The hijacking of Cameroonian pop hit Zangalewa for the World Cup anthem was only the latest instalment in a history of cultural plunder predating even Imbube.
Music is a structurally exploitative industry, but the apparent lack of any African music history archive documenting antecedents and ownership positively invites the pirates in.
And yet the archive does exist. It’s simply scattered in myriad sources and formats, as these three books illustrate.
Ethiopian composer, keyboard and vibes player Mulatu Astatke plays in Johannesburg on September 10. Unisa’s tiny, well-illustrated volume on his life and work provides context.
Abebe Zegeye’s contribution sketches the historical, musical and political backdrop to his life, juxtaposing — sometimes uneasily; the joins show — academic analysis and collated biography. A long interview with Astatke himself forms the second part of the book.
There’s also a CD. The interview is fascinating, the music gorgeous and the essay conscientiously referenced. But the CD lacks all discographical information — a grave flaw in a book of this type.
Max Mojapelo is a veteran SABC music broadcaster and Beyond Memory draws on his meticulously kept diaries to tell his story of the development of South African popular music.
On one level this is a warm, personal memoir; on another, an erudite treasure-house of information about who worked with whom and when and how these comings-together shaped the Mzansi sound. It requires purposeful mining: Mojapelo’s encyclopaedic experience unfolds as he lived it, not as others might shape or categorise it.
And that issue is precisely the focus of the latest Chimurenga volume, subtitled The Curriculum Is Everything. The pathways a reader follows — sequence, juxtaposition, genre assumptions — change the meaning and weight of each of the essays, artworks and unclassifiables the 270-page volume contains.
Contributions also focus on curriculum and teaching, with frameworks both serious and satirical. The collection has many threads and one is music — precious documentary about Johnny Dyani, Fela Kuti, Winston Mankunku and Sazi Dlamini. Follow those stories alone for one narrative.
Braid them with, for example, the Iraq War thread (the curriculum here being the learned assumptions of orientalism and cultural superiority) and they assume another, wholly fresh and startling. In offering readers such freedom and power, Chimurenga 15 lives the discourse of its motto: who no know, go know.