African Musicology: Towards Defining and Setting Parameters of the Study of the Indigenous African Music

This paper is an attempt to define African musicology as a standalone discipline. The study of indigenous African music is, in the main, assumed to be the competency of ethnomusicology. That ethnomusicologists are musical anthropologists suggests that they, like anthropologists, labour at presenting the image of the African to the European as well as the American institutions for a plethora of reasons and purposes. This explains a sense of reluctance when coming to addressing the need to fashion an alternative discipline designed, to unravel the intricacies of indigenous African music for the benefit of the African processes of knowledge making. Since the efforts of one Kwabena Nketia fifty years or so ago, African musicology has not succeeded in entrenching itself. By asserting itself, African musicology could stand to benefit the study of African music, let alone its own disciplinary development into the 21st century.