5 - ‘We Sing about What We Cannot Talk About’

Summary

In Venda – and throughout Southern Africa – knowledge can be dangerous. Potentially hazardous information, such as that pertaining to sexual health or death, is conventionally transferred through the lyrics of songs in highly prescribed ritual contexts, under the protection of an ancestral hierarchy or a Christian God. In this way, the bearers of dangerous knowledge in Venda negotiate limited responsibility for what they know. With the accumulation of such knowledge comes a responsibility to manage the associated risks. Most peer educators have direct experience of this through their attendance at female initiation, where girls become women by entering into the stratified structures of ritual knowledge, and where they graduate with the socially recognised ability to manage monthly ablutions and maintain fertility. In this controlled ritual context, stratified by hierarchies of ritual knowledge, the ancestors (through the authority of ritual elders) actively facilitate healthy reproduction – mostly through the didactic performance of initiation songs and the learning of ‘laws’ (milayo). Music, in this context, acts as a medium for the complete and safe transference of ritual knowledge whilst the songs, dances, and milayo of initiation represent the desire for continuity in healthy social and sexual reproduction (cf. Blacking 1969a–1969e; 1973; La Fontaine 1985).

Peer educators use music in a broadly similar manner. In one sense – and in the eyes of project designers – songs and dances are a cheap and readily available medium through which educators can pursue their goal of knowledge transfer during public performances. But their use of music is multifaceted, and must be understood on different levels. They intentionally select specific songs within certain genres through which they construct a complex group identity by association with their chosen performances. In addition to this, by framing AIDS education through music, peer educators seek – but do not necessarily achieve – the relative protection which these genres afford in different contexts. In this way they pursue new ends by old means.