African choral music is becoming a common selection of repertoire around the United States, with American choirs from all educational levels to community and professional choral ensembles. However, from an observation of the Midwestern American Choral Directors Association conference, every choir that had an African piece in their set, it was from South Africa. There is an extensive variety of choral music from Africa that has not been explored. Yet it is accessible from transcriptions and arrangements by composers from around Africa. Choral music directors in the United States, however, seem to face a dearth of resources to assist in teaching and rehearsing these pieces due to fears such as cultural appropriation, mispronunciation of new languages, and other challenges. This creates a need for an accessible multimedia guide to assist in teaching and rehearsing these pieces.

In this presentation, I seek to provide a possible guide to teaching African choral music, particularly from Kenya to American choirs as a stepping stone to diversify the American choral curriculum with more African music. As one who has been extensively immersed in Kenyan choral music traditions by performing and teaching a variety of songs in different languages, I will discuss the challenges and outcomes of the rehearsal techniques used in teaching repertoire from Kenya. I will exemplify this methodology through the process I experienced when I taught Ngulo, a song in Kikamba, a Kenyan language, that has been arranged for SATB at Ball State University with the University Choral Union.

Multicultural musics are increasingly becoming a part of choral music and music education curriculum in U.S. higher learning institutions as part of the larger effort to incorporate culturally responsive teaching practices. Most music educators in the U.S. teach these musics as cultural outsiders, and little has been written about those who teach the music as cultural insiders. There has been an increase in African choral educators in the U.S. educational, community, and religious spaces, whose primary formation is in an African country and who are viewed as custodians and transmitters of their national musical traditions. The pedagogy of African choral music in Western academic and other settings, therefore, raises significant questions of authority, authenticity, and the positionality of these educators. How do they teach African choral music? How do they negotiate authority as culture bearers? How do they diversify their repertoire selection? How are their pedagogical strategies culturally responsive?

Using the data from qualitative semi-structured interviews, I will discuss how these choral directors negotiate their identity as culture bearers, particularly as they work with diverse ensembles, institutional expectations, and audiences’ perception of African music. I posit choral pedagogy as a cultural mediation site, where the questions of authenticity, representation, and musical ownership emerge in teaching and performance practices. By focusing on the lived experiences of these educators, this study contributes to the existing discussion on culturally responsive teaching, ethical performance practices, and intercultural choral performance.

KiSwahili is one of the fastest‑expanding African languages, spoken by more than 200 million people worldwide. Its phonetic structure, with most words pronounced exactly as they are written, makes the language very accessible. This accessibility has encouraged non‑Swahili‑speaking artists, composers, and conductors to incorporate KiSwahili songs and texts into their creative works and performances. Notable examples include Amiri Baraka’s Kutoa Sifa, the opening of Michael Jackson’s Liberian Girl, Christopher Tin’s Baba Yetu, and Beyoncé Knowles‑Carter’s Spirit.

One of the best‑known Swahili songs, Malaika, has been covered by more than seventy artists, with Miriam Makeba’s version having the most popularity. However, various pronunciation errors have circulated among performers, some of whom adopted Makeba’s cover of the song. This highlights the need for a pronunciation and performance practice guide for singers, whether in popular, choral, or classical music context for clearer communication and more genuine interpretation of the text.

I will discuss some textual and musical miscommunications that arose from covers of Miriam Makeba’s rendition of Malaika. I will then explore the first documented Kiswahili song cycle “Kumbukumbu za Utotoni” by Eddie Baraka Mony by providing both translations and IPA phonetic transcriptions of the work, and also demonstrating the spoken literal and poetic delivery of the songs in order to disclose how and when meaning, understanding and interpretation are compromised when presentations are based on merely reading the text, deciphering notation or by relying on covers without an understanding of idiomatic performance practices.

African music as a course in many universities in the North America is experienced in performance ensembles, as a unit in a larger introduction to Africa, African American or ‘World Music’ course, or as a stand-alone course. Because of distance from quotidian, linguistic and other African lived musicking, a possible understanding of the music for performance and other usage is often achieved by virtually situating the space, people and repertoire, using descriptions and explanations of events, or invoking translation of lyrics. Often, songs with the fewest lyrics are preferred and coupled with other artistic forms in order to engage students and other audiences.

Building on the educational axiom of moving from known to unknown, I will discuss, habilitate and trouble the use of popular music as an entry point into the technicalities of African music performance. I draw from ‘rehabilitated’ Congolese Rumba repertoire that has been part of the Kenyan soundscape since the 1960s. The music has been re-interpreted in Kenyan spaces and refurbished in continuity. Or else, it interacts with indigenous, urban, and international popular musics to create new genres, some of which are referred to generically as afropop for commercial expediency. An analysis of the components of cosmopolitan African repertoire becomes an ‘open portal’ that unlocks African musics stylings at the interstices of resources that are the amalgam of a given piece. I will explore the strengths, weaknesses, and challenges of this approach to the study and teaching of the music of Africa.