ANKE FROEHLICH & INGE ENGELBRECHT

I am destined by the Lord to proclaim the Message of the death and blood of Jesus, not with human wisdom but with divine power. I have one passion. It is Jesus, Jesus only.

Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf

Genadendal (“valley of grace”) is a place of many historical firsts.^{[1]Genadendal became home to South Africa’s first nursery school on 12 September 1831 and holds South Africa’s oldest fire engine, one of the first Gutenberg printers, and is often described as the first “industrial” town due to the practice of trades such as carpentry, wagon building, blacksmithing, tannery, copper-smithing, and so on. See Hannetjie du Preez, “Genadendal’s Historical Context and Project Set-up”, in The Challenge of Genadendal, eds. Hannetjie du Preez, Ron van Oers, Job Roos, and Leo Verhoef (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2009), 15.} Besides being the first permanent Khoi settlement in the Cape and the oldest mission station in South Africa, it is home to South Africa’s first pipe organ. The mission station fostered a spirited Western art music tradition which still lives on today and has amassed a significant music archive. The practice of the Western art music tradition in Genadendal begins with Moravian missionary Georg Schmidt, who was sent to the Cape of Good Hope from Herrnhut in Germany by Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf to spread the Gospel among the local Khoi people.^{[2]A fascinating music theatre production, Khoi’npsalms, imagines the encounter between the Dutch colonists and the local Khoi people at the Cape of Good Hope through improvisation. The series of four improvisatory performances were presented by flautist Esther Marié Pauw, organist Francois Blom, and self-identified Khoi “memory music instrumentalist” Garth Erasmus—who played bow (a self-made Ghôrrah, which is a single-string bow with a calabash that is attached as resonator), saxophone, and blik’nsnaar—in March 2018 at the Woordfees arts and literary festival in Stellenbosch. The improvisations were based on six 16th-century Geneven psalm texts and melodies. Filmmaker Aryan Kaganof was commissioned to deliver an artistic response to the endeavour, which culminated in two films, namely Khoi’npsalms45 and Nege Fragmente uit Khoi’npsalms. To read more about the project, see Garth Erasmus, Marietjie Pauw, Francois Blom, and Andrea Hayes, “Improvising Khoi’npsalms”, Ellipses Journal of Creative Research 3 (2019-20), and Marietjie Pauw, Garth Erasmus, and Francois Blom, “Improvising Khoi’npsalms”.} The Moravian Church was originally a Protestant denomination from Bohemia. Schmidt settled in Zoetendalsvlei in the Overberg region of South Africa in 1737 where his ministry included teaching Dutch and sacred songs with the help of a Khoi interpreter named Africo.^{[3]Africo’s role to Schmidt is similar to Autshumao’s role as Khoi interpreter to colonial administrator Jan van Riebeeck, from whom this journal takes its name. Autshumao is perhaps better known as ‘Herri die Strandloper’, as van Riebeeck portrayed him in his journals. For a detailed account of the historiography around Autshumao, see Patric Tariq Mellet, “Autshumao – Between what is said and what is kept silent”.} Shortly thereafter, Schmidt moved his ministry to what was then called Baviaanskloof (‘valley of baboons’),^{[4]This is not to be confused with today’s Baviaanskloof, which is a valley that lies between the Baviaanskloof and Kouga mountain ranges in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. The region that is relevant here lies in the Western Cape’s Overberg district.} which was later renamed to Genadendal.^{[5]General Janssens, the then Governor of the Cape under the Batavian Republic, renamed the settlement to Genadendal in 1806, as recorded by Frederick Lionel Abrahams, ’n Temporaliteitspedagogiese studie van die vennootskap kerk en skool met spesiale verwysing na die kerk van die Morawiese Broederkerk te Genadendal 1737-1989, (Master’s Thesis, Stellenbosch University, 1989), 14 and cited by Inge Engelbrecht, Komponiste van Genadendal (Master’s Thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2017), 6.}

After Schmidt’s return to Germany in 1744, he was succeeded by three Moravian missionaries in 1792, Hendrik Marsveld, Daniel Schwinn, and Christian Kühnel, who continued Schmidt’s evangelical work among the local people. According to the common historical narrative, in the 48 years between Schmidt and his German successors, a local woman named Magdalena regularly read from the Bible to her community.^{[6] Bernhard Krüger, The pear tree blossoms. A history of the Moravian mission stations in South Africa 1737-1869 (Genadendal: Genadendal Printing Works, 1967), 45-52, as cited by Engelbrecht, Komponiste van Genadendal, 7. While Magdalena’s Biblical readings have become commonly accepted as part of the Moravian Mission Station’s historiographically constructed origin story, it is not substantiated by Marsveld, Schwinn, and Kühnel’s published diaries. By contrast, the missionaries’ narration describes Old Lena’s (as they referred to her) return to her so-called sinful ways. See Bredekamp, H. E. and F. Plüddemann, eds., The Genadendal Diaries: Diaries of the Herrnhut Missionaries, H. Marsveld, D. Schwinn and J.C. Kühnel, vol 1 (1792-1794), trans. Angelika B. L. Flegg (Bellville: University of the Western Cape Institute for Historical Research, 1992).} The German missionaries were accomplished musicians,^{[7]Ibid., 269.} as was Schmidt who composed his own hymns.^{[8] Ibid., 16.} At Genadendal, South Africa’s first training school was established in 1840,^{[9]Du Preez, “Genadendal’s Historical Context,” 14, as cited by Engelbrecht, Komponiste van Genadendal, 7.} which included music tuition.^{[10]Isaac Balie, Die geskiedenis van Genadendal, 1738-1988 (Cape Town: Perskor Publishers, 1988), 93, as cited by Engelbrecht, Komponiste van Genadendal, 7.}

Besides tuition in violin, piano, organ, voice, and choir, brass instruments were taught with vigour.^{[11]Nola Reed Knouse, “Moravian Music: Introduction, Theme, and Variations,” Journal of Moravian History 2 (2007): 45 and Krüger, The pear tree blossoms, 269, as cited by Engelbrecht, Komponiste van Genadendal, 7.} This tradition, that serves as an answer to the biblical calling of Psalm 150, lives on with the celebration of the annual “Basuinfees”, which is scheduled to coincide with Heritage Day in September this year. From this emphasis on music education, Genadendal fostered a vibrant musical life and produced a number of composers.^{[12]For an account of the lives and musical works of three composers of Genadendal, namely Sacks Williams, Dan Apolles, and Dan Ulster, see Engelbrecht, Komponiste van Genadendal}

Today, much of this heritage is preserved at Genadendal’s Mission Museum. The museum was founded and directed by Isaac Balie for 50 years, and is now managed by his daughter Judith Balie. One of the rooms in the museum holds display cases that exhibit printed and handwritten scores of both secular and sacred music, photographs, portraits of composers, instruments (especially positive organs, harmoniums, brass instruments, bowed string instruments, and pianos), and newspaper articles. The remainder of the music collection is uncatalogued and is stored in cardboard boxes in the museum’s safe. The documents in these boxes consist of secular and sacred scores such as chorales, hymns, and the like in staff and tonic sol-fa notation.^{[13]Grant Olwage has theorised on the significance of tonic sol-fa notation as a disciplinary tool in black choralism for the imperial civilizing mission at the Eastern Cape Frontier. See Grant Olwage, “Discipline and Choralism: The Birth of Musical Colonialism,” in Music, Power, and Politics, ed. Annie J. Randall (New York: Routledge, 2004), 25-46. For more on the colonial imposition of tonality and Western art music in Africa, see Kofi Agawu, “Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa,” in Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, edited by Ronaldo Radano & Tejumola Olaniyan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 334-356 and Agawu, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (New York, Routledge, 2003).}

The presence of works that were specifically composed for the Moravian church, by composers such as C. I. Latrobe (1758-1836), alongside composers of canonical Western liturgical music, such as W.A. Mozart (1756-1791) and G.F. Handel (1685-1759) is characteristic of the collection. Also worth mentioning, is the significant collection of educational material on counterpoint, basso continuo, and instrumental instruction.

A large amount of the scores that are found in these brown cardboard boxes are printed piano composition books that comprise works by composers such as Chopin and Schumann and have been preserved in a fair condition. However, although it is clear that an effort has been made to carefully store this material, some books are now unfortunately merely a collection of loose pages that often require rearranging by the researchers before the assistants are able to photograph the material. This might be due to the lack of proper storage space.

Before the first printing press was established in Genadendal, local inhabitants copied music scores provided by the missionaries by hand, a tradition that has clearly been cultivated over the years and is evident in the archive. Several books and pages of handwritten transcribed scores make up a large part of the archive and includes music scored for SATB voice parts, piano reductions of larger choral and orchestral works, and individual brass instrument parts for ensemble playing.

The Genadendal Music Collections Catalogue (GMCC) project envisions a database that documents and catalogues the music sources archived at the Genadendal Mission Museum. Furthermore, the project aims to document the oral histories of music teachers, composers, and musicians in the community. These interviews and the digital copies of the collection’s archived documents will be comprehensively catalogued, and hosted online as a database. The database will integrate sound files, images, and videos, and will include links to authority records created by other international library cataloguing systems, such as the German National Library and the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) initiative. The GMCC^{[14]GMCC is funded by the Heritage Fund of the German Foreign Ministry and the Strategic Fund of Stellenbosch University.} project is hosted by Africa Open Institute (AOI) at Stellenbosch University from October 2020 until September 2022.

The GMCC project aims to contribute to the documentation of music in Genadendal, and to enable further research into the historical impact of the Christian mission on music in the Western Cape, the agency of the Genadendal community in their adoption and localisation of the Moravian missionaries’ music, as well as the present manifestations of music in Genadendal. In addition, the project aims to provide material—in the forms of the music collection’s digitised documents, a thorough catalogue thereof, and recorded and transcribed interviews—for further research into the impact of Genadendal’s Training School and its dissemination of Western art music in South Africa.

The GMCC project was conceived by Jürgen May, an affiliate academic of AOI, who also directs the project as principal investigator. May and his wife first visited the Genadendal Mission Museum in 2016 as tourists interested in the traces of German presences in South Africa. This visit became an unforgettable experience for May, who recounts

It was not only because of the stunning moment when I unexpectedly found myself in a room stuffed with musical instruments that immediately sparked my researcher’s interest. There also was this unreal, surprising situation that an elderly gentleman addressed me in German; this was Dr. Isaac Balie who by some strange coincidence had identified me as a musicologist from Germany.^{[15]Jürgen May, personal correspondence with the authors, 13 July 2021.}

Inspired by his experience in Genadendal, and strongly encouraged by Stephanus Muller, the director of AOI, a plan for cataloguing and digitising the Genadendal music collections was developed.

Digitisation, cataloguing, and interviews for the documentation of oral history are conducted by researchers Inge Engelbrecht and Anke Froehlich, both postgraduate students at AOI. They are supported by two assistants from the Genadendal community, Petronella Louis and Dan Taylor. Louis and Taylor were both part of a previous project at the museum (from June 2011 to September 2012) for the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA)  that identified, documented and digitised all the artifacts that are in the museum.

As with any new endeavour, we experienced several challenges from the onset of this project. The most notable of these were the restrictions the Covid-19 pandemic posed for (and imposed on) the commencement of this undertaking. These restrictions, which included the ban on international and regional traveling at one stage, set the projected timeline back by several months. It also meant that the arrival of the necessary equipment and archival storage material was delayed, to the chagrin of all involved, but especially the assistants who were eager to begin working. Once the restrictions were lessened, we were able to travel to Genadendal and begin evaluating and sorting the material. Shortly after, our equipment, which included a repro stand and lights (from the United States) and camera (from Cape Town) arrived. Unfortunately, our archival boxes have yet to arrive.

The museum conference hall is currently our main venue for documenting. This space has graciously been made available to us by the director and staff of the museum and is shared between the GMCC project and equipment, and the general staff and activities of the museum. Although this room affords great mobility for our documenting activities and sorting of the material, it requires strategic intervention by the team to assure that the end product adheres to the requirements set forth by the project outlines. Some of these interventions often include practical measures such as blocking out natural light so as to limit unnecessary shadows on the digital end product.

The archive, community members, and team that we have been working with so far speaks of cultural and historical confluence. The noticeable cultural, regional and global linguistic differences, for one, the interactions between the different members of the team and the understanding of the material have already been interesting to observe. Therefore, this issue could become a fascinating case study in future research on the archive.

In the wake of devastation caused by fires around Table Mountain that started on 18 April 2021, which destroyed UCT’s African Studies Special Collections Library, a reminder of the importance of archival digitisation projects is hardly needed. While archival work can be time consuming and laborious, the day-to-day care and patience that the GMCC project requires is driven by a scholarly commitment to the preservation, documentation, and study of music and its concomitant social histories. As eminent musicologist Chris Ballantine eloquently puts it,

The second obstacle, then, is the archive itself. This reminds us, if a reminder is still needed, that archives are repositories of power. Of course, archives masquerade as neutral; they pretend to be nothing more than “passive storehouses of old stuff,” and they are sustained by a myth that the archivist is “an objective, neutral, passive keeper of truth.” But at least since Foucault we have come to see these views as illusions. Archives are constructed socially, within politically contested domains, in order to serve particular ends; they are bounded sites, subject to specific controls; the very act of preserving documents within these sites can confer legitimacy and agency on some social groups, in the same moment that it strips other groups of these capabilities. Archives are crucial to the maintenance of power—all sorts of power, including that of “the state, the church, the corporation, the family, the public, or the individual”. Archives define social memory, lay the foundation for history, fix identity, make it possible to say what we know and what we do not know. As our epistemological filing cabinets, archives are sources of hegemony; they “reflect and constitute power relations”; they define our social reality. “Control of the archive means control of society and thus control of determining history’s winners and losers.”^{[16]Christopher Ballantine, “Song, Memory, Power, and the South African Archive,” The Musical Quarterly 99, no. 1 (2016): 74. Ballantine quotes Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 1-5, 13.}

Ballantine writes from his perspective as expert witness in the 2013 court proceedings that concerned the Thula Baba lullaby. While the circumstances that surrounded the litigation are markedly different, Ballantine’s sentiments ring true for anyone who has ever endeavoured to archive or engage with an archived collection. An archive is never randomly compiled. Indeed, to archive, which is an agential and relational act, is to maintain power. Like Ballantine, anthropologist Bernard Cohn asserts that archival science points to the politics of knowledge making, that the gathering of facts is not an innocent exercise, but a larger project of information control.^{[17]Bernhard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1-15.} Archives store “facts” or, more accurately, epistemes^{[18]Michel Foucault used the term “episteme” to specify the strategic apparatus which permits the separation of scientific knowledge from non-scientific knowledge. For Foucault, an episteme has the power to classify knowledge, and he was well aware that this process of classification was not innocent, as scientific knowledge was deemed superior to any other forms of knowledge. Thus, the kind of episteme which a culture or society values, determines the kind of knowledge production it pursues. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 197; and Foucault, An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Noel Clarke (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 168.} which determine the ways in which history is written, and it has the power to make and unmake identities.^{[19]For more about the ways in which archives that were marked as “tribal” or “traditional” were denied the possibility of histories that change and were endowed with a timeless culture that is explicitly distinguished from modernity, see the two edited volumes Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and Material Record in Southern KwaZulu Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods, eds. Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer (Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwazulu Natal Press, 2016).} As Ballantine suggests, the preservation of documents in an archive makes and validates knowledge,^{[20]As postcolonial studies have shown us, knowledge-production is a contested site. Gayatri Spivak coined the term “epistemic violence” to describe the violence that knowledge production entails. Specifically, Spivak refers to the way in which colonial discourse produced knowledge about colonised subjects, which served to legitimise the civilising mission and colonial conquest. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Carly Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.} which can confer legitimacy and agency on some social groups, or take away these capabilities from other groups.

This view can be contested by stating that archival material merely constitutes “raw material”, and that it is the interpretation of the material which determines historiography, legitimacy, and agency. While this view is not entirely false, it fails to recognise that the decisions over which material is deemed worthy of collection is a political choice—whether witting or unwitting— in itself. If certain kinds of material are collected or deemed to be worthy of attention, then it follows that certain kinds of meanings, or epistemes, will be constructed.

A fascinating creative response to the centrality of the archive, as an institution, in history making, and South Africa’s colonial and missionary legacy was presented as an installation entitled Boundary Objects in Germany at Dresden’s Kunsthaus, as well as elsewhere, by the Burning Museum (BM) arts collective.^{[21]The Burning Museum (BM) is an interdisciplinary and collaborative arts collective that finds their roots in Cape Town.} After engaging with the Moravian archives in Genadendal and Herrnhut, the collective created an installation as a reflection on their own positions as “boundary objects” toward the “missionary morality”.^{[22] As the collective puts it, “Historically, the archive has occupied a central position in history making. The reliance on text, documents, referencing and citation constitute a Eurocentric legacy of, and fetish for objectivity, facts and ‘truth’. It is a positivist methodology that lingers like an epistemological shadow. Arriving in Dresden with the baggage of colonial discourse, we blend the archive in a ‘boundary practise’ of connecting and disconnecting personal narratives with historical narratives, to arrive at a place where we can ask questions differently. We cut out, reframe ourselves in images and the images themselves. The images [that are presented as part of the installation] are collages of photographs from the Herrnhut archive about the mission stations of Genadendal and Elim, South Africa as well as our own personal visual archives.” See Burning Museum collective, “The Mission and the Message: #colonialproblems”, burning museum, 13 September 2015. The intersections between work, coloniality, and archive-making has also been addressed by many scholars. See, for example, Elizabeth Elbourne, “Early Khoisan uses of mission Christianity,” Kronos 19, no. 1 (1992): 3-27; Elbourne (ed), Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799 – 1853 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008);  and Jane Lydon, “’Fantastic dreaming’: Ebenezer Mission as Moravian Utopia and Wotjobaluk responses,” in Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, eds. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 218-238.}

When considered in this light, and alongside this issue of herri’s theme of “social impact”, it is not difficult to recognize the responsibility and weight of historical legacy that the Genadendal Music Collections Catalogue project bears. By the same token, one understands that the task of the archivist and oral historian is critical for imagining a possible decolonial future.

The authors wish to thank Jürgen May for reading and offering invaluable comments on a draft of this article, the text is better for it.