African Music

Abstract

THE present volume will be welcomed by all A concerned with native music, but particularly by anthropologists, for the twofold interest its subject presents. Musical instruments, on one side, have always been a favourite object for ethnological studies, because as products of handicraft they are part of a people's material culture, and by magic and religious functions they play at the same time a prominent role in tribal life. The most ancient culture forms, on the other side, are found surviving among those primitive races who have been compelled to retire into the remotest and least accessible regions, for example, the Fuegians, the Tasmanians, the Andaman Islanders, the Vedda in Ceylon, or the Bushmen in the Kalahari. It is true that in South Africa this isolation even of the most primitive tribes, namely, Bushmen, Hottentots and Bergdama, has since long been far from complete, extensive tribal migrations, or smaller movements, particularly of Bantu negroes, having from time immemorial chequered the map of racial and cultural distribution. This very distribution, however, is the safest, if not the only, basis for a reconstruction of the early history of the country, that is, the history before the arrival of the European explorers.

The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa

By Prof. Percival R. Kirby. Pp. xix + 285 + 73 plates. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934.) 35s. net.