African Singer Research Articles

Affective Authenticity

This article develops the concept of “affective authenticity” to explore the experiences and reception of US-based African migrant musicians in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on interviews, archival sources and musical analysis, we trace the migration stories of South African singer Letta Mbulu and the ways in which she negotiated conflicting demands for “authenticity” in her musical performances on the American stage. Affective authenticity represents a heterogenous, explorative sound, reflecting pan-African politics and aesthetics that created the very conditions for African and African American musical collaborations. This aesthetic was countered with expectations for “scientific authenticity:” an ethno-linguistically circumscribed performance that catered to colonial ears and conceptualized African musics as insular, ancient and unchanging – an aesthetic held and policed primarily by (white) music critics. Through analysis of the Yoruba hymn Ise Oluwa (1927) and its “translations” in Mbulu’s performance on the soundtrack for the television show Roots (1977), we show the careful balance of voices, texts, instruments, and rhythms African migrant musicians perform in order to adhere to conflicting demands for authenticity, and the rebuke they experience when they transgress them. We also place conceptualizations of affective and scientific authenticity applied to popular music in broader discourses occurring during the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, the decolonization of Africa, and the entrenchment of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

“The Girl Next Door”: A Semantic Lyrical Analysis of Zahara’s Songs “Destiny” and “Rise Again”

This article applies semantic lyrical evaluation to two songs by the South African singer and songwriter, Bulelwa Mkutukana, popularly known as Zahara. The choice of these two songs is driven by her significant contributions to popular music, particularly in the arena of Afro-soul and contemporary African music. Her distinctive voice, heartfelt lyrics, and synthesis of various musical stylistics earned her widespread acclaim both in South Africa and globally. On the one hand, the global village continues to downplay South African music, claiming that it is too customised and culturally imbued. This article argues that song lyrics, like poetry, embrace ambiguous and polysemic meanings that may not be effortlessly conceptualised by those outside the arena of language and music. This means that the sense-making process requires linguistic theoretical techniques to enact context-specific meanings. To address this need, this article applies semantics as a theoretical framework. The principal findings and discussions indicate how Zahara uses language to articulate some of the social challenges that may contribute to the urgency of social change, transformation, consciousness, and cohesion, such as empowerment and motivation. By the same token, this article underlines how language and music share fundamental elements, both relying on rhythm, pitch, and structure, yet serving distinct communicative purposes. Language conveys meaning through words, phrases, and sentences, while music expresses emotions and aesthetics through sound and melody. Thus, the intersection of linguistic and musical subtleties in song underscores a unique synergy where the emotional reverberation of music enhances the communicative power of language.

Lorraine Hansberry and Miriam Makeba’s Affirmative Movements in History

AbstractLorraine Hansberry’s essay “Stanley Gleason” expresses her theory of Black existence. The essay depicts everyday acts that transform the body and, in so doing, expand what is possible. Her ideas about Black existence emerge as part of a long history of Black thought and in relationship to the artistic and political communities she organized. While working in Greenwich Village, Hansberry crossed paths with and learned from an international cadre of intellectuals and performing artists, including South African singer Miriam Makeba, how to shift the body to shape reality. The essay offers possibilities for locating live options within historical periods marked by despair and, therefore, for remapping the Black world from one of negation to one within what Hansberry called an affirmative movement in history.

Singing back to the Bard: A conversation on Desdemona with Rokia Traoré

Rokia Traoré is a Malian singer, guitarist and composer, known worldwide for her artistic syncretism and political activism. Her distinctive style blends elements of traditional Malian music with blues, folk and rock to address contemporary geopolitical and humanitarian issues. She is the artistic director of Fondation Passerelle, a non-profit organization she founded in 2006 to support young African singers and musicians by offering them high-quality professional training and work opportunities in the music industry. In this interview, she discusses her experience as songwriter and performer in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, sharing some intimate memories and elaborating freely on the role of performers and the importance of focused listening in live stage productions.

Paying a high price for skin bleaching

“I’ve been dark skinned for many years and I wanted to experience the other side. I wanted to see what it would be like to be white and I’m happy,” says South African singer Mshoza, whose real name is Nomasonto Mnisi.

Decolonizing the Mind Through Song

For post-colonial African musicians, decolonization became an imperative. Singing in one’s native language was not creative expression alone, but also a reclamation of indigenous culture and identity. In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o makes a case for African literature to be written in African languages. He also points out that singers and musicians have resisted mental colonization by retaining indigenous musical practices while promoting innovation: ‘These singers pushed the languages to new limits, renewing and reinvigorating them by coining new words and new expressions, and in generally expanding their capacity to incorporate new happenings in Africa and the world’ (1986:23). This article explores emphasis on African languages by African musicians as a form of agenda setting in communication as theorized by Scheufele (2000), focusing on the performance practices of ‘Mama Africa’ Miriam Makeba (1932-2008) and more recent artists influenced by Makeba. By making introductions to her songs and explaining the Xhosa culture in the context of Apartheid, Makeba primes her audience to hear the lyrics she sings as formed from intelligible language instead of alliterative nonsense. For many African singers since, singing in one’s native language (and other African languages) has become an intentional act of decolonisation and a recognizable signifier of pan-African identity for African audiences. This article studies performance choices, including singing in Xhosa and Zulu, and their significant impact on future musicians, the robustness of African languages and cultural identity formation.

‘Guilty Pleasures’, ‘Forbidden Fruits’ and ‘Brave Confusion’: Queer Love in the Music and Videos of South African Singers Toya Delazy and Nakhane Touré

Guided by socio-musicological perspectives, this article contends that Toya Delazy and Nakhane Touré grapple with issues pertaining to love and sexuality in their music. This is against the background of South Africa being hailed as a progressive country, especially relating to its constitution that acquiescently protects the rights of sexual minorities. Notwithstanding such constitutional protections, lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders (LGBT) continue to be victimised particularly in the impoverished townships of this country. Although they celebrate same-sex love, this article contends that such celebration is based on guilt and shame. Singing against such guilt and shame is a significant element in the construction of their sexual identity and acceptation of their same-sex love. The article concludes that Toya Delazy and Nakhane Touré’s songs are pioneering in South Africa for their open depiction of queer love in a socio-cultural milieu that considers such identities and modes of self-expression as unnatural, deviant and taboo. This music can thus be considered as a transgressive space that seeks to rehabilitate the manner in which same-sex love is perceived.

Playing the backbeat in Conakry: Miriam Makeba and the cultural politics of Sékou Touré’s Guinea, 1968–1986

This article revisits the cultural history of Guinea in the three decades following independence through focusing on the musical activity of Miriam Makeba, the exiled South African singer who resided in the country between the years 1968 and 1986. Recent scholarship has illuminated the vast investment of the Guinean state in developing modern national culture as part of the process of decolonisation as well as the limited freedom of expression, imposed by the state, that subjugated local cultural production. While these studies have concentrated primarily on Guinean cultural agents, this paper explores transnational dimensions within the cultural politics of Guinea. It highlights Makeba’s emplacement in Guinea in the context of nation building, Pan-Africanism, cold war politics and black transnational cultural exchanges. By focusing on the disparity between textual sources and musically embedded meanings extracted from Makeba’s music recorded in Guinea, this paper recasts Makeba as a conduit of African-American musical influences in the Guinean scene. By doing so, it uncovers cultural spaces that were not subordinated to official state ideology mediated through print culture, and thus have hitherto been unrecognised in mainstream historiography.

Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul

Tanisha C. Ford's Liberated Threads is a welcome addition to historical studies of civil rights and black power. Through case studies drawn from the United States, Great Britain, and South Africa, Liberated Threads focuses on the history and politics of “soul style” and examines how black women used fashion and beauty culture to express themselves in an era when blackness and black womanhood were being actively reimagined. Liberated Threads traces the emergence of soul style while zeroing in on the quotidian histories of black women activists (p. 10). How did these women's style choices reflect their needs and experiences in this era? Conversely, how did black women “style” themselves as newly liberated black and female subjects in a period of rupture and change? Liberated Threads approaches style as a cultural practice closely tied to political activism. Ford's eclectic, transnational archive, which draws from newspapers, magazines, photographs, lp covers, and interviews, allows her to capture the dynamism of familiar signifiers of soul style. In the opening chapters, for example, Ford examines the history of the “natural”—later, the Afro—as a popular hairstyle for black women, noting its different resonances in varying political and national contexts. The South African singer Miriam Makeba's short natural came to signify radical black glamour, but it also referenced the Bantu education system, which forced black South African girls to shed their distinctive plaits and cornrows once they entered school. In contrast, African American political activists in the 1960s embraced the natural as a critique of European beauty standards and a refusal to conform to stifling norms of black bourgeois femininity.

A marriage of inconvenience: Miriam Makeba’s relationship with Stokely Carmichael and her music career in the United States

This article analyzes the career of famed South African singer, Miriam Makeba, in the United States. After finding success throughout much of the 1960s, Makeba’s career and public image shifted after her 1968 marriage to Stokely Carmichael, a noted Civil Rights activist and proponent of the Black Power movement. Once Makeba became associated with Carmichael and his reputation as an extremist, the American public, media, and music industry changed their approach to Makeba as an individual and as an artist throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. Ultimately, this union caused American audiences to turn on her and her music, and this essay explores how and why this shift occurred.

Singing me to you

This article is concerned with the noticeable increase in musicians from previously disadvantaged communities (population groups who were previously disenfranchised) in South Africa who are studying, researching and performing Western art music. Because of the apparent discrepancy between the cultural and social contexts from which the musicians and the music originate, the article briefly considers the relationship between music, context and culture. African musicians’ interest in Western art music should not be attributed to Western art music only now being discovered by these communities, but rather to an increase in opportunities for these musicians to formally study and research this music. This article specifically examines the rise in the involvement of African singers in opera. It provides an overview of the reasons for this rise and points out some of the challenges facing voice lecturers at tertiary institutions. Finally, the article gives some feedback on how students who had been part of the North-South-South Project experienced this opportunity to study abroad.

The Expansion of Jazz through the Life of a South African Singer

Johnny Hartman biographer, Gregg Akkerman, reviews South African singer Sathima Bea Benjamin's life story as related in Musical Echoes:South African Women Thinking in Jazz, by Carol Ann Muller and Benjamin.

Wandering from pitch

Several writers have expressed their views in this Journal about a natural phenomenon: the wandering from pitch of their singers. I have also before me a leading Church Music Magazine in which a writer is at pains to give devices to overcome this difficulty especially with child choirs. From a long experience with choral groups in several countries, my own views are at variance with almost every writer on the subject. It may even come as a surprise if I say that African singers, even children or a whole congregation, can keep pitch when they are accompanied (by the harmonium, for instance, provided they can hear it enough); and that any musician who can transpose, or has a transpositor keyboard, could obviate the tendency in his singers. I do not find it a problem. But a few simple ‘rules’ should be observed.