BOOK REVIEWS101likely it is when using mystical explanations of misfortune to ascribe themto rural rather than urban causative agents.Finally, the fourth division on Rural Links in Urban Settlement is arather mixed group of papers on urban ethnicity, independent women in low-income urban areas and the control of urban residence. The whole tends tostress the continuing involvement of most tribesmen in their rural area oforigin.Due no doubt to some constitutional technicality of the InternationalAfrican Institute, the whole of a lengthy Introduction is repeated in Frenchto the extent of another 45 pages, while the text of the papers is entirely inEnglish.The book can be recommended to students of African migration.University of RhodesiaD. H. READERAfrican Hymnody In Christian Worship : A Contribution to -the History ofIts Development By A. M. Jones. Gwelo, Mambo Press, OccasionalPaper, Missio-Pastoral Series No. 8, 1976, 64 pp., Rh$0,65.In most mission work, wherever performed, there are certain areas of activitywhich become isolated and not very well known, although tremendous effortis put into them. Such a sub-field of mission work in Africa is church musicand its relationship to the societies in which the work is carried out.So far there has been no general analysis of the use and history ofchurch music in Africa; this is all the more surprising in that there is out-standing evidence of such music activities having taken place for more thanhalf a century in different parts of Africa within some mission societies.Therefore it is a most encouraging sign of progress that the excellentMambo Occasional Papers series has brought this aspect to the foregroundby devoting an issue to the general historical background of the developmentof church music in Africa. The author of the booklet could not have beenbetter chosen: A. M. Jones is one of the pioneers in this field, and has fol-lowed the progress of it with thoroughness and zeal.In his Introduction Jones stresses the fact that the subject matter is ofsuch vastness that 'no one person can possibly know all'. Nevertheless, aneffort has been made to cover the most important steps of development inAfrica south of the Sahara.The booklet is divided into three chapters. In the first one the authoroutlines briefly, but effectively, the approach of mission societies to music inworship in the initial stages, namely that the African converts should singas in Western Christianity.Jones points to three main reasons why such an approach was adopted:(i) converts entered a new stage in their lives through Christian baptism and'therefore pagan associations with their old life must be banished' (p.8);(ii) African Christians would not allow African music in church due to'heathen associations of the tunes' (p.9); and (iii) African music was notconsidered to be sufficiently artistic for sacred use in church as it was under-stood to be 'primitive' (p. 10).All this was disputed from the 1930s onwards when the arguments infavour of the introduction of African music into Christian worship wereraised. Missionaries, who favoured the idea of introducing indigenous musicinto worship, then argued for an adaptation technique in which Christian102BOOK REVIEWStexts should be worked out for existent secular tunes. Africans, however, oftenrejected the use of their own indigenous music in worship, but this wasmainly due to the indoctrination carried out by mission societies which hadbeen acti\e for nearly 50 years. Furthermore, from the early twentieth century,when evolutionary ideas on the part of anthropologists (who were mainlymissionaries) wore emphasized, the belief that African music lacked artisticvalue de\eloped; the basis for this belief, howc\cr, was to a large extent dueto the content and meaning of the secular texts of the tunes, and not due toproper musicological concepts.In the second chapter, Jones points to the growing awareness by somemissionaries of acceptuation of African languages, and how they were treatedcompletely wrongly in most Western hymns which had been transliterated.Some missionaries also became aware of the tonal character of Africanlanguages, which, in turn, raised a few voices to encourage the compositionof new tunes for new tests Š in other words a new hymnody was advocatedin the proper sense of the word as opposed to the adaptation techniquepreviously so widely recommended.Although Jone's paper 'Hymns for the African' (in Evangelisation:Report of the General Missionary Conference of Northern Rhodesia Heldin Broken Hill, Lovedale, S.A., Lovedale Press, 1931, 49-70), seemed tohave created a veritable explosion in church music activities throughoutAfrica, the adaptation technique was still firmly adhered to in most areas.It was not until 1946 that Frere Basil joined A. M. Jones in pointing to theproblems inherent in adapting African secular tunes to Christian texts. Healso recommended the establishment of 'a school of music for Africans wherethey can . . . develop new music in their own idiom for church use' (p.32).In the third chapter Jones briefly outlines the more important develop-ments and results achieved not only in the established churches but also insome of the independent churches.Jones's frequent use of the ambiguous term 'free rhythm' in this lastchapter, however, is used without a clear definition of what is meant. Inthe same chapter the term 'African genuine style' is also used in such amanner that one would interpret this term as a style where rhythmic andmelodic idioms of African origin are ingeniously blended with Western har-mony elements; yet this is an interpretation which Jones criticizes whencommenting on H. Weman's African Music and the Church in Africa(Uppsala, Svenska Institute! for Missionsforskning, Studia Missionalia, 1960):'The limitation of this approach is that he [Weman] considers music forAfrican Christian use should be a fusion of African and European styles'(p.51). But this is exactly what most African church music of today is allabout Š a rich blend of idioms from both Africa and the West which isusually termed 'Neo-African' music.Nevertheless, this booklet is a milestone in the discovery of a historyof African church music, and one hopes that others will add further know-ledge to what Jones has presented in such a personal and inspiring manner.Kwanongotna College of Music, BulawayoO. E. AXELSSON