Society for Ethnomusicology

Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song

Author(s): Carol A. Muller
Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 409-431
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
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VOL.46, No. 3 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FALL
2002

Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song

CAROLA. MULLER/ University of Pennsylvania

The public image of the archive is all too often of a dark place where one
sends things that are no longer needed. (Seeger 2001:41)
When a griot dies, it is like a whole library burning down. (Jegede 1995)
There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique
of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. (Derrida 1995:11)

wit and understanding, Tony Seeger describes a common stereo-

With
type of the "archive." The archive is a place where we turn over
things that no longer have a use value-that have been replaced by forces
of novelty, fashion, and innovation-into the care of those we hope will
keep them safe. We cannot discard these goods because we are not sure
that there might not be a purpose for them sometime in the future. While
this may be true for some, Seeger continues, in his experience American
archives are increasingly being transformed into significant cultural and in-
dividual resources for the retrieval of personal and collective heritage and
history. Similarly, Ginny Danielson (2001:4) provides several examples of
truly magical moments in which sound recordings of voices of the past have
opened up new imaginative and emotional vistas for numerous individuals
and communities.
In this paper, I am seeking to draw on this expansion of the conven-
tional definition of the archive, the archivist, and archival process by sug-
gesting that song composition provides a mechanism for archival deposit,
care, and retrieval in contexts of immanent loss.1 Even though many of us
have worked with historically rich oral traditions, it would appear that in
our work as ethnomusicologists the tendency has been to locate the idea
of the "archive"in cultures with technologies of repetition, such as writ-
ing, sound recording, and film, and to use the word "memory"when deal-
ing with "oral"or pre-literate communities. We conventionally think of
archives as buildings, as monumental edifices to institutional or state pow-

? 2002 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

409
410 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2002

er, and more recently, as also contained or secreted in homes as personal

collections. We tend to evaluate compositional process in much the same
way, i.e., written European compositions as monuments to a great musi-
cal past. Consequently peoples with histories-with documents that bear
witness to earlier times-have assumed greater positions of power than
peoples without an easily recoverable past. Countering these conventions,
I suggest that we begin to consider certain kinds of music composition as
archival practice: as constituting valued sites for the deposit and retrieval
of historical styles and practices in both literate and pre-literate contexts.
In support of my argument I draw selectively on Derrida's notion of
"archive fever" (Derrida 1995).2 This idea derives from his meditation on
the Freudianpsychoanalytic archive. Derrida'sessay is apposite for rethink-
ing the archive as a site of safekeeping in oral and literate cultures because
he integrates memory and archiving as dual sites and practices of the hu-
man mind.3 In other words, he posits that there is an ongoing relationship
between the live-ness of human memory and the archival moment, the
moment in which particularevents, bodies of data, are fixed as the archived
record. The stress upon human memory and archiving in a single space
enables us to consider oral tradition in some instances as an archival prac-
tice. Derrida then reflects on the relationship between Freud's concept of
the psychoanalytic archive and contemporary discourses about what we
might call mechanical technologies of remembering. I counter-pose Derri-
da's writing on the archive and archive fever with Susan Stewart's reflec-
tions on narratives created through the purchase of souvenirs and the cre-
ation of personal collections in an effort to further expand our sense of the
archive, as not exclusively the province of the public and juridical, but also
of the personal, the private, and perhaps even ephemeral (Stewart 1993).
The ethnographic focus is on three separate historical moments and
individuals, two from South Africa, Isaiah Shembe and Nathoya Mbatha,and
the third a British music-explorer who traveled to Africa, David Fanshawe.4
I argue that all three used musical composition and arrangingas an archive,
a space of safekeeping, into which they inserted Africanness as historical
style and/or sound. Isaiah Shembe was a Zulu-speakingprophet-healer who
established a new religious community in the early twentieth century with
an innovative repertory of religious dance and song called iziblabelelo za-
maNazaretha. This repertory constituted a kind of archival space for the
gathering of signs of Africanness in performance in the face of its total si-
lencing by the stringency of Euro-Americanmission culture that dominat-
ed KwaZulu Natal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Nathoya Mbatha is currently a member of Ibandla lamaNazaretha. In the
spirit of the recently instituted democractic principles of the new South
African nation, Mbatha has assumed the right to access and interpret the
 Muller.:Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song 411

regional Shembe archive of religious song by taking a selection of these

hymns and covering them with a new and strongly contested musical in-
terpretation. The young man has arranged these time-honored hymns in a
contemporary South African gospel style, and recorded them on cassette
with a dream of worldwide distribution. In contrast, British explorer and
composer David Fanshawe used north and east Africa as his archive by trav-
eling to the continent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He desired to take
possession of elements of this archive, to create a personal collection of
African traditional music recordings, which could be used as a resource for
his eclectic repertory of English compositions-the most widely known and
frequently performed is African Sanctus, the focus of my thinking on Fan-
shawe in this paper.'
The archive/etymology of the word "archive"Derrida argues, referenc-
es both a commencement, it is institutive; and a commandment, it is con-
stitutive. In its original meaning, it registered a new beginning on the one
hand, but also made the law on the other. The Greek origins of "archive"
are arkbeion, which meant "domicile"or "address,"while archons referred
to those who held power and lived in the place where such documents
were filed. In other words, an archive was defined as a place where docu-
ments important to the making and sustaining of the law were put in re-
serve, sheltered, and concealed (Derrida 1995:1-2). The archivist was a
magistrate who lived in that place, someone who enforced the laws con-
tained in the archived documents. This is perhaps the more conventional
way in which archives have been construed, and it is the way in which the
archive operates for Isaiah Shembe. Derridagoes on to argue that "archives"
now exist in numerous societal spaces, from the traditional site of public
archives, to the more confined space of the printed book-or as in this
paper the musical composition-to the absolute privacy of the human mind.
This more contemporary idea of the archive is more consistent with the
narrative on David Fanshawe and Nathoya Mbatha, though both conform
to the three major expectations of the archive as cited at the top of the
paper. These elements are: a place of consignation, a space in which things/
memories are placed in safekeeping; the capacity to be repeated, provid-
ing a medium through which the thing/memory can be copied, reiterated,
recited; and accessibility, it must have the quality of exteriority, a means
of retrieval (Derrida 1995:11).6
Derrida exploits the Freudian archive, the private archive of Sigmund
Freud's life and relationship to his father and the more publicly accessible
archive of his psychoanalytic legacy for a contemporary understanding of
the relationship between technology, memory, and the archive. In so do-
ing he builds into his discussion several key elements that I subsequently
explore in this paper in relation to certain kinds of musical composition
412 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2002

as forms of archiving. First, Derrida defines the archive as an accumulation

and capitalization of memory in some exterior place (1995:12). Such ac-
tion is the result of "archive fever," the urge to save in the face of forget-
fulness, death, and destruction, what Freud calls the "deathdrive." In times
of personal or social transformation, mutation, or the imposition of a new
order, when the past exists in tension with the present, spontaneous live
memories are fixed and archived for subsequent re-membering. Second,
Derrida posits the possibility of both private archives-those that shape
individual experience and exploration-and more (conventional) public
ones. For those individuals, like Sigmund Freud, who make significant im-
pact upon their societies, these two kinds of archives are obviously inter-
connected.' Third, Derrida expands the sites of archiving by extending
possibilities for inscription that incorporate the mechanical apparatus of
memory inside and outside of the human body, i.e., archiving is an act of
inscribing on the internal structures of the body/mind or through external
forms of mechanical reproduction (1995:34).8 Fourth, he reflects on the
transformation of ideas about memory and archive in light of recent tech-
nological innovations, particularlythe virtuality of the worldwide web and
email.9 Personal computers save information we don't want to lose, they
are individualized archives. Pushing the "save"command, marks the most
recent impressions of one's writing, turning them into archivable and re-
trievable text (1995:25-26).") Fifth, the idea of trans-generational memo-
ry, as etched in the body or in forms of inscription external to the body,
introduces the question of the impact of figures and voices from the past
on the present. We are certainly more comfortable with ideas that the dead
or geographically distant can speak to us through recorded texts, but are
perhaps less convinced about the possibilities of spectral voices interven-
ing in the present. Though Derrida does not address this specifically, as
ethnomusicologists we are well aware that in many communities the phan-
tom dimensions of memory enter through the realm of dreams and visions,
and sometimes in the magic of new technologies (1995:61)."11 Sixth, Derr-
ida insists that archiving of memory is not simply addressing the past, it is
not about preservation for its own sake, but is inherently directed toward
the future. Through the archive the voices of the past outlive their moment
of inscription, moving into the realm of virtuality, the realm of possible
interrogation and conversations in the future (1995:68).12 Seventh, the
Freudianarchive is an archive of knowledge transmitted from father to son,
it is in Derrida'sterms, a patri-archive.Finally,we are reminded that in using
archived memories, we bear the burden of over-simplification but also of
interpretation (1995:90).13
In the following three narratives, I suggest that each individual shapes
his compositional archive in a manner appropriate to the historical and
 Muller: Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song 413

political moment, the technology available for storage, and to the needs of
either the individual or the community. New technologies of musical mem-
ory enable different kinds of archives and compositional strategies. The
differences in each narrative suggest that we maintain flexibility in defin-
ing the archive and compositional process. For example, the archive of
Africanness created by Isaiah Shembe was a virtual or potential archive/
composition: it was built through the collection of dreams and visions and
transmuted through ritualized performance into the memories of members.
David Fanshawe's archive operates at an individual level, constituted out
of the accumulation of his recorded memories of encounters with African
performance. These are irregularlydisplayed largely outside of the African
continent.14 Nathoya Mbatha's small archive is perhaps truest to our con-
ventional understandingof the archive as recorded sound; it is availableonly
as a recording in cassette form with a limited circulation. As with the Fan-
shawe archive, individuals wishing to acquire the musical text are required
to travel to out of the way places."
A science of the archive must include the theory of [its] institutionaliza-
tion, that is to say, the theory both of the law [that] begins by inscribing
itself there and of the right which authorizes it. The rightpresupposesa
bundle of limits [that] have a history... (Derrida 1995:4)

In 1913, South African prophet-healer Isaiah Shembe (ca. 1879-1935)

had the first of numerous dream/visions in which he sensed a composition-
al urging in the form of a "voice." Contained inside the prophet's body, the
voice signaled profound disturbance. The "voice"was the spectral marking
of a historical period of enormous distress for African peoples in KwaZulu
Natal, South Africa,and a creative response to decades of social rupture, dis-
persal, and suffering instigated by British colonialism, Euro-Americanmis-
sionization, the fallout of the formation and destruction of the Zulu kingdom,
and environmental disaster. It gave to the prophet the rhythms and words
of a new style of singing. This was the first in what became an entire reper-
tory of sacred song known as izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha,the "hymns"of
the Nazarites. Izihlabelelo were crafted out of three compositional process-
es: sacred songs composed after the Wesleyan mission hymn, songs to ac-
company religious dance, and those in a hybrid Shembe style. Centralto the
performance of these songs was the reconstitution of "rhythm"as a quint-
essential musical and social dimension, and the renewal of dance as an in-
tegral element of religious expression.
After almost a century of intense mission activity in the KwaZulu Na-
tal region, Isaiah Shembe's hymns defined a new moment in black South
African religious and music history: in a context of the dismissal of things
African by European mission culture, this prophet insisted on the value of
414 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2002

retaining selected elements of "Africanness"in his community that were

integrated into a web of European hymnody and local traditional practice.
Drawing on a personal reserve of cultural memory, Isaiah Shembe argued
that one could take on the principles of mission Christianitywithout shed-
ding traditional ways (Roberts 1936). In so doing, he archived Africanness
into his own version of the mission hymn. Shembe was treated with scorn
in the early twentieth century by many of his contemporaries for his "prim-
itivism" and backward thinking by the mission-educated African elite
(Vilakaziand Mpanza 1996), and with disdain by the traditionalpurists who
resented changes brought to the vernacular "traditions."Perhaps ironical-
ly, in the "new South Africa" Isaiah Shembe's vision, foresight, and insis-
tence on retaining signs of Africanness in ritual performance are now cel-
ebrated as historical models of the "African renaissance" that State
Presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki have made so central to their
discourses on South African national identity in the late twentieth and ear-
ly twenty-first centuries.
In Rituals of Fertility (1999) I detailed the historical and political cir-
cumstances pertaining to the origins of the Shembe community, and the
central place of the new style of hymn performance practice instituted by
Isaiah and Galilee Shembe. In that book I argued that in the early twenti-
eth century, Africanness was feminized in South Africa: it was rendered
useless and peripheral by Europeans in the emergent industrial economy.
Here I wish to extend that idea by suggesting that what Isaiah Shembe did
in that moment was to create a living archive for holding Africanness as a
cultural practice in trust for future generations until such time as it would
be reconstituted as a force of power and visible social identity. The princi-
pal archive was institutionalized through the gift to Isaiah of a repertory of
song given by the ancestors. Isaiah Shembe returned this body of sacred
texts to his community with a set of rules pertaining to its performance.
Isaiah Shembe's authority over his followers was shaped through a
combination of traditional signs of power and the magical force of mission
Christianity, particularly as he read about it in the mission Bible. In his
youth, this man had had a series of visions that connected him to the an-
cestors, and he was plagued by ill health: both constituted early indications
of the calling of a traditional healer/diviner (isangoma). Baptized by the
African Baptists, and exposed to the Wesleyans in his travels, Shembe
claimed that his ability to read had occurred through divine intervention.
In about 1910 stories of his ability to perform miraculous healings amongst
the sick began to circulate in KwaZulu Natal. He started to preach and to
heal by first walking the length and breadth of the eastern coastline of what
is now know as KwaZulu Natal, and then proceeding on horseback.
 Muller.:Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song 415

The ultimate sign of Isaiah Shembe's cosmological power, however,

was his capacity to compose the song and dance repertory that has come
to be known in the region as izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha.16Having estab-
lished his authority in traditionalterms, the prophet archived "Africanness"
in the song composition in several ways. The first sign was the ancestral
participation in the conception of the repertory. As I explain in greater
detail elsewhere" the hymns were created in a manner consistent with
traditional beliefs: they were given by "heavenly messengers" to Isaiah
Shembe through the medium of visions and dreams, frequently while the
prophet was walking in Zululand (G. Shembe 1940).18 The spiritual voices
were mostly those of women and young virgin girls. Each new hymn would
be given with the rhythm and the words.
Nazarite oral history suggests that Isaiah's first compositional vision
came in 1910 while he was walking to what is the most sacred Nazarite
site, the mountain of Nhlangakaze (the first/great reed). This is historically
significant because it was the year that South Africa gained some indepen-
dence from Britain, being redefined as the Union of South Africa.19Shem-
be's second compositional vision came in 1913, again a politically signifi-
cant moment, because it marked one of the first of many pieces of
legislation pertaining to the expropriation of land from African peoples by
the South Africangovernment. From 1920, Isaiah began to compose hymns
prolifically until his death in 1935. While Isaiah Shembe ultimately learned
to write, he initially relied on a scribe, often a woman, to transcribe the
words of the hymns. Some members copied these texts into written col-
lections of their own.2? Isaiah's son Galilee Shembe, who assumed leader-
ship of the community in 1936, also composed a small repertory of hymns,
though the mode of conception signified through a different set of imag-
es: the educated schoolteacher Galilee's visions comprised hymn texts
written on a chalkboard.
To access this repository of sacred texts and its performance practice,
a person had to become a member of the community and abide by the rules
of its performance, largely embedded in what we would call a performance
aesthetic--rhythm, slow tempo, collective improvisation, relative pitch, and
respect for the words. On certain occasions, particularlywhen hymn sing-
ing accompanied sacred dance, the rules of performance also pertained to
disciplining the body in a manner consistent with Old Testament ritual
purification, through fasting, sexual abstinence, and food regulations.
Without sound recording technology at his disposal, Isaiah Shembe
inscribed in the minds of his growing community a second element of Af-
ricanness: the socio-musical practice of "rhythm."The best description of
this performance practice would be slow tempo, collective improvisation.
416 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2002

The Nazarite idea of rhythmic interplay operates on several levels. First,

rhythm signifies cross-rhythmic interaction that can only occur when sev-
eral people are singing together, overlapping rhythmic and melodic phrases,
in temporal tension with each other (e.g., in groups of 2 beats against
groups of 3 beats). With this idea of rhythm, there is no clearly identifiable
melody supported by a chordal texture characteristic of the European
hymn. The rhythms are articulated through drum accompaniment and the
feet of members performing the sacred dance, or ukusina (Sundkler
1976:186-87). Second, the style is highly valued, and believed to be sacred.
Members all stress that learning to sing Shembe's hymns takes a long time,
usually several years. Third, a typical performance of Nazarite hymns hap-
pens in a call-and-response structure. Here, a low-voiced leader intones the
first part of the melody, the second part comprises a chorus of members
who respond in a thick layering of short, texted melodies. Most Nazarites
are unable to read, so call-and-response sustains memorability. Fourth,
members listen carefully to the singing of those around them and respond
in a manner that creates a thick musical fabric of melodic-rhythmic frag-
ments bound together by a sense of the larger "rhythm"of religious wor-
ship. Each person improvises individually on the rhythms created by the
words.
The texts of the songs are a third archival element because they reflect
on Africanexperience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-
a kind of experience that has continued into the present for many. They
are a hybrid form that combines Isaiah Shembe's deep knowledge of the
mission Bible, particularly Old Testament theology and the form and poet-
ry of the Psalms, with Zulu poetic traditions, specifically izibongo (praise
poetry).21 Unlike most mission hymns that were musical and textual trans-
lations of European theology and belief, these texts were composed in a
deep Zulu, often mixed with Xhosa. They articulated the depth of suffer-
ing and hope of Africanpeoples in the KwaZuluNatal region, and of women
in particular. Isaiah Shembe had an uncanny sense of how to localize the
European Bible, frequently overlaying Old Testament prophesy, and New
Testament fulfillment of those words, with place names familiarto his com-
munity. Repetition of Isaiah's experiences in the lives of his followers is
one element that gives these hymns an enduring power in performance and
reenactment, and keeps the hymns securely within the bounds of the Naz-
arite community (see Brown 1999; Muller 1996, 1999a).
In 1940 Galilee Shembe collated a collection of his father's and his own
hymns into an official book of liturgy and hymns and had them printed for
church members. Copies of this text are sold in the Nazarite community
and used for daily devotion and communal ritual. Despite the fact that this
 Muller: Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song 417

book has circulated in ibandla lamaNazarethasince its first publication and

can be purchased relatively cheaply, until the introduction of the organ and
cassette recording/playback technology into ibandla lamaNazarethain the
mid-1980s, the style of Nazarite song and dance performance remained
archived in the bodies and memories of individual members only.22 Much
like jazz ensemble improvisation, this repertory is not easily reduced to staff
notation: no two renditions is ever an exact repetition, each is constituted
out of the personal contributions of individual members. Few Nazarites can
read notation anyway. This has helped to keep the performance practice
out of more generalized circulation beyond the community.
A fourth dimension of "Africanness"archived into the performance of
this newly composed repertory was the social principle of reciprocal gift-
giving. As the ancestors had given the songs to Isaiah Shembe, and he had
in turn given them to his followers, so they were required to return the gift
to the ancestors (now including Isaiah, Galilee, and the third leader and son
of Isaiah, Amos) as a collective articulation. All members are considered
shareholders in the circulation of izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha because all
were invested in the value of the words and sounds of the founder in their
individual lives, and in terms of the well-being of the Nazarite community
as a whole. Each person has the right to perform these songs as members
of the community, as social beings, rather than as individual agents.23
Ownership was, and continues to be collectively held, and Nazarites are
required to be good stewards of the gift of song and its danced accompa-
niment. The archive thereby remains largely concealed inside the bodily
memory of church members, exteriorized and repeated daily in gestures
of ritual and devotion.
In the 1990s a problem emerged with Isaiah Shembe's archive of Afri-
canness in the hymn repertory when individual members, empowered by
the miraculous force they believed came from Shembe, began to access and
re-interpret the archive. They started to sing the hymns in a new style, and
to record these innovations on cassettes that were sold to ibandla lamaNaz-
aretha. Church leaders under Amos Shembe (d. 1995) responded by urging
the younger generation to compose new material in the name of Shembe,
and to leave the traditional hymns stylistically intact. Much of the tension
between the older generation and religious order and younger, more demo-
cratically minded one is exemplified in the narrativetold by one such mem-
ber, Nathoya Mbatha,to whom I return in the last section of this paper. For
the moment, my focus shifts to David Fanshawe, an outsider to Africa, who
traveled to the continent intending to take a part of African music perfor-
mance home with him. He desired to use the recorded samples as an inspi-
ration and archival resource for his compositional production.
418 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2002

The word and the notion of the archive seem at first, admittedly, to point
toward the past, to refer to the signs of consigned memory, to recall faith-
fulness to tradition ... (Derrida 1995: 33)
In the summer of 1969, while registered as a composition student at
London's Royal College of Music, Britishexplorer-music collector-composer
David Fanshawe set off with a rucksack, stereo audio recorder, and about
fifty pounds sterling to fulfill a childhood dream of traveling to Africa. Hav-
ing previously covered the Middle East, he sought to record the music of a
place he thought to be less complex than his own (Fanshawe 1975).24 Fan-
shawe traveled alone, largely on foot, by hitchhiking, and more rarely,flying
by airplane. His odyssey of music and travel took him to five African coun-
tries between 1969 and 1973: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Egypt, and the
Sudan. Immersed in a web of family narratives of colonial experience in
India, and tales of exploration and adventure, the recordings he planned
to make would be used as compositional resources and constitute the core
material of an expanding personal archive of Fanshawe's recorded encoun-
ters with "others."
African Sanctus is arguably the most significant work to emerge from
this material. The Salterelo Choir premiered the piece at St John's Smith
Square in London in July 1972. Laterthat year it was broadcast by the BBC
to commemorate United Nations Day, and in 1974 the BBC produced a
documentary film, shot on location in Northeast Africa, about the making
of African Sanctus (Fanshawe 1994 liner notes). An earlier recording by
Philips Classics went gold in the United Kingdom.25In the same year (1975)
Fanshawe published a book African Sanctus: A Story of Travel and Mu-
sic that details his encounters with Africa, and the emergence of a compo-
sitional outline for African Sanctus. Earlyreviews of the piece provided a
mixed bag, ranging from celebrating the compositional complexity and
polyphonic possibilities presented by the recordings, to anxiety over the
future domination of African music over the European classical music leg-
acy, and outrage at the eccentricity of Fanshawe's musical visions.26 Play-
ing into a completely different kind of political climate, the piece is now
celebrated for its demonstration of multiculturalism and reconciliation on
the one hand, and it is used to raise funds for Africandevelopment projects,
including support of African HIV-Aidspatients on the other.27
This thirteen-movement composition interweaves live performance of
the twentieth century Britishchoral renditions of the Latinmass, the sounds
in which Fanshawe was immersed as a child, with personal recordings of
African song and ritual performance. This mass reflects the cross-shaped
mapping of Fanshawe's journey through Africa, with the Kyrie represent-
ing Cairo, and the Sanctus northern Uganda (Fanshawe 1995 liner notes).
Extensive liner notes are inserted into the cover of the commercial record-
 Muller: Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song 419

ing, providing an accompanying narrativeto each track of music. The piece

is not easily classified. In music industry terms, African Sanctus might be
marketed as a musical "crossover"because it integrates the "classical"tex-
ture of the Christian choral mass performed live with ethnic field record-
ings, a live drummer and soprano soloist, and more recently, a rock band.
Languages incorporated into the text are English, Greek, and Latin for
Christianity,Arabic for Islam, and several African vernaculars for local ritu-
als. As a commercial product, the package parallels the kind of content
produced by professional ethnomusicologists.
Composed into the fabric of each performance of African Sanctus,
Fanshawe's recordings have created the possibility for a kind of timeless
travel, similar to what Tim Taylor (1997:19-21) calls sonic tourism on the
one hand, and like Isaiah Shembe, an archive of the sounds of a way of life
decimated by economic degradation, the forces of modernity, natural and
human disasters, and disease, on the other. As some have remarked, many
have come to a new understanding of "Africa"through engaging Fanshawe's
artful display of the music and images in African Sanctus. Each of the thir-
teen movements combines one ethnographic moment from the compos-
er's African travels with his own composition. The field recordings are ar-
chived untouched, as "real"as the photographs of African "tribalpeoples"
printed inside the liner notes of the recording.28 They are edited as a whole
into the frame of the composition like one scans an image into a website.
The sounds of Fanshawe's African experience are carefully integrated into
the newly composed choral frame as archival objects, aural documents of
people met, places visited, and unrepeatable experiences. Much like the
virtual archive of the worldwide web, each performance enables individu-
al listeners to inhabit a piece of Africa as it was collected and fixed in time
by David Fanshawe.
Fanshawe's archiving of Africanness is, nonetheless, a complex process,
and it operates on at least three levels. First, Fanshawe begins by treating
the cultural production of African people as an archival resource for appar-
ently un-reflexive imperial extraction. Here the archive is like that of Isai-
ah Shembe-located in the individual and collective memories of living
bodies. But, like so much indigenous practice in the mid-twentieth centu-
ry, it is open to exploitation from the outside. So those who own the tech-
nologies of repetition, like sound recording machinery, and are willing to
travel are able to take possession and ownership of the archival content
through first live and then mediated repetition. Second, once recorded and
extracted, the Fanshawe archive operates in more conventional ways, as a
single location resource of the disembodied sounds of Africafor those seek-
ing only virtual travel. Third, and this is the focus of my discussion, the
sounds of Africanness are deposited into the fabric of song composition,
420 Etbnomusicology, Fall 2002

in this case, the composition of African Sanctus. In this frame the archive
of Africanness is inextricably tied to its relationship to Britainand to a his-
tory of colonialism, even though Fanshawe demonstrates in his published
materials a remarkable absence of transgenerational memory.
One has the sense through the sounds and packaging of African Sanc-
tus that David Fanshawe feels deeply about Africa, its music, and people,
feelings he expressed compositionally through the use of the recordings
(Fanshawe 1975). He clearly developed relationships with individuals.These
include the "Hippo Man"whose masked face provides the image on the
cover of the book and sound recording; the "wives"he was given for other
kinds of short-termexploration; and numerous tracks of the new version of
African Sanctus that are dedicated to named individuals. Undoubtedly, the
young explorer gained the right to access communities because he was
willing to travel on the one hand, and because he owned powerful record-
ing technology on the other. At least some of these elements resonate with
the core features of our own profession, and constitute the narratives con-
structed by collectors and producers of "world music" recordings, like Paul
Simon, Ry Cooder, and David Byrne: each uses a rhetoric of saving, recov-
ering, and consigning to places of safe-keeping lost performances of "oth-
ers" silenced or devalued by external forces of modernity.
Despite these reassuring qualities of Fanshawe's archival project, how-
ever, I would argue that ultimately African Sanctus can only operate as a
musical space for the display of personalized souvenirs or "biographical
objects" of Africa's musical past, with David Fanshawe as its collector-com-
poser and curator.29Africanness in the Fanshawe archive is far removed
from its conception in the archive of Isaiah Shembe. In making this argu-
ment my thinking is informed by Susan Stewart's profound work on the
relationship between narratives of self-construction, the purchase of sou-
venirs, and the collection of objects (Stewart 1993). There are two levels
at which her reading of souvenirs informs my writing on African Sanctus:
in the recorded "African"content, and the always newly performed Brit-
ish choral frame. First, the recordings. Briefly, Stewart argues that the sou-
venir is an object that embodies traces of an "authentic"experience. Much
like Fanshawe's peculiar travel in Africa and his contact with the "real"
people and their music, the experiences represented by the souvenir/re-
cordings can neither be repeated nor purchased. This is particularly true
because, as Fanshawe insists when questioned about remuneration to the
people recorded, most of these individualsand cultures no longer exist. Like
the souvenir, Fanshawe's recordings are a small representation of what
Stewart calls the "scene of original appropriation" (1993:136). But the ap-
propriation is always incomplete. Because no audience members were
present at that recording the listener is only able to gain a fuller understand-
 Muller. Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song 421

ing of the moment through the individual narrative created by the sound
recordist himself. In other words, the narrative is not so much about Afri-
ca as it is about Fanshawe's epic journey to that place, hence the supply
of liner notes, photographs, film, and accompanying book. The semi-pub-
lic nature of African performance captured on tape or archived by David
Fanshawe is interiorized and personalized through the story he tells about
his epic journey. The photographic images bear witness to the survival of
Fanshawe, their more recent possessor who, in the minds of his sponsors
and many listeners, braved the wilds of Africato capture in image and sound
his African musical trophies (Stewart 1993:147-48).
Second, in addition to the souvenirs one collects in distant places the
Latinmusic sung by British choristers functions as a souvenir of Fanshawe's
childhood. African Sanctus juxtaposes two kinds of memories: those of the
composer's childhood that frame the "real"sounds of Africanness he longed
to experience as a child. Both bodies of sound are idealized in the compo-
sitional process, both locked into the performative moment. Each speaks
to stereotypes of unattainable times and places of simplicity and purity, of
an earlier stage of human civilization, or even more specifically, as a stage
of Fanshawe's life (Stewart 1993:146). In this sense, David Fanshawe's Af-
rican Sanctus archive operates as a vehicle of idealized reflection, it en-
ables Fanshawe and his audiences to become tourists of the interior mo-
ments of the intrepid explorer's own life which is inextricably tied to his
travels in Africa.
Whatever his stated intentions, David Fanshawe's African Sanctus ul-
timately remains only a personal narrative, a story of "Africa'sheartbeat
captured by a musical Livingstone" (Fanshawe 1975 cover). While his in-
sertion of recordings of "real"musical snapshots of his African experienc-
es into the musical fabric of his piece honors the performers, and perhaps
remains true to sounds as originally recorded, there is a nagging sense of
discomfort over his rights to use the archived examples. He professes a kind
of access to record and appropriate using universalist rubrics like "one
world, one music," or "one world, one god." Strikingly absent from his
narrative is real reflection on the historical relationship of Britain to its
colonies (all of the countries he traveled to had British colonial interven-
tion in their histories). He appears to have presumed that those who own
the technology that records the music own the cultural content, an assump-
tion increasingly under scrutiny amongst professional archivists and ethno-
musicologists. And David Fanshawe assumes inordinate curatorial power
in the manner in which he has selected, cut, and inserted recorded excerpts
into his compositional archive of Africanness. He is able to hold onto this
position because it is clear that at least until recently, his view of Africa and
its people is one that exists only in its abstraction, only as a past reality.3o
422 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2002

... [T]hequestion of the archive is not, we repeat,a question of the

past... It is a question of thefuture, a question of thefuture itself
the question of a response,of a promise, and of a responsibilityfor
tomorrow.(Derrida1995:36)
Sometime in 1995, Shembe follower Nathoya Mbatha produced a cas-
sette containing a small selection of izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha labeled
Natboya Mbatha: Ngivuse Nkosi.3' "Ngivuse Nkosi" is the title of one of
Isaiah Shembe's hymns. Contraveningthe sociability inherent in izihlabelelo
performance, Mbathaperforms solo with an electronic keyboard and multi-
track recording technology. The musical arrangement he uses creates an
ambience of contemporary black South African gospel style performance,
with the soloist performing in the context of a simulated chorus of back-
up singers. Responding to Amos Shembe's directive to go and convert
outsiders to the faith of ibandla lamaNazaretha, Mbatha had hoped to use
his arrangementsof Shembe hymns to reach an audience beyond the bound-
aries of the community. Clearly, Nathoya Mbatha imagined he could use
Shembe's hymns to reach a generation of black South African youth im-
mersed in the live and mediated sounds of local gospel music by arranging
the words and melodies of Isaiah and his son Galilee Shembe to appeal to
contemporary African taste.32Knowing the good fortune of musicians like
Joseph Shabalalaand Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Mbongeni Ngema, Miri-
am Makeba, Hugh Masakela, and others who have traveled globally with
their music, Mbathaalso dreamed of the possibilities of journeying afarwith
his arrangements and compositions. For a short period there had even been
the possibility that the South African division of the transnational media
corporation BMGRecords would distribute the cassette for Mbatha'srecord
label C and G Records in Durban, South Africa. The trouble was that the
musical gesture threatened the integrity of the existing "archive"of iband-
la lamaNazaretha created by Isaiah Shembe. The church leadership inter-
vened and refused to authorize the deal.
Although Mbatha's desire to successfully record his performances of
Shembe hymns was authorized by Amos Shembe (d.1995) in the early
1990s, the cassette has generated considerable anger within the member-
ship. Ibandla lamaNazarethais a community that prides itself on its respect
for traditional"African"ways, and in its sacred song and dance performance
specifically. The fixity of Mbatha's musical object-the professionally pro-
duced cassette, the novelty of its contents-the gospel style arrangements
of a cherished musical style, its stress upon individualism in its production,
coupled with the mobility of the cassette as commodity, has made the
church leaders anxious about its impact both inside and outside of the re-
ligious community. I complete my discussion of the archive of Africanness
by reflecting briefly on three dimensions of the archive established by Isa-
 Muller: Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song 423

iah Shembe in the 1920s that continue to be drawn upon in the early twenty
first century. Each pertains to the politics of access to the archive in con-
temporary Africa.These archival dimensions are: the indispensability of, and
limitations imposed by trans-generational memory to the survival of the
archive; the question of the freedom to interpret archival content; and the
relationship between the containment of the oral archive and its dispersal
through sound recording technology, particularly the cassette.
Derrida discusses Freud's writing on trans-generational memory as a
kind of biological memory, either genetic or imposed by external experi-
ence (1995:34). In contrast, I have limited the idea of trans-generational
memory in ibandla lamaNazarethato memory collectively felt and verbally
transmitted. In this frame, several generations of Shembe followers carry
memories of Isaiah Shembe's life and spiritual powers. These are narrated
by members throughout the Nazarite ritual cycle, but particularly on May
2 when Isaiah's death is commemorated annually.33Those who were born
into the Nazarite community or converted later in life assume the familial
name of the founder-all are colloquially known as the followers of Shem-
be. All members have borne the weight of his name and adhered to the
bodily disciplines required, so all have been given access to the archive of
sacred song he constituted.34 Each generation has witnessed a portion of
the history of the community and the legacy of the founder himself. In other
words, to sing the songs of Shembe is not merely to know the past, but to
re-member it. Followers believe that each time they gather with other be-
lievers to sing, pray, dance, and preach to each other they do so in the
presence of the ancestors of their community, the generations of Nazarites
that have preceded them. To perform the hymns, as Nathoya Mbatha does
on his cassette, alone, outside of the community of the living and the dead,
is to violate the core of what it means to be ibandla lamaNazaretha.
In contrast to the sense one might have from David Fanshawe's experi-
ence of Africa as a willing and open archive, leaders of ibandla lamaNazare-
tha have a profound sense of the value of the song repertory to their own
community, and of the possibilities of its abuse by those who are not mem-
bers. The impression of the archive left by Isaiah Shembe was that it was
entrusted to the community at large, and that it was strongly regulated. Each
individualmember is permitted to use the repertory if they abide by its rules.
No member has been allowed to simply commodify, transform, or sell the
repertory.3"As the ancestors gave to the founder, so he gave to the commu-
nity, they in turn, have been required to return the gift to the ancestors
through collective performance. The capacity to profit individuallyweighs
heavily against the generational memory of collective accountability.
Finally,the dispersion of the repertory through the mass produced copy
of its performance constitutes a clear violation of at least two core princi-
424 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2002

ples of the archive created by Isaiah Shembe: the spectral presence of gen-
erations of Nazarite members at each new opening of the archive of sacred
song, and the strict rules pertaining to its performance. While there is no
doubt that repeating the performance outside of the bounds of the com-
munity would enhance possibilities for conversion to the Nazarite faith, it
also reduces the spiritual force Nazarites believe is embodied in each indi-
vidual and collective enactment of its words and music.

Conclusion
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memo-
ry. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential
criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitu-
tion, and its interpretation. (Derrida 1995:4n.1)

Drawing on Derrida's reading of Freud's notions of the psychic econ-

omy as a relationship between memory and archive, I have examined three
historical moments in twentieth century African music history as articulat-
ing three distinct but related archival gestures. Derrida's writing about "ar-
chival fever" which is informed by, and speaks to, the psychoanalytic ar-
chive created and left by Sigmund Freud, destabilizes the fixed, largely
nineteenth century notion of the archive as a monumental repository of
documents in the service of, and controlled by, the nation state. The me-
chanics of the psychic economy, of the human mind as both memory and
archive, are contrasted with a more conventional understanding of the ar-
chive as a museum-like place in which detached objects/written documents
important to political power are collected, housed, controlled, and some-
times concealed. Such juxtaposition enables a more fluid, even diasporic,
understanding of the archive, one more suited to cultural analysis in the
twenty-first century.
In Derrida's writing the archive both conserves and institutionalizes,
it is simultaneously traditional and revolutionary. The archive comes into
being in mutational moments, it is about saving in the face of destruction,
forged into being by what Freud calls the "death drive." The archive sig-
nals new beginnings, it is a commencement; it has the force of law, it is a
commandment; and it is a place where things are consigned. It is with this
definition that I have argued Isaiah Shembe "archivedAfricanness"through
his creation of a new style of hymn singing for his people in the early twen-
tieth century. Faced with the complete destruction and silencing of Afri-
can traditionalways by colonial powers, he deposited signs of Africanness-
call and response, relative pitch, drumming, sacred dance-into a newly
created archive of African song. This archive is what has been institution-
alized and documented as IziHlabelelo zamaNazaretha, the hymns/sacred
 Muller: Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song 425

songs of ibandla lamaNazaretha,the Nazaretha members. Like Freud's psy-

chic economy, however, the sacred economy of Isaiah Shembe's reperto-
ry was constituted out of a combination of the scattered habitats of collec-
tive memory and the greater fixity of the written archive: performance
practice remained un-notated, while the words were fixed in written texts.
The performance practice, conveyed in ibandla lamaNazarethathrough the
metaphor of "rhythm"has been transmitted through person to person com-
munication, while the experiences and faith of church founder, Isaiah and
his son, Galilee, were impressed (in the Derridean sense, Derrida 1995:26-
28) through the medium of the printed text. This practice continued largely
unchanged until the introduction of cassette technology into ibandla la-
maNazaretha in the late 1980s.36
The other two examples provide contrasting tales of the archive be-
cause they involved the constitution of an archive of recorded sound. Each
tale speaks to the archiving of Africanness as compositional process in dis-
tinct ways, though both invoke closer scrutiny of sound recording technol-
ogy itself as constituting inordinate mutations in musical transmission in and
about Africa in the latter part of the twentieth century (Adorno 1990). For
Britishborn David Fanshawe, sound recording facilitated the objectification
or "canning"of an authentic Africanness. In the spirit of nineteenth centu-
ry colonial collecting (Kirschemblatt-Gimblett 1998), twentieth century
recording technologies magically turned the lived experience of African
Others into something that could be captured, contained, carried home,
artistically recycled, displayed, and celebrated for its unchanging nature,
its lack of presence as a living reality.
After more than three decades of adventurous travel, Fanshawe creat-
ed a massive personal archive of musical souvenirs called the Fanshawe
Collections (Fanshawe 1995 liner notes). Occasionally, portions of the
sound archive have been made publicly accessible through a form of mu-
sical display in Fanshawe compositions like African Sanctus. Framedby the
purity of British choral voices, these now largely dead African musical tra-
ditions are presented like museum pieces trapped in the authenticity of their
past-ness while operating as contemporary monuments to a pre-colonial
Africanness, and relieving Britainof the impossible burden of post-colonial
guilt.37The archive itself, the concealed collection of the traditional music
of the peoples of Africa, (the Arab world and the Pacific as well) remains
the private property of musical curator, David Fanshawe. This is the archive
in the traditional sense, untouched by Freud or Derrida's sense of the ten-
sion between the evasiveness of living memory and the fixity of the archi-
val object, though it remains largely inaccessible to the public.
The third example, the cassette recordings of Shembe's hymns pro-
duced by Nathoya Mbatha, provides a contrasting definition of the archive,
426 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2002

and the archiving of Africanness through sound recording and musical ar-
ranging.38Even though the first sound recordings containing Nazaritehymns
were produced in the late 1940s and 1950s, the recorded disc as Long Play-
ing record did not radically shift the nature or contents of the Shembe leg-
acy largely because the production remained an activity of transcription by
scholars and the state-controlled South African Broadcast Corporation.
Further,the recording hardware and software remained too costly for most
members to own. This was not the case with the introduction of cassette
technology. Cassettes put the recording, copying, and sales of the musical
object into the hands of ordinary people. By opening the Nazarite archive
out into the future this technology, in combination with the miraculous
force of Shembe in the contemporary world, and the radical transforma-
tion of the South African and global political economies in the early 1990s,
is signaling a whole new way of thinking about the archive, of Africanness,
of sacred song, and of political power in the twenty- first century.
Imbued with the spirit of the new democracy and South Africa's re-
entry into the global political economy, Nathoya Mbatha took possession
of the collective archive as part of his new found democratic right to ac-
cess, and to participate in, its redefinition in the political moment. Mbatha's
actions parallel those of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commis-
sion (TRC). The TRChas defined the democratic nation by simultaneously
opening its archive up to add new content, to re-interpret the old, and to
making it globally accessible in a post-nation39global environment through
the worldwide web, and publication of its multi-volume report.40 It is this
exposure of the new versions of Nazaretha identity articulated in the con-
temporary sounds of African gospel music to an unknown community, and
the lack of control over the terms of its exchange that is troubling the lead-
ers of ibandla lamaNazaretha.
What clearly emerges in these three contrasting instances of archiving
is that notions of "Africanness"are fluid, and continually open to redefini-
tion. "Africanness"is powerfully shaped by the vantage points of individu-
als in specific historical and political circumstances, either as social beings
or as individual agents. Twentieth century imaginings of Africanness have
always been about power: personal, political, religious, traditional,modern,
cultural, gendered, racial, colonial, even post-colonial. In this paper these
imaginings have been manipulated in three ways: in the retention of cul-
tural identity as a form of resistance to colonization, as a template of au-
thenticity and pastness, and more recently, as a springboard for innovation.
So too is the idea of the archive, and its relationship to musical com-
position. The writings of SigmundFreud,Jacques Derrida,and Susan Stewart
enable a fluid movement back and forth between the archive/compositional
resource/individual inspiration as living body, and as the transcendent ex-
 Muller: Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song 427

ternal object (the sound recording) that never dies. None of the three ex-
amples is one or the other: each combines both bodily memory and objec-
tified record. This particular kind of compositional practice might thus be
defined as a historicizing gesture and as a poetic creation of a contempo-
rary space for repertorial renewal and public display in a global dimension.
The archive/compositional space is itself multi-sited, even diasporic; it is
personal and public; simultaneously real in its performance, and virtual in
its potential for imaginative travel. The trouble, however, is that the prob-
lem of ownership and the rights to access have not been adequately re-
solved. The tension remains between the definition of an archive's public
as shareholders of an inalienable object (in the spirit of ibandla lamaNaza-
retha) or stakeholders of an alienable commodity (ibandla lamaNazaretha
refusing to have its so unds extracted and dispersed).41

Notes
1. An earlier version of this paper was read at the meetings of the Society for Ethnomusi-
cology (Austin, Texas, November 1999) and the African Studies Association (Philadelphia,
November 1999). Visual and musical illustrations to the South African materials are contained
on the CD ROM that accompanies Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite
Women's Performance in South Africa (Muller 1999). I am grateful to those who funded this
research and writing: the Human Sciences Research Council, NERMIC,and the University of
Natal Research Fund, all in South Africa. Parts of the article were revised while I was a Fel-
low at the National Humanities Center in 1999-2000. This was funded in part by the Nation-
al Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Pennsylvania. Views expressed in this
article do not reflect those of the above institutions. I am also grateful to several people who
read the earlier versions of this article: Steven Feld, Rosalind Shaw, and Tim Taylor; and par-
ticularly to my colleague Emma Dillon who listened patiently and kindly to my musings on
archives and objects as I re-worked this paper in the summer of 2001 in Philadelphia.
2. I would like to thank medieval musicologist Emma Dillon for pointing me to this es-
say. She and I asked the students in our graduate seminars at the University of Pennsylvania
(Spring 2001) to all read the text, and we met to discuss it together one Friday evening. All
the students, regardless of graduate program, demonstrated remarkable collegiality and open-
ness in their readings of the text.
3. Derrida doesn't directly address oral tradition, though he mentions it in passing as
Freud discussed it in Moses (Derrida 1995:34-35).
4. Steven Feld read the earlier version, "PopularizingSacred Music: A View From 1990s
South Africa"(unpublished). He suggested that I think about both David Fanshawe's African
Sanctus and the Kenyan National Choir's renditions of Missa Luba. I am extremely grateful
to Steve for suggesting there might be some productive connections between the Shembe
material, the Chant Phenomenon of the early 1990s in the United States, and this earlier Afri-
can-European religious music. I have dropped the Chant materials because they no longer fit
the focus of this paper.
5. The idea of Fanshawe as archivist derives from Derrida's notion that by asking ques-
tions about Freud's relationship to Judaism, Yerushalmi's work (1991) constituted an archi-
val relationship to the dead Freud. So too, Fanshawe's collection of African music constitutes
an extension of the archive on African music, i.e., by presenting the archive as something
unrepeatable, opening up a section of Africa to the world, Fanshawe becomes an archivist
indelibly tied to African music history, even if only at a very individual level. Naturally, this
428 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2002

raises questions about the right to access, to own, and to participate in cultural practices not
one's own.
6. It is noteworthy that Derrida doesn't appear to deal with issues of rights to access, of
the politics of archives as such, though he makes a dislaimer about his on 1995: 4, n.1 par-
tially cited at the start of the conclusion to this paper.
7. Though it is only recently through the attention given to reflexivity that these two
have been connected as part of an intellectual enterprise i.e., the idea that the personal is sep-
arate from the professional.
8. Note that the stress upon bodily memory reintroduces complex questions of intergen-
erational memory, which refract on the idea of an "Africancultural memory," for example
Floyd 1995.
9. Derrida comments on one (of several) metaphors of inscription in the mind: the Mys-
tic Pad. Freud used a variety of such analogies, suggesting that the therapeutic process is one
of examining the mind with a telescope or microscope.
10. This raises questions about how music operates in this frame. Clearly, music exists
somewhere between the real and the virtual, it is not just a text to be read, but one that is
also performed. We accept that writing constitutes a kind of archiving, though I wonder about
human memory, the collective transmission of cultural information through oral means.
11. Voices of the past have emerged in new recording technologies in the "Western"
world (for example see Chapter 2 in Douglas 1999) and the "non-Western"world (for exam-
ple see Taussig 1993:193-235).
12. Opening the archive to the future is enacted by repetition, i.e., Jewish writer
Yerushalmi repeats a segment of Freud's legacy as if it has been newly discovered. In so do-
ing, Yerushalmi is now the archivist. The archivist produces more archives ensuring a future
for the archive.
13. Derrida posits that interpretation of the archive is always a problematic exercise. He
parallels this problem of interpretation with the psychoanalytic problem of the repression of
memory.
14. The idea of musical display is an extension of an idea from graduate student Ruth
Rosenberg who used it in a paper for my Seminar on Musical Objects and Objectivity in the
Twentieth Century (Spring 2001) at the University of Pennsylvania. Rosenberg developed the
idea in her discussion of the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz as the display of musical
objects through public performance.
15. Here I am thinking of the writing of Theodor Adorno (transl. by Thomas Levin, 1990)
and Michael Chanan 1995 who reflect respectively on the historical possibility, and emergence
of kinds of musical performance only available as recorded sound, and never as live perfor-
mance. Obviously, popular culture has been producing numerous forms of these kinds of
music and technologies in the last three to four decades.
16. Traditionally, it is claimed, a spiritual leader had to also demonstrate musical skill to
retain his power over a community (Vilakazi and Mpanza 1996).
17. Chapter 4 in Muller 1999a.
18. See also Ballantine 1996 and Muller 1999b on two other kinds of compositional pro-
cesses amongst Zulu speaking peoples.
19. The "Union"referred only to people of English and European descent in opposition
to African peoples in the land.
20. A copy of one of the "books" was deposited by Elizabeth Gunner in the British Li-
brary.
21. Izibongo as a genre of performance was historically connected to political eadership.
See for example, Brown's 1999 collection of essays, particularly those by Jeff Opland and Liz
Gunner. More recently it has been adopted to the needs of individual warriors/musicians (for
an example of the latter see Muller 1999b).
22. For a more detailed history of the recording of izihlabelelo zamaNazaretha,see Chap-
ter 5 in Muller 1999a.
 Muller. Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song 429

23. This distinction between social being and individual agent is drawn by Mary Dou-
glas 1990.
24. Fanshawe comments in the book that he found Africa to be not as simple a place as
he originally thought.
25. See http://www.rnh.com/news/winter94/concert.html, 5/31/2001.
26. Extracts of these reviews are integrated into the fabric of Fanshawe's book (1975).
27. See for example, http://www.vso.org.uk/events/sanctus.htm; http://www.rgs-
guildford.co.uk/Pages/Departments/Music/Music African sanctus.htm; http://www.post-
gazette.com/magazine/20001010bach3.asp.
28. For discussion of "the real" in technologies of visual and aural reproduction see for
example, Orvell 1989 and Thompson 1995.
29. Janet Hoskins (1998) coined the term "biographical objects" in reference to the au-
tobiographical narrativestold by Melanesians. I am using the term "curator"drawing from Feld
2000.
30. It would appear that Fanshawe is more actively involved in African development
issues now.
31. For a more complete narrativeon Nathoya Mbathaand the production of his cassette
see Chapter 5 in Muller 1999, and accompanying CD ROMfor musical examples.
32. South African gospel music has strong connections to the history of European and
African American gospel sounds, though it has also assumed a powerful local face and sound
in the last two decades, particularly through the performances by South African musicians,
in local languages (South Africa has 11 official languages and numerous others spoken region-
ally), drawing on South African experiences, and the increased media attention paid to the
genre in the last decade. See Chapters 4 and 5 in Muller 1999 for some additional discussion
of this.
33. For examples of the narratives of witnesses to the life and power if Isaiah Shembe,
see Chapter 8 in Muller 1999.
34. See Chapters 2 and 3 in Muller 1999 for further discussion of the bodily disciplines
in ibandla lamaNazaretha.
35. These conditions for selling a gospel style differ from the larger marketplace in South
Africa (and elsewhere in Africa, see for example, Kidula 2000) where you do not have to be
a Christian believer or member of the community to make or sell the sound.
36. For further discussion of the place of cassettes in ibandla lamaNazaretha see Chap-
ters 4 and 5 in Muller 1999.
37. While it may seem something of a stretch to hold Fanshawe's music and travels as
referencing a larger British accountability, it should be noted that his travels in Africa were
funded by two Foundations: first by British national composer Ralph Vaughan-Williamsand
second by that of Winston Churchill. In addition, Fanshawe studied composition at the Royal
College of Music. The book he published on his early travels appears to be constituted from
the many letters he wrote back to members of the Foundations as he traveled.
38. See Chapter 5 in Muller 1999 for further explanation.
39. See Appadurai 1996 for further discussion of post-nation states.
40. See South African Truth and Reconciliation Report 1998.
41. See Chapter 3 in Muller 1999 for further discussion of alienable and inalienable ob-
jects in ibandla lamaNazaretha, and Weiner 1992 for greater elaboration more generally.

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