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FOREWORD

THE publication of Musical Instruments of the Indigenous People of South Africa represents an impulse to re-animate the Scottish-born Percival Robson Kirby’s important early text in southern African music studies. The changes to the revised third edition include reworking the musical examples, designing the layout so that the discussion and photographs of instruments are near each other, and changing the title; Kirby’s original phrase ‘native races’ has been replaced by ‘indigenous people’. This revised third edition affords an opportunity to reconsider a classic, stimulating early study of the material culture of indigenous southern African musics nearly 80 years after Kirby’s book first appeared on bookshelves in 1934, and 45 years since it was last published.

Starting as early as 1923, Kirby turned his erudition and powers of observation to studying the music cultures of indigenous South Africans through a series of field trips during university vacations. He developed a project to collect, document and describe examples of each kind of musical instrument in southern Africa south of the Limpopo. He employed photography, ably assisted by Dr W. Paff, and made wax cylinder sound recordings of many performances as part of his method, and also learnt to perform the music. This practice later became standard in ethnomusicology, but was uncommon at the time. The tremendous energy he expended in this work resulted in a series of articles and the first edition of book. He displayed many of the instruments he collected in his ‘museum’ in the music department at the University of the Witwatersrand, using them in his teaching.¹ On retiring from Wits, Kirby loaned his collection to the Africana Museum, Johannesburg. It remained there from 1953 to 1981, when the University of Cape Town acquired it. Today it is housed in the university’s South African College of Music, with the accompanying materials deposited in the University of Cape Town Libraries’ Manuscripts and Archives Department.

The best way to read this book is in conjunction with viewing the instruments he discusses in this collection, which can be done by arrangement with the South African College of Music.

Kirby must have completed his text with great excitement. It was the first extended, scholarly study of southern Africa’s indigenous musics—Kirby’s term this—and it laid a foundation for studying music in the region; the many citations of Kirby by succeeding generations of scholars attest to this. A painstakingly written text, it is dense with historical perspectives, closely-observed detail, and a broad range of observations about instruments, music-making, dance and numerous other related subjects. Much would have passed into oblivion were it not for this book.

There is a ‘however’ to this tale; today Kirby’s original title sounds really old-fashioned with its ‘native races’. Would it have struck his contemporaries as anachronistic? Is the phrase ‘the native races’ a blemish that indexes hopelessly contaminated material within? The dated language in the original title foreshadows challenges the contemporary reader will encounter in Kirby’s writing. What are these challenges, and how might the contemporary reader approach Kirby today? It is helpful to consider the historical and intellectual discourses current when Kirby wrote. These form part of a larger issue, namely how to approach South Africa’s colonial archive, which frequently elicits a response of rejection arising from frustration with the ‘taint’ of the colonial period in which the archive was laid down.²

A first step might be to consider the conditions at the time that Kirby approached his subject. There was very little readily available, reliable material on the region’s music cultures. His decision to concentrate on the material culture of music was quite likely pragmatic. As it was, to undertake a survey of the musics of the region was a daunting project. He had no facility with the languages, nor a good knowledge of the many local histories he would encounter. These are some of the restricting factors he encountered in his first publication on local musics (1923). In this situation, it makes sense that he should begin his study with a survey of the material culture of music in the form of musical instruments. His work on the tympani book prepared him for studying musical instruments. Kirby began by carefully, apparently exhaustively, convening an archive of travellers’ accounts and any other relevant sources to provide historical depth through a multiplicity of (mostly outsider) voices and observations through time.³ This enabled him to place his research in a genealogy.

Kirby did not train in the range of disciplines that succeeding generations of ethnomusicologists would study. We can lament the lack of the empirical fieldwork methods of social anthropology, for example. The result is that we do not find in his work many aspects of the music cultures that he studied and which we would expect today. The reader seeking to position the musics and individual musicians in its precise local, historical moment will come away frustrated at the author’s inconsistencies in this regard. The researcher looking for additional information in Kirby’s field notes finds that they were written on the fly. There are transcriptions of short snatches and longer passages of music, occasional well-observed drawings of an instrument or a detail, and so on. Kirby typically notes the names of some people he encountered in his fieldwork (identified in nearly every case by a single name), a location, an instrument’s name, musical terminology, and a date. This necessitates a great deal of painstaking archival work to bring these musicians into history with, perhaps, a biography, as some of the best South African historical writing has achieved.

Paying attention to the relative thicknesses and thinnesses of data in Kirby’s writing can tell us about the nature of Kirby’s enquiry. He was interested in the typical instrument and/or performance identified largely in terms of ethnic group. He doesn’t ignore the individual or ensemble, but gives insufficient data about his research consultants for the modern researcher to be able to identify these people without considerable pains. He was not alone in this regard, as social science research tended to present anonymous subjects. This remains the practice where ethics require or the individual requests anonymity. But the lack of this kind of detail even in Kirby’s somewhat sparse field notes is a loss, which makes it very difficult to place these individual musicians in history. The result is a discourse about the music of ethnic group X, rather than the possibility of considering the practice of individuals. This makes it easy to typify the musics of indigenous southern Africans as ‘tribal’, a problematic construction long reinforced by institutional practice and popular discourse. It has the effect of rendering the material depersonalised, and, given the contemporary prevailing trends in South Africa, assigned to an ethnic grouping that functioned as discrete siloes.

Kirby’s interest in the big picture took the form of seeing all musics in history passing through the same evolutionary stages along a universal evolutionary path. He came to be heralded internationally as an expert on ‘primitive music’, and he added to theories about what constituted primitive music. Kirby was not alone in this social evolutionary approach, which was common in the social sciences in South Africa in the 1930s. This was the time when the ‘Native question’ was at the centre of debate and political practice, and Kirby’s colleagues on campus at Wits were busily developing the knowledge that these currents could draw on. Wits’ department of Bantu Studies was founded in the early 1920s at the same time as Kirby established the Music department. His phrase ‘native races’ resonates with the descriptive subtitle of the Wits journal, Bantu Studies: A Journal devoted to the Scientific Study of BANTU, HOTTENTOT, AND BUSHMAN.⁴ The upper case blazoned on the cover of the journal emphasises the contemporary notion of three southern African ‘races’, which Kirby, too, subscribed to. He published many of his African music research articles in this journal, and was influenced by and even took his lead from the discourse of Bantu Studies at Wits and beyond.

Kirby followed theories about the prehistory and history of southern African populations and, in particular, was influenced by Raymond Dart, Wits professor of Comparative Anatomy, in theorising the development of the peoples and music cultures of southern Africa. It is clear from Kirby’s memoirs that he counted Dart as a friend as well as respecting him as a colleague. Australian-born and London-trained, Dart is frequently valourised as the visionary discoverer of the ‘missing link’ Australopithecus africanus and a great teacher who placed South African palaeontology on a firm, dynamic scientific path that Phillip Tobias and others followed. There were, however, less palatable aspects of Dart’s legacy, which Saul Dubow (1996) critiques. Firm adherence to two theories, social evolutionism and diffusionism, guided his work, feeding directly and indirectly into the currents of scientific racism in South African theory and public discourse. That Kirby was strongly influenced by these streams of theorising is evident in this book, and he maintained these ideas even in his later writings, though the social evolutionist strand was contested in the South African academy. In seeking to account for Kirby’s take on ‘primitive music’ and social evolution, Grant Olwage suggests an earlier influence:

It is likely that Kirby’s training at the Royal College, headed at the time by Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, author of The Evolution of the Art of Music (1897), provided the intellectual context for his long-held evolutionary ideas as much as the early work of comparative musicology (2002:35, n.18).

In prefacing a posthumous article of Kirby’s for the South African Music Encyclopedia, John Blacking identifies key challenges that reading Kirby presents, at the same time as pointing to the value and validity of his work:

[Kirby’s] views on the evolution of music, musical stratification and the origins of scales from natural harmonics, and his contention that four-part music is not genuinely Black African, have been presented without comment, although there is evidence for different interpretations. Prof. Kirby’s conclusions have been based on many years’ fieldwork in all parts of Southern Africa where indigenous music was made, as well as an exhaustive study of all written and other records of musical practices made in the past (1986:266).

This pioneering text, produced in a short time span, has great historical value, and constitutes a kind of baseline for research into southern Africa’s musics. Riches abound in the text, which are not negated by dated theory and language. Not least among these are Kirby’s soliciting and elucidation of aspects of local music and performance terminology, techniques of music- and instrument-making, metaphor, and local music theory. Christine Lucia (2005:xlii) typifies the careful descriptive writing and analysis based in fieldwork and close observation in his article on the gora as ‘the better side of scientific positivism’.

Lastly, in the absence of a longer biographical note, I think it appropriate to note that those I have spoken to who knew Kirby concur that he was a caring person, a ‘character’, and a most engaging and effective lecturer; one of his students said with glee that even engineering students were drawn to attend his lectures! Among many instances of thoughtfulness in this correspondence, one is typical—a 1934 intervention to secure tax relief for Kwalakwala, a field consultant. Kirby had spoken to the magistrate in Bloemhof and followed up with a letter delivered by hand to the official to assist an ailing and impoverished man in his seventies. This Kirby, who contributed richly to the social and artistic life of Johannesburg and Cape Town, does not appear in this book, though his wit, charm and humanity sparkle in his memoirs and in odd corners of his writing.

MICHAEL NIXON

South African College of Music

University of Cape Town

1Unfortunately, a large part of his instrument collection in storage was lost to insect damage. The wax cylinder recordings, too, have become severely degraded, and only a few minutes of sound have been recovered from these.

2Amidst current work in this area an illuminating article is Carolyn Hamilton’s recent theorising of the James Stuart Archive, a colonial archive she has studied for several decades (2011).

3He draws, for example, on numerous accounts of Nama flute ensembles dating from 1661 up to his colleague Winifred Hoernlé’s field notes, artefacts and sound recordings from her research of approximately 20 years earlier.

4This publication’s title changed in 1941 to African Studies, the name it bears today.

References:

Blacking, John. 1986. ‘Indigenous musics of southern Africa’. In South African music encyclopedia, vol. 3. Edited by J. Malan. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.

Burchell, William John. 1822. Travels in the interior of southern Africa. London: Longman, Hirst, Rees, Orme and Brown.

Dubow, Saul. 1995. Scientific racism in modern South Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Dubow, Saul. 1996. ‘Human origins, race typology and the other Raymond Dart’. In Africa today: a multidisciplinary snapshot of the continent in 1995. Edited by Peter F. Alexander, Ruth Hutchison and D. M. Schreuder. Canberra: Australian National University.

Hamilton, Carolyn. 2011. ‘Backstory, biography, and the life of the James Stuart Archive’. History in Africa, 38:319-341.

Kirby, Percival Robson. 1923. Some old-time chants of the Mpumuza chiefs. Bantu Studies, 2(1):23-24.

Kirby, Percival Robson. 1947. My museum of musical instruments. SAMAB: South African Museums Association Bulletin 4(1):7-13.

Lucia, Christine. 2005. The world of South African music. Newcastle-upon-Tyne. UK: Cambridge Scholars.

Olwage, Grant. 2002. Scriptions of the choral: The historiography of black South African choralism. SAMUS 22:29-45.