South African Choral Music (Amakwaya): Song, Contest and the ...

3.3 Between Two Worlds: Exclusiveness, Segregation and Rejection 85
educated. They had some of their rights and they were proud of that, so they tried to uphold the culture.
And you see that in their arts. 107
All the choirs that I have worked with have had a membership with a high value for Christian
teaching and education in general. 108 Education is seen as the single most important factor in developing
a Western system of values and achieving social status, being educated assures one considerable
prestige. In fact, Langa Nkosi, a respected and influential conductor and adjudicator living in
Pretoria, claims that "choirs and being educated ended up in the same thing. Because you can't expect
an uneducated person to enjoy choral music. Even today, that's how people think... You must
be educated, in fact you must be a teacher".109
Realising this, I shall attempt in the second part of this thesis a detailed contextualisation of
education and music in a case study of one of the most important mission institutions of Natal,
Adams College.
3.3 Between Two Worlds: Exclusiveness, Segregation
and Rejection
As we have seen in the previous chapter (see 2.2.4, page 52), initially it was the homeless and outcast
black Africans who came to the mission stations, convinced that the missionaries could do for
them what they could not do for themselves. For them the missionaries were important protectors,
advisors, mediators, and advocates. Furthermore, landless men and women who had no other place
to go, eventually found home at the mission stations. Even though they soon realised that they had
to trade their old identity for one based on Christianity and Western social and political values, they
readily accepted these changes because the ''host and chalice conferred a status".ttO Heathen Africans,
as a result, saw the mission-educated black middle class as consisting of "separate people",
and therefore made a decisive effort to exclude mission-educated Africans.
3.3.1 Alienation from Traditional Black Communities
The alienation of black mission communities from their past becomes obvious in an account given
by the American Board missionary, Ray Phillips, of an experience he had around 1918 when he
attended a rural wedding. Although one has to bear in mind that the report exposes a good deal of
missionary prejudice, it gives a good sense of the tensions that must have existed between educated
and traditionalist Africans. In addition, it reveals how far the mission-educated Africans had departed
from their ancestral roots; they were almost completely prevented from participating in their
own culture:
Soon after arrival in South Africa my wife and I went to stay for a time in a native kraal far from civilization.
Reason - language study.
We were perspiring over our Zulu lessons one day, trying to straighten out the many different classes of
nouns, and stretching our mouths to encompass the difficult Zulu clicks, when a messenger arrived with
an invitation to attend a native wedding that afternoon.
107 Personal communication with Edward Mngadi, Durban, November 16, 1999.
108 Between September 2000 and March 2001, I conducted a survey using a comprehensive questionnaire in order to
obtain a detailed profile of the contemporary amakw