Introduction: Moerane in Life and Literature

Summary

Michael Mosoeu Moerane is one of South Africa's foremost mid-twentieth century composers, and was the first black South African to get a BMus degree. His extraordinary legacy has been overlooked because so little of it is known; and because the times in which he lived did not allow a black composer to gain any prominence.

In this work, which represents over a decade of detective work, trawling through archives and tracking down family members and former students, I attempt to recreate, from oral sources and fragments of archival material, a fitting portrait of one of our most compelling cultural figures. In narrating Moerane's musical life, we cover the political and social history of southern Africa during some of its most turbulent decades, presided over by the ideologies of imperialism and grand apartheid. In so doing, new light is shed on Moerane's contribution to this region's music history, and on our understanding of that history within a global context.

This introduction begins with a brief overview of Moerane's life in order to establish a few facts, with pointers to later chapters where fuller explanations are given. A survey of previous writing on Moerane follows – a ‘literature review’ – that reveals ways in which his life in twentieth-century colonial and apartheid South Africa and colonial and postcolonial Lesotho has been represented. In today's climate of redress for previously neglected composers, one does not always learn how marginalisation or erasure of a composer's life and music happens or how ‘race’ impinges on this.

Moerane's early life

Michael Mosoeu Moerane was born on 20 September 1904, the second son of Eleazar Jakane Moerane and his wife, Sofia Majara. His birthplace was Mangoloaneng, a village in the Mount Fletcher district of the Eastern Cape located in the larger region of what was then the British Cape Colony, a region known as East Griqualand or Transkei (see the map at the beginning of this book).

Mangoloaneng was established as a ‘French mission outstation’, where Moerane's father, Eleazar, who was descended from a long line of Basotho chiefs, acted both as an emissary for the Basotho royal family and an evangelist for the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. Eleazar Jakane and his family established a homestead that grew into one of great self-sufficiency.