Myth-Building through Diegetic African Music in Early South African Sound Films

Early South African sound film foregrounded issues of importance to Afrikaner nationalist ideology and contributed to its mythology through several strategies, from sentimentalizing domestic challenges of Afrikaner families to epic quasi-historical productions. These films initiated an immersion in nationalist propaganda that permeated the film industry. Myth-building through music in films of this period leveraged decontextualized African music to affirm colonial and nationalist stereotypes of Africans as primitive and warlike or, following subjugation, servile and happy. This chapter analyses how African music is implicated in the construction of colonial and nationalist mythologizing, deconstructing the surface-level ‘authenticity’ of diegetic indigenous music performance.