfying move, it is to the songs’ verbal texts that Erlmann turned to chart Caluza's politics.Google Scholar

76 The term amaculo in the title Amaculo ase Lovedale (Lovedale Music) originally denoted ‘little’ or ‘short’ songs performed without dance, and therefore lent itself to the mission's idea of music. Henceforth, amaculo has referred to black church or school music; Albert Kropf, A Kaffir–English Dictionary (Lovedale, 1899), 65; Dargie, Xhosa Music, 64.Google Scholar

77 Imvo zabantsundu (25 July 1894).Google Scholar

78 For a discussion of the predominance of major modality in Bokwe's works, especially the Victorian antecedents for this, see Olwage, ‘Music and (Post)Colonialism’, 162.Google Scholar

79 See, for example, John Blacking, ‘Trends in the Black Music of South Africa, 1959–1969’, Musics of Many Cultures, ed. Elizabeth May (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), 195–215 (p. 197).Google Scholar

80 South African Outlook (May 1922), 105.Google Scholar

81 For an overview of Xhosa mission hymnody, see Dargie, Dave, ‘South African Christian Music: Christian Music among Africans’, Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History, ed. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport (Oxford and Cape Town, 1997), 319–36; and A. M. Jones, African Hymnody in Christian Worship: A Contribution to the History of its Development (Gwelo (Gweru, Zimbabwe), 1976), chapter i.Google Scholar

82 Erlmann implies that the article was black-authored by discussing it within the context of black anticolonial nationalist thought and action; Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, 128. The verbal discourse and address of the article suggest otherwise. For example, at the time Lovedale used any opportunity to publicize its civilizing successes precisely by naming its converts as literate; Bokwe's contributions to the Kaffir Express and the Christian Express were acknowledged and even enumerated. Other articles on accent to appear in the Lovedale papers were all white-authored; see Kaffir Express (October 1871), 2–3; Christian Express (November 1883), 162–3, (August 1909), 132–3, and (May 1917), 74–5. Two colonists, Christopher Birkett and Thomas Daines, were among the first to put into practice compositional solutions; see, respectively, Ingoma, or Penult Psalm-Tunes, Compiled for the Use of the Native Churches in Southern Africa (London, [1871]); and Kaffir Express (September 1874), 2–3.Google Scholar

83 See ibid., 2.Google Scholar

84 Heywood, Our Church Hymnody, 60, 63.Google Scholar

85 Kaffir Express (June 1875), 8.Google Scholar

86 Kirby, ‘The Uses of European Musical Techniques’, 38; Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, 128.Google Scholar

87 A. M. Jones charted the ‘Rise of Dissatisfaction’ with the ‘old-style hymnody’ from Birkett, through Kirby's and his own interventions, amongst others, during the 1930s, to the beginnings of the African Music Society in the late 1940s and early 1950s; Jones, African Hymnody, chapter 2. Note how white was the dissatisfaction.Google Scholar

88 See Birkett, Ingoma, or Penult Psalm-Tunes.Google Scholar

89 Quoted in letter by R. H. W. Shepherd to Kirby, 10 March 1958, Cory Library, MS 14712(u).Google Scholar

90 Hugh Tracey, ‘Short Survey of Southern African Folk Music for the International Catalogue of Folk Music Records’, African Music Society Newsletter, 1/6 (1953), 41–6 (p. 42); also idem, ‘Native Music and the Church’, Native Teachers’ Journal, 12/2 (1932), 110–15 (p. 111).Google Scholar

91 Hansen, ‘Music of the Xhosa-Speaking People’, i, 231, 217, 201. Other research that has debunked the accentual integrity of black South African song includes David Rycroft's work on Zulu poetics – see, for example, ‘Stylistic Evidence in Nguni Song’, Essays on Music and History in Africa, ed. Klaus Wachsmann (Evanston, IL, 1971), 216–60 (pp. 237–9), and ‘The Relationship between Speech-Tone and Melody in Southern African Music’, South African Music Encyclopedia, 2, ed. Jacques P. Malan (Cape Town, 1982), 301–14 (p. 308) – and John Blacking's study of Venda children's songs, the latter clearly demonstrating the gap between the rhythms of speech and song for the most ‘natural’ of singers, children; Venda Children's Songs: A Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis (Johannesburg, 1967), chapter 3.Google Scholar

92 For an account of references to tone in isiXhosa in nineteenth-century colonial linguistics, and of more thorough descriptions from the 1920s on, see Claughton, John Sellick, ‘The Tonology of Xhosa’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Rhodes University, 1992), chapter 3.Google Scholar

93 IsiXhosa had been musicalized long before linguistic science's insights into its tonal nature. The early missionary-linguist John Appleyard spoke of the ‘euphony’ of the ‘Kafir language’, which was ‘melodious; possessing … a peculiarly easy and agreeable flow'; The Kaffir Language: Comprising a Sketch of its History; Which Includes a General Classification of South African Dialects, Ethnographical and Geographical: Remarks upon its Nature: And a Grammar (King William's Town, South Africa, 1850), 65, 72.Google Scholar

94 Tracey, ‘Native Music and the Church’, 111; Percival R. Kirby, ‘The Effect of Western Civilization on Bantu Music’, Western Civilization and the Natives of South Africa: Studies in Culture Contact, ed. Isaac Schapera (London, 1934), 131–40 (p. 131).Google Scholar

95 Kirby, Percival R., ‘African Music’, Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa, ed. Ellen Hellmann (Cape Town, 1949), 616–27 (p. 621). For a similar proposal, see Agawu, Kofi, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (New York and London, 2003), 108. Agawu's stance on the African music–language nexus is contradictory. While acknowledging the ambivalences of tone/tune relationships, he nevertheless strains to uphold African languages’ special affinity with their musics, a move that seems to undermine his politico-epistemological position, which argues against the difference-seeking plots that have structured the study of African music; see esp. chapters 5 and 7 respectively for ‘language and music’ and ‘difference'.Google Scholar

96 Percival R. Kirby and Clement Martyn Doke, review of A. M. Jones, Nyimbo sya Waklistu awakatolika: Lala Hymnbook, Bantu Studies, 5/2 (1931), 203–4 (p. 203); Kirby, ‘The Uses of European Musical Techniques’, 38.Google Scholar

97 Coplan, In Township Tonight!, 30; also Erlmann, ‘Black Political Song’, 192.Google Scholar

98 Ernst Westphal, ‘Linguistics and the African Music Research’, African Music Society Newsletter, 1/1 (1948), 12–18 (p. 14). Kirby had assisted the noted linguist C. M. Doke in his phonetic work on southern African languages.Google Scholar

99 See Claughton, ‘The Tonology of Xhosa’, 11–12. Claughton, of the Rhodes University School of Languages, tells me that even Xhosa-speaking residents of neighbouring towns can speak with different tonal patterns. Marking the tones for the language as a whole, then, is always a non-definitive exercise. Nor, in fact, are the tones marked in written usage. This is in contrast to orthographical practice for some West African languages.Google Scholar

100 Jones, A. M., ‘Hymns for the African’, African Music Society Newsletter, 1/3 (1950; orig. 1930), 8–12 (p. 10).Google Scholar

101 Jones, African Hymnody, 21; also Tracey, ‘Native Music and the Church’, 112. Similar thinking informed southern African Catholic efforts from the 1960s to create church music in an ‘indigenous style'; see Dargie, Dave, ‘Group Composition and Church Music Workshops’, Papers Presented at the [First] Symposium on Ethnomusicology, 1980, ed. Andrew Tracey (Grahamstown, 1980), 10–13.Google Scholar

102 Kirby, ‘The Uses of European Musical Techniques’, 38.Google Scholar

103 Hansen, ‘Music of the Xhosa-Speaking People’, i, 230, 223–4, 218, 227–8. The other major late twentieth-century writer on Xhosa musicking, Dave Dargie, has been more dogmatic in his statements on the speech–song relationship; see Dargie, Xhosa Music, chapter 6.Google Scholar

104 Blacking, ‘Trends in the Black Music of South Africa’, 196, 210.Google Scholar

105 Kirby and Doke, review of Jones, Nyimbo sya Waklistu awakatolika, 204.Google Scholar

106 Tracey, ‘Native Music and the Church’, 111–12.Google Scholar

107 Ibid., 114.Google Scholar

108 See, for example, Erlmann, African Stars, 1–2, 16.Google Scholar

109 Ibid., 16.Google Scholar

110 In its nineteenth-century racial–sexual formulation, the context of Tracey's use, hybridity was no less a subversive phenomenon. For a history of hybridity's racial and cultural politics, see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London, 1995).Google Scholar

111 Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing, History and the West (London, 1990), 148–9. Peter Childs and Patrick Williams suggest that hybridity for Bhabha is not the introduction of cultural relativism or a synthesized position but the return of what colonial authority has disavowed, something menacing; An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (Harlow, 1997), 134; also Young, Colonial Desire, 22–4. Bhabha's thoughts on hybridity are most fully written in ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, The Location of Culture, 102–22, esp. pp. 111–16. While it is almost impossible to characterize a terrain as diffuse as postcolonial studies, it would not be amiss to name part of the field resistance studies. So much does a resistant postcolonialism seem to have become orthodoxy that Childs and Williams speak of a necessary ‘corrective to those critics who would see postcolonialism as (all too easily) resistant'; An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory, 19; also Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001), 355.Google Scholar

112 Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, 128.Google Scholar

113 Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, ‘Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music’, Western Music and its Others, 1–58 (pp. 27, 30).Google Scholar

114 Young, Colonial Desire, 22. Martin Scherzinger notes the contradiction by which Erlmann at times situates political resistance in hybridity, and at other times in ‘a kind of Africanist aesthetic purity'; review of Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, 135. As I have suggested, the former cannot be separated from, but is crucially dependent on, inventions of the latter.Google Scholar

115 Howard Winant, ‘The Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race’, Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, ed. Les Back and John Solomos (London and New York, 2000), 181–90 (pp. 181–2, 185–6).Google Scholar

116 The first was fought in the name of Afrikaner nationalism.Google Scholar

117 Erlmann, African Stars, 1, xvi.Google Scholar

118 See my ‘Scriptions of the Choral’, for how a narrative of cultural nationalism has structured histories of South African music.Google Scholar

119 The essentializing strategies of identity politics, as well as their resistant natures, are well known. But the identity politics in which I am suggesting the contemporary ethnomusicologist is engaged is not, I think, akin to Gayatri Spivak's ‘strategic essentialism'; see especially Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London, 1993); also Benita Parry, ‘Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance, or Two Cheers for Nativism’, Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Manchester, 1994), 172–96 (p. 176). Here, the critic makes political use of categories rooted in ‘the natural’ in acknowledgement of their epistemological error, while the body of work I am critiquing proceeds seemingly unaware of the partially invented nature of the Africanisms it employs.Google Scholar