Sub-Saharan African Musical Learning Communities

This chapter tackles the childhood music practiced in traditional and modern African settings with emphasis on teaching and learning as facilitated and enhanced by children’s songs and music-making. The spaces where music making takes place, the types of children’s music material, and the occasions during which children make music today are explored from the context of South Africa’s Venda, Zimbabwe’s Shona, Ghana’s Akan, and Kenya’s Luo communities and cultural practices, as representative people of Sub-Saharan Africa. The music practices are interrogated as elements of the African Indigenous Knowledge System, a complex entity from which communities derive their identity and make sense of their existence. The school plays a role in providing scope, modalities, and context for cultivating children’s growth through the use of music in teaching, teaching music, and employing music in non-class situations for learners’ aesthetic development, cultural, and intellectual growth.