Individual Histories of East African Musician-Composers - Part II

In the course of our biographical work with, so far, 46 musician/composers in East and South-East Africa since July 10, 2011 (the date we started project P23834-G15), we found that many of these artists can in a sense be seen as "cultural dissidents". Often they are emigrants from their social environments and have been engineering their exits in response to cultural constraints. If they find recognition as artists elsewhere, their idiosyncrasies will eventually be tolerated also at home. Here the question arises about principal sources of inspiration in the life of these artists. In many cases, we found, they developed their interests after travel away from home, even in other countries, or in the context of labor migration. Besides, an important stimulus often came from the media, broadcasts, records etc. In many cases intra-family identifications were important, in one case identification with an ancestral spirit who was a musician, in another cross-sex identification, such as by a young woman in Mozambique who has taken up the art of her father, and through hard work has become a virtuoso log-xylophone player. Such patterns transcend "normal" forms of behavior expected in a society. We found that structurally, the principal sources of inspiration in those musician/composers often converge to form a kind of n e t w o r k, whose elements are functionally interrelated. Our project request is in connection with a need for studying such networks systematically. We would like to reconstruct especially some patterns in the earliest sources of inspiration of our artists, sometimes travelling with them to learn about places, contacts, artefacts (e.g. certain sound recordings). The assessment of these sources opens up a new dimension in the study of the individual histories of East and South-East African musician/composers in the context of innovative changes in culture history of all times.

Guided by the idea of focusing on the individual composer/musician in African societies and creativity-stimulating factors in their life histories, our project has evolved from multiple angles, in a basically interdisciplinary approach. The composition of our research team trained in a variety of fields, i.e. cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, African linguistics and literature, and musician-composers from the countries of study, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique, allowed us a multi -faceted approach. We were studying how gifted individuals in the societies concerned have processed the challenges of musical enculturation during adolescence, how they reacted to societal pressures and stimuli during adulthood, and how they have defended their individual styles. Rare opportunities have turned up to document African composers recorded works spanning all their adult lives, i.e. half a century of compositional endeavor. Some of those whose life histories we have written down, e.g. Faustino Okello and Waiswa Lubogo in Uganda, were first recorded as far back as 1962 (by Gerhard Kubik), others such as the late Limited Mfundo in Malawi already in 1958 (by Hugh Tracey) . This has given us a formidable time-span for study. On December 18, 2013 there was Gerhard Kubiks re-encounter with the blind guitarist Faustino Okello in the latters homestead near Pader, northern Uganda, after 46 years! G. Kubik had last recorded him in November 1967 at the Salama Blind School near Mukono. We celebrated the meeting as a century event like Stanley meeting David Livingstone. Mr. Faustino Okello I presume ! (DVD by Moya A. Malamusi). There has been an opportunity through our project also to rectify common stereotypes, such as the one that women have a subordinate role in African musical practice. Moya A. Malamusis discovery of the expert log xylophone players Selina and Magdalena Jiya in a village in northern Mozambique has increased our awareness of the leading involvement of female instrumentalists and composers in African music history, on musical bows, drums, xylophones, mbira, as singers and story-tellers; most recently also as part of the nyanga panpipe dance among the -Nyungwe of Mozambique, as documented by Regine Allgayer-Kaufmann and Dayina Malamusi within this project.