Michael Mosoeu Moerane (20 September 1904 – 27 January 1980) was a choral music composer and the first black South African to write a symphonic poem, in 1941.
Early life Moerane was a member of the Bafokeng, specifically the Mahoona clan – traditional healers whose longer history can be traced back several centuries through the lineage of the Bakwena royal family. He was born on 20 September 1904 in Mongoloaneng, a village in the Mount Fletcher district of South Africa close to the border with Lesotho. He was one of seven children born to Eleazar Jakane Moerane and his wife Sofi Majara, whose grandparents were disciples of Moshoeshoe I and were among the first Basotho converts to Christianity. Moerane's parents were African landowners and members of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society Church. Most of their abundant arable land and livestock, however, had disappeared by the 1990s, owing largely to the apartheid government's Homelands policy. The family home contained a harmonium, which was probably the first instrument that Moerane learnt to play, and his siblings all became professionals, like himself. The two most celebrated are his younger brother, Manasseh Tebatso Moerane, the educationist, cultural activist and journalist who became an Editor of The World newspaper, and his younger sister, Epainette Mbeki, one of the first women to join the Communist Party of South Africa, a stalwart community activist and promoter of women's development, and mother to a future President of South Africa, Dr. Thabo Mbeki.
Education His father's primary school provided Moerane's first elementary schooling, after which he attended Mariazell Mission School in Matatiele and then Morija Training Institute in Lesotho. In 1924, Moerane completed Standard VIII at Lovedale Mission High School in Alice, South Africa, and by 1926 he had obtained a certificate of Matriculation at the South African Native College (later called the University of Fort Hare) while simultaneously completing a high school teaching diploma at Lovedale Training School. Moerane registered for a Bachelor of Music degree part-time in 1930 through Rhodes University College, which was at that time a satellite campus of the University of South Africa (Unisa). He completed the B.Mus. in 1941, a degree still modelled in those days on the Oxbridge & London B.Mus. degree courses. According to his Student Record, which was obtained by Professor Percival Kirby from Unisa in 1962, Moerane passed the 1st-year subjects "History of Music, Harmony & Counterpoint and Elements of Sound" in 1930, the 2nd-year subjects "Counterpoint, Score Reading and Composition" in 1931, the 3rd-year subjects "Orchestration and Instrumentation", "Double Counterpoint and Fugue", "Advanced Composition" in 1933, and "Composition III", "Exercise". The Rhodes University Calendars for these years add more detail to the subjects that Moerane was expected to study, by himself, at home, which include aural training, dictation, writing in open score, melody harmonization, phrasing and form, analysis, history of western music from 1700 to 1900 and elements of acoustics.
Family life In 1931, the year in which Moerane obtained a permanent post at Lovedale High School, he married Beatrice Betty Msweli, who had been a fellow student at Lovedale. Their first child, Mofelehetsi, was born at the end of 1931, followed by a daughter, Mathabo. A second son, Thuso, was born in Kroonstad, where Mrs Moerane was teaching, in 1935. The couple had two more daughters, Hadieo and Sophie, and their last child, a son, Thabo, was born in 1947. By that time, they were living in Queenstown, South Africa (now called Komani). Mrs. Moerane was known in the extended family for her domestic skills, and indeed she wrote the lyrics to one of Moerane's songs which is set for three female voices and appropriately called, "Ma-Homemakers" (Homemakers) and, because one of the verses is in isiXhosa, . The Queenstown years, when the Moeranes' children were growing up, were evidently characterised by his strict discipline, his insistence on their speaking Sesotho at home rather than his wife's home language, isiXhosa, which is also the local language, and his dislike of the influence of jazz culture on his children. The Moeranes' next-door neighbours in Scanlen Street were Todd Matshikiza, the jazz composer and pianist, and beyond that another jazz musician. In addition to jazz and choral music, the Eastern Cape was also known for its anti-apartheid activities and leaders, and Moerane himself was actively involved through his membership of the Cape African Teachers Association (CATA). It is also well known that he sympathised with the policies of the Pan-African Congress (PAC) rather than the African National Congress (ANC), and that he supported the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). After he had left Queenstown, Moerane's son, Thuso, was served with a banning order on 15 February 1966, under which he was "prohibited under the Suppression of Communism Act from attending gatherings for five years", and the family home, 10 Scanlen Street, was bulldozed down under apartheid's Group Areas Act. Mr. and Mrs. Moerane became somewhat estranged from each other during the 1960s and Mrs. Moerane returned to live in Queenstown, where she died a few months after her husband, in 1980.
Teaching Moerane officially taught History, Latin, Mathematics, Sesotho, Commercial Arithmetic or English, depending on the position he held, since Music was not a subject in most African schools. He held posts at St. John's College Mthatha (1922), Lovedale's High School, Training School and Practising Schools (1920s–1930s), Basutoland High School (1939–1940), Queenstown Secondary School (1942–1957), Mfundisweni Teacher Training Institute Mpondoland (1958–1959), and Peka High School Lesotho from 1961 until his retirement in the late 1960s. After he retired, Moerane helped with the establishment of the Department of Music at the new National Teachers Training College in Maseru, capital of the (then) newly independent sovereign state of Lesotho. Moerane's position in Queenstown was jeopardised by his "deep non-racialist" beliefs and his involvement with CATA, so that he became "a thorn in the flesh of the Education Department who decided to force him to retire prematurely". He was thus forced to leave South Africa. Peka High School was situated in the Leribe district of northern Lesotho, known for its strong support of the left-wing Basutoland Congress Party (BCP), which was directly opposed to the policies of the Basutoland National Party (BCP), led by Leabua Jonathan, who seized power in a coup in 1970 until he himself was removed in a coup in 1986. In other words, Moerane moved from one turbulent political climate to another. At Peka, where Moerane "talked openly about his support for the BCP", he left an indelible impression on his students, among whom was the novelist Zakes Mda. In both Peka and Queenstown, Moerane conducted a small family (later school) orchestra, because he had received a donation of instruments in the early 1950s; he arranged and wrote music for them and taught all the instruments himself; the group was known as the "African Springtime Orchestra". He provided music education at home throughout his life to students and members of his community, he conducted and adjudicated choirs, put on concerts and musical theatre productions, and all in all, as his brother M.T. Moerane put it when the family raised Moerane's tombstone in 1988, despite the lack of formal music education for Africans, Moerane "trained thousands of music teachers-to-be", above all through his own compositions, which thousands of choristers knew and loved.
Compositions Moerane composed more than 80 works, the majority of them fairly short pieces for a cappella choir, of which 50 choral works and the symphonic poem have survived. During his lifetime he was known by only a handful of choral pieces; the remainder (of the 50) were brought to light long after his death. The manuscript score of his symphonic poem, Fatše La Heso (My Country), survived largely because of the efforts by Percival Kirby to have it donated to Rhodes University Library. Many other works in manuscript or typescript (written in tonic solfa notation) survived thanks to their careful curation by Moerane's sons: first Thabo, and then after his death in 2006, Thuso, after whose death in 2021 they passed into the hands of his grandson, Tsepo. Like thousands of other works written by hundreds of composers in southern African in tonic solfa notation, Moerane's choral works were composed for school or church choirs and choral competitions, their performance history going largely unrecorded with music copied and distributed informally. This, together with the fragility of the manuscripts, the tonic sol-fa notation, and the fact that Moerane used indigenous African languages, Sesotho and isiXhosa for most of his lyrics, prompted the publication in 2020 of a complete edition of his music under the auspices of the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University, with lyrics translated and choral scores transcribed into staff notation. The choral works are grouped here according to voicing – SATB, SAA, SA – but in reality, many of them have subdivided voices; moreover, Moerane's music reflects his command of a range of melodic, harmonic and contrapuntal textures and styles. He registered for royalty purposes with the Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) in 1973, and his music is still (2022) in copyright. A complete Catalogue of Works by M. M. Moerane was published by African Composers Edition in 2020. Very few of Moerane's manuscripts and typescripts were dated, and so it is only through circumstantial evidence (when a work was prescribed for a competition, for example) that assigning dates to his works becomes possible. Details about individual works and approximate dates ascertained through interviews, are available on individual scores in the critical edition online.
Sacred choruses Approximately eight works are written in the style of church hymns, anthems or sacred songs: these include "Tsatsi La Pallo" (Judgement Day), "Ruri!" (Truly!), and "Ngokuba Sizalelwe Umtwana" (For Unto Us a Child is Born), which uses the same text from Isaiah 9, verse 6, as Handel's "For Unto Us a Child is Born" from Messiah, and which opens with a unison quotation from the old Xhosa melody by Ntsikana Gaba, "Ntsikana's Bell". Moerane's other religious works are his eight arrangements of spirituals in English, among which is a rousing eight-part setting of "Go Tell It on the Mountain".
Songs about traditional life Moerane wrote about 18 songs in which traditional and community life feature strongly, and which sometimes include aspects of Sotho traditional music in their rhetorical style, pentatonicism, or bi-chordal harmonies. One of them, "Morena Tlake" (King Vulture), quotes from Enoch Sontonga's anthem "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" at the end. Like most other southern African choral music composers Moerane wrote his own lyrics, but unlike most, he also drew heavily on literary texts, especially from Sesotho writers Bennett Makalo Khaketla, Ntšeliseng 'Masechele Khaketla, 'Mabasiea Jeannette Mahalefele, and Kemuel Edward Ntsane. Songs based on the latter's poems – "Mohokare" (The Caledon River), "Ngeloi La Me" (My Angel), "Paka-Mahlomola" (Creator of Sorrow), and "Satane A Tšeha" (The Devil Laughed) – are full of references to the hardship of migrant labour. In "Paka-Mahlomola", for example, written for female voices in a sombre homophonic style, almost like a lament, the river symbolises the damage people suffered as a result of crossing it to seek work on the mines, far from family and community. The river sings a different tune, is the song's message, depending on which side of it you live.
Love songs