BY MCPHILIPS NWACHUKWU & NWAGBO NNENYELIKE
Ninety-year-old emeritus Professor of Music, John H.Nketia, of Ghana was in Nigeria last week on the invitation of the Creative Arts Department of the University of Lagos to talk on Politics and Music. After over a three-hour meaningful engagement with his assigned task, the strong and energetic octogenarian poster face of African music scholarship honoured the request of  arts on Sunday to talk about his meaningful journey in music education, Pan African vision  and their challenges.

Congratulations, you will be 90 years old in June. A rare feat, we’d say. Prof, can you tell us what your growing up was like; and the type of experience that nurtured your scholarly engagement with music?

As a child, I was very active at the performances of traditional music and dance. My parents were not literate. They had no inhibitions about what is Christian or no Christian. For them culture was just culture. They allowed me to go to the performances, and so I heard quite a lot of traditional music. When they decided that I should go to school I stayed with my grandmother who was with the Presbyterian Church and she should have restrained me, but she had some traditional things in her.

I was able to visit the extended family. When  there was a funeral ceremony and other ceremonies they took me, they did not think that they had to protect me either from Christianity or the Christian thinking that a small boy might wander off and some other things. Any way that was an opportunity. So, I grew up to study music and dance. I did not think of music as a scholarly thing.

But of course in school I learnt the tenor, sulpha and so on. It was exciting. I also learnt western hymns that were taught and they were exciting. I did not see a conflict. At that time, it was not an intellectual problem. It was just a matter of listening to something and liking it or not liking it. So the experience that I was getting in middle school and so forth seemed alright and my mother was looking up to me.

After standard three I was going to middle school and she decided that it was expensive. She asked my uncle who was better in terms of cash to look up to me. So I stayed with my uncle but he also was not literate, expect that he has lived in Kumasi and knew the integrity of a change. He was a butcher and was rendering service to people. He had that touch but he was not literate. As I was growing up this my uncle was interested in the change that was coming to me, because I could read, he could read. I could write his letters for him. My school too seemed to be interested in me for the little I did in music. When the teacher wanted someone to sing I will do it.

My teachers encouraged me and I sat for the entrance examination to the Ecole Ponty College, and  when the result came, among two hundred or so I was the second. So the teacher went to my uncle and tried to persuade him to take me to training college so that I could be trained as a teacher, because my uncle knowing Kumasi city thought that when I finish standard seven, I would go into commerce and be an assistant storekeeper somewhere and make money. But he agreed with my teacher and I went to training college.

It made a lot of difference, because when I got there, saw the scheme of work, syllabus and all the activities, I did very well, because the first quarter of my introduction into music I like the music courses so much, that before going home for the vacation I got a hold of a drawing book and ruled all the lines, copy one piano exercise two times, I take it home and learnt to play the piano. At home, they play it at the church once a week on Sundays for church services. The whole week from Monday nobody is there playing. I got this idea that I could go there all the days before
Sunday and practice.

But the colonial thinking as at the time was for one  to get educated and take up civil service white paying jobs and become “a big man”?

I never thought of  becoming a big man, because to me the teachers who taught me, were seen to be the big men.  I like them. So I cannot think of any other job because if you went to the training college, you come out to become a teacher.

Exactly ?

In fact, when I finished the four years I was also trained as teacher catechist. That is a theological training.  But before the end of the year I was appointed to the staff of the very college, I was trained. So I never taught in schools. These kinds of atmosphere excited me, and I was teaching. I was interested in my language. I was teaching that and the  English language. I was also teaching music.

You are the most authoritative voice when it comes to African music in the academic sense. So, how was the whole experience of intellectualising African music like, in those days?

I started quite early.  African music is my music, my culture. It is what I know best and people were interested in what I have to say about African music, especially when I began to do research into my own music. That was really what brought me to the attention of other people. I go to conferences I delivered papers relating to my African experience.

Through these media, I became a member of international associations- international folk music council, international music council, International society for music education. I became executive member of this one or that one. It was quite interesting. These associations held their conferences in different places and different countries. If you are an executive member, they pay your fare to go to those conferences.

So today you are here, tomorrow you are there, and I was able to write papers delivered in these places. There was a lot of interest from what I have been doing from Africa and  always when there was a problem, I will think about what the problem means in terms of Africa. So, there was always a thing to share and that really sort of helped me all over the places I was going around to do this.

What was the reception like in the early days when you went about  talking about African music in these  international conferences?

Let me go back to my third year at the University of Ghana when I was appointed as a research fellow. I decided to do a lot of research; recording of traditional music. When I record the music I also wanted the literature because I love literature. But my first in three years was Funeral Dirges of the Akan people. How the women mourn the dead and as they mourn and cry, the poetry, the text that they sang. So I collected these and analyzed the material and found that every clan, every lineage had its own dirges.

That young girls were supposed to learn this, so that when there was funeral they could sing. I was able to create a book out of this. This was my first book and it was published in 1955. It received a raving review in the Times Literary Supplement. So that was something that caught people’s eye. There were other publications that followed; African music in Ghana, then all the articles. Then , I also came to Ibadan to attend conference of The West African Institute of Social and Economic Research. The
se were all well received at that time.I was also composing my own songs back in Ghana.

Were you composing in your  native languages?

Yes. I always composed in my own language. I did not write my songs in the English language.

Why

That was because if I write in English I will write in English style and I want to write in my own language and write in my own style, because my own language has its own rhythm and its own intonation different from English. So if I compose songs in my own language it goes down better. Also I was very proud of my African identity. Even though I studied English and English Literature, that was another culture and enjoyed doing that. But every time I studied their things I challenge myself like iambic pentameter, I ask myself what is this? Do I have it in my language? I will analyze it and find that we do not have it in my language. We have something else.

Was this a kind of protest against colonial standard?

It was not; rather it was the pride in my own culture and the satisfaction I got from knowing my culture. When I was a child I would just sing the songs and really think about them. But now I get a song, sing it and would think about the structure. My creative and artistic sensibility was aroused by these. My teacher did not tell me to arouse it. I mean the text just aroused my attention. So, I learnt a lot. I was also very interested in the language. I published quite a lot of things in my own language; poems, stories like the story of flies, the story of healing. I even did translations, because I want to see the new vocabularies I could create.

What gave impetus to your compositional patterns?

There was a man called Ephraim Emu. He was a teacher at the training college. He was really the first to innovate. He was teaching western music and doing other things. The principal of the training college once asked him a question, why are you not teaching the students some of the songs I hear the labourers on campus sing? He went to listen to them and tried to write some of the songs down. He found them difficult. So he went back home and tried to study his traditional songs. From what he got out of this, he tried to write a new song for the church. The first song he composed, he got his choir to sing in the church.

The   minister was not sure of the song, he invited his elders to come and listen to Emu and his choir perform the song. The elders liked it after listening to it. So they said we shall see in the church on Sunday. Emu took his training college boys on Sunday; he told me he was not sure that the congregation would like it.At the church, he mounted  the podium where he would conduct the choir near the door so that if the congregation did not like the song and want to protest he would run away from the door, because he knew they will not touch the school children.

But at last they were all overwhelmed as the people enjoyed the songs. They were calm as the choir was singing wandering where that type of song came from. And from then on he was encouraged to create his own songs. He was the first to create an anthem for Ghana as a song to be performed on empire. That has become our second national anthem.

You were appointed to help establish the Institute of African Studies in the University of Ghana. What was the mandate of African Studies?

It was to focus on Africa as  field of study. To use African ideas, African ways in  thinking of our problems, deal with African problems, find the solutions; provide a place where we could train civil servants in the African values and so forth. It was to be a postgraduate institution. So we made provisions for civil servants that could be given leave of absence to come and study. Really it was to be a focus on Africa.

The institute was not really to be a Ghanaian institute or just African institute but a pan African institute  recognized in the Diaspora. All these affected my own way of thinking about African music and because of this African connection, I have been to Jamaica and many other places. So,  my concept of African music and African culture extends to the Diaspora, and what they have retained should be retained no matter the changes that we go through.

To what extent does this pan Pan-African vision shape your scholarship in  music development for Africa?

There were several ethnic groups in Ghana. I studied them. But I also went to other places. And the first thing that really confirm this as important to me was when Senghor did his first festival of Negro arts in Dakar. For the first time I saw all Africans in Dakar. There was a display of different kinds of music and expression of African culture in different tongues and patterns. At that festival, I   tried to  find out  what is it  that makes all these things different collectively from the others from outside European culture.