Gender and Sexuality in South African Music (review)

Gender and Sexuality in South African Music, a book of nine short essays drawn from conference presentations at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, in 2003, begins with an interesting idea: music's uniquely "nonrepresentational" properties, we are told by editors Chris Walton and Stephanus Muller, allow "composers greater freedom to express desire . . . more openly than other arts . . . commonly allow" (i). Situated in a South African context described as negatively "obsessed with sex" (the editors locate the paranoid regulation and denial of sex and sexuality and particularly the prohibition on miscegenation during the years of apartheid as a central departure point for their inquiries), the book suggests thereby that nonrepresentational cultural practice is a privileged site of repressed desire. The book aims to recover this buried record in South Africa and to offer a historical representation hitherto misrepresented or rendered invisible. Gender and Sexuality in South African Music thus functions as an exposé, bringing to the "light of day what has too long been hidden in the murky mires of recent history" (i, iii). The inhibited practice of writing the past (and thus history) here uncannily recapitulates the structure of repressed sexual desire.

The editors do not make clear whether it is music itself (figured as the nonrepresentational art par excellence) or the "Afrikaner establishment" of the apartheid era (figured as oppressive and censoring) that renders historical representation repressed ("hidden," "murky," etc.). It is true that the public language of the National Party recoiled with Byzantine embellishment from the "horror of 'mixing the races,'" but of how such anxious representations articulate with music's ineffable character the editors do not speak (ii). Examples of evident "sexual intent" in music offered at the outset of the book—the words "when death approach'd, unlock'd her silent throat" in Orlando Gibbens's Silver Swan, say, or Chuck Berry's "play with my ding-a-ling," and so on—do not inspire much confidence in the nonrepresentational theory of music. Here the evidence tends to hinge on the music's text instead of its drastically musical aspect. Music's unique ability to carry a component of sexual desire cannot, it seems, receive as much attention in the book as its launching statements suggest. Put differently, "gender and sexuality" may not, after all, appear "in South African music," as the title of the book suggests.

And yet some of the essays in Gender and Sexuality do rise to the task of engaging the gendered dimensions of music directly. Most prominently, in "Music Is a Woman" Meki Nzewi unapologetically advances the thesis that all music in Africa, qua music, is itself gendered female: "Music is a [metaphysical] Woman" (71, emphasis added). It is not that traditional music in Africa is performed only or even mainly by women but rather that music's philosophical import is intricately associated with the social power of women. "The effect and affect of music on humans operate in a subtle nature similar to the woman's exercise of power in the affairs of traditional African society," Nzewi boldly asserts (73). Nzewi's description of traditional African life is attached to a critique of colonialism: "In Africa," he claims, "gender was not an issue before Western modernism invaded, colonized and deconstructed Africa's worldview and socio-cultural knowledge systems" (72). With examples ranging from the musical practice in the kiba musical theater of the Pedi people of South Africa to the musicological parlance amongst the Igbo people of Nigeria, Nzewi effectively demonstrates how conceptions of gender underlie traditional African musical performance, social action, and discourse. The three concentric circles of participants in a kiba performance, for instance, "symbolize a trinity of power, or energy domains," which are associated with gendered aspects of traditional life. The inner circle of women drummers, symbolizing the womb, is the foundation ("the source and crucible") of the performance; the middle circle of men dinaka (pipe) players, symbolizing the male role in society, is the active, yet "ephemeral," dimension...