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A royal account of music in Zulu life with translation, annotation, and musical transcription

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

David K. Rycroft
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Extract

The text presented below has been transcribed from a verbal account given by the Mntwana (Princess) Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu, of the Zulu Royal family. The Princess is the sister of the late Paramount Chief Solomon Maphumuzana Nkayishana, and great-aunt to the present Paramount Chief of the Zulu. Her late husband was Chief Mathole Buthelezi, and her son, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, is at present Chief Executive Councillor of the kwaZulu Government. Princess Magogo is widely acknowledged as the greatest living authority on the subject of Zulu music. As a performer, her musical repertoire is prodigious, encompassing traditional items dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and possibly earlier. Her reply, when asked how she came to learn so much of the Zulu musical repertoire, was as follows: ‘When I was a young girl, I slept in the huts of my grandmothers, the wives of King Cetshwayo, and one could not escape hearing a great deal of our traditional music’. Besides her accomplishment as a singer, the Princess is the last remaining player of the classic Zulu instrument for song-accompaniment, the ugubhu musical bow. The present discourse, on Zulu music and its role in traditional life,, provides insight of a kind that is beyond the reach of an outside observer, since the Princess has drawn on a lifetime of personal experience. To provide relevant illustrations, she frequently broke into song during her discourse. Musical transcriptions of these songs appear at the end of the present paper, in Appendix 1. The tonality of the music is briefly discussed in Appendix 2.

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , June 1975 , pp. 351 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1975

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