Appreciating SA's Greatest People
Monday, June 9, 2008
More than Mozart
"The world is still enjoying the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart even after many centuries. And now amid the high cost of living and many atrocities in our country, there is a hidden treasure. It is a pity that Michael Mosoeu Moerane, a composer, pianist and choral director is not on this earth to hear me laud his work.
“I fell in love with most of his work as a member of a chorus. He wrote different kinds of works, choral classical, traditional and many more. But in all his works, you could see he was a romantic. A creative one even! Some of his song titles are women's names. Word has it that some were his girlfriends. I'm talking about songs like Sylvia and Della. The only artists who interpret these songs in the way they were meant are Sibongile Khumalo and the Gauteng Choristers led by Sidwel* Mhlongo.
“I won't leave out the fact that Ntate Moerane is uncle to His Excellency President Thabo Mbeki. Mr Moerane apparently taught the young Thabo Mbeki how to play the flute. I may be clueless, but the little research I have done does not show any high national order in his name. When I write like productive people like Mr MM Moerane, I also want to lobby organisations like the South African Music Awards (SAMA) and the government to find our roots in music. The SAMA is so far the only relevant platform to acknowledge such marvelous work.” Posted by My Haven. Full Post [Michael Mosoeu Moerane (1909-1981) is profiled at AfriClassical.com]
Michael Mosoeu Moerane
South African Composer
Composer, Pianist & Choral Director
SA's first Black Music Graduate
Fatse la heso
Member of SAMRO
4 comments:
I was thrilled when I came across this blog as I researched the life and works of Mosoeu Moerane as part of a book I'm currently writing. I am profiling 10 African Choral Music composers of the 19th to early 20th century in the Eastern Cape, former Transkei. This is the feeling I get every time I read about our icons who were never really given the recognition as you mentioned at the beginning of your blog. Strangely enough in my introduction I lament the fact that even us Africans know so much about Mozart, Bach, Handel etc than we do about our own. My book intends to begin to reverse this. and hopefully it will catch. I am writing about those composers whose songs I sang at school so many years ago and had no clue who they were, what inspired them and what circumstances they worked under. It's going to take a very long to undo the legacy of Apartheid on black South Africans.
Hi Mpumi I was made aware of your comments through Bill Zick an African American who has cataloged Classical and Choral musicians of African ancestry the world all over. I contributed some info on Michael 'mike' Moseou Moerane, my Maternal uncle, correcting some mis information especially the claim that he was born in Lesotho (where he died and is laid to rest), however, like all his siblings he was born at Mangolaneng, Mount Fletcher district Eastern Cape. 'Mike' Moerane taught at Lovedale and later in Queens Town (where his second born son, Thuso Moerane lives) before being banned from teaching due to his resistence to Bantu education. His younger Brother, Frazer, taught for a time at the famous and community school started by Chief Bikitsha and his Amafengu people, Blyswood, a monument to the African people quest for advancement.
[The leaders of the amamFengu had asked, through the Cape’s agent Captain Blyth, for the establishment of a “child of Lovedale” in the Nqamakwe district. Stewart decided to test the commitment of the amamFengu leaders by challenging them to come up with £1000, promising them that if they succeeded, he would get a matching amount from the church in Scotland.
The leaders of the amamFengu began collecting money from their people immediately.
The meeting with the leaders came about because they had told him the money was ready for him. So he had no choice but to meet them and to make good on his promise. At the meeting the representatives of each amamFengu residential areas (known in those times as “locations”) brought the money collected in their areas and laid it on the table which had been set up in the middle of the gathering, at which sat the three white men. The money had been collected in coins and the table had to be cleared many times as it was filled with money. The Rev Ross used a pillow case from the cart in which Dr Stewart had travelled to collect the coins.
There were 103 such locations and so the collection of the money on the table took a great deal of time. At the end of the day the money was counted and it came to £1 478, much more than Stewart had challenged the people to collect. Indeed there were a few locations which were not represented at the meeting and when their contributions had been added the total was £1 646!
That a largely illiterate group of mainly subsistence farmers, only a small minority of whom were Christians, could collect such a huge sum of money in about four or five months was indicative of the people’s desire for and commitment to their education. This was in the year 1873.] by Tony MacGregor.
That is the aspiration of blacks to this day. Those white settler colonials who insult us by saying our children are refugees running away from Mud Schools should know that Mud Schools were built through self help by those illitrate and poor rural Black women whose husbands were trapped in the migrant labor system and attached to the mines. Those Black women built those MUD school with their hands in bid of giving their children a better future and so it is with the so called refugees in Western Cape. Those calling us refugees here in Africa should go back where they originate or came from be it EUROPE (Germany, Holland, England.....),etc. This is Africa, and no black person here is a refugee or settler be he/she being Haitian, Brazilian, Jamaican, Afro American, Indian Siddi, etc
Hi Rangoane, this is wonderful. I also know the story about Captain Veldtman Bikitsha and the building of Blythswood. I did my matric there and that's where my late husband Boy Bikitsha 'spotted' me. You're right about discrepancies in records about our icons. That's what I'm discovering too as I'm writing my book. It will be so because as black SAns we don't write. Let's keep doing it maan. Who is Izak Khomo? Somebody by that name sought to contact me via Bernadette on Nikiwe's wall on Linkedin.
Hi Mpumi
Izak Khomo is the same Rangoane
Ciao
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