The African Native Choir were probably inspired by the Fisk Jubilee singers who toured Britain in the 1870s to raise funds for their African-American college.

The African Native Choir came from South Africa in 1891 with the aim of raising money for technical schools. (See the “Object of Visit” section on the front of the programme.) According to the newspaper reports about the choir’s performances, a speech was usually made about the tour and its fundraising aims. The speech was given by the Manager or the Musical Director, both were of white European background.

Early in the tour they performed for Queen Victoria at Osbourne on the Isle of Wight. Royal patronage increased the Choir’s popularity and was often mentioned in newspaper articles about the tour.

There are a series of photographs that were taken to publicise the tour where the choir members are in costume (see South African History online website). It seems as if they started wearing “native costume” part of the way through the tour.

From the newspaper interviews that the singers gave we know that most of them received Western-style educations at missionary schools. Their everyday clothing was much the same as the British audiences they performed in front of. The costumes that they adopted could be said to be a performance of “Africanness” that met the expectations of their audiences, rather than reflecting the reality of their lives as Africans.

A series of photographs were taken of the tour by the London Stereoscopic Company. Some of them are reproduced in the articles in the further online resources. A full selection can be seen on the Getty Images website.

A discussion of the costumes that the choir wore on stage and in the photographs can be found in the Jane Collins article below (and extract included).

Kaffir is an extremely offensive racial term used in South Africa to refer to non-white peoples.

The front cover of the programme lists the African nations which the performers belonged to: Amaxosa (amaXhosa), Fingo (Fenu/Mfengu), Tembu (or Thembu), Bapedi (Pedi), Bastuo (Basotho), Zulu and Cape. The inside of the programme makes little or no distinction between these groups which had their own languages and cultural heritages but refers to them as “natives”. (See further online resources for articles exploring the use of the words “kaffir” and “natives”.)

Most of the performers are listed on the programme with their initial and then their family name. The first names that are listed tend to be African. We know that many of the troupe had European first names: Eleanor Xiniwe, Paul Xiniwe and Josiah Semouse.

The singers have been grouped together according to their voice – soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass. These are classical Italian musical terms.

Eleanor and Paul Xiniwe were a married couple. In an interview given to the Illustrated London News, Paul describes how he worked hard to earn money for his education. While he was a child, he worked before and after school. At 15 he left school and started working for a telegraphy company to earn enough to go to college and become a teacher. One of the young boys on the tour, John, also had the family name Xiniwe, so seems to have been their son. Paul invested some of the family’s money into the tour.

Josiah Semouse also talked to the Illustrated London News. He sent a regular report of the tour back to a missionary newspaper in South Africa. These reports were used in the book “Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination” by Veit Ehrlmann.

Charlotte Maxeke was known as Makhomo Manye on the tour. Like Paul Xiniwe, she was a teacher in South Africa. When the tour ended Charlotte returned to South Africa and continued with her education. In 1903 she became the first Black woman to earn a degree in South Africa. She also became involved in politics and helped found the Bantu Women’s League which became the African National Congress Women’s League in 1918.

Extracts from the Illustrated London News, 29 August 1891

Paul Xiniwe

I was born in November 1857, of Christian parents. I attended school from my youth and contributed in some measure to the cost of my education by doing some domestic work for an English family before and after school hours. This materially assisted my mother in paying the school fees and for my clothing. At fifteen years of age I left school and entered the service of the Telegraph Department as a lineman having to look after the poles and wires, and to repair breakages by climbing poles in monkey-like fashion. Being transferred to the Graaff Reinet Office, 130 miles from home, I had to go there alone without any knowledge of the road, or of any person there; but I got there in three days, travelling on horseback. The officer in charge at Graaff Reinet found my handwriting better than that of the European clerks, and, in consequence, gave me his books to keep, with additional pay, and any amount of liberty in and about the office. This was a privilege which I highly valued and turned to the best advantage by studying the code-book, taking them home to pore over them at night, and coming to the office about two hours before opening time, as I kept the keys, to learn, privately, the art of telegraphy. I surprised the mater and clerks one day by telling them that I could work the instrument, and to dispel their serios bouts went through the feat to their great astonishment, but happily, also, to the pleasure of my master. After three years’ service I left the post of lineman, quitted Graaff Reinet, and was employed on the railway construction as telegraph clerk, timekeeper and storekeeper: a highly respectable and responsible post of a native to hold. When I left school and home I only had a little knowledge of the “three Rs”; but I was assiduous in improving my learning and seeking to qualify myself for a higher position. I had now, earned a good sum of money on the railway, as well as a good name, as the testimonials I hold from there could show. Still desirous of greater improvement, I went to Lovedale, and held the office of telegraphist also in that institution, which helped me to pay my college fees. I stayed there two years, and passed the Government teachers’ examination, being one of only two who passed from the institution out of twenty-two candidates presented. I then took charge of a school at Port Elizabeth, which I kept for four years, and which I gave up to carry on business at King William’s Town, until the period of my joining the “African Choir”.

Makhomo Manye

Born 7 April 1871

My father is a Basuto of the Traansvaal, and my mother an Umbo, the people commonly known as Fingos. Both are Christians of the Independent Church; my father is a local preacher of that church. I was brought up at Uitenhage and at Port Elizabeth, where I got my schooling under efficient teachers, who passed me through the Government requirements of mission schools. My parents being unable to send me to one of the girls’ high school, I therefore had to stay and work under mistresses. We left Port Elizabeth and came to Kimberley, where after two years or a little more, I was engaged as an assistant teacher and sewing mistress in a Wesleyan Government-aided school; there I served for a year. During my stay there, a Government Inspector visited our school and gave a favourable report of its condition; he spoke in high terms of the lower section, which was under my supervision. During my time of service in the above school, we had local concerts, in which I was the conductor’s assistance and leading voice. I resigned, through unavoidable circumstances, and joined the African Choir.”

Johanna Jonkers

The little I know of my parents is that they were taken captives by the Dutch which they were about twelve years of age. They were badly treated by the Dutch, till it happened that some good friends pitied my mother, and advised her to go to the town, and she was waiting outside when she met a gentleman who passed her three times that day. At last he spoke with her, and bade her come to his house. She went with him, and told him, as she reached the house, that she came from a farm-house where the Dutch people were very hard and cruel to her. The new friends who now received her, being very sorry to hear her sad story, took good care of her, and she stayed with them till she got married and had a happy life. I was born here, at Burghersdorp; my parents were Christians.

Josiah Semouse

I was born in 1860 at Mkoothing, in what is now known as one of the conquered territories (Basutoland). My parents being Christian people, I was naturally so brought up; I first attended school at a small village called Korokoro, where my father was appointed local preacher, and there I learnt to read and write my own language. Then I went to the Morija training institution, about thirty-six miles from my home. I heard from a native teacher that there is a school in Cape Colony, called Lovedale, which is famous for the practical knowledge that it imparts in its pupils. But, a few months after, war broke out between Basutoland and the Cape Colony about the order of disarmament. I took part against the British during this war, but I was not happy, because I did not know the English language then. When the war was over, which was decided in our favour, I left Basutoland for Lovedale, travelling day and night; I slept for a few hours till the moon came out, and then pursued my course, till I reached my destination in eleven days, the whole distance being about 400 miles. At Lovedale I received both education and civilisation; then one day, in March 1886, the principal of the college received a telegram from Kimberley to say that there was a vacancy in the office there for an honest, educated young man. I was sent to fill up the vacancy, and I remained there till the end of March 1891, when I received an esteemed offer from the manager of the African Choir to join the choir for England. We left Kimberley on April 10, and called at several towns as we proceeded. On May 20 we embarked at Capetown in the Warwick Castle; during the first two days we were sea-sick, but I was the first one to get over it, and I became a general servant of the choir till they all got better, I had a pleasant voyage till we landed on the English shore on June 13. In England, I was very much surprised by many things. The trains running at the tops of the houses in London, much faster than railway trains to in South African, especially struck my notice. Wandering about this big city, which seems endless, I admired St Paul’s Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament; I have visited the British Museum, the South Kensington Museums, the Zoological Gardens, the Crystal Palace, and other places. What I have see here is more than all I had every heard of before. I am the correspondent of a Basuto paper, but I doubt whether its readers will believe the reports in my writing, as everything is so wonderful here.

Extract from Collins, Jane (2007) Umuntu, ngumuntu, ngabantu: the story of the African choir. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 27 (2). pp. 95-114. ISSN 14682761

However, as Erlmann reveals (pp. 103–104), this is a construction of the ‘native’ tailored to appeal to the Victorian audience and bearing little resemblance to clothes as worn in Africa. Many of the Choir are wearing woollen blankets, European imports to Africa as part of the trade in manufactured goods. They were gradually adopted in South Africa through the nineteenth-century and, for the wearers, signified a very complex relationship with modernity, as much a sign of protest as one of acquiescence. A semiotic system is in operation between the members of the Choir themselves, which would not have been read by Europeans. There are other incongruities in this ‘generic’ African folk costume. The beads worn by some of the women closely resemble Victorian costume jewellery; the woman in the middle appears to be wearing some sort of western gown. Could it be that this ‘bricolage of Victorian and African sartorial elements’, to use Erlmann’s phrase, demonstrates that ‘the performers, like many other Africans involved in the emerging international show business’, as Annie E. Coombes suggests, ‘knowingly exploited a presentation of self and identity which re-appropriated and transformed anticipated western assumptions about the African and Africa and which was calculated to have a particular effect in Britain’ (Coombes: 107)?

Collins refers to Veit Erlmann’s book “Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination. South Africa and the West” Oxford University Press, 1999.