African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 540
compositions become integral part of popular music genres and transcend denominational
boundaries and hierarchies.
8. Church and Popular Culture Interaction. The situation of church autonomy and
popular music (culture) is a dialectical one, a creative space for the common interchange
and negotiation of musical ideas, with important musical repercussions, as summed up in
the following examples. (The term gospel is employed rather loosely in the African
Christian context to refer to a wide range of music that incorporates evangelistic and
Biblical themes.):
I [have] noted the importance of Christianity not only as a source of
musical inspiration but as a training school for musicians. There can be no
doubt that the Christian religion played a significant role in the
development of highlife music…. Many bands were created in indigenous
churches and were provided with instruments and ready markets in the
process. In a sense, during the late 1970s and the early mid-1980s,
highlife adopted a distinctly religious flavour. (Graham 1988, 104)
[G]ospel music might come from small ensembles like guitar bands, but playing songs
with religious or inspirational content. Several of Nairobi’s most famous stars have gone
from pop to gospel. Joseph Kamaru, a pillar of Kikuyu pop music since the 1960s,
recently disbanded his band and reformed a gospel group. The style is so popular at the
moment that the newspapers have added a top ten weekly gospel chart to their African
and International top ten lists.
[A] growing trend in the Nairobi music industry in the last six years, [is] the solo
gospel singer. While the phenomenon of the solo singer is not new in Nairobi, this
development was made more obvious due to a sudden influx of kiosks selling this music
on cassette. The style became so popular that people began to buy new cassettes instead
of relying on the traditional practice of pirating. Out of this popularity came the
development of professional church musicians in Nairobi (Kidula 1995, 1–16). At the
start of the twenty-first century local gospel music constitutes around 75 percent of the
popular music output in Ghana (Collins 1996, 1503 [reporting on the state of popular
music in Ghana]).
Another important source of influence regards conscious efforts in privileging African
American performance culture, both sacred and secular, within the context of the
worldwide popular culture. (See, for example, Veit Erlmann’s accounts of African
American presence in South African Christian and popular music, beginning in the early
1890s, The Early Social History of Zulu Migrant Workers’ Choral Music in South Africa
1990; Migration and Performance: Zulu Migrant Workers’ Isicathamiya Performance in
South Africa, 1890–1950, 1990; and Nightsong: Performance, Power, and Practice in
South Africa, 1996). The active exchange and symbiotic processes between church and
popular music are illustrated further by an increasingly pervasive culture of cassette
trading and fame surrounding individual musicians. Both the name and several musical
elements identified with juju—a popular Yoruba music genre—explain this symbiosis
very well; soukous, highlife, mbube (e.g., Ladysmith Black Mambazo) and rap are some
of the popular music sounds that are reproduced in the church contexts, often with
techniques of contra facta and parody (i.e., replacing “secular” texts and sound