stimulating early study of the material culture of indigenous southern African musics nearly 80 years after Kirby’s book first appeared on bookshelves in 1934, and 45 years since it was last published.
Starting as early as 1923, Kirby turned his erudition and powers of observation to studying the music cultures of indigenous South Africans through a series of field trips during university vacations. He developed a project to collect, document and describe examples of each kind of musical instrument in southern Africa south of the Limpopo. He employed photography, ably assisted by Dr W. Paff, and made wax cylinder sound recordings of many performances as part of his method, and also learnt to perform the music. This practice later became standard in ethnomusicology, but was uncommon at the time. The tremendous energy he expended in this work resulted in a series of articles and the first edition of book. He displayed many of the instruments he collected in his ‘museum’ in the music department at the University of the Witwatersrand, using them in his teaching.1 On retiring from Wits, Kirby loaned his collection to the Africana Museum, Johannesburg. It remained there from 1953 to 1981, when the University of Cape Town acquired it. Today it is housed in the university’s South African College of Music, with the accompanying materials deposited in the University of Cape Town Libraries’ Manuscripts and Archives Department.
The best way to read this book is in conjunction with viewing the instruments he discusses in this collection, which can be done by arrangement with the South African College of Music.
Kirby must have completed his text with great excitement. It was the first extended, scholarly study of southern Africa’s indigenous musics—Kirby’s term this—and it laid a foundation for studying music in the region; the many citations of Kirby by succeeding generations of scholars attest to this. A painstakingly written text, it is dense with historical perspectives, closely-observed detail, and a broad range of observations about instruments, music-making, dance and numerous other related subjects. Much would have passed into oblivion were it not for this book.
There is a ‘however’ to this tale; today Kirby’s original title sounds really old-fashioned with its ‘native races’. Would it have struck his contemporaries as anachronistic? Is the phrase ‘the native races’ a blemish that indexes hopelessly contaminated material within? The dated language in the original title foreshadows challenges the contemporary reader will encounter in Kirby’s writing. What are these challenges, and how might the contemporary reader approach Kirby today? It is helpful to consider the historical and intellectual discourses current when Kirby wrote. These form part of a larger issue, namely how to approach South Africa’s colonial archive, which frequently elicits a response of rejection arising from frustration with the ‘taint’ of the colonial period in which the archive was laid down.2
A first step might be to consider the conditions at the time that Kirby approached his subject. There was very little readily available, reliable material on the region’s music cultures. His decision to concentrate on the material culture of music was quite likely pragmatic. As it was, to undertake a survey of the musics of the region was a daunting project. He had no facility with the languages, nor a good knowledge of the many local histories he would encounter. These are some of the restricting factors he encountered in his first publication on local musics (1923). In this situation, it makes sense that he should begin his study with a survey of the material culture of music in the form of musical instruments. His work on the tympani book prepared him for studying musical instruments. Kirby began by carefully, apparently exhaustively, convening an archive of travellers’ accounts and any other relevant sources to provide historical depth through a multiplicity of (mostly outsider) voices and observations through time.3 This enabled him to place his research in a genealogy.
Kirby did not train in the range of disciplines that succeeding generations of ethnomusicologists would study. We can lament the lack of the empirical fieldwork methods of social anthropology, for example. The result is that we do not find in his work many aspects of the music cultures that he studied and which we would expect today. The reader seeking to position the musics and individual musicians in its precise local, historical moment will come away frustrated at the author’s inconsistencies in this regard. The researcher looking for additional information in Kirby’s field notes finds that they were written on the fly. There are transcriptions of short snatches and longer passages of music, occasional well-observed drawings of an instrument or a detail, and so on. Kirby typically notes the names of some people he encountered in his fieldwork (identified in nearly every case by a single name), a location, an instrument’s name, musical terminology, and a date. This necessitates a great deal of painstaking archival work to bring these musicians into history with, perhaps, a biography, as some of the best South African historical writing has achieved.
Paying attention to the relative thicknesses and thinnesses of data in Kirby’s writing can tell us about the nature of Kirby’s enquiry. He was interested in the typical instrument and/or performance identified largely in terms of ethnic group. He doesn’t ignore the individual or ensemble, but gives insufficient data about his research consultants for the modern researcher to be able to identify these people without considerable pains. He was not alone in this regard, as social science research tended to present anonymous subjects. This remains the practice where ethics require or the individual requests anonymity. But the lack of this kind of detail even in Kirby’s somewhat sparse field notes is a loss, which makes it very difficult to place these individual musicians in history. The result is a discourse about the music of ethnic group X, rather than the possibility of considering the practice of individuals. This makes it easy to typify the musics of indigenous southern Africans as ‘tribal’, a problematic construction long reinforced by institutional practice and popular discourse. It has the effect of rendering the material depersonalised, and, given the contemporary prevailing trends in South Africa, assigned to an ethnic grouping that functioned as discrete siloes.
Kirby’s interest in the big picture took the form of seeing all musics in history passing through the same evolutionary stages along a universal evolutionary path. He came to be heralded internationally as an expert on ‘primitive music’, and he added to theories about what constituted primitive music. Kirby was not alone in this social evolutionary approach, which was common in the social sciences in South Africa in the 1930s. This was the time when the ‘Native question’ was at the centre of debate and political practice, and Kirby’s colleagues on campus at Wits were busily developing the knowledge that these currents could draw on. Wits’ department of Bantu Studies was founded in the early 1920s at the same time as Kirby established the Music department. His phrase ‘native races’ resonates with the descriptive subtitle of the Wits journal, Bantu Studies: A Journal devoted to the Scientific Study of BANTU, HOTTENTOT, AND BUSHMAN.4 The upper case blazoned on the cover of the journal emphasises the contemporary notion of three southern African ‘races’, which Kirby, too, subscribed to. He published many of his African music research articles in this journal, and was influenced by and even took his lead from the discourse of Bantu Studies at Wits and beyond.
Kirby followed theories about the prehistory and history of southern African populations and, in particular, was influenced by Raymond Dart, Wits professor of Comparative Anatomy, in theorising the development of the peoples and music cultures of southern Africa. It is clear from Kirby’s memoirs that he counted Dart as a friend as well as respecting him as a colleague. Australian-born and London-trained, Dart is frequently valourised as the visionary discoverer of the ‘missing link’ Australopithecus africanus and a great teacher who placed South African palaeontology on a firm, dynamic scientific path that Phillip Tobias and others followed. There were, however, less palatable aspects of Dart’s legacy, which Saul Dubow (1996) critiques. Firm adherence to two theories, social evolutionism and diffusionism, guided his work, feeding directly and indirectly into the currents of scientific racism in South African theory and public discourse. That Kirby was strongly influenced by these streams of theorising is evident in this book, and he maintained these ideas even in his later writings, though the social evolutionist strand was contested in the South African academy. In seeking to account for Kirby’s take on ‘primitive music’ and social
