Gender and Sexuality in South African Music (review)

A remarkable academic achievement of the past few decades has been to turn sex, normally a topic of perennial interest to most of us, into a bore. When expanded into 'sexuality' and coupled with 'gender', it does not promise lively reading, and Gender and Sexuality in South African Music, the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Pretoria, fully lives down to this expectation. It is mainly concerned with the horrid things done by men to women, heterosexuals to homosexuals, and, inevitably in view of this setting, whites to blacks. Of the nine chapters, two are devoted to female composers, three to male homosexual composers, three to 'gender' in native African music, and the remaining one to Victorian prejudices both at home and in the southern African colonies.

By far the best chapters are the two on woman composers. These are 'Being Rosa', an amusing study by Chris Walton of the minor composer Rosa Nepgen, and 'Pride, Prejudice and Power: On Being a Woman Composer in South Africa', an autobiographical sketch by Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph, the only mildly pretentious feature of which is the title. Indeed, it is striking that throughout this book the best passages stick to plain biography. The more analytical the intention, the worse the result.

Much is made of the puritanism of South Africa in the days of apartheid. There seems to be an underlying assumption that sexual and racial oppression are much the same thing, and a patriotic desire that the old Afrikaner Nationalist government should be pre-eminent in both. Actually, it was relatively tolerant in sexual matters, as long as race did not enter into them. For the English-speaking whites (who tend to be neglected in this rather Boerocentric book), 'Nat' puritanism was a minor nuisance and a standing joke, chiefly visible in the form of censorship. And even that had mostly gone by the early 1980s.

In fact, the Nat kultuur-apparatchiks come out of it rather well. The two leading South African composers of the 1950s and 1960s, Arnold van Wyk and Hubert du Plessis, were both gay, but, since they were both also Afrikaners, the establishment was prepared to overlook these little irregularities for the sake of the credit brought to the volk. Nor was it any handicap to a composer to be female. Rosa Nepgen, another Afrikaner, was something of a figure of fun, but that was because of an absurd, late-romantic earnestness unsupported by any great talent, not because she happened to be female. Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph specifically says that prejudice against woman composers was far worse at the Royal College of Music, where she studied in the early 1970s, than anything encountered in South Africa. It was in England that she was first offered a commission (for a BBC film score) in return for sexual favours—deplorable, no doubt, but at least an option that seldom comes the way of the heterosexual male composer.

The three chapters on native African music deal respectively with women's protest songs during the anti-apartheid movement, the writings of the jazz critic Tod Matshikiza, and traditional performance among the South African Pedi and Nigerian Igbo. They reveal a macho culture in which women's place is clearly defined and firmly subordinate, but also musically important—more so, in some respects, than that of the men.

The chapter on nineteenth-century British attitudes, by Grant Olwage, has more substance than most of the others (there is a doctoral thesis behind it), but views the Victorians with the same lofty disdain as they themselves viewed African music. The conclusions are hardly surprising. Upper- or upper-middle-class Victorian males, we learn, regarded music as an emotional affair, suitable for such emotional creatures as women and blacks; and while these subordinate...