Journal articles on the topic 'Xhosa music'

This article is an attempt to investigate and explore certain patterns in traditional Christian Xhosa songs as found in Xhosa music. The corpus of contemporary Xhosa music is vast, and difficult to explore properly without recognising the patterns of traditional music. In order to recognise these patterns Xhosa music in general will be discussed first – Xhosa music also as a form of art. Having done that, it will try to uncover certain elements of traditional songs in Christian Xhosa music. A comparative approach will be used to reveal the similarities between traditional and Christian songs. To compare certain aspects in a literary work does not imply attaching more significance to one element than to another. This method rather implies a way of looking beyond narrow boundaries, and to explore other spheres of human activities.

This study is an examination of relationships among family background, family and school learning environments, goal orientations, and students' interest in music. Data were collected from 18-year-old black South African students, 340 women and 285 men, whose main language was Isi Xhosa. Findings indicated that when family background was defined conjointly by family social status and parents' aspirations, (a) family background, gender, family and school learning environments, and goal orientations combined to have medium associations with students' interest in music, (b) relationships among learning environments, goal orientations, and students' interest in music varied for students with different family backgrounds, and (c) the learning environment and goal-orientation variables partially accounted for the relationships between family background, gender, and students' interest in music.

Music and dance are human universals. Understanding the communicative nature and the interpersonal dynamics of making music and dancing has a wide area of applications from academic to artistic, educational and therapeutic uses. Cross-cultural and embodied cognitive approaches are important, as they ensure a view across a spectrum of cultural practices and allow us to explore which aspects of cognitive performance are learned and how. In this study, our aims were to use a case study to investigate possible cross-cultural differences in movement, especially corporeal representation of beat and metre; to study group entrainment and factors contributing to synchronisation accuracy. From earlier studies in various fields of behavioural and brain imaging research (perception and attention, music performance, action observation network in the brain etc.) we expected that experts would be more coherent and better entrained, or mutually synchronised to each other, but we were interested in the temporal dynamics of entrainment in a group and the details of these differences. In our study, a choir from South Africa and a group of Finnish choir singers were brought together for a two-day workshop. Songs with choreographed dance movements from various cultures in southern Africa (e.g. Zulu, Sotho and Xhosa) were taught to Finnish participants, and a simple dance choreography was made for a Finnish song that was taught by the Finnish participants. Video, audio and movement data were recorded over a number of performances and practice sessions. Several participants were interviewed informally during the course of the workshop. In this study we analyse two recordings of performances, one of the African and the Finnish song-and-dance. As expected, the analysis showed differences in embodiment of rhythm and synchronisation between the novices and experts. The novices were very focused on footsteps and their whole body was entrained to just the beat-level of the metrical hierarchy. The experts, however, demonstrated entrainment to multiple metrical levels, with different parts of their bodies. Analysis of the temporal dynamics of the interpersonal relationships within each group revealed a process of continuous, mutual adaptation to achieve accurate entrainment. Investigation of group entrainment and individual deviations from the mean phase revealed roles of leaders and followers and illustrated differences in beat-by-beat synchrony and coordination of larger structures, including bars, phrases and the whole song. The findings demonstrate how making music and dancing in a group is an enlightening example of joint action and that dynamics of interpersonal coordination can be studied in a relatively naturalistic setting. Mimicry, mirroring, shared intentions and intersubjectivity, with all their emotional consequences can be experienced, observed and to some degree manipulated and studied in these settings. Our rich data set of natural musical behaviour are intended to help to direct the stricter, experimental research designs on this matter, as well as inform especially multi-cultural educationalists about learning patterns of rhythmic dance movements.

While there have been a number of studies on the decontextualisation and secularisation of traditional ritual music in America, Taiwan and other parts of the globe, very little has been written on the processes and transformations that South Africa’s indigenous ceremonial songs go through over time. This study was prompted by the authors’ interest in, and engagement with the Xhosa initiation song Somagwaza, which has been re-imagined as a popular song, but has also purportedly found its way into other religious spaces. In this article, we attempted to investigate the extent to which the song Somagwaza is still associated with the Xhosa initiation ritual and to analyse evidence of it being decontextualised and secularised in contemporary South Africa. Our methodology included an examination of the various academic treatments of the song, an analysis of the lyrics of a popular song, bearing the same name, holding small focus group discussions, and distributing questionnaires to speakers of isiXhosa on the topic of the song. The data gathered were analysed using the constant comparative method of analysing qualitative research.

Until the 1960s music in the African language Catholic churches in southern Africa was confined to European (or European style) tunes set to African language texts. The music used suited neither the languages of the people nor their spiritual and emotional needs. Some church leaders, such as Archbishop Hurley of Durban, wished to see a change for the better. Certain missionaries tried to do something about it, in particular Oswald Hirmer and Fritz Lobinger, Bavarian missionaries working in the Xhosa area. The author had done music studies, and in his work in Zwelitsha parish, near King Williams Town, had used some of the music resulting from the work of Hirmer and Lobinger. The two missionaries gave him the chance to start a project for creating new church music in African styles by working with local church members in different areas. This went so well that the author was taken onto the staff of Lumko Pastoral Institute, with Hirmer and Lobinger. Over the period 1979 to 1989 the author was able to promote and record new church music in many languages in South Africa and its neighbours, plus a great deal of the traditional music of the region. In 1996 Anselm Prior, then director of Lumko, returned all the field recording originals to the author, giving him the opportunity to put together a significant contribution to the preserved music heritage of Southern Africa, including African traditional music and church music. The article is a report on the project and its results.

Van der Wiel, Renée. The Swazi People. Gallo Manor, South Africa: Awareness Publishing Group, 2012. Print.South Africa describes itself as “one rainbow nation going forward”, but within that rainbow there are eleven indigenous South African peoples. The Swazi People is one of eleven volumes in the African Cultures of South Africa series, which presents the cultures for readers at the upper elementary level. The other volumes include the cultures of The Khoikhoi, The Ndebele, The North Sotho, The San, The South Sotho, The Tsonga-Shangaan, The Tswana, The Venda, The Xhosa, and The Zulu.In The Swazi People, Renée Van der Wiel describes their arts and crafts, beliefs, clothes, history, houses, language, leaders, marriage, music and dance, recipes, and way of life. The book incorporates many Swazi words, which are listed in the glossary at the back of the book. For example, mahiya (cotton cloth), gogo (grandmother) and lobola (marriage gift, usually cattle) are all listed in the glossary.This volume is attractively produced and brightly coloured. It opens with a full-page map of South Africa that shows the historical movements of the Swazi people and highlights their homelands. Text and images are presented on alternate pages. The professional quality images are usually full-page and are either historical black and white photos or modern colour photos of Swazi people engaged in traditional activities. There is also an index, which improves the book's usefulness as an elementary research text.The text is written in age-appropriate language and deals with the subjects in sufficient detail that as an adult, I was able to learn from it. In general, the tone is objective and non-judgemental. For example, "[i]n 1973, King Sobhuzall and the Imbokoduo National Movement stopped all other political parties from taking part in elections in Swaziland. (…) After only five years of being a democracy, Swaziland became a country ruled by a king." Where there is bias present, it is more in the form of presenting the Swazi point of view: "But the Boers did not care about looking after the Swazi people – all they wanted was to get through to the sea without having to travel through British territory.".This sturdily bound volume is an excellent work and is highly recommended for public and elementary school libraries. Highly recommended: 4 stars out of 4Reviewer: Sandy CampbellSandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

This paper explores South African hip-hop activist Emile YX?'s work to suggest that he presents an alternative take on mainstream US and South African hip-hop. While it is arguable that a great deal of mainstream hip-hop is commercially co-opted, it is clear that a significant amount of US hip-hop (by Angel Haze or Talib Kweli, for example) and hip-hop beyond the US (by Positive Black Soul, Godessa, Black Noise or Prophets of da City, for example) present alternatives to its co-option. Emile YX? pushes for an alternative to mainstream hip-hop's aesthetics and politics. Foregoing what Prophets of da City call “mindless topics” (Prophets of da City “Cape Crusader”), he employs hip-hop to engage audiences critically about social and political issues, including language and racial identity politics. Significantly, he embraces AfriKaaps, which is a challenge to the hegemonic speech variety of Afrikaans. From Emile's perspective, AfriKaaps preceded Afrikaans because it was spoken by slaves during the Cape colonial era and was later culturally appropriated by Afrikaner Nationalists in the apartheid era to construct white, Afrikaner identity as pure and bounded. AfriKaaps in hip-hop therefore presents an alternative to mainstream US-centric hip-hop in South Africa (via AKA or Cassper Nyovest, for example) as well as Afrikaner Nationalist representations of Afrikaans and race by promoting multilingual hip-hop aesthetics, which was initially advanced by Prophets of da City in the early '90s.Pursuing Alternative TrajectoriesEmile YX?, a former school teacher, started out with the Black Consciousness-aligned hip-hop crew, Black Noise, as a b-boy in the late 1980s before becoming an MC. Black Noise went through a number of iterations, eventually being led by YX? (aka Emile Jansen) after he persuaded the crew not to pursue a mainstream record deal in favour of plotting a career path as independent artists. The crew’s strategy has been to fund the production and distribution of their albums independently and to combine their work as recording and performing artists with their activism. They therefore arranged community workshops at schools and, initially, their local library in the township, Grassy Park, before touring nationally and internationally. By the late 1990s, Jansen established an NGO, Heal the Hood, in order to facilitate collaborative projects with European and South African partners. These partnerships, not only allowed Black Noise crew members to continue working as hip-hip activists, but also created a network through which they could distribute their music and secure further bookings for performances locally and internationally.Jansen’s solo work continued along this trajectory and he has gone on to work on collaborative projects, such as the hip-hop theatre show Afrikaaps, which looks critically at the history of Afrikaans and identity politics, and Mixed Mense, a b-boy show that celebrates African dance traditions and performed at One Mic Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2014 (48 Hours). This artist’s decision not to pursue a mainstream record deal in the early 1990s probably saved Black Noise from being a short-lived pop sensation in favour of pursuing a route that ensured that Cape hip-hop retained its alternative, Black Consciousness-inspired subcultural edge.The activism of Black Noise and Heal the Hood is an example of activists’ efforts to employ hip-hop as a means of engaging youth critically about social and political issues (Haupt, Stealing Empire 158-165). Hence, despite arguments that the seeds for subcultures’ commercial co-option lie in the fact that they speak through commodities (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45), there is evidence of agency despite the global reach of US cultural imperialism. H. Samy Alim’s concept of translocal style communities is useful in this regard. The concept focuses on the “transportability of mobile matrices – sets of styles, aesthetics, knowledges, and ideologies that travel across localities and cross-cut modalities” (Alim 104-105). Alim makes the case for agency when he contends, “Although global style communities may indeed grow out of particular sociohistoric originating moments, or moments in which cultural agents take on the project of creating ‘an origin’ (in this case, Afrodiasporic youth in the United States in the 1970s), it is important to note that a global style community is far from a threatening, homogenizing force” (Alim 107).Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s concepts of ethnoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes and mediascapes, Alim argues that the “persistent dialectical interplay between the local and the global gives rise to the creative linguistic styles that are central to the formation of translocal style communities, and leads into theorizing about glocal stylizations and style as glocal distinctiveness” (Appadurai; Alim 107). His view of globalisation thus accommodates considerations of the extent to which subjects on both the local and global levels are able to exercise agency to produce new or alternative meanings and stylistic practices.Hip-Hop's Translanguaging Challenge to HegemonyJansen’s “Mix en Meng It Op” [“Mix and Blend It / Mix It Up”] offers an example of translocal style by employing translanguaging, code mixing and codeswitching practices. The song’s first verse speaks to the politics of race and language by challenging apartheid-era thinking about purity and mixing:In South Africa is ek coloured and African means black raceFace it, all mense kom van Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionEk’s siek en sat van all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s om te expose onse behoort aan een rasHou vas, ras is las, watch hoe ons die bubble barsPlus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir daai potjie want ons wietie wattie mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSoe hulle moet gemix het om daai clicks to employ(Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; my emphasis)[In South Africa I am coloured and African means black raceFace it, all people come from Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionI’m sick and tired of all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s to expose the fact that we belong top one raceHold on, race is a burden, watch as we burst the bubble Plus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir that pot because we don’t know what the mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSo they must have mixed to employ those clicks]The MC does more than codeswitch or code mix in this verse. The syntax switches from that of English to Afrikaans interchangeably and he is doing more than merely borrowing words and phrases from one language and incorporating it into the other language. In certain instances, he opts to pronounce certain English words and phrases as if they were Afrikaans (for example, “My” and “land’s”). Suresh Canagarajah explains that codeswitching was traditionally “distinguished from code mixing” because it was assumed that codeswitching required “bilingual competence” in order to “switch between [the languages] in fairly contextually appropriate ways with rhetorical and social significance”, while code mixing merely involved “borrowings which are appropriated into one’s language so that using them doesn't require bilingual competence” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, he argues that both of these translingual practices do not require “full or perfect competence” in the languages being mixed and that “these models of hybridity can be socially and rhetorically significant” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, the artist is clearly competent in both English and Afrikaans; in fact, he is also departing from the hegemonic speech varieties of English and Afrikaans in attempts to affirm black modes of speech, which have been negated during apartheid (cf. Haupt “Black Thing”).What the artist seems to be doing is closer to translanguaging, which Canagarajah defines as “the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). The mix or blend of English and Afrikaans syntax become integrated, thereby performing the very point that Jansen makes about what he calls “the lie of purity” by asserting that the “mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sir” (Emile XY? “Mix en Meng It Op”). This approach is significant because Canagarajah points out that while research shows that translanguaging is “a naturally occurring phenomenon”, it “occurs surreptitiously behind the backs of the teachers in classes that proscribe language mixing” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). Jansen’s performance of translanguaging and challenge to notions of linguistic and racial purity should be read in relation to South Africa’s history of racial segregation during apartheid. Remixing Race/ism and Notions of PurityLegislated apartheid relied on biologically essentialist understandings of race as bounded and fixed and, hence, the categories black and white were treated as polar opposites with those classified as coloured being seen as racially mixed and, therefore, defiled – marked with the shame of miscegenation (Erasmus 16; Haupt, “Black Thing” 176-178). Apart from the negative political and economic consequences of being classified as either black or coloured by the apartheid state (Salo 363; McDonald 11), the internalisation of processes of racial interpellation was arguably damaging to the psyche of black subjects (in the broad inclusive sense) (cf. Fanon; Du Bois). The work of early hip-hop artists like Black Noise and Prophets of da City (POC) was therefore crucial to pointing to alternative modes of speech and self-conception for young people of colour – regardless of whether they self-identified as black or coloured. In the early 1990s, POC lead the way by embracing black modes of speech that employed codeswitching, code mixing and translanguaging as a precursor to the emergence of music genres, such as kwaito, which mixed urban black speech varieties with elements of house music and hip-hop. POC called their performances of Cape Flats speech varieties of English and Afrikaans gamtaal [gam language], which is an appropriation of the term gam, a reference to the curse of Ham and justifications for slavery (Adhikari 95; Haupt Stealing Empire 237). POC’s appropriation of the term gam in celebration of Cape Flats speech varieties challenge the shame attached to coloured identity and the linguistic practices of subjects classified as coloured. On a track called “Gamtaal” off Phunk Phlow, the crew samples an assortment of recordings from Cape Flats speech communities and capture ordinary people speaking in public and domestic spaces (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”). In one audio snippet we hear an older woman saying apologetically, “Onse praatie suiwer Afrikaan nie. Onse praat kombius Afrikaans” (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”).It is this shame for black modes of speech that POC challenges on this celebratory track and Jansen takes this further by both making an argument against notions of racial and linguistic purity and performing an example of translanguaging. This is important in light of research that suggests that dominant research on the creole history of Afrikaans – specifically, the Cape Muslim contribution to Afrikaans – has been overlooked (Davids 15). This oversight effectively amounted to cultural appropriation as the construction of Afrikaans as a ‘pure’ language with Dutch origins served the Afrikaner Nationalist project when the National Party came into power in 1948 and began to justify its plans to implement legislated apartheid. POC’s act of appropriating the denigrated term gamtaal in service of a Black Consciousness-inspired affirmation of colouredness, which they position as part of the black experience, thus points to alternative ways in which people of colour cand both express and define themselves in defiance of apartheid.Jansen’s work with the hip-hop theater project Afrikaaps reconceptualised gamtaal as Afrikaaps, a combination of the term Afrikaans and Kaaps. Kaaps means from the Cape – as in Cape Town (the city) or the Cape Flats, which is where many people classified as coloured were forcibly relocated under the Group Areas Act under apartheid (cf. McDonald; Salo; Alim and Haupt). Taking its cue from POC and Brasse vannie Kaap’s Mr FAT, who asserted that “gamtaal is legal” (Haupt, “Black Thing” 176), the Afrikaaps cast sang, “Afrikaaps is legal” (Afrikaaps). Conclusion: Agency and the Transportability of Mobile MatricesJansen pursues this line of thought by contending that the construction of Shaka Zulu’s kingdom involved mixing many tribes (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”), thereby alluding to arguments that narratives about Shaka Zulu were developed in service of Zulu nationalism to construct Zulu identity as bounded and fixed (Harries 105). Such constructions were essential to the apartheid state's justifications for establishing Bantustans, separate homelands established along the lines of clearly defined and differentiated ethnic identities (Harries 105). Writing about the use of myths and symbols during apartheid, Patrick Harries argues that in Kwazulu, “the governing Inkatha Freedom Party ... created a vivid and sophisticated vision of the Zulu past” (Harries 105). Likewise, Emile YX? contends that isiXhosa’s clicks come from the Khoi (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; Afrikaaps). Hence, the idea of the Khoi San’s lineage and history as being separate from that of other African communities in Southern Africa is challenged. He thus challenges the idea of pure Zulu or Xhosa identities and drives the point home by sampling traditional Zulu music, as opposed to conventional hip-hop beats.Effectively, colonial strategies of tribalisation as a divide and rule strategy through the reification of linguistic and cultural practices are challenged, thereby reminding us of the “transportability of mobile matrices” and “fluidity of identities” (Alim 104, 105). In short, identities as well as cultural and linguistic practices were never bounded and static, but always-already hybrid, being constantly made and remade in a series of negotiations. This perspective is in line with research that demonstrates that race is socially and politically constructed and discredits biologically essentialist understandings of race (Yudell 13-14; Tattersall and De Salle 3). This is not to ignore the asymmetrical relations of power that enable cultural appropriation and racism (Hart 138), be it in the context of legislated apartheid, colonialism or in the age of corporate globalisation or Empire (cf. Haupt, Static; Hardt & Negri). But, even here, as Alim suggests, one should not underestimate the agency of subjects on the local level to produce alternative forms of expression and self-representation.ReferencesAdhikari, Mohamed. "The Sons of Ham: Slavery and the Making of Coloured Identity." South African Historical Journal 27.1 (1992): 95-112.Alim, H. Samy “Translocal Style Communities: Hip Hop Youth as Cultural Theorists of Style, Language and Globalization”. Pragmatics 19.1 (2009):103-127. Alim, H. Samy, and Adam Haupt. “Reviving Soul(s): Hip Hop as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the U.S. & South Africa”. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice. Ed. Django Paris and H. Samy Alim. 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South Africa: Ku Shu Shu, 1995.Prophets of da City. “Cape Crusader.” Ghetto Code. South Africa: Ku Shu Shu & Ghetto Ruff, 1997.YX?, Emile. “Mix En Meng It Op.” Take Our Power Back. Cape Town: Cape Flats Uprising Records, 2015.