Introduction: South Africa, the Nineteenth Century

The multifaceted nature of South Africa’s nineteenth-century history makes it a rich site for understanding how musical cultures are instantiated and enacted, and how they interact with one other.Footnote ¹ Digitized source material documenting the societal and cultural aspects of the country’s music, however, is only starting to become available and large gaps remain in the material available from South African repositories. This review, therefore, will move between discussing sources that could be available and those that are, and will provide some reflections on the usefulness of both in order to show some of the ways in which the digitization of source material could enhance research into music of the South African nineteenth century.

Before proceeding, however, it is necessary to provide some context for readers who may not be familiar with South Africa’s history in this period, and to say something about what is meant by ‘South Africa’ and ‘nineteenth century’. At the outset, it should be noted that South Africa’s nineteenth century was shaped by colonial activity, part of which involved complicated and fraught entanglements between societies and cultures.Footnote ² The period was marked by war and conflict between the various groups in the region. The wars that occurred between 1779 and 1879 in the Eastern Cape, involved not only amaXhosa, in whose territory the conflicts took place, but also various indigenous nations, and alliances of colonial, white settler forces.Footnote ³ In 1879, the British Empire launched an invasion into Natal to topple the Zulu kingdom's power in that region.Footnote ⁴ Conflict came not only in the form of war and battle. The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand (1852) and diamonds at Kimberley (1866/7), not to mention other natural resources elsewhere, resulted in immigration into the region and mass internal migration – often under duress – of many of the country’s indigenous people who were recruited to work as labourers on mines. Engaging with these fraught and contested histories is a challenge for any scholar, not least music historians. Each of these significant historical moments also had musical histories attached to them, yet to be fully examined extensively by scholars of South African music.Footnote ⁵

In this article, ‘South Africa’ means the territory as the country is known today, while the South African Nineteenth Century is considered to span the years 1800 to 1910.Footnote ⁶ During the nineteenth century ‘South Africa’ was used in some literature to refer to the region of the southern tip of Africa, but this did not always correspond to the country as it is known today. For example, between 1852 and 1902, the ‘South African Republic’ was the name of one of the northern Boer republics, and the British South African Company considered everything south of the Zambezi to be under its remit and, by extension, ‘South African’. For most of the period 1800–1900, indigenous rulers continued to govern, although their power came to be undermined and weakened by the colonial incursions of British and Dutch Boer colonizers. By the late nineteenth century, the region came to be made up of smaller, self-governing colonies: the Cape Colony, Natal, Orange Free State, and the Transvaal, ruled over at different times by either British or Boer governments. In 1910, the Union of South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire, was created by unifying the four British and Boer colonies. This new country was created with no regard for indigenous jurisdictions. The year 1910 could, however, be considered as the beginning of the modern South African state and when the ‘shape’ of the country, as it is seen on a map today, was established. The Union of South Africa was governed by a white minority government with a limited voting franchise and restricted land ownership for the country’s majority black population, continuing the policies of the colonial era which dominated the nineteenth century. As Christine Lucia articulates, cultural and musical discrimination were amongst the many adverse consequences that resulted from successive state policies of segregation and racial discrimination.Footnote ⁷ The country’s external borders have remained largely the same, but the internal, provincial boundaries were redrawn in 1994 with the advent of multiparty and multiracial democracy.

Borders are both subject to change and porous by nature and while many of South Africa’s musical cultures can be situated within the country, many also transcend the country’s physical boundaries. Although this review will for the most part discuss what is available in South Africa it should be noted that material pertaining to the South African nineteenth century can be found in repositories all over the world. There was also South African musical activity outside South Africa, for example, the ‘African’ Choir’s 1891–93 tour of Britain.Footnote ⁸ The same can be said of historical materials available to music historians. For example, the papers of many missionary organizations that operated in South Africa during the period are now largely held by overseas repositories.Footnote ⁹ Some of these are available digitally via platforms such as Adam Matthew or in microform/microfiche format.Footnote ¹⁰ They are rich sources for information about musical activity and have been used by music historians.Footnote ¹¹

Sources for Music Research

A researcher investigating aspects of music in nineteenth-century South Africa would probably begin by seeking out the following types of sources:

1. 1. Travel writings

2. 2. Personal writings such as letters and journals

3. 3. Musical ephemera, including sheet music, concert programmes and certificates

4. 4. Newspapers

5. 5. Missionary archives

6. 6. Official/state publications and papers

7. 7. Oral sources

Readers will notice that all but one of these sources are textual.Footnote ¹² As digitization, broadly speaking, involves transferring information from a physical source into a digital format, this review’s discussion will naturally lean towards scores, manuscripts, journals, or other types of inscribed, textual sources.Footnote ¹³ Most musical cultures in South Africa, however, have for centuries relied on oral transmission. The earliest sound recordings of indigenous South African music date from the early twentieth century and so, in the first place, there are no contemporary, i.e., nineteenth-century, sound recordings that can be digitized. Working with oral sources when researching nineteenth-century music history, therefore, requires specialized methodologies, and for this reason, oral sources are largely left out of this review, but with the acknowledgment that they are a potentially rich source for music research.

This review, in many ways, is the present-day digital version of an article published in 1987, which gave an overview of sources pertaining to South African music research. Margot von Beck, the article’s author noted

Von Beck’s list is shown in Table 1. The list is by no means current and certainly not exhaustive. I revisited it out of interest to ascertain, first, if these sources have any relevance for nineteenth-century studies, and, second, how many are digitally available. Von Beck’s list is a product of its time as the terminology and nomenclature of several of the titles show, the classification used, and the criteria for determining what counts as a musical re/source make clear. Front and centre are the categories of ‘work’ and ‘composer’, which presupposes a western musicological stance towards approaching the South African musical past.

Table 1.

List of print sources for South African music research (1987)

The most voluminous of the sources listed is Malan’s 1979 South African Music Encyclopedia (SAME). It contains information relevant to nineteenth-century studies such as the entries covering the music history of towns and cities, not to mention biographical content. Malan claimed that

The SAME's claims to be a national musicological benchmark were contested almost as soon as it appeared.Footnote ¹⁶ Today, not only is SAME an exemplar of how print reference works risk soon becoming out of date and are inevitably incomplete, but the content has further limitations because the historiographical method was to create a musicology that reflected the ideology of apartheid South Africa.Footnote ¹⁷

The same can be found with other work produced during the same period. Van Der Merwe’s Musiekbibliografie (1958 and 1974), which is not available in digital format, might provide a useful starting point for anyone looking at, for instance, the history of music publishing in South Africa.Footnote ¹⁸ Again, the data it contains needs careful interrogation. Yvonne Huskisson’s work is essentially a directory or catalogue containing biographies and a list of works for over 300 black composers, including significant figures like John Knox Bokwe (1855–1922), Enoch Sontonga (c. 1873–1905) and Benjamin Tyamzashe (1890–1978).Footnote ¹⁹ There are also entries for figures who might be less well-known, such as Joseph Makgema, Blanche Mdudu and Gladson Sidyiyo. Twenty-seven of the composers in the bibliography were either born or active during the period covered by this review and those names are listed in Table 2.Footnote ²⁰ Huskisson’s survey lists the compositions for each composer: some are credited with a single composition (e.g. Sontonga) while others tally up to over 100 (e. g. Tyamzashe).Footnote ²¹ Such numbers are an indication of both a vibrant composition scene and an active community of black composers. A digitized version of the 1969 book can be found on archive.org but the original scores of the compositions that are listed are unavailable in digital form.Footnote ²² The collection of scores, which Huskisson assembled herself, can be found in the libraries of the South African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) and the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). On the SABC and SAMRO websites I could not find any digitized versions of the scores, let alone reference to their physical existence.Footnote ²³

Table 2.

Composers listed in Huskisson who were born during the nineteenth century. Where it can be established, year of death is indicated with an asterisk

The sources found in von Beck, then, aside from the general lack of digital availability, present an additional challenge as the influence of the apartheid ideology prevalent at the time is overt in the scholarship. A contemporary review of Huskisson by Naomi Ware Hooker warned: ‘As one proceeds below the surface information presented in the biographies, however, one becomes immediately aware that this is truly a document of white, pro-apartheid South Africa’ (underlining in the original) and the opening sentence of Huskisson’s ‘Preface’ illustrates the problematic nature of the paradigms which informed this work.Footnote ²⁴ By whatever means a researcher accesses these sources – digital or print – it is an important consideration for anyone unfamiliar with South African history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

More recently, musicologists in South Africa have developed their own turn towards a new musicology that has seen significant changes of focus, method, and scope. Tracing these shifts is beyond the time and space of this article, but interested readers should look at the pages of the South African Journal of Musicology and SAMUS: South African Music Studies – the main journals for South African musicological research – to see what has occurred in more detail.Footnote ²⁵ Digital scholarship has been used as a space in which to re-present earlier scholarship on marginalized groups. Two examples of projects that have utilized digital format and methods stand out. The first is an ongoing project in response to Malan’s work initiated by the African Open Institute at Stellenbosch University to create a Southern African Encyclopaedia of Music and Sound.Footnote ²⁶ The digital format is integral to the project’s aims of habilitating indigenous and vernacular forms into a scholarly musical resource, while making knowledge about South Africa musics available to all. To achieve this aim, it is hosted on Wikipedia so as to be accessible and public-facing and allows for updates to be made in a rapidly changing knowledge environment.Footnote ²⁷

The second is the African Composers Edition (ACE) which has used digital means to provide greater visibility and accessibility to the music of previously marginalized black composers. It has produced digital scholarly editions of music by Joshua Mahopeloa (1908–82) and Michael M. Moerane (1904–80).Footnote ²⁸ The music of both composers can be said to have stylistic roots in the nineteenth century. But this pioneering work stands alone, and many more initiatives of this nature are needed in order to give digital recognition to this constituency of South African composition.

Digitization in South Africa

I have not been able to establish what the earliest musical source for nineteenth-century music research in digital form is. Sources for music studies, however, often come available through the digitization of non-music sources. South Africa’s first major digitization project was ‘Digital Innovation South Africa’ (‘DISA’) which began in 1997 and was funded by the Mellon Foundation. The project sought to bring South Africa’s previously isolated history and collections into the then growing body of international digital knowledge.Footnote ²⁹ A discussion of the rise and fall of the DISA project – a compelling tale in its own right – is beyond the remit of this article, but it did result in one of the earliest digital yields of musical source material.Footnote ³⁰

While DISA’s aim was to focus ‘on the socio-political history of South Africa, particularly the struggle for freedom during the period from 1950 to the first democratic elections in 1994’, an associated project known as ALUKA included a heritage component and so some of what was digitized has relevance for nineteenth-century studies.Footnote ³¹ It is, however, a limited offering as the full scope was never realized. The sections most relevant to nineteenth-century music research are the digitized items of the Campbell Collections.Footnote ³² There are 31,898 digital records in the Campbell section, and one has to scroll through 1,595 pages, clicking on each record to find out what it contains. I managed to find two items of musical interest – an illustration of how one often has to dig to find information relevant to music studies. The first is a scan of a page from Helen Tongue’s book on South African rock art showing a painting containing a group of people drumming on shields.Footnote ³³ The second is entitled ‘Music & Dancing’ and appears to be a scan of a page from a (possibly) nineteenth-century travelogue, but the metadata doesn’t give any further source information.Footnote ³⁴ The DISA pages include a music section containing sound recordings (30 in total) in MP3 format. The metadata provided is sparse and doesn’t provide a date for the originals. It’s unclear how much and how frequently this resource is maintained, further to which a clunky website and interface make it frustrating to use.

Another digitization project that has relevance for music studies is ‘ǃkhwe-ta ǃxōë: the Digital Bleek and Lloyd’. This is a digitized collection of materials produced by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, who were philologists resident at the Cape in the nineteenth century. In 1870, Bleek and Lloyd began working with |Xam-speaking convicts serving time in a Cape Town prison. Their project entailed documenting the language and culture of the |Xam-speaking peoples, one of the San/Bushmen groups at the Cape. Bleek and Lloyd were concerned with language and collecting stories, many of which were transmitted in songs and thus there is a substantial amount of musical information found in the notes taken by Bleek and Lloyd that have now been digitized (see Figure 1) and used by academics.Footnote ³⁵ This vast collection is therefore important as a source for nineteenth-century indigenous musicking and an important source to use with oral histories.Footnote ³⁶ The significance of this collection’s material has gained it recognition in UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World’ register.Footnote ³⁷

Figure 1.

Screenshot of Bleek and Lloyd showing a transcription of the lyrics in ǀXam (with English translation) for ‘Jackal’s song (and The song of the Caama Fox).’

Repositories for Music Research

In order to find repositories for musical research and to establish where digital collections could be available, I used a LibGuide available from the Library of the University of Stellenbosch.Footnote ³⁸ It provides information for music collections held in 33 repositories across the eight provinces listed.Footnote ³⁹ Although the guide is in need of some updating and expansion, and navigating it requires some work when used for nineteenth-century studies, it is an extremely useful resource because it brings into one place a profile of repositories for music research in South Africa.

In this guide, each repository (both private collections and institutions) has its own page, on which information is presented according to a template to show contact information, holdings, potential acquisition, and the scope and content of a repository’s collections. A ‘type’ has been assigned to the collection or group of materials (‘Western art music’, ‘popular music’, ‘African music’ are some of the ones used). Unfortunately, no year is given, meaning that a researcher would need to go to each record to find out the period to which it is relevant. The scope and content information also directs researchers to a wide variety of materials from print articles, to diaries, to ephemera, to personal documents (to name a few). The guide is organized by province, which is one of the ways to navigate the resource, the other being a keyword search.

Of relevance to the present discussion is the information provided on digitization projects (past, current and planned). I counted that 13 of the 31 repositories listed had either completed or were planning digitization projects. Although this number is likely higher (see Table 3) hardly any of the collections listed relate to the nineteenth century. For instance, the National Library of South Africa’s digitizations are not mentioned, suggesting that there are omissions. It is also not clear what is available digitally, or what projects are in progress, such as the Information Centre for Southern African Music’s (ISAM) current project of digitizing approximately 1,000 scores published between 1800 and 1900 that are part of its collection.Footnote ⁴⁰ The digital collection of the Cory Library at Rhodes University includes a chapter about the music of amaBhaca from By Veldt and By Kopje (London, 1907).Footnote ⁴¹ Written by William Scully, an Irishman who emigrated to South Africa in the 1860s, with the assistance of Nora, his wife, the chapter contains descriptions and transcriptions onto staff notation of the songs they heard during their travels in the region inhabited by amaBhaca.

Table 3.

Repositories listed at the Directory of South African Music Collections (Libguide: University of Stellenbosch)

SUNDigital Collections – the digital platform of the University of Stellenbosch’s special collections – includes a music section which provides digitizations of collections kept at the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS). One of the collections pertinent to nineteenth-century studies that is available via SUNDigital is the Genadendal Music Collections (see Figure 2).Footnote ⁴² Genadendal was founded in 1738 by the Moravian Church as a mission station. Alongside the music making that formed part of religious worship, Genadendal became a centre for music and music training. SUNDigital’s offering is a sibling of the Genadendal Music Archive, a project funded by the German Foreign Ministry and Stellenbosch University, that aims to catalogue and digitize the musical ephemera, manuscripts and instruments found in Genadendal Museum.Footnote ⁴³

Figure 2.

Screenshot of the Genadendal pages on SUNDigital (https://digital.lib.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.2/16977) .

State repositories

The two state institutions responsible for preserving the country’s official documents and heritage artefacts are The National Library of South Africa (NLSA) and The National Archives and Record Service of South Africa (NARSSA). Official and state archives come under the remit of NARSSA, which, like the NLSA, is governed by statute. A new search engine provides the facility to search across 14 national repositories, although as yet it is only partially migrated.Footnote ⁴⁴ A search using the keyword ‘music’ and date limits ‘01/01/1800 – 01/01/1910’ yielded 12 results, mostly correspondence on education.

The NLSA is not only the country’s legal deposit library, but also the central repository for the country’s heritage.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is an amalgamation of two of the country’s historical legal deposit libraries: the South African Public Library, established in 1818, by the British governor, Lord Charles Somerset to serve the Cape Colony and the State Library, established in 1887 in Pretoria to serve the Boer Republics. Until South Africa’s transition to multiracial democracy in 1994, the two libraries were regarded as separate yet enjoyed the same legal deposit status and thus worked co-operatively. In 1997, the two libraries were merged to create the NLSA, a government agency responsible primarily for legal deposit.

The NLSA’s collections pre-date the establishment of the first library in 1818.Footnote ⁴⁶ Finding musical material in the NLSA requires some work, but there are important sources for the period available. In terms of named, distinct music collections, the NLSA holds sheet music, periodicals and books under its legal deposit arrangements, although it is difficult to ascertain how much has a nineteenth-century provenance. The Grey Collection includes a number of medieval liturgical manuscripts which contain plainchant.Footnote ⁴⁷ While some of these manuscripts are listed on the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) and the Cantus database (cantusdatabase.org), none have been digitized.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Grey Collection has a substantial collection of hymnbooks printed in South Africa from the 1820s onwards in a variety of indigenous languages. Most of these are the product of missionary societies active in South Africa during the nineteenth century, but none are available digitally. Another major music collection is the John Armstrong Collection of Vocal Music, donated to the South Africa Library in 1953, which contains over 1,200 items of sheet music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Also undigitized and of musical interest, are the papers of C. E. Boniface (1787–1853). Boniface lived at the Cape from 1807 where he was an active linguist, teacher and composer of music, writer and editor.

The digital offering of the NLSA is limited. The Digital Collections pages of the NLSA list 49 digitized collections, of which 45 are newspapers and magazines, two are collections of posters, one a collection of drawings, and one a collection of theatre ephemera.Footnote ⁴⁹ In total, the digital section comprises some 13,000 files. Approximately 14 of these collections, cover or cross over into, the nineteenth century and would provide information to music researchers about musical life in South Africa. The collection is mostly derived from the Western Cape but does cover other parts of the country such as Gauteng, KwaZulu Natal, the Eastern Cape, and the Northern Cape. Newspapers form the bulk of the offering available here and show the value they can have as source material for researchers.Footnote ⁵⁰

The digital collections are fully accessible, browsable and digitisted versions of several newspapers, many from the nineteenth century. While not musical sources, per se, they do provide musical information and, in some cases, musical compositions, and have strong musical links. Isigidimi samaXosa (The Xhosa Messenger)Footnote ⁵¹ ran from 1870 to 1888Footnote ⁵² and was edited for a time by the composer John Knox Bokwe. The 1 August 1875 edition of the newspaper contains a hymn tune written by John Knox Bokwe and notated in tonic solfa (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Screenshot Isigidimi, 1 August 1875.

Using the text searchable function, I searched key terms such as ‘music’, ‘hymns’, ‘concerts’, ‘instruments’ and ‘amaculo’.Footnote ⁵³ The results provided a surprisingly rich yield of musical information from music shop advertisements, to reviews of concerts, to advertisements for concerts, and accounts of lectures on musical topics. These results come from newspapers of both the ‘white’ and ‘black’ press offering insights into the musical activities and cultures of the societies that made up nineteenth-century South Africa. The search was possible because the digital files are available as OCRs. This assists with finding information, but the transcripts are not carefully edited, while the scans of the original pages are low res making them difficult to read. At the risk of scraping the digital barrel and stepping outside the period under review for a moment, even one of the poster collections yielded some musical ephemera. Two of the recruitment posters in the ‘War Posters’ collection include musical references: one quotes the popular Afrikaans folk song ‘Vat jou goed en trek Ferreira’ while another is an orchestral concert poster for a performance of Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ Symphony (Figure 4).Footnote ⁵⁴ While these examples go outside the chronological concern of this review, they serve as a further illustration of the point that music researchers sometimes need to cast the net widely to find information to help their research.

Figure 4.

Poster ‘Medical Aid for Russia.’

Digitized Sources Found Elsewhere

Apart from primary sources, information about musical life in nineteenth-century South Africa can be found in published books. Throughout the nineteenth century, a steady stream of travelogues written by explorers, travellers, and visitors to South Africa for both leisure and business were published. Primarily for British and European audiences, these publications provided descriptions of the landscape, the state of the colony, wildlife, and music.

The musicmaking of indigenous groups was heard by European travellers, who made attempts to depict and document what they heard in illustrations and transcriptions. Such perceptions of indigenous music making, however, were often skewed by the writers’ cultural prejudice and a limited understanding of the music’s significance resulted in dismissive and derogatory descriptions. Nonetheless, what is recorded in them provides a body of historical evidence about South Africa’s indigenous musical cultures through invaluable iconographic, textual, and, in some cases, notated examples. These offer a means with which to start an investigation into pre-colonial era musical cultures. A selection of examples is available in Table 4.

Table 4.

Sample of travel writings available on archive.org

Many of these accounts are available via platforms such as archive.org, which offers digitized version of volumes such as William Burchell’s, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa.Footnote ⁵⁵ Burchell’s account contains a description and transcription of the music he heard being played by Khoekhoe/San musicians, together with a drawing depicting a person playing the Gorah.Footnote ⁵⁶ The accounts also contain descriptions of music in European styles. Latrobe’s journal (see Table 4) contains some 40 mentions of music that he heard on the Moravian mission stations he visited, in churches, and in domestic settings. The types of music mentioned range from hymns, to military music, to instrumental recitals, to performances of compositions by composers such as Mozart and Haydn. Another online repository that should be consulted for print materials is the HathiTrust. A search run on HathiTrust with the terms ‘South Africa’ and the dates 1800–99 returns nearly 200,000 hits ranging from travelogues, to periodicals, to government/state publications.

Conclusion: The Digital Lag

South Africa can be considered a digitally ambitious country, and there is evidence of a high rate of digital literacy.Footnote ⁵⁷ Smartphones are ubiquitous, as they now are in most of the world, and people use them to transact on a day-to-day basis. Additionally, the recourse that citizens and state have to digital technology is accelerating. Recently, it was reported that in 2025 the Department of Home Affairs issued four million smart identity cards (up 17 per cent from the previous year) as part of its ‘digital transformation agenda’, which includes the digitization of its internal records.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such efforts, however, are focussed on the present, leaving historical sources to remain in a largely analogue state. Not only has this created a lag in the availability of digitized historical sources, it has also demonstrated the potentially sad and harsh consequences of leaving historical collections undigitized. I think of the tragic fires at the University of Cape Town (April 2021) and the Parliament Buildings (January 2022), which resulted in the destruction and permanenet loss of countless historical artefacts that were yet to be digitized.Footnote ⁵⁹

In the case of sources for music studies, the lag in availability of digital sources could partly be explained by the point made earlier in the essay – that South Africa’s musical past consists of multiple practices and methods of recording and transmitting, some of which defy digitization. As this review has shown, there is a wealth of information available; finding it, whether in digital or physical format, requires careful and painstaking work. At present, relying solely on digitally available sources would provide a limited body of evidence, which risks missing many historical voices or privileging some over others – a problem that in the past has plagued South African musical research. Perhaps more urgent for researchers at this stage is being aware of these issues and developing methodologies for digital research that balance the politics resulting from the multiplicity of cultural and historical voices from South Africa’s musical past.