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Missionary Education and Musical Communities in Sub-Saharan Colonial Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2017

Claudius Torp
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Abstract

This article explores the effects of music education carried out by Protestant missionaries on local forms of sociability in sub-Saharan Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on a methodological framework of ideal types of musical communities, the examination focuses on examples of musical encounters between missionaries and the Yoruba in West Africa, the Lobedu in South Africa, and the Nyakyusa in East Africa. A closer look at the kinds of sociability facilitated by missionary music will reveal a colonial dialectic emerging from the contrasting forces of cultural hierarchy and belonging.

Keywords

African historycolonialismeducationmissionsmusic
Type
Cultural Brokers and the Making of Global Soundscapes, 1880s to 1930s
Information
Itinerario , Volume 41 , Special Issue 2: Cultural Brokers and the Making of Global Soundscapes, 1880s to 1930s , August 2017 , pp. 235 - 251
Copyright
© 2017 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

Translation by Alex Skinner

*

Claudius Torp is currently principal investigator of the project “Piano Culture and Cosmopolitanism. A Global History of Keyboard Instruments, c. 1850–1930,” funded by the German Research Foundation, at the University of Kassel.

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