Voices ResourcesA website for the worldwide community around the journal Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy

At a recent Community Music Therapy meeting here at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, Sunelle talked about work with a group of ten-year olds at Sea Point primary school in Cape Town. The children were preparing a music 'item' for the school concert when one of the children noticed her shoes.

Miss, those are Pantsula shoes, miss, they are Xhosa, the men wear them for the Pantsula dance! Perhaps we can do the Pantsula dance for the show, miss! No, we are not Xhosa, says another, we are coloured - so the black kids can do the Pantsula dance, the coloured kids can do the Kaapse Klopse. What about the white children, asks Sunelle. Oh................... they can do rap.

So the group breaks up according to colour lines to begin preparing.

Wait - Miss, have you seen the television advertisement where all the white people live in tin shanties and the black people live in the city with houses and swimming pool? Maybe we should swop! The black kids will do Kaapse Klopse, the coloured kids do rap, and the white kids do Pantsula.

The group break up along colour lines once more, to prepare each of the dances.

Wait! Miss! This is not right - this is South Africa, we must all learn to do each other's dances! Each group to have everyone in it! We need coloured and white and black kids to do the rap, the Pantsula and the Kaapse Klopse because then we can learn each other's music.

The groups break up a third time, this time defined by the music.

This story might have remained something passing by - one of the many anecdotes we tell, we hear, we forget. It seems important to record it not just for this country and continent, but for anyone, anywhere. When Sunelle told the story - en passant so to speak - it sounded like a big story; and I asked her permission to VOICE it, more broadly, here.

This column is a call to Africa: where music happens everywhere: in taxis, markets, in healing and praying; in city and rural contexts, in day and night, full moon and full sun, and yet, African voices remain quieter than most. Music therapy in Africa risks remaining in its own enclave, separate from other enclaves in other parts of the world. What a loss for the profession both in and out of Africa! Without an African Voice, music therapy worldwide risks remaining a practice created by the vast written tracts that have become part of the international music therapy canon. The canon that music therapy students everywhere study, absorb, believe in - and what music therapy is NOT, then, is loudly stated by what the canon omits. Even if music therapy in Africa does not speak 'in the global tongue', it needs to be sounded, voiced, noted, and heard. Or remain invisible, non-existent, an illusion.

SO! To return to our story - music therapy, too, can remain in enclaves, with each creating, re-creating, celebrating its exclusive values, and 'showing' one another what it is we do in our enclave. An alternative is shown to us by the children in Cape Town: who dare to visit and learn one another's dance.

Acknowledgent

I am grateful to Sunelle Fouché for allowing me to use this story

How to cite this page

Pavlicevic. Mércèdes (2004). Calling African Voices. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2004-calling-african-voices