The Songs of Struggle:

African Music and the Message of Revolution

Matthew Shelley

Peoples of Africa

Dr. Jerry Galm

 The history of music in Africa is the history of music around the world.

There is no human group that does not have some form of music, no matter

how isolated. Music is a common element to every human. We can

therefore safely conclude that music had developed and become present in

the early human population before any widespread dispersal. Consequently

music may have been in existence for at least 50,000 years and the first

music may have been invented in Africa and then evolved to become a

fundamental constituent of human life.[Willin 1]

Such a legacy and its widespread implications has left Africa with a

musical history and variation unrivaled in most of the world. Africa is a

huge and disparate place, so it would only make sense that musically there

would be just as many if not more variations. Western traditions often

place music into a separate, sacred space. The realm of Beethoven,

Brahms, Pacelbel, et al., is set aside and placed into a higher category than

other forms of music, even in their own tradition such as folk songs. This

distinction is rarely made elsewhere, most notably across Africa. Music here

is an expression of life. It is not set aside for times of worship, or for times

of great happiness, nor is it reserved wholly for the dirges of mourning.

Music is a part of all these aspects of life, as well as the mundane tasks done
daily. There are songs to welcome the newly born, there are songs to send

off those lost. There are songs of war, songs of love, songs of grief and

songs of praise.

In fact, there is more music in Africa than nearly the whole of the rest

of the world.

In my research for this topic, that has become abundantly clear, so while I

will attempt to cover a broad overview of the musical traditions of Africa in

general, the latter part of this paper will focus on where the musical

traditions of Africa have crossed with the socioeconomic struggles there,

namely musics role in revolution and resistance movements in South Africa's

Apartheid.

The North of Africa is dominated by Arab classical tradition in music.

The traditional music of the Bedouin Nomads and others still hold out,

however the dominance of Arab culture in this region has left an indelible

mark on nearly all music to generate from the region, even up to and

including todays contemporary pop music. While this is a vibrant and

healthy musical tradition, the Arabic Classical tradition has a long history of

amalgamation and adaptation of various local musics.

 The Sub-Saharan region and others have preserved far older musical

traditions, and from these there have been a multitude of studies. Arthur

Morris Jones' work in 1978 noted two major aspects of African music: The

shared rhythmic principles of Sub-Saharan African musical traditions

comprise one main system, and the focus on functional performances of the

music, most notably with audience participation and so called “work songs”

[Jones 1978]
. The shared rhythmic principles were so profound, the percussionist

and scholar C.K. Ladzekpo affirms the homogeneity of the region's rhythmic

principles.
 Img Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Afrika_MO.jpg

Geo-political map of Africa divided for ethnomusicological purposes, after

Alan P. Merriam, 1959.

These two main aspects were an early breakthrough in ethnomusical

studies of the area, aiding in dividing the entire region into four main areas:

[Merriam 1963]
:

To the east includes the music of Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi,

Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe as well as the islands of

Madagascar, the Seychelles, Mauritius and Comor. While Arab classical still

has a major influence over the region, there is a strong element of Indian,

Polynesian, and Indonesian influence.

 The southern regions include music of South Africa, Lesotho,

Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia and Angola, however similarly to the Western

African and Central African music, there is a large influence of Western

European and North American music.

Central African music can be described as the music of Chad, the

Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia,

including Pygmy music and other traditional forms.

Western African is the music of Senegal and the Gambia, of Guinea

and Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Liberia, of the inland plains of Mali,

Niger and Burkina Faso, the coastal nations of Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo,

Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo as well as

islands such as Sao Tome and Principe.

The musical traditions of Western Africa are probably the most

strongly supported and known outside of Africa. The region is the birthplace

of two major instruments, firstly the Djembe, which is a single headed

hourglass shaped drum capable of a wide range of tones despite its single

head, generally between fourteen to eighteen inches in diameter. It is

known for being simplistic to pick up and play for simple rhythmic emphasis,
but many advanced and professional players focus on complex polyrhythmic

notations. Also culturally linked to this region is the Tama, or Talking Drum,

a similarly hourglass shaped drum, albeit much smaller and with a dual

headed system on each end, the heads tensioned with a series of

intertwined fibers forming a series of parallel strings which is then held

under the arm and squeezed while struck with a curved mallet, altering the

tension of the heads creating a “talking” sound. While the Tama has become

a popular instrument even today, it has historically been connected with long

distance communication in various places in central and western Africa.

[Carrington 1949]

The region is also known as the birthplace of the Bougarabou, a large

conical wooden drum with a single goat skin head. While locally popular, the

instrument gained popularity outside of Africa when it, like the Central

African Makuta, was adapted for Cuban styled playing and reshaped into

what is now known as the Conga drum, which is the backbone of the Afro-

Cuban drumming traditions of the last century and a half.

The percussion instruments of eastern and southern Africa were built

around the Ngoma drums. Ngoma drums, commonly known as Ashiko

drums, are musical instruments used by certain Bantu-speaking peoples of

East Africa; 'ngoma' is, simply, the Swahili word for 'drum'[Mutwa 1969]. It is a
tall and thin (around 46” in height with only a 15” playing surface) slightly

conical drum which has a very wide variety of playing methods including

paddles, hands, mallets, and sticks (obuuti).

The focus on percussion instruments is no oversight; the tradition of

drumming in Africa is an important element of nearly every musical form

found on the continent, and is quite often an element of spiritual

[Mutwa 1969]
communication and ceremonial application . To the west, stringed

instruments not unlike western style guitars have increasingly become

common, although their presence before European involvement is unlikely.

As an example, the Kora is a banjo-like stringed instrument, fashioned of a

calabash gourd and played to a high level of competency.

This is not say there is no history of stringed instruments throughout

Africa, there are an overwhelming plethora of stringed and woodwind/flute

instruments in addition to the plethora of drums. This is true across the

whole of the continent, not in any one region.

The specific patterns, techniques, and melodies employed throughout

African music would be more than enough to fill a library of books, as it

indeed has. While it is difficult to ascribe importance to one aspect over

another, the root of Afro-Cuban drumming is what is called the Clave.

 The clave rhythmic pattern is used as a tool for temporal organization

in Afro-Cuban music. The five-stroke clave pattern represents the structural

core of many Afro-Cuban rhythms. Often one player will establish a clave as

an underlying beat, upon which the other musicians will develop an

interwoven polyrhythmic pattern[Kubik 2006]. This element is found not only in

instrumental accompaniment, but can often be vocalized as a foundation

rhythm in any musical setting.

There is a relative ease with which the People of Africa will turn to

song, as a form of expression, timekeeping, communication and so much

more. Indeed there have been times in which this ease was seen as a

threat. The South African Election of 1948 would see the first steps taken

towards exacerbating the already tensioned racial relationships between the

so called “four races” of the area into full on apartheid.

By the end of 1959, apartheid had been fully implemented, and so too

had begun the resistance. In 1964, Vuyisile Mini would become one of the

first to be executed under the new regime. He, like so many other members

of the early African National Congress and its military wing, Umkhonto we

Sizwe (or MK), was a poet and musician before joining the ANC in 1951. His

pauper's grave was exhumed in 1998 and he was given a hero's funeral.
Not because of his martyrdom, but because of his action; he wrote the song

'Pasopa nansi 'ndondemnyama we Verwoerd', or 'Look out, Verwoerd, here

are the Black people', which became one of the most popular liberation

songs of the 1950s and became a cultural anchor for its direct addressing of

Hendrik Verwoerd, known as the Architect of Apartheid[Gerhart 1977:89].

These songs were heroic in scope; anyone could sing them and give

the lyrics power. Groups could rally around mutual singing of resistance

hymns. Mini's music would inspire hundreds of musicians under apartheid

rule to express themselves, as they had done generationally, in song.

Unfortunately the next thirty years would see the self imposed exile of

many of the musicians of the region to Europe and America. Hugh

Mesekela would go on to have great success in the Western World in the

1970s and 80s with songs such as “Stimela”, a stylistically spoken

monologue giving a harrowing account of the diamond mines and the

conditions they impose on the lives of the workers, and “Bring Him Back

Home”, the pleading but joyous song that became a rallying cry in 1989 to

free Nelson Mandela of his prison.

Abdullah Ibrahim, resistance songwriter and noted jazz pianist, helped

to focus the resistance movement after the Soweto Uprising of 1976, when
his melodies became the anthems for the ANC despite his own exile lasting

from 1960 until the 1990s. Mirian Makeba would prove to be one of the

more prolific and suppressed songwriters of the era, her songs of resistance

would help to identify the detained leaders of the MK such as Nelson

Mandela and Albertina “Ma” Sisulu as the heroes of the people:

Our leaders are in jail

They are all together at Nonqonqo station

Here is here is Sisulu

Here she is in jail

Here is Mandela

Here he is in jail

What is it my African people?

What shall I say?

Our leaders are in jail

They are all together at Nonqonqo station

The freedom songs have an important historical context. Particularly

in the United States, freedom songs have referred to protest songs of the

abolitionist, civil rights, and labor movements. Yet, in South Africa, the

songs take on a different meaning, referring to a unique collection of songs

tied to the struggle for racial equality during the twentieth century.

Stylistically, freedom songs originated in choir as a unifying and prevalent

genre that combined southern African singing traditions with Christian

hymns. Most of the songs have simple melodies and are sung a cappella.

More importantly, they are composed and sung in groups, and often reflect

changing political circumstances and attitudes[Olwage 2008:160].

In 1994 after the fall of apartheid, the new President of South Africa

Nelson Mandela declared that both "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" and the previous

national anthem, "Die Stem van Suid-Afrika" ("The Call of South Africa")

would be national anthems. While the inclusion of "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika"

celebrated the newfound freedom of many South Africans, the fact that "Die

Stem" was also kept as an anthem even after the fall of apartheid, signified

to all that the new government under Mr Mandela respected all races and

cultures and that an all-inclusive new era was dawning upon South Africa. In

1996, a shortened, combined version of the two anthems was released as

the new South African National Anthem under the constitution of South

Africa[Web II].

The music of Africa is a firmly entrenched, culturally significant

element of not simply the African cultures as they exist or have existed, but

as the society changes and is shaped by the events of the world and within
their own borders, so too does the music change to support the emotions,

thoughts, and actions of the people involved at every level. Music here

serves no one purpose more than any other. Just as it helped to identify the

freedom movement to itself even before it had taken on its form, so too was

music an element of the mundane life, of existence, as a part of our struggle

in all things on this Earth.

Bibliography

Wallin, Nils
2000, The Origins of Music. Massachusetts: MIT Press

Jones, A.M.
1978, Studies in African Music. London: Oxford University Press

Merriam, Alan
1963, The Anthropology of Music. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Carrington, John
1949, The Talking Drums of Africa. Carey Kingsgate Press.

Mutwa, Credo
1969, My People, My Africa. New York: John Day Co.

Kubik, Gerhard
2006, Structural Analysis or Cultural Analysis? Comparing Perspectives on
the ‘Standard Pattern’ of West African Rhythm. Journal of the American
Musicological Society 59(1)

Gerhart, G. M. & Karis, T.

1977, From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of Politics in South
Africa 1882-1964, Vol. 4 Political profiles 1882-1964. Stanford: Hoover
Institution Press

Olwage, Grant
2008, Composing Apartheid: Music For And Against Apartheid.
Johannesburg: Wits University Press

Web I: http://home.comcast.net/~dzinyaladzekpo/PrinciplesFr.html

Web II: http://www.info.gov.za/aboutgovt/symbols/anthem.htm