Making a Musical Monument: The South African Music Encyclopedia and the Politics of Knowledge

The South African Music Encyclopedia(SAME) is a four-volume, 1,920-page tome published between 1979 and 1986 under the editorship of Jacques Philip Malan. Considered by some as the most important achievement of apartheid-era music studies, others deem it its most compromised undertaking. It remains the only comprehensive music encyclopedia produced on the African continent. In this article, I view SAME as a textual field of social, political and aesthetic explication. This enables me to read SAME’s foci – and its silences – as a reflection of both South African music scholarship and broader apartheid-era knowledge production. Drawing on extensive archival research and close analysis of the text, I examine the commissioning of SAME, its contents, the policies of its editor-in-chief, as well as the ideologies and methodologies that shaped its approach.My analysis shows that SAME’s structure and omissions reflected the racialised exclusions characteristic of apartheid society, mirroring the regime’s reconfiguration of South Africa’s physical and intellectual landscapes. Just as apartheid confined black and coloured South Africans to designated areas, SAME segregated black musical traditions into separate entries, limiting their integration into the encyclopedic domain of white South Africa. Yet, many of SAME’s exclusions also resulted from the limitations of the field and disciplinary structures of the time. These included significant blind spots in terms of popular music, a general lack of scholarship on African music, a recurrent European orientation as well as a depoliticised form of music historiography largely unmoored from social and lived contexts. Ultimately, SAME exemplifies the ideological and structural constraints that shaped apartheid-era knowledge production, demonstrating how many major intellectual projects reinforced racial and disciplinary exclusions.