Giving a voice to budding young scholars on the African continent

Abstract

Giving a voice to budding young scholars on the African continentIn his influential publication Representing African Music (2003), Kofi Agawu asserts that '[t]he spirit of African music is […] not always manifest [ed] in the scholarship about it' (xii) and that 'there is a disjunction between the practice of African music and its scholarly representation ' (xv-xvi). While Agawu's polemic against ethnomusicology has been praised by some (see Solis 2004) and critiqued by others (see Meintjes 2006), his call for more research on African musics by African scholars -or what Euba (2008:158) refers to as 'good foreign policy […] that allows the Other to speak for the Other' since it is 'fully capable of representing itself ' -still rings true in our current milieu of academic decolonisation.The Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa (JMAA) prides itself as a pan-African publication that 'aims to combine ethnomusicological, musicological, music educational and performancebased research in a unique way to promote the musical arts on the African continent' <Aims and Scope>. Among other endeavours, JMAA contributes to the development of African musical arts scholarship through the commissioning and publication of: • Reports on African musical arts-related conferences, concerts and events on the continent, as well as relevant international proceedings. This volume, for example, includes a report by the Nigerian scholar Bode Omojola on the Akin Euba Symposium and Concert held in Lagos, Nigeria earlier this year; • Tributes and obituaries of notable African scholars, such as the Zimbabwean mbira player Chartwell Dutiro's honouring of his fellow countryman, the musical icon Oliver 'Tuku' Mtukudzi, who passed away in January this year, 1 and Patricia Shehan Campbell's obituary of the Namibian scholar Minette Mans, who died in June. • Reviews of African musical arts-related books and CDs, as apparent in Paula Fourie's discussion of Sylvia Bruinders's recent publication (2017) on the Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape, South Africa, and Kirsten Adams's review of the album Where Worlds Collide (2017) by the piano duo Kathleen Tagg and