Politics and Music in Colonised South Africa

Abstract

The Spirit of Resistance in Music and Spoken Word of South Africa’s Eastern Cape explores the social history of Black South African musical and oral poetry traditions that emerged in the Eastern Cape in the context of colonisation, missionisation, and urbanisation. Michie historicizes these two auditory and oral forms as they evolved as transcripts of both Black protest and cultural adaptation in the wake of two centuries of dispossessive war and law in South Africa. The book documents the Eastern Cape roots of South Africa’s distinctive liberation and protest arts, as well as the country’s globally recognised harmonics and melodies, which have become standard in the South African singing and creative canons. As with Black American music such as blues and jazz, the Black South African sound owed a good deal to the protracted daily struggles of colonial subjects, who over two centuries, vocalised their laments, celebrations, and protests through song and poetry. Michie focuses on the Eastern Cape’s musical and cultural specificities as they shaped, and were in turn shaped by, the region’s experience of colonisation, and especially Christianisation. The book shows how Eastern Cape indigenous music forms were transformed by the arrival of European Christianity as both a message and cultural genre, which also became in turn a path to economic advancement via the medium of Western education. The Spirit of Resistance provides a comprehensive account of the long journey of African auditory response to the colonial encounter. Michie recounts the familiar story of the Christian impact on African life and the resultant emergence of indigenous African Christianity, and the musical lineages that it would give rise to during the nineteenth century and how these were transformed by the transformations of Black life by urbanisation in the twentieth century. This included the development of hymnal and, later, political ‘standards’, such as ‘Nkosi Sikelela iAfrica’ in the tradition of Christian choral music, and the subsequent emergence of more modern genres such as kwela, South African jazz, mbaqanga, and the militant chants of itoyi-toyi, which were ubiquitous during the struggle against apartheid. Michie’s account is a cast of familiar players, for those who are acquainted with the story of the emergence of the class of African Christian educated elites and their role in the emergence of