Conference Agenda

Given the country’s history of racialised separate development, the South African present is marked by both a departure from its apartheid past and a still uncertain path toward a curriculum suitable for the recontextualisation of African music within tertiary institutions. This paper traces the roots of this issue to a pre-tertiary African music curriculum that devalues indigenous musical expressions, drawing on the extensive work of Mandy Carver. Building on empirical research involving interviews with ethnomusicology experts in South Africa and beyond, I identify a path forward for African music curriculum development that moves beyond the tokenistic inclusion of expressive practices sourced from different geographies within the continent, under the banners of ‘decolonisation’ or ‘transformation’ in South Africa’s post-student-protests present. The paper engages with Meki Nzewi’s concept of ‘humanning’ and Choi et al.’s framework of critical consciousness (2015) through music education, arguing that crafting a clear and robust language for the teaching and adjudication of African music is a necessary starting point for a curriculum that genuinely transcends a tokenistic inclusion of African musical practices in post-apartheid South Africa.

This paper considers patterns emerging from an ongoing research project titled Investigating the Exclusion of Traditional African Instruments in Worship. Surveys conducted with 200+ congregants in theologically diverse churches across the UK, USA and South Africa probed the continued exclusion of traditional instruments in either African or predominantly African diaspora churches, a legacy of colonialism. Kofi Agawu considers the ‘civilising missions to Africa’ (2023) noting impositions of western music ‘amount to a musical violence of a very high order, a violence whose psychic and psychological impacts remain to be properly explored’. Almost all churches surveyed here use Christian Contemporary Worship (CWM/CCM), with these works originating from a small writer pool, connected to Australian or US based evangelical churches. 18–25-year-old respondents, who have grown up in churches, identified CWM as their musical and cultural heritage, unaware of traditional musical heritage. John Lindenbaum (2013) notes that, ‘while CCM is just one of many forms of sacred music, it is more likely than others to produce neoliberal subjectivities because of the particular temporal and spatial contexts in which CCM fans encounter neoliberal discourses and projects.’ A cultural amnesia reflected in responses from young African congregation members suggests that the global adoption of CWM continues colonial era practices of musical heritage erasure. Adorno and Horkheimer famously proposed that the Culture Industry ‘infects everything with sameness’; the pervasiveness of CWM liquidates localities, erasing traditional heritages for young church members at the speed of global, Christian capital.

How is African choral music shaping transnational choral practices in Germany? What are the roles of German choral conductors in facilitating such practices? Previous ethnomusicological works on African music in Europe have focused on African migrants’ initiatives towards the promotion of African indigenous and popular music on the continent (Carl 2011; Stokes 2020). Few of the studies have established how such projects facilitate transnational musical exchanges between the continents (Cimardi 2022). Yet, how African choral music participates in such exchanges, particularly in Germany’s choral music scene, has not been fully discussed. In responding to these questions, I explore how African choral musical practices by German-led African choirs contribute to transnational music making in Germany. This study draws from an ethnographic research between June 2024 and December 2025, involving interviews with choir directors, singers and drummers as well as participation as a singer, drummer and facilitator at different concerts and workshops organized by the choirs. Through regular performances in religious events, concerts and recordings, German-led African choirs are transforming old and creating new spaces for the practice, circulation and consumption of African choral music in ways that transcend its popular exotic and stereotyped positions. By extending the conversation on transnational music and African music, the study offers new ways of thinking about and interpreting Afropeanism through the framework of ethnomusicology. I argue that exploring African choral music in Germany opens fresh vistas for elevating sidestepped views in global music studies.