Music Undefended

The Resonance of an Africanising Value

Abstract

The music of a culture defends the culture. It defends the people, their identity, their language, their rhythm, their melody and all the idioms and mannerisms peculiar to them. But most of the times we come across academics and armchair theorists who try to put up arguments in defence of their traditional or cultural music. The truth is that while such dissipation is going on in the ‘world class’ journals among the elite class, the reality is that something else is happening in the different classrooms. This is in reference to African music with all the multi cultural currents it entails. Until now, the real people who have ensured the authentic survival of traditional music have been the uneducated who live in the rural areas. This paper is a general commentary on the ineptitude that has attended the sorry state of development in the classroom teaching of indigenous music systems. Our curriculum still bears all the marks and yoke of colonialism. The histories we teach remain the musical happenstances of Europe and America. Only very few scholars are working towards a documentation of the events that happen around us. This apparent hangover from our oral past needs urgent attention. The reversal of the existing curriculum to reflect the genuine survival needs of African peoples must take the driver’s seat. We are no people unless the language and the sounds of our forgotten past find their ways into our classroom. We are not a people unless this echo from the past is heard in our radios, our televisions and from nursery kids with delight and enthusiasm. Then and only then will our music defend us by defending itself and truly stand for all times as one of the pillar values of Africa. In the end what matters most is that this value makes us completely Africanised.