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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
As the title indicates, this memoir traces the life and struggles of Musa Ngqungwana in becoming an opera singer. The book is made up of twenty chapters and a postlude. Each chapter marks a particular important stage in the life of the author and how that particular moment intersects, affects and influences his quest to be an opera singer.
The author does not isolate his quest to become an opera singer from the social, cultural, religious, political and economic situations and conditions that define his everyday existential circumstances as a black South African. His experiences as an individual clearly attest to the fact that self-narration is similarly the narration of the nation. As such, his own personal experiences and the history of the nation are at several points inextricably intertwined. A reading of Ngqungwana's memoir and his drive to become an opera singer in South Africa overtly reveals the problems that black people face in South Africa. Indeed, his narration of his pursuit to become an opera singer is ostensibly a visual portrait of poverty that defines the everyday lives of black South Africans in the townships and country sides. He asserts:
I know what it's like to grow up with deprivation and depravity surrounding you because of your social-political conditions: to look at your grandmother, tears of pain streaming down her wrinkled, defeated and worn-out face, her once ever-present dimples hidden under the yoke of yearning for a better life. She had no money and no one she could ask for resources to help her survive. Prayer was all we had to get through those days, but even that wasn't enough. Our rumbling, singing stomachs, resulting confused minds, weren't in tune with the Holy Spirit. (2)
This is in sharp contrast to the memoir of Angelo Gobbato's A Passion for Opera (reviewed above) that presents whites in South Africa as a privileged class. Unlike Gobbato's story, Ngqungwana's is one mainly marked by persistent deprivation, abjection and lack of privilege.
However. Ngqungwana's life story is also one of possibilities; a story that affirms the maxim that all dreams are valid.
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