ABSTRACT
The definition, content and approach to music in contemporary public schools have garnered ambivalent relationships in the continent’s independent nations’ educational spaces. Music is an enigma to university and high school administrators who have little understanding of the discipline, as it is practised in the academy. The proffered curriculum often leads to reluctant (if any) support from these administrators, since the type of Western music studied shares very little with the lived musical experience and patronage of most people in any given African country. The music curriculum inherited from European colonists was and still is the standard through which most of the world measures musicianship in academic spaces. On the one hand, this is the main approach the said educators experienced in their formal schooling even if they encounter other ways of knowing, learning and performing elsewhere. The curriculum has become the way of ‘doing’ music in contemporary schools to the dearth of systems indigenous to the continent or borne out of Afrogenic social or creative systems. On the other hand, there is a steady growth in institutions offering music courses in public and private institutions on the continent. That growth was preceded by interests in the musics of the continent for academic, industrial and recreational use by people from other continents. It is also spurred by a desire to increase one’s musical competence and understanding in the face of increasing opportunities in the burgeoning music industry on the continent. In this discussion, I will highlight some ways select educational institutions from ‘Anglophone’ Africa have mitigated challenges in the discipline, discuss some other resources and approaches to teaching and learning music suggested from outsiders to the continent or Africans who teach outside the continent, dissect the trajectory of intended learning outcomes, and propose some ways to moderate the debates on what is lived, what is taught and what is researched. My primary case studies are drawn from Kenya.
