The symphonic poem Fatše La Heso (My Country) is Moerane's only extant orchestral work. As an orchestral composition by a black South African that makes extensive use of traditional music, it remains unique. The preconditions for the work to exist are unusual and it stands in quite sharp contrast to the orchestral work produced, for example, by African Americans William Grant Still, William Levi Dawson and Florence Price. The 1930s and 1940s in the United States were ‘a time of rebirth in the Black literary arts known as “The Harlem Renaissance”’, when ‘Black artists of all mediums – writers, poets, painters, and musicians – were encouraged by black leaders to draw upon their own African cultural heritage and events of recent black history […] for inspiration in their own respective artistic media.’ Many black South African writers and artists were inspired by the Harlem Renaissance to reconcile modernity with the preservation of black cultural traditions, and it is highly likely that Moerane was too, when he set about reconciling orchestral writing with traditional music from Lesotho.

The inspiration behind his symphonic poem was not only the Harlem Renaissance; there were many factors at play in the genesis of the work, including musical influences. A number of African-American and African composers admired Dvořák (1841–1904): not only had he helped to shape the genre of the symphonic poem as an expression of nineteenth-century nationalism, but through his promotion of ‘the wealth of American material found in the melodies and harmonies’ of spirituals, he had inspired Grant Still, Price, Levi Dawson and others to incorporate styles such as the spiritual into their classical compositions. Dvořák had lived for a while in the United States and worked closely with the famous black collector of folk songs and spirituals, Harry T Burleigh (Henry Thacker Burleigh), some of whose arrangements Moerane knew (see Chapter 7). Notwithstanding the racialised world in which African-American composers in the 1930s and 1940s operated, it was still possible for them to study at university and to contemplate symphonic writing. For Moerane, it was almost unthinkable, given the ‘parallel streams’ of music production and reception in South Africa described in earlier chapters.

The state's concerted campaign against Nusas put Jenny Curtis's generation of student activists into a precarious position and forced them to re-evaluate their politics. Surrounded by banned people, Jenny found her room to manoeuvre seriously curtailed. The space for resisting apartheid – legally, openly – was narrowing, and fast. After her brother Neville's dramatic escape to Australia (sneaking aboard a boat, using a friend's passport) others soon followed in his path. Three more of the Claremont communards (Chris Wood, Paula Ensor and Philippe le Roux) were living in exile by 1976. For many young white leftists, there was a sense, as Barbara Hogan remembers it, that

Responding to this rapidly deteriorating political climate, Jenny Curtis and her comrades were largely on their own. They had become ‘post-student people’. That is to say, having developed their politics inside Nusas, they now found themselves older than and also intellectually and emotionally beyond the confines of campus politics. The interaction with the Black Consciousness Movement and the repressive tactics of the state had forced these young white people to reject liberalism, and to radicalise in various ways. At the same time, the even heavier repression of the 1960s meant that Curtis's generation was more or less entirely cut off from previous generations of struggle. As Glenn Moss described it, ‘there was very little contact with the past because those who had been involved in the past were either in jail, or banned, or house arrested, or dead, or in exile’. For Barbara Hogan, this separation from older activists meant that ‘we weren't given the givens’. In other words, the process of radicalisation that this group of young people experienced happened largely without the possibility of being mentored, or sculpted, into accepting the so-called ‘correct line’. Cut adrift from the major African nationalist organisations and the Communist Party, this group, says Hogan, ‘developed our own homespun brand of what it means to be a Marxist in South Africa.

Conspiracy minded

Barbara Hogan estimated that ‘a hundred or more’ people were detained during her time.

Contrary to what the security police might have imagined at the time, the political climate among young opponents of apartheid in the late 1970s was fluid, contested and experimental. Devan Pillay, a young man raised in East London, classified racially as Indian, and studying at Rhodes University, found himself right in the middle of all of these different political trajectories. Along with his friend Lindy Harris and a white lecturer at Rhodes named Guy Berger, Pillay was part of a reading group, which had been organised with the explicit goal of understanding the ANC and Marxism more deeply. At the same time, Pillay had some contact with people who were active in the ANC underground, including Mandla Gxanyana, and a distant relative of his, whom the ANC sent to recruit Pillay. In other words, according to Pillay, ‘I was sort of ready to be recruited into a political project … But I wasn't yet recruited.’

The commission of inquiry that was convened by the IUEF in order to investigate Williamson's espionage was comprised of an international group of representatives from different governments. In addition to John Wilson, who had been the information officer at the IUEF office in London, the commissioners were:

The commission met on three separate occasions, between April and June of 1980, in Geneva, London, Lusaka and Gaborone. In addition to reading through whatever files were still held by the IUEF (as Williamson had absconded with a large pile of key documents) the commission also heard testimony from more than 20 different people, including staff of the IUEF, recipients of IUEF funding and representatives from the ANC (Mac Maharaj, Thabo Mbeki and Thomas Nkobi), as well as representatives from Zanu. Arthur McGiven, the BOSS officer who initially exposed Williamson, also gave testimony.

The principal function of the commission of inquiry was to assess ‘the extent of damage done to the organization, to the recipients of IUEF assistance, and to IUEF relations with other organizations’ as a result of Williamson's infiltration. The commission was concerned not only with the specifics of what Williamson had done (or intended to do), it also sought to probe more deeply into the structural problems within the IUEF, which (a) allowed the organisation to be infiltrated in the first place and (b) allowed a significant portion of well-meaning funds to be diverted and misused by the South African security services. The commission was influenced strongly by the stated concerns of the donors who provided funding for the IUEF. Crucially, since a great deal of the funding for the IUEF came from European governments, there was a concern that widespread distrust of the IUEF as a result of Williamson's infiltration would have a negative impact on all attempts to fund the anti-apartheid movement. ‘This was a clear and present danger judging by the various reports appearing in the donor countries.’

Mangoloaneng, Mariazell and Morija

Michael Mosoeu's first teacher was his father, at Jakane Moerane's Junior Primary School of Mangoloaneng. This went up to what was then called Standard 4, equivalent to the current Grade 6 in South Africa, in which the average age is eleven to twelve. Rural children like Moerane helped with farming chores before and after school: ‘the care for the calves, horses and sometimes even sheep, was our full responsibility and woe betide us if anything went amiss in these fields.’ Like his siblings, Moerane continued higher primary education (Standards 5–7) at the Roman Catholic Mission School at Mariazell, five miles north of Mangoloaneng. Mariazell ‘trained us to be hardy’, remembers Manasseh: ‘we woke up even in the Drakensberg winters in time for mass at 5 a.m. and we did manual work after classes and our food was simple but good.’

Moerane's musical education began, as it does for most children, informally, in the family home and the community. Moerane played the harmonium in the house, an instrument that, as his sister Epainette pointed out, ‘would be unusual now, but it was not unusual then’. She remembered how one's feet had to pump the pedals while ‘you played on top, on the keyboard’, and that ‘whenever there was singing, he [Moerane] preferred classical music’. Her recollection was that among all the siblings, ‘Mike’ was ‘the only musical one, the only one interested in music’. When I asked her where she thought this talent came from, she replied ‘Goodness knows!’ Moerane learnt to read tonic solfa notation at primary school; ‘very elementary music’, as Epainette saw it, adding that she personally ‘was so uninterested! … tonic solfa … very boring!’.

The mission press at Morija published school textbooks and song-books in tonic solfa, some of which Jakane would have bought for his school. Mariazell made use of tonic solfa songbooks published by the Catholic Mazenod Institute in Maseru. Singing and tonic solfa theory provided the staple musical education for African children in mission schools across southern Africa in the early twentieth century – and did so in state schools until comparatively recently.

Lusaka limbo

If it were possible to reconstruct the Schoons’ mindset at the moment of understanding that they needed to leave Botswana, it might be possible to understand the thought processes that went into the decision to go to Angola. However, there is about a six-month gap between their departure from Botswana in June of 1983 and their arrival in Luanda in December of that same year. These months are almost entirely unaccounted for, either by Marius or by anyone who might have known them and worked closely with them during that period.

There are a number of problems with reconstructing these events. First of all, it is important to understand that whether or not either Jenny or Marius were actively participating in armed activities, they were nonetheless, as disciplined members of the ANC in exile, ‘under instruction’, which meant being subject to a military hierarchy. This was especially true in terms of major life decisions, such as where to live or what work to do (even whether or whom to marry). That is, in the language of the ANC at that time, the Schoons would have been ‘deployed’ to Lubango, and this would have been thought of in much the same way as any other soldier, for any army, being deployed into a given war situation. Other members of the ANC underground during that same period explained to me that it was possible – to an extent – to refuse a command from someone higher in the hierarchy, or at least to negotiate for another option. But this kind of negotiating had to be done within reason, and while understanding that the organisation had limited resources, spread out across multiple countries in Africa, as well as further afield. Also, at the end of the day, there was always the basic feeling that having committed oneself to the ANC meant surrendering to the larger needs of ‘the movement’, even in matters of life and death.

When Hilda Bernstein interviewed Marius Schoon in 1990, after the organisation's unbanning, and as he was preparing to return home, there are a number of moments in the interview where he expresses criticisms or regrets about the ANC.

On 26 and 27 March 2019, almost 60 years since the Sharpeville Massacre, a group of 50 or more veterans from the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), came together for a conference at Liliesleaf, which is now a ‘space of liberation’, a museum and conference centre, but was once the site of a dramatic police raid, in 1963, which led to the imprisonment of most of the African National Congress's (ANC) executive leadership. At this conference, on multiple occasions I witnessed MK members saying, ‘we fought against apartheid … and apartheid ended.’ Likewise, younger people in the audience repeatedly congratulated the veterans for having taken up arms, and therefore for ending apartheid. In other words, there was no need to fill in the missing information that is contained within the ellipses. We fought … we won. Story told.

As the veterans told their personal stories about their time in the military underground, I saw that all stories were received as heroic accounts, regardless of the actual details. One veteran spoke of the disastrous failure to bring a large ship down the east coast of Africa, intended to land in the Transkei, to launch a guerrilla uprising, in imitation of the Cubans. The veteran recounted the way in which ‘the boat got sick’ and had to turn back again and again, never making it further south than Dar es Salaam. Another veteran recounted, in gripping detail – and with a remarkable sense of humour – being one of a group of soldiers instructed to march through Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from the Zambian border in the north and attempt to infiltrate South Africa. Desperate for food and water, the group found themselves wandering through a game reserve, hunting zebra (‘the striped quagga’) while being hunted down themselves by the Rhodesian special forces. Many of his comrades died, and he spent months in jail.

Botswana: Wedding day departure

Despite Jenny Curtis and Marius Schoon's defiant enthusiasm, the banning orders did eventually take their toll. When ‘Marius received a tip that he was going to be arrested’, due to his communication with Breytenbach while at Pretoria Central, he decided that his only viable option was to flee the country. Consequently, Jenny Curtis decided that they would need to get married straight away ‘so that, should Marius be caught and imprisoned, she would be able to visit him’. However, figuring out how to marry two people who were under banning orders was by no means straightforward. As Jack Curtis explains, ‘This presented a knotty problem. A magistrates’ court was out of the question for the wedding, and any minister of one of the established churches was likely to hedge at being party to an illegal gathering.’ In fact, as early as March of 1977, both Curtis and Schoon applied to the minister of justice for an exemption to marry. In a provocative attempt to give these applications additional weight, the couple had their letters hand-delivered by Helen Suzman, the Progressive Party MP, who could add a personal touch to the appeal. Suzman attached a note: ‘You once said in the House that you are “a kindly man” – maybe you will react accordingly to the requests I was told were contained in the letters.’ In addition to requesting an exemption to marry, the couple also requested permission to visit Marius's sister in Natal, and ‘Schoon also requested a variation of his restrictions to enable him to live with Curtis at her address’. Unsurprisingly, none of these requests for exemptions was granted. Even though the applications were submitted during April, the minister of justice made no reply whatsoever, through all of April and May. Therefore, the couple decided that the wedding needed to proceed illegally. On 3 June 1977, Jenny Curtis and Marius Schoon were married.

Moerane wrote 16 works that are a direct product of his Christian upbringing and lifelong faith. Alongside his knowledge of and respect for traditional cultural values, he wholeheartedly embraced the culture and theology of the Protestant church, but because of his fairly advanced education in Western classical music, his style of writing goes far beyond the rather simple style of the hymn. His considerable polyphonic skill and a creative use of voices and harmony reveal themselves in a number of works that show his deep spirituality. Four different categories of spiritual songs are distinguished in this chapter, not in order to be prescriptive but simply by way of introduction to his music. They are distinguished not only by their texts, but also by their musical style, and are organised here into four categories: hymns, anthems, sacred songs and spirituals.

The three hymns are simple four-part harmonisations of existing or newly composed congregational melodies: Ea Hlolang (The Triumphant One), Jehova Oa Busa (Jehovah Reigns) and Ntate Ea Mohau (Lord of Mercy). The three anthems are more challenging in their vocal part-writing: Leseli La Hao (Your Light), Vumani KuYehova (Sing To Jehovah) and Ngokuba Sizalelwe Umtwana (For Unto Us a Child is Born). The two sacred songs, Ruri! (Truly!) for SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) and Tsatsi La Pallo (Judgement Day) for SAA can be sung in any type of venue and on any kind of occasion, including a church service. The eight spirituals are in English and are written for varied voices. One of them is an arrangement of a sea shanty, Shenandoah, for SSATTBB, while the rest are arrangements of African-American tunes: By An’ By for SATB, Go Tell It On The Mountains (Christmas) for SATB soloists and SATB choir, I Got A Home In-a Dat Rock for SATB, I Stood On De Ribber for Soprano solo and SATB choir, It's Me, O Lord for SATB, Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen for SAA, and Witness for SATB.

Hymns

Brought up in the practice and faith of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS) church, which later became the Lesotho Evangelical Church (LEC), Moerane was extremely familiar with the PEMS hymnal Lifela tsa Sione. This was first published in Morija in 1844, 11 years after the French–Swiss missionaries established the Protestant mission in Basutoland, and it continues in print to this day.

Books about composers are generally located in subject areas such as orchestral or piano music, opera or chamber music, jazz, electro-acoustic music, popular music, folk or traditional music. The focus of this ‘musical life’, Michael Mosoeu Moerane (1904–1980), wrote one short orchestral work but more than 80 short a cappella choral works for amateur choir, of which only about 10 were known during his lifetime. Composers in the past about whom biographies are written tended to have worked mainly in Europe, North, Central or South America, the Russian Federation and Australasia. Moerane, on the other hand, spent his whole life in rural southern Africa: first the British Cape Colony, then the British Protectorate of Basutoland, then apartheid South Africa and post-independence Lesotho, the latter, one of the smallest and poorest countries in the world.

In addition to subject area and geographical area, there is another unconventional factor in this case. This is not a detailed chronological biography, but an overview of Moerane and his music from different perspectives. A birth to death narrative, even if this were desirable, is impossible because insufficient personal and professional documentation survives to support such an account. If there were personal diaries, certificates, memoirs, notes, memos, LPs and books, they have disappeared – only a few photographs and professional letters are to be found. If much more had existed, however, would it have brought us any closer to ‘the truth’ about Moerane? Biography, to Freud, was an exercise in idealisation, which is why he went to some lengths to destroy his professional papers. Peter Gay makes this claim in the Preface to his biography of Freud, where he also quotes Freud's warning: ‘Whoever turns biographer, commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to embellishments, and even to dissembling his own lack of understanding, for biological truth is not to be had, and, even if one had it, one could not use it.’ There are a couple of truths about Moerane in this book that might make some members of the family uncomfortable, but they are very far from amounting to ‘biographical truth’ writ large. As for dissembling my lack of understanding, some readers will no doubt find plenty of this here.

The 18 songs in this chapter are distinguished from songs in Chapters 7 and 8 by their texts, which are in almost all cases drawn from Sotho authors, and are intensely personal. They are the most ‘literary’ of Moerane's songs, as it were. He was very well-read in Sesotho and English literature, as has been shown. Thirteen songs are for SATB: ‘Mitsa-Mahosi (A Call To Kings), Barali Ba Jerusalema (Daughters of Jerusalem), Della, Hoja Ke Nonyana (If I Were a Bird), Khati (Skipping Game), Lebili (Wheel), Likhohlo (Gorges), Mahakoe (Jewels), Monyaka Oa Pelo (A Joyful Heart), Naleli Ka ‘Ngoe (One Star at a Time), Paki Ha Li Eo (No Witnesses), Satane A Tšeha (Le Joeleputsoa) (The Devil Laughed (Johannesburg)) and Sylvia. Five are for SAA: Lia Qhomaqhoma (They Frolic), Mohokare (The Caledon River), Ngeloi La Me (My Angel), Ntsoaki (a girl's name) and Paka-Mahlomola (Creator of Sorrow).

Because they are so diverse in their musical character and textual themes, I group and discuss these works according to the authors of the poems that Moerane drew upon. Bennett Makalo Khaketla is the poet for five songs: ‘Mitsa-Mahosi (A Call To Kings), Khati, Lia Qhomaqhoma, Likhohlo and Monyaka Oa Pelo. The work of Khaketla's wife, ‘Masechele Caroline Ntseliseng, is used in one song, Hoja Ke Nonyana. Five songs are based on poems by Kemuel Edward Ntsane: Ngeloi La Me, Mohokare, Paka-Mahlomola, Paki Ha Li Eo and Satana A Tšeha (Le Joe-leputsoa). ‘Mabasiea Jeannette Mahalefele is the poet whose work is used for Ntsoaki. The words of Barali Ba Jerusalema are from the Old Testament's ‘Song of Songs’. Della uses a poem by the Xhosa poet, Sampson Synor Mputa, and Moerane himself wrote the lyrics for Mahakoe and Sylvia. Moerane rarely uses an original poem in its entirety, preferring to extract verses that must have inspired his musical sensibilities.