Mangoloaneng, Mariazell and Morija

Michael Mosoeu's first teacher was his father, at Jakane Moerane's Junior Primary School of Mangoloaneng. This went up to what was then called Standard 4, equivalent to the current Grade 6 in South Africa, in which the average age is eleven to twelve. Rural children like Moerane helped with farming chores before and after school: ‘the care for the calves, horses and sometimes even sheep, was our full responsibility and woe betide us if anything went amiss in these fields.’ Like his siblings, Moerane continued higher primary education (Standards 5–7) at the Roman Catholic Mission School at Mariazell, five miles north of Mangoloaneng. Mariazell ‘trained us to be hardy’, remembers Manasseh: ‘we woke up even in the Drakensberg winters in time for mass at 5 a.m. and we did manual work after classes and our food was simple but good.’

Moerane's musical education began, as it does for most children, informally, in the family home and the community. Moerane played the harmonium in the house, an instrument that, as his sister Epainette pointed out, ‘would be unusual now, but it was not unusual then’. She remembered how one's feet had to pump the pedals while ‘you played on top, on the keyboard’, and that ‘whenever there was singing, he [Moerane] preferred classical music’. Her recollection was that among all the siblings, ‘Mike’ was ‘the only musical one, the only one interested in music’. When I asked her where she thought this talent came from, she replied ‘Goodness knows!’ Moerane learnt to read tonic solfa notation at primary school; ‘very elementary music’, as Epainette saw it, adding that she personally ‘was so uninterested! … tonic solfa … very boring!’.

The mission press at Morija published school textbooks and song-books in tonic solfa, some of which Jakane would have bought for his school. Mariazell made use of tonic solfa songbooks published by the Catholic Mazenod Institute in Maseru. Singing and tonic solfa theory provided the staple musical education for African children in mission schools across southern Africa in the early twentieth century – and did so in state schools until comparatively recently.