This article considers Hugh Tracey’s 1952 book African Dances of the Witwatersrand Gold Mines in relation to the history of music scholarship in southern Africa. Its first finding is that sound recordings and archives were crucial in the making of disciplines such as ethnomusicology and ethnology in Africa, and that Hugh Tracey was at the forefront of this process, especially in southern Africa. Its second finding is that Tracey’s project contributed to the discourse of tribing that was popular at the time, both in academic disciplines such as ethnology and in practical enterprises such as commercial recording and mining industries. The central argument is that, arising when it did in the history of sound reproduction, Tracey’s project instantiated a particular vision of the sound archive in Africa, one that emphasized preservation, purity, and study. The article also retrieves the work of early African intellectuals whose cultural vision ran counter to that of Tracey and his contemporaries; in particular, apartheid is held responsible for suppressing the views of African intellectuals such as H. I. E. Dhlomo. The article concludes with some reflections on the future of African music scholarship.
The history of this collection of authentic African music, songs, legends and stories is in many ways a personal one. It dates back to the early 1920s when I first sang and wrote down the words of African songs I heard in the tobacco fields of Southern Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe]. Several years later (1929) I made a number of discs with a visiting recording company (Columbia, London) when I took fourteen young Karanga men with me to record in Johannesburg, five hundred miles south. These were the first items of indigenous Rhodesian music to be recorded and published. Shortly afterwards several of these items were used by John Hammond of CBS, at Carnegie Hall in New York as preliminary music to his program on the historic occasion when he presented on the stage, for the first time in that city, the music and the personnel of a number of southern Negro bands.
—Hugh Tracey (1973)
So Hugh Tracey reminisced in 1973 about his use of recording technology as a means of preserving and studying African music in the early decades of the twentieth century.1 Tracey began taking an interest in African music in 1921 during his early days in Zimbabwe, where he had come to farm tobacco with his brother. Born in 1903, just three years after Princess Magogo—the expert in Zulu royal song whom he would later record—Tracey was one of eleven children born to a family in Devonshire, England. On moving to Zimbabwe in 1920, aged seventeen, he first had the chance to personally witness African traditional performances. Living with the Karanga people there, he learned to speak Karanga and started notating the songs he heard. Tracey was immediately convinced of the importance of music in the lives of the people.2 It is nevertheless clear from his account that from the early days of his recording expeditions, collections of audio recordings of music were linked to the commercial interests of recording companies, such as Columbia Records and Gallo Music. What his account fails to mention is that the people to whom he spoke in Karanga and whom he used as interlocutors were laborers on his farm. Settler agriculture in Zimbabwe in the 1920s led to the development of “agrarian capitalist relations.”3 For the Karanga men and women, interactions with Tracey would have been proscribed by the labor-employer relations common at the time.
This article revisits Hugh Tracey’s 1952 book African Dances of the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, now considered a milestone in the then emerging study of music in Africa.4 The book grew out of Tracey’s field recordings in the Witwatersrand gold mines. From this beginning, he went on to conduct field recordings all over southern Africa and in many regions of Central and East Africa. In so doing, he stood at the beginnings of the use of recording technologies to collect sound records in Africa in the early twentieth century. His endeavors accompanied and supported scholarly attempts to establish ethnomusicology as a field of study. Indeed, the creation of sound archives coincided with an increase in ethnographic study of “tribal” societies. These studies were led by the disciplines of anthropology and musicology, which were beginning to establish, in academic terms, a discourse on African culture, music and performance.5
The outlook of Tracey and others was actively challenged by intellectuals in southern Africa. Of all the African intellectuals of the early twentieth century, H. I. E. Dhlomo was the most “consistent and persistent in engaging himself with the dialectic between modernity and tradition in African intellectual and cultural history.”6 Recognizing that the colonial attempt to retribalize African people could only fail, Dhlomo threw himself into debates on language, music, drama, and other areas of culture, especially in the 1930s. Although African intellectuals such as Dhlomo were excluded from official government channels and decision-making bodies, they forged a space of their own, a space Njabulo Ndebele identifies as that of “existential autonomy,” many of whose aspects were beyond the reach of white people.7 In independent newspapers, school readers, and memoirs, African intellectuals documented performance repertoires and reviewed concerts; they deliberated on the future of African creativity in ways that went beyond the restrictions of the time. These were individuals of African heritage who had been educated in European and American missionary schools. In their intellectual endeavors they reflected on the status of African precolonial art forms in the postcolony.
It will be argued here that the kinds of practices that eventually became labeled as ethnomusicology emerged from questions that were being asked with regard to African performance repertories. This is observable in the taxonomical categories used to organize these repertoires, which were sometimes classified as dance, as in Tracey’s book, while scholars such as Percival Kirby chose to arrange them through the classification of musical instruments. In what follows I make three principal observations. First, sound recordings and archives were essential to the development of fields like ethnomusicology and ethnology in Africa. Particularly in southern Africa, Hugh Tracey was at the vanguard of this kind of recording and preservation project. Second, Tracey’s work was influenced by the “tribing discourse” that was prevalent at the time in ethnological domains, as well as in the recording and mining industries. My claim is that Tracey’s initiative, emerging at that particular moment in the history of sound reproduction, embodied a specific vision of the African sound archive that emphasized preservation, purity, and study. Third, early African intellectuals were making theoretical attempts to appraise African tradition at the same time as Tracey’s sound archiving initiatives. The high point was the 1930s, when Dhlomo began to experiment with drama and to theorize about precolonial African creative repertoires. Although interested in the archiving of historical phenomena, Dhlomo eschewed the tribing discourse, which makes his point of view radically different from that of Tracey. The concluding section of the article looks ahead by proposing ways in which music scholarship in Africa may begin, in Frantz Fanon’s words, to “open up the future.”
Historical Background: Recording and Preserving Sound
Recording proved to be a global phenomenon from its beginnings in the 1890s, and between the First and Second World Wars the United Kingdom became a major center for the recording and manufacture of gramophone records.8 The confluence of these two factors meant that there was widespread interest in recorded sounds from all over the British Empire in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1912 recordings of Swazi chiefs who had visited London in the early 1900s were distributed and sold internationally. In addition, recording technicians were sent by recording companies on expeditions to capture Afrikaans and other traditional folk musics of Africa. The recordings were then advertised and sold as “native records” to global audiences.9
As recordings began to reach widely dispersed audiences, scholars like the Austrian Erich von Hornbostel (who had never been to Africa) began to use them to construct a theory about African and Oriental music, creating a system of classifying musical instruments based on the sounds each produced. In 1928 Hornbostel published an article under the title “African Negro Music,” in which he alerted readers to his fears “that the modern efforts to protect culture are coming too late,” and that true African music was already disappearing before music scholarship had identified what it was.10 He went on to urge recording of African music “by means of the phonograph,” otherwise “we shall not learn what it even was.”11 Recordings had real power for Hornbostel; indeed, in all his research on African music he spent no time on the continent. What enabled him to construct his ideas about African music was recordings, collected in the growing repositories of sound archives and exhibitions of musical instruments in the museums and universities of major European cities. Following his investigation, scientific collections of musical instruments and sound archives began to appear, such as the Berliner Lautarchiv, founded in 1915 (some of whose sound archives were captured from prisoners of war in German concentration camps during the First World War); the Musikinstrumenten-Museum Berlin, founded in 1888; and the Kirby Collection, founded in 1954 (now housed partly at the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music and partly at Museum Africa).12 Many of these early sound archives were inspired by commercial interests such as the British Gramophone Company; subsequently, African-based companies like Gallo Music took hold of the market. Gallo Music had started out by recording music performed by miners from all over southern Africa (including Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia, to mention only a few countries), who would congregate at the Witwatersrand gold mines, Johannesburg, in the 1920s and 1930s.13 Gallo Music eventually employed Hugh Tracey for this role, and he became the leader of African music archiving. What started as the African Music Transcription Library in Roodepoort, Johannesburg, eventually grew to become the International Library of African Music (to which we shall return).
Sound Preservation and the Discourse of Tribing
Tracey’s achievements in the archiving of sound in Africa are indisputable, but his contribution must be understood within the context of the tribing of African populations that was prevalent at that time. Tribing was an ideology that held that all African people belong to specific tribes and must be kept in those tribes for their development. The term “tribing” refers to the naming of African populations according to distinct tribes, a practice instantiated through various mechanisms of governance, commerce, and knowledge production. Recognition of the historical ideology of tribing directs attention to the influence of ideas about tribes on the way we think about the past today. It leads to consideration of how thinking about African cultural repertoires developed in a way that emphasizes fixity, rather than progressive human development; in short, tribing promotes the image of a timeless culture.14 The ideology was replicated in similar ways in a variety of official discourses—academic, state-led (particularly in the Native Affairs Administration), and corporate (in the Chamber of Mines, recording companies, etc.). These discourses were increasingly elaborated and amplified via the broadcasting technologies of loudspeaker and radio that were introduced in the mines in the early 1940s.15
The way in which tribing translated into Tracey’s work was in his dismissal of missionary and city-inspired styles of music, and in overt promotion of what he considered traditional African music. In his explanation of performance contexts, Tracey often assumed his reader was unacquainted with the cultural practices being described, which was not always the case, especially for the African-educated class who were deeply interested in cultural matters. One can, for instance, think of Dhlomo’s extensive writings of the 1930s on “African Dramatic Forms,” a phrase he coined as a way of thinking of African repertoires as interconnected, rather than reducing them to music, dance, and poetry, as scholars often did.16
Dhlomo viewed the transformations that were taking place in art, life, and culture in South Africa as follows:
We live under conditions in many ways similar to those that produced great Greek dramatic literature and the immortal Elizabethan drama. What, then are some of the conditions under which great literature thrives? It is a time of transition, of migration of population, of expansion, of the rise of new horizons and new modes of thought and life. It is a time when an old indigenous culture clashes with a newer civilization, when tradition faces powerful exotic influences. It is a time when men suddenly become conscious of the wealth of their threatened old culture, the glories of their forefathers, the richness of their tradition, the beauty of the art and song. It is a time when lamentations and groans, thrills and rejoicings, find expression in writing. It is a time when men discover in their history, great heroes whose activities are near enough to be of interest and meaning, but remote enough to form subjects of great, dispassionately passionate creative literature. It is a time when men realize they can preserve and glorify the past not by reverting back to it, but by immortalising it in art. It is a time when men embrace the old and seize upon the new; when they combine the native and alien, the traditional and the foreign, into something new and beautiful. It is a time when men become more of themselves by becoming transformed, when they retreat to advance, when they probe into their own life by looking outward at the wider world, when they sound the mute depths by gazing at the rising stars.17
This viewpoint was entirely at variance with that of Hugh Tracey. Tracey recorded music that he believed was under threat of being lost. Seldom did he give jazz or marabi, for example, the same attention as styles like dingaka or ingoma.18 He was often disparaging toward those who saw themselves as custodians of such contemporary styles. The early African intellectuals were one such group, who, during the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, chose to self-identify with the contemporary styles of choral music and jazz, among others. Cultural critic Walter Nhlapo wrote in 1945,
But we deserve the heavier art of Caluza, Bokwe, Tyamzashe, Mohapeloa and others. These works demand concentrated attention and frequent repetition before digestion is completed, and even then at each new hearing reveal some fresh facets, some nuance, some subtlety that had escaped previous notice. It is in this varied music, I feel certain, lies the spirit of both old and new Africa.19
The four composers whom Nhlapo mentions here were leading innovators in new musical forms. As Nhlapo’s last sentence indicates, these African composers were concerned with the spirit of both the old and the new, and were thus consciously absorbed in the task of elaborating African modernities through their art. In the 1920s and 1930s, the cultural imagination of the African middle classes was evolving from church halls and mission schools to a concert tradition, so that within these middle-class gatherings a distinct repertoire developed. Musical performances no longer comprised only Western hymns but, increasingly, fused African traditional singing with ragtime tunes derived from minstrel songs and music hall songs of British provenance sold as sheet music at shops in the major towns.20 For instance, Reuben Caluza in the 1910s and 1920s, and to some extent Joshua Pulumo Mohapeloa in the 1930s and 1940s, wrote syncopated numbers that were clearly inspired by jazz bands.21 Although the songs remained in four parts, the tunes were groovy and involved dance steps.
Many African composers, while not necessarily resenting tradition, nevertheless respected Tracey’s perspective. Mohapeloa, for one, was a modern African composer par excellence. Born in Molumong, Lesotho, he wrote in his native language of Sotho, but his music circulated among choirs and vocal groups all over southern Africa,22 so much so that he was one of the three African composers who agreed to join Tracey’s African Music Society (AMS) in 1947. The AMS’s goal was to preserve and study traditional music, to the extent that Tracey had a special category for “African Members” that was separate from “Members,” who were white. This special categorization appeared as a slap in the face for university-trained composers such as Caluza and Mohapeloa. Mohapeloa had studied music at Wits University in Johannesburg under Percival Kirby, who was also a Member of the AMS (and whose vast collection of musical instruments forms the Kirby Collection at the University of Cape Town). Mohapeloa certainly understood his own craft as preserving Sotho music rather than being “pseudo-European,” as he composed songs using traditional melodies. The special (if not demeaning) designation within the AMS did not seem to diminish Mohapeloa’s regard for Tracey.
When Mohapeloa made an application to the Lesotho government for a study tour grant in the 1960s, he put Tracey’s name down as a referee. He wanted to explore music composition in England, Germany, Kenya, and the United States. The Lesotho government then sent his application to Tracey for expert review, even though he had never studied music at university. Tracey dismissed the application on the grounds of its usefulness to the composer, saying that the study would “be altogether confusing for him, and indeed might undo any good work which he undertook on the African continent.” He went on to suggest that Mohapeloa “first becomes steeped in the music of Africa, from both a scientific and artistic point of view…freed from his present leanings toward the mixing of African and European musics in his compositions.”23
It would appear, then, that although Tracey “regularly recorded in contexts and situations that were already infused with hybridity,”24 more than twenty years into his career his formulation of culture and music had not changed, despite having gone deeper into recording and preserving music in Africa following his tenure at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (he left broadcasting in 1943). Tracey’s musical preferences placed him at loggerheads with influential members of the New African intellectual movement of the time, including journalist Dhlomo and secretary of the Zulu Cultural Society Charles Mpanza.25 By contrast, the mining houses, the South African state broadcaster, and recording companies all at some point or another supported Tracey’s archiving work and approved of his ideas. In circles where those ideas were endorsed, things went on almost without regard for the opinions of those who held different views about the development of African culture, music, and performance, and about the direction in which these might subsequently evolve. Tracey’s tribal ideas could not have been at variance with the ideas of those at the helm of the institutions of mining, broadcasting, and recording, for the sedimentation of tribal ideas in the white imagination in South Africa took place over a long period. His project, arising at that particular moment in the history of sound reproduction, instantiated a particular vision of the sound archive in Africa.26 Tracey’s vision was characterized by a great emphasis on education; indeed, he established the AMS and the African Music Textbook Project, among many other endeavors. He also became influential in the formation of the field of study of traditional African music, a field that would rely on sound archives as evidence.
In short, Tracey was deeply concerned with collecting sound material, and with using practical tools, recording devices, and field notes in order to create his collection. His enthusiasm for collecting superseded his interest in scholarly writing, and because of his practical approach he was often distrustful of musicologists who were studying African music only in a theoretical sense, without equal emphasis on performance and active participation.27 Even in his book African Dances, published in 1952, Tracey writes only the introduction, and then allows the photographs to tell the rest of the story (as discussed further below). But this is not all, for as we experience the book in the twenty-first century, we are acutely aware of the institutional archive that underpins the spread of and interest in the author’s contributions—that is, the archive known as the International Library of African Music (ILAM), housed at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape. ILAM is one of the most significant repositories of African music in the world, preserving thousands of sound recordings dating as far back as 1929.28 There is an interdependency between African Dances and the site-specific archive of ILAM that shapes and informs how Tracey is understood today. Those who find the book first may very well end up visiting the site-specific archive, and those who come across the archive may very well end up purchasing a copy of the book, or Tracey’s many other books, in an effort to understand the archive better. Before turning to the book, it therefore makes sense to consider the various institutional contexts and ideologies that shaped its production and eventual reception.
Sound Technology as Evidence: Musicology and Anthropology
In his study of the beginnings of musicology (Musikwissenschaft) as a discipline in the 1880s, Bruno Nettl notes that studies of folk music and non-European musics were included in the earliest musicological journals, even though they did not constitute the majority of the articles published. He writes, “I believe that what was crucial in making a holistic musicology out of music history was the addition of the kinds of work done by ethnomusicological studies, in the sense of an interculturally comparative perspective, a relativistic approach, and a commitment to the study of the world’s musics as aspects of human cultures.”29 Nettl’s explanation implies that ethnomusicology developed as a self-conscious twin in the growth of musicology as a discipline. Musicology recognized that without being able to account for non-European musics it could never claim universality, even as an aspiration. From the mid-1870s onward, however, changes in Western culture were also accelerated by technological developments in the area of sound reproduction, including the carbon-button microphone (1876), the phonograph (1877), an instrument for measuring sound waves (1882), the tuning forks produced by Karl Rudolph Koenig and others (1890s), and the beginning of the mass production of cylinder recordings (1902).30 There were also significant political and cultural changes during the same decades. At the Berlin Congress of 1885, colonialism became a done deal and, as a celebration of the right to colonize, Africa was divided on a map among European imperial nations. Academic circles saw the emergence of ethnology, philology, linguistics, and anthropology as disciplines, and enthnology and anthropology introduced ways of rationalizing African cultural and social systems.
Two kinds of anthropology came to dominate South African scholarship: social anthropology and Volkekunde (to which we shall return). Social anthropology drew on the British school of anthropology, whose inspiration had been the work of Bronisław Malinowski.31 As pursued in South Africa, social anthropology was specifically anti-political in the way it refused to deal with the fact that the African societies it studied were contained within the modern state of the Union of South Africa, choosing instead to view these societies as distinct tribal states in themselves.32 As professor of social anthropology at the University of Cape Town from 1921, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s contribution was influential. According to his theory of structural functionalism, societal practices fitted together to maintain stability; in other words, the function of a practice was to support the social structure. Societies were viewed as defined tribal entities, and it was believed that their stability was sustained by the tribal social formation, with social order kept intact through the “social system” and “kinship” relations.33 What this anthropological gaze did was to keep the discourse focused on cultural matters and kinship ties, conveniently overlooking national questions of politics, land, and economy. In this sense, early ethnographers mirrored the aspirations of the segregated state, which preferred theories that would mask its own complicity. Mahmood Mamdani has argued that the South African state formation at that time could be better explained as a kind of despotic rule that happened to be decentralized, to the extent that each political identity carried with it a different set of assumptions of citizenship. According to Mamdani, civic citizenship was racially defined: it spoke the language of rights, equality, and civil law, and was the terrain of whites. There was also a limited citizenship, which was ethnically bound and of which African populations were deemed subjects: it spoke not of rights but of culture and customs, and it too was enshrined in the power of the state.34 In early twentieth-century anthropological studies, the nature of the state created an intellectual blind spot, in that tribal relations could not be seen as the state’s invention but were assumed to exist a priori.35
Early ethnographers therefore contributed to the increasing suspicion toward Africans who were self-styled urbanites, and who therefore impeded their search for untampered or (to use Tracey’s term) “unadulterated” African tribal life.36 Evidence from the nineteenth century, however, tells a different story. In the middle of that century, new worldviews critical of colonialism placed pressure on colonial governments to find alternative ways of administering power without direct force (but still capable of serving the colonial project). Theophilus Shepstone, the British colonial administrator, chose to resolve the challenge by finding indigenous African models of domination. In the legacy of the Zulu king Shaka kaSenzangakhona he found a model of central control that circumvented some of the more liberal demands of British constitutional government.37 The strategies imposed by Shepstone paid rigorous attention to detail, so that they would work and convince as colonial modes of governance. They were also imaginative and included Shepstone’s own acting out of the role of Shaka (who by then was dead) in public ceremonies, conveying certain modes of public address that called the society to attention, including heralding via izibongo (praise-poetry). It was at this time that tribality as a colonial mode of controlling African people was crafted and perfected, but in the emerging ethnographies of the 1920s and 1930s this historical reality was disregarded: tribal ties were viewed as precolonial in origin. The real political discourses that informed the mobility, settlement patterns, and economy of all people in South Africa—such as the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, which legislated the land dispossession of native populations—did not feature.38 The emphasis was on custom, ritual, and performance, the repertoires through which Tracey’s African Dances is framed.
Volkekunde was a different ethnological tradition, inspired by German philology and the anthropology of Carl Meinhof, that grew side by side with the development of social anthropology in the early to mid-twentieth century. The emphasis within Volkekunde was on language as a tool through which to study African cultures, but the languages were racially structured and language was seen to imply polity. It tended to be more governmental in its orientation; indeed, N. J. van Warmelo, a leading exponent of this tradition, became the government ethnologist from 1930.39 The government’s Ethnological Section played a key role in establishing the terms for determining tribes within the African population in the Union of South Africa.40 In essence, the Ethnological Section conducted bogus research that supported the chieftaincy claims required for tribal demarcations; historical evidence was adduced so as to order African populations in a way that was effective for the state’s administration. The ordering of these populations as tribes also made them more easily governable as labor on farms and in the mines.41
What is important for our study of Tracey is that the various traditions of ethnology developed side by side, and that those who were embedded within them moved across different networks of publicity. Tracey himself worked for state broadcasting and at some point for a commercial recording company, and he interacted with the mining industry. In addition, his first sound recordings in the 1920s were made at the apex of the development of mechanical sound-reproduction technology globally.
“African Dances”
Tracey’s book African Dances was first published in Johannesburg in 1952. The publisher was the AMS, the same organization that had undermined African composers such as Mohapeloa through a special category of membership. It is a photographic book, with preliminary comments by Tracey regarding the various repertoires of dance presented in the photographs. We are told that the photographs were taken by Merlyn Serven, whose previous expertise lay in photographing the Russian Ballet and whose experience is noted as an important factor in the project’s fulfillment. We are also told in the acknowledgments that the author felt indebted to the Chamber of Mines, which had given him permission to pursue study on the mines. The foreword was written by W. W. M. Eiselen, who was Secretary of Native Affairs at the time.42 The study involved entering the compounds in which African mine laborers lived, where Tracey and Serven would record and photograph the African performers. Mr L. G. Hallett, chief compound manager at the Consolidated Main Reef Mines, was the person responsible for organizing the groups of performers on Tracey’s behalf. Tracey tells us that the photographs had to be taken on site, but away from the modern industrial buildings that he felt were “incongruous” with the spirit of the project, which was to document the performances of the men in costume.43 To meet this objective, he required a backdrop that could suggest a possible tribal setting for the bodies on display.
In charge of every compound was a compound manager. The recreational space that was part of the compound structure was positioned in such a way that it was hard to ignore any recreational activity taking place within the compound, especially any sounds emanating from it. In the early 1940s, loudspeakers were introduced to enhance the entertainment that was already being provided at the mines in the form of sports and leisure activities aimed at African audiences.44 The mining industry was one of the major forces in the spread of African sport in Johannesburg in the 1930s and 1940s, but rather than promoting “urban” sports such as soccer or rugby, the industry promoted activities that were ostensibly more suitable to a rural-based labor force, hence the dance competitions between the different “tribes.” Miners themselves were governed by a vicious hierarchy, with ethnically divided izinduna (African supervisors) and a white compound manager as the ultimate authorities.45
The photographs give us a glimpse of what life was like in the compounds. They show us the arenas, where the men danced adorned in all kinds of imaginative costumes that supposedly reflect the traditional attire of each distinct group. Some of the costumes were created by Hallett, who received special thanks in the book for his improvisations.46 Tracey considered the staged nature of the dances an obstacle to their full appreciation, which he believed required a village context, since African dance “springs from the homely convictions of the village and not from the artifice of the stage, a limitation which, incidentally, makes it almost impossible to export an African dance outside its own domain.”47 The dance competitions relied on the mineworkers being already organized into a hierarchy according to ethnicity, usually on the basis of language. Upon arriving in urban complexes like Johannesburg, migrants encountered men from other regions, who probably also spoke languages they could not understand. Solidarity consequently arose among those who spoke similar languages and came from the same regions, as Jeff Guy and Motlatsi Thabane have shown through their study of Basotho mineworkers. In the recruitment of miners, great care was taken to group people according to regional divisions that corresponded to the tribal agenda of the mining companies and government. Even in the compounds, miners were allocated leaders from their own tribal group, allowing mine managers to suppress any worker agitation by means of the ethnically appointed izinduna.48
Solidarity was also used to structure the dance competitions. The organization of mineworkers into distinct tribal groups was used by the mining industry as a way of assuring whites that Africans were unlikely to mount insurrections. Assimilation to urban life was seen not only as harmful, but also as a threat to the European presence. The following was written in a mining journal published in 1944: “In the mining industry, however, the Natives are, almost without exception, tribalised, paying homage to their own chief, bowing to the authority of their tribal laws, and directly influenced by tribal custom.”49
“Ingoma” Dancing in Durban and Johannesburg
A public incident in Durban that was to have consequences for a later proposal to establish a dance arena in the city similar to those in the Johannesburg mines helps us to understand the genesis of dance competitions in South African urban social life. Sound scholars have suggested that the cacophony of modernity lies partly in the way sound participates in the clash of people and cultures as they compete for space in the urban environment.50 The urban space of the industrial city of Durban witnessed a number of acoustic clashes in the 1920s and 1930s. In June 1929, laborers who were mostly members of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) got into a noisy clash with police and white vigilantes at the ICU Hall. They were chanting well-known ingoma songs, enlivened with political themes of the times. The gathering of African multitudes in the city and the noise they made must have attracted attention, as all ingoma-related dancing and the carrying of sticks were afterward banned within the city.51 Ingoma can be seen here to have represented a physical and sonic strategy of demanding attention, such that there was a change in the way Africans were thenceforth regulated in the city.
In the years following this incident, existing oppressive policies such as the Native Affairs Act of 1920 (with its hints of tribally based district councils) and the 1927 Native Administration Act were ruthlessly interpreted. Popular political organization was also severely restricted; tribalization and cultural adaptationism were now the buzzwords for controlling African populations in the cities. The combined effect of the passing of the Slums Act in 1934, the withdrawal of the Cape African Vote in 1936, and the passing of the Black (Native) Laws Amendment Act in 1937, which prevented the acquisition of land by Africans in urban areas without the permission of the governor-general, was to intensify domination of African populations.
The Durban incident of June 1929 must have left a chilling impression on the city’s influential white population, because ten years later, when Tracey proposed the establishment of an ingoma dance arena to the city council, he encountered strong opposition. The arena was to serve as a multipurpose center, of the kind we would now call a “tourist cultural village,” for the preservation of Zulu war dances and the “exhibition of native huts.” Dance competitions were to be held there. Controversy ensued when Mr T. J. Chester, the manager of the Durban Municipal Native Affairs Department, wrote a piece opposing the scheme in the local English newspaper Daily News. Chester did not want natives living in the center of the city as this was against municipal policy. Tracey answered, “although the exhibition of huts containing native crafts will be open seven days a week, no natives will live there, and the only time they will occupy the arena will be for a few hours a week when dancing is in progress.”52
Chester’s other concern was that the council had already given three playing fields elsewhere for native dancing. Tracey countered that “these facilities will not encourage European interest and support of native dancing as much as would an arena in an area which is readily accessible to tourists, without going through a ‘black belt.’” He went on to point out that the scheme would stimulate the market for native products. Furthermore, it was already being supported by Mr H. C. Lugg, the Chief Native Commissioner for Natal, the province in which Durban is located, who felt that the scheme would be a “Godsend” to the native communities. Tracey believed that once Durban established the arena, other centers in the Union would follow suit.53
“Zulu dances are as dead as the dodo!” was the response of an unnamed person writing under the pseudonym Usingququ, adding that “neither ricksha boys nor the native from the sugar estate would know anything about it.” The writer went on to question the desirability of using Africans for the “purpose of stimulating the tourist traffic to this country, for the Zulu to be gazed upon by the tourist with eyes of curiosity mingled with pity,” concluding, “It is employment, not dancing, that the natives need.”54 Usingququ’s letter raised two crucial considerations. First, by dismissing the authenticity of Zulu dancing, s/he exposed the fabrication of these dances as traditional. The term “ingoma” (literally, “a song”) covers a diverse range of male song-dances, such as isicathulo, isiBhaca, and isishameni; its use captures the inseparability of dance from song within some African performance contexts. Ingoma is not, however, a traditional form, as it emerged through the convergence of disparate regional forms in Durban during the First World War.55 Secondly, by insisting that these dances were dead, the writer criticized the attempt to tribalize Africans.
A response to the letter appeared in the same newspaper two weeks later. The author asserted that although the dancing would not give the natives employment, “it would nevertheless be helping substantially to give them that recreation essential to produce the sound mind and sound body.…The Zulu war dance was a psychological dance with an object, and through a prolonged period of peace it has naturally gone out of fashion, just as the minuet has gone out of fashion in European dancing.”56 The point of the comparison between a minuet (a seventeenth-century European courtly dance with elegant steps) and an ingoma (a hybrid war dance from the repertoire of traditional Zulu regiments involving sticks and lively gestures) was presumably that each was understood as the highest form of dancing within the culture to which it belonged. If the war dance is the only dance capable of being redeemed in Zulu culture, then the need to salvage the African becomes more urgent for the European settler. Showcasing a tamed version of the war dance may then stand as evidence of the progress colonialism has made in bringing discipline and order to natives.
We might imagine the scene during a time of war. The war dance takes place within an arena, creating a form of escape from the prevailing Second World War for the European eyes that gaze on it, naturalizing the African within the European world simply as “entertainment.” The implication is that improving the black person is by far the most important gift whites can give the Africans. It also matters that the form under discussion is dance, an artistic expression centered on the body: the body carries the burden of visibility; it must be seen. The showcasing marked a move in the co-opting of ingoma and its practitioners into the city fabric, and firmly naturalized ingoma within the city’s public life. The gutsy timbre, which could only be achieved through multiple voices chorusing, unregulated, was now lost. Even the physicality of the dance itself, the sounds of stamping feet, the cheers of multitudes drowning out the cityscape—all of which add to the aural environment—were gone.
Leaving Durban, Tracey resumed his work on the mines in Johannesburg. By this time in the mid-1940s, protest action in the mines was on the increase, as a consequence of which the industry decided to promote the formation of dance clubs as a form of leisure. These dance clubs were arranged according to the structural hierarchies of tribes that were already present in the mines. Through the Association of Mine Managers, “tribal dancing” became a universal phenomenon in the Witwatersrand area, leading to the widespread erection of dance arenas. Similar incidents were reported in Johannesburg; for example, in 1944 competition organizers felt that the choreography of the Mozambique Chopi performers was becoming too aggressive, so the Chopi men were asked to replace the movements with gentler, less threatening gestures suitable for tourist exhibition.57
In Johannesburg, Tracey again became involved in efforts to create dance arenas. The arena at the Consolidated Main Reef Mine was the first to be built according to his specifications in 1943. This arena is where most of the photographs reproduced in the book African Dances were taken. Tracey’s arena could accommodate three thousand spectators.58 It was a semicircular structure with an open area at its focal point and audience seating around it (see fig. 1). To promote attendance at the events, the mine provided transport and gave the spectators carnival objects such as whistles and rattles with which to cheer the performers on. Many whites also attended the events.
Mine dance in an arena designed by Hugh Tracey at the Consolidated Main Reef Mine, Johannesburg. International Library of African Music (Republic of South Africa), ILM00428_151. Used with permission.
Mine dance in an arena designed by Hugh Tracey at the Consolidated Main Reef Mine, Johannesburg. International Library of African Music (Republic of South Africa), ILM00428_151. Used with permission.
The emphasis was not only on the dance floor itself, but also on the comfort of the viewing experience. With this arrangement, Tracey believed that “the art of native dancing should receive its proper recognition from white and black alike.” Tracey felt the need to quell fears of insurrection by declaring to his readers that the dances were not war dances, but rather “secular dances.”59 This was unsurprising given the newspaper debate on ingoma that he had been embroiled in when based in Durban a few years earlier. The attendance of mineworkers would have been hampered by the shift-work system used in the mines, which meant that only a certain section of the miners would be available at a particular time for rehearsals and actual competitions. African women were not permitted to work at the mine, so African men would leave their homes far away and come to work without their families. They would be surrounded by men at all times, unless they managed to slip away into the slums where Africans, poor whites, and Chinese lived side by side, and where they could find some of the strong alcohol that was not permitted by the government. This is where they were likely to come across women dancing in the city. Tracey’s classification of African dancing was therefore also gendered.
Ways of Seeing through the Photographs
From this examination of African Dances, it is easy to conclude that that part of our history—as Africans, and indeed as world citizens—was racial in its structuring of social relations. It is not necessary to pinpoint the aspects that suggest racism, as these are already widely recognized. We can also conclude that the way in which African realities were studied (in the ethnos disciplines) and made into history tended to echo the racist views promoted by the state, albeit under different terms. As highlighted above, Tracey was an enthusiast of African music; he learnt to speak a local southern African language (the Karanga language spoken in Zimbabwe and Botswana), something few whites attempted. During his time in Africa he would have been considered one of the more well-meaning whites by the African educated class and others who interacted with him. Furthermore, unlike previous scholars such as Hornbostel, Tracey actually lived in Africa, and used his social skills to collect background information on the repertoires he recorded.60
But in reading the text today, I am also aware of myself as a brown-skinned African person whose first language is Zulu, and thus as someone who lies beyond the scope of its imagined readership. Even though many African intellectuals, such as Dhlomo, were very invested in thinking about African dramatic forms in the 1930s, Africans were excluded from that readership. The book’s tone of address, directed at European ears, therefore causes me to experience discomfort, seeming to suggest that perhaps I belong elsewhere in its distribution of power relations, that perhaps my position is with the mine dancers, who come alive through the pages as unknown subjects, and are then forced into being objects by the process of objectification effected through the camera and the written word. We should bear in mind Susan Sontag’s observation that a photograph should be taken as a way of seeing events that unfolded, and not as seeing itself; it allows us access to that reality, of which we do not have direct experience.61 It is through the labor of photography that the miners are actualized as a part of the cultural object of the book and therefore become activated into that world—no longer as subjects of their own making, but as part and parcel of the process (or the way of seeing events), of the given set of conditions by which the book became a possibility.
The intended readership is evident from the opening pages. The foreword begins with the statement “For many decades Westerners have been at work to civilise the Bantu”—a clear expression of assumed authority to civilize, and at the same time a designation of the book’s readership.62 The imagined readership is also shown in the inclusion of a glossary of terms that would not necessarily need explaining to, for example, a first-language Zulu speaker. Most of these terms fit well into the Khuluma-Thefula cluster of languages, as classified by linguists, which are mutually intelligible—namely, Zulu, Xhosa (both spoken in South Africa), Swati (spoken in South Africa) and eSwatini, and dialects of Ndebele (spoken by many in Zimbabwe and parts of South Africa). These, along with the Sotho group of languages, cover the majority of the languages spoken in southern Africa and would therefore not need explaining to most of this population.
The glossary also gives short explanations of some of the terms used by the mine dancers. This section gives a good indication of the repertoire of ideas about dance and performance that Tracey might have viewed as important on the basis of his observations of the dances at the mines. The repertoire of ideas represented in the glossary also gives an indication of what he may have perceived as a hidden world for his English readers, a world that he felt ought to be understood in order to grasp the contents of the book.
How might Dhlomo have critiqued Tracey’s project? I think he would have pointed to the problematics of its combining the archiving of old creative forms with a state-led ideology of the retrogression and fossilization of individuals and communities under the rubric of separate development. For Dhlomo, precolonial African forms are “a virgin field with boundless possibilities for experiment, for development in kind, for individual originality, for poetic exaltation. Detached from the heat and mud of the Present—yet vital to, and able to comment upon the Present—this field can produce wonders and miracles of achievement.” Having noted this need to develop the historical archive, he commented that it was “a time when men realize they can preserve and glorify the past not by reverting back to it, but by immortalizing it in art.”63 The idea of glorifying the past but not returning to it clearly distinguishes Dhlomo’s outlook from that of Tracey. Although the two men might have agreed on the need to establish African archives, Dhlomo cautioned against retribalization. To his way of thinking, what modernity had to offer was too valuable for African people to be excluded from its gains. It was important for him that the objective of establishing historical archives should not be conflated with that of general control of African creative practices. For Dhlomo, artistic revival was separate from forced reversions to the past, promoted under the discourse of retribalization.
“Opening Up the Future”
The challenge inherent in early studies of African music is that those who defined it had to explain it both in terms of and against the aesthetic values of European music. This is not to say that they were unaware of the problem; on the contrary, in their attempt to overcome this weakness they constantly invented theories that they believed would give them a way of dealing with their bias.
That was their challenge. Our challenge today seems different: how do we receive their contributions on music in Africa, while defining our own terms for a new African scholarship? One of the ways in which bias is manifest is the authors’ redirecting of their own ignorance about African languages and culture to their readers, who were presumed to be equally ignorant. Bruno Nettl hints precisely at this problem when he notes that one is perhaps unable to absorb new information about a new musical culture except by making implicit comparison to something already known.64 This something that is already known is the presumption I refer to here. It presents not only a methodological but also an ontological crisis for African people who are on a quest for self-knowledge, who may find themselves unaccommodated in the mode of address at work in the literature (and by implication in its substance).
Africanist scholar V. Y. Mudimbe writes, “The main problem concerning the being of African discourse remains one of transference of methods and their cultural integration in Africa.”65 My sense is that a critical reading of African Dances, as offered here, while it unveils the injustices of a particular moment (and its replicable factors), may not be useful for us in terms of “opening up the future.” I have the following words of Frantz Fanon in mind here: “When the colonized intellectual writing for his people uses the past he must do so with the intention of opening up the future, of spurring them into action and fostering hope. But in order to secure hope, in order to give it substance, he must take part in the action and commit himself body and soul to the national struggle.”66
The challenges that resulted in the field of practice known as ethnomusicology or African music scholarship were circumscribed by the kinds of questions it asked, the limits of its investigation, and the way it chose to arrange African repertoires of sound. As noted above, African sound repertoires were sometimes organized as dance, as in Tracey’s book; at other times, the organization was based on the classification of musical instruments, as in Percival Kirby’s collection. As a consequence of the imposition of these taxonomies on African phenomena, a whole new discourse emerges that cannot be properly called “traditional.” It is a discourse whose coding resides in the excessive organizing of facts, symbols, and objects, such that they become unimaginable outside those technologies (ways of seeing) that make them visible. In the case of African Dances, Tracey’s archive of sounds foregrounds the experience of the book; the photographs taken by Serven and the sounds of the archive are what brings the assemblage to life. This assemblage is quite separate from indigenous modes of apprehending the performative material—what Falola would call the “ritual archive”67—the very indigeneity that the book claims to resurrect.
In responding to these challenges of taxonomy and disciplinary domain, I suspect we have to go even further than the explanations of music theory and analysis used by Kofi Agawu in his explanation of tonality’s colonial impact. In mapping the transformations of African musics over the past few hundered years, Agawu notes that the Western system of organizing music, including melodic development and in particular four-part harmonization, have had the most enduring impact in the evolution of African musics.68 This may be true, but the unevenness of the distribution of that colonial infiltration means that what has changed in one part of Africa may have remained unchanged in another part. Given the historically multimodal nature of human movements on the continent, what can be observed is that certain practices and repertoires traveled with people as they moved.
In my study of ubunyanga in KwaZulu-Natal prior to the arrival of Europeans, I noted how skilled practitioners across specialist fields such as medicine, music, metalworking, and thunder-herding developed a repertoire of terms that are related conceptually to terms used in other parts of the African continent.69 Terms related to insimbi (“iron” in Zulu) are linked to concepts such as bisimbi, which features prominently in craft-making institutions dating back as far as the fifteenth century in the Congo, where bisimbi are the nature dwelling spirits believed to reside in rocks, ancient mystery trees, rivers, and lakes. When crafters approach rocks and mystery trees, they first speak to the bisimbi to inform them of their intention, which could be to cut the tree for building a musical instrument or tool, or to crush the ore rock for iron smelting. The fact that iron can be referred to as insimbi suggests that the bisimbi spirits remain even in the shift from the natural material of rock to artisanally processed iron. Successful crafters are those who possess powers over the bisimbi.
Similar craft guilds showing the collaboration of musical, metallurgical, medical, and weather-related gnosis are observable in different regions of the African continent, including the Great Lakes, the Congo rainforest, and parts of West Africa. The Mande in West Africa speak of the nyamakalaw, guilds of griots, leatherworkers, metalworkers, potters, and musicians, among others. They are regarded as those who have a monopoly over certain social acts and for whom practices such as iron production arise out of divine inspiration. Crafters must be full of nyama, which is the life force (also described as evil, defilement). They have a gift in the use of nyama energy without causing themselves harm. Those who are specialists are regarded as capable of taming the power of nyama. In Zulu, the term “nyama” is used to refer to the flesh of animals or humans. It is also invoked in the word “nyamalele” in describing how wizards can make themselves disappear, and can be used to refer to the malady of black bile (melancholy), which in Zulu is termed “isinyama.”70
What becomes apparent in these examples is the cross-pollination of ideas and concepts over widely spaced regions of the continent. In the absence of old writerly traditions in many parts of Africa, the repertoires and sedimented language concepts are often the only evidence of such linkages between people, cultures, and civilizations. So although we might agree with Agawu’s contention that the Western age has had a lasting effect on the musical cultures of the continent, the spread of those ideas has been uneven.
In places where the Islamic age (extending from the eighth to the thirteenth century) left a lasting imprint, such as Mali and Senegal, the Western missionary age did not have as much of an impact. Similarly, in places that were not ideally located for missionary infiltration (such as the hinterland and the equatorial rainforest), the impact appears to have been less direct. But there is also evidence of others having fused the influence of the two ages and combined it with older African performative types. The key to “opening up the future” therefore lies in acknowledging the uneven distribution of European and Islamic influences and understanding that they occurred alongside other intra-African influences, as people and ideas moved about. It entails hesitating before placing undue emphasis on European colonial transformations of African musics, and recognizing that the real source of the dynamism of African creativity is the cross-pollination between different regions, learning from each other, on the continent itself.
Notes
This article would not have been possible without the support of the DST-NRF Centre for Excellence in Human Development hosted by Witwatersrand University, and of the South African National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. The project began as a survey of sound archives in Africa and was initially hosted by Afropolitan Explosiv’s critical engagement platform. The underlying research was revisited in response to an invitation extended by Stellenbosch University in 2015 to review Hugh Tracey’s African Dances of the Witwatersrand Gold Mines (1952). Earlier versions of this article have appeared as: Thokozani Mhlambi, “Africa: Why Sound Matters?,” Afropolitan Explosiv, December 15, 2016, https://afropolitanexplosiv.co.za/2016/12/15/africa-sound-matters-archive/; “An Introduction to African Music Archives,” Music in Africa, October 20, 2015, https://www.musicinafrica.net/magazine/introduction-african-music-archives; and “Early Sound Recordings in Africa: Challenges for Future Scholarship,” Herri 4 [2020], https://herri.org.za/4/thokozani-mhlambi/.
“Hugh Tracey’s Portrait,” Rhodes University, International Library of African Music, last modified March 7, 2024, https://www.ru.ac.za/ilam/about/history/hughtraceysportrait/.
“Hugh Tracey’s Portrait.”
Erik Green, “The Development of Settler Agriculture in British Africa Revisited: Estimating the Role of Tenant Labour in Southern Rhodesia, c. 1900–1960,” African History Working Paper Series 29 (2016): 3–32, at 3.
Hugh Tracey, African Dances of the Witwatersrand Gold Mines (Johannesburg: African Music Society, 1952).
See V. Kofi Agawu, Representing African Music (New York: Routledge, 2003), and Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Both these authors put a spotlight on the genealogies of colonial discourse on African culture. Agawu’s work, in particular, examines colonial discourses pertaining to music in Africa.
Ntongela Masilela, New African Movement, August 11, 2004, https://pzacad.pitzer.edu/nam/newafrre/writers/hdhlomo/hdhlomoS.htm.
Njabulo S. Ndebele, “Constituting the Nation, beyond the Constitution,” Njabulo S. Ndebele personal website, last modified April 17, 2017, https://www.njabulondebele.co.za/2017/04/constituting-the-nation-beyond-the-constitution/.
See especially Peter Martland, Recording History: The British Record Industry, 1888–1931 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013).
See John Cowley, “Recordings in London of African and West Indian Music in the 1920s and 1930s,” Musical Traditions 12 (1994): 13–26.
Erich M. von Hornbostel, “African Negro Music,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 1 (1928): 30–62, at 60.
Hornbostel, “African Negro Music,” 60.
See Anette Hoffman, “Introduction: Listening to Sound Archives,” Social Dynamics 41, no. 1 (2015): 73–83; Anette Hoffman, Kolonialgeschichte hören: Das Echo gewaltsamer Wissensproduktion in historischen Tondokumenten aus dem südlichen Afrika (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2020).
See Lara Allen, “Preserving a Nation’s Heritage: The Gallo Music Archive and South African Popular Music,” Fontes artis musicae 54, no. 3 (2007): 263–79.
See Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer, introduction to Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods, ed. Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer, 2 vols. (Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press, 2016), 1:13–15.
See Thokozani N. Mhlambi, “Sound in Urban Public Space: Loudspeaker Broadcasts in Johannesburg and Durban in South Africa, 1940s,” Cultural Studies 34, no. 6 (2020): 959–78, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2019.1704424.
There are numerous articles by Dhlomo on African Dramatic Forms, many of which were republished in English in Africa 4, no. 2 (1977), as follows: “Drama and the African,” 3–8; “Language and National Drama,” 9–11; “African Drama and Poetry,” 12–17; “African Drama and Research,” 18–22; “Nature and Variety of Tribal Drama,” 23–36; “Why Study Tribal Dramatic Forms?,” 37–42; “Zulu Folk Poetry,” 43–59; “Masses and the Artist,” 60–62; “Bantu Culture and Expression,” 66–68; “The African Artist and Society,” 71–72; “‘The House of Bread’: Poet versus Politician,” 73–76.
Dhlomo, Transvaal Native Education Quarterly, March 1939, quoted in Dhlomo, “Why Study Tribal Dramatic Forms?,” 41.
See Mhlambi, “Sound in Urban Public Space,” 972.
Walter Nhlapo, “SABC Bantu Broadcasts,” Umlindi, August 4, 1945.
See Veit Erlmann, African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 123.
See Christine Lucia, “Joshua Pulumo Mohapeloa and the Heritage of African Song,” African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music 9 (2011): 56–86, at 65.
On Mohapeloa’s music and its circulation, see J. P. Mohapeloa, preface to Khalima-Nosi tsa ‘Mino Oa Kajeno: Harnessing Salient Features of Modern African Music (Morija: Morija Sesuto Book Depot, 1951).
Quoted in Paulette Coetzee, “Performing Whiteness, Representing Otherness: Hugh Tracey and African Music” (PhD diss., Rhodes University, 2014), 84–85.
Noel Lobley, Sound Fragments: From Field Recording to African Electronic Stories (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022), 40.
See Mhlambi, “Sound in Urban Public Space,” 972–75.
My point of view here chimes with that of historian Saul Dubow, who suggests that segregation was crafted and perfected as a national policy and sentiment during the interwar years, rather than at the onset of apartheid in 1948. During the interwar period, the Native Affairs Department underwent expansion as it sought to become more sophisticated in its instrumentalization of state-led fragmentation and isolation of the majority of the population. Saul Dubow, “Holding ‘A Just Balance between White and Black’: The Native Affairs Department in South Africa c. 1920–33,” Journal of Southern African Studies 12 (1986): 217–39, at 217. Hugh Tracey’s stint on the radio in the 1930s anticipated many of the ideas that became mainstream when Radio Bantu was established in 1960. With its characteristic tribal shield logo, Radio Bantu made the ideology behind the Population Registration Act of 1950 believable via the airwaves. The act classified people according to racial types: white, Bantu (meaning African), colored, and Indian. A person’s classification determined their ability to access education and healthcare as well as their economic status.
See J. H. Kwabena Nketia, “African Music and Western Praxis: A Review of Western Perspectives on African Musicology,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 20 (1986): 36–56.
See Luis G. Amoros, Tracing the Mbira Sound Archive in Zimbabwe (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1–3.
Bruno Nettl, “The Institutionalization of Musicology: Perspectives of a North American Ethnomusicologist,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 287–310, at 291.
See “History of the Cylinder Phonograph,” Library of Congress, accessed August 11, 2024, https://www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-sound-recordings/history-of-the-cylinder-phonograph/.
See Robert Gordon, “Apartheid’s Anthropologists: The Genealogy of Afrikaner Anthropology,” American Ethnologist 15 (1988): 535–53.
See John S. Sharp, “The Roots and Development of Volkekunde in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 8 (1981): 16–36.
“For a preliminary definition of social phenomena it seems sufficiently clear that what we have to deal with are relations of association between individual organisms. In a hive of bees there are the relations of association of the queen, the workers and the drones.…These are social phenomena; I do not suppose that any one will call them cultural phenomena. In anthropology, of course, we are only concerned with human beings, and in social anthropology, as I define it, what we have to investigate are the forms of association to be found amongst human beings.” A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “On Social Structure,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 70, no. 1 (1940): 1–12, at 2.
See, in particular, Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4–8. Similar points about citizenship were raised in Mahmood Mamdani, When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa, A. C. Jordan Professor Inaugural Lecture, May 13, 1998 (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1998).
See Gordon, “Apartheid’s Anthropologists.”
See Sarah Nuttall, “Stylizing the Self: The Y Generation in Rosebank,” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 430–52, and Tracey, African Dances, 32.
See Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 76–78, 93.
On the devastating effects of the Land Act, see Sol. T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, before and since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (London: P. S. King & Son, 1916).
See Sara Pugach, “Carl Meinhoff and the German Influence on Nicholas van Warmelo’s Ethnological and Linguistic Writing, 1927–1935,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 4 (2004): 825–45.
See Grant Olwage, “Scriptions of the Choral: The Historiography of Black South African Choralism,” South African Music Studies 22 (2002): 29–45.
See Sean Hanretta, “Women, Marginality and the Zulu State: Women’s Institutions and Power in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African History 39, no. 3 (1998): 389–415.
According to Saul Dubow, the Native Affairs Department believed itself to have a kind of parental surrogate relationship toward its African wards. This perpetuated the notion that the department was acting in the interests of African people, which of course was not the case, given that it was part of the government that promoted segregation and retribalization. In fact, the Native Affairs Department attempted to strike a balance between its “protective role” and its “coercive functions.” Dubow, “Holding ‘A Just Balance between White and Black,’” 218–19. It goes without saying, therefore, that the department would have wanted to be seen to be involved in Tracey’s initiative—which explains the foreword by Eiselen.
Tracey, African Dances, 2.
See Mhlambi, “Sound in Urban Public Space.”
See Cecile Badenhorst and Charles Mather, “Tribal Recreation and Recreating Tribalism: Culture, Leisure and Social Control on South Africa’s Gold Mines, 1940–1950,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23 (1997): 473–89, at 474–76.
Tracey, African Dances, acknowledgments.
Tracey, African Dances, 2.
Jeff Guy and Motlatsi Thabane, “Technology, Ethnicity and Ideology: Basotho Miners and Shaft-Sinking on the South African Gold Mines,” Journal of Southern African Studies 14 (1988): 257–78, at 258–59.
“Introducing the Rand’s Native Mineworkers,” South African Mining and Engineering Journal, September 2, 1944, 3–5.
See especially Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 36–37.
See Erlmann, African Stars, 260. I use the term “noise” here to refer to sound in its unpleasant, even violent, form.
Letter to the editor, Natal Daily News, February 20, 1939.
Letter to the editor, Natal Daily News, February 20, 1939.
Letter to the editor, Natal Daily News, March 23, 1939.
See Erlmann, African Stars, 259.
Letter to the editor, Natal Daily News, April 6, 1939.
See Badenhorst and Mather, “Tribal Recreation and Recreating Tribalism,” 478.
See Garrett Felber, “Tracing Tribe: Hugh Tracey and the Cultural Politics of Retribalisation,” South African Music Studies 30–31 (2010–11): 31–43, at 36.
Tracey, African Dances, 1.
See Nketia, “African Music and Western Praxis,” 39.
Susan Sontag, “Photography: A Little Summa,” in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 124–25.
Tracey, African Dances, 1.
Dhlomo, “Why Study Tribal Dramatic Forms?,” 39, 41.
Bruno Nettl, “Comparison and Comparative Method in Ethnomusicology,” Yearbook for InterAmerican Musical Research 9 (1975): 148–61.
Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 183.
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin Classics, 1961), 167.
Falola’s concept of “ritual archives” suggests a possibility; namely, that certain kinds of knowledge go unnoticed in the lexicography of power, enabling and sustaining the current knowledge framework (which is largely credited to the European heritage). The concept further suggests that the unnamed configuration of ideas that preceded and has existed in tandem with the European inheritance is in itself an archive, even though it does not conform to the classic notion of archive. Toyin Falola, “Ritual Archives,” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, ed. Adeshina Afolayan and Toyin Falola (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 703–28, at 707–8.
V. Kofi Agawu, “Tonality as a Colonizing Force in African Music,” Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, February 19, 2009, posted May 29, 2014, YouTube, https://youtu.be/z_sFVFsENMg?si=OxU0LzoYGO7z81VQ.
Thokozani N. Mhlambi, “Regional Mobilities, Technology and the Status of Myth in Africa: Retrieving Musical/Creative Codes in KwaZulu-Natal before Colonialism,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 12 (2023), https://csalateral.org/issue/12-2/regional-mobilities-technology-myth-africa-musical-creative-codes-kwazulu-natal-colonialism-mhlambi/.
See Mhlambi, “Regional Mobilities, Technology and the Status of Myth in Africa.”