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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'Music of Origin': Class, Social Category and the Performers and Audience of Kiba, a South African Migrant Genre
Author:James, DeborahISNI
Year:1997
Periodical:Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
Volume:67
Issue:3
Pages:454-475
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:Sotho
labour migration
songs
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Architecture and the Arts
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/1161184
Abstract:This article uses a case study of the 'kiba' migrant performance genre from the Northern Province of South Africa to illuminate recent theoretical ideas on the role of performers and audiences, and in so doing to offer a critical perspective on the way in which the concept of class has been conceptualized in some southern African studies. While the homogenizing and Western-oriented concept of class may well be unsuitable in some African and other southern contexts, as certain writers have claimed, migrant northern Sotho communities have developed indigenous notions of social category which combine modern work-related sources of identity with apparently backward looking celebrations of traditional behaviour. The broader constituency of labour migrant performers in the study comprised three distinct groupings: male workers residing on the Witwatersrand but based in Sekhukhune, the reserve southeast of Pietersburg; male migrants' stay-at-home dependent wives or sisters who reside year-round in the same Sekhukhune area; and female labour migrants from the Leboa area who have moved to the Witwatersrand more recently. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French.
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