A Joyful Noise: African Churches Reclaim Traditional Musical Instruments
In 1956, Johan K. Louw, a missionary of the Dutch Reformed Mission School at Dowa in the then British African colony of Nyasaland (now Malawi), expressed one wish: to see his African flock praising and worshipping the Lord through their own music.
“After my short experience of work amongst African people in Nyasaland, I am becoming more and more convinced that the foreignness of the music we use in worship is a very important contributory factor in making the Christian religion to be something Western in the mind of many an African,” pointed out Louw, who had worked among the natives for 14 years.
During these years, the missionary had observed, with disappointment, how the imposition of Western music on Africans caused their worship to be rather staid, stilted and awkward.
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“When one true African Christian musician is brought to disregard any form of church music that he may have known in the past and breaks forth praising God in the musical medium that lies closest to his heart, half the battle will have been won. This is not impossible,” the missionary wrote in the journal “African Music.”
Missionary ban on native music
According to historical accounts, the conspicuous absence of native music in African churches during the better part of the colonial era was not by accident, but by design.
When Western Protestant Christian missionaries arrived on the African continent in the 19th century, they disallowed the use of native musical instruments in church, which they associated with demonic worship, fearing that these would encourage their converts to retain their earlier religious practices. As a result, various celebrated African musical instruments such as the Zimbabwean mbira, marimba, gourd rattle, flutes, native whistles, clatter sticks and African talking drums, among others, were banished from the church.
But over the years, as increasingly larger segments of the African populations embrace Christianity, perceptions have been changing. From Zimbabwe to Nigeria, from Uganda to Ghana and everywhere across the African continent, these instruments that were once blacklisted as undesirable for quintessential Christian worship are now finding their way into African Christian spaces of worship, where they are playing not an insignificant role.
Today, in many churches across Africa, the solemn congregational hymns are either dominated or supplemented with vibrant instrumental music, unheard of during the time of missionaries.
‘It’s part of inculturation’
Solomon Olusola Ademiluka from the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies in the Faculty of Human Resources at the University of South Africa, who is also affiliated with the Department of Religious Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Kogi State University in Nigeria, has studied the use of African traditional instruments in Christian worship by the Yoruba people of his native Nigeria.
He said the early missionaries placed a strict ban on all forms of native music as well as the use of musical instruments for fear that converts would retain what they considered to be heathen practices.
“For the missionaries, anything associated with African religion was [idolatry], and therefore an abomination,” Ademiluka told Religion Unplugged. “Traditional musical instruments used to be employed in the worship of the gods; hence, they couldn’t be admitted into Christian worship. I will say it’s part of inculturation; many things that the early missionaries rejected have been found by African Christians as useful for the advancement of the gospel.”
According to Prof. Norman Murdoch’s book “Christian Warfare in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe,” it was not uncommon for some missionaries in some parts of Africa to toil for up to three years without gaining even a single convert. It was these precious converts that the missionaries feared could slip back to their traditional worshipping practices, hence the move to ban native music and their instruments, together with other native cultural practices.
‘Demand for indigenization of worship’
As part of Christian worship, the missionaries translated European Christian hymns into the local languages for use in the church, usually accompanied only by the organ. However, African Christian converts, dissatisfied with these dull adaptations, with encouragement from liberal missionaries like Louw, increasingly demanded the indigenization of worship, particularly its music. To satisfy this desire, Africans began to make suitable indigenous adaptations to the order of worship service.
In his study, Ademiluka pointed out that churches and Christians involved in this practice always pointed to biblical references, particularly Psalm 100, which clearly encourages exuberant music. He also highlights that Psalm 150 specifically instructs worshippers to employ various kinds of musical instruments in their worship.
His research established that these indigenous musical adaptations enhanced interest in worship by making it culturally meaningful.
“These adaptations also cater for the musical tastes of the varying ages in the congregations, especially the youth, which is actually one factor that accounts for the numerical growth of the New Generation Churches above the older denominations,” Ademiluka wrote.
“Furthermore, lively music has often served as a source of inspiration for depressed worshippers,” he wrote. “Most importantly, instrumental music has become an inseparable part of the worship service in most churches so much that it is unimaginable conducting worship without it. If it ever happened ‘people would go away and perhaps not come back.’ Therefore, rather than being a hindrance to Christianity in Nigeria, instrumental music has actually helped its growth and development in several ways.”
The final breakthrough
A real breakthrough for African musical instruments came in 1964 during the canonization of the Uganda Martyrs when the Vatican II synod allowed the first ever African indigenous music to be performed during a Catholic worship.
In doing so, Uganda became the first country in the world to have its music sung in indigenous languages, accompanied by traditional instruments, at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.
With the advent of independence of most African countries from the colonial rule that had helped enforce the ban on native instruments, more African musical instruments increasingly emerged from the shadows.
Kenneth Mufuka, a professor of African History at Lander University in South Carolina, said some African pastors frustrated with “missionary arrogance” led a rebellion against what they saw as the imposition of Western cultural norms.
Mufuka said that, in addition to banning native musical instruments, the missionaries “also banned other cultural practices” such as polygamy and, in some cases, these issues resulted in some of the African pastors breaking away to form independent African churches.
Takudzwa Matata, the director of the Parktown Methodist Choir in Harare, which is popular for its almost exclusive use of African traditional musical instruments, told Religion Unplugged there is now acceptance of most of these instruments as time has since shorn of the stigma that used to be attached to them.
“As a church, we have been using these traditional musical instruments for a long time that they are now part of our identity as the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe,” he added.
A festival of African instruments
This past September marked the Mbira Month in Zimbabwe, which is highlighted by 30 days of celebrating the mbira, a uniquely Zimbabwean traditional musical instrument.
This year, the festival organizers decided to run a two-day online festival to showcase the use of African traditional musical instruments in Christian worship.
To their surprise, there were more than 60 entries from across the whole of the African continent in which various Christian musical groups displayed a wide range of traditional musical instruments available on the continent.
“It was more than we expected,” the festival’s organizer, Albert Chimedza, told Religion Unplugged. “We received entries from many countries, and from these entries, you can see that in countries like Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi and others, it is now almost normal for the people to use their own traditional instruments in Christian worship, which is what it ought to be.”
Cyril Zenda is a journalist based in Harare, Zimbabwe.