Moerane was born into a family of teachers who ‘irradiated’ education throughout southern Africa ‘and beyond’:

The enormous pride expressed here is fully justified. Yet teachers at these few elite schools for African scholars worked against all odds. Moerane spent most of his teaching life in the Cape Colony working in the environment of mission education during the poverty-gripped colonial late-1920s and throughout the 1930s; then in a climate of increasing state repression in black schools during the 1940s and 1950s, as apartheid took control of every aspect of life. Even in his final years in Lesotho, he operated in a country rife with political interference and economic impoverishment. Not only that, but by the time he was fully educated and musically trained, and had produced an orchestral work that belongs firmly within the orchestral culture of the Western metropolis, Moerane was obliged to teach only in rural schools, which were largely without resources, and without a formal music curriculum. This while negotiating a national educational ideology that separated schooling from urban life and dictated that students aspire to be little more than agricultural or industrial labourers. That he not only survived these odds, but did such a huge amount of good as a teacher is clear from the evidence presented in this book. But first we must ask: how did the odds become so stacked against such an achievement?

In the landmark 1984 publication, Apartheid and Education: The Education of Black South Africans, one author after another documents policies that had remained unchanged for a hundred years prior to that, and were, in the 1980s, still excluding the black majority from any aspirations.

Michael Mosoeu Moerane is one of South Africa's foremost mid-twentieth century composers, and was the first black South African to get a BMus degree. His extraordinary legacy has been overlooked because so little of it is known; and because the times in which he lived did not allow a black composer to gain any prominence.

In this work, which represents over a decade of detective work, trawling through archives and tracking down family members and former students, I attempt to recreate, from oral sources and fragments of archival material, a fitting portrait of one of our most compelling cultural figures. In narrating Moerane's musical life, we cover the political and social history of southern Africa during some of its most turbulent decades, presided over by the ideologies of imperialism and grand apartheid. In so doing, new light is shed on Moerane's contribution to this region's music history, and on our understanding of that history within a global context.

This introduction begins with a brief overview of Moerane's life in order to establish a few facts, with pointers to later chapters where fuller explanations are given. A survey of previous writing on Moerane follows – a ‘literature review’ – that reveals ways in which his life in twentieth-century colonial and apartheid South Africa and colonial and postcolonial Lesotho has been represented. In today's climate of redress for previously neglected composers, one does not always learn how marginalisation or erasure of a composer's life and music happens or how ‘race’ impinges on this.

Moerane's early life

Michael Mosoeu Moerane was born on 20 September 1904, the second son of Eleazar Jakane Moerane and his wife, Sofia Majara. His birthplace was Mangoloaneng, a village in the Mount Fletcher district of the Eastern Cape located in the larger region of what was then the British Cape Colony, a region known as East Griqualand or Transkei (see the map at the beginning of this book).

Mangoloaneng was established as a ‘French mission outstation’, where Moerane's father, Eleazar, who was descended from a long line of Basotho chiefs, acted both as an emissary for the Basotho royal family and an evangelist for the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. Eleazar Jakane and his family established a homestead that grew into one of great self-sufficiency.