Page 27 - Research & Innovation Report 2020

HUMANITIES

Exploring the music

of the Khoisan

In April 2020, Professor Alethea de Villiers, head of department in the Department of Music
and Performing Arts was announced as one of five recipients of a prestigious international
music education research grant.

Since joining the University in 2012, Prof de Villiers has been a is being said about the people who call themselves South Africa’s
member of the International Society of Music Education (ISME), first nations – the Khoisan – in the music curriculum.
affiliated with the International Music Council and the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. As a result, she responded to a call from ISME-SEMPRE (Society
for Education, Music and Psychology Research) for applications
Prof de Villiers’s research interests are music education policy, to fund research on the music culture of first nations. Her
multicultural education and democratic citizenship. Her recently successful proposal was awarded $3000 (approximately R42 000)
published article, “(Re) organizing the music curriculum as for a research project titled, “Rewriting the decolonising and
multicultural music education” in the International Journal of indigenising narrative: A South African case study”.
Music Education triggered Prof de Villiers’s realisation that little
Prof de Villiers explains: “The indigenising
project is looking at how music from the
culture of all the South African people can be
incorporated into the curriculum. And while
I’ve been reading on this journey, it’s almost
been like being on a treasure hunt. You don’t
find all the information in one place because
some of the people have died and there are
also very few people who even speak these
indigenous languages. So we cannot recreate
what happened before because there isn’t a
generation passing something on to the next
generation.

“But I discovered the Khoisan revivalist
movement, so I am now speaking to revivalists,
who like myself, are wanting to reclaim and
learn about all of their ancestry. This research
is almost saying ‘what happened in the past?’
and what can we include today to make it
topical and also for people to be interested
in it.”

In her research Prof De Villiers says she has
found that there is very little evidence of the
music itself because when people started
writing it there were no recordings. There are
Prof Alethea de Villiers fragments of the music that exist and some

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